BETWEEN SHTIBL AND SHTETL
Figure 16.1. Der rebbe kimt, 1902, postcard. A caricature of a visit by the rebbe to his Hasidim. The German text reads: “The rebbe comes, the rebbe comes, the rebbe is already here.” Courtesy of Marcin Wodzinski, Wroclaw.
DESPITE THE CENTRALITY OF THE TSADDIK and his court, few Hasidim in the nineteenth century spent much time in his company. The geographical expansion of Hasidism and the growth in the number of its followers meant that the vast majority of Hasidim lived a long way from their leader and visited him no more than several times a year, or even several times in a lifetime, paying him very brief visits of one or a few days. Among the thousands of followers of the tsaddikim from Ger or Belz, few spent more than a few holy days at their courts, always in the company of hundreds of other faithful, and fewer still had significant individual contact with them. While the court was the locus of Hasidic faith, most of the lives of the Hasidim took place in the many hundreds of small towns or shtetlekh where the overwhelming majority of them lived.
We have already seen how in the eighteenth century, Hasidism began to organize its institutions—especially the shtibl or prayer house—at the local level and how local Hasidic groups negotiated their relations with a sometimes hostile kahal and rabbinate. These developments were now enacted on a mass scale in the nineteenth century. At first, the Hasidim had to defend themselves against accusations of sectarianism, but as they became more accepted, they moved from constructing parallel institutions to taking control of many of the established structures of communal authority. In some places, Hasidism became the dominant force, while in others it remained one religious and social alternative. In many places, a particular group of Hasidim did not enjoy a monopoly and they needed to work out a modus vivendi with competing Hasidic groups present in the same town. Finally, Hasidim—like Jews generally—had to manage their relations with the non-Jewish majority population and with the Gentile state.
Power in the Shtetl
The relatively low barrier between Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not mean, of course, that the growth of Hasidism was not accompanied by conflict. On the contrary, wherever Hasidism expanded, it came into interaction, often confrontation with other forces within the Jewish community, which tried either to preserve the status quo or to compete in their own drive to expand. There was nothing inherently “Hasidic” in these conflicts, since they were in the main struggles for power within the shtetl of the same sort that involved other groups as well.
The Hasidic competition for power within local Jewish communities did not follow a single pattern, and there was certainly no “Hasidic plot” to attain dominance. At any given time, the relationship of the Hasidim to communal institutions differed from community to community and region to region. In some places—and certainly early on in our period—the Hasidim constituted an unorganized group of individuals, the followers of one or perhaps more than one rebbe. These individuals eventually formed a distinct and cohesive group with its own institutions and internal hierarchy. At this stage, the Hasidim fought to defend their separate existence. But in some communities, they moved from separation to infiltration of the communal institutions, whether the community board, havurot, or rabbinate. Finally, in areas where the Hasidim achieved a significant power, they sometimes aspired to dominance in the community.
We have seen that by the nineteenth century, most non-Hasidic authorities did not consider the Hasidim a sect, which would have led them to ban the members of the movement. But even if they were accepted as a legitimate havurah, they still might constitute a threat to public order because of their separatist behavior. The exodus of Hasidim from their native communities to the courts of the tsaddikim during festivals was often seen by the community elite as such a threat. This was especially marked during the High Holidays, from Rosh Hashanah to Sukkot, because the major festivals were a traditional period of donations for the maintenance of various communal institutions. The offerings were voluntary, but there was, of course, significant social pressure to donate. By not attending the synagogue and making their donations elsewhere at the court, the Hasidim caused the community significant financial damage.
An even greater challenge came when the Hasidim created a separate Hasidic prayer house, or shtibl, whose structure and function will be the subject of the next section of this chapter. Already in the eighteenth century, the creation of a shtibl was often the first catalyst of sharp confrontation with the non-Hasidic majority. It was also the first occasion on which a coherently organized group of Hasidim could be identified. The kahal typically opposed the creation of the shtiblekh because it wished to maintain control over forms of organization of the community, including religious confraternities, prayer gatherings, and so on. Establishment of the shtibl naturally placed a section of the community beyond direct control of the kahal, and provided a model for other such groups that might follow. Conflicts concerning Hasidic “meetings” at night appear throughout the entire nineteenth century, even when Hasidism had already become an accepted social force. In addition, the creation of the shtibl had economic consequences, because it meant a decline in income from donations by people called to the reading of the Torah in the main synagogue, from collection boxes there, from payment for seats, and even community taxes and other contributions.
In the eighteenth century, we saw also that the Hasidic demand to practice their own ritual slaughter, separate from that of the community, was one of the primary causes of friction on the local level. The halakhic issue was resolved by the introduction of steel knives, which were both very sharp (as demanded by the Hasidim) and suitably strong (as their opponents demanded) and therefore fulfilled the legal requirements espoused by both sides. However, even though the halakhic aspect of the problem was settled by the early years of the nineteenth century, conflicts still erupted sporadically until the twentieth century whenever the Hasidim tried to push for the appointment of a Hasidic slaughterer. The power to appoint the slaughterer was emblematic of who held the economic, political, and social power in the community.
Another area of potential conflict between Hasidim and other sections of the local community was the appointment of rabbis. As we saw in section 1, a number of Hasidim—Ya’akov Yosef of Polnoye, Shmuel Shmelke Horowitz of Nikolsburg, and Levi Yitshak of Barditshev—had been appointed to rabbinical positions in the earliest stages of the movement, but they were not appointed as Hasidim. Hasidic affiliation was not a typical criterion used in evaluating a candidate as rabbi; more important were Talmudic knowledge, ties with influential families in town, and willingness to accept a position in a small town where the compensation was very low. Appointments to the rabbinate became a subject of controversy only when a local Hasidic congregation proposed its own candidate despite doubts regarding the candidate’s suitability for the post, or when it opposed the non-Hasidic candidate because of his views on Hasidism. In these cases, Hasidism might become the bone of contention.
The Hasidim turned out to be surprisingly victorious in blocking anti-Hasidic rabbis, even though quite often they were a small minority. As a bitter resident of Nasielsk, Central Poland, explained in his complaint to the state authorities in 1860: “for them, a rabbi is not necessary; … Hasidim have illegal rabbis [that is, tsaddikim] and do not need a rabbi because they do not pray together with us in the synagogue but only go to the synagogue to make some kind of scene with the rabbi.”1 This complaint certainly makes sense since the Hasidim used the standard services of the community’s rabbi significantly less than the non-Hasidic community, and so in contentious situations, they had little incentive to compromise. This naturally gave them the upper hand in conflicts over rabbinical appointments.
Nevertheless, the Hasidim became increasingly interested not only in blocking unwanted candidates, but also in the appointment of Hasidic rabbis. Such appointments offered the opportunity to spread Hasidic values within the wider community through the post of the rabbi. Additionally, many tsaddikim found that their income from the pidyon and ma’amad was insufficient, because the ever-growing number of tsaddikim created increasing competition for these resources. Rabbinical salary became an important source of supplementary income for many Hasidic leaders.
The income from the rabbinate was not, however, an attractive incentive by itself. At times, becoming a communal rabbi required the failure of other means of livelihood. A story about Shalom of Belz has it that as a young man, he did not want to become a rabbi, but instead was living on his income from trade, while studying in the kloyz of his teacher, Ya’akov Yitshak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin. The Seer advised him to undertake a certain transaction, while at the same time discouraging his partner from doing the same. Only after the transaction ended in a spectacular bankruptcy did it transpire that the Seer wanted Shalom to abandon trade and become a rabbi. Even if the story is apocryphal, it emerged from a certain social reality. Several other Hasidic leaders, such as Hanokh Levin of Aleksander, in fact became rabbis only in the wake of a business failure.
One motive for becoming a rabbi, specific for the Kingdom of Poland only, was that after 1846 the only way to avoid punishment for wearing traditional Jewish attire was to occupy the post of rabbi or deputy rabbi. While this certainly was not the only motivation, it clearly played a role, since in some communities the number of assistant rabbis increased from one to more than five in the year the law on Jewish dress was introduced. In addition, a rabbinic position became a way to avoid military conscription, which was made mandatory for Russian Jews in 1827 and for Polish Jews in 1843. Later, a rabbi could also exempt one or more rabbinical students from the military draft. Of course, these motives applied equally to Hasidim and non-Hasidim, although the evidence suggests that Hasidim were more determined than others to retain their traditional dress.
