Classic literature retains its significance regardless of when written. Generations come and go, and times change. However, specific human traits remain, despite the number of years that have gone by since the author wrote the novel. This is the case with Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satan in Goray. Originally published in 1935, the message in this book is as relevant today as it was seventy years ago. In seventeenth-century Poland a hamlet is rebuilding itself after being completely decimated in the Chmielnicki massacres against the Jews. The residents are understandably vulnerable to a professed Messiah, who promises them salvation but instead leads them into religious fanaticism and evil-worship. In today's society, where so many people are emotionally stressed and searching for answers, is it also possible that someone promising deliverance could gain power and develop a religious fanatical group?
             The novel takes place in the secluded Polish village of Goray in the year 1648. The people are anxious, confused and disorientated, because they are still suffering the cruel devastation of the Cossacks who mass murdered Jews and other peasants and artisans. Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, pledges to rebuild Goray and quickly institutes the original sacred law and "began to supervise the observance of the laws of ritual diet, saw to it that the women went to the ritual bathhouse at the proper time, and that young men studied the Torah" (5).
             Ironically, the Rabbi swears to confront anyone who tries to destroy this religious community and even flogs a zealot student who "secluded himself from the community" (25), yet he is disturbed by his own black shadows and "running into objects in dark
             corners...and quivered as though engaged in a ghostly wrangle" (47) becomes a recluse, sitting alone, locked within his study, unable to help the community. Before, "everything had proceeded in an orderly fashion" (29) and "com...