Join IHGC Fellow Sam Shuman (Religious Studies) in welcoming Professor Hannan Hever (Yale University) for this public lecture.  This event is presented as part of Prof Shuman's "States, Saints and Other Sovereigns" speaker series. 

Politics, Space and Identity in Karlin Hasidic Tales  
The talk will discuss how the tales of the Karlin Hasidim created space to establish their political identity. The transition to the printed tale and its reproduction has abolished the sacred aura of the ritual of the tales oral performance; and the representation of the space of the Holy Land of Israel through the holy language in print presented the severe theological challenge of nullifying the sanctity of this space.  Hannan will present the ways in which the Hasidic tale overcomes this theological challenge through movement in the space of exile, which makes it possible to imagine and thus also produce through the tale the aura of the holy space in Eretz Israel. In contrast to the Zionist nationalist axiom of returning to the Land of the Patriarchs to become its owners, the purpose of the Hasidic aliyah to the Holy Land was not national but aimed at fulfilling the mitzvah of Yishuv Ha-Aretz, as well as to pray there and ultimately to be buried there. The tales of the Karlin Hasidim did not include a theological aspiration of a political realization of Jewish sovereign control over Eretz Israel; their non-nationalist presence reduced the tension and prevented much of the conflicts between the Hasidim and the Arab natives of the land.    

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Professor Hannan Hever is the Jacob and Hilde Blaustein Chair in Hebrew Language, and Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Jewish Studies. His most recent books are:    

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics. Philadelphia: Penn University Press, 2023.      

Literature of a tribe or literature of a people? Jerusalem: Carmel 2023.  

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility. Leiden: Brill, 2019.