Началось все с того, что предпоследний Сатмарский ребе что-то не поделил с одним из своих хасидов, которого Минц называет Ableson (правильнее, возможно, Абельсон). Конфликт затянулся, и в какой-то момент сын ребе решил указать противнику его место, и напомнить ему о скелетах в семейном шкафу:
The Satmar Rebbe's son, the oldest son, Aaron, he has sometimes a big mouth. Aaron, the Rebbe's son, gave a speech and he called Ableson's[45] mother a hatzufah [impudent woman]. "This Ableson's mother--that impudent woman with her tsiganer [gypsy] family--came to the shul and starts yelling." You know, with that phrase he was trying to bring up an old pain.
Что это означало, Минцу разъяснил один из его информаторов:
There is an old story about the Ableson family, given only from mouth to ear, about the quality of their family. There were some rumors about a hundred years ago about the Ableson family, that it's not so spotless. A woman in the family had a relationship with some demon or something and that's how the branch of the family got started. . . . Nobody knows how she became pregnant. She went away to a different town and came back pregnant and she didn't have any love affair. She was a virgin. She was still a virgin. She married later, but this child was from tat pregnancy.
It's written in a lot of books at that time. The Kotsker, on of the big rabbis, said that one of their ancestors was made pregnant by a demon.
Что самое интересное - по словам информанта, для сатмарских хасидов эта история была отнюдь не преданьем старины глубокой, но руководством к практическим действиям.
This goes back six generations. The family is spread out and the descendants feel a little guilty. They try to behave, you know, so that nobody should throw it back at them. The family is so widespread because they're so rich. They've gotten into every family. They're very aggressive people, probably because they come from the devil.
Even today when somebody is making a marriage arrangement he wants to find out if the family is not from the witches. I know that my mother and my father when they made a marriage arrangement, it was a day before they left the country, they found out if there's a witch or not.
Понятно, что когда речь идет о сатмарах, спрашивать, какое нынче тысячелетие на дворе, бессмысленно - эти ребята даже среди биндюжников слывут грубиянами. Но все равно, прэлэстно, прэлэстно.
И кстати, правильнно ли я понимаю, что после этой истории один популярный аргумент антихристианской полемики можнно считать небывшим?
Пы. Сы. Если верить Марку Шапиро, для венгерским ортодоксов идея, что женнщина родить от демона никогда не казалось странной:
In the beginning of the nineteenth century a married woman named Yittel Levkovich gave birth to a child which, we are told, was obviously not her husband's. Yittel claimed that she had been raped by a male demon. This claim was accepted and the woman was not regarded as an adulteress nor was the child regarded as a mamzer. Yet other Jews refused to marry with the descendants of this woman, and these descendants were known as "Chitshers." Matters got to be so bad that in 1926 a broadside was published signed by many Hungarian rabbis declaring that there was no problem marrying into the Chitshers. Among the signatories was the young R. Joel Teitelbaum, the rav of Satmar.
Despite this plea, there were those who continued to shun the Chitchers, and even to this day there are families in the Hungarian hasidic world who will refuse to intermarry with other Hungarian hasidim since the latter are descended from Yittel and the demon.