Ger Tzedek: The Righteous Convert
The life of Count Valentin Potocki (who was called the Ger Tzedek after his death) was a remarkable break in the “monotonous course of the Jews’ economic struggle in Vilna” in the mid-18th century.[1] As a young man, Potocki left Poland to study in Paris with his friend Zaremba. There they befriended an old Jew who studied Hebrew books in his wine shop. The stories of the Jewish wine merchant interested Potocki and Zaremba so much that they persuaded him to teach them Hebrew. He taught them about Judaism as well, and they were so impressed that they vowed to relinquish their Roman Catholic religion and one day convert to Judaism.
From Paris, Zaremba returned to Poland and married the daughter of a rich nobleman. Count Potocki moved to Rome, where his resolve to convert only strengthened. A few years later they decided to follow through on their promise to the Jewish wine shop merchant. Zaremba and his wife met Potocki in Amsterdam and all three were accepted into the Jewish faith. Potocki took on the name Abraham ben Abraham.
Potocki returned to Poland and wandered from place to place until his identity was discovered, almost by accident, in a townlet some miles from Vilna (Ilye). While studying in a Beit Midrash, Potocki was disturbed by a noisy little boy who refused to leave or be quiet. Potocki took the boy by the ear and put him outside. He remarked that such a misbehaved boy could not be a real Jewish child and would probably be baptized. The boy ran to his father, a tailor, and told him what had happened. The tailor, outraged by Potocki’s jab at his own religious fidelity, went to the local squire and betrayed Potocki’s identity as a proselyte.
Potocki fled to a village inn a few miles away. The innkeeper, afraid of harboring a wanted man, gave Potocki up to the squire’s servants. Potocki was put in shackles and taken to Vilna, where he was tortured in the hope that he would return to Christianity. Neither entreaties by friends and family nor a long imprisonment could persuade Potocki to recant. Legend relates that Potocki’s mother was able to acquire a pardon for him, but by the time she brought it to the jail, it was too late. Potocki was burned alive on the second day of Pentecost, May 24, 1749. The Jewish community remained indoors during the event to avoid community persecution. One exception was Leiser Zhiskes (a Jew) who, in an effort to obtain the martyr’s ashes, shaved his beard, dressed as a Christian, and bribed the executioner.
Although Potocki died at the stake, the story of the Ger Tzedek did not. Legend relates that as Potocki was being arrested, he uttered a curse that the tattle-tale tailor and his descendants for ten generations should not be spared some affliction. A visitor to the tailor’s townlet (Ilye) in 1930 reported that “all the descendants of the tailor had some physical defect: they were either deaf, dumb or lame, although the duration of the curse had about expired.”[2] It is also told that from the place where the Count’s ashes were buried grew “a vigorous tree almost in the form of a man, with outstretched branches resembling hands and feet, which drew vast pilgrimages of Jews.”[3] Later the Jewish authorities erected an iron shed over the grave and added a Hebrew inscription, but the grave has been repeatedly vandalized throughout history. Today the Ger Tzedek lies in the old cemetery in Vilna, not far from the tomb of the Gaon Elijah.
The life of the Ger Tzedek has been remembered in many ways. One author in 1992 recalls “my father telling me of going to the grave of the Ger Zedek on the Count’s yarhzeit and saying kaddish with a large group of Vilna’s Jews who came yearly to honor his memory.”[4] Another describes how the rabbi of the main synagogue in Vilna memorialized the Ger Tzedek, whose yartzeit falls during Shavuot. “Rabbi Hirsh Levinson would interrupt the rejoicing on Shavuot to relate how Abraham ben Abraham Potocki became a Jew and how he died for the sanctification of His name on the day of the giving of the Torah.”[5] The story of the Ger Tzedek has been recorded in books[6] and even a play that was performed in Warsaw and America in the 1920s.[7] But perhaps the best way to remember the Ger Tzedek is by one of his teachings. He is reported to have taught:
…when God offered the Torah to the nations of the world and they refused to accept it, there were individuals among them who were prepared to receive the Law; from them descended converts whose souls were present at Mount Sinai.[8]
(Additional details at Wikipedia. Here is an additional version of his story.)
[1] The life and legends of the Ger Tzedek are told in part in Cohen, Israel, Vilna. (1992). This quotation is on p.73. Various parts of the story are related on pp.73–4, 416, and 484–6. The Ger Tzedek story related here is taken from Cohen’s work except as noted otherwise.
[2] Cohen’s Vilna, p.485, attributed to A. Litvin in Jeshurin, E., Zammelbuch pp.841–7.
[3] Cohen’s Vilna, p.74.
[4] Hautzig, Ester, in introduction to Cohen’s Vilna, p. xxiii.
[5] Goodman, Phillip, The Shavuot Anthology. p.237.
[6] Cohen writes in Vilna p.486 that the text of the legend was printed in Prussia in 1862, and a Polish translation exists from 20 years earlier. The Ger Tzedek story was also discovered by pupils of Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) in the search for Jewish heroes (see From Mesopotamia to Modernity, p.251).
[7] The play, Der Dukus was written by Alter Kacizne and performed in Warsaw in 1925 and afterwards in America. Shipley, Joseph, Encyclopedia of Literature. (1946) p.1043 and Cohen’s Vilna p.486.
[8] Shavuot Anthology, p.237.
