Philip Rubenstein
Hasidism, Part 1: Birth, Rise, and Opposition

Philip Rubenstein | Hasidism, Part 1 Birth, Rise, and Opposition | 05.19.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- A secular Jew sits down on a park bench and a man wearing a black hat and a black coat sits down next to him. The secular Jew turns on the man and shouts, “What is it with you Hasids? This isn’t the old country, it’s the modern world. You people are an embarrassment to the rest of us.” The man in black garb is shocked, and he turns towards his neighbour and he says, “What do you mean Hasid? I’m Amish.” The secular Jew recoils in horror and immediately switches his tone. “It’s so wonderful the way you’ve all managed to hold on to tradition.” Now this subject of Hasidism, as you’ll have guessed from the joke, is problematic. And it’s problematic for a number of reasons, not least because for most of us, it’s not a blank canvas. We all carry preconceived ideas, stereotypes, and prejudices in our heads of Hasidim and Hasidism and Hasidic practises. And some of these stereotypes will tend to be critical of Hasidic society, perhaps as repressive, mediaeval, secretive, misogynistic, and others by contrast might be idealised or even over idealised, seeing Hasidism as the saviours of the Jewish people and Jewish tradition and a steadfast bulwark against Western decadence and materialism.

The problem goes back to the early histories, which themselves tended to be partisan. The early histories of Hasidism were written either by Mitnagdim, that’s the Lithuanian rabbinical Jewish establishment that opposed Hasidim and they accuse them of being heretical, or they were written by Maskilim, that’s the supporters of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. And they regarded Hasidism as benighted and old fashioned, or they were written by supporters and Hasidim themselves. And their history tends to be largely built on bubbe meises, old tales that are largely myth and legend. And it’s really only much later, much, much later, really in the early 1930s that we start to see any real attempt at a responsible factual history of Hasidism. And that comes with the works of Simon Dubnow. So I’m just going to make a small request to everyone who’s listening today that we all put our preconceived ideas to one side and we come to this subject anew with an open heart and an open mind. Let me just get the slide deck up. Okay, here we go. Sorry, oops. Hope everyone can see that.

So this is a history of Hasidism in two parts. And today we’re going to be looking at the first century, the emergence of Hasidism in the early 1700s, the 18th century and we’re going to take the story up until round about 1820. And it’s a story that we’re going to anchor in the lives predominantly of three men. There’s the Baal Shem Tov, who’s recognised as the originator of Chassidut, Hasidism and he brings it to life. There is the Maggid of Mezeritch, Dov Ber, who’s there in the middle, and he’s responsible for building Hasidism into a movement. And then the movement gets its first, let’s call it bump in the road when it encounters opposition in the form of the Mitnagdim, who were led by the mighty Vilna Ga'on, who’s the gentleman on the right. I used the term men when I talked about anchoring this to three men, and I use the term advisedly because this is a story about men in terms of the early Hasidic history. Women do not feature in the story in common with most religious movements of the same period. And this issue of where women are in Hasidism is fraught and it’s something that I’m going to be looking at next week in the presentation then. So please be patient because we’re not going to ignore the position of women.

When we think of the 18th century, we tend to think of its being the dawn of the modern world. It’s when science, philosophy, industry, medicine, politics, all become recognisable as something inherently modern. But of course, it’s a mistake to see the direction of history as moving purely in a straight line from religion to secularism, because the 18th century is also an age of religious revivalism. There’s pietism in Germany, there’s the old believers in Russia, there’s the great religious awakening in North America. And so the story of modernity weaves and twists and turns even as it progresses forward. And if we turn to the story in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is where the story of Hasidism begins, what do we find in the early 1700s? Well, for those of you who were listening to Trudy last week give her fantastic lecture on the deluge, you’ll remember how she described the assault on Poland Lithuania in the mid 1600s, the 1640s and fifties, where there was the onslaught from the north by the Swedes, there was the sustained attack from the east, from Russia, and from within there was the Khmelnystky Uprising. And these events conspired over the whole period of the deluge to very significantly weaken this idea of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and of the state. And of course, it weakens all of the institutions. And remember that under the commonwealth, Jews had a unique position where they have more legal autonomy than anywhere else in the world.

