https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.jhs.2021v52.027
Rabbi, Mystic, or Impostor? The Eighteenth-Century Ba’al Shem of London,
Michal Oron, translated by Edward Levin (London: Littman Library
of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University
Press, 2020) isbn 978-1-904113-03-4, pp. xviii + 309, £39.50.
The colourful eighteenth-century Jewish mystic and magician, Samuel
Falk, known as the Ba’al Shem (master of the [divine] name, wonderworker/
magician) of London, has been the object of more than a century of
research. Even so, as Yehuda Liebes put it in his thoughtful review of the
original Hebrew edition of this book (“Diary of an Enigma”, Ha-Aretz, 3
June 2003, https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/1.4845072, in Hebrew),
Falk is still an enigma to scholarship. Studied long ago by such historians
as Adolf Neubauer, Solomon Schechter, Hermann Adler, and Cecil Roth,
among others, Falk has attracted primary attention in our own era from
two historians with radically different perspectives and backgrounds,
Michal Oron and Marsha Keith Schuchard.
The present volume is the English translation of Michal Oron’s
Hebrew book (Mi-Ba’al Shed le-Ba’al Shem: Shmuel Falk, Ha-Ba’al Shem miLondon), published by the Bialik Institute in 2002. When it first appeared,
it made a major contribution to the subject in presenting two previously
unpublished diaries of Falk himself and of his factotum Zevi Hirsch of
Kalisz, along with several other Hebrew documents, especially the critical
letter on Falk penned by Jacob Emden and Falk’s recently discovered
will. Oron devoted much effort to annotating these texts, and providing
a general introduction presenting her own interpretation of the nature of
Falk’s character and activity.
Published eighteen years later, the English edition is virtually identical,
although it has been shortened and partly abridged to conform to the
needs of an English readership. In his aforementioned review, Yehuda
Liebes aptly characterized the two diaries as
very intimate texts, not intended for publication, offering a detailed
report of the Ba’al Shem’s activities, day in and day out, over a lengthy
period of time. Here we find life as he lived it: accounts of his meetings
with people of different social classes, work accidents (explosions while
undertaking alchemical experiments, mishaps that befell him during
mystical outings in the forests), lists of books in his possession, remedies,
recipes for cookies, complicated money matters (his assistant describes
Jewish Historical Studies, volume 52, 2020
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him as exceedingly stingy), gambling (with which he made a mint while
his assistant, needless to say, always lost at cards), bitter disputes in which
he took part and even spats with his wife (on one occasion, over a kugel
that turned out badly). Falk also records his dreams with astonishing
openness, shedding light on his innermost desires and fears. In one
dream, his servant steals all his property. In another, his wife jumps out
of the window and breaks her neck. He dreams about his father, who
abandoned him as a child, who now looks up to him as a philosopher, and
about a close friend masturbating in his presence. . . . Most of all, however,
the diaries describe Falk’s magic. His assistant records the practical side,
describing the rituals in all their bizarre detail, whereas Falk concentrates
on the spiritual side – the verses and incantations.
Liebes’s rich summary is one thing, ploughing through these private
and obscure texts, which sometimes consist merely of lists of household
objects, loans, pawns, lottery tickets, and books, is quite another. The
Hebrew includes many foreign words, especially Yiddish, as well as
some awkward phrases and grammatical mistakes, and despite Oron’s
extensive efforts, many passages remain incomprehensible. The problem
is exacerbated when rendering these texts into accessible English. The
translation was begun by the late David Louvish but completed by Edward
Levin. Michal Oron did not take an active part in preparing this volume,
so the primary burden fell on Levin and the managing editor of the
Littman series, Connie Webber, who both contributed introductions to
the volume, explaining the challenges the publication entailed and their
occasional uncertainty in making difficult decisions about the translation.
Determined to offer translations that are both faithful to the original
and understandable to the uninitiated reader, Levin has also taken the
liberty of shortening or adding to Oron’s notes. Both Levin and Webber
deserve much credit for taking on such responsibilities without the direct
involvement of the author. Todd Endelman, the well-known historian of
Anglo-Jewry, has also added a helpful new introduction.
Another obstacle in using this volume is that its scholarship is not
up-to-date. As far as I can tell, there is hardly any reference to works on
the subject published in the last two decades. I am referring not only to
scholarly writing on the occult, freemasonry, Rosicrucians, Swedenborg,
radical underground movements and secret societies, and the like, but
to new research in the field of Jewish studies relevant to the ambiance of
Falk and his contemporaries. To name only a few, Pawel Maciecjko (and
several of his students) have contributed significantly to the study of
Rabbi, Mystic, or Impostor? Michal Oron
317
Sabbateanism in general and of Jonathan Eibeschütz and his son Wolf
as well as his associate Moses David of Podhajce in particular, and to
scholarship on Jacob Frank and Frankism. Others, such as J. H. Chajes,
Agata Paluch, and Asaf Tamari, have worked on practical kabbalah,
demonology, possession, magic, and healing in early modern Jewish
cultures. Their work and that of others might have shed new light on some
of the details in the texts Oron collected.
