HASKALAH AND ITS SUCCESSORS
THE RUSSIAN MASKIL, ELIEZER TSVI ZWEIFEL, claimed that all the essential contours of Jewish life in the nineteenth century “were brought upon us by the dispute which began in the time of the Besht, the Gaon Eliyahu, and Mendelssohn.”1 Indeed, the three most important forces competing for the soul of and for political control over Jewish society in the nineteenth century were Hasidism, non-Hasidic Orthodoxy (the Mitnaggdim), and the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah, represented in Zweifel’s statement by their three reputed founders. As Hasidism developed in the nineteenth century from an elite, mystical group to a mass movement, it came to be perceived as, and indeed became, a major ideological, social, and political rival in the struggle for dominance in Eastern European Jewish life. In this and the following chapter, we will discuss in turn relations with other segments of the East European Jewish society and with East European political powers. These relations played key roles in the development of Hasidism, defined as much by its social, cultural, and political interactions with the outside world as by its theological doctrines. While relations with non-Hasidic traditional representatives of the Jewish community were discussed in chapter 16, in this chapter we will look at the interactions between the Hasidim and various liberal and modernizing intellectuals, primarily the Maskilim and their successors. We will also devote some attention to attitudes toward Hasidim on the part of non-Jewish intellectuals.
The relations between Hasidism and the Haskalah are among the best-known aspects of the interaction between the various nineteenth-century ideologies of the East European Jews. They are often represented almost mythically as a Manichean division of the world into two opposing and warring camps. However, such a sharp binary opposition does not capture the nuances of this interaction and focuses excessive attention on extreme, radical voices. This chapter’s task will be to investigate how much truth there is to the belief that the war between the Haskalah and Hasidism was so important. As we shall see, the conflict between the two was neither inevitable nor necessarily of primary importance for either of them. Nor does ideology fully capture the full social relations between these different elements in Jewish society.
Maskilim on Hasidism: Beginnings
Although the first Haskalah critiques of Hasidism appeared as early as the 1770s, one should not exaggerate their significance. The early Maskilim had little contact with Hasidism, and even if they knew of its existence from the writings of the Mitnaggdim it was a completely marginal matter for them, probably indistinguishable from pietism generally. As opposed to the Mitnaggdim, who saw the Hasidim as a threat to the social and religious order, the early Maskilim criticized Hasidism more as an obstacle to the reform of tradition and the social order than as a threat to them.
Three early texts from the 1790s provide illustrations of the nascent Haskalah’s attitude toward Hasidism. Each is the result of the writers’ personal experience. All three, albeit in varying degrees, influenced later perceptions. We have already encountered Solomon Maimon, whose visit to the court of the Maggid of Mezritsh provided us with the earliest ethnographic descriptions of the Hasidic movement as it began to form. After fleeing Lithuania, where he had been educated as a Talmudic scholar, he reached Berlin in 1779, and, after a great many vicissitudes, gained the approval of the Berlin Maskilim, including Moses Mendelssohn. His penetrating analyses of Kant’s philosophy brought Maimon fame, but he is best known as the author of the first autobiography, published in German in 1793, charting a path from the darkness of traditional Judaism to the light of Haskalah. An element in the darkness from which he fled was the Kabbalah of which the “New Hasidic Sect” was a contemporary exponent.
Maimon pointed out the differences between the old and new forms of Hasidism, especially the new Hasidism’s attack on asceticism. For Maimon, unlike for the Mitnaggdim, Hasidism did have some positive features since it criticized the ascetic extremism of traditional Judaism as well as the degeneration of the rabbinical tradition into barren legalism and soulless ritual. Yet that is where its positive side ended. In Maimon’s view, the creator of the new movement, “Rabbi Joel [sic!] Balschem,” was a quack and a charlatan, who, by means of “cabalistic hocus-pocus” had gained the common herd’s approval. When Maimon visited the Maggid’s court, he was initially impressed but eventually came to the conclusion that Dov Ber himself was a fraud and his practices as a tsaddik a mere pack of tricks.
Hasidism was hardly central to Maimon’s narrative. He admitted to having only a passing acquaintance with the movement, which, in any case, was in its infancy when he left Lithuania. Since Hasidism was a populist movement to reform Judaism, but failed to do so, in his view, it pointed the way instead toward reform via Enlightenment. Maimon also consciously took advantage of the growing interest at the time of the French Revolution in sects and secret societies whose goal was ostensibly to achieve world domination. Maimon believed that Hasidism was on its way to disappearing, since, owing to the activities of the Vilna Gaon, “scarcely any traces of the society can now be found.”2 Such a picture might have been accurate for Lithuania in the 1770s when Maimon left the Commonwealth, but was quite inaccurate for the two decades later when his autobiography was published.
Of the same generation as Maimon, Menahem Mendel Lefin (1749–1826) came from Satanów in Podolia. Between 1780 and 1784, while in Berlin, he came into contact with the Berlin Haskalah circle and, after returning home, he associated himself with the Czartoryskis’ court. It was Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski who encouraged Lefin to present a project to reform the Jewish people in connection with the issue being raised at the Great Sejm of 1788–1792. His “Essay on the Plan to Reform the Polish Jews,” written in French and in the form of a draft bill, appeared anonymously, probably toward the end of 1791. According to Lefin, “the Jewish nation’s most powerful and most effective engine is religion,”3 thus a reform of these people had to treat religion as a point of departure. In his opinion, Judaism’s history is the story of rational reflection, first in the Talmud, then Maimonides, and in modern times, with Moses Mendelssohn. This healthy core of Judaism is, however, threatened by “devout ignorance,” whose most dangerous creation is a new sect, unnamed by Lefin, which credits its leaders with the power of performing miracles and forgiving sin, scorns religious study and humiliates rabbis. These leaders attract disciples by the splendor of their courts, which they owe to rich gifts from the many visiting pilgrims. Thanks to spies and the persecution of its adversaries, and especially their rabbis, Hasidism had taken over Podolia, Ukraine, Volhynia, and part of Lithuania, although many Lithuanian towns had succeeded in resisting.
Lefin proposed using anti-Hasidic rabbis—the group most persecuted by the Hasidim—as the vehicle for reform. The government ought to nominate open-minded rabbis as district rabbis with broad powers to censor books and excommunicate. They should also stage disputations with supporters of Hasidism since that might force the Hasidim to resort to rational argument. Satirical writings, ridiculing Hasidic beliefs and their absurdities while not insulting the opponents, could be especially helpful in this contest. Over the next few years, the polemical and satirical model proposed by Lefin became the Eastern European Haskalah’s most important weapon in its arsenal against Hasidism.
Although Lefin’s main goal was the reform of the Jewish people in Poland, Hasidism emerged as the principal threat to this program since it represented the Kabbalah, which he judged to be the main roadblock to modernization. But his overall program was overtaken by historical events and went nowhere. Shortly after the dissolution of the Great Sejm and the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Lefin left Warsaw and after 1808 settled in Galicia, where he established close contacts with the local followers of the Haskalah. In this way, his views on Hasidism exerted a decisive influence on the whole first generation of Galician Maskilim, notably Yosef Perl and Nahman Krochmal.
A final figure in the early Eastern European Haskalah was Jacques Calmanson (1722–1811), or Solomon Jacob ben Kalman, who came from Hrubieszów, Central Poland, where his father supposedly was a rabbi. Calmanson himself received a broad education: he studied in Germany and France, knew many languages, and traveled extensively. After settling in Warsaw, he practiced for many years as King Stanisław August Poniatowski’s physician. His treatise, “Essay on the Current State of the Polish Jews and Their Betterment,” written during the time of the Great Sejm and published five years later, is structurally very similar to Lefin’s essay, although much more comprehensive. The first chapter was devoted to religion and represented, according to its writer, an essential introduction to an understanding of the Jewish community’s rites and traditions, which was a condition for the success of any reforms. In the passage “Concerning the Sect Named the Choside, or Zealots, the Bigots,” Calmanson represents the Hasidim as a sect known only to Polish Jewry, which had arisen in the 1770s [sic!] in Mezhbizh in Podolia. Its founder, a fanatical rabbi, deluded the credulous people longing for the unusual, and announced himself to be a prophet. He also maintained that he could heal the sick, thanks to which he gained many followers. This sect, “which continues to survive,” rejects knowledge and makes a virtue out of ignorance. The only knowledge respected by the Hasidim is the Kabbalah, yet their leaders are ignoramuses about it; these leaders persuade the faithful that they are learned mystics in order to control them. The leaders run to exploit their followers for their own material gain. Calmanson thus condemns the tsaddikim for taking advantage of the simple folk’s naïveté:
We should pity the absence of light, the good and unwise faith of these unenlightened and credulous people, who believe that through the actions of this completely deranged blindness they are doing God’s work, while in fact all their efforts go towards supporting the eccentricity of a few crafty fanatics, in whose continually and troublesomely ruling persons, they have and will have despots.4
While accusations of economic exploitation by the tsaddikim had appeared earlier in the writings of the Mitnaggdim, it was Calmanson who made it the centerpiece of his critique since he believed generally in the need to free the simple Jews from despotic rule of the Jewish aristocrats and rabbis. Hasidism was merely the latest incarnation of the conflict between the religious-financial elite and the common people, and was by no means the most dangerous aspect of the conflict. But this argument—that Hasidism created economic exploitation—soon became one of the most popular themes in attacks by Maskilim.
