There is something slightly misleading about seeing an old religious tradition on a bookshelf.
A book gives the impression that the ideas inside it were always meant to exist in this form: ordered into chapters, given a title, edited, printed and eventually catalogued by a library. The object looks stable, so we unconsciously imagine that the tradition behind it was stable too.
In my work as Anton Pshydynskyi at NAnews, I keep encountering the opposite. Jewish history is full of things that survived precisely because they changed form: an oral teaching became a book, a language of one generation became the translation language of another, and a small town whose Jewish world largely disappeared continued to exist inside stories told somewhere else.
That is what made me want to bring two very different pieces together here, on the NAnews journal at Federated Journals. One begins in a small town associated with the early public life of the Baal Shem Tov. The other begins with shelves of books in contemporary Kyiv.
Between them lie almost three centuries, several languages and one surprisingly persistent question: how much can a tradition change before we decide it is no longer the same tradition?
Before Hasidism became books, it was people talking
The Baal Shem Tov occupies such a large place in Jewish religious history that it is tempting to imagine a neat beginning. A founder appears, formulates a doctrine, followers read it, and a movement grows.
History is less convenient than that.
The early life of Israel ben Eliezer — the Besht — remains partly hidden behind later Hasidic traditions. Places including Tovste and Medzhybizh are connected to different stages of his emergence as a religious figure, healer and teacher, while stories written later often mix historical memory with legend.
When I worked on the story of Tovste and its connection to the early Baal Shem Tov, that uncertainty interested me almost as much as the known facts. In Hasidic tradition, Tovste is associated with the period in which the Besht began to become publicly known as a tzaddik and healer before his later years in Medzhybizh.
The important thing for me is that the movement did not begin with a publishing house.
It began with encounters.
A teaching could survive because somebody remembered it
The Besht himself did not leave behind a library of authored books. His ideas circulated through teaching, stories, sayings and the memories of disciples, who later wrote and published material attributed to him.
The National Library of Israel's overview of the Baal Shem Tov makes this point especially clearly: his teachings were transmitted orally during his lifetime and were preserved in writing by followers in later generations. National Library of Israel
That detail changes how I look at the word “preservation.”
We often assume that writing something down is the act that saves it. But before anyone writes, somebody must decide that a sentence is worth remembering.
There is a fragile stage between voice and text where an entire intellectual tradition may depend on human attention.
Oral tradition is unreliable — and remarkably durable
Those two statements can both be true.
Stories change when people repeat them. Details become sharper, cleaner or more miraculous. Chronology is compressed. A teacher's sentence may acquire a perfect form that real conversation rarely has.
Historians are right to treat such material carefully.
Yet oral tradition can carry something for decades until somebody finally writes it down. The written version may not reproduce the original moment perfectly, but without generations of people repeating the story, there would be nothing left for the historian to examine at all.
Human memory is an imperfect archive.
Sometimes it is also the only archive available.
The town itself was another kind of archive
Tovste once had a substantial Jewish population. By the twentieth century, Jewish life was part of the ordinary structure of the town rather than a historical subject displayed to visitors.
People prayed, worked, raised families and moved through streets without thinking of themselves as future heritage. The synagogue was not “a Jewish historical site.” It was a place people used.
Then the Holocaust destroyed that world.
The German occupation brought a ghetto and mass murder. The Jewish community that had existed there for generations ceased to function as a living community, while the cemetery and traces in the landscape became evidence of a world that could no longer explain itself.
A place that once produced stories became a place requiring explanation.
That reversal is brutal.
We often begin caring about culture after ordinary life has disappeared
This may be one of the saddest patterns in historical preservation.
While people are alive and using a language, building or ritual every day, nobody calls it heritage. It is simply life.
Only later, when something is threatened or lost, do we begin cataloguing it.
We photograph the synagogue after the congregation has disappeared.
We record the song when few people still know the words.
We publish a dictionary when the language is no longer heard naturally in the street.
There is nothing wrong with that work. It is necessary.
But preservation often begins after spontaneity has already ended.
A publishing house performs the opposite movement
This is why the second story interested me so much.
Dukh i Litera was founded in Kyiv in 1992 and developed into a major Ukrainian publisher of humanities literature, including philosophy, theology, history and Jewish studies. Its Judaica catalogue includes works on Jewish civilization, Holocaust history, Yiddish culture and Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
When I wrote about Dukh i Litera and its Ukrainian-language Jewish studies publishing, the obvious story was about books.
But the more interesting story, to me, was about language.
A body of Jewish history and thought is being made available to readers through Ukrainian.
That sounds simple.
It is not.
Translation changes the audience before it changes the text
A reader who can already work comfortably in Hebrew or English has access to an enormous Jewish library. Someone who reads Russian has another large body of translated material.
