The impact of the Chabad movement on postwar Jewry can hardly be compared to that of any other Orthodox group. Chabad is famous both for proselytizing Jews alienated from religion and for the messianic controversy surrounding the last leader of the movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Rebbe, 1902–94). Many of his followers predicted that he was the messiah, a belief that, surprisingly, went unchallenged by his most radical adherents after his death. The unprecedented scale and intensity of Chabad messianism shook the Jewish community and sparked a new wave of interest in Chabad teachings, rituals, and, most of all, in the persona of the Rebbe himself.
Interest in the life of the Rebbe reached its pinnacle in 2014. That year, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the Rebbe's passing, saw the publication of three biographies penned by authors with varying degrees of connection to Chabad.Footnote 1 Although not stated explicitly, these books were also written in response to an academic biography of the Rebbe by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, published by Princeton University Press in 2010.Footnote 2 As I will discuss below, the authors read, misread, and intentionally concealed knowledge because of their ideological commitments—strategies that were themselves a response to Chabad's long record of negotiating the tension between parochial and academic historiography of the movement.
In the early twentieth century, the sixth Chabad rebbe, Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn (1880–1950), embarked on the project of writing the history of the movement, though he often based his work on dubious sources. His project, described by Ada Rapoport-Albert as “hagiography with footnotes,” was part of the modernizing trend in interwar Hasidism in general, and Chabad in particular.Footnote 3 In contrast to other, older genres of hasidic literature, with his quasi-historical writings Schneersohn intended to create a counternarrative of hasidic history that could compete with scholarly studies on Hasidism in a form that could appeal to a non-Chabad reader. While by and large rejected by academic scholarship, the partisan “hagiography with footnotes” had a tremendous impact on the way in which Hasidim have written and understood their history.Footnote 4
The paradigm of “hagiography with footnotes” has also determined the way in which the academic research of Hasidism perceives twentieth- and twenty-first-century hasidic historiographical literature, Chabad and non-Chabad alike. The recent Hasidism: A New History, a collective work intended to present a comprehensive and cutting-edge history of Hasidism, reduces contemporary hasidic historiography to this paradigm.Footnote 5 Contrary to this claim, the recent Chabad biographies show that the symbolic boundary between the partisan and academic literature is now blurrier than ever before. Chabad literature, in a similar vein to other segments of haredi culture, has developed coping strategies to negotiate the tension between its insularity and de facto participation in the surrounding culture.Footnote 6 In the case of Chabad, the processes of integration have been further intensified by the movement's outreach-oriented ideology. At least some Chabad literary production is intended to appeal to secular readership, and therefore its form and content has to be adjusted accordingly. The biographies of the Rebbe occupy a special place within this sector of Chabad literature.
The Rebbe has been the central figure of Chabad outreach both during his lifetime and after his death. Chabad literature, iconography, and the activities of Chabad emissaries have constructed the Rebbe as the leader, teacher, and father figure for all Jews, even those most detached from a religious lifestyle. The Rebbe's advice and blessing have been within the reach of everyone, and people have been encouraged to visit him or to write him a letter—even years after his passing.Footnote 7 Consequently, the controversy over his biographies is not purely academic. Presentation of the Rebbe's life concerns the core of the Chabad mission. Misrepresentation of his life is bound to jeopardize the mission. Writing the Rebbe's biography is, to put it bluntly, an active expression of Chabad's outreach ethos.
An examination of the strategies applied to both the content and the paratext of the biographies complicates the dichotomy between “academic” and “partisan” historiography of Chabad. Chabad authors appropriate academic language and scholarly conventions in order to construct the Rebbe's biography in a form that would appeal to a skeptical, college-educated reader, yet would remain unthreatening to the Chabad cause. By doing so, these authors subvert the critical potential of academic discourse and transform it into a powerful tool for Chabad outreach. In sum, Chabad's self-appointed mission to unaffiliated Jews has diametrically changed the movement's literary output. The Chabad movement's twenty-first-century historical writings have surpassed the model of the “hagiography with footnotes.”
The “hagiography with footnotes” mode responded to the disintegration of the Chabad community in the face of the political and cultural challenges of the interwar years. The recent biographical output springs from the current continuous leadership crisis in the movement, which has chosen not to appoint a new rebbe after Schneerson's passing. “Hagiography with footnotes” was a project of one man, Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn. The new literature, in contrast, is polyphonic, reflecting the conditions of the Chabad movement in the post-Schneerson era: deeply engaged with external cultures, with porous boundaries, and lacking one undisputed leader.
Chabad's Grappling with Historiography
Chabad's complicated dialogue with scholarly historiography begins with Ḥayim Meir Heilman's Bet rabi. Heilman's Hebrew book, published in Berditchev in 1902, covered the history of Chabad under the leadership of the first three rebbes. It was meant as a response to hagiographic works by controversial figure Michael ha-Levi Frumkin-Rodkinson and to historical works by maskilic author Eliezer Zweifel and by Simon Dubnow.Footnote 8 Notably, Heilman's book itself (which is still used today in scholarship, although with prescribed caution)Footnote 9 uses parochial oral traditions, as well as preserved documents, thus drawing extensively on hagiography and academic scholarship in its attempt to discredit them both. Clearly, the question of methodology was not as much at stake as was the issue of who was eligible to write about Chabad. Even though access to the sources was, according to Heilman, the sine qua non of proper research, it was not sufficient and required a particular ethical attunement. Thus, Heilman criticized Zweifel for bringing up mitnagdic sources in his account of Chabad history, while he deliberately ignored them in his book so as not to instigate unnecessary controversies.Footnote 10
The most famous instance of Chabad's grappling with history writing occurred during the leadership of Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn.Footnote 11 Yosef Yiẓḥak drew on old oral traditions and furnished new ones when necessary, as well as both genuine and forged documents (from the so-called Kherson genizah),Footnote 12 to create a significant corpus of quasi-historical literature over many years, which was unprecedented in the Chabad tradition. Yosef Yiẓḥak's historiographical endeavor reached its peak with the publication of a series of articles entitled “ʾAvot ha-ḥasidut” (The forefathers of Hasidism), the talks collected in Likute diburim, and his memoirs, Der Lyubavitsher Rebn's zikhroynes. The articles were published in the journal Ha-tamim under the auspices of the central Chabad-Lubavitch yeshiva in Otwock in the years 1935–37/8. The memoirs were printed in installments in the Yiddish Morgen zhurnal between 1940–42 and later also in book form.Footnote 13
Throughout his life, Yosef Yiẓḥak remained attentive to non-Chabad publications on Chabad and occasionally responded to them in Chabad venues. The controversy over the authenticity of the painting of the founder of Chabad, Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), can serve as an interesting example. When, in 1938, an article in the Hebrew press questioned the authenticity of the portrait, Yosef Yiẓḥak reproached the person responsible for the article in a private letter, and roughly at the same time published in Ha-tamim archival documents supposedly confirming the authenticity of the painting. However, he never publicly referred to the actual controversy or acknowledged the article that prompted his response—a strategy that, as will be shown below, has been used in the recent biographies, too.Footnote 14
Yosef Yiẓḥak's quasi-historical works served several purposes. First, they constructed the past of Hasidism so that Chabad under his leadership would appear to be a reflection and fulfillment of the vision of the Hasidim of old. Second, retelling the history of Hasidism and Chabad reinforced the Hasidim's bond with their tradition, particularly for those who had moved towards other, less strict, ways of life. Third, by elevating Chabad hagiographical traditions to the status of historiography, Yosef Yiẓḥak aimed to present Chabad as legitimate in the eyes of the more acculturated part of the Jewish community while simultaneously challenging the developing academic history of Hasidism.Footnote 15
Most importantly, Schneersohn's works were to play an edifying and identity-building role. After all, major sections of these works were published in Ha-tamim, a journal addressed predominantly to students of Chabad yeshivas, the vast majority of whom were new to Chabad.Footnote 16 These students grew up neither in the vicinity of the Chabad court, nor in a Chabad community. They carried no memory of the town of Lyubavichi, now separated from them by the Soviet border. In other words, they did not grow up as Chabad Hasidim but had to be educated to become so. The “hagiography with footnotes” aimed to fill this void by constructing a new, collective memory of the old world of Chabad-Lubavitch.
