NATHANIEL DEUTSCH. The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 95, No. 2 (Spring 2005) 360–365
NATHANIEL DEUTSCH. The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her
World. S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xix Ⳮ 310.
The passion and curiosity that drive the scholarly work of Nathaniel
Deutsch are evident on every page of his latest path-breaking contribution. After publishing two works on Gnosticism and ancient Jewish mysticism, Deutsch explored African American religious encounters with
Judaism before turning his attention some five years ago to Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, the Jewish holy woman better known as the Maiden
of Ludmir.1 Born in Ludmir in the early nineteenth century, the Maiden
was an only child who, from her youth, learned Torah and prayed like a
boy. As a young woman, she reportedly spent hours crying and praying
tekhines (women’s prayers) at her mother’s grave until a collapse that left
her critically ill for weeks. She emerged from this illness with the declaration that she had been given a ‘‘new and lofty’’ soul, and that she would
never marry. Her father’s death left her with sufficient means to build
her own beys medresh, or study house, where she transformed herself into
a public religious figure who gave blessings and taught men and
women—most of them apparently poor and working-class. Opponents
accused her of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit, and she was
eventually prevailed upon to marry, with the assumption that marriage
would put an end to her unacceptable behavior. Her groom was apparently too afraid of her to consummate the marriage, however, and the
couple soon divorced. In her early fifties, the Maiden emigrated to Palestine, where she succeeded in reestablishing herself as a religious leader in
Jerusalem. Leading primarily female followers, she spent most of her
days making pilgrimages to the tomb of Rachel the Matriarch and to the
Western Wall, where she prayed in tallis and tefillin. She died at nearly
100 years of age and was buried on the Mount of Olives.
Although Deutsch began his work on the Maiden by attempting to
produce a reliable positivist biography of a figure whose life was the stuff
of legend, he eventually realized that no such work could be written. No
1. Yvonne Patricia Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch, Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (New York, 2000); Nathaniel Deutsch,
Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1999); Nathaniel Deutsch, The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and Merkabah Mysticism (Leiden, 1995).
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single life of the Maiden could be identified or reconstructed, as ‘‘even
the most basic biographical details . . . [were] contested in the different
. . . tellings of her story’’ (p. 7). Rather than surrender in defeat, Deutsch
crafted a history ‘‘in which competing memories of the past haunt the
present, while the specters of today influence how we remember and interpret the past’’ (p. 11). The work is no less about memory, then, than it
is about history. The memories of the Maiden—or ‘‘imaginings’’ as
Deutsch calls them—are her ‘‘afterlives’’ that, taken as an entire ensemble, convey ‘‘the full significance of the Maiden of Ludmir’’ (p. 9). While
at times these imaginings may conflict with one another, each, he maintains, reveals a different face of her legacy. Deutsch calls this historiographical sensibility ‘‘midrashic’’ (p. 211), and indeed, to some, his work
may seem uncomfortably so. Yet Deutsch not so much loses track of the
distinction between history and memory as he revels in exploring their
complex interrelationship. The path of memory is most directly followed
in Deutsch’s encounters with living surviving (former) residents of
Ludmir, and in his journey to the town, artfully described in the afterword. Survivors of Ludmir shared images of the Maiden recalled from
childhood, and freed the author from his long-held assumption that ‘‘the
sole path to the Maiden of Ludmir lay in the written accounts of her life’’
(p. 46). These living Ludmirites, as well as the author’s own undisguised
presence throughout, impart a nefesh h.ayyah, a living spirit, to the book
that I found refreshing and empowering.
Lest the reader get the impression that memory has displaced history
entirely in this work, be reassured that Deutsch presents a serious treatment of the social and historical background of the Maiden’s emergence.
In a manner recalling Moshe Rosman’s masterly reconstruction of the
Miedzyboz of the Baal Shem Tov, Deutsch sketches the history of
Ludmir’s Jewish life up to the period of the Maiden’s birth in the early
nineteenth century, with a special focus on its place in the history of
Hasidism in general and the Karlin-Stolin dynasty in particular. Deutsch
sees the Maiden as having constituted an alternative to the emerging dynastic form of Hasidism as represented locally by Shlomo Karliner’s son,
Moshe of Ludmir, whose ‘‘aggressive and public displays of power’’ were
based on lineage alone. In many ways, the Maiden thus resembled the
rebbes of the earlier paradigm—a resemblance that could only make her
doubly threatening to the new dynastic elites.
