How the Wise Men Got to Chelm

How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world—one fool per town. But the angel’s bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm. The collected tales of these fools, or “wise men,” of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life—as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected. By placing literary Chelm and its “foolish” antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.

Bernuth...provides a detailed and comprehensive examination of the evolution of some of the best-known Yiddish folk stories--those revolving around the comically foolish men of the town of Chelm--that places those tales in historical and cultural context., [Von Bernuth] provides a comprehensive survey of all the collections of Chelm stories and their predecessors published since 1700, shows how the tales explored Jewish identity, community and history, and delivers a few punch lines., von Bernuth succeeds admirably in showing how the mythic locale allowed for the expression of various Jewish fantasies and anxieties over the past century and a half, and indeed continues to do so today., A beautifully-written work of meticulous scholarship. How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first book in any language to fully explore the humor and the seriousness in one of the most enduring and beloved legends of popular Jewish culture. Von Bernuth not only traces the origins of the fools of Chelm, but goes further to illuminate what these stories reveal about the intersections of European and Jewish cultures and the shifts in Jewish cultural development over a three hundred year period., This book is deeply learned, immensely sympathetic, and refreshingly free of cultural anxiety or chauvinism, Ruth von Bernuth squarely sets this famous genre within a milieu that is at once thoroughly Germanic and distinctively Jewish, and she carefully traces the continuities and transitions from early modern to twentieth-century expressions. Very wise indeed, this is a model analysis of the creative workings of not only Jewish but other diasporas as well.

Ruth von Bernuth is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.