THE BAAL SHEM TOV

Abstract

IMMANUEL ETKES, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, translated from the Hebrew by Saadya Sternberg, BrandeisUniversity Press, Waltham, Ma., 2005, $39.95. Three eighteenth-century Jewish leaders epitomize the trends which dominated most Jewish religious thought in the West until very recently. The lives of these three remarkable men overlapped by just over 30 years, from 1729 to 1760; but they never met. They were so different in both temperament and intellectual outlook that it is challenging to imagine how they might have conversed — had such a meeting ever taken place. The three were Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the pioneer of Enlightenment Judaism; Elijah, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1799), the archetypal rabbinic scholar, mistrustful of religious enthusiasm but utterly devoted to Torah learning and piety; and Israel ben Eliezer (1700–1760), more commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov, abbreviated to Besht.