Deutsch’s historical research is impressively grounded in archival research in Russian, Ukrainian, and Israeli archives as well as contemporary Hasidic sources. The Maiden’s date of birth is thus established by
census lists from nineteenth-century Palestine (p. 75), and her wedding
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date by a Russian government census of Ludmir undertaken in 1858 (p.
181). The Russian census enabled Deutsch to find the probable date of
Mordechai of Chernobyl’s visit to the town to attend the wedding of his
son to Moshe of Ludmir’s daughter—and ostensibly to convince the
Maiden to marry. As an example of the way in which this work leaves
few stones unturned, note that the author investigates possible Christian
influences on the Maiden not merely through suggesting phenomenological affinities but through a study of Church records from the women’s
monastery of Ludmir. Like the Maiden, the self-supporting women of
this Basilian (Uniate) noncommunal monastery lived in privately owned
rooms while pursuing lives of celibacy and pious asceticism (pp. 161–64).
Deutsch’s use of the widow lists from the censuses commissioned by
Moses Montefiore in nineteenth-century Palestine is also exemplary.
These lists include detailed information concerning Jewish women in Palestine at a time when they constituted a majority of the Jewish population
and are thus an invaluable resource for reconstructing their lives (p. 193).
In one of two lists noting her arrival in Palestine compiled by the Volhynian Hasidic community in 1875, the Maiden appears as a sixty-nine-yearold woman from Ludmir who arrived in 1859, ‘‘ha-rabbanit ha-tsaddeket
Hannah Rochel.’’ Such appellations indicate that the leaders of this Hasidic community ‘‘viewed her with respect and strongly suggests that the
Maiden of Ludmir successfully reestablished herself as a holy woman,
though not necessarily a woman rebbe, in Palestine’’ (p. 194).
Deutsch’s work also represents an important contribution to the history of women’s visionary mystical activity in Jewish culture and largely
corroborates and augments recent work by Ada Rapaport-Albert and myself.2 Rejecting the blanket exclusion of women from the history of Jewish mysticism, Deutsch rightly insists that ‘‘any attempt to understand the
Maiden’s story must acknowledge her place within a long chain of Jewish
2. It is interesting to note that this subject, long overlooked in Jewish historiography, was identified and explored by the three of us almost simultaneously in
complementary studies. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, ‘‘On the Position of Women
in Sabbatianism,’’ The Sabbatian Movement and its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, ed. R. Elior (Jerusalem, 2001); J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds:
Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadephia, 2003). Deutsch also
takes up the work of Chava Weissler repeatedly in his treatment of the Maiden’s
religiosity and kabbalistic proclivities. See Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs:
Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston, 1998). My review of
Weissler’s book in this journal may be found in Jewish Quarterly Review 92.1–2
(2001): 188–92.
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women pneumatics’’ (p. 116). Deutsch also recognizes other influences
on her religious activities in Ludmir, noting in particular the female
models of the ‘‘foresayer’’ (firzogerin) and the woman exorcist (vaybersher
opshprecherke) as well as the male itinerant preacher (magid) (p. 138).
Her later religious activity in Palestine was distinctively different, however. Her frequent devotions at the tomb of Rachel the Matriarch still
suggested the model of the firzogerin but no less that of the klogmuter
(professional mourner). These female models seem to have shaped her
devotional practices at the tomb while making her a less threatening and
more familiar figure to her devotees and the rabbinic leaders of her new
community in Jerusalem (p. 201). The apparent popularity of her pilgrimages to Rachel’s tomb as well the memories of Jerusalemites who
recalled her years in the city suggest that the Maiden ‘‘was apparently
not only a woman leader but a leader of women’’ (p. 202).3 Not to paint an
overly sanguine picture, Deutsch also explores oral traditions that suggest that the Maiden’s life in Palestine may not have been an unmitigated success (p. 206).
Deutsch’s characterization of the Maiden’s mystical religiosity is still
more complex, for he recognizes not only her similarity to previous and
contemporary Jewish holy women but her difference as well. This difference is striking: among Jewish holy women only the Maiden was a rebbe
with devoted followers, or hasidim, as well as a beys medresh of her own in
which to pray (the gornshtibl) and to say toyres at the third Sabbath meal.
Not only her sex set her apart from other rebbes, however; her refusal to
marry was also unique. Again, unlike the contemporary rebbes whose
status was inherited dynastically, the Maiden’s large and devoted following was owed solely to her charisma and reputation for holiness (p. 219).