Chabad Historiography after the Holocaust
The need to furnish new Hasidim with resources for traditions that would bind them with old Lubavitch became even more acute during and after the Holocaust, when the center of Chabad was reestablished in the United States. The necessity of reaching out to disenfranchised Jews of various backgrounds and introducing the new followers to the teachings, customs, and history of Chabad prompted Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn to establish the Kehot publishing house in 1942. He placed it in the charge of his son-in-law, the future Rebbe. Among the early publications of Kehot, two books illustrate the objectives of the publisher. The first is Ha-yom yom, a calendar for 1942/43, which provided a daily description of a custom, anecdote, or a sentence by one of the Chabad rebbes.Footnote 17 The second is the aforementioned Der Lyubavitsher Rebn's zikhroynes, Yosef Yiẓḥak's pseudohistorical account of Lubavitch before the rise of the first Chabad rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Liady, to leadership.
In the past seventy years, Chabad historiographical writing thrived and significantly contributed to the flourishing of haredi literature.Footnote 18 Over the years, in a similar vein to the major nonhasidic haredi publisher ArtScroll, Kehot has produced an entire library of books of various genres and sorts, from new editions of hasidic sources to commentaries on the intricacies of kabbalistic ideas to halakhic compendia to literature and cookbooks. Just as ArtScroll succeeded in manufacturing the entire library for an “authentic” Orthodox household, so Kehot did for an “authentic” Chabad household; and just as ArtScroll appropriated modern means to this end, so did Kehot.Footnote 19 Like other streams of Jewish Orthodoxy, Chabad turned to scripturalism as a remedy for the broken chain of tradition, and it stimulated the boom in Chabad publishing.Footnote 20
Several decades separate Yosef Yiẓḥak's historiographical enterprise from the recent biographies of Menachem Mendel, and the Chabad of today holds a very different position in the Jewish community than it did in the 1930s and 1940s. The recent biographies of the Rebbe, while derived from Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn's approach to historiography, respond to a different crisis. Just like the Chabad of Yosef Yiẓḥak, the Chabad of the twenty-first century faces the necessity of reinventing itself. During his leadership, Yosef Yiẓḥak succeeded in turning a parochial east European hasidic group into a worldwide Jewish movement with a general appeal. In the twenty-first century, the outreach has intensified and the growth and influence of Chabad seem unchallenged. Chabad itself has been undergoing a transformation from a movement headed by an extraordinarily charismatic leader to a movement run by the Hasidim. The absence of an unquestioned leader has highlighted factional divisions. Like the Roman god Janus, Chabad since the passing of the Rebbe in 1994 has two faces: one looks toward the past, focused on the preservation of Chabad and the perpetuation of the Rebbe's legacy; the other looks toward the future, investing enormous resources in the development of new institutions and activities. The Rebbe's biographies are part of this double-edged approach. On the one hand, they preserve awareness of the Rebbe's uniqueness and his contribution to postwar Judaism, while on the other hand they point toward the new Chabad that carries the flame into the future, without the Rebbe physically present.Footnote 21
The Rebbe's Early Biographies
Although The Rebbe by Heilman and Friedman was the first attempt to provide an account of the Rebbe's life that would match the standards of academic scholarship, it was far from the first biographical work devoted to him. In 1989, Herman (Yirmiyahu) Branover, with Avraham Naveh, published Be-‘en ha-lev. Branover, a Soviet-educated academic, found his way to Chabad while still in the Soviet Union, and after coming to Israel in the 1970s became an author of Orthodox inspirational literature. He was less interested in historical accuracy than in the appraisal of the Rebbe to his (presumably) secular readers. The book was published in English as The Ultimate Jew after the Rebbe's passing. The new Hebrew edition with additions came out in 2006 as Naviʾ mi-kirbekha, and it is a rare curiosity among the Rebbe's biographies, as it openly claims that the Rebbe is alive and present and will come back as the King Messiah.Footnote 22
The first biography that dealt exclusively with Menachem Mendel's life before becoming the Rebbe of Lubavitch was published in three volumes during the Rebbe's lifetime. Authored by a young Hasid, Mordekhai Menashe Laufer, and published by the Israeli branch of the Chabad flagship press, Yeme melekh assembled both witnesses’ testimonies and some relevant documents, and it continues to be read today—three out of the four biographies discussed in this paper refer to it, albeit in somewhat different manners and with various levels of criticism.Footnote 23
Shortly after the Rebbe's passing, another biography, Shaul Shimon Deutsch's Larger than Life, was published, also focusing on Menachem Mendel Schneerson's early years. Deutsch's book, although marred by somewhat clumsy editing, proved to be a breakthrough, as it successfully debunked many myths that surrounded the Rebbe's life. It furnished documents illuminating the Rebbe's family history and his education in Berlin, among other points.
