Thirty years ago, the Institute of
Jewish Studies at University College London (UCL) hosted an international
conference in memory of its former director, Joseph G. Weiss, who had been an
important scholar of Hasidism – the Jewish religious movement that began in
Poland in the eighteenth century and quickly came to dominate significant
segments of Polish Jewry. At this conference, scholars from North America,
Europe, and Israel presented papers on numerous aspects of Hasidism.[1] Among them
was one by Immanuel Etkes, in which the historian from the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (HUJI) summarized the past few decades of research on Hasidism and
set a research agenda for the future. Chief among his concerns was whether
Hasidism as a movement represented a revolutionary impulse or whether it was
ultimately a conservative movement that reaffirmed longstanding traditions.[2]
The three decades since the Weiss
conference have been characterized by tremendous growth in the study of
Hasidism. Much of this scholarship has continued to examine the primarily
religious components of the phenomenon of Hasidism, following in the vein of
Weiss; his mentor, Gershom Scholem; and Scholem's peer and principal opponent
in a debate over the philosophical nature of Hasidism, Martin Buber. However, a
significant line of research has sought to situate Hasidism within its
historical context as a social movement arising from and subject to the kinds
of forces that have traditionally given rise to new religious communities, as
well as to nonreligious mass movements. Broadly speaking, the lines of inquiry
over these three decades have considered the origins of the Hasidic movement,
the movement's initial position between traditional elites and the masses, and
the phenomenal spread of Hasidism over the first fifty years of its existence.
What has emerged since 1988 is a more complete conception of Hasidism as an
historical phenomenon that, while certainly religious, could also be understood
from secular viewpoints of sociology and politics.
Histories
of Hasidism From Dubnow to Weiss
Hasidism was first submitted to
systematic historical study by Simon Dubnow, who published a two-volume
Hebrew-language study in the early 1930s.[3]
Before Dubnow's work, writing on Hasidism consisted almost exclusively of the writings
in Hebrew or Yiddish of the Hasidic masters themselves on theological and
philosophical topics, as well as hagiographies of Hasidic rebbes, which relied
heavily on legends about these men and their alleged supernatural abilities. In
addition, there were observations written about the Hasidim from the viewpoints
of their detractors, the maskilim of the Jewish Enlightenment or the misnagdim,
the traditional Orthodox opponents of the Hasidic movement. In the spirit of
the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, Dubnow adopted a critical study
of the Hasidic literature in an attempt to extract a purely historical record.
Although Dubnow broke new ground with his study, it nevertheless relied very
heavily on Hasidic tales in the absence of more objective historical sources.
The next generation of scholars who
studied Hasidism was dominated by the figures of Martin Buber, the
Austrian-born Israeli philosopher of Judaism, and his German-born fellow
Israeli Gershom Scholem. Buber and Scholem engaged in a lengthy dispute over
the fundamental nature of Hasidism and its relationship to mysticism generally
and Kabbalah specifically, as well as its role within the larger context of
Jewish history. As a religious philosopher, Buber's treatment of Hasidism
sought to situate it within a larger paradigm according to which "the
Jewish past depends upon the idea that borders between ages are porous and that
an eternal essence of Judaism continues through all of them."[4] Scholem
responded to Buber's writing about Hasidism with the criticism that Buber's
writing sought to renew Jewish spirituality using Hasidism as a model and thus
failed to provide "a full accounting of Hasidism in its original
context."[5]
For his own part, Scholem applied a more purely historical approach to
understanding Hasidism, positing its emergence as a reaction to the heretical
Sabbatian sect that, while also drawing on Jewish mysticism, nevertheless
taught a theology well within the Orthodox mainstream.
While undoubtedly valuable, Buber’s and
Scholem's work nevertheless continued to view Hasidism overwhelmingly as a
religious phenomenon within a broader consideration of intellectual history,
rather than from a purely historical viewpoint. Following in this line of
inquiry was Weiss. Like his mentor Scholem, Weiss studied Hasidism's
relationship with the mystical tradition in Judaism. He also published studies
of the Hasidic dynasties of Chabad and Breslov. Although some preliminary
research on non-religious aspects of Hasidism was conducted by Shmuel Ettinger,
Benzion Dinur, Raphael Mahler, and the aforementioned Weiss,[6] the
majority of the scholarship on Hasidism after Dubnow was predominantly religious
in nature, so much so that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted that “The extraordinary
current interest in Hassidism [sic] totally ignores both its theoretical
bases and the often sordid history of the movement.”[7]
Thus, when the UCL conference was held
in Weiss’s honor, much of the scholarship continued to focus exclusively on the
movement’s religious elements. However, a number of other scholars at the
conference established more secular lines of inquiry, which have since come to
dominate the historical literature on Hasidism, even as the literatures on
philosophy and religious studies have seen continued scholarship on Hasidism
from their specific viewpoints.