Despite these condemnations, Calmanson was actually ambivalent about Hasidism. Unlike Lefin, he sympathized with rather than condemning the naïve followers of Hasidism. Also, unlike Lefin, he did not condemn fascination with the Kabbalah, and even showed respect for it. In fact, Hasidism for Calmanson was more a curiosity than a real social threat. Compared to the accusations he hurled against Frankism, which he saw as a much greater threat than Hasidism, or the institutions of traditional Jewry, which he consistently calls the Jewish greatest plague, his critique of Hasidism was relatively mild.
Ideology and Literature
Lefin and Maimon’s conviction about Hasidism’s fraudulent nature, and Calmanson’s belief that Hasidism was the incarnation of the eternal rabbinical exploitation of ordinary Jews—all these arguments became the stock-in-trade of the later Haskalah. While much of this discourse borrowed from the reasoning of the Mitnaggdim, the two enemies of Hasidism differed fundamentally: whereas the Mitnaggdim criticized the Hasidim for being potential revolutionaries, populist destroyers of the status quo, the Maskilim saw in Hasidism a throwback to medieval obscurantism and, if they saw anything positive in it, it was because they thought it might have reforming potential.
The basic dividing line between the Hasidim and the Maskilim was their different attitudes toward modernization. Whereas the Maskilim saw modernization as an historical inevitability and an opportunity to develop Jewish society, for the Hasidim these changes—abolishing estate structures of the premodern society and Jewish autonomy, and even the legal restrictions inextricably associated with this premodern state of affairs—represented a threat to the traditional world. Although both groups developed in response to modernization and its consequences—in this sense, both were products of the modernizing processes—their responses were radically different. These attitudes, which did not emerge immediately, were the consequence of a long process of internal development and confrontation that shaped their respective selfimages and the images of their opponents.
Following the three early Maskilim just described, the nineteenth-century Haskalah leveled religious, political, economic, and cultural arguments against Hasidism. Like Mendel Lefin, they defined Judaism as made up of two contradictory religious strands, the rational, represented by Moses the lawgiver, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Haskalah, and the irrational, mystical tradition rooted in magical thinking, culminating in Hasidism. As the incarnation of religious obscurantism, Hasidism represented everything that was alien to the Haskalah, and, in fact, to pure Judaism.
This religious critique came together with attacks on Hasidism’s allegedly antisocial behavior such as retaining differences in Jewish dress, language, and customs, as well as anti-Christian prejudice and xenophobia. The Maskilim charged that the Hasidim violated Jewish law by defining Christianity as idolatry in order to justify immoral behavior toward Christians: “All their actions are filled with immorality, intolerance, and disdain for everything that a Hasid is not. They teach often and quite shamelessly that idolaters can be deceived and officials bribed.”5 In this way, the Hasidim obstructed the Haskalah’s goal of integration into the surrounding Christian societies. And Hasidic separatism threatened to provoke Christian attacks on the Jews.
The Maskilim also attacked Hasidism on political grounds, partly for its alleged failure to recognize the authority of the state, but even more over the leadership of the Jewish community, personified in the tsaddik. Apart from the personal attributes of specific tsaddikim, the Maskilim rejected the principle of leadership based on religious charisma or mystical attributes as completely irrational. Haskalah criticism of the tsaddikim was nourished by Enlightenment anticlericalism. The writings of Hume and Voltaire on religion had particular influence on the Galician Maskilim, especially Yosef Perl and Yehudah Leib Mieses. All spiritual hierarchies were the result of historical deception and were nourished by the people’s naïveté. The tsaddikim were the most recent Jewish representatives of this deceitful class of priests. The Maskilim claimed thus that the Hasidic leadership was totally anachronistic, rooted in the premodern, barbarous past, by which they ignored the fact that the Hasidic idea of leadership was itself thoroughly modern since it had no real precedent in earlier Jewish history. Thus the struggle between Maskilim and Hasidim was over who should exert political control in the Jewish community and how. The Maskilim maintained that political representation should rest in the hands of those who were the best educated and who best understood the challenges of the modern world—to wit, the Maskilim themselves.
Political criticism was closely linked to economic criticism. In the terms already laid out by Jacques Calmanson, the Maskilim accused the tsaddikim of fleecing their followers. In 1861, an anonymous writer observed in lurid terms that smacked of antisemitism:
The black cavern of fanaticism—evil spirits gesticulating grotesquely grumble incomprehensibly, in the darkest corner of the cavern there lurks a vampire with broad, black wings, his face still smeared with the blood sucked from the victim, who has been anaesthetized under the air of the wings of his deceit and by his voice, the poor, emaciated sons of Israel … they respond from every city and village in Poland to the voice of the vampire from the cavern of darkness, to the voice of the prophets of Baal, who have founded their mission upon the falsified authority supposedly obtained from the hands of the God of Israel in the words which centuries ago resounded in the Arabian desert: … Say to the sons of Israel: “go!,” “come forth with the pidyonot.”6
The collection of offerings (pidyonot) by the tsaddikim led, in the opinion of the Maskilim, to the impoverishment of the whole Jewish population, especially Hasidic families in which a hungry wife and ragged children awaited the return of their profligate father, who squandered their hard-earned money at the tsaddik’s court. Even worse, the boundless faith in the tsaddik made the Hasidim economically submissive, leading to indolence and failure to take up gainful employment. This stood in stark contrast to the Haskalah program of refashioning the Jewish economy in Eastern Europe along modern, productive lines.
Finally, the Maskilim accused their enemies of a whole series of offenses against modern culture. Their language, Yiddish, was a bastardized form of German, and they were averse to grammatically accurate Hebrew. They were similarly averse to modern science, which left the Jews mired in ignorance. Instead of adopting modern, bourgeois sexual mores, they adhered to traditional behaviors such as early marriage that the Maskilim regarded as promoting sexual dysfunction. Replicating an argument of the eighteenth-century Mitnaggdim, Yosef Perl saw the Kabbalistic sexual symbolism in Hasidic books as a form of pornography. He wrote indignantly that the Hasidim saw daily prayers as sexual intercourse with the shekhinah, a charge already leveled by the Mitnaggdim. In this same tone of indignation, he attacked the Hasidic habit of smoking tobacco in order to ward off constipation, which they believed to be an obstacle on the road to achieving communion with God (devekut). Such use of tobacco violated his sense of bourgeois decorum (although presumably he did not oppose smoking per se). The Maskilim also heaped opprobrium on the Hasidic use—or, as they would have it, abuse—of alcohol and its accompanying licentiousness: “Ill-mannered riff-raff, with no sense of self-worth, for whom nothing is more sacred than a full glass and a pipe.”7 In a great many such accusations the shame that their “progressive” co-religionists felt toward the Hasidim showed through.
Underlying all these critiques was a belief that the Hasidim were essentially dishonest and hypocritical. As such, it was impossible to have a civilized disagreement with them in which one side had to accept that its opponent could be right. Rather, they were “thieves, swine and rogues.”8 The Maskilim compared the Besht to the wellknown charlatan Alessandro Cagliostro or to the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola, and Hasidism to cunning Jesuitism. According to Ozjasz Ludwik Lubliner: “each religion has its Jesuits; even the Jews have them. Fanatical Hasidim, enemies of the light, carefully nurture the old prejudices and superstitions, are such Jewish Jesuits.”9
Perhaps despairing of rational argument against such charlatans and hypocrites, the Maskilim turned to parody. It was in Galicia, where the Haskalah had its most vigorous early development that the harsh war against Hasidism took a satirical turn in the works of Yosef Perl (1773–1839; see figure 18.1). A wealthy merchant from Tarnopol, Perl had the financial means to assert his independence from traditional Jewish society and to pursue a career as a Haskalah writer, satirist, social and political activist, educator and religious reformer. The scale of his activities was impressive: in 1813 he opened the first modern Jewish school in Galicia, whose curriculum realized Haskalah ideals, and he ran it until his death. But his main literary, and political, battle was against Hasidism, which he saw, following his teacher Mendel Lefin, as one of the greatest threats to the Judaism of his day.