The Hasidim also attempted to gain positions on Jewish community boards. Even though they already sought such posts in the eighteenth century, it was only with the strengthening of the movement in the nineteenth century that the candidates were put forward as Hasidim and not independent of their Hasidic affiliation. Many were of course motivated to acquire communal positions for the good of the community, since even after it was reduced in its powers, the kahal still played a significant role in public life. However, materialistic motivations were sometimes at work as well, since members of the kahal board might minimize their personal tax obligations as well as control communal finance. Yitshak Bendermacher of Piotrków, Central Poland, described an 1845 scheme:
Several weeks ago the official auction for the leasing of the mikveh was to have taken place in the office of the magistrate. The date of the auction was changed several times to confound those trying to obtain the lease. In the end, when the auction was taking place in the magistrate’s office, they [representatives of the Hasidic community board] closed themselves in the office and did not admit any of the competitors for the lease, which resulted in the mikveh being leased for a derisory sum, which will mean less income and hurt the community.2
As the Hasidim fought to gain control of the kahal, the traditional leaders of the community might either fight back or give way. In Czestochowa in 1820, for example, the kahal board supported angry non-Hasidic members of the community who had armed themselves with sticks to chase off Hasidim trying to force their way into the local mikveh under police protection. However, the kahal was by no means always anti-Hasidic. Relations with the community board changed radically as the Hasidic movement developed and Hasidim were able to gain significant representation on the boards of certain Jewish communities and even dominate them.
As the Hasidim in a town grew in numbers, they might attempt to take over the synagogue or the local bet midrash. Hasidic minyanim had always existed alongside communal synagogues and study halls, but in these cases, they tried to introduce Hasidic customs as the sole or dominant practices. Thus it was, for instance, in Liady, Belarus, a town associated with the Chabad tradition as the first seat of the dynasty’s founder Shneur Zalman and, from 1869, the residence of his great-grandson, Hayim Shneur Zalman. In the 1870s, a local group of Hasidim introduced the Chabad prayer book with its Sephardic liturgy in the bet midrash. However, Liady was not ready for Hasidic domination. Their opponents moved into the courtyard, where they prayed in their own fashion, and at the first opportunity they retook the study hall. The conflict dragged on for months, two cantors were hired, and there were embarrassing confrontations: depending on which cantor reached the pulpit first, prayers were said following either the Ashkenazic rite or the specific Chabad liturgy. The conflict ended only when the Hasidim left the study hall and built their own. This attempt to take over communal prayer thus failed. However, in many other places, the Hasidim did succeed in taking over community synagogues or study halls.
In places of very significant Hasidic influence, Hasidim also attempted to permanently control the rabbinate and other community functions by subordinating them to one of the Hasidic courts. The maggidut contracts that towns in Ukraine signed with tsaddikim and especially those from the Chernobyl dynasty (see chapter 11) essentially subordinated the local communities to Hasidic rule. This was a contract modeled on the feudal system in which subjects subjected themselves to the landowner’s authority in return for protection and the right to reside on “his” land. As the Hasid Mordechai Glubman wrote: “This was actual rule. The granting of maggidut to the rebbe of a particular town, group, or community meant turning over all public, spiritual, cultural, and economic life to the rule of the rebbe and his Hasidim.”3
In communities where the Hasidim won control of the kahal board, synagogues, confraternities, or other local institutions, non-Hasidim had to accept Hasidic religious and cultural patterns: Sephardic ritual, late prayers, shtiblekh, celebration of specific Hasidic festivals, such as the yortsayt of deceased tsaddikim, and so on. Maintaining non-Hasidic traditions in such local communities became an expression of opposition to Hasidism.
Domination had its drawbacks, however. Observers in the nineteenth century, including Hasidim themselves, found that many so-called Hasidim really had nothing in common with Hasidic ideals, and that they were Hasidim only because it was convenient for them, because they feared social ostracism, or, for the indigent, because the Hasidim provided them with food and drink on festive occasions. Conquest of communities could thus ironically weaken the internal cohesion of Hasidism and sow the seeds of later crisis.
Moreover, centers with a great number of adherents were often wracked by internal dissension and struggle between the followers of various Hasidic courts. Rarely did a single dynasty take control of everything, as the Belz Hasidim did in towns in the immediate vicinity of Belz, such as Cieszanów of which it was said that “almost all the town’s Jews travel to Belz” or Uhnów where “all the Jews in Uhnów are Belz Hasidim.”4 Most communities were not monolithic but were rather split between followers of various dynasties, which provided protection from the most glaring excesses of dominance. Abuse of power could lead to a migration of followers to another shtibl and a shift in the balance of power. That in fact did happen, for example, when the Hasidic community board in Piotrków in 1845–1846 abused their prerogatives so much that some of their former supporters wrote complaints to the local government.
The conflicts between the courts of Ger and Aleksander, Pshiskhe and Lublin, and Kotzk and Izhbits, which started at the level of the tsaddikim, devolved into skirmishes in local Jewish communities. Most such conflicts between courts, regardless of their theological overlay, were translated at the local level into competition over appointments of rabbis, ritual slaughterers, control of the local bet midrash, or even to arguments over whether sufficient honor was given to a visiting rebbe by followers of a competing tsaddik. One might argue that the emergence of these conflicts between Hasidic groups was a sign of the maturation of the movement, whose acquisition of power in many communities opened it up to internal struggles over the spoils of victory. The very fragmentation of Hasidism into many competing courts was thus both a strength and a weakness.
The struggle over control of communal institutions might be carried out amicably but could also involve social and economic pressure, boycotts, and even bans of excommunication. Violence was not unknown. While the rebbes of Sandz and Sadagora exchanged pamphlets in their famous conflict, their Hasidim in Oswiecim in Western Galicia exchanged blows: local documents attest to a Sadagora Hasid splitting the head of a Hasid from Sandz with a heavy beer mug. In 1840, a Hasidic rabbi in Belchatów, Central Poland, complained of members of an anti-Hasidic group:
One of them … grabbed me, standing in front of the holy ark, and he tried to push me away. Hershke Kirshenbaum called out in a loud voice to catch me by the peyes and take me out of the synagogue. Mendel Leib shouted to me in the synagogue “poshei yisro’el,” [Jewish criminal].… When I was standing in front of the holy ark, Szlama Wajs grabbed me by my shroud and pulled me off and they extinguished the light.… For no reason and without any justification, I was called a thief and he pulled my beard.5
This example demonstrates how verbal aggression, such as public defamation, ridicule, and insults, could escalate into physical violence. In the most extreme circumstance, it might even involve murder, as in the well-known Ushits affair when Israel of Ruzhin was accused of ordering the murder of two Jewish informers (see chapter 11).
Another method for settling internal feuds in the community was denunciation to the government with a request for intervention, a subject we will treat in some detail in chapter 19. Such denunciations, by both Hasidim and non-Hasidim, were symptomatic of the deterioration of communal solidarity in the nineteenth century. An illustrative case is a conflict in Checiny, a small and impoverished provincial town in the southern part of Central Poland. In 1818, the local kahal asked the provincial authorities for assistance in preventing members of the community from spending religious festivals outside their town, a typical complaint against the Hasidim, as we have seen. It was a sign of the times that the kahal turned to the government to enforce its will since it no longer had the authority to control a dissident group.
Another vehicle for settling conflicts between Hasidim and non-Hasidim was interventions by supra-communal authorities. Modern political intercessors, such as Yitshak of Vurke, worked as lobbyists on behalf of the Hasidim and, sometimes, the whole Jewish community. As such, they could be brought in to resolve communal disputes. However, turning to outside authorities, either Jewish or Gentile, often backfired. The more the resolution of conflicts required external intervention, the more chronic they became and the more the local communities, unable to settle these conflicts themselves, lost authority. Thus conflicts between Hasidim and non-Hasidim (or between different groups of Hasidim) emerged easily, but were hard to extinguish.
The Shtibl
From the eighteenth century, the center of Hasidic life on the local level and the base from which they extended their influence over their communities was the shtibl (sometimes also called a kloyz). A typical Hasid would often spend his free time and sometimes whole days and nights in small confraternities, composed entirely of men, united by a highly emotional and intense group experience. In the opinion of Yitshak Even, writing in the early twentieth century, “a kloyz was for Jews … quite simply paradise, where a Hasid became a new man.”6 Many nostalgic memoirs recall the shtiblekh as characterized by exceptional intensity, ecstatic prayer, brotherly love, and joyous atmosphere, “where the soul shone on the faces of the Hasidim, and the shtibl was filled with great warmth and celebration.”7 The most important autonomous space in which the Hasidim could develop their religious life, the shtibl’s basic functions did not essentially differ from its non-Hasidic equivalent. Exactly like a bet midrash, the shtibl was a place for religious studies, private and public prayer, for meetings, celebrations and hosting visitors, including traveling tsaddikim. Some particularly zealous Hasidim spent nearly all their time in the shtibl; for them, it was like a home.
A normal day in the shtibl began early in the morning with the arrival of the kesteidems, young husbands supported by their in-laws for a few years during their religious studies. The students remained in the shtibl throughout the whole day. The next group was those coming for daily morning prayers (shaharit), often more than one minyan praying at different times. Then a group of children with their teachers came, since shtiblekh often made part of their premises available to hadarim, traditional religious schools. The shtibl filled up especially at the time of afternoon prayers (minhah), and were full for evening prayers (ma’ariv).
