'(...) academics, may they bite the dust'. This harsh statement - especially if you are an academic and this matters for you - is included in the rabbinic ban issued by Rabbi Yisrael Eliyahu Weintraub agaist the works on zoology and science of Rabbi Nosson/Nathan Slifkin. This depreciation of anything that has to do with academic research and knowledge in general is not new and unfortunatelly applies even to the most 'progressive' - for the naives ears and eyes - Hasidic groups as the Chabad which constantly discourge their followers to follow an academic career.
The extensive research of a couple of Hasidic characters done by David Assaf in Untold Tales of the Hasidim is an interesting evaluation in this respect. The tales in question refer to a couple of representatives of various Hasidic dynasties - Ruzhin, Chabad, Satmar among others - with unique life stories that sometimes leaded them against their group and even against their Jewish upbringing. They are the OTD - Off the Derek, term used for the ex-Hasidic men and women that left the fold - of the old times, without the advantage of nowadays widespread online media and the support of organisations like Footsteps helping them have a normal life as part of the general society they are living in.
But even then, complex mechanisms of internal and external censorship operated apparently successfully enough to obliterate from the collective memories those individuals that did not conform to the set of values assumed by the respective religious group. Memory is used not in order to find the truth but to reshape the collective identity. 'The mechanisms shaping and preserving historical memory among groups with a religious, ideological, political or educational agenda (including Hasidim) do not always take an interest in history as it was but rather in a form that can be called history as it should have been. Memory is a prime educational tool, and any unauthorized interpretation can shake the foundations of an ideological world in need of nurture and protection from its enemies'.
The tales re-told by Assaf, a specialist in Hasidic dynasties and histories in general, recollect a diverse range of situations and personalities: from the conversion to Christianism to Moshe, the son of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Chabad), to the curious 'defenestration' of the Seer of Lublin, or the fierce opposition to the Bratslav Hasidim or the curious personality - for his Hasidic background - of Rabbi Menahem Nahum Friedman of Itscan the last scion of the Shtefaneshti dynasty.
Each story is told from different angles, finely outlining the historical evaluation and interpretation at different moments.
The book is precious not only for the complex methodology and the fine attentio to detail, but also for taking out of Hasidic historical forgetfulness - for very clear ideological reasons - extraordinary histories. Most of those characters were, in fact, sending a message of a crisis following the dramatic meeting between modernity and tradition. Many of the contemporary untold tales of the Hasidim are in the making.
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