In 1816, he wrote a lengthy anti-Hasidic tract in German, Uiber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim (On the Nature of the Hasidic Sect). The image of Hasidism that Perl created in his tract was so shocking that the authorities feared that it might lead to social unrest and did not allow its publication. Although it was not published in the nineteenth century (it was only published in 1977), it circulated widely in manuscript, and turned out to be perhaps the most important source of information on Hasidism both for Christian circles, as well as for liberal Jews in Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. For instance, the German-Jewish historians Peter Beer and Marcus Jost used it in the first academic histories of Hasidism.
Figure 18.1. Yosef Perl (1773–1839), Yidishe Kesovim (Vilna, 1937), engraving, frontispiece. Perl was the Galician Maskil who wrote early satires of Hasidism. The inscription in Yiddish reads: “Portrait of Yosef Perl. Original in the Perl Synagogue in Tarnopol. According to an engraving, printed in Lemberg.” From the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
Perl’s treatise was addressed to the Austrian civil authorities and the Christian reader, and it was meant to explain Hasidism in a way accessible to the uninitiated. After explaining the movement’s name, Perl discusses the history of its formation and presents its main principles, which he reduces to slavish obedience toward the tsaddikim and the search for devekut, the state of spiritual ecstasy that he trivializes as an alcoholic stupor. Every Hasidic group, he explains, must have its leader called “rebbe,” who does not have to come from the family of the Besht nor even be a descendant of the tsaddik, although descent from a family of tsaddikim greatly helps in such a career. A great many benefits accrue to a tsaddik: the wealthiest families want to ally themselves with him, he leads a lavish lifestyle, is showered with gifts, and rides around the district collecting tribute. The whole country is divided into spheres of influence, and each tsaddik fights to increase his turf, leading to numerous quarrels between groups. Perl presents the Hasidim as economically indolent and the tsaddikim as frauds living off the simple folk. In addition, all the Hasidim plot against non-Hasidim, the state, and Christians generally, whom they do not recognize as human, but as idolaters whom one can cheat, rob, deceive, and bribe.
Perl’s fame in his own time and to this day is based on his satirical work Megaleh Temirin (The Revealer of Secrets), published in 1819 under the pseudonym Ovadia ben Petahia. The epistolary novel is a collection of 151 alleged Hasidic letters, which the writer supposedly obtained as the result of his magical ability to transport himself instantaneously and become invisible. The story describes the efforts of Hasidim who learn about the existence of a certain anti-Hasidic book (or bukh), which appears to be none other than Perl’s own Uiber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim. Enraged by their discovery, they attempt at all costs to obtain and destroy it. The Hebrew that Perl puts in the mouths of his fabricated Hasidim is deliberately fractured, thus adding another level of anti-Hasidic satire. In the first letter, for example, a Hasid reports to his fellow (the translation here attempts to capture the flavor of the ungrammatical Hebrew):
When I begin to read your letter, it shook me up because I saw in it the news you bring me of a treyf travesty that was recently published against our Faithful and against the real tsadikim, and that this bukh was sent to Galicia to the prince of your community to read! According to your letter, it’s full of wickedness, deceit and mockery aimed at the tsadikim and real rebbes! … I’m afraid to inform our holy rebbe of this news for two reasons. Because for the blink of an eye he’ll be aggravated, G-d forbid! Even though our rebbe must’ve already seen this in the higher worlds, all the same he might be aggravated, G-d forbid!, when he hears this in the lower worlds. And I’m also afraid maybe he’ll instantly take some revenge against the writer of this here bukh, burning him by means of the Prince of the Torah or some such thing, and we won’t have the privilege of seeing this sinner and of getting sweet revenge—of hitting him, denouncing him, burning everything he owns and so forth.10
While pretending to be a Hasidic work, the book sharply criticizes Hasidic beliefs, customs and ethical double standards by parodying actual Hasidic texts, in particular Shivhei ha-Besht and the tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (which Perl was inadvertently the first to publicize beyond the small circle of Bratslav). Megaleh Temirin is considered to be the first Hebrew novel, and its influence on the subsequent development of Hebrew writing was considerable. Haskalah writers in the nineteenth century frequently referred to it, while two decades later Perl himself published a continuation of the novel called Bohen Tsaddik.
Perl became involved in a particular confrontation with Tsvi Hirch Eichenstein of Zhidachov, who was a vehement opponent of Haskalah. Although he does not mention Perl by name, Tsvi Hirsh’s target in this passage could not be clearer:
One is not allowed to have any discussions on matters of faith with a heretic [apikores] who mocks and laughs at everything said to him and mocks and makes fun of everything dear and holy. For the power of mockery [letsanut] is so great as to defeat a hundred reproofs, so it is a matter of great pain when anyone meets with this mocking heretic.11
As we saw in chapter 13, Zhidachov was distinguished by its advocacy of Kabbalistic study. Perl and other Maskilim close to him opposed Tsvi Hirsh not only for promoting Hasidism but also for adhering to “fanatical” Kabbalah, both of which were virtually identical in their minds. The Maskil Shlomo Yehudah Rapoport referred to Tsvi Hirsh as “the madman of Zhidachov.”
Tsvi Hirsh, for his part, preached in 1820 against studying the Bible in translation, which seems to have been aimed at Perl’s school of Tarnopol. Perl reacted angrily to this attack, primarily, it seems, out of fear that it would discourage payment of the special tax that went toward supporting his school. He wrote a fictitious letter, which was apparently never sent, purporting to be from the Hasidim of Ze’ev of Zbarazh, the son of the Maggid of Zlotshev. These Hasidim supposedly state that Tsvi Hirsh has unjustly cursed Tarnopol and, if he doesn’t recant, it will lead to his death. Perl uses gematriot (combinations of numbers keyed to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet) to associate Tsvi Hirsh with various villains in Jewish history such as the biblical Jeroboam and the heretic Jacob Frank. In 1827, Perl reported to the authorities that the tsaddik planned to arrive in Zbarazh for the Sabbath in order again to incite the public against payment of the school tax. As a result, Tsvi Hirsh was expelled from the town on the eve of the Sabbath, a clear victory for Perl.
Other examples of anti-Hasidic satirical texts were Divrei Tsaddikim (1830) by Perl and Isaac Ber Levinsohn, and Yehudah Leib Mieses’s Sefer Kin’at ha-Emet (1828), a dialogue between Maimonides and Solomon of Chelm, a rabbi and an early Maskil, who both attack belief in demons, amulets, witchcraft, and miracle-workers. The Yiddish pseudo-autobiography of Yitshak Yoel Linetski (1839–1915) titled Dos Poylishe Yingl (1867–1869), which also parodies Hasidic mores, became one of the most popular Jewish literary works in the nineteenth century. A less-known, but very interesting work in this vein is Efraim Fischel Fischelson’s Yiddish Teyator fun Khsidim, a disputation between the enlightened hero Leib Filozof and a group of Hasidim of Belz. The discussion takes place in a Hasidic study hall where Leib is studying traditional Hebrew texts. Enlightened, but faithful to religion and tradition, he calls on typical Haskalah arguments against Hasidism, proves its irrationality and points to the parasitical life style of the tsaddikim. The debate ends in the Maskil’s triumph: the yeshivah students who are watching vote for Leib and attack the Hasidim as “beggars and frightful rogues.”12
Enlightenment Voices on the Other Side
Despite these rabid attacks on Hasidism as the sect of darkness, the Haskalah’s view of Hasidism needs to be nuanced. Not all of the Haskalah anti-Hasidic literature was really aimed at Hasidism, and many of the polemics used anti-Hasidic rhetoric for general polemical purposes. For example, in the famous conflict surrounding the appointment of the Maskil Shlomo Yehudah Rapoport as rabbi in Tarnopol, Rapoport, as well as his allies, including Perl, pointed to the Hasidim as their principal—indeed their only—opponents. But, in fact, the camp opposing Rapoport consisted of many more representatives of the non-Hasidic rabbinical elite, Mitnaggdim and even Maskilim. In other controversies, one Hasidic group might even accuse another of being Hasidic, since this seemed the best strategy to discredit an opponent in the eyes of the civil authorities. The radical critique of Hasidism thus became a figure of speech, a kind of heavy rhetorical artillery behind which other conflicts might hide. It was safer for the Maskilim to attack Hasidism as a kind of “whipping boy,” when their real target was rabbinic authority as a whole.
