Fall of Jewish Culture in Singer's Satan in Goray

Abstract

Singer's first novelSatan in Goray(1933) is a portrayal of failed messianism resulting in the dreadful fall of Jewish culture in the Eastern Europe. The novel is set in Poland in the wake of the Chmelnicki massacres of the 1640s, a dark period in Polish Jewish history in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered and whole town was wiped out. Out of despair of that calamity grew faith in a false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. Singer's novel chronicles the way that messianic fervour grips and destroys a single town as well as its culture. The novel is an epic description of Jewish cultural collapse in the east European society. It is about the release of the repressed forces breaking loose in a rupturing Jewish world, an account of self destructive sexual revolt against repressive religious culture. Moreover,Satan in Gorayis a depiction of communal hysteria, anarchy, seduction and victimization of women, Rephele and of the community Goray in the grips of messiahnic arrival. It can be characterised as a cultural parable of the decaying world drawing the analogy between Jewish common destinies of early 20 century and the predicament of Polish Jews in the 17 th century. th