Despite also having been penned by a Chabad Hasid, this book caused a major controversy for its critical approach to the Rebbe's biography, and eventually led to the author's removal from the Chabad community. Almost simultaneously, Aharon Zev Mendelsohn published The Rebbe: A Biography, volume 1, Early Years.Footnote 24 Mendelsohn had commissioned Deutsch's research, edited it, excised controversial fragments, and supplemented the text with hasidic stories, thus assuaging its potentially contentious tone. Deutsch, who did not agree to the far-reaching editorial interventions, outran Mendelsohn and published an unabridged version of his manuscript as Larger than Life. The conflict was taken to both religious and secular courts and resulted in the first volume of Deutsch's book being withdrawn from bookstores.Footnote 25 Mendelsohn's enterprise, however, did not prevail. Although the book was the first volume of a series intended as a complete biography, other volumes did not follow.
In the introduction to the second volume, Deutsch remarks bitterly that his book upset two groups of Chabad followers: those who consider it disrespectful to treat the Rebbe “as a person, rather than deity,” and those who wish to deny Deutsch the right to bypass communal institutions and potential censorship while writing about the Rebbe.Footnote 26 Deutsch did not hold back; his dedication of the second volume to David Berger, author of the highly contentious book The Rebbe, the Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference,Footnote 27 “for his tremendous courage in standing against the [Chabad] Messianic campaign”Footnote 28 did not help the biographer maintain a good relationship with the Chabad community. As a result, both Larger than Life and its author were ostracized, and, unlike in the academic works, the reader will rarely find references to them in works of authors associated with Chabad.Footnote 29
Despite these issues, Larger than Life played a crucial role in developing the discourse concerning the Rebbe's life story. On the one hand, the documents published there for the first time facilitated research that would eventually lead to the first academic biography. On the other hand, although the work was shunned by its critics from the hasidic camp, it nevertheless forced them to acknowledge its findings and to explain them, in their own way, to both hasidic and nonhasidic audiences.
The Engineer, the Saint, and the Leader for Our Times: the Rebbe's New Biographies
As important as the aforementioned books were, it was the 2010 publication of The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson that served as a catalyst for the biographical writing about the Rebbe. The Rebbe is the first and, so far, the only biography of Menachem Mendel Schneerson coming from the academic community. Published by a major academic press, The Rebbe is the joint work of American sociologist Samuel Heilman and Israeli historian Menachem Friedman. Defined by its authors as a “sociobiography,”Footnote 30 the book strives to uncover and analyze life-altering social and historical circumstances that turned Menachem Mendel Schneerson from an introverted son of the Yekaterinoslav rabbi into the leader who breathed a new life into Chabad and turned it into a worldwide empire of sheluḥim (emissaries). The book builds to some extent on previous research, but also adds significant new findings. These include the future Rebbe's student records from a technical college in Paris, once and for all putting an end to the myth that he acquired a doctorate from the Sorbonne.Footnote 31 The Rebbe also discusses the controversy surrounding the Chabad messianic idea—the Rebbe's alleged messianic status and its repercussions for the Chabad community, both in his life and after his death.Footnote 32
The authors’ methodology, as well as their mistrust toward the editorial practices of Chabad publishers, resulted in the outright exclusion of the Rebbe's speculative and autobiographic writings, including his prewar diaries.Footnote 33 Instead, the authors filled the lacunae in source materials with speculations about psychological motivations for Schneerson's behavior. This approach has made their book stand out from other biographies. It has also, however, led to criticism within and outside the academic community for failing to grasp the Rebbe as a complex religious thinker and an accomplished leader. The book presents the future Rebbe as a person living a double life, torn between the hasidic court of his father-in-law and the cultural attractions of Berlin and Paris. Perusal of his diaries and teachings would have yielded a more nuanced and integrated description of Schneerson's young years, as well as his growth into the leadership role in Chabad. Instead, the reader is often left with speculations, which stem not so much from the stiff methodological framework imposed by the authors from the outset as from the polemical tone of their narrative.
The Rebbe did not occur in a vacuum. Heilman and Friedman did not merely use findings furnished by the Chabad writings, in particular the earlier biographies (most prominently, Larger than Life and Yeme melekh); the Hasidim's veneration for Schneerson inversely determined the tone and argument of The Rebbe. Heilman and Friedman were eager to dismantle the Chabad image of the Rebbe as superhuman and bring Schneerson down to mortal proportions, just as the Chabad biographers wanted to preserve and promote it. The Rebbe is, therefore, hardly a dispassionate analysis of historical and sociological data. Creating a counternarrative to the Chabad biographies is its unspoken agenda.
Whereas the Hasidim attempted to paint the image of Menachem Mendel Schneerson as a young man who grew organically into the role of the leader of the Jewish people, Heilman and Friedman argued that his life aspiration was in the field of engineering. While the Hasidim claimed that Schneerson excelled in all areas, sacred and profane, Heilman and Friedman used their discovery of the Rebbe's academic record from Paris to portray Schneerson as a struggling student at a mediocre polytechnic school. If, according to the Hasidim, Schneerson emerged unscathed from the perils of the cultural life of prewar Berlin and Paris, so Heilman and Friedman attempted to prove that this experience affected him profoundly and complicated his relations with Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn. If the Hasidim believed that he is at least worthy to be the messiah, then Heilman and Friedman wanted to show him as a man of flesh and blood, driven by passions and sometimes even simply by the hope for material gain.
While The Rebbe explicitly excludes Schneerson's speculative writings, revered by the Hasidim, it privileges the voices silenced by the Chabad mainstream. The Rebbe draws on Deutsch's Larger than Life and on interviews with Barry Gourary (1923–2005), estranged scion of the Schneersohn dynasty, who lost a bitter court battle against his uncle, the Rebbe, for the ownership of the library of the previous Chabad leader. The fact that Friedman had served in the trial as an expert witness for Gourary and did not disclose it in his book was seen by some as suspicious, if not unethical, and as evidence of his bias.Footnote 34 Regardless of the significance of this particular omission, The Rebbe was a polemic against Chabad's “hagiography with footnotes.” Whether intentionally or not, it remained deeply embedded in, and dependent on, hasidic historiographical discourse. Effectively, it failed to assume its own, independent voice.