The satires of Perl and other Haskalah attacks on Hasidism give the impression of monolithic obsession with the movement on the part of the modernizers. But Perl, who seems to have been, in fact, singularly obsessed with Hasidism, should not be taken as the only representative of the Haskalah. As early as 1824, the Warsaw Maskil and censor Jakub Tugendhold, whom we met in the last chapter, issued an unambiguously pro-Hasidic opinion in connection with an official inquiry into the legality of the “sect of the Hasidim.” Tugendhold also came to the defense of Hasidism in 1831 in Obrona Izraelitów, a supplement to the seventeenth-century work of Menasseh ben Israel, which was meant to exonerate the Jews from the accusation of using the blood of Christian children for religious rituals. As we will see in the next chapter, one of the new variants of accusations of ritual murder in the nineteenth century was the thesis that not all Jews, but only certain Jewish sects, used this blood. Tugendhold refuted this accusation by stating that within current Judaism there were no sects:
The Hasidim who exist today, cannot be regarded as a sect, if one considers the true meaning of that term in relation to the essence of religion. For these Hasidim do not deviate in any way from the essential laws and regulations of the Old Testament, the Talmud, or other subsequent works that are respected by the nation of Israel for their religious value. Indeed, it is the duty of every Hasid to obey all such laws and regulations much more scrupulously than their law requires.13
Tugendhold’s defense of Hasidism was twofold. He refuted the accusation of using Christian blood but more importantly denied that the movement had the characteristics of a sect, affirming instead that it was a group on a par with the other variants of Judaism like the Mitnaggdim and Maskilim. In 1862, at a meeting of the Warsaw Censorship Committee he moved that Shalom Jacob Abramovich’s Maskilic story Limdu Hetev not be approved for publication, since it incited people against the Hasidim, “by far the greatest number of [whom] are really devout and moral.”14
Tugendhold was no apologist for Hasidism, however. He did not hesitate to criticize the Hasidim for “despicable arrogance” and “ignorance and fanaticism,” but he also acknowledged that they retained a deep mystical faith and valuable religious traditions. The first “progressive” Jew to side with Hasidism, Tugendhold’s overall philosophy was one of mutual toleration: he defended the Hasidim against the Mitnaggdim, the Mitnaggdim against the Hasidim, the Maskilim against the Hasidim, and even the Hasidim against the Maskilim.
Tugendhold became personally acquainted with Yitshak Meir Alter, the future Gerer Rebbe, when the latter still lived in Warsaw; the Rebbe would visit Tugendhold with requests for intercession with the government. When in 1859 the government of Congress of Poland took up an initiative to reform the Jewish community “the Hasidim, on learning of the negotiations and fearing changes, which might favor education, took advantage of the help of the censor and principal of the Rabbinical School, Jakub Tugendhold.”15 Tugendhold turned out to be an influential ally: he succeeded in getting the civil authorities to reject the liberal project and to accept his proposals, which benefited the traditionalists and moderate reformers. Tugendhold also defended the Hasidim from the official accusation that their prayers contained passages hostile to the tsar and the government. Moderate Maskilim might thus make common cause with Hasidim against radical change.
A similar willingness to defend Hasidism was embraced by the Galician Maskil Jacob Samuel Bick, who in the 1820s accused his fellow Maskilim of a lack of tolerance and a revolutionary fervor that led to fratricidal battles within the Jewish community. Bick rejected Haskalah elitism and cosmopolitanism, claiming that the Hasidim were better than the Maskilim, because they were close to the masses, specifically cared about Jewish values, and were sensitive to the spirit of the people. In the community of the Galician Maskilim, among whom anti-Hasidic prejudice was de rigueur, Bick’s stance provoked a violent reaction and accusations of “conversion” to Hasidism. Bick eventually broke with the camp of the Haskalah, but there is no proof that he ever became a Hasid.
The most systematic attempt to revise the Haskalah’s anti-Hasidic ideology was authored by Eliezer Zweifel (1815–1888), a Russian Maskil a generation younger than Bick and Tugendhold. In Shalom al Yisrael (1868–1870), Zweifel, like his two predecessors, bemoaned the divisions within the Jewish world as harmful as well as artificial. Zweifel developed a theory of “three shepherds,” according to which the simultaneous appearance of the three great reformers of Judaism, Eliyahu Gaon of Vilna, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Besht, was the work of God and their tasks complemented one another:
God saw … and He raised up for us three shepherds in different places to support the three pillars … the Almighty called upon Rabbi Eliyahu in Lithuania to safeguard the Torah, to purify its Talmud, and to oversee its logic and its diligent study. He called upon the head of the Hasidim in Volhynia to marshal devotion and to fan the embers of feeling. He found the great sage of our people Moses ben Menahem in Germany, and called him to place the cradle of Enlightenment in the lamp of religion.16
Although Hasidic piety was radical, even excessive, in God’s dialectical plan, the Maskilim, Hasidim, and Mitnaggdim would temper one another. On an equal footing with Haskalah and the Talmudic studies practiced by the Mitnaggdim, Hasidism was thus an important reforming force in Judaism. Over many pages, Zweifel proved that Hasidism was not a foreign body in Judaism, and that its ideas had their roots in ancient religious writings: “anything found in the ocean of Hasidism may be found in the sea of the Talmud and the Kabbalah.”17 Opposing the Maskilic criticisms of Hasidism, he also claimed—as we have argued as well—that the Besht had not been an uneducated ignoramus, that the rabbis of the day had respected his learning, and that he did not deserve the scorn poured on him. Hasidism had a great many valuable attributes, such as the brotherhood of all its members, and its pantheism was close to the philosophies of Plato and Spinoza. Zweifel’s positive evaluation of Hasidism focused on its formative years, but in comparison with the views that had been dominant, his was a radical reappraisal that pointed beyond the Haskalah.
A leading Maskil whose views demonstrated the complexity of Haskalah opinion on Hasidism was Aleksander Zederbaum (1816–1893), the founder and editor of Ha-Melits, the first Hebrew periodical published in Russia. Zederbaum wrote two notable series of articles on Hasidism. The first, from 1866, discussed religious leadership in Judaism, including an important survey of contemporary tsaddikim, and appeared a year later as a book titled Keter Kehuna. The second was an investigation of the conversion to Enlightenment of the tsaddik Dov Ber Friedman of Leova and the resulting controversy between the dynasties of Sandz and Sadagora (see chapter 13 for a discussion of this episode).
Zederbaum expressed some critical views about Hasidim, especially their internal schisms, but did not attack Hasidism frontally and sometimes even expressed positive opinions toward those of the tsaddikim who seemed to him rational enough, such as Shneur Zalman of Liady and Yehudah Leib Eger of Lublin. His opposition faded further in the 1870s when he declared that Ha-Melits was not going to focus any more on internal disputes inside Jewish society. This seemed to reflect a gradual change in opinion about Hasidism in the direction of less combative views, such as those of Eliezer Zweifel. But it was also related to Zederbaum’s own change of focus from improving Jewish society to improving relations between Jews and non-Jews. Not only did he become less interested in Hasidism, but he also believed that internal Jewish disputes, even in Hebrew, promoted a negative image of Jews in the eyes of non-Jews.
Notwithstanding Zederbaum’s decision to refrain from criticizing Hasidism, he could not remain silent when faced with specific cases of what he perceived as improper behavior on the part of the Hasidim. The most notable example was a campaign in 1878–1879 against the Rebbe of Radzin, Gershon Hanokh Leiner, who forbade circumcising a newborn son of a Hasid of the opposing group of Kotzk Hasidim. And he also criticized competing newspapers—Ha-Tsefirah and Ha-Levanon—which he blamed for being too favorable toward Hasidism.
There were also Maskilim who explicitly rejected appeals to the government against Hasidism. When in 1845 a Maskil from Działoshits, Eliasz Moszkowski, proposed a project of reform that would declare Hasidism illegal, leading representatives of the Jewish liberal camp—Mathias Rozen, Jan Glücksberg, Abraham Wienawer, and Jakub Rotwand—whom the government of Congress Poland asked for advice, rejected the proposal, guided by the age-old principle that Jews should not turn to non-Jewish authorities to settle communal disputes.
