Hasidism

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Hasidism is a movement of Jewish religious renewal that arose in the mid-eighteenth century among the Jews of Podolia and Volhynia, in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and spread within a few generations across much of Eastern Europe. Its name comes from the Hebrew ḥasid, “pious one.” At its heart was a shift in emphasis rather than doctrine: away from learning measured by mastery of the Talmud, and toward inwardness, fervor, and the nearness of God in ordinary life.

The movement traces itself to Israel ben Eliezer, called the Baal Shem Tov — “Master of the Good Name” — an itinerant healer and teacher who died around 1760 and left almost nothing in writing. What is known of him comes mostly through later disciples and a collection of legends compiled decades after his death, so the line between the historical figure and the founder his followers needed is not easily drawn. His successor, Dov Ber of Mezeritch, organized the teaching and trained the disciples who carried it outward; from them descended the dynastic courts — Chabad, Breslov, Satmar, and many others — that still define Hasidic life.

What the movement taught was a particular intensity of devotion. Devekut, “cleaving” to God, was held to be available not only to scholars but to anyone, and to be reachable through prayer, song, dance, and joy as much as through study. The everyday was not a distraction from the sacred but a place to find it. Hasidism drew its metaphysics from Kabbalah, especially the sixteenth-century system of Isaac Luria, and made that once-esoteric material the common idiom of ordinary piety — a popularization that its critics found alarming. Central to its social form was the tzaddik, or rebbe: a righteous man believed to stand closer to God than other people and to draw down blessing for his followers, who gathered at his court and bound their lives to his.

That last claim provoked fierce opposition. The established rabbinic authorities of Lithuania, the Mitnagdim — “opponents” — saw in the cult of the tzaddik a dangerous elevation of a man, and in the new ecstasy a slackening of discipline and learning; the conflict, sharpened by recent memory of the failed messiah Sabbatai Zevi, produced bans and bitter polemic through the late eighteenth century. In time the two camps drew closer, united against the secularizing pressures of modernity.

Scholarship has long debated what Hasidism amounted to — a mystical movement, a social one, a reform of popular religion, or all three at once — and how much the picture handed down by the dynasties reflects the movement’s beginnings. What is not in doubt is that it reshaped the religious imagination of Eastern European Jewry, and that its courts, all but destroyed in the Holocaust, were rebuilt afterward and endure.

→ Related: Jewish Mysticism · Kabbalah · Mysticism · Ecstasy