Jewish Studies Unscrolled: The Petitions of Rabbi Elijah Guttmacher, with Glenn Dynner

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Religion & Spirituality, Judaism, Society & Culture

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🗓️ 27 December 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

Today on Jewish Studies Unscrolled, we dive into the fascinating world of kvitlekh—19th-century petitions addressed to Rabbi Elijah Guttmacher, a misnagdic rabbi whose miracle-working reputation drew thousands of supplicants. Discovered in a Polish attic in 1932 and preserved by the YIVO Institute, these handwritten pleas offer vivid, if fragmentary, snapshots of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, revealing stories of financial struggles, illness, and family crises. Glenn Dynner, historian and author of The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust, joins us to share how he has teased history from these tantalizingly incomplete records.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello podcast fans. It's producer Josh Cross here. If your email inbox right now is anything like mine, you're being inundated with the end of year giving asks. Well, I'm coming at you with one more. Here at Tablet, we are proud, thrilled really, to be able to offer you Jewish content, on podcasts, on our site, in newsletters, and even on Zoom. We've been bringing you old favorites, new shows and miniseries you've liked, and we've even got some new ones coming soon that you're going to love. But we can't do it without a little help from our friends, which is where you come in.
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1:10.6	Welcome to Jewish Studies Unscrolled, the podcast where we bring on an expert guest to take a close read of one Jewish text. I'm Elisa Quint. In 1932, a team of
1:17.2	budding ethnographers known as Zumlers, Yiddish for collectors, came across an enormous
1:23.7	trove of papers in a dusty attic in Poland. There they were. Several thousand
1:31.8	pieces of paper with messages handwritten on them, in multiple styles of handwriting, mostly in
1:37.7	Hebrew but some in Yiddish. They seemed like letters, but there were no envelopes. The Zomlers
1:43.5	didn't necessarily know what these pieces of paper were, but there were no envelopes. The Zamblers didn't necessarily know what
1:45.1	these pieces of paper were, but they hauled them off to the Yiddishavisinschaflacher Institute,
1:50.8	or the Yivo Institute in Vilna, as part of a larger effort to preserve even the most humble
1:56.8	evidence of Jewish culture. Years passed, and the papers attracted little attention.
2:05.6	With time, archivists et Yivo identified the papers. The letters belonged to a rabbi Eliahu
2:14.1	Gutmacher, only they were not written by him, they were addressed to him.
2:20.7	Among pious Jews of the 19th century, celebrity didn't get much greater than Goodmacher.
2:26.8	This is significant because, unlike Goodmacher, most of the rock star rabbis in Eastern Europe
2:33.1	were Hasidic.
2:34.9	Gutmacher was Misnagdic, a term for non-Hasitic rabbis.
2:40.2	Usually, misnagic rabbis were low on charisma, but high on intellect.
2:46.1	Gutmacher was different.
2:48.4	Born in Borik in Western Poland in 1796, he settled in Gretz in 1841 after
	...

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