Hasidim on Haskalah
While for the Maskilim the main bone of the contention with Hasidism lay in the struggle over modernity, Hasidic criticism of the Haskalah used decidedly different rhetoric, focused instead on adherence to the halakhah. Hasidic literature rarely deployed ideological arguments against the Haskalah and its heirs and, in fact, rarely even referred to Maskilim by name. On the occasions when they did, it was to use the names of iconic Maskilim to stand for the movement: “the villain of Dessau, Moses Mendelssohn, is the incarnation of the villain of Balaam; like Balaam he extolled Israel, but his intentions were impure; Dessauer and his companions did likewise saying that they wanted Israel’s goods, but they profaned Israel, for those who followed him, were lost.”18 In this kind of rhetoric, the Hasidim rarely engaged directly with Haskalah ideology, but rather viewed the Maskilim as traditional heretics, the purveyors of lawlessness and depravity.
Hasidic texts refer to their modernist opponents as Germans (daytch), assimilationists (mitbolelim), villains (anshei beli’al), heretics (minim), or heathens (apikores), and in more colorful versions as an “infectious skin disease” (sapahat), which if not treated could lead to the destruction of the whole body. Neutral terms along the lines of “progressives” (anashim mitkadmim) were rare. When the nineteenth-century Hasidic writer Moshe Menahem Walden, whom we discussed in the previous chapter, used the term “Maskil,” he immediately added “a Maskil, that is, a heathen.”19 The attitude of the Hasidim toward the Maskilim was thus not much different from the attitudes of the Maskilim toward the Hasidim, thus demonstrating a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the two.
As an example of this rhetoric, consider the following by Natan Sternhartz, the Bratslav Hasid:
These evil sects want to teach languages and science to the young and to lead them to utter heresy, as we plainly see that all who are snared in the trap of the fowlers of these accursed ones (may their names be expunged) cast off the yoke and, worse than the apostate from spite, they violate the Sabbath and the like. The main intention of these hosts of evil and broods of Satan is to eradicate from the hearts of the young the name of God, so that they may no longer be called by the name of Israel. They exert their utmost efforts to become like the Gentiles in their actions, speech, manners and dress.20
Enlightenment is nothing but an attempt to overturn Jewish law. It was also a species of subversive intellectual inquiry, as we have already seen in the writings of Tsvi Hirsch Eichenstein of Zhidachov and David Twersky of Talne.
In addition, Hasidic texts do, at times, describe actual disputes between Hasidim and Maskilim over military service, secular education (as in the confrontation between Perl and Tsvi Hirsh of Zhidachov), and dress, all highly fraught issues that divided Jewish society. For the Hasidim, the representatives of Haskalah bore at least equal responsibility for these controversies with the government, which is why they often appear as the explicit villains. The stories over the decree in Congress Poland mandating European styles of dress illustrate this point, since the Maskilim agitated for it. According to Hasidic tradition, the measure was widely ignored as some Hasidic leaders, especially Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger (who was still in Warsaw at the time), called for martyrdom in the defense of tradition. When the Maskilim recognized that their project had fizzled, they convinced the viceroy that Yitshak Meir was to blame and should be arrested to coerce his support for the decree. His subsequent imprisonment brought opprobrium down on the Maskilim; even Christians protested. In the Hasidic telling, the authorities realized that the decree ran counter to God’s law and rescinded it. Yitshak Meir returned to Warsaw in triumph.
In this account, the Maskilim are incorrigibly evil and the source of moral contagion. So, too, with a clearly anachronistic story told by Moshe Menahem Walden, in which the future tsaddik Ya’akov Yitshak Horowitz of Lublin (at the time, still in Łańcut) visited his teacher Elimelekh of Lizhensk. Elimelekh accompanied his favorite pupil to his lodgings, but did not enter his room, saying that he felt an evil spirit in it. It turned out that one of the holy books in the room had become contaminated because it had belonged to a certain Maskil. Similarly, Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe reportedly said, “Even though one should do so by law, I do not want to read the Torah in a grammatically correct way, because they [the Maskilim] follow this custom so closely.”21
For the Hasidim, the Maskilim were particularly dangerous because they plotted with antisemitic governments. They thus fell into the age-old category of mosrim and malshinim (betrayers and informers), with all the opprobrium that centuries of tradition heaped on such traitors. This was, however, a misimpression on the part of the Hasidim. Many of the appeals to the government to intervene in Jewish affairs did not originate with representatives of Haskalah. For example, the most important anti-Hasidic investigation in Poland in 1823–1824 (see chapter 19) most probably stemmed from a complaint submitted by the Jewish community board or perhaps even by a rival group of Hasidim. As news of the incident spread among the Hasidim, however, they attributed responsibility for it to Maskilim, or, as a Hasidic leader Aleksander Zusya Kahana wrote, to “hypocritical people” who “do not observe Jewish law and are weak in religious belief.”22 Belief in the political power of the Maskilim undoubtedly affected the Hasidim’s attitude toward them, for, regardless of reality, they believed that the Maskilim were opponents to be taken seriously.
The Hasidim also told stories of encounters between tsaddikim and Maskilim in which the former invariably got the better of the latter, thus demonstrating the superiority of Hasidism. One such story is based on a real meeting between Isaac Beer Levinsohn, known as the Russian Mendelssohn, with the tsaddik Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt. Levinsohn decided to pay the tsaddik a visit, to ask him a few questions and thus make fun of his ignorance. But when he came face-to-face with the tsaddik, he did not have the time to ask questions, for the tsaddik first interrogated him with five or six questions about the customs of mourning. Only when Levinsohn returned home, did it turn out that the questions had referred to him, since during the conversation five or six members of his household had died. In Levinsohn’s account of this meeting, the outcome was the opposite: Levinsohn’s complete victory over the tsaddik.
Unlike the stories about Mitnaggdim who experience a miracle and become Hasidim, however, there are relatively few Hasidic accounts in which a Maskil who is initially hostile is transformed into a convert through the powers of a tsaddik. One exception was the doctor from Piotrków, Hayim David Bernard (d. 1858), who supposedly became a fervent Hasid. While this “conversion” is not corroborated in other sources, there is nevertheless persuasive evidence that Bernard became close to some Polish tsaddikim. It appears that the Hasidim turned his relative rapprochement with Hasidism into the fiction of a full-blown conversion. Another exceptional case was the British Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore. While Montefiore appears as almost a Maskil for his opposition to Hasidic dress and other customs, in Hasidic literature, he is portrayed positively for his missions in defense of the Jews in the court of Tsar Nicholas I.
However, disputes with real Maskilim were more the exception than the norm in Hasidic literature. The Hasidic writers generally do not distinguish between Maskilim, integrationists, full-blown assimilationists, and even apostates. Instead, their writings are full of anonymous “villains” breaking halakhic rules and openly offending Jewish tradition. According to a Hasidic account, when Yitshak of Vurke and Yitshak Meir of Ger had to ask a certain “progressive” Jew to intercede with a minister, they went to see him on the Sabbath, and, to their distress, he profaned the day of rest by smoking a cigar. And when another wealthy man requested in return for intercession a small part of eternal life, he wanted this assurance only so as to be able to sin even more in this world.
The Hasidic opposition to Haskalah was thus but one part of their larger war against modernity. But the legacy of the battle against the Maskilim continued long after Haskalah had departed from the historical stage. When the great cultural changes promoted by the Maskilim actually took effect as a result of much larger social and economic forces, the conflict with the now vanished Haskalah continued to loom large in the Hasidic world, with the Maskilim persisting for Hasidim as an embodiment of their arch-enemy, occupying that place in their literature up to the present day.
Beyond Polemics
Life did not entirely follow ideology. The relations between Maskilim and Hasidim took place as much in local interactions as in the pages of books or newspapers. In one of his letters, Isaac Beer Levinsohn described his native Krzemieniec in Volhynia, and the attitudes prevailing there:
My town is a town of despair, without learning, without writers, without books; without anyone who could bring something new, who might read a book, without any access to literature. Daily I hear the lamentations of the poor, exploited by their oppressors, our brothers, the leaders and guardians of Israel. I hear too the rising hubbub of those drinking alcohol, dancing in large numbers and singing loudly, introducing new customs to my town, and those drinking alcohol get drunk and call out: “Holy One!”23
The noisy drinkers are of course the Hasidim, presented here in line with the Haskalah canon as uncouth ignoramuses, lacking in moral principles and good behavior, and their leaders as ruthless extortionists, preying on simple folks’ ignorance. Levinsohn’s isolation and poverty were in fact the lot of many Maskilim in small and medium-sized towns throughout Eastern Europe. But it was on this local level—beyond the literary polemics we have been discussing—that many interactions between Maskilim and Hasidim took place.