This is before the emancipation. And Jews here were granted a form of self-government and they had an entire parallel legislature, which was known as the Sejm, the S-E-J-M, the Sejm, also known as the Council of Four Lands, sometimes called the Council of Five Lands. But after the deluge, as well as all of the other institutions that are weakened, the Sejm is also in a weakened state. And this is because the Jewish population on the eastern frontiers had been all but wiped out in some areas as a consequence of the Khmelnytsky pogroms. Trudy gave us the estimate last week and historians dispute these numbers and they’ll be disputing them for many more years. She gave us the estimate that 40,000 Jews were massacred during the Khmelnystky attacks. And the Polish nobility had a problem now because they now had to send out an entirely new wave of Jewish leaseholders to manage their estates in these lands. And with the attempt to reestablish entire new Jewish communities, the nobles found it necessary to sell appointments to by and large corrupt rabbis whose job was to protect the financial interests of the nobles. Now in an earlier era, this might well have worked, but by the time these attempts were made, the Polish Golden Age has long passed and is now pretty much of a faded dream. Most of the aristocrats had lost the family wealth over the generations, and the Jewish population found to a large extent, they could largely ignore the authority of the corrupt rabbis and they could do what they wanted pretty much with impunity.

So this is the situation in Podolia, which you can see in the map in the circled area, the bottom in what’s effectively Southeast Poland or Western Ukraine, whatever your preference is, and whichever dates you happen to be looking at. And in Podolia at this time, we have a weakened Polish state, we have a weakened form of Jewish self-government. And what that means is that there’s a vacuum and into this vacuum comes, there’s a transformation. This area becomes kind of a haven for non-conformists. Who is it who fills the vacuums? We start to see a shadow industry of itinerant preachers, healers and mystics. Remember, this area is quite primitive and it’s governed by folk tradition and superstition. So people in this area are susceptible to all manner of faith healers. And these people start to go by the name of Master of the Name, Ba'al Shem in Hebrew. And these Ba'ale Shem, they’re by and large self-made men. They’re from usually humble backgrounds, they’re trying to eek out a living. They may have a rudimentary education in the Torah, the Talmud and the Kabbalah. They travel from town to town, they’re all peripatetic and they allegedly heal the sick and they do so through the sale of amulets, such as the one that’s in the slide here. And they sell these amulets. These are small pieces of paper which have got inscribed within them sacred texts and sacred incantations.

Now the use of amulets is controversial. It’s a Kabbalistic practise, and it’s bordering on what’s known as practical Kabbalah, which has been prohibited by the rabbis and should be prohibited until the temple is rebuilt. The trouble is that the plummeting clout of the court Jews is such that the Ba'ale Shem are able to operate without anyone stopping them. It’s no surprise, of course, that the industry attracts its fair share of, let’s call them snake oil salesman. The ease of making these amulets and the complete lack of any barriers to entry means that many of the Ba'ale Shem, not all of them, but many of them are complete charlatans. But there’s one among them who stands out and who starts to gain a reputation. And his name is Yisroel ben Eliezer, Israel ben Eliezer and he’s later going to be known by the name Baal Shem Tov, which is often shortened to Besht in Hebrew, that’s Ben Shem Tov so Besht. Most of what Jewish tradition purports to know about the Besht and his life was written by his disciples more than 50 years after his death. So we can assume that pretty much all of it is legends that have been grafted on. These are often tales of miraculous events that have attributed to him all kinds of superhuman and supernatural powers and feats that he’s meant to have accomplished. I’ll give you an example, this one that’s clearly been grafted on by legend.

Apparently he has the power to understand the language of palm trees. Now, where did this story come from? It came from a story that’s told about the 16th century Kabbalist Isaac Luria, the Ha'ARI as he was known, who of course operates in Safed, in Palestine. And one thing about Safed and Palestine is that there are palm trees there. And one thing about the Besht in the Ukraine is that in the Ukraine there are no palm trees whatsoever. So this is clearly a complete legend that’s been adapted from another story. Even later Hasidim would acknowledge that there was a certain amount of fairy telling in the descriptions of the Baal Shem Tov. And one of the sayings go, “If you believe all the stories about the Besht, you’re a fool. But if you don’t believe any of them, you’re a heretic.” So for our purposes, we’re going to stick to what’s known about the Besht by way of records and documents. And some of these only became available after the Soviet Union fell and some of the archives opened up and some tax records were discovered. So we know he actually existed. The Besht was born in or around 1700. We don’t really know. Some people claim the 1690s, some people claim later. He’s orphaned at an extremely young age. He’s under 10 years old when both parents have died. He receives a pretty poor education. And in fact, he never studies the Talmud.