Origins
of Hasidism
By
the time that Hasidism began to appear as a topic in the writings of maskilim,
the dynastic court model of Hasidic life had already taken form. According to
this form, Hasidic communities were centered on the court of a tzaddik,
who mediated the relationship between his community and the divine. Whereas
only the tzaddik might be able to achieve the higher levels of mystical
consciousness required to commune directly with God (a state called devekut),
through the community’s devotion to the tzaddik, it could attain devekut
through him. To achieve this closeness, members of Hasidic communities
regularly convened in the court of the tzaddik, and when the tzaddik
ultimately died, leadership of the court would pass to a designated successor –
usually a son or close relative.
According
to the Hasidim, as recorded in their hagiographies and repeated in their lore,
this dynastic court model came from the founder of their movement, R’ Israel
ben Eliezer of Mezhbizh,[8]
known as the Ba’al Shem Tov or the Hebrew acronym Besht. The Besht, they said,
established a court at Mezhbizh and designated as his successor R’ Dov Ber of
Mezritsh, called the Maggid. Upon the Besht’s death, the Maggid took over the
leadership of the Hasidim, establishing his own court, leading the defense of
Hasidism in its initial clashes with the misnagdim, and sending emissaries
to surrounding communities to establish new courts, assuring that the movement
would spread. From these courts emerged the courts that persisted into the
twentieth century and beyond.
Upon
critical examination, however, much about this version of events did not ring
true. Among the principal issues was the characterization of the Besht. At the
UCL conference, Ada Rapoport-Albert stated simply, “The method by which
hasidism recorded its spiritual debt to its first two and most profoundly
revered leaders has to some extent obscured the facts.”[9] Using
Hasidic lore itself, she demonstrates that the Besht was not alone in his
generation as a leader of Hasidim. Two prominent tzaddikim, R’ Pinchas
of Koretz and R’ Nahman of Kosov, “had their own circles of disciples and
regarded themselves as colleagues of the Besht.”[10] In fact,
Rapoport-Albert shows that the earliest published collection of the Besht’s
teachings, Shivhei ha-Besht, depicted R’ Nahman as a onetime opponent of
the Besht. From these relationships of the Besht with colleagues,
Rapoport-Albert infers that the role of the tzaddik and court as claimed
by later Hasidim could not have obtained in the Besht’s time; otherwise,
significant rivals would not have existed.
In
addition, drawing on earlier writing on Hasidism by Abraham Rubinstein and
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rapoport-Albert shows that the Maggid’s
succession to the Besht’s leadership was not uncontested. There were a number
of leading Hasidic figures, the most important of whom was R’ Ya’akov Yosef of
Polone, author of the first published work of Hasidic homiletics, Toldot
Ya’akov Yosef, and a disciple of the Besht. Nevertheless, she questions the
notion that a significant battle for the leadership persisted and posits that
multiple leaders of different communities likely existed at once. The belief
that a single leader would have emerged was instead the result of the
“anachronistic expectation that the leadership should have passed immediately
and directly from the Besht to the Maggid of Mezhirech, just as it did
eventually pass from father to son.”[11]
While
much of Rapoport-Albert’s research since 1988 has continued to examine
Hasidism, she has focused primarily on issues of gender within Hasidic
communities, as well as in contemporaneous Jewish communities. However, two of
her fellow attendees at the UCL conference – Moshe Rosman and Gershon Hundert –
carried forward the historical study of the Besht and his leadership of early
Hasidism. Rosman’s presentation in 1988, “Social Conflicts in Miedzyboz in the
Generation of the Besht,” set the stage for what ultimately emerged in 1996 as Founder
of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov. In a thorough
examination of the Besht, Rosman places R’ Israel ben Eliezer within the
historical context of the province of Polonia in the mid-eighteenth century.
