מדרש שמות ב'ספר בוחן צדיק' ליוסף פרל

Joseph Perl's Boẖen Zaddik is one of the most complex satires of Hasidism written in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is the sequel to the main anti-Hasidic work he had composed earlier, Sefer Megale Temirin, published in 1819, a work that critiques the social context of the Hasidism of his day. In Boẖen Zaddik he widens his scope to attack the rabbinate of Galicia and Jewish society in general. The work underwent various revisions from the first draft, composed in the 1820s, through its printing in 1838. Previous scholarship regarding this book has focused on literary and linguistic analysis, overlooking much of the historical substratum. The article concentrates on identifying the figures mentioned in the work, particularly the rabbis of Galicia, who are the apparent object of the author's polemic, rather than the Hasidim, as presumed earlier. By deciphering the allusions to names and places in the work, and by comparing the printed version of the text to the earlier recension found only in manuscript, a new layer of the work is uncovered, challenging a number of central scholarly assumptions and reorienting the reader to a richer appreciation of the writings of Joseph Perl.