As a teenager, he falls in with a secret network of Ba'ale Shem and it’s they who introduce him to the Kabbalah. The young Israel when he’s a little older, he starts to travel between villages, so rural village to rural village, and they’re all too small to have their own rabbi or their own teacher. So to make a living, he starts teaching the children from local families, giving them a basic Jewish education. He’s based in and around Medzhybizh, which as you can see is bang in the middle of Podolia. But he’s moving around a lot in his twenties and he’s doing all kinds of odd jobs. Sometimes he’s a herbalist, he spends time digging in clay pits to make a living. And he finally is able to settle on a career as a Baal Shem where he starts to perform healings and exorcisms all over the southeastern region of Poland where he’s based and doing so from his adopted home in Medzhybizh. He marries young, but his first wife dies. He marries a second time to a woman from a wealthy family whose father has been impressed by his capabilities, and he starts to develop a reputation as a mediator.

He finds that he has a talent for being able to successfully mediate disputes between warring parties before the matter ever needs to reach a Beth Din. And it’s around about this time when he’s in his mid to late twenties that he receives the nickname, the moniker Baal Shem Tov which literally just means the good Baal Shem, because unlike many others who were really only in it to make a quick buck, he’s genuinely interested in people and he’s genuinely interested in helping communities. He’s not the rabbi of Medzhybizh, but from around the 1740s or so when he’s around 40, he starts to be recognised as a rebbe. In Hebrew, the word is tzaddik, and a rebbe is an individual who seems to have a kind of an unofficial position of authority in a community proclaimed not by any officialdom but by public acclaim. And what starts to happen is that instead of going to synagogue, many ordinary people start coming to his house to pray. He’s still travelling. All the Kabbalists do at this stage. And as he’s travelling, he starts to build a following. So let’s talk a little bit about his approach and what it was that drew people to him. Baal Shem Tov starts to speak about how to elevate the soul. And he says you don’t have to fast and you don’t have to perform all kind of manners of self mortification. You elevate the soul by serving God with joy.

Joy is a key theme in everything that he talks about. He introduces Kabbalistic rituals into everyday life. Before Kabbalah had been an elite practise for an elite few, and he says everything and everyone has a divine spark in it. You, me, the leaves on the trees, and that we can redeem the spark and return them to God by finding the essential truth in everything and everyone. This is a very Kabbalistic idea. He preaches that the best way to connect with God is prayer through feeling, kavanah in Hebrew. And prayer he says should be a joyful act. So he fills services with songs and dancing, and he encourages people to pray aloud, volume. And he tells them they can clap, they can dance, they can do somersaults, they can have a shot of vodka. And this is all in pursuit of a more joyous and more experiential connection with God. And what this approach does is it democratises the practise of Judaism. He says the greatest Torah scholar and the simplest Jew are equally loved by God. And so it means that farmers can connect with God just as easily in their fields as a Talmudist can in a study hall. Peasants are encouraged to pray about practical problems they have, such as asking God to help them heal a sick cow. And this accessible approach starts to really resonate across villages in Eastern Europe.

It allows ordinary people to connect with their Judaism without the traditional barriers of money, education or family pedigree. These ideas start to coalesce together, but it’s only going to be in the next generation, the generation of the Baal Shem Tov’s disciples that they’re going to be given a name. And of course, the name is Hasidism. In Hebrew it’s Chassidus or Chassidut. This name, this word Chassidut has been around really forever, but it’s adopted as a kind of a term for popular mysticism and it starts to catch on. Sometimes it’s translated as piety, but that doesn’t nail it. Sometimes people try and explain it as going above and beyond in the service of God but I don’t think that gets it either. So I’m going to talk about what Hasidism is for the next few minutes, but before I do, here’s a real treat because the magnificent Elie Wiesel was fascinated by Hasidism for all of his life. And he gave a series of lectures at the 92nd Street Y in the late sixties on the Hasidic masters. This is based on a number of books that he wrote on Hasidim. Wiesel has a family connection. He’s born in Sighet in Romania, which then later becomes part of Hungary. So it’s around Carpathia. And Sighet, if you look at the map, you’ll see it’s not so far from Vizhnitz and he’s connected on his mother’s side to the Vizhnitz Hasidim. So he’s already got a family connection, but he’s got an absolute fascination with Chassidut. So this is how he describes what Hasidism is, if I can just get this up.