Local communities were the natural arena of confrontation between Hasidim and Maskilim. In order to put its social and cultural program into effect, the Haskalah movement struggled to attain political power within Jewish communities. Since the Hasidim were usually the most organized group in local communities, even if they were not in the majority, the frustrated Maskilim saw Hasidism as the principal roadblock to their aspirations and, moreover, a roadblock that was becoming stronger as the century wore on. Local accounts are full of stories in which the much more numerous Hasidim persecuted Maskilim by means of ostracism and other forms of social pressure. Hasidic families might force sons-in-law inclined toward Haskalah to divorce their wives (non-Hasidic traditional families did not behave much differently), as was the case with a well-known Maskil Avraham Ber Gottlober. “Progressive” Jews from Łódź complained in 1848 of public humiliation, ridicule, insults, jostling, shoving, knocking off of hats, damaging non-Jewish clothing, agitating against participation of “civilized” Jews in synagogue services, and burdening them with extra community taxes or increasing burial fees—all at the hands of Hasidim. More brutal forms of pressure, including physical violence occurred as well. Possibly the best known case was the death of a liberal preacher Abraham Kohn in Lwow in 1848, but despite popular belief that he and his family were poisoned by the Hasidim, the case remains a mystery and a suspected Hasid was never convicted. As the conflict worsened, the Maskilim came to regard their Hasidic opponents not only as embodying a differing vision of the social order, but as a bunch of uncouth, wild, fanatical crooks. The battle thus degenerated from ideology to invective.
The Hasidim were aware of the disparity in strength at the local level and took advantage of it. However, they also believed that the representatives of Haskalah enjoyed special access to the civil authorities and that they used this influence to gain control over Jewish affairs, including in the battle with Hasidism. As we shall see in chapter 19, the Maskilim did take the initiative to shape governmental policy on the Jews generally and Hasidism specifically. Yosef Perl not only wrote anti-Hasidic satires but also petitioned the Austrian authorities to effect changes in the Jewish community. In the Kingdom of Poland the author of the sharpest anti-Hasidic reports was Avraham Stern, a conservative Maskil.
However, the matter was more complicated. Both Perl and Stern failed spectacularly, since none of their petitions, reports, and memorandums had any significant effect on government policy toward Hasidism. No government was inclined to believe in the impartiality of any petitioner—and certainly not Jewish petitioners. The Maskilim were no exceptions. As a result, the influence of the Maskilim on government policy toward Hasidism was limited at best. Intervention with the civil authorities was not an important instrument in the Maskilim’s battle with Hasidism. It even appears that Hasidim resorted more frequently than did the Maskilim to denunciations to the civil authorities in order to solve intra-Jewish disputes.
Finally, no discussion of relations between Hasidism and the Haskalah would be complete without the most surprising aspect of the story: actual cooperation between members of the two warring camps. Hasidic literature relates numerous friendly conversations in Uman between Nahman of Bratslav and Maskilim, including the wellknown “heretics” Khaykl Hurwitz and Hirsh Ber. And, on the other side, the Haskalah press could write with sympathetic interest about tsaddikim such as Avraham Landau of Chekhanov (Ciechanów), or Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger. Radical Maskilim accused the rabbi and moderate Galician Maskil Tsvi Hirsch Chajes (1805–1855) of supporting the Hasidim, citing as proof his real and supposed cooperation with Hasidim in Zhovka and Kalisz.
Paradoxically, even the numerous Hasidic stories mentioned earlier about the unpleasantness facing tsaddikim asking for help from “heretics” who broke the Sabbath laws are proof that in fact the Hasidim did work with these non-Hasidic and often anti-Hasidic Jews in achieving their joint goals. A particularly dramatic area of cooperation involved countering accusations of ritual murder, leveled in the nineteenth century specifically against the Hasidim. Isaac Beer Levinsohn, known for his anti-Hasidic statements, received financial assistance from Israel of Ruzhin toward the publication of his famous treatise Te’udah be-Yisra’el (1828), and produced at his request Efes Damim (1837), a tract demolishing the accusations against the Jews of ritual murder.
Some Hasidic leaders even initiated action supporting the activities of the Maskilim and integrationists. The Maskilim vigorously advocated for agricultural settlements to create a more “productive” Jewish economy. These proposals gained acceptance generally among the Jewish population, including some Hasidic leaders. So, too the Haskalah call for Jews to learn non-Jewish languages found favor among some rebbes, notably Yitshak Meir Alter, who issued a call that every Jewish teacher of religion “endeavor to conduct a lesson in Polish, bringing in for that purpose a Polish teacher who is a native speaker.”24 Similarly, Alter issued an appeal in 1863 to write Passover bills of sale of hametz (leavened products) to non-Jews in Polish, winning the approval of integrationist circles in Warsaw.
On the level of daily local interactions, even the sharpest ideological disputes might at times be suspended to allow the community to function. Tsaddikim visiting a local community were respectfully received in the homes of the local Maskilim; some even stayed there. Some Maskilim visited tsaddikim at their courts whether with a request for a prayer or advice, or on a simple courtesy call. In Warsaw, the Hasidim and the integrationists formed a political coalition, which ran the local Jewish community for four decades. Thus beyond the well-known polemics, relations between Haskalah and Hasidism were far more varied than later historiography has portrayed them.
Beyond the Haskalah
The East European Haskalah was largely a literary movement that envisioned the Jews continuing to constitute their own cultural community, even if that culture was brought into the modern world. By the 1860s, with liberalization in Alexander II’s Russia and emancipation in the Habsburg Empire, a horizon of possibilities opened up beyond the Haskalah. Jews intent on modernization increasingly turned to the vernacular languages of their countries: Russian, Polish, German, and Hungarian. Many sought much greater political and cultural integration than had been envisioned by the Maskilim, now calling themselves Hungarians, Poles, or Germans of the Mosaic faith. Soon, the birth of new ideologies produced new approaches toward Hasidism. These new attitudes turned out to be one of the most visible signs of the end of the Haskalah era.
For German Jews, the Hasidim were unfamiliar, exotic strangers beyond their borders; until certain Hasidic leaders appeared in Central European spas (see chapter 21), they knew of them primarily through literature written in German. The first such account, which we have already described, was Salomon Maimon’s autobiography. Another was the essay by the Lithuanian Mitnagged with Enlightenment leanings, Israel Löbel, Glaubwürdige Nachricht von der in Polen und Lithauen befindlichen Sekte: Chasidim genannt, published in 1807 in the German-Jewish magazine Sulamith. The essay, which we discussed in chapter 3 on eighteenth-century opposition to Hasidism, became the canonical text on Hasidism for Christian writers such as Abbé Henri Grégoire’s L’histoire des sectes religieuses (1810) and the American Hannah Adams’s The History of the Jews (1812). The essay was also quite often cited in the Polish debate on reforming the Jewish population.
In 1816, David Friedländer, a close ally of Moses Mendelssohn and later one of the most important Jewish political activists in Germany, wrote a treatise at the request of the Polish Bishop, Franciszek Malczewski, recommending profound changes in the traditional Jewish life in Poland. He mentioned Hasidism as one of the obstacles to the development of education among Polish Jews. Following Maimon, he contrasted old ascetic hasidim with the new anti-Talmudic “sect” and characterized its teachings as an incomprehensible mixture of Kabbalistic, mystical, and Neoplatonic ideas. According to Friedländer, the Hasidim had no printed or even handwritten books, they recognized no authority except their randomly selected leaders engaged in miracleworking, trading in amulets, communing with the dead, and falling into ecstasy. Friedländer’s knowledge of Hasidism was thus very superficial and often wrong. Nevertheless, his remarks were an important source in shaping public opinion of Polish reformers, Eastern-European Maskilim, and liberal German Jews.