The reactions to The Rebbe also confirm the extent to which it chose to be part of Chabad's inner historiographical discourse. The Rebbe has drawn mixed reviews from the academic community. On the one hand, it was awarded the 2010 National Jewish Book Award. On the other hand, reviewers pointed to its methodological deficiencies, most importantly the refusal to acknowledge the Rebbe's speculative writings and the far-reaching and largely unsubstantiated speculations regarding the Rebbe's life in Europe and the motivations behind his decision to rejoin the Chabad court in the United States.Footnote 35
Unsurprisingly, the book caused major turmoil within and around the Chabad community. London-based Chabad rabbi Chaim Rapoport responded in the blogosphere with a lengthy and rather disparaging review essay, later reworked, toned down, and published in book form.Footnote 36 An exchange ensued,Footnote 37 followed later by a quasi-self-review published in AJS Review by Samuel Heilman, in which he felt the need, yet again, to explain the reasons, motivations, and intentions of his and Friedman's book.Footnote 38
The response was demonization, delegitimization, and misprision. Rapoport's confrontational appraisal of Heilman and Friedman's work began by questioning their credentials and methods and ended with an outright accusation that their book constituted a “joint effort to malign the name of a great man after his death [which] constitutes the severe sin of hoẓa'at shem ra‘ ‘al ha-metim [slandering the dead].”Footnote 39 In other words, not only did he rebut the book on account of alleged shortcomings in the authors’ training,Footnote 40 he perhaps more importantly disqualified the authors themselves as, essentially, incapable of meeting the ethical standards required when dealing with the life story of the Rebbe.
Still, even more noteworthy than Rapoport's head-on criticism were indirect responses to The Rebbe, namely the new biographies that appeared around the twentieth anniversary of Menachem Mendel's death: Chaim Miller's Turning Judaism Outwards, Joseph Telushkin's Rebbe, and Yeḥi'el Harari's Sodo shel ha-Rabi. These works illustrate the difficult dialogue within twenty-first-century historical writing about Chabad and further complicate the ostensibly sharp distinction between partisan and academic scholarship.
In addition to these three books, Adin Steinsaltz's My Rebbe was published roughly at the same time. My Rebbe is an openly and unabashedly hagiographical account, and Steinsaltz does not refer to non-Chabad literature. It is a synthesis of internal Chabad sources with the author's personal experiences and anecdotes he collected from other Hasidim. Steinsaltz wanted “to recreate the [Rebbe's] person as he really lived and taught, and help him carry on his great mission.”Footnote 41 In that respect, My Rebbe belongs more with the pre-2010 commemorative partisan biographies, and therefore it will be, by and large, excluded from the analysis below. It should be noted, however, that somewhat paradoxically, the author's status in the community and the openly tendentious character of his book might have given him more extensive freedom to discuss some of the controversial issues surrounding the Rebbe's life. Steinsaltz is, for example, the most forthcoming of the biographers about the rift between the factions within Chabad following the Rebbe's stroke, and the only one who mentions internal power struggles in the Lubavitch headquarters.Footnote 42
A reappraisal of the current Chabad's relationship to historical and biographical discourses is problematic primarily on account of the factionalism of the movement.Footnote 43 Chabad Hasidim are dispersed all around the globe, acting within various communal and organizational frameworks. There are also various degrees of affiliation to Chabad, and over the decades of its outreach work the movement has succeeded in attracting a vast number of sympathizers and fellow travelers, who, as we shall soon see, may speak for or about Chabad without formally being part of it. All this makes it difficult to define what qualifies as the voice of Chabad when not issued by the Chabad umbrella organization Agudas Chasidei Chabad or published by Kehot; indeed, none of the Rebbe's biographies were published by Kehot. Harari's book was published by Yediʿot Sefarim, one of the biggest Israeli publishers of both fiction and nonfiction books. Telushkin's biography was put out by a large trade book publisher, Harper Wave. Miller, in contrast, published his book through his small, ostensibly Chabad-affiliated press, Kol Menachem (the voice of Menachem), which focuses on nonhasidic readership.Footnote 44 These publishing decisions, as well as the authors’ affiliations, may have influenced the final shape of their books.
Harari, an alumnus of Tel Aviv University who drew nearer to Chabad while in his doctoral program, offers a biographical account, which (as he declares in the introduction) does not include new research findings; its virtue lies in the book's different approach to the Rebbe's personality.Footnote 45 Harari brushes off a priori a possibility of academic research, because “the critical approach fails to grasp the public's comprehension and the true reasons why it accepts the Rebbe, his speculative teachings and instructions.”Footnote 46 For Harari, explaining this adherence is not a matter of adopting an appropriate critical methodology. Perhaps prompted by the polemical overtones of The Rebbe, he understands the critical approach as concerned with the beliefs of the Hasidim, and not methodological rigidness. Critical research, in his opinion, “generally looks like a detailed chart, which precisely describes what an unconvinced person should be cautious about, according to the researchers’ hierarchy of values.”Footnote 47 Critical research on Chabad, as Harari understands it, has tried to keep people away from Chabad, rather than help them understand it.
Understanding the Rebbe, claims Harari, is possible only when the reader puts herself in a Hasid's shoes. Therefore, instead of suspending judgment regarding the validity of the Rebbe's teachings and focusing on the mechanisms of the Rebbe's leadership, Harari proposes suspending any judgment at all. As he puts it, “If people are convinced only by what they believe is true, in order to understand the Rebbe's influence on the public, we need to contemplate the ideas he propagated, on the assumption they are, indeed, true.”Footnote 48 As a result, the approach postulated by Harari is blatantly uncritical. While his methodological declaration might disqualify the manuscript from publication with an academic press, it was not problematic for a major publisher seeking to attract a broad audience; indeed, the bracketing of criticism advocated by the author is designed as a means for any reader to uncover the eponymous “Rebbe's secret.”
Telushkin, who has family ties to Chabad but did not grow up in the community and does not consider himself a Hasid of the Rebbe,Footnote 49 produced a rich compilation of accounts of various people's encounters with the Rebbe that reveal his extraordinary character traits. Only a section at the back of the book contains a chronological account of “major events in the life of the Rebbe.”Footnote 50 Effectively, and despite all the effort expended by Telushkin to confirm the stories with their authors,Footnote 51 and despite a substantial footnotes section, the book can still be considered part of the hagiographic genre.
As opposed to Telushkin, Miller, who is a fully-fledged Chabad Hasid, intended to give a full account of the Rebbe's life, from his birth in Nikolayev until his passing at the Beth Israel Hospital in New York. He painstakingly plodded through countless documents and recordings, and his efforts resulted in a well-rounded biography of an extraordinary leader for extraordinary times. He provides a rich bibliography, which, in addition to Chabad sources, includes all major academic monographs on the doctrine and history of Chabad, both in Hebrew and in English, as well as some other relevant works by academic scholars of Hasidism. Moreover, a reader expecting to find haskamot (rabbinic approbations) will be surprised to see that they have been replaced by a dozen or so praises. Admittedly, some of them come from Orthodox rabbis, but some come from prominent Jewish studies scholars, such as Daniel Matt, Shaul Magid, and Elliot R. Wolfson.Footnote 52
One may speculate that Telushkin's greater distance from the Rebbe's court and his well-established status as a best-selling Jewish public intellectual gave him a free hand to write his book as he pleased, whereas Miller's position as an overtly Chabad author writing for a Chabad-affiliated press placed his endeavor under more scrutiny and forced him to shape the book in the most scholarly manner possible in order to avoid an outright rejection of his text as yet another hagiography.