[Clip plays]

• [Elie Wiesel] It was mainly a protest, a protest against ugliness, a protest against fossilisation of Judaism then, a protest against the establishment because then the establishment used to be as it is today by rich people, but then it also used to be led by knowledgeable people, unlike today. So the Hasidic movement then was an organised protest, putting the accent on aesthetic approach to life, on beauty as much as of truth, on sincerity, and mainly on solidarity. Hasidism in the beginning was really a protest against indifference, indifference of man towards his fellow man and indifference of God towards His creation. Later on, we found a beautiful passage about the Gerrer Rebbe, the first Gerrer Rebbe, who was the brother-in-law of the Kotzker Rebbe. A Hasid came to him and the rebbe says, “Tell me Moishe, how is our friend Yankel?” And Moishe says, “I don’t know.” And the rebbe began screaming at him, “How come you don’t know? You pray in the same synagogue. You study the same texts. You sing the same songs, and you don’t know whether he doesn’t miss anything, whether he’s not sick, whether he does not need consolation or advice or a smile?” Hasidism then was a brotherhood, and it was mainly in the beginning, in the French existential sense, a project, a projection of man towards his creation.

[Clip ends]

• So he’s saying, Weisel is talking about Hasidism as a rebellion. He’s saying Judaism had become stale, brittle and lifeless. And you know, he uses this expression, it’s a protest against fossilisation and indifference. What is it that the Hasidim believed? And I’ve just picked out five ideas, and I’m just going to go through them fairly quickly just to kind of give a flavour of early Hasidic philosophy as it starts to develop. The first belief is the belief in a divine imminence. Let atar panui mineh is Aramaic for “no place is devoid of God.” God is everywhere. God is in absolutely everything. And if God is in everything and is everywhere, the Hasid must be guided with that knowledge in their intellectual and their emotional behaviour. Second of all is the idea of devekut, adherence to God or adhesion. And devek is a word in modern Hebrew that actually means glue. So it’s adhering yourself to God. And again, the job of the Hasid is to get ever closer to communion with God. There’s also a belief in the transformation of evil into goodness.

Again, this is a very Kabbalistic idea. In non-Kabbalistic writings, traditionally the belief is that evil is there to be overcome, but Hasidim believe that evil shouldn’t be overcome, that even in evil there are sparks of goodness that need to be redeemed. And so the idea is to elevate the evil into goodness. Fourth of all is enthusiasm in worship, even to the extent that you spend more time praying than you do studying the Torah. There’s a Hasidic wonderful quote, which I think is my favourite Hasidic quote, which is a reply by a Hasid to a rebuke from an opponent. And he says, in Kotzk, we have a soul, not a clock. This was based on the accusation that the Hasidim would say it’s more important to wait until you can pray with real meaning than to pray at the allotted time. So even if you are out of time and you’re not praying when you should do, you should still wait until you’re ready. And this idea of enthusiasm, of simha, of joy, requires dance and music.

Dancing is an expression and a stimulator of joy to the Hasid. It purifies the soul and it unites the whole community, especially when you’re dancing in a circle. A Hasidic saying is when one dances, at least one foot is raised above the earth. Hasidim also emphasised music as a means to achieve devekut, communion. And it was interesting, I mean, we’ve all heard the Hasidic nigunim, the melodies, the songs, many of these melodies have been deliberately drawn from local gentile culture. They’re Hungarian melodies or Romanian or Ukrainian or Polish or Russian melodies. And the belief, which is based on a Kabbalistic idea, is that sacred melodies have been taken captive somehow in gentile music, and that the divine sparks hidden within them just await redemption by the Hasid. The final idea, which is the most controversial I think, is the role of the tzaddik. And this is later going to be a real defining feature of Hasidism, the role of the tzaddik or the rebbe who is the head of the dynasty. The Baal Shem Tov of course, he’s the archetypal tzaddik. And the tzaddik is an intermediary between man and God.

The tzaddik is responsible for the religious welfare of his followers. He’s also responsible for bringing requests by them to God and for mobilising divine assistance to protect the Hasid from their enemies. So now we turn to Mezeritch. Mezeritch is the home of the Besht’s successor, the Maggid of Mezeritch. It’s said that quote, “after the death of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, the Shechina, the Divine Presence itself got up, left and moved to Mezeritch.” Mezeritch is approximately, as you can see, a hundred or so miles northwest of Medzhybizh. And it’s no accident that it’s going in that direction because it’s becoming more central in its geographical location to the hub of where the action is. The successor to the Besht is Dov Ber Avraham, the Maggid of Mezeritch. Maggid just means preacher, by the way. Dov Ber, the Maggid is born in or around 1710. Again, dates are not precise.

