The Red Heifer

Born in Międzyboż in the Russian Empire (today Medzhybizh, Ukraine) to a Hasidic family with an impressive rabbinic lineage, Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski was raised in an intensely religious environment. Drawn to the Haskalah, the young Berdyczewski was compelled to divorce his wife by his stringent father-in-law, and he turned to maskilic and modern Hebrew writing in 1886 even as he pursued Talmud study at the famed Volozhin yeshiva. In 1890, Berdyczewski moved to Germany for university study, engaging deeply with Nietzsche’s thought, reading voraciously, and earning a doctorate. Between 1896 and 1900, he emerged as the leading voice of a generation of young Hebrew writers demanding the expansion of the young literature’s bounds beyond narrowly Jewish themes, the recognition of the aesthetic as a value and end in itself, and the liberation of individual Jewish writers to explore every aspect of the larger world and the inner self unconstrained by the dictates of Jewish tradition or obligations to the nation. Berdyczewski became one of the great exponents of the view that Jewish life and Hebrew culture could flourish only via a radical break with the dead weight of Jewish tradition, which would allow his generation to cease to be “the last Jews” and instead become “the first Hebrews.” Yet he also continued to find the tradition deeply compelling, and at times focused on recovering what he thought might be “countertraditions” of vitalism, humanism, and erotic and creative energies hidden or repressed within canonical Jewish texts and legends. From the turn of the century, Berdyczewski produced an outpouring of Hebrew short stories and novellas that both dramatized this inner struggle of his generation of young men and offered unsettling half-vitalistic and half-naturalistic portraits of violent desires, drives, and urges playing out beneath the veneer of ordinary life. His fiction on these latter themes would eventually take on a more symbolist character. In 1902 Berdyczewski moved to the German city of Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland), where he continued to produce Hebrew fiction, wrote a large corpus of Yiddish stories that offered an unvarnished portrait of small-town life, and wrote several volumes of stories and essays in German portraying the East European Jewish world from an anthropological distance. He also engaged in ambitious and idiosyncratic anthologizations of Jewish folklore and legends. Some of his works appeared under the name Bin-Goryon.