But the existence of a book in Ukrainian creates a different relationship.
The reader is no longer being asked to leave one linguistic world before entering another intellectual one.
That matters more than we sometimes admit.
Language tells a reader whether a subject belongs naturally inside his or her culture or must be approached as imported knowledge.
A Jewish studies book in Ukrainian quietly says: this history can be discussed here, in this language, as part of this intellectual environment.
Translation is not a neutral pipe
We often speak of translation as transportation.
There is a text on one side. A translator carries the meaning across. The same object arrives on the other bank.
Anyone who has translated seriously knows that this is fiction.
Words carry historical associations. Religious terminology may already have established equivalents in one language and no satisfying equivalent in another. A phrase that sounds natural in Hebrew can become unbearably formal in English; something obvious to a Jewish reader may require explanation for somebody encountering the subject for the first time.
The translator therefore does not merely move the text.
The translator rebuilds the conditions in which another person can read it.
That does not mean the translator gets to rewrite history
This distinction is important.
Adapting context is not the same as changing evidence. A historical date remains the same. A quotation cannot be improved because another version sounds more elegant. A disputed claim should remain disputed.
But a translation still has to decide how much background the new reader needs.
What is a shtetl?
What is a tzaddik?
What does “baal shem” mean historically?
Why does a Ukrainian place name appear differently in Polish, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and English sources?
Those decisions shape understanding even when every underlying fact remains untouched.
In a strange way, Hasidism itself depended on translation long before modern translators arrived
Not necessarily translation between national languages, but translation between experience and story.
A religious encounter had to become something another person could repeat.
A teaching had to move from the teacher's voice into the disciple's memory.
Memory became notes.
Notes became printed books.
Printed books moved between communities.
Later, scholars translated those materials again — linguistically, historically and conceptually — for readers living in completely different societies.
Every stage changed the container.
The tradition survived the containers.
This is why I distrust the phrase “authentic version”
Authenticity is valuable when it means respecting sources.
It becomes dangerous when it suggests that culture has one frozen correct form.
Which version is the authentic one?
The sentence spoken by the Besht?
The version remembered by a disciple?
The nineteenth-century printed collection?
The scholarly critical edition?
The Hebrew version?
The Ukrainian translation read by a university student in Kyiv?
These are not interchangeable objects.
But neither are they simply authentic versus fake.
They belong to a chain.
The chain becomes more visible once geography is lost
When a community still lives in one place, transmission can happen almost accidentally.
A child hears pronunciation from adults. Customs are absorbed without explanation. Religious vocabulary is understood because everybody around uses it.
After migration or destruction, that invisible infrastructure disappears.
Then culture has to become explicit.
Somebody writes the recipe.
Somebody records the melody.
Somebody explains the holiday.
Somebody translates the book.
Things once learned simply by being present become things that must be taught deliberately.
Israel is full of traditions that passed through exactly this transformation
Jewish communities arrived here from Europe, North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Ethiopia, the Caucasus and elsewhere. They brought languages and customs that were completely ordinary in their places of origin.
In Israel, those traditions met Hebrew and one another.
Some weakened.
Some were deliberately preserved.
Some disappeared for a generation and returned later with new prestige.
Others changed so much that arguing over whether the Israeli form is “authentic” becomes almost meaningless.
Living traditions behave that way.
They absorb the place where they now live.
Books are especially strange immigrants
A person crosses a border once.
A book can cross repeatedly.
It may begin in one language, be translated into a second, edited in a third country and read decades later by someone whose connection to the original culture is completely different from the author's.
Yet we still recognize a continuity.
This is one reason a publishing project can matter far beyond publishing statistics. A translated book does not merely increase the number of available titles.
It creates another route through which memory can move.
I think that is where Tovste and Dukh i Litera meet
One story begins before a great religious movement had a fixed written canon.
The other belongs to a world where texts can be edited, translated, printed, digitized and searched within seconds.
The technologies could hardly be more different.
But the human problem has not changed much.
How do we make sure an idea reaches someone who was not there when it was first spoken?
The answer has never been only “write it down.”
Writing is one stage.
Someone still has to read.
A book on a shelf can be as silent as an abandoned synagogue
This is worth remembering.
We sometimes treat publication itself as success. The book exists, therefore the culture has been preserved.
But existence is not transmission.
A book nobody opens is a stored object.
An archive nobody searches is potential memory.
A historical site nobody understands is architecture without context.
Preservation requires the next person in the chain.
That person may be a scholar, a student, a tourist, a grandchild or somebody who arrived at the subject accidentally.
Curiosity may be more important than obligation
There are many respectable reasons to read about Jewish history.
Education.
Family memory.
Academic work.
Religious study.
But I think curiosity is underrated.
A person sees a strange name on a map and asks what happened there.