His parents were poor and he was always quite solitary. When he was young, he enjoyed nothing more than getting up at sunrise and going off on his own for hours, taking walks through forests and around rivers and lakes. He always suffered ill health. He was nearsighted and had bad legs. He limped from a very early age. Just like the Baal Shem Tov he married young and again, just like the Baal Shem Tov, he initially earned his living first as a tutor of children, and then as a wandering preacher. Legend has it that he came to the Besht reluctantly. He was looking for a cure for an illness that he’d contracted brought on by excessive fasting, and the Besht cured him with a Kabbalistic ritual. And so began an intense relationship between master and disciple. The story of the succession from the Besht to the Maggid like everything else in early Hasidic history, again is shrouded in myth and legend. One story has it that after the death of the Baal Shem Tov in or around 1760, his son rabbi Tsvi became the next rebbe. After only a year, he gives up the position and among the disciples to stand out as contenders, one of them is Dov Ber and the other one is Jacob Joseph of Polonne.

Jacob Joseph is a gifted writer, and the Maggid is a gifted speaker. And the early Hasidic tradition is oral, not written. So it’s the Maggid who wins out. I’m not sure if this story has got much truth in it. It’s possible that there was no actual succession event at all. There was no Hasidic movement yet. And it might simply be that the Maggid was one of the more capable disciples. And that as he became more capable and more effective than anyone else, over time his leadership grew organically and he became the successor simply by dint of being the most effective leader. What was he like, Dov Ber? Well, it seems that in personality, he was an absolute contrast to the Besht. The Besht wore simple peasant clothes, and the Maggid wore elegant robes. The Besht prayed with crowds. The Maggid preferred to pray on his own and sometimes with known chosen disciples when he needed to make up a minyan. He was solitary where the Besht loved people and loved being with people. And rather than travel around, he lived his life in poor health with bad legs. And so he was forced to change the tradition of the travelling Kabbalist and instead, he based himself in Mezeritch. And people came to see him.

His reputation spread far and wide and hundreds came to see him. One individual called Rebbe Leib Sarah’s travels to Mezeritch and allegedly he says, “I came to the Maggid not to hear his words, nor to learn from his wisdom, but simply to see him tie his shoelaces.” Because of the sheer numbers who are coming to see him, hundreds and hundreds, he’s the first rebbe to appoint a gabbi, a gatekeeper. And of course, it’s the gatekeeper’s job to decide who gets to see the rebbe and who doesn’t. But the biggest difference between the Besht and the Maggid is the difference between the promoter of the idea and the promoter of the movement. And it’s interesting. Like so many ideologies or religious movements, there’s a founder and there’s a builder. The founder originates the idea and the builder creates the movement. We see this in Christianity with Jesus who’s then followed by Paul. And of course we see it much, much later with Marx the ideologue, whose ideas are actuated by Lenin, who creates the communist state. He trains 30 disciples, five of whom are, if you like, super disciples, who go on to be great rebbes. And they include the Chozeh, the Holy Seer of Lublin. But perhaps more well known than any of them is Rabbi Shneur Zalman who’s sent to Liadi and of course he becomes the founder of Chabad-Lubavitch and is known thereafter in Lubavitch terms as the Alter Rebbe, the old rebbe. So here again is Elie Wiesel and he’s describing what’s special about the Maggid’s leadership.

[Clip plays]

• [Elie Wiesel] I believe, and that is his relevance to our epoch, he was great because he dared to succeed the Baal Shem Tov. He was not afraid of being judged and losing in comparison. He understood the importance of transmitting teaching and new discoveries. He understood the necessity, not only to begin a new road but to continue. And he accepted his role as vessel of communication, to continue rather to begin a new path. He understood the necessity of providing the dispersed Jewish communities with leaders. He felt, he had to foresee it, that European Jewry was embarking upon a long and difficult road and therefore needed dynamic leadership. Furthermore, and here is his greatness, once his disciples became leaders in their own right, the Maggid did not become jealous of their fame and accomplishments. And you know, this is something so rare in our times and in all times. If the Talmud says, “l'olam al y'hay Adam m'kaneh livno u'l'talmido,” a man should not be jealous of his disciple, it is because it is a normal thing to be jealous of the successor, to be jealous of the disciple. He was not jealous. More than that, he never reproached them for searching for new ways. He wanted them to be different from himself. He wanted each one to establish his own dynasty, his own school of thought. Rather than keeping them dependent on him, he wanted them to become independent, sovereign, and develop their own intense individual abilities to the limit and beyond.

