Fall of Jewish Culture in Singer's Satan in Goray
Date
2006
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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
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century.
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Description
Keywords
Jewish Culture, European society, Communal hysteria