Chabad Biographers (Not) Reading The Rebbe
Regardless of their distinctive forms and methods, all three biographies implicitly engage Heilman and Friedman's The Rebbe. They seamlessly merge parts of the book's narrative, findings, and academic apparatus. They reuse information provided by Heilman and Friedman's book, address the lacunae, and respond to its critical appraisal of the Rebbe's achievements, all while hardly even acknowledging it. Some facts, which sparked scandal when mentioned by Deutsch in 1996, are treated matter of factly. Others are acknowledged, but their significance is diminished or increased depending on the book's argument. Others still, which have remained contentious, have been filtered out.
Chaim Miller includes The Rebbe in the bibliography, but he goes to great lengths not to present it as a direct source for any part of his book. Instead, he dismisses it as a tendentious account from the perspective of the Rebbe's estranged nephew, Barry Gourary.Footnote 53 Yeḥi'el Harari goes one step further and refers to The Rebbe as a major proof of the academy's utter failure to explain the secret of the unique influence Schneerson had on people's lives.Footnote 54 Harari views Friedman and Heilman's critical approach (and that of academic research of Chabad in general) to the object of their study as a condemnation of the Rebbe and his followers.Footnote 55 It is not surprising, therefore, that he hardly ever refers to Friedman and Heilman's book. In contrast, Telushkin tries to disguise his reliance on this text altogether. He never indicates it as a source, yet several times he refers to Chaim Rapoport's “Afterlife,” which is a review of the former!Footnote 56
Misprision of The Rebbe is also discernible in the way the later biographies construct their arguments, choose their focal points, and select their sources. This becomes clear against the background of the two pivotal points of Heilman and Friedman's narrative: the Rebbe's university studies and the messianic campaign. The former is decisive for understanding the Rebbe's life; the latter—his “afterlife.” Both are particularly controversial in light of the hasidic (and in general, haredi) world view and are thus exceptionally difficult to tackle for authors coming from the Orthodox camp. Schneerson's studies seemingly contradict the approach of the hasidic community that tends to shun secular education; his passionate messianism makes Chabad an easy target for accusations of antinomianism and breaching the boundaries of Jewish Orthodoxy. The various ways in which the three biographers deal with these issues reveal the respective ideological agendas of their work.
The Reluctant Academic
The Rebbe, as depicted by Heilman and Friedman, was a maverick. Despite never cutting ties with the ẓ addik’s court, Schneerson aspired to the life of an engineer rather than of a rebbe or a rabbi. Only later, due to disastrous historical developments, did he return to the Chabad fold. The argumentation for this thesis occupies a central place in The Rebbe, involves first-time disclosure of fascinating archival documents, and arguably constitutes the most thought-provoking, speculative, and controversial part of the book. The next forty-three years of Menachem Mendel Schneerson's life, from his ascent to leadership until his death, receive just as much space as his thirteen years in Germany and France.
How, then, did Telushkin, Harari, and Miller cope with the Rebbe's secular education in their respective books? The first step, as mentioned above, is a conscious omission of Heilman and Friedman's work, even though all three books correctly report Schneerson's academic credentials.Footnote 57 The education of the Rebbe is less important for Telushkin's narrative, which is constructed around a series of the Rebbe's unusual traits rather than a chronology of his life. Telushkin recalls events from the era preceding the Rebbe's ascent to leadership only when they may shed a positive light on the events that happened during his leadership. He refers to the Rebbe's time at university in this vein.
While crucial for Heilman and Friedman's argument, assessing the Rebbe's academic ambitions is a nonissue for Telushkin. He reiterates an old argument, according to which the Rebbe considered secular knowledge as simply a useful instrument for facilitating observant life.Footnote 58 Any other possible reasons, says Telushkin, lie “in the realm of speculation.”Footnote 59
Schneerson's university experience does, however, play two primary roles in Telushkin's book. First, Telushkin echoes earlier hagiographical accounts, which highlighted the extraordinary intellectual capabilities of the Rebbe, albeit not in as blatantly implausible a manner. For example, he describes the Rebbe as a gifted student, who would easily follow Martin Heidegger's lectures while simultaneously studying rabbinic and hasidic sources.Footnote 60 Moreover, Telushkin uses Schneerson's firsthand experience at a German university to explain the Rebbe's opposition to college education later in his life. The German academic community, despite its intellectual achievements, complied with, or, as in the case of Heidegger, enthusiastically supported, the Nazi regime. For the Rebbe, the inability to create an ethical system that could prevent the rise of Nazism was a sign of the failure of Western philosophy and education.Footnote 61
Miller's treatment of this episode is far more complex. As he strives to present the span of the Rebbe's life to its fullest extent, he presents Berlin and Paris as simply a stage in the Rebbe's life rather than a watershed moment. Miller assiduously builds up the Rebbe's character from his childhood years on, always stressing his deep engrossment with hasidic sources. Harari, too, shares this sentiment, and his account of the Rebbe's years in Berlin and Paris highlights Menachem Mendel's relations with his father-in-law and his court, as well as his involvement in Torah study.Footnote 62
Focusing on Schneerson's involvement with the Chabad court, in turn, leads both Harari and Miller away from speculations about the future Rebbe's academic ambitions. Miller offers three possible explanations of why the young Schneerson became involved in university education. Firstly, although he admits that it “was not the norm in Chasidic circles,”Footnote 63 he uses the very same explanation as Telushkin and determines that Schneerson's “key motivation was undoubtedly the need for a vocation.”Footnote 64 Secondly, Miller constructs the image of his protagonist as a leader-to-be who would “turn Judaism outward”; therefore, his university education is presented anachronistically, as a way of acquiring the necessary skills for his future mission.Footnote 65 The third possible motivation that Miller offers is even more noteworthy. Menachem Mendel, aware of the appeal of modern culture among Jewish youth and the toll it took on the Orthodox community, purposefully submerged himself in it in order to “know to answer a heretic”Footnote 66 and to become capable in the future of guiding estranged Jews back to the fold of the faith.Footnote 67 Aside from being purely apologetic, this explanation shows how hasidic spirituality mixes with historical assessment in Miller's work: the Rebbe's education reflects the hasidic concept of the ẓ addik, who descends to the world of husks [kelipot] to redeem the sparks of holiness trapped there as a result of the sins of Israel.Footnote 68
Was Miller's Rebbe indeed “straddling worlds,” as Miller refers to the Rebbe's Berlin years? According to this account, he was never very attracted to anything Western European culture had to offer. In contrast to Heilman and Friedman's demonstration of various cultural attractions that could lure Menachem Mendel and his wife, Miller supplies a description of their Berlin neighborhood as full of hasidic shtiblekh and kosher amenities.Footnote 69 All the above is presented without referring to the former book. Instead of pursuing his academic or vocational dreams, as Heilman and Friedman claimed,Footnote 70 in Miller's account the future Rebbe remained deeply involved in the study of hasidic texts, as well as in the proceedings of the court of his father-in-law, the rebbe Yosef Yiẓḥak.Footnote 71 In short, Miller wants to convince the reader that you could take Menachem Mendel out of the Chabad world, but you could not take the Chabad world out of Menachem Mendel.