In the colorful description of one early twentieth-century witness: “The Belz kloyz usually buzzed like a hive. From minhah to maa’riv there was loud talking, some shouting, people swarmed. The Hasidim prayed ecstatically, loudly, turning this way and that, they prayed with kavvanah [intentionality].”8 Worshippers burst frequently into ecstatic song, praying with great fervor, or studying silently. Others related stories of the extraordinary miracles performed by current and ancient tsaddikim, which was no less a religious act in Hasidism than prayer. According to one story, a distinguished Hasidic leader, Aryeh Leibush of Wisznica (d. 1849), reported that
once he passed a kloyz, and saw great light shining from there, and thought that there were certainly some people there sitting and studying Torah for its own sake. So he entered there in order to see it, and saw two Hasidim sitting and telling some stories, but not studying. Rabbi [Leibush] asked: “Brothers, what are you talking about?” They answered that they were telling some stories about tsaddikim. Once he heard it, he wondered, as he understood that it was from these stories that the light shone.9
In the majority of Hasidic groups, study also belonged to the canon of religious practices. Some groups such as the Ger Hasidim took pride in the level of the religious studies in their confraternity. In less educated groups, which included Hasidim of lower social status, Talmudic studies played a lesser role or could be supplemented by more popular texts, such as the popular compendium of folk legends Ein Ya’akov, popular homiletic literature, or books in Yiddish.
Celebrations, such as the anniversary of the death of the tsaddik, were central to the life of the shtibl. In addition to pilgrimages to the gravesite of the tsaddik, the yortsayt of the rebbe was also celebrated on the local level. During such ceremonies, an especially mystical role was ascribed to toasts with vodka, which, beyond their social role, were ceremonial acts of religious celebration elevating a dead tsaddik’s soul to yet-higher levels of sanctity. Joyous feasting, often modest in material terms (herring, barley soup, a slice of honey cake), might mark other festive events. As Yehezkel Kotik recalled:
If someone had a yortsayt, the Hasidim in the shtibl demanded a sip of schnapps, and if he couldn’t afford the vodka, it was donated by one of the wealthier Hasidim. But if a wealthy man had a yortsayt, he had to provide plenty of drinks, and after the service, the bottles were passed around and things got lively. Indeed, every day was something like a holiday for them. Here—the yortsayt of the rebbe and an opportunity to hold a feast, to sing and dance, or there—the arrival of a special guest, in whose honor the feasting, singing, and dancing were repeated, or just for the sake of having a good time. They always had one reason or another to make each day a festival. One had to commemorate a famous rebbe’s yortsayt, another, the memory of still another rebbe, and then came the yortsayt of Moses himself. Then there was Hanukkah, the new moon, the Tenth of Tevet, the Fifteenth of Shvat, Purim, Shushan Purim, Passover, Lag ba-Omer, and Shavuot! … On the Ninth of Av [the day that commemorates the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem] pails of water were spilled beneath the socks of the praying congregants. They would fling burrs at one another that got entangled in their beards and were very hard to remove, which caused uproarious laughter. Afterward they would go to the graveyard, where those burrs grew on low bushes and again got stuck in their beards and hair. In short, the Ninth of Av was a day of laughter and amusement.10
We are struck here by the provocative transformation of a day of mourning—the fast on the Ninth of Av—into an occasion for childish pranks and riotous behavior. Some of this behavior may have been a result of the role of alcohol in Hasidic ritual, which led anti-Hasidic critics to accuse the Hasidim that “they hold a dance in the same place chosen for a religious service, and that at it they drink various alcoholic beverages, and having become drunk, they dash out into the road, singing, jumping and emitting all sorts of shrieks.”11
Both Kotik and Even had abandoned Hasidism for modern life, so their descriptions may be unreliable. And accusing the Hasidim of debauchery was almost certainly a polemical exaggeration. The amounts of alcohol consumed were usually minimal and what looked to outsiders like pranks often had deeper ritual meaning such as fighting melancholy (the biggest enemy of a Hasid), inducing ecstasy, and creating an egalitarian community. Such behavior certainly offended Maskilim who embraced bourgeois comportment, but Hasidic behavior in the shtibl was far from sybaritism or drunkenness.
The shtibl also fulfilled important socioeconomic functions, as we shall see in more detail in the next section of this chapter. It often operated like a savings bank, assisting Hasidim in financial difficulties, collecting money for dowries for poor women, or providing board and lodging for itinerant Jews, as well as Hasidim traveling to visit their tsaddik. Hosting pilgrims was not only an act of charity but also served to build broader ties than just local ones between the followers of a given tsaddik, and thus strengthened group identity.
The shtibl could be found anywhere: in buildings constructed for the purpose, a peasant hut, a basement, or rented rooms at a synagogue. From surviving memoirs, descriptions and a few illustrations, we find that a great many shtiblekh were housed in very modest surroundings, often in a single room in little wooden buildings with simple furnishings and poor sanitary conditions. Yitshak Even commented on the Sadogora Hasidim’s kloyz in Boryslaw that: “The building of the kloyz was a simple ruin standing simply by a miracle … the benches, tables, and bookcases had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to the building.”12
In addition to these tables, benches, and bookcases furnished with a few sacred texts, the shtibl had to have a stove, so that it might welcome visitors in the winter. Here is a description of the early twentieth century Ger shtibl in Piotrków Trybunalski:
[There were] coarse wooden benches along the west wall which had no back support. In the middle of the room stood a square table covered with a colorfully embroidered cloth, on top of which the Torah scroll was placed for reading. In the middle of the east wall stood the aron ha-kodesh filled with Torah scrolls. Next to it was the amud [lectern] with the shiviti inscription above it, where sometimes a note was left with the name of someone seriously ill and his mother’s name. The south and north walls had porcelain heating stoves with hooks for hanging upper garments, towels, and water cans for washing one’s hands. There were long tables and benches along the west wall. The two rooms to the right of the large room had tables, benches and bookcases filled with volumes of the Talmud and poskim, the Bible, the writings of Geonim and mefarshim, rishonim and aharonim, pilpul, Hasidism, Kabbalah, and musar [ethical teachings].… The room to the left of the large room had two tables, benches, two large barrels, and a tin can. One barrel contained pure water for washing hands, and the second had used water. There were kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling, as well as on the tables. Invariably there were candles burning in the candlesticks over the amud to mark the anniversary of the death of someone close to the Hasidim, or on behalf of someone seriously ill.13
Despite these simple furnishings, the Hasidic prayer hall may have been the project of a wealthy member of the community who acted as its patron. This was particularly true in Galicia, where the kloyz was often established and financed by influential families, either the wealthy or those of distinguished pedigree from rabbinical families, descendants of once-famous tsaddikim, or even by people not distinguished by wealth or birth, but particularly devout. In exchange for the financial support of its patron, the members of the shtibl would provide him with social and political backing in the community, a typical client-patron arrangement. In fact, it was much more common in Galicia for a shtibl to be affiliated less with a distant court than with a local eynikl—that is, the descendant of a well-known rabbi or tsaddik. Since a great many Jews in Galicia worshipped in local kloyzn run by these little-known “grandsons,” and not in the kloyzn of large Hasidic courts, Hasidic leadership was more diffuse there. Most of these grandsons recognized the authority of one of the powerful tsaddikim, but the prayer houses under their patronage were still more independent than elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Not all groups had wealthy or otherwise prominent patrons, however. For example, in Tykocin, where there were relatively few Hasidim (around twenty men), for a long time they had nowhere to worship, so they would rent various premises for the purpose. Things changed when a lonely, old woman of limited means, Pesia Macherka, decided to bequeath her run-down hut for religious purposes, and so she put it in her will for the local Hasidim, on condition that once a year they would say kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for her. The donor died before the feast of Passover in 1914, and that very day the Hasidim carried the ark into her home and began to worship there.
The shtibl required financial upkeep: rent, lighting and heating, furnishings, alcohol, and food. Dues were imposed on wealthier Hasidim, or income was derived from auctioning off readings from the Torah. There were also local customs for supplementing a shtibl’s income. For instance, in Chelm (Central Poland) the wealthy members of the Belz shtibl did not always pay on time, so the shtibl was frequently in financial trouble. The gabba’im would then block off the shtibl’s door on the Sabbath and everyone going out was forced to leave his tallit (prayer shawl). Quarrels and shouting were of no avail, and when the Hasidim needed their prayer shawls again, they had to buy them back.
The shtibl also had a highly complicated system of rights and duties, usually supervised by volunteer functionaries. Like non-Hasidic prayer houses, a typical shtibl had a designated person to say morning prayers, often someone else for afternoon and evening prayers, and yet another person for prayers on feast days and for musaf (additional prayers). In those kloyzn that had a room for women, there was also a zogerke, a woman leading the prayers for women. An additional functionary auctioned off readings from the Torah and handling the shtibl’s finances. Shtiblekh also had their own scribes and gabba’im responsible for the regular running of the shtibl, and those responsible for supplying alcoholic beverages. Some even had their designated clowns for the feast of Purim.