[Clip ends]

• So Hasidism and the experience today, all the different groups, this is where it comes from. It comes from the Maggid who trains his disciples and sends them into each corner of the empire. I have to say, I mean, I think I could listen to Elie Wiesel describing the inside of a ping pong ball for an hour and still be absolutely enthralled. And if you’re interested in these lectures, there’s a few of them online, and you can just get them just by Googling Elie Wiesel Hasidism 92nd Street Y. And I really, I thoroughly recommend them. They’re just so fascinating. Wiesel says, he says later in the lecture, which is a lovely phrase, “The Maggid brought the legend of Hasidism into history.” From the 1750s onwards, Hasidic thought and practise spreads throughout Eastern Europe like wildfire. It draws people in because it’s so accessible. Kabbalah, as I mentioned earlier, was meant to be restricted to the elite few. It was said that it should only be studied by a highly learned married man who’s over 40. But the Hasidim dilute Kabbalistic ideas. They teach them to everyone, and they say anyone can practise this. And the way Hasidism grows is that purposefully the Hasidim become part of local communities. They provide a spiritual authority in turn at a time when the rabbi mostly just serves as a legal authority and doesn’t do much else.

The Hasidim on the other hand, spends time with the sick and gives them blessings for good health. And in doing so, they undermine the authority of the rabbi and start to create an alternate power base in town. They join the Havurot. These are the groups in each community that’s responsible for taking care of a particular mitzva. So it may be that one group is there to feed the poor, another one is there to visit the sick, another one performs the chevra kadisha, which cares for the recently deceased. So they’re able to carry out a social revolution by being part of the community. So you probably know what’s coming. Not everyone warmed to the Hasidim. In fact, many influential rabbis started to get increasingly worried that this was a dangerous new movement insinuating itself into the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. And it caused them great concern on many different levels. They disliked the fact that Hasidim seemed to be anti-learning because they spent so much time praying, there was no time left for study. They found Hasidic enthusiasm during prayer to be alarming and distasteful.

All this shouting and clapping and dancing and jumping and somersaulting, that’s not prayer, that’s raucous behaviour. They were concerned that the Hasidim were undermining rabbinical authority. They disregarded set prayer times. They had their own makeshift synagogues in houses, so-called shtiebels, which drew people away from the main synagogue. They reinterpreted the laws of schechita, of animal slaughter by using much sharper knives than had been used before. So the Hasid became the go-to butcher in a town which drew away income from the rabbi. They started to worry that these Hasidim may be another false messianic movement. The spectre of Sabbatai Tzvi is still there in east Eastern Europe. And Jacob Frank, who Trudy spoke about last week, is active at this time. Jacob Frank, by the way, who was born in Podolia. So all of this is, you know, it’s not just that it’s recent, it’s that it’s it’s present. And the worry is that this figure of the rebbe who is starting to become in some circles an object of worship, maybe the rebbe is going to become a false messiah.

So these rabbis start to denounce Hasidism in their speeches and in their writings. And before long, they come to be known and they come to style themselves as Mitnagdim, the opponents. Hasidism meanwhile continues to spread and it continues to spread north and west. And it even gets as far as the very home of Jewish study and learning, Lithuania. And even here, it gained some traction because status in Lithuania is based on three measures, money, lineage, and learning. And if you have none of those, you have no status. So there’s huge numbers of people even in the Lithuanian community who are feeling pretty disenfranchised. Hasidism comes to them and says, we can reenfranchise you, we can give you a place in Judaism. So now we must pause because we are going to meet Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shmuel Zalman Kremer, also known as the Vilna Ga'on, the genius of Vilna. Vilna is in the very centre of Lithuania, and in the centre of Vilna is the most respected rabbi in Europe, the Vilna Ga'on. He’s born in 1720 into a rabbinical and scholarly family. And he first gained attention as a child prodigy. He has a photographic memory and an unrivalled passion for study. Legend has it, again, it’s legend, that by the age of four, he’d memorised the entire Tenach, the Hebrew Bible.

