The Angel and the Covenant . Jewish Zealot, Mystic, Promoter of Science, and Universalist, A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinhas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy by David B. Ruderman University of Washington Press, 192 pp., $50 Sefer ha-Brit ha-Shalem by Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz, expanded edition by Yitzhak Lax Sifriati Press, 779 pp., 61 NIS

Sometime in the 1770s, Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg, one of the closest disciples of the Maggid of Mezheritch, decided to bring the new teachings of Hasidism to his brethren in Western Europe. As the story goes, he was halted at the German border by the Angel of Death, who told him, “This is not your place.” Shmelke hesitated, but went on. The angel warned him again, but Shmelke stuck to his course. “If you spread your teachings in this land,” the angel warned him, “I will personally make sure that all the Jews here become Hasidim.” At this, Shmelke stopped, realizing that it would radically alter the nature of the movement, thus Hasidism remained an Eastern European Jewish phenomenon.

Although Sefer ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant) by Pinchas Eliyahu Hurwitz (1765–1821) was an attempt to bring the news of 18th-century science, not Hasidism, to its Jewish readers, it too was an essentially Eastern European Jewish phenomenon. Throughout the 19th century, it was the main source of scientific information and natural history for traditional Eastern European Jews, though of course much of it was fanciful or already outdated (for instance the medieval notion that there are geese in Scotland that grow botanically, like barnacles, on trees).

The book was first published anonymously in 1797 in Brünn, Moravia (modern-day Brno, Czech Republic) and quickly became a best-seller, occasioning speculation that the author was really Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, the great Vilna Gaon, or, perhaps, the late philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Following a pirated 1800–1801 edition, Hurwitz published an expanded edition with his name in Zolkiew in 1806–1807. In that preface, he boasts that copies of the book were even sold in Holland, England, France, and Italy. Yet, of the 40 editions that are meticulously documented in an appendix to the distinguished historian David B. Ruderman’s fascinating new study of Sefer ha-Brit, not one was printed in Western Europe. Neither of the two parts of the book—the first part consisting of a concise, popular compendium of modern science, nor the second part comprising a treatise on kabbalistic piety—apparently had much to offer Western Jews. The 41st edition just appeared in Israel, where it still finds a receptive haredi audience, interested primarily in the book’s kabbalistic and ethical teachings.