The social composition of the shtibl was anything but homogeneous, including, as it did, wealthy merchants, poor artisans, the kest-eidems, children in the heder, travelers, and beggars. In Galician kloyzn, even women might put in an appearance. But not everyone praying or studying in the shtibl was a Hasid (as we have already argued and will see further on, women were not counted as Hasidim), and at the end of the nineteenth century there were shtiblekh where most of the worshippers were non-Hasidim.
Another form of heterogeneity was the “all-Hasidic” shtibl—that is, a shtibl in which the followers of various Hasidic dynasties might worship together. Shtiblekh of this sort were common in areas where there were too few followers of a specific tsaddik to establish separate prayers rooms for each court/dynasty. From shtiblekh appearing on the lists of subscribers to Hebrew books, it would appear that in White Russia and Lithuania, “all-Hasidic” shtiblekh with no attachment to any specific court accounted for almost 40 percent of the total, while in Ukraine such “ecumenical” establishments accounted for only 9 percent, in Galicia barely 4 percent, and in Central Poland as little as 2 percent. This distribution partially corresponds to the differences in concentrations of Hasidim in these various locales: the fewer Hasidim, the more likely that they would worship in a common shtibl.
These joint prayer houses were most likely to be established by supporters of different branches of the same dynasty, such as the followers of the Sadagora (Chortkov, Boyan, Husiatyn, Sadagora), Chernobyl, or Sandz dynasties. Sometimes, they were the product of common schools to which the tsaddikim belonged (Amshinow and Aleksander; Kotzk and Ger), or from entirely local arrangements and alliances. It appears that the dynasty that contracted this type of alliance the least frequently was Chabad, building on its elitist self-image.
Wherever possible, though, the Hasidim aimed to set up their own single-group shtibl in order to build group solidarity. As a result, there might be several, or even several dozen, such shtiblekh in a single town. An example was Brzeziny, with 3,917 Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, which boasted the shtiblekh of Ger, Aleksander, Ostrowiec, Grodzisk, Skernievits, Rozprza, Radzin, Amshinov Hasidim, as well as of two local tsaddikim residing in the town. Just these lists alone testify to the enormous religious and social diversity that Hasidism infused into the small towns of Eastern Europe.
The Economics of the Hasidic Shtetl
A feud had broken out between the Hasidim and the common Jews of Leoncin. It had been simmering for a long time and it now erupted into a full-scale conflict. The common Jews, mostly artisans and village peddlers, envied the wealthier Hasidim, who were properly disdainful of the paupers and ignoramuses. It was the old-age envy-hatred that has eternally divided classes, only this time it found expression in matters dealing with religion.14
Leaving aside the Marxist overtones of this passage by the Yiddish novelist and memoirist Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), it is nevertheless an accurate portrait of the stratification of the Jewish community in Leoncin at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the Hasidim occupying a place among the wealthy. This observation may seem surprising. Traditional historiography portrayed the Hasidim, especially in the eighteenth century, as either holy paupers, much in the manner of St. Francis, or proto-proletarian revolutionaries. We have already observed that eighteenth-century Hasidism was scarcely a movement on the margins of Jewish society. In the nineteenth century, Hasidism increasingly attracted those from the prosperous classes. Keeping in mind that Hasidism was not an economic organization and financial gain was not its ulterior goal, we want to investigate the following questions: What were the economic structure and function of Hasidic institutions at the community level? Were Hasidim on average richer or poorer than non-Hasidim and, if so, did they exhibit any specific occupational profile?
While a comprehensive study is impossible, what we have instead is an analysis of the four Jewish communities of Aleksander, Czestochowa, Koniecpol, and Wloclawek in the first half of the nineteenth century (1820–1837), which amounted to a little less than one percent of all the Jewish communities in Central Poland at that time. In all four communities, the Hasidim are overrepresented in the highest fiscal classes (or income brackets), suggesting that on average they were, in fact, richer than non-Hasidim.
This data finds corroboration in anecdotal material, both from the same time and place and from other regions and periods. For example, in Aleksander in 1834, on the occasion of the selling of the seats in the synagogue, the community board reported that the income was very low because “a significant part of Jews from the first [that is, the highest, richest] fiscal class abandoned the synagogue and established their own”—namely, a Hasidic shtibl.
Israel Joshua Singer recalls a situation in which a certain butcher decided to join Hasidism. The other butchers of the town despised him for this because they understood it as an attempt to show his supremacy over them. This suggests that the low status craftsmen guilds may have actively tried to prohibit their members from joining the Hasidic movement. Some nineteenth-century anti-Hasidic critics argued similarly that Hasidim avoided crafts and concentrated in trade. The Galician Maskil Yosef Perl gave a list of the most typical professions of the Hasidim as arrendator, stall-keeper, peddler, and innkeeper. These claims may have been an expression of the Maskilim’s desire to “productivize” the Jews, but perhaps these accusations actually reflected the real occupations of the Hasidim.
This image of relative prosperity and concentration in trade does not, however, apply to all Hasidim at all times and in all regions. As it became a mass movement, Hasidim included both rich and poor among them. As Yehezkel Kotik recalled: “Hasidism suited every class of people, from poor to rich, from ignorant to learned, from old to young.”15 Especially in areas of Hasidic dominance, such as late nineteenth-century Galicia, the structure of the Hasidic community must have been closer to the structure of the general Jewish population. There were also some Hasidic beggars, dependent on the support of their wealthy co-religionists, who certainly did not fit this image of relative prosperity. Moreover, it seems that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in some regions, such as Polesie and other areas of historical Lithuania, the Hasidim were poorer than the non-Hasidic population. Another such case contradicting the image of prosperity was the Hasidic settlement in the Land of Israel, which was dependent on the financial support from abroad and generally lived in great poverty.
There also seems to have been economic differences among followers of various Hasidic courts. Some groups were commonly considered wealthier, while some others were seen as poor, as testified by statements in post-Holocaust memorial books recalling the histories of their shtetlekh in Eastern Europe. In Central Poland, for example, the followers of Ger were recognized as the most affluent group, while the followers of the tsaddikim from Vurke and several small courts were considered poor. Similarly, in Lithuania the followers of the Chabad-Lubavitch and Karlin dynasties were typically described as wealthier, while the followers of Kobrin and smaller dynasties were considered economically inferior. In Galicia, the Hasidim of Sadagora and its offshoots were considered relatively rich. There were also local patterns. In Belarusian Telechany, for example, the Hasidim divided into the followers of Stolin, who were rich businessmen, the followers of Lubieszów, who were the middle class, and the followers of Janów Poleski, who were paupers. Since we lack hard statistical data, these popular perceptions may be incorrect and they may have been the result of people projecting the wealth of the court onto its followers. Still, the testimonies are consistent enough to suggest that the perception did reflect economic reality.
It is possible that such visible economic differences between followers of various courts emerged from the differences in emphasis that particular Hasidic leaders placed on the doctrine of banei, hayei u-mezonei (“offspring, life, and sustenance”), the responsibility of a tsaddik for the prosperity of his followers in terms of children, health, and a decent income. This, in turn, might have shaped the ethos of their followers. This doctrine is most commonly associated with Elimelekh of Lizhensk, but the notion was common to many other Hasidic leaders, too, both in the eighteenth century and later. Some dynasties put greater emphasis on the doctrine, while some others were less concerned with the material well being of their followers. There were also tsaddikim famous for their self-imposed poverty, such as Meshulam Zusya of Hanipoli, David of Lelov, and Meir of Premishlan. A well-known story applied to many Hasidic leaders, starting with the Besht up to the twentieth-century tsaddikim, had it that they immediately donated to the poor all the money they gathered during the day so that nothing would remain with them overnight for the needs of their own families. This was obviously more of a myth than reality, especially with respect to the “regal” courts. Most of the major branches of Hasidism in the nineteenth century put strong emphasis on the material concerns of the dynasty and its followers and such antimaterialistic behavior became a feature only of tsaddikim of small dynasties.
Despite regional differences and the incomplete nature of the sources, we can still state that at least in some areas and some periods the Hasidim were on average economically more prosperous than their non-Hasidic counterparts. One possible cause of this relative wealth was the interaction between the Hasidim in their place of residence and the tsaddik. Unlike the non-Hasidic population, the Hasidim had at their disposal an external authority, who might serve as an arbitrator when arbitration was required. Yitshak Yoel Linetsky in his anti-Hasidic novel Dos Poylisher Yingl (The Polish Lad) from mid-nineteenth-century Russia lists four professions most typically seeking assistance of the tsaddik: “arrendators haunted by installments, public figures in search of teachers and ritual slaughterers, merchants hoping for credit and business partners in quest of arbitration.”16 Arbitration based on the strong authority of the tsaddik and mutual trust of his followers was significantly cheaper and more effective than the enforcement of contracts by courts, and thus enhanced the economic prosperity of the tsaddik’s followers. The commercial success of many ethnic or religious minorities in the premodern world was based on the strength of such social bonds that effectively reduced the costs of contract enforcement. Recourse to the tsaddik as mediator perpetuated this premodern system of contracts in the modern age.
