Sound an Alarm! Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous

"Revealer of Secrets is a portrayal-both realistic and satirical-of Eastern European Jewish life in the tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century. It reflects the struggle that raged between the Haskalah and Hasidism as the Jewish people stood on the threshold of modernity. In the battle between reason and faith, the Haskalah admired science and rationalism and recommended broad education to its adherents, while Hasidism revered mystical intuition in its charismatic rebbe-saints and encouraged religious fervor in its followers. Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody- The Book of Esther-Perl unleashed a broadside. Testing the Righteous, published in 1838, is a sequel consisting of a discussion of readers' reactions to the earlier work, including criticism of the author's use of khsidic sources. Its plot revolves around the search for a completely honest man, in the course of which representatives of the various elements of Jewish society are reviewed and their defects exposed. The parade of failures includes not only khsidim, but also rabbis, businessmen, craftsmen, and even maskilim"--