A student finds a Ukrainian translation of a Jewish history book and opens it without any family connection to the subject.
Someone hears “Baal Shem Tov” in Israel and later discovers that the geography behind early Hasidism lies across towns in Eastern Europe.
These are small acts.
Culture often survives through small acts.
This is also why I am wary of the phrase “cultural bridge”
It is too easy.
Publish one translated book and somebody announces a bridge between nations. Organize one event and the bridge becomes a headline.
Real understanding is slower.
A bridge only matters if people actually cross it.
That requires readers willing to encounter a history that complicates what they thought they knew.
Sometimes the best cultural exchange produces not agreement but better questions.
A Jewish reader in Israel and a Ukrainian reader in Kyiv may not need the same book from the same book
That sounds paradoxical, but it is normal.
An Israeli reader may approach early Hasidic history through religious familiarity and know the major names while having only a vague sense of the physical geography.
A Ukrainian reader may know the towns, regions and historical empires but encounter the Jewish religious world as something that had been present nearby yet remained largely absent from mainstream education.
The same text therefore fills different gaps.
This is one reason multilingual publishing fascinates me.
Translation does not create identical readers.
It gives different readers access to the same conversation.
It also changes what belongs inside Israel news
I use that phrase carefully, because not every historical book or old village needs to be forced into a news frame.
But Israel is a society built by communities whose histories began elsewhere. Understanding the intellectual and religious worlds those communities brought with them often means following a story outside Israel's present borders.
Hasidism is an obvious example.
A movement that is now highly visible in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and other Israeli communities carries names, stories and traditions shaped in Eastern Europe.
The geography moved into memory.
The written word is one of the vehicles that made that possible
A teaching can outlive its teacher because somebody writes it down.
A community can outlive its physical location because its books travel.
A reader can encounter a vanished world because a translator makes that world legible in another language.
None of these processes gives us the original experience back.
The young student reading about Hasidism today cannot stand in an eighteenth-century room and hear the Besht speak.
The book is not a time machine.
But it is evidence that one generation believed another generation should have access.
Every transmission loses something
This is unavoidable.
The spoken voice disappears.
Context is compressed.
Translation changes rhythm.
A later editor explains something the first audience never needed explained.
The physical place becomes a photograph.
A ritual once embedded in ordinary life becomes a subject of research.
If we expect preservation to prevent all loss, preservation will always fail.
A better question is whether enough survives for another person to continue the conversation.
And every transmission can add something too
A translation may reveal relationships hidden by an older vocabulary.
A scholarly edition can identify the historical layers of a story.
A new reader brings questions the original community never asked.
A language that did not previously possess a large body of Jewish studies can develop the terminology needed to discuss it seriously.
That is not contamination of the tradition.
It is evidence that the tradition is still capable of producing intellectual consequences.
I keep returning to the fact that the Besht left no library of his own books
For someone whose influence became so vast, that is almost poetic.
The survival of his ideas depended on other people.
They listened.
Remembered.
Repeated.
Wrote.
Printed.
Interpreted.
Translated.
Disagreed.
No single person controlled what would happen to the tradition after him.
Perhaps nobody ever does.
The publisher occupies another point in the same chain
Dukh i Litera works in a world of ISBN numbers, editors, translators, printing, digital catalogues and academic institutions. It is almost comically distant from an eighteenth-century teacher speaking to a small group of followers.
Yet the underlying act remains recognizable.
Someone receives a body of thought and decides it should remain available to someone else.
The tools became more sophisticated.
The responsibility did not.
Maybe survival is the wrong metaphor
Culture does not survive the way an object survives in a sealed container.
It survives more like a story.
Every person receives it slightly differently and passes it on under new conditions.
That creates risk.
It also creates life.
A tradition that cannot be translated, discussed, questioned or carried into another environment may remain perfectly pure.
It may also become perfectly irrelevant.
I would rather think in terms of continuity
Continuity allows movement.
It does not demand that Tovste remain what it was three hundred years ago, which would be impossible. It does not demand that a Ukrainian-language book reproduce the mental world of its Hebrew, Yiddish or English source without alteration.
It asks for something more modest.
Can the next person still find the thread?
Can they know where it came from?
Can they distinguish history from legend?
Can they ask another question after finishing the page?
If the answer is yes, the chain has not ended.
And perhaps that is what books do best
They do not preserve a world intact.
They leave doors.
A name.
A footnote.
A place.
An argument.
A sentence that makes somebody stop reading and open another source.
Tovste led me toward the early Hasidic world. Dukh i Litera led me toward the problem of how that world, and many other Jewish worlds, can become readable in another modern language.
The distance between them is enormous.
The connection is simple.
Somebody spoke.
Somebody remembered.
Somebody wrote.
And somebody, much later, decided it was still worth reading.