At times, the tsaddik was also a source of financial support, functioning effectively like a no-interest-loan credit union by collecting money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor. The ideal behind this function was charity, a virtue repeatedly stressed in both the teachings of the tsaddikim and the social practices of the Hasidic community. Like other Jews, the Hasidim regarded wealth as belonging to the people of Israel as a whole rather than individuals and as a gift from God conditional upon the practice of charity. As many Hasidic stories indicate, however, the tsaddikim insisted on giving to the recipients of their charity “not the fish, but rather the fishing rod.” The Hasidic ethos of charity was not only a means of equalizing economic inequalities, but also a powerful tool of economic mobilization.
The tsaddik also participated in the economic life of his followers sometimes in the form of a fictional joint venture, in which the tsaddik invested his blessing and his follower invested money. The involvement of the tsaddik in extending his blessing was not only symbolic, but also branded the products of his follower as “kosher.” Once associated with the tsaddik, the products become more desirable, at least to other Hasidim. In late nineteenth-century Russia, the business most enhanced by such joint ventures was insurance, since the tsaddik’s ostensible ability to tell the future and abort divine decrees added significant value to any insurance policy.
The tsaddik and his court, as a place of gathering of people from many places, provided an ideal setting for the many merchants numbered among the Hasidim to make deals and create commercial networks. In his anti-Hasidic brochure Uiber das Wesen der sekte Chassidim (1815), Yosef Perl noted that most Hasidic pilgrimages took place in the month of Tishrei, because at that time trade in farm products began. Perl concluded that this allowed the tsaddikim easier exploitation of their followers, because at that time they had ready cash. Stripped of polemic, though, Perl’s observation may have a more rational explanation. Pilgrimages were attractive to many merchants because they created the possibility for commercial contacts at the court exactly at the time when major contracts on agricultural products were made. Moreover, after signing contracts at the court, the merchants returned home to their towns, where they might benefit from the economic advantage stemming from their visit to the court. For a merchant, his Hasidic affiliation both considerably extended his commercial contacts and provided a relatively wide and secure trading network.
Above all, it was Hasidic solidarity as both religious ideal and social practice that contributed to their relative prosperity. Joseph Margoshes described the Hasidic kloyz in Lwow of the 1880s:
The balebatim [householders] of the kloyz shared a great unity and love. They considered themselves to be members of one family, even the wealthiest among them. If someone among them experienced joy or pain, almost all of them would get involved, even if a person were poorer than them. There were several well-off balebatim in the kloyz who earned their entire income from the wealthier members of the group. They acted as brokers for the wealthy men’s businesses or received generous long-term loans to enable them to engage in trade and support themselves in an honourable manner. Their status was due to their association with the kloyz.17
Hasidic solidarity thus enhanced the prosperity of its followers since the wealthy supported their poorer comrades. The Hasidic havurah did not replace traditional ways of starting and running business through family, in-laws, and communal support, but it delivered additional economic opportunities for its members, which, in turn, gave them relative advantage over non-Hasidic sectors of the Jewish community.
Hasidism could also be mobilized as a kind of tax shelter, since, after 1824, as a result of a new law, Hasidim became the only Jewish group in the Kingdom of Poland whose right to establish prayer houses and to separate from the Jewish community was guaranteed by law (see chapter 19). From the 1820s, two families competed for the dominance in the Jewish community in Wloclawek, Central Poland. When in the 1830s one of them took the upper hand, a leader of the losing group, the wealthy merchant Majer Rypinski and his supporters declared themselves as a Hasidic group and, by establishing their own prayer house, separated from the Jewish community. The community elders complained to the local authorities that “the only source of this sect’s origin is that they wanted to avoid taxes,”18 which indeed happened when the group failed to contribute to the communal budget. The community board in Wloclawek claimed that the law now made it possible for anyone who wanted to avoid communal taxes to declare itself a Hasidic group. This was most likely a gross exaggeration, but it seems that Hasidism might indeed have been attractive to some members of the economic elite of the community, because it opened a way for them to be free of social and economic control by the Jewish community. In cases of conflict between two competing groups, Hasidism created the possibility for one of them, usually the weaker, to free themselves from the dominance of the competing group.
Many anti-Hasidic critics claimed that the shtibl was a place where the rich members of the community might escape from their financial obligations toward the poor. In Kuzmir, for instance, where seventeen wealthy families created a shtibl, the Jewish community board complained in 1862:
This minority is wealthier and pays a significant part of auxiliary synagogue dues, but they only pay the dues; they do not carry any other part of the financial burden of the synagogue, such as paying to read from the Torah scrolls, so we can reliably claim with a clear conscience that this minority of families does not carry a greater financial burden for the synagogue but a lesser one.… In addition, these wealthy families do not go to the synagogue and so do not pay to read from the Torah scrolls, sit in the pews, or make offerings on Yom Kippur or pay to make repairs to the synagogue. The mikveh gets no income from these families because they have their own separate bath. In a word, they are a community within a community.19
This accusation was not entirely correct. The rich Hasidim did participate in communal expenses and did pay to the poor, but by supporting a Hasidic charitable network rather than that of the community.
It would be wrong to assume that the economic relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim were always conflict-ridden. In most cases, communities were able to restructure communal revenues to compensate for the loss of income from its Hasidic members, a restructuring with which the Hasidim themselves collaborated. A good example was the widespread illegal licensing of the selling of yeast. The Jewish communities throughout nineteenth-century Poland sold the monopoly for distribution of yeast to the highest bidder and agreed on relatively high prices so that they could bring higher income to the leaser and ultimately to the community. This monopoly, however, violated state law and therefore depended entirely on an informal communal agreement. In many communities across Poland, the Hasidim cooperated amicably in this new source of communal income and in several cases even supported it with their own ban on those who would try to break the monopoly. This is especially interesting when compared with the violent opposition of many Hasidic groups to fiscal obligations put on their prayer halls, Torah scrolls, and income taxes. It seems that the Hasidim opposed those forms of taxation that might have been used by the kahal as instruments against dissenting groups, but were more inclined to accept obligations that did not pose such a threat, even though the revenues collected by these taxes were used for the benefit of the Jewish community at large and not particularly for the Hasidic group. In this case, the Hasidim were not motivated by material gain, as they were sometimes accused. They were, in fact, open to financial concessions if these could buy them acceptance or at least social peace. The ulterior goal was not economic gain, but rather social autonomy, stability, and security, and the Hasidim were ready to pay for it.
An excellent example of the way a Hasidic community might function within a local economy has been preserved by Yehezkel Kotik in his nineteenth-century recollections on Kamenets Litewski in Belarus. When a wealthy flour merchant was suspected by the Hasidim of informing against their rebbe, the Hasidim decided to bring the suspected informer to bankruptcy by the following scheme: the merchant provided the flour to all the local shopkeepers on credit and collected his payments only when providing the next supply of flour, again on credit. The Hasidim informed all the shopkeepers in the area that they were not to pay the merchant under the threat of a Hasidic ban. At the same time, they informed the shopkeepers that they would not be harmed and would receive the flour, because the mill owners were forced under the ban to accept a new supplier. As Kotik writes, “their scheme succeeded beyond all expectations.” The merchant-informer did not manage to collect a single payment, lost some six thousand rubles, which was most of his wealth, and had to escape from Brzesc chased by young Hasidim throwing stones on him. Brought to the verge of bankruptcy, he begged the Hasidim for mercy, which was granted to him on condition that he come together with his three sons to the rebbe’s court, “walk into the presence of the rebbe in his socks, and beg for forgiveness.” In addition, he was to pay nine hundred rubles, and to “give his word of honour that he would take his sons to the Slonimer rebbe’s court every year until they married.… He was also to donate a new Torah scroll to the Kamenets shtibl and was obliged to come … every Shabbat to pray there. In other words: he was to become a Hasid! Nothing short of a conversion.” Thanks to their group solidarity, the Hasidim, although a tiny minority—Kotik counted no more than thirty men, or some 5 to 10 percent of the town—managed to force the majority population to accept their dictate and restructure economic relations. Not only did they punish the flour merchant, but they also placed a new flour supplier in an economically profitable position. However, these economic effects were less goals in themselves than instruments of social and political influence.
While econonic gain may not have been the main motivation for many Hasidim, without the economic dimension, our understanding of the religious, political, and social functioning of the Hasidic community is not complete. The experience of solidarity was certainly an important religious feature of the Hasidic movement, but it was a feature that had economic consequences. Religion and economics worked together to enhance each other as Hasidism became a dominant force in nineteenth-century Jewish life.
The Family
Our discussion so far has focused on Hasidic men and their public activities in the religious and economic spheres. But what of their women and children? If Hasidism had indeed been a sect, then membership might have encompassed the families of the sectarians, and their mothers, wives, and children of both sexes would have been considered full-fledged Hasidim. However, since the Hasidim did not regard themselves—and were generally not regarded by others in the nineteenth century—as sectarians, what were the consequences for the identities of their families? Did the exclusion of women from eighteenth-century Hasidism continue into the nineteenth century? Did they participate, formally or informally, in the perpetuation of Hasidic norms, values, and ethos? What was the attitude of nineteenth-century Hasidim toward family life?