The description of the French period follows the same pattern. Heilman and Friedman emphasize the Schneersons’ exposure to secular culture in the bohemian neighborhoods of Paris, which they chose as their place of residence.Footnote 72 Miller responds (without acknowledging his interlocutors) by stating the distance from the Schneersons’ apartment to the nearest synagogues. Also, Miller and Harari choose to pass over possible reasons why the Schneersons decided specifically on Paris after the Nazi rise to power in Germany.Footnote 73 Heilman and Friedman relate this to the fact that other members of the Schneerson family, albeit estranged from the hasidic lifestyle, lived there and might have provided a limited support network for the new immigrant couple. Moreover, what Heilman and Friedman describe as the time of Menachem Mendel Schneerson's intensive study toward his dream degree in engineering, Miller describes as “relatively uneventful”Footnote 74 years of college studies, caring for the needs of his ailing father-in-law, and private Torah study punctuated by rare public appearances. Most of the descriptions of the future Rebbe's public engagement are apocryphal and serve to perpetuate the impression of Menachem Mendel's devotion while away from Chabad circles.Footnote 75
Miller and Harari generally agree with Heilman and Friedman in their description of Menachem Mendel's enrollment in the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, du Bâtiment et de l'Industrie (ESTP), the duration of his course, the arrangements made for Friday classes so he would not be forced to break the Sabbath, and so on. Perhaps only Miller's characterization of the ESTP as an “elitist” school would raise Heilman and Friedman's eyebrows.Footnote 76 Their book describes the ESTP as “a school … narrowly aimed at providing its students entry into the civil and engineering industries … not interested in turning out intellectuals.”Footnote 77 Perhaps this is an echo of earlier hagiographical accounts overinflating the Rebbe's academic achievements, or perhaps only a different understanding of elite status in higher education. Still, the troubling detail lies not in the way in which they describe the Rebbe's education at the ESTP, but in their selection of the sources that substantiate it. Neither Harari's nor Miller's book acknowledges the discovery of the Rebbe's ESTP records, which was Friedman and Heilman's original contribution to his biography. Instead, perhaps due to Friedman and Heilman's “detracting” attitude,Footnote 78 Miller refers his readers to a Chabad publication, which had not yet even been published at the time his book came out;Footnote 79 Harari refers directly to the ESTP archives.Footnote 80
The Elusive Messiah
For Heilman and Friedman, the Rebbe's messianism is intrinsically linked to Chabad's growth during his leadership of the movement and after his death. Therefore, they include the Rebbe's “afterlife,” expressed by the ever-increasing activities of Chabad emissaries, as a legitimate part of his biography. Still, their interpretation of Chabad messianism and its impact on the direction the movement took following the death of the Rebbe proved no less controversial than their account of the Rebbe's engineering career. Just as Heilman and Friedman's discussion of the Rebbe's university education was received as disparaging because it depicted him in somewhat too earthly and common terms, so the description of the messianic fervor in Chabad and the widespread belief in the late Rebbe as the King Messiah could show the community as detached from reality and from normative Jewish Orthodoxy.Footnote 81 In response, the three biographies choose to downplay the significance of messianism in Chabad and the belief that the Rebbe might have been the messiah.Footnote 82 Telushkin, Harari, and Miller might have felt that bringing up this issue would be seen as leaving a stain on the Rebbe's legacy or at least would complicate the harmonious image propagated by Chabad outreach.
Therefore, as with the Rebbe's alleged penchant for secular education, his messianism also becomes almost an incidental issue in Miller's book. It appears in the discussion of the end of the Rebbe's life, having been mentioned earlier only in passing.Footnote 83 While Miller admits that messianism had always constituted part of the Rebbe's message, he chooses to blunt the edge of this statement, illustrating it with a quote from a letter written by the Rebbe in which he presented his messianic idea as just one ring in the very long and rich chain of rabbinic tradition.Footnote 84
After showing that the acute messianism of Chabad conforms to the tradition set by the Jewish sages, Miller continues to debunk the controversy surrounding the belief in the Rebbe as the messiah. He recalls several instances when the Rebbe protested against his Hasidim trying to pronounce him as the messiah.Footnote 85 More importantly, he unpacks the Rebbe's messianic idea as inherently disinterested in the messiah's identity, let alone in promoting the Rebbe as one. The Rebbe's messianism, says Miller, is rooted in the Maimonidean Mishneh Torah, a book to which the Rebbe indeed assigned extraordinary significance.Footnote 86 The description of the King Messiah in Mishneh Torah allows a righteous individual to be declared as the messiah only after he has gathered the exiles and rebuilt the Jerusalem temple.Footnote 87 The kind of messianism it offers is oriented not on the personality of the messiah, but on the collective effort of the Jewish people to bring closer his advent. Therefore, Miller states that “ironically, any focus on the persona of Mashiach [messiah] is liable to detract from the work of bringing the Redemption. … If we do not need to know and cannot know with certainty, who the Messiah is—as Maimonides implies—then this potentially contentious issue ought to be avoided.”Footnote 88 A reader of Miller's book may wonder to what these last words in fact refer. Is it really only the theoretical speculation on the identity of the messiah that is potentially contentious and therefore should be avoided? Or, perhaps, is it the actual belief of the Chabad community that the Rebbe is the messiah that is better not discussed? While Heilman and Friedman look at this problem from a sociological perspective, as something that had tangible impact on the rituals, activities, and social organization of the Chabad community, Miller takes a purely theoretical perspective. He not only conflates the Rebbe's messianic idea with the messianic concept present in Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, but he also deems the latter to be “the normative view of Judaism.”Footnote 89 This way, he can pass over the core of the messianic controversy in Chabad: the belief that the Rebbe is a messiah, and that either he will return from the dead, or he never died but went into concealment. Miller simply waves off Chabad messianism as a deviation from the boundaries of normative Judaism. Dwelling on it would detract from the Rebbe's mission of working towards redemption.
