Gender in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales

Abstract

Martin Buber’s anthologies of Hasidic tales remain some of his most widely read writings, but few have studied them intertextually vis-à-vis the original Hasidic sources. This article does so, focusing specifically on Buber’s representations of gender in Hasidism. Reading Buber’s tales hermeneutically for gender sheds light on Buber, Hasidism, and the dynamic confluence between them. Firstly, it helps us to identify key aspects of Buber’s representation of Hasidic theology. Regardless of his intentions, when Buber remoulded Hasidic sources to prioritize bodily concreteness over spiritual abstraction, meetings over meditations, and tales over treatises, he subverted theological-metaphysical constructions of gender in Hasidism. Secondly, reading the tales for gender illuminates key aspects of Buber’s representation of Hasidic communities. Buber often softened and omitted sexist elements in the original sources. While this may reveal his egalitarian impulses at times, the article demonstrates that Buber’s efforts to hide misogyny actually rendered women even less visible than they were in the original sources, as images of women dissolved into a sort of gender-blind, neutral (i.e. masculine) humanism. As a whole, Buber’s textual alterations raise thorny questions regarding the ethics of neo-Hasidism or any other movements that gloss over the shadows of historical phenomena.