When he was seven, he was already ensconced in learning Talmud. And by the time he was eight, in his free time for a hobby, he’s studying anatomy. He begins to study on his own. At 18, he leaves Vilna and he goes into kind of a self-imposed exile where he travels all through the communities in Poland and Germany. And on his return to Vilna, he shuts himself away in his house and devotes himself and his energies to Torah study and nothing but Torah study. And he continues on this path throughout his life, although he still finds time to write books on maths and astronomy, and some of the sciences that are emerging. For Ga'on never held a formal title or position, he never served as a communal rabbi. Nevertheless, Lithuanian Jewry considered him to be their acknowledged leader. And his contemporaries throughout Europe deferred to his authority bar none. The organised campaign meanwhile against Hasidism ramps up in 1772, which ironically is the year that the Maggid of Mezeritch dies.

A public letter from the Jewish community of Vilna is issued and it bears the signature of the Vilna Ga'on among others. And this letter, you can see is a complete denunciation of Hasidism. This is just an extract from it. And I’ll just read what this says. “In the middle of prayer, they interject obnoxious alien words in a loud voice, conduct themselves like madmen, and explain their behaviour by saying that in their thoughts they saw in the most far off worlds. The study of Torah is neglected by them entirely. And they emphasise that one should devote oneself as little as possible to learn and not grieve too much over sin committed. Every day for them is a holiday. When they pray according to falsified texts, they raise such a din that the walls quake. They turn over like wheels with their head below and their legs above. Therefore, do we now declare the people shall robe themselves in clothes of zeal for the Lord of Hosts to extirpate, destroy, outlaw and excommunicate them.”

So this letter is not just a denunciation, this letter is a herem, excommunication. Hasidic leaders, including Shneur Zalman, and Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk desperately try to meet with the Vilna Ga'on to see if they can change his mind because no one wants to pick a fight with a great man. But he refuses to see them. And so the Hasidim strike back. Some of them start to claim that the Vila Ga'on’s teachings are full of lies. And before long, a vicious war of accusation and counter accusation begins and it lasts for some 50 years. There’s a second letter that’s issued in 1781. This is a copy of it. And somewhere here is the Vilna Ga'on’s signature in and amongst many others. The war is at its most extreme and brutal between around 1780 and 1805 so over that 25 year period. And this is when the Mitnagdic leaders use every tool, every device that’s available to them to utterly destroy Hasidism. What do they do? They extend the ban on Hasidim to a ban on intermarriage with any Hasid. They denounce Hasidim to the Tsarist government. So remember what our timing is here. Northeast Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine have all been ceded to Russia as spoils from the Napoleonic wars. And the Mitnagdim tell the authorities that Hasidic rebbes are subversives, spies and traitors.

These unusually groundless charges, but they result in arrests. Among prominent Hasidic leaders who are jailed on account of these denunciations are two of the Maggid’s disciples, Shneur Zalman of Liadi and Asher Perlov, who becomes the tzaddik of Karlin-Stolin. By the way, I have to say, you know, this goes both ways. Mitnagdim would assume bans on the Hasidim, they would burn Hasidic books and they’d get them locked up by the authorities, but the Hasidim would do the same in return. Bans, the book burnings, the denunciations to the governments. But ultimately, the Mitnagdic dream of totally crushing Hasidism, this dream ends in failure. It gets a setback first with the death of the Vilna Ga'on in 1797 and secondly, with the decision in 1804 by the Russian government to legalise Hasidic prayer houses. What’s curious about the war in all its brutality and its viciousness is that in the long run, it actually strengthens both movements, both the Hasidim and the Litvak, the Lithuanian Mitnagdim themselves. Opposition unites the Hasidim into a close knit community.

It forces them to moderate some of their more extreme positions, and it encourages them to dedicate themselves more to the study of Torah. Meanwhile, the struggle inspires the Mitnagdim to become more accessible. And Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, who is one of the disciples of the Vilna Ga'on, is the creator of the first yeshiva in Volozhin which makes Torah study more accessible. And it becomes the template for many of the great yeshivat that would then follow on. The fact is that by around the 1820s, the Mitnagdim and the Hasidim not only have to stop fighting each other, but they now actually have to start teaming up and working together. And this is because they realise they now have a new common enemy, and it’s one that’s far more insidious and dangerous to both of them than either of them ever was to each other. This threat has a modernist face, and it’s called the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. So next week we’ll continue the story of the Hasidim and the history of the Hasidim from the 1820s onwards, and we’ll start with the Haskalah and we’ll bring the story up to date.