Children of both sexes remained outside of the Hasidic world. Until late in the nineteenth century, there did not exist any specific school for Hasidic children that would provide them with education different from that in traditional non-Hasidic hadarim (primary schools). Non-Hasidim could be teachers of Hasidic children as well as the other way around. Some Hasidic parents might have preference to employ a Hasidic rather than non-Hasidic teacher, but even if they did, it had no influence on the curriculum, which remained the same for the vast majority of Jewish boys. Some parents expected that their male children would not learn too excessively, as this might be detrimental to their piety. Beside these very general preferences, the children of the Hasidic parents received exactly the same education as those from non-Hasidic families.
At the same time, however, at least from the mid-nineteenth century, and probably also earlier, sons inherited a Hasidic identity from their fathers, which became one of the most common ways of expanding the Hasidic population. As Yekeskel Kotik recalled about his father: “It was clear as daylight that once the father was a Hasid, his children and their offspring would also be Hasidim, and generations of Hasidim were bound to follow in their footsteps.”20 This was also the case for Kotik himself until he revolted against his father. Frequent visits to the Hasidic prayer hall, where his father would take him were a source of his early fascination with the movement and his deep absorption of Hasidic cultural norms and behaviours. Josef Erlich in his “memoirs of a former Hasid” from mid-nineteenth-century Galicia, recalled that under influence of his stepfather, who would take him regularly to the shtibl and to the tsaddik in Belz, he imbibed Hasidic values and became an ardent Hasid himself. In other words, the father-son relationship proved to be one of the most important patterns of transferring Hasidic identity and of propagating Hasidic culture.
The matter was much more complicated in the case of women, whether mothers, wives, or daughters of Hasidim. Female members of Hasidic households did not historically define themselves as Hasidim nor were they defined as such by others. The tsaddik Meir Rotenberg of Apt stated during an investigation by the Polish government in 1824 that “women generally are not Hasidim.”21 To be sure, direct statements of this type are rare since the non-Hasidic status of women must have seemed selfevident to most Hasidim. Only those who were ignorant of the nature of the Hasidic community, such as Stanislaw Staszic, a leading Polish Enlightenment politician and ministerial official who conducted the interrogation, could have raised the question of women’s status. Other evidence supports this conclusion. In folk songs, the partners in Hasidic marriages are referred to not as Hasidim but rather as “Hasidim and their wives.” These folk texts are valuable because they capture the consciousness of the lower classes, and suggest a broad understanding that the female members of Hasidic households were not recognized as “female Hasidim.”
Women were also excluded from the rituals constitutive of Hasidic identity, especially full membership in a shtibl. Many Hasidic prayer houses were inaccessible to women, especially in Central Poland, but also in Lithuania and Belarus, although we noted earlier that there were some in other areas in Galicia that had prayer rooms set aside for women. Women from Hasidic homes more commonly attended non-Hasidic communal synagogues, as did women from non-Hasidic households, than they did Hasidic shtiblekh. A correspondent of a British weekly wrote in 1859: “In some towns where the Khasidim abound, the synagogue is almost empty and kept open for the women who are not admitted into the Beth hamidrash of the Khasidim, and a few old Jews attend to conduct worship in the synagogue for the sake of the women.”22 This source may, however, have exaggerated the abandonment of the communal synagogues.
A tragic event in 1856 provides unexpected evidence for the question of women and Hasidism. During prayers in the great synagogue in Lublin, a fire broke out. In panic, the worshippers ran to the exit of the synagogue, which was blocked because the doors opened inwardly. In the terrible crowding, several people died and many more were injured. In the wake of the event, the state authorities ordered an official inspection of all synagogues and prayer houses in the entire Kingdom of Poland. The inspections conducted in 1857–1858 provided information on the number of men and women praying in synagogues and prayer houses in several communities of which the most detailed was for two provinces (gubernias): Lublin, where the adherents of Hasidism dominated, and Suwalki, in which Hasidism was underrepresented. According to the reports from the Suwalki province, 28 percent of the individuals attending communal synagogues were women. In the Lublin province, on the other hand, the proportion of women was as high as 45 percent, half again as much as in Suwalki province. Since the only difference between the two provinces was the percentage of Hasidism, we would have to conclude that where Hasidism was strongly represented, a significant proportion of the male population did not attend the communal synagogue but prayed instead at the shtibl. If women were included in the shtibl, their percentage in the communal synagogues would have been the same as men. However, women belonging to Hasidic households attended the communal synagogue, as they could not participate in the shtibl services together with their husbands, brothers, and sons.
Women were excluded from services not only when the male Hasidim gathered for prayer in their shtibl but also during domestic celebrations, when, in the words of a woman born at the beginning of the twentieth century, “women were not allowed in the big room while the men were praying and singing.”23 If this was the case in the early twentieth century, it was certainly true of nineteenth-century Poland, Lithuania, or Belarus: women in Hasidic families did not pray together with their menfolk.
They also did not participate in two other primary rituals of Hasidic life: the mikveh and pilgrimage to the tsaddik. Of course, women used the mikveh to purify themselves after their menstrual cycle, but these were individual rituals lacking any social bonding, while the male ritual of mikveh, as we have already noted in the eighteenth century, became a communal one instituted by early Hasidism. Women did come to the courts of the tsaddikim, although, as we saw in chapter 15, not all tsaddikim were willing to receive them face to face. And they were excluded from the other bonding activities of the court such as the tish and the bet midrash. Since, as we have also noted, Christians of high and low birth also visited the courts, it is clear that the presence of women in the courts was not a sign of formal membership in the Hasidic fraternity.
Some additional light on the place of women in the Hasidic family is shed by nineteenth-century memoirs. Yehezkel Kotik described the relationship between his parents. His father, Moshe Kotik, who came from a non-Hasidic family, married Sarah, the daughter of the rabbi and Mitnagged Eliezer Halevi of Grodno (d. 1853). Both families belonged to the Belarusian anti-Hasidic tradition, and Sarah’s was a wellknown rabbinic family. However, the young Moshe Kotik decided to become a Hasid. Immediately after his wedding, he ran away from home to the court of Moshe of Kobrin (d. 1858), becoming one of his ardent followers. It would have been difficult for him to return to his parents, as his father, Aron Leyzer Kotik, could not reconcile himself to his son’s Hasidic sympathies. His wife, however, reacted quite differently, stating that whether her husband was or was not a Hasid did not concern her at all. Rather, like many other women of the time, she was indifferent to his spiritual life. And Moshe evidently did not concern himself with his wife’s spiritual life either. Like the mother of Yehezkel Kotik, Pauline Wengeroff of Brisk (1833–1916) was also married to a Hasid. In time, she too became accustomed to the strange customs of her husband, but she never adopted or even understood them herself.
Marrying off the daughter of a Hasid to a non-Hasid is confirmed in the literature as well. For example, the poet and Maskil Eliakum Zunser (1836–1913) was matched with the daughter of a wealthy Hasid named Hillel. Zunser’s father-in-law was so pleased with the match that immediately after the wedding, he took Zunser to the court of the tsaddik Shlomo Hayim of Koidanov (d. 1862) in order to show him the “treasure” he had acquired for his daughter. Clearly, Zunser’s non-Hasidic orientation did not trouble his Hasidic father-in-law, while the couple’s harmonious marriage, and Zunser’s love for his wife, demonstrate that her Hasidic origins did not affect the quality of family relations. We have no evidence about whether Zunser’s wife identified with Hasidism either before or after the marriage.
Based on the memoir literature, it appears that marriages between the children of Hasidim and non-Hasidim, including those holding anti-Hasidic views, occurred relatively often. Even if one would assume that the marriages between two Hasidic families might have been more frequent, especially in Hasidic-dominated areas, marriages between the children of Hasidim and non-Hasidim did not carry the stigma of “mixed marriages”; they were, after all, arranged by the families with complete agreement on both sides, and the question of belonging or not belonging to the Hasidic movement did not affect the relations between them. The situation was, naturally, quite different for the families of the tsaddikim, for whom connections by marriage with other Hasidic courts were a matter of dynastic strategy. But the world of Hasidism was not limited to the exceptional lives of the tsaddikim. Their experience obscures rather than explains the experience of the ordinary Hasidim, who constituted the vast majority of the movement’s adherents.
Thus for a woman to marry or to be born to a Hasid did not imply that she had thereby acquired a Hasidic affiliation. Nor did it dominate her own or the family’s religious practice, or have a necessary impact on the quality of the relationship between husband and wife. No act of “conversion” to Hasidism or declaration of identification with its values and practices was required of women from non-Hasidic households who married Hasidim. Affiliation with Hasidism was entirely the concern of the male members of the family. Fathers naturally transmitted it to their sons, but they did not expect their own affiliation to extend to their mothers, sisters, daughters, or wives.