Like most of his predecessors in examining Hasidic history, Rosman examines the
writings of Hasidic masters, including the Besht, as part of determining the
historic role of the Besht in the emergence of Hasidism. In his early chapters,
however, he provides detailed context for the time and place in which the Besht
lived, and in doing so, he examines contemporaneous Polish sources.
First,
Rosman establishes that, rather than an epithet applied exclusively to R’
Israel ben Eliezer, the term ba’al shem referred generally to a sort of
faith healer common to Poland in the eighteenth century. That the Besht held
this position shows that he was not an itinerant preacher at odds with the
Jewish establishment but very much a part of it, as demonstrated in Polish tax
records showing that the Besht enjoyed tax exempt status while serving in his
position in Mezhbizh.[12]
Next, synthesizing the research of previous scholars, including Scholem and
Weiss, and with his own archival research and examination of the works of maskilim,
Rosman shows that there were already Jews identified as Hasidim in eighteenth
century Poland. These Jews appeared before the emergence of the followers of
the Besht, undermining the narrative in which the Besht founded the movement –
although certainly a “Beshtian Hasidism” emerged by the end of the century.[13]
Next,
Rosman examines the national and regional contexts in which the Besht lived.
Here again, the traditional Hasidic lore is undermined. Whereas the Hasidic
literature has typically portrayed the emergence of Hasidism as the natural
reaction to an environment of extreme persecution by the Polish authorities and
Ukrainian peasantry, emblematized, respectively, by blood libels and the
depredations of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his forces in the mid-seventeenth
century, a careful examination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when the
Besht lived in Mezhbizh shows a surprising level of stability. Moreover, in
tracing the complex history of the Podolia region, including cession to the
Ottomans in 1672 and subsequent return in 1699, Rosman contextualizes the
comparative stability of the region with its reincorporation into the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth:
Along with
everyone in the region, the Jews benefited from the moderate degree of
stability offered by magnate rule and the economic boom that was the effect of
recolonization. They also knew how to operate with their neighbors in areas of
life where cooperation was deemed appropriate by both sides, such as physical
and supernatural defense. In Podolia, Jews and Christians shared the physical,
social, cultural, and economic environment, even if they did not operate in the
same universe of discourse.[14]
Instead,
Rosman asserts, the primary source of tension in the Besht’s Mezhbizh was
within the Jewish community itself between elites and non-elites, as well as
between members of the elite, particularly between members of the kahal
(the autonomous leadership of the Jewish community) and those of the pospólstwo,
i.e., men of Polish citizenship whose taxation level entitled them to political
participation.[15]
Notably, these conflicts would likely not have involved the Besht, or if they
did, he would have participated as part of the kahal.
Rosman’s
observations overlap with those of Hundert, whose presentation at the UCL
conference focused on the social forces at play in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth during the Besht’s lifetime. Beginning with the observation of a
rapid increase in the Jewish population as the result of decreased infant
mortality, Hundert notes that a larger cohort of young men, particularly if a
significant proportion were idle, would have exerted pressure due to
“generational tensions” on the stability of Jewish communities, resulting in a
“loosening of social stability.”[16]
Like Rosman, Hundert largely dismisses a role for significant external
oppression on the emergence of Hasidism; he also shows that sustained economic
stability characterized this period of Jewish history in Poland. Thus, Hundert
sees intergenerational conflict as perhaps being decisive in explaining
Beshtian Hasidism.
Elites
and Masses
The
traditional historiography of Hasidism had drawn a picture of a populist
movement led by uncredentialed holy men who challenged the traditional
religious and secular authorities of Eastern Europe. Part of the factual basis
for this legendary version of events was the ban of excommunication issued in
1772 against the Hasidim by misnagdim led by R’ Eliyahu ben Shlomo
Zalman, the Gaon (genius) of Vilna. The ban entered the lore of the Hasidim,
along with the Vilna Gaon as the primary Jewish antagonist of Hasidic tales. To
some extent, the Vilna Gaon came to represent for Hasidism all rabbinic elites,
so the characterization of the Besht and his successors ultimately saw
expression with no small amount of populism, in opposition to the exclusivity
that characterized the leadership of the misnagdim.