From the end of the 1830s, news on Hasidism appeared ever more frequently in the German-Jewish press. Between 1839 and 1840, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published an extensive essay titled Der Chassidismus in Polen by a Maskil from Brody, Julius Barasch (1815–1863), at the time a young medical student in Berlin. This article was entirely devoted to early doctrine and did not deal with Hasidism’s social structure or customs. Like a great many other articles in the German-Jewish press about Hasidism, it was based entirely on the already-extensive Haskalah literature on the subject rather than firsthand information. Another important piece was published in 1858 in the same journal by the editor-in-chief, Ludwig Philippsohn. Philippsohn analyzed the factors in the rise of Hasidism, pointing out that the Hasidim were numerically equal to the rabbinical Orthodox and supporters of progress, but that they outstripped both these groups in energy and initiative.
While the Maskilim tended to publish in the Hebrew press, whose circulation was often small, new Jewish periodicals began to appear in Eastern Europe in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. It was often there that new attitudes toward Hasidism began to percolate to the surface. In 1861, Daniel Neufeld, the editor of the Polish-Jewish weekly Jutrzenka published an article on Hasidism in Samuel Orgelbrand’s Encyklopedia Powszechna. Unlike prevailing works on the subject of Hasidism, Neufeld pays little attention to Hasidism’s original ideas, but instead provides excellent ethnographic material on the contemporary movement. Although the article is not free of criticism, typical of Haskalah writing, especially against the Besht and unnamed “backward” Galician tsaddikim, Neufeld draws attention to positive aspects of the movement, especially its folk nature. This is perhaps the first testimony to the fascination with Hasidism as a movement of the folk in secular Jewish circles of Eastern Europe. Neufeld also saw in Hasidism a Polish version of Jewish Orthodoxy. He believed that Hasidism’s “Polish” character would help with the Polonization of the Jewish people, the fantasy of Polish-Jewish liberals of this type. The new attitude toward Hasidism was therefore connected for Neufeld to a romantic identification with Poland.
Neufeld believed in unifying the various religious groups within Polish Jewry and even went so far as to question the “progressive” camp’s superiority over the Hasidim and Mitnaggdim:
Let the Hasidim worship according to Portuguese [that is, Sephardic] ritual with their Kabbalistic accompaniments; let them designate the time of worship according to their preferences as 8:00 in the morning or as 12:00, let them perform their rites of purification. None of this is in the least prejudicial to religion, morality or social obligations. Who can prove, impartially and with abnegation of his own customs, which of the three liturgies is most pleasing to God? And so, what is the point of mutual persecution and degradation? Enough of these quarrels, of this suspicion of one another, of these unjustified accusations, all of which, after all, bring only suffering to the poor masses and profit for a few charlatans.25
The first result of changed attitudes toward the Hasidic movement was the rapprochement of a group of Warsaw Hasidim under the leadership of the Rebbe of Ger with leading representatives of the integrationist movement, led by Neufeld and Marcus Jastrow. And although after 1864 Neufeld and Jastrow disappeared from public life—arrested or exiled for pro-Polish activity during the 1863–1864 antitsarist uprising—other advocates of the integration retained the most significant points of their program.
So, although Hasidism remained for the integrationists ideologically foreign, it ceased to be a mortal enemy. A gradual rapprochement, at least in matters not affecting fundamental ideological differences, led to a coalition of Hasidim and integrationists in the leadership of the Warsaw Jewish community board and a little later also in Płock. Although such coalitions were dependent on many local factors, they opened a new chapter of relations between integrationists and Hasidism that had been marked by delegitimization and demonization. While, as we recall, there were earlier modernizers who rejected demonization of Hasidism, it was only in the 1860s and 1870s that such views became widespread.
The weekly Izraelita, founded in 1866, perpetuated the ideas of Neufeld’s Jutrzenka, including revolutionary solidarity between Polish Jewish progressives and the Hasidic movement. Despite shifting opinions, Izraelita’s columnists Samuel Henryk Peltyn and Izrael Leon Grosglik, sought common ground on the “Hasidic question.” In a programmatic article, Peltyn established that both Hasidism and Haskalah, appearing at the same historical moment in the eighteenth century, were attempts to revive Judaism from the dessication of the law and were both thus noble movements of religious reform. “Scorning form as a meaningless cover he [the Besht] dug down to the idea pulsating beneath; condemning mechanically following formulae he penetrated into their spirit, caring little for the outer garments with which attempts had been made to clothe this spirit.”26 Unfortunately, a lack of rational tools had forced the Besht to turn to the emotions, and had therefore ended up in mysticism, the Kabbalah, and the Zohar, well-known poisons of the soul. It was then inevitable that this laudable movement of religious reform had degenerated into tsaddikism with all its fatal consequences.
Even the Hebrew press, like Zederbaum’s Ha-Melits, began to reflect these new views of Hasidism. We recall that Zederbaum attacked Ha-Tsefirah for taking too favorable a position on Hasidism. Published from 1862 in Warsaw by the eminent inventor and astronomer Hayim Zelig Słonimski, this periodical did, in fact, display surprisingly moderate views. Although Słonimski himself was at times hostile toward Hasidism—he criticized Eliezer Zweifel’s pro-Hasidic Shalom al Yisrael, for example—Ha-Tsefirah did not publish openly anti-Hasidic articles. David Jaffe from Disna, for example, called in an essay for a just appraisal of the strengths and shortcomings of Hasidism. According to Jaffe, who himself had been a Hasid when he was young, the Hasidim surpassed the Maskilim in many respects: they were more unified, showed magnanimity, and were interested in the affairs of the country. And the fact that the Hasidim traveled once a year to see a holy man “is not a sin after all.”27 Slonimski’s decision to publish such an encomium had a clear purpose: to win over Hasidic readers. So it was that the market won over ideology.
Another publication that marked the turn to a post-Haskalah era was the Viennese monthly Ha-Shahar, published between 1868 and 1884 by Perets Smolenskin (1842–1885). Smolenskin was a product of the Haskalah. In his long novel Hato’eh be-Darkhei ha-Hayim (The Wanderer in the Paths of Life), published in Ha-Shahar in installments, he depicted Hasidism as a movement of ignoramuses and obscurantist materialists. Yet, sensitive to the emerging revaluation of Hasidism, he also presented it as a legitimate popular revolt against excessive rabbinical stringency. Even before the crisis of the Haskalah in the wake of the 1881 pogroms, Smolenskin evolved from Maskil to nationalist and this romantic interpretation of Hasidism pointed ahead to the marriage between neo-Hasidism and Jewish nationalism at the fin de siècle.
The “Science of Judaism”
Together with these journalistic revaluations, nascent Jewish scholarship also confronted the challenge of how to integrate Hasidism into new narratives of Jewish history. These historians belonged to what came to be called the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Science of Judaism”). The most significant historians who addressed Hasidism in the early decades of the Science of Judaism were Peter Beer, Isaac Marcus Jost, and Heinrich Graetz. The Prague Maskil Peter Beer is remembered more as a forerunner than as significant in his own right. In his 1822 study of Jewish sects, Beer placed Hasidism among the Kabbalistic sects in addition to the Pharisees, Rabbinites, and Sabbatians. In an extensive chapter devoted to Hasidism, he describes its beginnings, principal ideas, and social structure, and in an appendix summarizes some of Shivhei ha-Besht. As already mentioned, most of Beer’s information is drawn from Yosef Perl, including Perl’s interpretations, sarcasm, and irony. Isaac Marcus Jost also borrowed from Perl; however, unlike Beer, Jost was a professional historian. So, even though his Geschichte der Israeliten (1828) contains most of the same information as in Perl and Beer, Jost distanced himself from labeling Hasidism as heretical.
The most important historian of the Wissenschaft des Judentums was Heinrich Graetz, a scholar from Breslau (Wrocław), whose History of the Jews became standard reading for anyone interested in the subject well into the twentieth century. Like Mendel Lefin before him, Graetz presented the history of Judaism as a continuous dialectical battle between rational and irrational forces. The current personification of this dispute was “a new Essenism, with forms similar to those of the ancient cult, with ablutions and baths, white garments, miraculous cures, and prophetic visions”28—that is, Hasidism. Graetz recognized Hasidism, like the earliest forms of the Kabbalah, as a historically determined reaction to the development of normative Judaism, in this case to Moses Mendelssohn’s rationalist revolution. At the same time, however, Hasidism was dangerous because it introduced foreign elements into Judaism; “it was sort of Catholicism within Judaism,”29 which led to the formation of a new sect without the Hasidim necessarily intending to do so.