As they now appear to the English reader, the private diaries offer limited
perspective on what Samuel Falk actually believed about himself and his
life mission, and why, unlike most ba’alei shem, he seems to have acquired
considerable fame and notoriety among Christians and Jews alike. His
material success and the steady stream of visitors from all over Europe
who were willing to pay him for his services while visiting his conspicuous
“camp” on London Bridge surely singled him out as a fascinating
mediating figure between the two faith communities. I need not recount
here the full list of Christian nobles, such as Count George Rantzow
and Baron Theodor von Neuhoff, as well as more infamous Christian
celebrities, such as Count Alessandro Cagliostro and Giacomo Casanova,
who offer ample evidence of their high regard “for the great prince and
high priest of the Jews” (p. 29). One would think that such flattery by
Christian notables might have repelled rabbis and other Jewish elites from
entering into close contact with the mysterious Falk. But Moses David of
Podhajce referred to him in messianic terms, and Sussman Shesnowzi,
another credible Jewish witness, offered similar words of commendation.
The powerful Boaz and Goldsmid families supported him, both materially
and in other respects. While Falk resisted membership in a specific
London congregation since he claimed to be “a ba’al-ha-bayit (master of
the house) for the whole world” (p. 59), there appears to have been little
Jewish resistance to his continual presence in London over several decades,
nor does he appear to have incurred the wrath of many enemies. On the
contrary, when he died, he seems to have been properly memorialized
as a reputable Jew especially generous in his will in supporting multiple
segments of the Jewish community both in London and in Fürth.
So how should Samuel Falk be remembered, and how can historians best
evaluate him and his legacy? It is at this point that the extensive scholarship
of Marsha Keith Schuchard should be mentioned. If one concludes that
the mythical image of Falk – the occultist and alchemist, the alleged Jewish
conduit to Christian radical movements and secret societies – is ultimately
more significant than the mundane portrait of his everyday life revealed in
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the diaries, it is to Schuchard’s work that one is obliged to turn, if not to
her ultimate conclusions, then at least to the provocative questions she has
consistently raised. Schuchard has found little favour with some historians
in the field, who have questioned her often unsubstantiated conclusions
based on flimsy or circumstantial evidence, especially when speaking
about Judaism and kabbalah. Endelman, for example, sees her work as
the best-known of the fanciful and speculative accounts of Falk that have
flooded the scholarly marketplace, pointing to her conclusions that Falk
was a crypto-Sabbatian, a supporter of Stuart claims to the British throne,
a radical freemason, and teacher of sexual kabbalah to Swedenborg,
and more. He even evokes the authority of Pawel Maciejko, the expert on
Sabbateanism and Frankism, who deems her imaginative rendering of a
Jewish-Christian international network “more like a positive fantasy of
modern enthusiasts of multi-culturalism than a historical reconstruction”
(p. 9).
Some twenty years ago (in Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: AngloJewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, published by Princeton University Press in 2000, pp. 161–9 and, on freemasonry, 150–53), I tried to offer
my own tentative reflections on Falk in the context of eighteenth-century
Anglo-Jewish thought, addressing the work of both Oron and Schuchard.
I could not accept most of the details Schuchard presented regarding Falk
as well as several of his Jewish contemporaries. I still maintain my initial
scepticism regarding her observations, but I am unhappy with those who
would dismiss her views out of hand or simply label her work a fantasy.
Historians need to refute her, and challenge every mistake she supposedly
makes, but they should appreciate the provocative questions she has
posed and the extraordinary erudition she has displayed in her work on
radical freemasonry, Blake, and Swedenborg. She claims no expertise in
Jewish matters and Hebrew sources, but her powerful imagination should
prod other historians to rethink and question some of their conventional
assumptions.
To Oron’s great credit, she takes Schuchard and her work seriously,
relying on some of her suggestions while emphatically rejecting others.
It is precisely the exchange between them, especially in the notes to her
chapter “Samuel Falk and the Freemasons”, that is most constructive.
Our present state of research has not changed significantly since Oron
wrote this chapter and Schuchard published her initial essays on Falk
as an “Unknown Superior” of freemasonry. We do know that Falk was
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319
deeply connected to Sabbateans of the Eibeschütz circle; that he had
intimate contacts with freemasons, an affiliation shared by many Jewish
intellectuals in London at the time, who enjoyed both the social and spiritual
fellowship offered to them by cosmopolitan Christians; and that he might
have been in close proximity to Swedenborg and his radical ideas as well.
Oron strongly counters Schuchard’s assumption of Falk’s membership
in a kind of Jewish-Christian religious network, maintaining that he lived
and died as a Jew, and was buried with honour in a Jewish cemetery. If one
were to tone down Schuchard’s claim that Falk was the founder of a new
hybrid religion, and suggest instead that he maintained close affiliations
with Christians both personally and through masonic networks, without
relinquishing his Jewish identity, the two interpretations would not
necessarily contradict each other. What seems obvious to this reader is that
both the scholarly works of Oron and Schuchard should be consulted and
refined by future researchers, not only in sharpening their gaze on the Ba’al
Shem of London, but also in unearthing more fully the intriguing, complex,
and often hidden connections between Jewish and Christian radical ideas
and movements in early modern Europe.
David B. Ruderman
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