But for now, I’m going to stop here and I’m just going to have a look at everyone’s questions. And let’s see, how are we for time? I think we’ve got just a few minutes to take some questions. So let me just stop sharing and then we can have a look at some of the questions. Here we go. Let’s see.

Q&A and Comments

So here’s Joan who said some very nice personal things. Thank you very much, Joan. Mayra, thank you.

Q: Susan says I was taught that in the late 12th century, the Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer were considered Ashkenazic Hasidim. Is this the same as Hasidism today? A: There’s always been a strain of something that’s called Hasidism and people who call themselves Hasidic. It was different, but it had many things in common. And there’s still a, well, there’s a connection with the idea of piousness, but less so with the Kabbalistic ideas.

Q: Was the Baal Shem Tov not buried in Chernobyl and people came recently to see his grave to visit says Rose? A: Rose, yes, he’s buried not far from Medzhybizh and there’s a shrine by his grave. And it’s visited regularly by Hasidim.

Judith, of course, I mean, one of the things that’s bound to happen, of course, is that many people who are listening will be from Hasidic families themselves and will have connections with Hasidic families. Judith Hayman says, do you know anything about the Amdura Hasidic dynasty? My father was Mark Amdura. His family came from Amdur in Belarus now called Indura. The Amdura Synagogue still stands. I don’t, but I’m going to find out. I haven’t come across the Amduras. How interesting. There are something like 15 to 20 really, really well known and substantial Hasidic groupings, but there are more than a hundred others, many of which are quite small, but which still thrive today.

Q: Aunt Rose asks, if the Besht never went to heder, who taught him the Tanakh or the Kabbalah? A: He learned a very basic Tanakh while he was at school. He didn’t do particularly well as a student. He did have a form of Jewish education as a kid, but he was taught Kabbalah by a group of Ba'ale Shem. Adrian Banks says Martin Buber was fascinated by Hasidism. Absolutely. And there’s a whole series of writers of which Martin Buber is the most well known who much later on from a non-Hasidic perspective, rediscover Hasidism as a root into a spiritual connection with their Judaism. And Buber had a fascination with Hasidism. Solgoger says the Go'an of Vilna was born in Gordenev. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Bernard.

Q: Bernard asks today are most Hasidim Lubavitch, Habad, or are there many other sects? A: There are very many other sects, and we’ll look at some of them next week. Lubavitch is one of the most well-known, but is by no means the largest of the groupings. The largest today is Satmar, and the other large ones include the Belz Hasidim, the Gerrer Hasidim and also the Brezlovs who are very different from other Hasidim, and we’ll come onto them next week.

Q: How did the Hasidim sustain themselves economically once they were not travelling around? A: Very good question. I mean, some of the Hasidim who made themselves Baale Shem were able to eek a living through selling amulets and through donations that were made for the healings and the exorcisms they did. But many others were just ordinary. They might be ordinary farmers who would attach themselves to Hasidim. The answer really is that most of them were fairly poor at the time that we’re talking about. Okay.

Q: Stephen Creed asks is the divisiveness between Mitnagdim and Hasidim similar to what I experienced in Israel between Ashkenazim and Sephardim? A: I don’t think it is, but certainly some of the divisions that we still see today more I think in Israel, between Haredim and the secular world, have got their roots in the differences between the Hasidim and the Maskilim, the supporters of the Haskalah. What’s fascinating about Haredim today in Israel and outside of Israel and Haredi is a term, it’s a blanket term that we apply to the ultra Orthodox of which Hasidim are a part. And these days there’s far less of a difference and there’s far more cross-fertilization.

For those of you who saw “Shtisel,” wonderful, wonderful series that was shown on Netflix a few years ago and I think has gone into its fourth series. The Shtisel family are not Hasidim. They dress like Hasidim, they have the peot, the side curls, they have the hats, they have the shtreimels but they are not Hasidic. They are Litvak, Lithuanian Haredim. And they’re very loosely based on a Litvak group called the Purusha who to all intense and purposes, they look like Hasidim, they dress like Hasidim, but they’re actually Litvaks so you can see how cross fertilised the communities have become over the years.

So I think we need to leave it there because I’ve just noticed the time. So thank you everyone who’s been listening. Part two is on Tuesday, so for those of you who are able to, I very much look forward to seeing you then.