Consequently, there is no “afterlife” that can be discussed. Miller's narrative ends abruptly with the Rebbe's passing in 1994. What Heilman and Friedman perceive as yet another turning point in Chabad's ideology and social organization prepared by the Rebbe in his lifetime, the Chabad historian presents as an afterword to the Rebbe's story, told by thousands of sheluḥim serving the Jewish people around the globe. The death of the Rebbe did not cause the feud between the competing factions of meshiḥistn (messianists) and non-meshiḥistn; it instead provided Chabad with a new opportunity to grow and develop a “grassroots style autonomy.”Footnote 90 The story of crisis and dissent in Chabad, and in the broader Jewish community, is retold as a harmonious effort by the Rebbe's “spiritual children” to perpetuate his legacy.Footnote 91
The rift that erupted in the movement following the Rebbe's passing features in Harari's book. The reader learns about the radical meshiḥistn and the moderate “mainstream” of Chabad.Footnote 92 Harari also mentions the group of Chabad Hasidim who anticipate the Rebbe's second coming, but he brings them back to the fold of Orthodoxy by anchoring their belief in talmudic and hasidic sources that apparently support this belief.Footnote 93 All in all, the controversy declines in light of the belief shared by all factions that the Rebbe continues to lead the movement even after his passing, a belief that derives from the practice of the Rebbe himself, who kept visiting the grave of his predecessor for many years and referred to him as “the leader of the generation,” even long after his death.Footnote 94
The belief that a Hasid can bind with a ẓ addik while prostrating on his grave provides the interpretative key, according to Harari, to Chabad's post–“third Tammuz” messianism.Footnote 95 The meshiḥistn, he argues, merely push one step further the belief in the ẓ addik’s presence at his grave so it acquires more tangible meaning.Footnote 96 By doing so, Harari blurs the distinction between the meshiḥistn and the non-meshiḥistn, and defines the difference between them as in degree rather than in kind. Both factions have grasped the messianic idea of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and they only differ with regards to the intensity of their messianic fervor.
Interestingly enough, in this case Telushkin provides a more elaborate and, at least ostensibly, less evasive response. He even acknowledges Berger's book on the topic (though, unsurprisingly, not Heilman and Friedman's), but concludes that the criticism is misplaced, as “when the Lubavitchers use the word ‘Messiah’ in referring to the Rebbe, they do not mean what people think they mean.”Footnote 97 In order to substantiate his claim, Telushkin, like Miller, redirects the discussion from the actual messianic campaigns instigated by some Hasidim to the messianic idea as it arises from the sources. Telushkin, too, refers the reader back to Maimonides's Mishneh Torah as the definitive source on messianism.Footnote 98 Since the Rebbe's death ultimately renders him unfit to fulfill the criteria set by Maimonides, then those among his Hasidim who call him the King Messiah cannot literally mean it. Menachem Mendel was merely “a potential Messiah”—an individual whose traits and achievements made him a very strong candidate to become the messiah, but whose death prevented him from actualizing this potential.
Telushkin does not explain why these Chabad Hasidim stay true to the letter of the Maimonidean codex while at the same time taking the great liberty of reassigning a new meaning to the concept of the messiah. In any case, this debate does not end the story of the Rebbe's messianism. Unlike Heilman and Friedman, who recognize messianism as a main factor of the Chabad movement's growth after 1994, or Miller, who chooses to avoid this problem altogether, Telushkin acknowledges the existence of a faction that, even today, believes that the Rebbe is the messiah.Footnote 99 Like Harari, he points to the sources that the meshiḥistn use to substantiate their claim that the idea of the resurrected messiah is still confined within the framework of Jewish Orthodoxy, and additionally provides several anecdotes and opinions of prominent rabbis that reject this possibility, but not much beyond that. In a way, Telushkin uses these opinions in order to avoid engaging the problem of meshiḥistn in today's Chabad. Like Miller, he tries to minimize the role acute messianism plays in a factionalized Chabad that lacks an unchallenged leader who could cut short messianic speculations, as the Rebbe did several times.Footnote 100
Telushkin does not deny that there are Hasidim who believe that the Rebbe is the messiah, even after his death; he simply argues that it does not matter. The messianic faction is a deranged margin of the community (a view disputed by David Berger in his polemical article),Footnote 101 and, more importantly, the messianic belief has no impact on their practice. The lack of practical implications, says Telushkin, ultimately makes messianism a nonissue in Chabad.Footnote 102 This view not only challenges the perspective of Heilman and Friedman, it also ignores the Rebbe's mystical interpretation of the Maimonidean idea of the redemption as a continuous process that takes place beyond the human dimensions of time and space—a concept that underlies Schneerson's messianic teaching and can account for the persistence of the belief that he was and still is the messiah.Footnote 103 Telushkin, describing the Rebbe's “leadership after life,”Footnote 104 finally criticizes Friedman directly, but—puzzlingly—not for his evaluation of the Chabad movement he provided with his colleague in The Rebbe in 2010, but for an article published in 1994. Written before the Rebbe's death, the article contains, among others, Friedman's pessimistic prognosis for Chabad's future with no leader.Footnote 105 Friedman's early assessment was conditioned on the anticipated demise of messianism after the Rebbe's death; the book, to which Telushkin chose not to respond directly, instead shows the routinization and institutionalization of messianism as the reason for the movement's survival and growth. Telushkin, for his part, dismisses the messianism entirely. In order to rebut Friedman and Heilman's analysis, he refers to an older work by Friedman, consciously ignoring whatever their later revisions might have contributed to the discussion.
Partisan History for General Readership
The four biographies illustrate the continuous give-and-take of Chabad and academic historiography. Academic scholars have relied on source materialsFootnote 106 and secondary literature published by Chabad.Footnote 107 Chabad writers, for their part, seem to have an ambiguous approach to the academic lore. On the one hand, the academic discourse furnishes them with new and useful materials that enrich their own narratives; on the other hand, some of these materials may unsettle the Chabad audience and require reevaluation and reappropriation for the dominant Chabad discourse. This, in turn, prompts two processes. First, new sources are disclosed that may disprove claims of academic historians or at least cast a more favorable light on some contentious events.Footnote 108 Second, as academic scholarship challenges the Chabad narrative in front of a nonhasidic audience, the response of the Chabad camp is directed towards the academy and attempts to conform to academic rules.Footnote 109 Miller's Turning Judaism Outward is the best example of this phenomenon, as it incorporates hasidic sources along with academic publications (albeit selectively chosen), uses a scholarly apparatus, and provides blurbs from prominent academics.