However,
here again, the facts are at odds with the legend. As already noted, the Besht
was clearly a member of the kahal elite, at least while residing in
Mezhbizh. In addition, several factors called into question the populist
conception of Hasidism, including the complexity of the relationship of the tzaddik
with his Hasidim and the likely inability of the mass of uneducated Polish Jews
to grasp the theologically complex nature of Hasidic teachings. In a 1988
essay, Immanuel Etkes sought to offer some preliminary insights into these
questions. Beginning from the standpoint of pre-Beshtian Hasidism as a deeply
obscure religious movement, Etkes asks whether the transformation of Hasidism
“from an esoteric phenomenon into a popular movement” began with the Besht or
preceded him.[17]
Part
of answering this question for Etkes involves examining the circle of Jews
around the Besht. Assuming that this circle would be characterized by personal
contact with the Besht, a common religious orientation with his, and
recognition of his leadership, Etkes, like Rapoport-Albert, examines the
relationship of the Besht with R’ Ya’akov Yosef of Polone, noting that Hasidic
lore teaches that he was not a Hasid before meeting the Besht – a point
supporting the counter-observation that most of the Besht’s followers would
have been Hasidim already before meeting him. Further, taking issue with the
view of Dubnow, Dinur, and Scholem that the Besht preached a more accessible
form of intimate communion with God, Etkes points to the lack of stories in the
Hasidic lore about such teaching to the masses as disproving their assertion.[18] Thus, he
argues, “the Besht did not go beyond the traditionally accepted conception of
his age […] that worshiping God on the level of Hasidism was appropriate for
only outstanding individuals and was not within the reach of the masses.”[19] In short,
Hasidic knowledge was an elite commodity and not intended for popular
consumption.
In
a significantly more recent article, Jan Doktór of the Ringelblum Archive in
Warsaw sought to further explain the process by which these esoteric teachings
that were scrupulously guarded by the elite tzaddikim could nevertheless
engender a mass movement. In contrast to Etkes, Doktór situates the elitism
among Hasidic leaders in the pre-Beshtian period. Surveying the situation of
Hasidism in eighteenth century Poland, he notes that the elite status of the
Hasidic masters was based not only on the arcane nature of Hasidic spirituality
but also on its claim to revelation. This claim ultimately elevated them to a
higher level than even Talmudic scholars.[20]
For Doktór, the transformation from elite to mass movement began with the
dissolution of Jewish self-government in Poland by the Sejm, the Polish
legislature, which abolished the Council of the Four Lands in 1764 (notably
four years after the Besht’s death). The Council had exercised authority over
all Jewish communities in Poland, and Doktór posits that the weakened autonomy
of the Jewish community after 1764 led to the inability of Jewish authorities
to combat Hasidism on an official level. He notes further that, while Hasidism
had spread broadly across Eastern Europe by the nineteenth century, only in
Poland did it emerge as a mass movement, and the aforementioned ban in 1772 had
little effect in Polone or Mezritsh.[21]
However, the mere absence of an
external political authority was not sufficient to explain Polish Hasidism as a
mass movement, rather than an elitist stream within a much larger religious
community. Here, Doktór elaborates on the key role of the Maggid of Mezritsh and
the TaLK brotherhood that he established to replace the weakened kahal
system. (The name of the brotherhood came from the abbreviated Hebrew acronym
for the year of the Jewish calendar in which it was founded (5530)). Under the
TaLK brotherhood’s auspices, the Maggid sent his followers as traveling
preachers to nearby communities to spread Hasidism (discussed in detail below).[22] It was
the third generation of Hasidism, Doktór concludes, that used the court of the
Maggid as a model for the court of the tzaddik and that situated the
Besht as the movement's founder retroactively.[23]
The notion that the emergence of
Hasidism as a mass movement coincided with the leadership of the Maggid,
however, evokes its own inherent paradoxes. The Maggid was, after all, a man whom
Shmuel Ettinger had characterized as “a leader of authoritarian views” who “yet
directed the movements into ways of decentralization.”[24] If the
Maggid’s authoritarianism was consistent with the elitism of the Besht’s time,
then it remains to be explained both why the Maggid believed it was necessary
and desirable to spread Hasidism to the common people and how he accomplished
this goal. For Doktór, the first question can be answered with the evolution of
the role of the tzaddik. Here, the role of R’ Ya’akov Yosef of Polone is
instrumental. Along with R’ Meshulam Feivush Heller of Zbarizh, Ya’akov Yosef
“demanded that the gap dividing the spiritual elite from the masses be closed
by introducing such leaders who were able and willing to help common people climb
to a higher spiritual level.”[25]
Thus, the tzaddik acted not only as an enlightened conduit between God
and the faithful who simplified complex theological material for mass
consumption but also as a vehicle by which the movement itself could transcend
its elite status and become a true mass movement.
