Joseph Perl

[1] Born and raised in the Austrian province of Galicia shortly after its annexation in the first partition of Poland, he was a follower of Hasidism in his youth.

It is an unusual book in that it satirizes the language and style of early Hasidic rabbis writing in Hebrew, which was not the vernacular of the Jews of its time.

According to Dov Taylor, in his introduction to his English translation of Revealer of Secrets, Perl denounced Hasidism not only in his writing but in memoranda to representatives of the Austrian Empire.

[3] On March 22, 1838, Perl wrote a letter suggesting that the government censor Jewish libraries, prohibit meetings in mikvehs and close cheders and yeshivas, which he called "a place of refuge for vagabonds, thieves… a nest of demoralization and of… nefarious, scandalous deeds.

[6] As an educator, he was a founder of the Deutsch-Israelitische Hauptschule, a school for Jewish children which taught secular subjects such as history, geography, mathematics, and natural science in German, in addition to the Bible and Talmud.