Despite his negative opinion of Hasidism as “un-Jewish,” Graetz described the Besht as a child of nature and a student of folk medicine. This romantic version, according to which Hasidism was a justified revolt against ossified rabbinical formalism, was not original with Graetz, as we have already seen in some of the journalistic writings from the second half of the nineteenth century. It even informed the Maskil and rabbi Abraham Kohn of Lwow in his Letters from Galicia from the 1840s. In subsequent years, Moses Hess, the German Jewish forerunner of Zionism, embraced this image of Hasidism as part of his own idiosyncratic version of Judaism. And, as we shall see in chapter 21, this romantic image of Hasidism stood at the center of the literary movement of neo-Hasidism.
Graetz’s history influenced many other writers. For example, the amateur Warsaw historian Hilary Nussbaum copied Heinrich Graetz in sharply criticizing the Hasidic movement, but he believed too that the germ of positive change lay within it and that Hasidism as a reform movement resembled what Moses Mendelssohn had undertaken in Germany. The convergence observed by Graetz of the Besht’s and Mendelssohn’s period of activity led Nussbaum to the naïve statement that if it had not been for the Besht, Mendelssohn would have appeared in Poland: “then the seeds of education scattered at the same time by Mendelssohn in Germany would find fertile ground in Poland, and instead of the sect of Hasidim and miracle-working tsaddikim, we would have a class of progressive Jews and spiritual, educated leaders.”30
Graetz was also one of the principal inspirations, alongside Leo Tolstoy and Ernest Renan, for Simon Dubnow, the first real historian of Hasidism. Although his History of Hasidism, published simultaneously in Hebrew and German in 1931, is the betterknown work, Dubnow already brought out the first fruits of his research in the Russian-Jewish periodical Voskhod between 1888 and 1893. Dubnow used strikingly rich sources of varying provenance, including numerous Hasidic materials, which allowed him to construct a many-sided picture, which departed significantly from the prevailing conventional narratives of Hasidism. As a result, his History of Hasidism is still one of the most significant interpretations of the movement.
A close companion of the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am and the Hebrew poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Dubnow was a major figure in the turn from liberal integrationism to a form of nonterritorial nationalism. His view of Hasidism flowed from this post-Maskilic ideology. Following in Renan’s footsteps, Dubnow sought ways to appeal to religious figures and movements with the aim of building a new secular Jewish identity. Attempting to strip away the beginnings of Hasidism and its alleged founder from legendary embellishments, Dubnow presented the Besht as a simple and modest man, close to nature, sensitive to the injustices done to simple folk and in revolt against the rigid formalism imposed on Judaism by a rabbinical elite. Dubnow admitted that the Besht had resorted to miracle-working, but this was not a result of his dishonesty, but rather his simplicity. His teachings, unlike the rabbis’ cold scholasticism, were affirmative, antiascetic, and focused on ecstatic spirituality. Thus Dubnow’s Besht, like Renan’s Jesus, fit a contemporary ideal, promoting an egalitarian Jewish culture, based on ethical principles, rather than hyper-intellectualism and exploitation of the poor. Hasidism was a kind of popular revolt against the inequalities in Jewish society and a successful effort to bring back religion to the people. Most importantly, however, in Dubnow’s eyes, Hasidism was a harbinger of Jewish nationalism, thus a direct predecessor and inspiration for his own emerging nationalist ideology.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hasidism was becoming increasingly visible in the writings of the emerging group of Jewish historians in Russia and Poland, some of them nationalists like Dubnow, some still deeply rooted in the integrationist worldview. Together with Dubnow, several other young historians, such as Yuli Gessen and Pesah Marek, published in Russian-Jewish periodicals their articles on aspects of social and political history of Hasidism. At the same time, Dawid Kandel published a series of Polish-language articles on Hasidism in Central Poland and Shmuel Abba Horodezky published his first accounts of Hasidism in Hebrew. Despite methodological shortcomings, these works contributed to the changing reception of Hasidism among liberal, now increasingly secular, Jewish intelligentsia in Poland and Russia.
Hasidism had now become a relic of times past that contemporary man could treat as an ethnographic curiosity, literary subject matter, or the source of new ideologies. One might reconcile a fascination with the movement’s beginnings with condemnation of its current activities. It also made it possible to retain some distance, not requiring an intellectual response to the questions posed by Hasidism’s stubborn existence. The way was now clear for a new appropriation of Hasidism by secular writers and ethnographers to whom we shall turn in chapter 21.
1 Eliezer Tsvi Zweifel, Shalom al Yisrael, ed. Avraham Rubinstein (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 1, 65.
2 Maimon, Autobiography, 175.
3 Menahem Mendel Lefin, “Essai d’un plan de réforme ayant pour objet d’éclairer la nation Juive en Pologne et de redresser par lá ses moeurs,” in Materiały do dziejów Sejmu Czteroletniego, ed. Artur Eisenbach, Jerzy Michalski, Emanuel Rostworowski, and Janusz Wolański (Wrocław, 1969), vol. 6, 410.
4 Jacques Calmanson, Uwagi nad niniejszym stanem Żydów polskichy ich wydoskonaleniem. Z francuskiego przez J[uliana] C[zechowicza] (Warsaw, 1797), 19.
5 Yosef Perl, Uiber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim, ed. Avraham Rubinstein (Jerusalem, 1977), 141–142.
6 “Postęp (Znaczenie święta Paski),” Jutrzenka 3, no. 14 (1863): 134–135.
7 Leopold Lubelski, “Wybryki Chassydów w Kaliszu,” Jutrzenka 2, no. 16 (1862): 125.
8 Efraim Fishl Fischelsohn, “Teyator fun khsidim,” Historishe Shriftn fun YIVO 1 (1929): 658.
9 Ozeasz Ludwik Lubliner, Obrona Żydów zamieszkałych w krajach polskich od niesłusznych zarzutów i fałszywych oskarżeń (Bruxella, 1858), 10, 24.
10 Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel, ed. Taylor, 21–22.
11 Tsvi Hirsch Eichentsein of Zhidachov, Yalkut Ateret Tsvi (Brooklyn, 2001), vol. 1, 114.
12 Fischelsohn, “Teyator fun khsidim,” 645–694.
13 Jakub Tugendhold, Obrona Izraelitów, czyli odpowiedź dana przez Rabbi Manasse ben Izrael uczonemu i dostojnemu Anglikowi na kilka jego zapytań względem niektórych zarzutów Izraelitom czynionych (Warsaw, 1831), XXIII–XXIV.
14 Max Weinreich, “Mendele-dokumentn,” YIVO Bleter 10 (1936): 365.
15 Undated letter from Marcus Jastrow to Jacob Raisin in the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Marcus Jastrow Biographical Notes, 26.
16 Zweifel, Shalom al Yisrael, 20–22. Translation in Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston (Portland, OR, 2002), 311.
17 Cited in Gloria Wiederkehr-Pollack, Eliezer Zweifel and the Intellectual Defense of Hasidism (Hoboken, NJ, 1995), 216.
18 Moshe Menahem Walden, Ohel Yitshak (Piotrków 1914), no. 135, 55.
19 Walden, Nifla’ot ha-Rabbi, no. 41, 14b.
20 Likkutei Halakhot (Zolkiew 1848), vol. 3, Orah Hayim, Hilkhot Shabbat, no. 5, sec. 15; cited in Khaim Liberman, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 6 (1951): 300.
21 Yoets Kim Kadish, Siah Sarfei Kodesh (Łódź: 1931), vol. 5, 105, sec. 8.
22 AGAD, CWW 1871, 65–69; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 11.42.
23 Isaac Ber Levinsohn, Yalkut Ribal (Warsaw, 1878), 72.
24 Jutrzenka 2, no. 46 (1862): 381.
25 Daniel Neufeld, “Urządzenie Konsystorza Żydowskiego w Polsce. VII. Gmina” Jutrzenka 2, no. 40 (1862): 329.
26 Samuel H. Peltyn, “Chassydyzm, jego istota i stosunek do rabinizmu,” Izraelita 3, no. 24 (1868): 193–194; no. 25, 201–202; no. 27, 217–219.
27 David Jaffe, “Disna” [letter], Ha-Tsefirah 7, no. 4 (1880): 28–29.
28 Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1956), vol. 5, 374.
29 Ibid., vol. 5, 382.
30 Hilary Nussbaum, Szkice historyczne z Życia Żydów w Warszawie od pierwszych śladów pobytu ich w tym mieście do chwili obecnej (Warsaw, 1881), 121.