The final elite association of early
Beshtian Hasidism elucidated by recent scholarship was that with Jewish elites
outside of the Orthodox community altogether. In this regard, the work of Glenn
Dynner has been revelatory. In a 2005 article ultimately included as a chapter
in his 2006 study Men of Silk, Dynner chronicles the extensive
associations between Polish Hasidim and Jewish “mercantile elites,” who
“emerged as full-fledged patrons” of the early Hasidic movement.[26] Dynner
traces how the established role of the ba’al shem continued to enjoy
patronage from wealthy Jewish elites as Poland began to industrialize.
Secularization accompanied industrialization and the emergence of a Jewish
bourgeoisie in Warsaw and other cities. However, even as wealthy Jewish
industrialists began to eschew folk remedies for their illnesses, Dynner argues
that they transferred the relationship to one of pure patronage, providing
significant financial support for the Hasidim. Whereas these modernizing
processes in Germany produced the Haskalah and its criticism of
Hasidism, in Poland, resistance to Germanization to some extent informed the
alliance between Jewish financial elites and the Hasidim. In addition, Dynner
notes that a mutually beneficial relationship would have emerged due to factors
such as expanded business opportunities, the generally positive view of
Hasidism toward the accrual of wealth, the desire of Jewish financial elites to
attain and retain personal honor, and a sense that, by associating with
Hasidim, these secularized elites could achieve a kind of religious practice by
proxy.[27]
As discussed in greater detail below, this association of Polish Hasidim with
financial elites was a significant contributor to the successful spread of the
movement across Polish territory and beyond before the end of the Napoleonic
period.
The
Remarkable Expansion of Early Hasidism
If
there is a single aspect of Hasidism that has drawn the attention of secular
historians most, it is the movement’s phenomenal expansion in the years between
the life of the Besht and the end of the Napoleonic period – where Dubnow’s
original study ended. Explanations over the past three decades have typically
ascribed this phenomenon to a combination of geopolitical, economic, and
institutional causes. As noted above, the Maggid of Mezritsh sent his followers
across Eastern Europe to find adherents, but they could have quite easily been
turned away by the populations that they encountered. Some of these factors we
have examined already, e.g., the weakening of Jewish autonomy in Poland and the
subsequent dilution of the authority of the local kahal. In addition,
like all mass movements, the early Hasidic movement exploited the available
print medium in Poland to spread its message to possible proselytes. However,
these two factors are insufficient to explain the ubiquity of Hasidism in
Poland within sixty years of the death of the Besht.
Thus
far, the most comprehensive look at the factors facilitating the spread of
Hasidism – at least across Poland – is the aforementioned Men of Silk by
Glenn Dynner. Beyond the relations discussed above between Jewish financial
elites in urban Poland and Hasidic leaders, Dynner’s book engages the complex
geopolitical history of late eighteenth century Poland under trinational
partition, the triumph of Hasidism within local Jewish institutions, and the
exploitation by Hasidim of the print medium to communicate their message. For
instance, part of discussing the case of Polish Hasidism entails
differentiating among the courses taken by the movement following partition of
the country into Prussian, Austrian, and Russian zones. According to Dynner,
unlike the areas of Poland annexed in earlier stages of the partitioning by
Russia and Austria, which established “royalist” Hasidic dynasties based on the
absolutism of these countries’ secular rulers, Central Poland, subject to a
more constitutional form of government, gave rise to modernizing trends among
these Hasidic communities.[28]
The readiest example is this relationship with secularized Jewish financial
elites.
