Jewish Christian Contact in the Shtetl

In much of history there has always been the presence of a battle between Christianity and Judaism. Because of this battle and the potential threat of conforming to Christian beliefs, there were people that began to take sides and form opinions based on this matter. Thus there was an arising of fictional stories founded on Jewish-Christian contact. In “Zaidlus the Pope”, and “On Account of a Hat,” Singer and Aleichem take sides and formulate their opinions into these fictional stories.

In Zaidlus the Pope, we meet a man named Zeidel Cohen who is led astray by the devil and tricked into becoming a pope. Zeidel was quite an impressing man with an impeccable genealogy that stretched back to King David. “He was also the greatest scholar in the whole province of Lublin. At the age of five he had studied the Gemara and the Commentaries; at seven he memorized the Laws of Marriage and Divorce; at nine, He had preached a sermon, quoting from so many books that even the oldest among the scholars were confounded.” He was a very learned Jew who loved to read volumes of books, “sucking into his lungs the dust from ancient pages.”

But in all of Zeidel’s knowledge and

In these lines alone Singer’s attitude towards Christianity is revealed here; it is threatening. He causes his readers to get the impression that the Gentile livelihood is based solely upon idolatry. He makes it plain that to be a Christian is to believe in a host of various things and to have no real root or foundation. And the character Zeidel is susceptible to this kind of faith because since the Christians “idolize anything that is great” and he is great than he can be seen as a sort of God among men.

“On Account of the Hat” is a tale of a man whose name is Sholem Shachnah but referred to as Shachnah Rattlebrian by people in his town. On Passover Eve Sholem goes on a journey and falls asleep in a train station that is filthy and dirty and has a horrendous dream. He dreams that he has paid a porter he knows to wake him up when his train comes so that he can make it home in time to spend Passover with his wife and children. In the dream he loses his hat and gains a new one, a visor with a red line across it. The visor gets incorporated into his dream because he sees a man prior to going to sleep on the bench next to him wearing the same visor and a uniform of some sort. As a result of the porter not waking him up in time, in the dream that is, Sholem rushes up to the ticket booth wearing the visor, trying not to miss his train back home.

These two stories are just examples of two author’s point of views on the Jewish-Christian relationship. There are undoubtedly many more stories like these that provide insight into the minds of Jews during the rise of Christianity and conformity. Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer illustrate their concerns successfully through the use of fiction as a literary form.

In this story, Sholem Aleichem has taken a rather

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