| Sumario: | This article focuses on an emergent, transnational Hasidic revival movement centered around the Kerestirer Rebbe, Yeshaya Steiner (Shayele), a Hungarian miracle worker who lived in Hungary from 1851 to 1925. His iconic portrait is commonly associated with mystical protection against the infestation of rodents in Jewish homes and businesses. I reveal how this is only one small piece of his broader populist appeal, however. I do this by interweaving hagiographic texts, Hasidic social media, and ethnography with anthropological theory and political theology on hospitality, sovereignty, and patronage.I contend that Shayele operates as a populist patron saint of protection against other "intruders" into everyday Hasidic life (e.g. police, inspectors, and judges). In invoking the sovereign authority of a dead Hasidic master, Shayele's male followers talk back, quite literally, to power—held by multiple social actors and distributed across multiple jurisdictions, including living Hasidic leaders and state authorities. Rather than rehearsing a normative cosmopolitan account of hospitality, which frames hospitality as a series of rights endowed to the stranger, I reframe hospitality as a site of mediation between human, metahuman, and divine actors. Hospitality offers guests refuge from a world always imagined as hostile and exterior to it; the saint, as a threshold figure, polices boundaries, protecting welcome intruders (guests) from unwelcome intruders (enemies).While largely dormant for nearly a century, this revival movement shares a common political grammar with a resurgent populist politics. His hospitality extends to patrons, cronies, and friends; his sovereign authority shields patrons from (common) enemies and from consequences.
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