Revealer of Secrets

Revealer of Secrets (Hebrew: מגלה טמירין), first published in 1819, is an epistolary novel by Joseph Perl, a proponent of Jewish emancipation and Haskalah.

His followers published a collection of stories about his life, Shivhei ha-Besht (ln Praise of the Ba'al Shem Tov), in 1815.

[1] The following year Perl published Ueber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim aus ihren eigenen Schriften gezogen (On the Nature of the Sect of the Hasidim, Drawn from Their Own Writings),[2] in which he laid out what he saw as the absurdity of Hasidic beliefs and practices.

[4] The novel was seen as part of the theological debate between adherents of Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment) and the religious revivalism of Hasidism.

[6] 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.