How to Read Naḥman of Bratslav’s Tales in Their Historical Context

In this article I offer a new interpretive key to Naḥman of Bratslav’s canonical tales, showing how the political dimension of the stories informed their theological message. Drawing on an archivally informed historical reconstruction of Naḥman’s political experience, I show how we can read the tales both as allegories as well as mimetic, concrete references to the political reality in partitioned Poland and its neighboring states. Naḥman’s tales, I argue, intertwined contemporary political and future eschatological events within a compact narrative frame. In so doing, Naḥman sought to encourage his followers to interpret the familiar political landscape as a means to understand the divine rule of the world, and to envision the world to come as an imminent remedy of the existing political order.