Lost Classic: Satan in Goray, by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray is a study of what happens when people try “to resolve a hundred dilemmas with one answer”. The dilemmas in question are those besetting Poland’s Jewish community in the year 1666; eighteen years after it was all but obliterated by vicious pogroms at the hands of the neighbouring Ukrainian warlord, whose men “sewed live cats into the bellies of women”. As the survivors trickle back to the town of Goray, they want to know why God let this calamity befall a humble and devout people. Was their observance incorrect? Or was it a sign of the End Times, and will they soon be borne victorious to Israel on a golden cloud?
To these and a hundred other questions, a single answer presents itself. Word reaches the town of a possible new Messiah arising in the East: the great and mysterious Sabbatai Zevi, who “rode daily on a silk-saddled horse, with fifty runners before him”. The news lights a touch paper among the restive cabbalists of Goray. Exegesis is provided from the Zohar; signs and wonders are observed; a legate arrives on behalf of the new Messiah, then another. Soon the town is in a ferment. The End Times are coming! Their suffering is soon to end! Against the tide of millenarian fervour stands a single man: old Rabbi Benish, whose reputation still instils respect for the proper rites of Judaism. “But how will it all end?” he asks passing children. He mounts a final stand, and is beaten back by forces beyond his control.
In his place emerges a young prophetess; who is fought-over, married, and managed by successive self-appointed leaders of the new sect. As the improprieties amount, her visions intensify; driving the vicious cycle of millenarianism ever-faster. Soon the people “stopped buying houses and sewing heavy coats, as it would be warm in the land of Israel”. Kosher disciples are abandoned. The sect takes control of taxation and – by way of recompense – relaxes the adultery laws. Men surprise women bathing. Ecstatic dancing and drinking sweeps the town. The Rapture approaches.
And passes. A woman casually remarks that “maybe they should repair their houses and get this thing out of their heads: the Messiah is not coming to Goray”. But she is scolded and reminded that she is “a no-one and a person of humble origin”. Yet it soon transpires that Sabbatai Zevi has embraced the very forces from which he was supposed to liberate them. The town becomes divided against itself. Some produce further evidence in support of the False Messiah, others recant Judaism altogether; some try to rebuild their ruined institutions, others plunge ever deeper into sin. Soon Goray has become “a den of robbers and an accursed town.” But even as they confront their material dereliction, the people uncover a much worse problem: in attempting to summon the Messiah, they have instead summoned a genuine Demon into their midst.
Isaac Bashevis Singer originally wrote Satan in Goray in Yiddish in 1935, basing it on the historical Sabbatai Zevi, whose false-gospel of sexual liberation did indeed sweep through the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It is hard to imagine how the manuscript – by then serialised in English in New York – appeared to the reader after 1945. For it is a parable not just of religion but the power of false promises to sweep away institutions, and how the Siren call of licentiousness is so often heard through their crumbling walls.
It reveals the frequent paradox of high-utopianism: that “the generation before redemption has to be completely guilty, and goes to great lengths to commit every possible offence”. It unpacks how temporal power comes cloaked in prophecy; the importance of critical mass to overcome the individual; the sublimated power of teenage prophets; the venality of radical leaders; and the slow torture of cognitive dissonance as the tide retreats. It is impossible to count the number of times this prophecy has come true since its publication, or escape the feeling that its perennial warning should be heard across the political spectrum.