Beyond these forces, Dynner considers
Hasidic commandeering of local Jewish institutions, as do virtually all of the
other authors on the topic, although his treatment is lengthier and more
comprehensive; for instance, beyond the mere establishment of Hasidic control
over the town synagogue, Dynner further asserts that once Hasidic dynasties
were established in towns, the movement could penetrate the countryside further
by the sending of “cantors to impose Hasidic modes of worship.”[29] Such an
approach obviously relied upon not only the establishment of Hasidic control
over community institutions but also the institution of a Hasidic dynasty based
on a tzaddik who could delegate such authority to his followers.
Also
from an institutional perspective, Adam Teller has demonstrated how the erosion
of Jewish autonomy assisted the spread of Hasidism by weakening social
institutions at the level of the shtetl. In an article published in
2005, he finds that the Hasidic movement demonstrated the “ability to come to
terms with and adapt various institutions and social relationships in the
eastern Europe of its day that was key to its phenomenal success in overcoming
the challenge of Polish geography and becoming a mass movement.”[30]
According to Teller, the administrative
institutions of the state, of magnates on estates, and of the church all played
roles in the spread of Hasidism. Regarding the state, the decentralization of
power in the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth allowed Hasidism to establish
competing local institutions that, once they grew, were able to occupy
positions of authority within Jewish communities. An example that Teller offers
is the establishment of Hasidic kosher slaughtering facilities, which
challenged the authority of the existing facilities both by casting doubt on
their adherence to halakha (Jewish law) and by creating competition with
the overall community.[31]
Regarding the magnates, Teller finds that the Hasidim adopted certain
characteristics of the estate system of large landowners to form their courts
as a sort of chancellery.[32]
Finally, regarding the church, Teller finds parallels between the practices of
mendicant orders of Catholic monks and Hasidim, sharing as they did the ideal
of a voluntary religious society.[33]
In a related study, Yohanan
Petrovsky-Shtern examines the importance of the havurah (Jewish communal
organization) in the propagation of Hasidism in its early generations. In the
disintegration of the kahal system, the importance of these institutions
increased as establishment institutions weakened, and Hasidism was able to
capitalize on this importance to establish positions within communities. Teller
examines four modes by which Hasidism "conquered" new regions using havurot:
infiltration, by which Hasidim joined and ultimately took over an existing
institution; merging-reproducing, in which the Hasidic and pre-existing
institutions were joined; isolating-alienating, which characterized the initial
reaction of Hasidic communities to exclusion from kahal institutions;
and patronizing-endorsing, in which the kahal authorities supported and
encouraged the founding and growth of parallel Hasidic institutions.[34]
Petrovsky-Shtern offers multiple examples across Poland of each mode of Hasidic
growth, including four lengthy case studies drawing on contemporaneous documentation
from the Jewish communities involved.
Most recently, in a 2013 essay
investigating the issue, Shaul Stampfer looks past the more obvious explanation
of the availability of the print medium and the institutional takeover model
employed by Dynner and Teller, and he instead employs a model of innovation
from the late American sociologist of communications Everett Rogers. Rogers’s
model has five characteristics – relative advantage, compatibility, complexity,
observability, and trialability – and Stampfer considers each of these
characteristics in the context of early Hasidism.[35] While
Stampfer briefly discusses the first three characteristics, it is in the final
two that he sees the greatest significance, particularly regarding the Hasidic shtibl
(local prayer house). Unlike a synagogue or beit midrash (house of
study), the shtibl allowed secular activities, including eating and
sleeping, and thus provided the community with “activities that appeared to be
social and recreational.”[36]
Per Rogers’s model, the non-Hasidic community could observe and try out the shtibl
as an alternative to their usual worship and social practices, and its
comparative leniency regarding certain behaviors could be a powerful force in
attracting new adherents.
