Tempus Fugit

And that quickly, a month has gone by since I've written here. By way of a quick update, my current plan is to take a graduate-level Russian history class at Penn in the fall and another graduate-level history course at Edinburgh in the spring, the latter probably a methodology. Finishing the third class at Edinburgh will entitle me to a Graduate Certificate in History that I can either continue to build on at Edinburgh or (I hope) transfer to the M.A. program at Penn, should I be admitted there. More on this eventually. For now, it's a regrouping period.

Possible research topics for the fall include the Bund in late imperial Russia or the Black Hundred, the antisemitic ultranationalist group behind many of the pogroms that occurred in Russia around the time of the Russo-Japanese War and 1905 Revolution.

Twitter Threads

It's been a while since I've written, so a few updates seem in order.

First, I aced my Jewish History class, so I'm happy about that. I'll apply (again) to the M.A. program in history in the fall, hopefully with better luck than before. In the meantime, whether I'll take a course at Edinburgh, Penn, or neither in the fall is up in the air.

In the meantime, I've written to Twitter threads, so I thought I'd link to them here.

On death tolls in 20th century socialist states: https://twitter.com/thamesdarwin/status/1139508972858355713

On whether ICE camps are comparable to concentration camps: https://twitter.com/thamesdarwin/status/1141142098219085824

Histories of Early Hasidism: The Last Three Decades in Research

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.

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[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.

                [10] Ibid, 83.

[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.

New Podcast Appearance: DOOMED With Matt Binder

I appeared on Matt Binder's podcast DOOMED last night. Here's the appearance plus another hour or so of content from him. Worth subscribing and watching often. I'll be back in a week or two with this term's research paper (finally).

live now with @thamesdarwin discussing holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. tune in: https://t.co/wVqBrTGmod

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 3, 2019

Readings in Jewish History: Jews and Race

It turns out I haven't done nearly as much writing this term for my Readings in Modern Jewish History course. Below is only the second writing assignment for this term and might be the last before I submit my term paper. That paper is due in the first week of May. In the meantime, I'll probably post my annotated bibliography.

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Elaborate on the connection between Jews and sexual activity according to Gillman. What is the significance of this connection in terms of the larger discourse on the Jewish body and the way in which it is viewed as sick, black etc. Muse on the way in which Gillman makes use of images. How do these images help to answer his question as to “how the representation of the Jewish body is shaped and, in turn, shapes the sense of Jewish identity.” (170)

Gilman's treatment of the connection between Jews and sexuality fits into the pattern already established in our course in the works of Hyman, Seidman, and Yerushalmi (when considering the topic vis-à-vis Freud's musings on the topic). Each of these authors has engaged the matter of the perception of Jewish men being in some way depraved, effeminate, or deranged. Seidman actually cites Gilman directly in this regard, writing that increasing visibility of homosexuality in Central Europe "coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie" (p. 97). However, whereas these authors' discussions of the intersection between Jews and sexuality remains muted and marginal to their primary exigeses, Gilman pushes these associations to their greatest extents. Remarkably, he does so without having to move the clock forward to the 1940s, demonstrating not only that the seeds of Nazi antisemitism's preoccupation with Jewish lechery began decades earlier but also that the overt association of Jews with sexually criminal behavior was already in circulation in the 1880s and well outside Central Europe.

Gilman accomplishes all this by pointing out how suspects in the Jack the Ripper case -- particularly "Leather Apron," an Eastern European Jew -- were characterized as Jewish in the public imagination. In this way, the Whitechapel murders become a synecdoche for the whole of Jewish perversion. The corpses mutilated by Jack the Ripper are likened to the phallus mutilated by circumcision and to the livestock butchered by the shochet, and the suspicion that the murderer was killing prostitutes as revenge for contracting a venereal disease is expanded to consider the common belief that Jews were carriers of syphilis. Finally, the association of Jews and prostitutes generally allows for the association of the sexually pathological to intersect with the far better established stereotype of the Jewish obsession with money. Thus, the sexualized image of "the Jew" does not replace earlier monetary or even religious motives for anti-Semitism; rather, it complements them and renders them more biological.

Arguably, the ability to communicate the visceral nature of these themes would be hampered without visual representations, which is perhaps why Gilman includes numerous plates providing examples in the chapter on the Ripper. It also becomes easier with these images -- as well as with those presented in the chapter "The Jewish Nose" -- to see the linkages between the popular art of late 19th century Europe and Der Stürmer. Moreover, Gilman uses the sexual othering of Jews to show how it coincides and intersects with racial othering. On the topic of syphilis, e.g., he writes, "It is marked upon his face as 'ethnic eczema.' It is a sign of sexual and racial corruption as surely as the composite photographs of the Jew made by Francis Galton at the time revealed the 'true face" of the Jew" (p. 125).