Once we recognize that the identity of Hasidism on the community level was analogous to that of “confraternities” or havurot—rather than a sect—a new interpretation of the relation between women and Hasidism is possible. In each havurah, as in each Hasidic congregation, membership was formally limited to men, while the women were excluded even if some of them might have identified with its goals and fulfilled some of its functions. The female relatives of the Hasidim, like the women related to men in havurot, might have supported the involvement of their menfolk as an expression of their own piety, and might even have gained from it some prestige and pride, but they did not thereby become members in their own right.
Hasidism did affect family life, since the male members of the household might be absent from home on the Sabbath, the High Holidays, or other festivals to make pilgrimage to the tsaddik’s court. This would leave the female members of the household in charge of conducting domestic religious celebrations on their own, which may have enhanced their authority in the home. On the other hand, non-Hasidic men often traveled as well, although not necessarily on festivals, so the relative effect of male absence from Hasidic and non-Hasidic homes is hard to quantify.
There were also some distinctly Hasidic customs that had ramifications for women in Hasidic households. For example, according to a late nineteenth-century account from Galicia, in Hasidic families, women did not eat in the sukkah during the festival of Sukkot, which distinguished them from non-Hasidic women. Likewise, by the late nineteenth century, and perhaps even earlier, the affiliation of the head of the family to a particular Hasidic group affected the style of dress worn by his wife and daughters, since some tsaddikim demanded that their followers compel the female members of their household to comply with a particular dress code.
Food might also affect women’s behavior in relationship to their husband’s Hasidic affiliation. For example, in the wake of controversies surrounding Hasidic ritual slaughter, women were often forced to choose between one of two local purveyors of kosher meat, and the choice was dictated by the Hasidic affiliation of their husbands. Hasidism also introduced certain food choices into the family kitchen such as prohibiting matzo balls in chicken soup during Passover, a specifically Hasidic prohibition. These ritual innovations, even if mostly minor, forced the women to conform to practices arising directly from their husbands’ Hasidic identity.
The pietistic sexual ethics of some Hasidic groups, which we have already treated in a number of places, must have affected the quality of relations between the Hasid and his wife. These ascetic practices prescribed periods of sexual abstinence within marriage beyond those required by Jewish law, the avoidance of pleasure during marital intercourse, and the attempt, on the part of a few Hasidic groups, to keep the relationship between husband and wife as distant as possible (see the discussions in chapters 27 and 28 on Hasidism in the State of Israel and Hasidic society in the postwar period). Not all Hasidic groups adopted such practices, and we have no direct evidence of how men and women experienced them in their domestic lives. Nevertheless, a woman from a non-Hasidic background might have had to adapt to different relations if she married a Hasidic man.
On the other hand, some of these practices may have drawn certain women closer to Hasidism. A good example is the wife of Yehezkel Kotik, who “leaned toward Hasidism”24 and was very disappointed when her husband rejected the Hasidic way of life. The pressure she brought to bear on her husband shows that she was eager to be the wife of a Hasid, and that Hasidic affiliation—even if mediated through her husband—was important to her. Another example is from the memoir of Hinde Bergner (1870–1942) from Galicia, who describes her mother walking each Friday from Szczytna to Jaroslaw (about 8.5 kilometers), to offer the tsaddik resident there a small amount of money and a flask of vodka, gifts to express her personal piety. Women might express affiliation with Hasidism as benefactors or patrons, the best-known example of which was Temerl Sonnenberg, a wealthy patron of several Polish tsaddikim. The role of patron and benefactor was not only a source of prestige for these women; it also enabled them to exercise a certain measure of social influence. At the same time, however, the ability to wield such influence was limited to a very small number of wealthy women, since in order to be socially effective, their charity had to be substantial. Another example was a certain Krajndel Sejdenwajsowa, who, in 1860, offered “half of her home, part of the ground floor at no. 620 in the town of Lublin, in perpetuity as a new synagogue for the Hasidim in Lublin belonging to the company of the rabbi of Kozhenits.”25 This role was socially acceptable, since it could be justified as charity, in which women were expected to participate.
Charity was not, however, necessarily an expression of the donor’s identification with the beneficiaries of the gift: in most cases, the same donors who supported a Hasidic community or its leader also supported non-Hasidic institutions and persons. Even Temerl Sonnenberg, the most acclaimed female patron of Hasidism, offered her charity to numerous non-Hasidic institutions and individuals, including the Christian poor. Nevertheless, at least in some cases, such charitable activity might have been an expression of the woman’s sympathy and emotional attachment to Hasidic ideals and values.
It is therefore entirely possible that some, perhaps even many, women did subscribe to the ideals of Hasidism in one way or another. However, we still lack information about the place of Hasidic values in the worldview of such women, and how it may have affected their self-definition. What is clear, however, is that the female relatives of men who belonged to the Hasidic movement cannot be automatically defined as female Hasidim, just as the female relatives of men who belonged to the communal havurot did not themselves belong to these exclusively male institutions. When we come to the twentieth century, we will see how some of the relationship of women to Hasidism underwent a change, particularly in Chabad. The waves of women’s liberation that so altered the lives of secular women could not be ignored even in the cloistered world of Hasidism, but if the door might be opened for some Hasidic women to identify as such, for others, the new threat of modernity shut it closed.
Relations with the Gentile World
The Jews of Eastern Europe did not live in an ethnic or religious bubble. Although the shtetlekh in which the majority of them lived contained large percentages of Jews, as market towns, they attracted the local peasants who would deal with Jewish merchants in the marketplace. Hasidic life in the nineteenth century was primarily a semirural affair where Hasidim interacted on a daily basis with Polish, Ruthenian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Romanian peasants, merchants, artisans, and others. The Hasidim did not differ significantly from their non-Hasidic coreligionists in either their attitudes toward their Christian neighbors or in their actual interactions with them. We noted in the first chapter of this book that Hasidic thinkers inherited earlier Kabbalistic stereotypes of Christians as demonic. But whether these tropes filtered down to rank-and-file Hasidim or influenced their relations with non-Jews in their localities is hard to prove. Instead, it seems most probable that, side-by-side with historically negative attitudes toward Gentiles, many positive, pragmatic interactions took place.
How did the peasantry of Eastern Europe view the Hasidim? If Hasidism did make an impact on the consciousness of the peasants, then it was a result either of contact with a local tsaddik or of interactions in areas where there was a strong Hasidic presence. Ruthenian and Polish peasants, the only groups to have been researched, at times exhibited positive attitudes toward Hasidism, a surprising finding since Christian folk culture in Eastern Europe retained the same negative stereotypes about Jews that Jews held toward Christians. The positive image of Hasidism probably derived from the alignment of the traditional, conservative, and deeply religious Hasidic world with the self-definition and values system of the Christian peasantry in Eastern Europe, especially once both cultures faced the challenge of secular modernity. The Christian peasants may have felt that the Hasidim were the closest to their own values, irrespective of religious differences. One of the respondents in field studies conducted in Southeastern Poland in the 1970s and 1980s described the Hasidim as follows:
They were religious, quiet and God-fearing, better than the other Jews. They cared about their appearance and wore clean clothes. But it was the same faith.… They said: “As you respect yourself, so respect God.” They were more respected by the Poles because they did not cheat. A Pole respects such a person. They shouted at the other Jews for conducting themselves poorly.26
Although this statement and others are from long after the Holocaust, at a time when there were no Jews left in rural Poland, they seem to reflect views formed earlier.
Miracle-working tsaddikim, the “Jewish prophets,” as the Christians often called them, were a primary source of positive views of Hasidism. As we have already seen, Christians of all ranks in society made use of the folk healing, magical services, or even simple advice provided by the rebbes. “Strangeness” was without a doubt a positive factor in elevating the tsaddik’s appeal, since in the peasant view of reality, “strangers” were closer to mysterious, at times impure, but equally useful forces, and thus might be even more effective than Christian folk healers. It is worth noting too that the mass spread of Hasidism and the accessibility of the tsaddikim to non-Jewish petitioners came precisely at a time when, owing to the improvement in the education of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Uniate clergy, the closing of monasteries, as well as the Enlightenment policies of the authorities, Christian holy men, hermits, and monks diminished in number and were therefore less accessible to the peasantry. Hasidism stepped into this vacuum to provide much needed services.
In addition to medical assistance, Christian stories of tsaddikim very often present them as honest arbitrators in disputes between Christians and Jews, frequently recalling judgments made in favor of the Christians. According to one of these stories, recorded in 1984, in Shinova, a local peasant had borrowed money from a Jew:
After a certain time, the Jew asked for it back, but the peasant said “I have already given it back to you!” They argued for a long time, and finally the Jew said: “Let us go to the prophet and find out whether you have given it back to me or not.” They went to the prophet, who listened to them and said: “In three days it will be clear whether he has given it back or not and which one of you is lying.” Three days later, the Jew’s son died.27
Does this late story tell us about attitudes in the nineteenth century or even the interwar period in Poland? It is hard to say but since it was recorded at a time when there were no more Hasidim in Poland, it almost certainly reflects earlier folk beliefs about the tsaddikim as honest brokers who might side with a Polish peasant against the Jews.
