ABSTRACT
Isaac Bashevis Singer is that rarity among modern Jews, a literary intellectual who is not only hostile to leftism in all its forms, but who appears never even to have been seriously tempted by the siren call of leftist sloganeering and utopianism that has lured so many Jews to their destruction. Singer’s imaginative vision of Jewish socialism and communism as a pseudoreligion links his novels of modern life like The Manor and The Estate or The Family Moskat with novels like Satan in Goray or The Slave, in which the false messianism of the seventeenth century plays a central role. Singer’s celebration of Zionism, however qualified, may help to explain his unquenchable fascination with the mystical messianism of seventeenth-century Sabbatianism, despite his stress on its disastrous effects. In Zionism and in Israel itself, Singer sees above all else evidence of the unpredictable vitality of Jewish life, rather than a messianic redemption from exile and a resurrection of the dead.