In this same section of the book, Gilman focuses on the internalization of these tropes by Marcel Proust, who wrestled with both his own Jewishness and his own homosexuality. The protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, created by a gay writer, is a Jew who marries a prostitute. Complicating these relationships further is Proust's French citizenship at a time when Jewish membership in the French nation felt tenuous but was not yet as publicly dispute as during the Dreyfus affair. In a way, how Proust negotiates his internalization of the complex relationships among sex, race, and nation is to externalize them in the form of Swann. In so doing, he creates an "arch-Jew" who is "visibly marked … as the heterosexual syphilitic, as that which Proust was not (at least in his fantasy about his own sexual identity)" (p. 126). Of course, Proust is only one example. Freud is another, but it is likely that neither of their cases was "typical." That said, the two men's conflicts of sexualized representations of Jews could indicate a larger phenomenon of self-loathing imposed by external anti-Semitism, regardless of how these conflicts are ultimately expressed or resolved.

Readings in Modern Jewish History

Short on cash this term to take another course at Edinburgh, I decided to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania's extension program and take a grad-level course in Jewish History. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty rigorous so far. It's very reading heavy, as the title would suggest. Plus, as a term paper, it'll be necessary to write a 20- to 25-page historiography on a topic of my choice. I was thinking about taking on the "uniqueness" argument over the Holocaust, which is probably the third biggest debate in the field following the Historikerstreit and intentionalism vs functionalism. I'll report on that matter when the time comes.

In the meantime, the weekly assignment for the course involves a five-minute in-class presentation on a prepared topic. The first such presentation I made on two chapters in David Sorkin's forthcoming book on emancipation. The chapters I worked on involve mass politics in the context of emancipation in the period from 1870 to 1914. Sorkin's basic argument is that emancipation is an ongoing project in Europe and the Ottoman Empire beginning around 1550. He breaks with the earlier east-west paradigm of European Jewish history and instead posits a sort of three-plus-one model of eastern, central, and western European Jewry (the latter including the U.S.), plus the Ottoman Empire.

Later today, discussion will ensue on the below short response to a question on Benjamin Nathans's book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia. I'll post my work on Mondays this term. Enjoy

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2) How did the Russian government’s vision of Jewish integration into Russian society differ from that of Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders? And, inasmuch as both of those visions evolved over time, were there periods when they were more or less in sync, or at least capable of being harmonized? If not, what factors prevented it? How does this relate to the references to tension highlighted by Nathans throughout the text?

During the period under discussion, the position of the Russian government vis-à-vis Jewish integration varied from tsar to tsar and sometimes ministry to ministry. In this regard, the position of the government was far more dynamic than that of the intellectual and communal leaders, who favored an incremental approach of selective integration. Nathans writes that this form of integration was "designed to disperse certain 'useful' groups of Jews into Russia’s hierarchy of social estates" (p. 24). Among the key institutions playing a role in this process was the military, which offered the opportunity for the mainstreaming of Jewish men, albeit often at the expense of their identity as Jews, particularly in the earliest periods of Jewish conscription, when it was synonymous with cantonism. Later, after a number of Jewish elites had settled in St. Petersburg, Evzel Gintsburg, as one of the Jewish community's leaders, encouraged Jewish enlistment, including of his own sons. This call by Gintsburg coincided with a more liberal approach to integration adopted under Alexander II and his defense minister Dmitri Miliutin, where the prevailing wisdom called for the dissolution of specifically Jewish estates into the pre-existing social estates of the Russian Empire -- here within the larger context of a full military overhaul that instituted universal service regardless of nationality.

At the same time, it is important to note that the strategy and tactics of the integrationist Jewish elites could be at cross-purposes with the Jewish leadership in the Pale. With the wave of pogroms that descended on the Pale in the 1880s in particular, the two leaderships found themselves at cross purposes, with the Pale leadership arguing for emigration, which was diametrically opposed to integration, even when selective. At this time, the position of the Russian government was far closer to that of the Pale leadership, with the policies of Tsar Alexander III seeking to reverse the gains made under his father. An example here is the institution of quotas on Jewish enrollment at Russian universities. Whereas the quotas, as a "silent pogrom," had the effect on the Petersburg-dwelling elites of undoing some of the gains in this area since the 1860s, from the standpoint of the leadership back in the Pale, the quotas had the positive advantage of preventing a larger number of Jews from becoming fully acculturated by the Russian education system.

Therefore, the positions of the government and the Jewish leadership were most in sync or must conducive to harmonization under Alexander II. The tensions that prevented continued harmonization before and after the height of Jewish-Russian cooperation in selective integration were largely the aforementioned influence of the less integrationist Pale leadership and the reaction among the Russian general population of greater exposure to the Jewish population in the form of the integrated population, which unlike in most of the Pale could and did compete economically against the urban Russian population. This competition, coupled with religious anti-Semitism and a press often willing to stoke resentments, represented a reason for caution by both the government, which largely sought to avoid violence, and a portion of the Jewish population itself.

Fascism Podcast With historic.ly

Here's an interview I did a few weeks ago on the historic.ly podcast, covering a lot of topics all either directly or indirectly related to fascism. Enjoy. Share. Etc.