All in all, Chabad historiography has significantly developed since Yosef Yiẓḥak's “hagiography with footnotes.” Today, the biographies, enriched by years of difficult dialogue with the academy, increasingly blur the line that separates academic and parochial historiography. They keenly use the academic research, primarily when it does not affect the core of the argument, but openly disregard it when it directly challenges the Chabad narrative. Thus, for example, while Miller does not acknowledge Heilman and Friedman's findings or arguments regarding the Rebbe's life, he draws on academic research on Chabad's mystical doctrine.
The increasing professionalization of Chabad historiography is related to Chabad's engagement with the nonhasidic public. In contrast to the haredi literature examined by Yoel Finkelman, which targets contemporary haredi readers immersed willy-nilly in American culture, the Chabad biographies try at the same time to win over a nonharedi, often secular, university-educated reader.Footnote 110 Indeed, books of openly hagiographic character, not dissimilar to Yosef Yiẓḥak's “hagiography with footnotes,” continue to be published, but they only preach to the choir.Footnote 111 In order to win admiration for the Rebbe among a college-educated audience, the biographies have to convey esteem for the Rebbe as an inadvertent effect of their superior research into his life. Scholarly in form and Chabad in content, the biographies perpetuate the legacy of the Rebbe and actually, to use the title of Miller's book, “turn [the Chabad version of] Judaism outward.”
Shaul Magid argues that according to Chabad, “the way back to tradition for the Jew is not to be convinced of Judaism's truth but to be reintroduced to one's own self.”Footnote 112 The biographies demonstrate that his claim requires qualification. One of the Chabad slogans expressing its flexible attitude to Jewish education is “Educate the child according to his way” (Proverbs 22:6). Namely, while striving for the perfect truth as the ultimate goal of the learning process, one needs to consider first the student's imperfect skills and abilities.Footnote 113 Convincing a contemporary secular reader of the Rebbe's merits and the truth of Judaism, while using academic discourse familiar to the reader, can be a fitting means to the ultimate end, which is the “reintroduction to one's own self.” The writing of Chabad biographies remains central to the Chabad outreach project and, consequently, the biographies are at the core of Chabad's spirituality. The fact that Chabad's spirituality reaches broader audiences when expressed in a book that follows certain rigors of academic research than through the Rebbe's homilies is a fascinating feature of the twenty-first-century Chabad movement.
The superiority of the Chabad-affiliated authors’ research is supposedly granted by their privileged position as privy to the Rebbe's project. This position gives them better access to the Chabad sources and deeper understanding of the “secret” of the Rebbe's personality—something that the critical approach by definition fails to grasp. The problem, therefore, is not merely how Chabad history should be written, but also who should be eligible to write it. The answer ultimately comes from Telushkin's, Harari's, and Miller's books: this privilege should remain limited to the members and friends of the community. The result is partisan historiography for general readership.
The question of who can legitimately write about the Rebbe and his movement is particularly important in light of the lack of a single leader in today's Chabad. In the past, a rebbe was unchallenged both as the spiritual leader of the movement and as the repository of its inner oral traditions. It was the rebbe who sanctioned the dissemination of Chabad stories and histories through his subordinate institutions. Thus, Yosef Yiẓḥak's “hagiography with footnotes” and its manifestations in the times of his successor, the Rebbe, were a top-down project. Conversely, nowadays the writing of Chabad history has become a collective, bottom-up effort of the Hasidim and fellow travelers. Since there is no longer one appointed keeper of the flame, the entire Chabad is now given the task of perpetuating the Rebbe's legacy. The right to tell his story is transferred to each and every person transformed by his charisma, from a Crown Heights–based Chabad rabbi to a non-Chabad bestselling author.
The biographies by Telushkin, Harari, and Miller ultimately fail as unbiased scholarship. Their failure, however, does not restore the dichotomy between partisan “hagiography with footnotes” and Friedman and Heilman's academic history. Rather, my examination of both the Chabad and non-Chabad biographies shows how their discourses are enmeshed and mutually dependent. Friedman and Heilman made their biggest contribution by portraying the social circumstances that shaped Schneerson into the Rebbe of Chabad, a transnational movement of emissaries. They failed, however, by succumbing to a counterpolemic that sought to portray the Rebbe as a mediocre engineering student rather than as a mystic and pietist who at the same time pursued secular study, or as a disheartened immigrant who turned to Chabad when he realized that his life aspirations could not come true in the new country. Conversely, Miller and Harari contributed more to our understanding of the Rebbe's religious thought and leadership despite their partisanship. From this perspective, the dichotomy between the academic and the partisan collapses; none of the authors extricated themselves from polemics over the Rebbe's legacy. The academic biography of the Rebbe has yet to be written.
Recently, a new volume came out devoted to the first three decades of the Rebbe's life: Boruch Oberlander and Elkanah Shmotkin's Early Years. A product of a Chabad-affiliated new media archive, Jewish Educational Media, and the Chabad flagship publisher Kehot, Early Years is an anthology of archival sources on the Rebbe, mixed with oral history and Chabad traditions. The book shares many features with the biographies discussed here. The book's attractive layout is by far superior to many other Chabad publications. It features numerous archival sources, many of which have been used by the biographers discussed here.Footnote 114 Finally, it relies on the help of academic scholars to describe each of the six cities in which the future Rebbe lived in his early years.Footnote 115 Despite all this, and the subtitle claiming otherwise, the Rebbe's biography is not told here “by documents and archival data.” The lack of critical assessment of the sources, and the inclusion of “in-depth” excurses that provide hagiographic and homiletic contexts to presented factography, prove otherwise. The Rebbe's life is told here by his loyal Hasidim, in a blatantly confirmative and commemorative biography. The fact that the official Chabad press has published it, and that new volumes are in the pipeline, may indicate that the movement's leadership is trying to reclaim control over the memory of the Rebbe.
The developments in Chabad historiographical writings illustrated by the recent biographies have broader implications that exceed just one hasidic faction's history. Many American religious groups, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have experienced a crisis of authority and the ensuing negotiation of the tension between insularity and missionary involvement in the outside world. In his recent articles, Shaul Magid has made a case for presenting two hasidic groups, Chabad and Satmar, within the framework of American millennialist groups.Footnote 116 He also remarks on affinities between the strategies employed by Chabad and non-Jewish fundamentalist groups.Footnote 117 Particularly striking are similarities in the responses of both Chabad and the Evangelicals to American feminism, or their turning to academic scholarship and mass media for legitimacy and outreach.Footnote 118 These strategies are further exacerbated in those movements, which, just like Chabad, struggle with the lack of a unified leadership. A comparative study of Chabad as a part of a broader American fundamentalism, however, has yet to be written.
