The Taub (Kalov) Family

To understand the Taub lineage, one must first situate the spiritual ground from which it sprang. Hasidism, as analyzed by Jean Baumgarten in The Birth of Hasidism, was not a mere mystical sect but a vast social and religious movement that reconfigured, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the relationships between the individual, the community, and the sacred within Eastern European Judaism [Baumgarten, 2006]. Founded on joyful devotion (avodah be-simcha), attachment to the spiritual master (tsaddik) and the conviction that divine presence radiates through all creation, it offered to the Jewish masses, often poor and poorly educated, direct access to a living religiosity.

This movement, initially confined to Podolia, Volhynia, and Galicia, spread through the radiance of successive courts. Baumgarten emphasizes that the transmission of Hasidism operated essentially through the relationship of master to disciple, each tsaddik sending or inspiring students who in turn founded new courts [Baumgarten, 2006]. It was through this path that Hasidic spirituality reached Hungary, a land where traditional rabbinic Judaism remained powerful and where the reception reserved for the movement was at first reluctant, sometimes hostile.

The Hungarian implantation of Hasidism testifies to a virtue that Jewish tradition has long cultivated: openness to the foreigner bearing teaching. In receiving a current coming from the East, the communities of Szabolcs county demonstrated this intellectual hospitality which, from Late Antiquity through medieval migrations, has allowed Jewish thought to circulate and fertilize itself. This capacity to integrate the contribution of elsewhere without dissolving oneself represents a delicate balance, which the Taub lineage will incarnate in its own way by embracing both the Magyar language and the Kabbalistic mysticism inherited from the East.

The founding figure of the lineage is Yitzhak Isaac Taub (traditionally placed around 1751-1821), established as rabbi in the town of Nagykálló, in Szabolcs county, in northeastern Hungary. Hasidic tradition reports that as a child he was a modest shepherd, and that a wandering master recognized in him an exceptional soul before guiding him toward study and the Hasidic way. This narrative, transmitted orally in Kalov circles, belongs to the register of edifying memory rather than to that of verifiable archive; it must therefore be received as a founding narrative whose function is to exalt the humility of origins.

Tradition connects him to the circle of great masters of the third generation of Hasidism, notably to Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, under whom he is said to have been formed. This spiritual filiation, coherent with the mode of transmission described by Baumgarten [Baumgarten, 2006], inscribes Kalov within the great mystical lineage which, step by step, traces back to the Baal Shem Tov.

What distinguishes Isaac Taub, and what the collective memory of Israel has retained, is the expression of a piety founded on humility and closeness to the people. By making the anonymous shepherd the starting point of his legend, the Kalov tradition expresses a cardinal value of Hasidic Judaism: the conviction that the fervor of the simple heart is worth the learning of the scholar. This valorization of the ordinary man, of the am ha-arets transfigured by sincerity, extends an ancient intuition of Jewish spirituality according to which God listens first to intention and the breaking of the heart.

The most famous work attributed to Isaac Taub of Kalov is not a treatise but a chant: Szól a kakas már — "The rooster crows already." Composed in Hungarian mixed with Hebrew, this niggun became, in the memory of Hungarian Judaism, the very symbol of Hungarian Hasidism. Tradition reports that the rabbi heard this melody from the mouth of a young shepherd guarding his sheep in the fields, and that he "redeemed" it — that is, snatched it from its profane destination to elevate it to holiness — by perceiving in it the cry of exile of the Jewish soul awaiting its redemption.

The text, in its transmitted version, interweaves the image of the rooster announcing dawn, that of the forest and the bird, and a questioning in Hebrew about the return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple. The Hungarian folk song, a song of love and nostalgia, becomes here an allegory of exile (galout) and messianic hope. This gesture joins an ancient meditation of Judaism on the condition of the exile: as Yitzhak Baer showed in Galout, exile is never in Jewish tradition a simple geographical dispersion, but a theological category in which the dispersion of the people corresponds to a cosmic rupture calling for repair [Baer, 2000].

The very procedure of the "redemption of sparks" — finding the divine hidden in the profane, including in a shepherd's melody — draws directly from Lurianic Kabbalah. Lawrence Fine described how, in the system of Isaac Luria, each particle of creation contains sparks of holiness that it belongs to man to raise up and restore [Fine, 2003]. By transposing this theurgy into the field of vernacular song, Isaac Taub accomplishes a spiritual act of great boldness: he affirms that the language of the host country, the Hungarian of the peasant, can itself become a vehicle of divine presence.

It is here that the Taub lineage expresses with the greatest force a virtue of its own: the contribution to Jewish thought and sensibility through the mediation of local culture, without denial of identity. The question of how far vernacular language can carry the sacred runs through all of Jewish history — one need only think of the meditations on vision and speech studied by Haviva Pedaya, where language becomes one of the privileged places of mystical experience [Pedaya, 2002]. The chant of Kalov offers to this long reflection a concrete, popular and enduring answer.

Around the rabbi of Kalov a court was established, following the model of other Hasidic centers of Eastern Europe described by Baumgarten, where the faithful flocked seeking counsel, blessing and teaching [Baumgarten, 2006]. The town of Nagykálló became a pilgrimage center, and remained one: the rabbi's tomb still attracts visitors today on the anniversary of his death, the 7th of the month of Adar according to tradition.