There are also Polish folktales going back to the beginning of Hasidism that seemingly corroborate stories in the Hasidic canon. In Red Ruthenia, Podolia, and Volhynia, there are many stories, versions of which also occur in Shivhei ha-Besht, connected to various “holy places,” such as wells, springs, caves, or stones, that at one time or another the Besht had visited. For instance, Shivhei ha-Besht relates that the Besht “lived in a small village and made his living by keeping a tavern.”28 In a local Christian version of this story, this “small village” is identified as Troscianiec. According to the Christian story, the Besht had blessed the mayor (wójt) of the town, Stefan Hajseniuk, for having sent straw for the path that the Besht used daily before dawn to go barefoot from his tavern to the spring where he washed. The Besht promised the mayor eternal help. When years later, Hajseniuk was removed from the post of mayor and accused of fraud, he went to Mezhbizh to the Besht to ask for his intervention. He was initially unable to see him, so for a time he had to take a job as a watchman, but as soon as the Besht heard about him, he received him immediately and offered him a choice of long life, the mayoralty, or wealth. Hajseniuk was unable to make up his mind and so asked for all three. And so it was that he received all three.
This story, told to an ethnographer in 1903, almost certainly does not reflect a historical tradition going back to the time of the Besht in the early eighteenth century. But the fact that it continued to be told into the early twentieth century demonstrates that Christians shared with Hasidim the belief in the miraculous powers of the tsaddikim and knowledge of the “sacred geography” of Hasidism. The overlap between Hasidic tales and peasant folk memory points to a common popular culture between Jews and Christians that existed in parallel to—and perhaps even superseded—the religious hostility between them.
Turning to the attitudes of Hasidim toward Christians, one common motif in Hasidic tales is the evil priest, clearly personifying all of Christianity. In one of these tales, Ya’akov Yitshak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, taught that one could lose and gain a fortune in a single instant, but one of his Hasidim doubted him. On the way home, the Hasid met a priest, who converted him to Christianity and told him, as proof of sincerity, to bequeath his whole estate to the Church. Only when the Hasid had done so did he realize that in this way he had lost everything—his estate and his soul—and that this was his punishment for doubting the tsaddik’s teachings. So he ran immediately to the tsaddik and told him everything, whereupon the tsaddik said that he would very soon become rich. The priest’s house caught fire and the document with the Hasid’s bequest was burnt. And everyone, with the exception of the priest, lived happily ever after.
There were, of course, many areas of real friction between Jews and Christians, especially as a result of economic competition. In the thousands of surviving petitions (kvitlekh) submitted by both Hasidic and non-Hasidic petitioners to Eliyahu Guttmacher of Grodzisk Wielkopolski, non-Jews tend to be mentioned in connection with economic disputes. The Christians depicted are usually unambiguously negative in character and behavior, not surprisingly, since these petitions arose from conflicts. The writers of these petitions most frequently use the derogatory term “uncircumcised” (arelim) for describing non-Jews, and they petition for “success in business and collecting debts from the uncircumcised,” or “that the hearts of the uncircumcised turn to good and that they not deprive me of my livelihood,” or that the petitioner “win the cases he has against the uncircumcised.”29
Yet these various registers of negative opinion on Christians and Christianity do not tell the whole story. There are many positive statements about the majority as well, among them Hasidic tales of “good goyim.” Here is an example from a tale about the tsaddik David of Lelov:
One day Rabbi David submerged himself in a river that he encountered on the road; this was at night when it was extremely cold. A goy was also passing that way and, seeing that someone was bathing in the river, went over to see who it was. When Rabbi David emerged from the river, the goy took his own warm clothes (a sheepskin jacket called a pelz) and dressed the holy Rabbi David, since he had taken pity on him. When Rabbi David saw this, he blessed him that he might live to be 120; and his holy words came to pass.30
In another type of story, in which the negative stereotype is subverted, the good goy becomes an unwitting medium for religious wisdom. One day, a non-Jewish cobbler came to Levi Yitshak of Barditshev and asked in Ukrainian: “Do you have anything to be mended?”31 The alarmed tsaddik realized that the cobbler was not asking about his shoes, but about the state of his soul.
The reversal of the stereotype finds expression in true stories as well as legends. Numerous autobiographical pieces in yizkor books of the Jewish pre-Holocaust communities describe positive relations between the Hasidim and their Christian neighbors. At times, they even express surprise at the rift between the established stereotype and empirical observation, including signs of respect for their neighbors’ “false” religion. In one story from Dzialoshits, a certain Hasid was traveling with a Christian coachman, who drove past a Catholic church without taking off his cap. The Hasid immediately got down from the wagon saying: “I refuse to go on with someone who does not respect his own religion.”32
Finally, some Hasidic texts promote harmonious relations. A story in Shivhei ha-Besht tells about Satan accusing a Jewish landlord of cheating non-Jews, and that this sin outweighed even his merits of constant study and good works: “From this it can be seen that one should refrain from robbing Gentiles, since, as it is written in the books, Satan deducts this sin from one’s holy merits.”33 The story, of course, is ethnocentric—at issue is the well-being of the Jew and not the Christian—yet the practical conclusion is not to do harm to Christians. Whether such a tale is representative of Hasidic attitudes toward Christians or contributed toward forming such attitudes is hard to say, but it does suggest that on both sides, the relationship between Hasidim and their non-Jewish neighbors was more complex than the negative stereotypes that each may have harbored.
This chapter has tried to show how Hasidic life cannot be confined to the courts of the tsaddikim, as important as those institutions were to the identity of the movement. Because the Hasidim typically lived at some distance from the court—and often at a great distance—they had to create their own local institutions and to fight for their place in local communities. It was in these institutions—and especially the shtibl—that the day-to-day life of the Hasid took place. Moreover, Hasidism in the nineteenth century was a public movement, which, we have argued, had relatively little effect on women and the family. We turn now to several other public manifestations of Hasidism: its book culture, its conflicts with movements of Enlightenment, and its relationship to the state.
1 AGAD, CWW 1663, 532–535; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 39.02.
2 AGAD, CWW 1560, 190–194; reprinted in ibid., 27.01.
3 Mordechai Glubman, Ketavim, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 2005); cited in Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 136.
4 Sefer Zikaron le-Kehilat Hivniv (Uhnow) ve-ha-Seviva, ed. Natan Ortner (Tel Aviv, 1981), 64.
5 Archiwum Panstwowe w Lodzi, collection: Anteriora Piotrkowskiego Rzadu Gubernialnego, call no. 2496, 566–567, 570.
6 Even, Fun’m Rebben’s Hoyf, 66.
7 Yizkor-bukh fun Rakishok un umgegnt, ed. Bakalczuk-Felin (Johannesberg, 1952), 53.
8 Vilner, “The Rebbe of Sadagora Visits Dobromil,” Sefer zikaron le-zekher kehilot Dobromil ve-Nayshtot, ed. M. Gelbart (Tel Aviv, 1964), 61.
9 Moshe Menahem Walden, Nifla’ot ha-Rabbi (Bilgoraj, 1911), introduction.
10 Kotik, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 200.
11 Even, Fun’m Rebben’s Hoyf, 4.
12 Ibid., 5.
13 Ya’akov Malts, “The Shtibl of the Ger Hasidim” [Hebrew], in Piotrkov Tribunalski ve-ha-Sevivah, ed. Ya’akov Malts and Naftali Lau (Tel Aviv, 1965), 321–322.
14 Israel Joshua Singer, Of a World That Is No More, trans. Joseph Singer (New York, 1970), 250.
15 Kotik, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 408.
16 Isaac Joel Linetsky, The Polish Lad, trans. Moshe Spiegel (Philadelphia, 1975), 251. Emphasis added.
17 Margoshes, A World Apart, 51.
18 AGAD, CWW 1734, 25–27; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 18.01.
19 AGAD, CWW 1632, 145–180; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 40.02.
20 Ibid., 188–189.
21 AGAD, CWW 1871, 179; cited in Marcin Wodzinski, Hasidism and Politics: The Kingdom of Poland 1815–1864 (Oxford and Portland, OR, 2013), 105.
22 Jewish Chronicle (March 25, 1859), 3, cited in Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (New York and Cambridge, MA, 1985), 105.
23 The testimony of Dora Moszkowska, born in Krakow in 1901, in the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York, microfilm MM108, 3.
24 Kotik, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 361.
25 AGAD, CWW 1610, 549.
26 Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem, 1995), 51.
27 Ibid., 147.
28 In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, no. 19, 34.
29 YIVO Archives, RG27, Eliyahu Guttmacher (1796–1872), box 1, folder 32 (Ansjaków), folder 8 (Uniejów), folder 43 (Ostróg).
30 Brokman, Migdal David, 3.
31 S. Ansky, “Mutual Influences between Christians and Jews,” as translated by Golda Werman, in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 14: 1–2 (1992), 68.
32 Alter Horowitz, “Reb Kalman Dayan,” in Sefer izkor shel kehilat Dzialoshits ve-ha-seviva (Tel Aviv, 1973), 206.
33 In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, 115–116.