From a more purely geopolitical
perspective, Rachel Manekin argues that the partition of Poland among Germany,
Austria, and Russia in the late eighteenth century resulted in favorable
conditions for Hasidism to grow. Writing largely in response to Raphael
Mahler’s 1985 book Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, she argues
that the Austrian authorities, who took control of Polish Galicia, were largely
tolerant of Hasidism. She marshals new documents, as well as critiquing
Mahler's earlier interpretations, to conclude that the Austrian government's
policy was informed by recognition that Hasidism did not differ qualitatively
from other forms of Orthodox Judaism and that the state need only intervene in
rare cases. Manekin writes, “Local administrations were not always aware of the
fine points of the law, and this is why the hasidim chose to approach
the highest office in the land, the Gubernium, which represented the official
Habsburg policy.”[37]
Finally, some of the most exciting work
on the spread of Hasidism has focused extensively on the human geography of
Eastern Europe, with the application of digital history to better understand
the evolution of the movement. Leading this field is Marcin Wodziński, a
professor of history and literature and chair of Jewish studies at the
University of Wroclaw in Poland. Although he has worked for decades in the
field of Jewish history, including studying Hasidism, very little of his work
has been available in English until recently. The culmination of his recent
scholarship is the Historical Atlas of Hasidism, published last year
with coauthor Waldemar Spallek, also on the faculty at Wroclaw. In particular,
in the second chapter of the atlas, cowritten with Uriel Gellman of Bar-Ilan
University and first published in 2013, the authors use encyclopedic data from
Israel to generate five maps of five periods of the expansion of Hasidism.
Their conclusions include that German and Lithuanian influences prevented the
spread of Hasidism to the far north and west and, in agreement with Manekin,
that Austrian rule after 1795 encouraged it.
In addition, they find that, until the
end of the nineteenth century, Hasidism remained largely a rural phenomenon. As
such, the sense that Hasidism truly dominated Poland might have been grossly
overstated:
Still, it seems
that with a few isolated exceptions, the vast majority of Hasidic leaders
neither managed nor attempted to gain exclusive control over their
neighborhoods. Rather, they typically shared their geographic space with a
number of competitors. The dominant model, then, was of a large number of
closely clustered centers, with several Hasidic leaders active at the same
time, either in the same town or, more often, in a number of neighboring small
towns. The general assumption underlying our maps is that the density of such
centers reflects, however indirectly, the relative demographic strength of
Hasidism in a given region, even if some or perhaps all of the leaders
clustered in it had comparatively few followers.[38]
Further,
the authors claim that near monarchic conditions, as alleged by Weiss and later
Dynner, within territories were rare; instead, many minor tzaddikim
tended to exist within territories, primarily Galicia, Bukovina, and Ukraine.
If further research bears out these findings, it could greatly change the
direction of research on Hasidic history.
The
Future of Historical Research on Hasidism
As noted, Wodziński and Spallek’s
atlas appeared less than a year ago, as did his Wodziński’s book Hasidism:
Key Questions, which seeks to collect much of his research of the past
decades into a compact volume addressing the issues discussed here, as well as
the role of women in Hasidism and the economics of Hasidic communities. In this
regard, the book is an economy-sized version of the massive Hasidism: A New
History published in 2017, a nearly 900-page overview of the movement’s
history with contributions from eight authors, including Wodziński,
Gellman, and Moshe Rosman. Both works provide convenient single-volume
overviews for readers, but neither offers any new insights not introduced
elsewhere.
These books’ appearance
notwithstanding, much remains to be discovered. Wodziński himself conceded
the shortcomings of his own geographic work thus: “Very little can be stated
about the dynamics of expansion in the early years of Hasidism’s development,
until 1772. Although this first period may be the most important for
understanding the reality of expansion, the data available are too scarce to
draw a detailed picture of the process.”[39]
Rosman’s monograph on the Besht is an invaluable contribution to our
understanding of the first generation of Polish Hasidism, but the relationship
between the Besht and the Maggid of Mezritsh and much about the Maggid himself
remain shrouded in mystery. A critical biography of the Maggid employing the
methodology used by Rosman would be a tremendous step forward in responding to
Wodziński’s concession. To date, only one biography of the Maggid in
English has been published – The Great Maggid by Jacob Immanuel
Schochet, which appeared in 1990. However, Schochet, as a Chabad rabbi who
relied heavily on Hasidic homiletics and hagiographies for his source material,
was limited in his impact, although more exacting work could be based on
Schochet’s, as Dubnow once built upon the works of Hasidim and maskilim.
An in-depth study of the life and influence R’ Ya’akov Yosef of Polone is also
warranted if we are to have a full sense of how early Hasidism developed.
