SHIVHEI HA-BESHT

Without question, the most fecund, interesting, intriguing, problematic, and most exploited source relating to the Ba'al Shem Tov is Shivhei Ha- Besht. The title in Hebrew means, literally, “Praises of the Ba'al Shem Tov,” and the book is a collection of more than two hundred hagiographie stories concerning the Besht and some of the people associated with him. A sample of the titles (added by twentieth-century editors) of some of the stories can lend an idea of the book's subject matter: The Birth of the Besht, The Besht's Marriage, The Besht and the Robbers, The Besht as Rabbi Gershon's Coachman, The Besht's Revelation, The Besht's Prayer, How the Rabbi of Polonne Drew Near to the Besht, The Besht Cures the Grandson of Rabbi David of Ostróg, The Incarnation of Sa'adiah Gaon, Traveling to Redeem Captives, The Priest Who Was a Magician, The Besht Has No Money, The Besht's Dream.

Virtually every writer on the Besht has made use of this collection in constructing a portrayal. The key questions they have considered are as follows: Given the methodological issues, what is the relationship of these stories to historical events? What is the historical kernel that underlies these stories or the historical reality to which they are pointing? Each scholar has picked and chosen among the stories, giving much more weight to some than to others. Some of the tales have been declared fantasies, some embellishments of historical events, and some “authentic,” meaning that they are reliable reports of aspects of historical events that occurred.

Dubnow, and others following his example, apparently decided that the criterion for historicity was plausibility. Events that are consistent with rationality and sound as if they could have happened probably did. Yet since so many patently legendary details in Shivhei Ha-Besht get in the way of rationality, Dubnow, and others, relied more on the motifs and patterns of behavior repeated in the stories than on reported individual facts. Even if details were mistaken or legendary, the assumption of these scholars seems to have been that such details “reflect” the truth, while the aggregate portrait of the stories is fairly reliable.