Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of Pinchas Mendel Singer and Bathsheba Zylberman, was born in 1904 in the Polish village of Leoncin. His father, an impoverished Hasidic Rabbi, proudly claimed to be a descendant of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the founder of Eastern European Hasidism. His mother was the offspring of an austere anti-Hasidic rabbi, whose approach to the study of traditional Jewish law and contempt for Hasidic mysticism foredoomed the marriage. The Hasidic's love of folklore, miracles, and marvels clashed with traditional Jewry's faith in the wisdom of painstaking study and scholarship. These two strains of mystical and traditional Judaism appear in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy" as well as many other short stories by Singer that dramatize the tension between the rational and the inscrutable.
A tradition of learning. The primacy of education in Judaism has helped preserve Jewish culture throughout a history of heinous catastrophes. The Jewish scriptures are comprised of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the rabbinic codes based on the Talmud, which consists of the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah is the "oral law" said to have been communicated to Moses when he received the ten commandments on Mt.
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