In addition, while scholars have
addressed the emergence and growth of Hasidism in the parts of Poland annexed
to Prussia and Austria, as well as those that are today part of Ukraine,
comparatively little research exists on Hasidism in Russia outside of studies
focusing particularly on Chabad-Lubavitch. A parallel approach could apply to
specific studies of Hasidic dynasties that submit these tzaddikim and
their followers to historical scrutiny. Again, while some such studies do exist
– primarily of the Chabad and Satmar dynasties – similarly large and
influential dynasties have been relatively ignored in the historical
literature.
Finally, the UCL Weiss conference in
1988 included a presentation by Khone Shmeruk on the then-recently discovered
manuscript on Hasidism by Ignacy Schiper – the Polish-Jewish historian who
lived in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II before dying in Majdanek.
However, the manuscript itself, which the author deposited in the Ringelblum
Archive, has only been published in the original Polish and in Hebrew
translation, substantially limiting its usefulness to historians in other
countries. Of the authors mentioned in this essay, only Dynner cites Schiper’s
research, noting that Schiper first hypothesized the link between Polish
Hasidim and Jewish financial elites in urban Poland. At the very least, increased
access to Schiper’s work could provide for more complete historiographies in
the future.
[1] These papers were eventually
collected, translated into English, and published in Hasidism Reappraised, edited
by Ada Rapoport-Albert (Portland, Ore.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization,
1996).
[2] Immanuel Etkes, “Past Trends
and New Directions,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ibid, 462.
[3] Simon Dubnow, Toldot
Chasidut (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1930). The work was published almost immediately
in Yiddish and German, but only selections have been translated into English
(see note 6 sub).
[4] Claire E. Sufrin, “On Myth,
History, and the Study of Hasidism: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem,” in Encountering
the Medieval in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by James A. Diamond and Aaron
W. Hughes, vol. 17 of Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and
Philosophy (Boston: Brill, 2012), 131.
[5] Ibid, 132.
[6] Much of this scholarship,
including English translations of excerpts from Dubnow’s two-volume study, was
republished in Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present, edited
by Gershon David Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1991).
[7] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor:
Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1996), 97.
[8] Place names in Eastern Europe
are presented in their Yiddish transliterations per YIVO rules.
[9] Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism
After 1770,” in Hasidism Reappraised, op. cit., 80.
[11] Ibid, 91.
[12] Moshe Rosman, Founder of
Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov. (Oxford, UK: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014; first published in 1996 by University of
California Press), 169.
[13] Ibid, 39
[14] Ibid, 62.
[15] Ibid, 93-94.
[16] Gershon David Hundert, “The
Conditions in Jewish Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
Middle Decades of the Eighteenth Century,” in Hasidism Reappraised, op.
cit., 47.
[17] Emanuel Etkes, “Hasidism as a
Movement,” in Hasidism: Continuity or Innovation?, edited by Bezalel
Safran (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1988),
7.
[18] Ibid, 14, 15.
[19] Ibid, 17.
[20] Jan Doktór, “The Beginnings of
Beshtian Hasidism in Poland,” Shofar, 29, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 44.
[21] Ibid, 48-49.
[22] Ibid, 49-50.
[23] Ibid, 51-52.
[24] Shmuel Ettinger, “The Hasidic
Movement – Reality and Ideals,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism, op.
cit., 238.
[25] Doktór op. cit., 51.
[26] Glenn Dynner, “Merchant Princes
and Tsadikim: The Patronage of Polish Hasidism,” Jewish Social Studies,
12, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 67.
[27] Ibid, 88-89.
[28] Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk:
The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 34-38.
[29] Ibid, 57.
[30] Adam Teller, “Hasidism and the
Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic
Movement,” AJS Review, 30, no. 1 (2006): 8.
[31] Ibid, 14-15. According to Adam
Ferziger of Bar-Ilan University, this point was first developed by Khone
Shmeruk.
[32] Ibid, 19.
[33] Ibid, 26.
[34] Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern,
“Hasidism, Havurot, and the Jewish Street,” Jewish Social Studies, 10,
no. 2 (Winter 2004): 14.
[35] Shaul Stampfer, “How and Why
Did Hasidism Spread?”, Jewish History, 27 (2013): 202-203.
[36] Ibid, 206.
[37] Rachel Manekin, “Hasidism and
the Habsburg Empire, 1788-1867,” Jewish History, 27 (2013): 292.
[38] Marcin Wodziński and
Waldemar Spallek, Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 34-35.
[39] Ibid, 38.
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