The implantation of Hasidism in Hungary did not occur without tension with traditional rabbinical Judaism and, later, with the reformist and modernizing currents that deeply divided Hungarian Judaism in the 19th century. The relationship to custom (minhag) lay at the heart of these debates. The work of Eric Zimmer on the metamorphosis of Jewish customs shows how much fidelity to inherited usages structured the identity of Ashkenazi communities, each region forging its own practices and defending their legitimacy [Zimmer, 1996]. The court of Kalov was part of this culture of minhag, preserving Hasidic usages while taking root in Hungarian soil.

This communal embeddedness illustrates an essential value: involvement in collective life and care for others. The Hasidic tsaddik, in the model described by Baumgarten, is not a hermit but an intercessor and a pastor, engaged in the daily hardships of his followers — poverty, illness, conflicts [Baumgarten, 2006]. One cannot, however, lacking precise archival records of the particular charitable acts of the court of Kalov, attribute to it more than what the very structure of the Hasidic institution makes probable: charity (tsedaka) and hospitality inscribed in the function, rather than documented in detail.

The distinctive feature of Hasidism was to establish a hereditary transmission of spiritual authority: at the death of a tsaddik, his charge often passed to a son or a disciple who perpetuated the "dynasty." Baumgarten showed how this dynastization, from the late eighteenth century onward, transformed Hasidism into a network of rival and complementary lineages [Baumgarten, 2006]. The Kalov lineage was part of this movement, its successors perpetuating the name and spiritual heritage of the founder through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This Hungarian Hasidic world was destroyed in the spring and summer of 1944. After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the deportation of Hungarian Jews was carried out with extreme speed and scope: in a matter of weeks, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to the extermination camps. Yitzhak Arad's work on the killing centers of Aktion Reinhard, and more broadly, the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau, document the mechanics of this annihilation [Arad, 1987]. The communities of northeastern Hungary, the historical heart of Magyar Hasidism of which Kalov was a center, were among the hardest hit.

The survival of the Taub lineage after the Shoah resulted from a slender thread and reconstruction in exile, notably in the United States and in the Land of Israel, where descendants and disciples revived the name of Kaliv. This revival, in the context of absolute catastrophe, expresses the virtue of faithful memory: refusing to let the song of the founder die with those who had carried it. By perpetuating Szól a kakas már and singing it on the ashes, the heirs of Kalov made transmission an act of spiritual resistance, joining that cardinal conviction of Israel that remembrance (zakhor) is in itself a commandment and a form of survival.

The history of the Taub family of Kalov, modest though it may be in volume of archival items, offers a privileged vantage point on the manner in which a local tradition connects to the universal memory of Judaism. The gesture of Isaac Taub — sanctifying a shepherd's melody — is not a picturesque accident: it joins a fundamental tension between the universal and the particular that runs through all Jewish thought.

The name of the founder itself, Yitzhak — Isaac — invites resonance. Jewish tradition has made the figure of Isaac, through the episode of the Binding (Aqedah), a paradigm of offering, silence, and tested fidelity; David Stern demonstrated the richness of the transformations this figure underwent in Jewish imagination [Stern, 1993]. Without forcing the connection, one can read in the piety of the rabbi of Kalov — this disposition to offer even the song of a foreign land upon the altar of devotion — a distant echo of this vocation to offering.

Likewise, the insertion of the lineage into Hungarian culture interrogates the relationship of the diaspora to its host lands, a question that runs from medieval Spain to the Italy of ghettos. Roland Goetschel, studying Isaac Abravanel, demonstrated how a Jewish scholar could serve the princes of his time while remaining faithful to his tradition and the hope of return [Goetschel, 1996]; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, through the case of Isaac Cardoso, explored the comings and goings between cultural integration and Jewish fidelity in modern Europe [Yerushalmi, 1987]. The court of Kalov belongs, all things considered, to this family of experiences where Judaism embraces the language and forms of a country without ceasing to be itself. This is, undoubtedly, its most original contribution to the collective Memory of Israel.

The Taub lineage of Kalov does not assert itself through the volume of its scholarly writings, nor through brilliant communal power, nor through abundant documentary wealth. Its greatness lies elsewhere, and must be named with precision. Among all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried, this family will have expressed, more than any other, the sanctification of popular language in service of devotion and hope — that capacity to gather the sparks of holiness buried in the humblest culture, that of the shepherd and vernacular song, and to make of it a path toward God and a cry of messianic hope.

In this, the lineage combines three traits rarely found together: the humility of its origins, claimed by the legend of the shepherd become tsaddik; the mystical audacity, inherited from the Lurianic Kabbalah of the restoration of sparks [Fine, 2003]; and fidelity to the hope of return, which inscribes Hungarian nostalgia within Israel's long meditation on exile [Baer, 2000]. The song Szól a kakas már remains the condensation of this synthesis: a melody of the Hungarian plains become prayer for Jerusalem.

Annihilated in its place of origin by the catastrophe of 1944, raised up in exile by the steadfast piety of its heirs, the lineage of Kalov will have finally testified to the virtue of remembrance. As long as the rooster's crow of Nagykálló resounds in a synagogue, somewhere, the promise borne by Rabbi Isaac Taub — that the dawn of redemption approaches — will continue to belong to the living memory of Israel.