Such religious independence would still have been impossible, however,
had she been a dependent woman; her quickly dissolved marriage and
her father’s death shortly thereafter, however, solved that problem. Her
father’s death also provided her with sufficient wealth to build her study
hall and ultimately to emigrate to Jerusalem as a woman of means (pp.
134–35).
One claim that has been repeatedly made in literary, religious, and
scholarly treatments of the Maiden is that in becoming a rebbe, she willy3. This conclusion lends further support the argument I make in ‘‘Women
Leading Women (and Attentive Men): Early Modern Jewish Models of Pietistic
Female Authority,’’ Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, ed. J. Wertheimer (New York, forthcoming).
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nilly became a ‘‘false male.’’4 This is a claim that Deutsch examines closely
and ultimately rejects. This is not to say that he does not recognize the
male model implicit in her functioning as a rebbe, or the limited opportunities for women within Judaism, but simply the fact that while ‘‘many
authors have chosen to masculinize the Maiden of Ludmir . . . their own
evidence suggests that she may have embraced a more androgynous identity’’ (p. 224). Deutsch’s argument is that ‘‘in constructing her social and
religious identity the Maiden of Ludmir drew on male and female influences and in doing so went beyond dichtomous constructions of gender’’
(p. 125). While in agreement with Ada Rapaport-Albert that the Maiden
‘‘did not transform Hasidism into a more egalitarian movement (and it is
not clear that this was her goal),’’ he rejects her assertion that the Maiden’s years in Palestine were a kind of forced exile marked by failure and
reminds us of the significance of the fact that ‘‘she does appear to have
succeeded in living as an independent spiritual leader for more than half
a century in Eastern Europe and Palestine’’ (p. 215).
For all my enthusiasm about this book, I must confess that at times I
found myself wondering whether Deutsch did not get lost in the porous
seam dividing history and memory. Imaginings are subjected to close
readings as if they might yield some historical insight beyond the sometimes aesthetic, sometimes ideological bent of their writers. Thus, for example, Deutsch draws attention to the fact that in no literary account
does the Maiden explicitly describe her new soul as male, as if a fictional
elaboration might have settled the historical question (p. 107); he discusses a recent literary treatment as if it is representative of traditional
Hasidic ideology (p. 105). His close, comparative readings of anachronistic treatments, the frequent associative speculations, and even the exegesis of a mistranslation (e.g., pp. 102 ff.; 175) will strike more conservative
historians as perhaps too postmodern in sensibility. I have no quarrel
even with this facet of the work, however, so long as distinctions between
the study of history and memory do not seem to have been uncritically
obfuscated.
Deutsch’s study of an exceptional Jewish holy woman has succeeded
in revealing the variety of ways in which Eastern European women could
function as important religious figures in their communities. Although
some were active within the male-dominated establishment, Jewish holy
4. The scholarly argument to this effect may be found in Ada RapoportAlbert, ‘‘On Women in Hasidism, S. A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludmir
Tradition,’’ Jewish History: Essays in Honor of C. Abramsky. ed. A. Rapoport-Albert
and S. Zipperstein (London, 1988), 495–525.
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women more typically acted outside of the domain of religious authorities.
Excluded from institutional positions of leadership, women in patriarchal
contexts nevertheless exercised what Monika Chojnacka has called ‘‘social power’’: ‘‘the ability to make independent decisions as well as influence the actions of other people.’’5 While ‘‘invisible’’ to most historians
(p. 9),6 Jewish holy women played significant roles in Hasidic communities often studied as if ‘‘the entirety of lived experience’’ within them
could be identified with ‘‘the male elites who dominated them officially’’
(p. 214). More broadly, Deutsch has brought rare cutting-edge historiographical sensibilities to a methodologically conservative discipline.
Going beyond a naı̈ve positivism without being cavalier in his research,
Deutsch’s innovative approaches illuminate his subject, engage his
reader, and should empower Jewish historians to research and write with
more courage than is our custom.
University of Haifa
J. H. CHAJES
5. See Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore,
Md., 2001), xvi. I discuss this with regard to Jewish female pneumatics in
‘‘Women Leading Women.’’
6. On the historiographical invisibility of women, see Joan Wallach Scott,
‘‘The Problem of Invisibility,’’ Retrieving Women’s History: Changing Perceptions of
the Role of Women in Politics and Society, ed. S. J. Kleinberg (Providence, R. I.,
1992), 5–29; Deutsch, Maiden, 9.
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