THE STATE AND PUBLIC OPINION
FROM ITS EARLIEST MANIFESTATIONS, Hasidism’s critics attacked it as a threat to the state. Maskilim like Jacques Calmanson warned civil authorities and Christian public opinion that the hold of the tsaddikim over their followers might have disastrous political consequences:
It should undoubtedly be expected that the authorities will undertake immediate and effective measures to put a check on the further spread of such a dangerous sect.… Why should not the country in which this reptile breeds, and not only Jews, fear its ferocity if there is no resolute dam to the attacks of folly of these dazzled zealots?1
From the very earliest phases of this conflict, the confrontation between Hasidism and its opponents involved appeals to governmental intervention. Governmental authorities were fully aware that Hasidism was also a political phenomenon. As the chief of police in Lwow, Leopold Johann Nepomuk von Sacher wrote in 1838: “[Hasidism] seems to possess not only a religious, but also a political dimension”2
First Encounters
Although the Hasidim consistently defined themselves in social and religious rather than political terms, they defended their interests in the political arena as well as asserted their vision of Jewish life in the modern state. Hasidic politics were not only a matter of necessity but also flowed from the idea of the tsaddik as responsible for the material and social well-being of his Hasidim, a theology that might have political consequences.
At first, the Hasidim, like other traditional Jews, did not see the Habsburg and Russian states, which inherited most of the Jewish population after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as essentially different from medieval or early modern states. Tsadok ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) argued that modern states were nothing but new manifestations of the four typological kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. As late as the early twentieth century, Hayim Eleazar Shapira of Munkatsh asserted that all the Christian nations among whom the Jews of Europe lived were collectively the Kingdom of Edom for whose destruction the Jews pray in the Birkat ha-Minim, a traditional prayer that curses heretics.
However, many Hasidic leaders soon came to recognize that something new was afoot. As they grappled with the modern bureaucratic state, they developed a kind of modern politics, based initially on early modern shtadlanut (intercession), but soon adopted new techniques. One might call this new kind of politics “defensive modernization”—that is, the adoption of modern political tactics by traditionalists to defend against the encroachments of the modern world. As we shall see in this chapter, both state policy toward Hasidism and Hasidism’s reaction to the state were critical in defining the character of the movement throughout the long nineteenth century.
Hasidism did not interest either the administration or public opinion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of its existence. The first and only voice to speak of Hasidism during the period of the Great Sejm, 1788–1792, was the pamphlet by a Maskil, Menahem Mendel Lefin, discussed in chapter 18. Despite its apocalyptic tone and its powerful patron—Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski—Lefin’s publication passed virtually without notice. Tadeusz Czacki, the Polish politician and author engaged in reform of the Jewish population, in his 1807 Tractate on Jews and Karaites, explained the attitude of the government of Poland-Lithuania toward Hasidism in the following words: “It was expected in the Polish government that the Hasidim would soon die out if nobody asked about them.”3
Neither did the Hasidim themselves pay much attention to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Insofar as they did take note of it—and most of the evidence comes from after its demise—their attitude appears to have been positive. According to Hasidic tradition, Pinhas of Korets (1728–1790), a disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov, was a passionate supporter of the Commonwealth, which he saw as the best place for Jews to live. He supposedly remarked:
It was the Jews who dwelt in Germany who suffered the bitterest exile of all, for no Jew is permitted to remain there without a prawo (special permit) nor to keep more than one of his children with him in the country. And all this is so, because the Jews [in Germany] are indistinguishable from the Gentiles in their dress and speech. Exile in the land of Ishmael [Turkey] is not as bitter as in Germany, because Jews there are at least distinguished by language, though not by dress. However, in Poland where both their clothing and language are different, the exile is less bitter than anywhere else.4
Hasidic legend attributes great significance to Pinhas’s political position, although the legend may have little basis in history. We are told that after the death of King August III, the Saxon, Pinhas went to see the Maggid, Dov Ber of Mezritsh, to seek his advice about who should become the new ruler of Poland-Lithuania. After a long debate and discussion of various candidates, the tsaddikim agreed that the only suitable person would be Prince Stanisław Poniatowski. So it came to pass that with the miraculous intervention of the tsaddikim, this unknown prince was elected King of Poland.
After the election of Stanisław Poniatowski as king of Poland, Pinhas allegedly addressed the specter of the planned partition of the Commonwealth by Russia, Austria, and Prussia. About Russia, he said: “No one before me had ever stepped into such filth. For had anyone trudged in filth such as this, he would have drowned.”5 Against the threat of Russian annexation, Hasidic legend claimed that as long as Nahman of Horodenka was on Polish soil, no earthly power could threaten the country. However, the moment that Nahman left Poland for the Holy Land, Russian forces crossed the Dniester and threatened Polish independence. Pinhas decided to prevent this. He set off for Zasław in Volhynia, where he held a Sabbath service. Everyone found the visit strange, given that Pinhas had never been there before. Twenty years later, just before his death, Pinhas revealed that his prayers at the Zasław synagogue had prevented the Russians from attacking Poland at that time, and if he could have lived for another two years, he would have completely destroyed Russia, Prussia, and France. But, says the legend, since Pinhas died in 1790, Russia and Prussia carried out the second partition of Poland three years later. This retrospective legend, whose origins were after the partitions of Poland, preserves a nostalgic memory of the Commonwealth and the supposedly miraculous role of Hasidism in attempting to preserve it.
After the final dismantling of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the states that succeeded it—Prussia, Austria (Habsburg Empire), Russia, and, after 1807, the Duchy of Warsaw—were as indifferent to internal Jewish matters, including the Hasidim, as had been the old Commonwealth. The new regimes were engulfed in various crises, including three great European wars up until 1815, so that the new Jewish “sect” was hardly on their radar. Considering how little the elites of European society knew about the Jews in general, these governments had insufficient information about the Hasidism from which to develop a coherent policy.
This marginal interest in Hasidism was true not only in the initial stages of the partition but also throughout the long nineteenth century, even if, as we shall see, the dynamics varied between Austria, Russia, and the Kingdom of Poland. The result was that most nineteenth-century policies toward Hasidism, very much like policies toward Jews in general, resulted from short-term, often accidental measures with little thought to their long-term consequences. In place of comprehensive strategies, we find localized reactions of bureaucrats, ministers, governors down to mayors and gendarmes, often motivated by inertia, ignorance, and self-interest. The Maskil Jan Glücksberg wrote that representatives of the Polish administration, instead of trying to reflect the reality of daily life in the law, used the law as yet another instrument of anti-Jewish harassment and personal enrichment. Some officials considered the Jews an easy source of bribes, while some others, overburdened with convoluted legal regulations, avoided any kind of intervention, letting matters follow their own course. In addition to this, formulation of a rational policy on Hasidism was bedeviled by the xenophobia, prejudices, and stereotypes that bureaucrats harbored about the Jewish population as a whole. As a result, state policies typically failed to understand the specific nature of Hasidism.
The Jewish historical narrative has traditionally interpreted such attitudes and resultant actions as an expression of hostile policies by East European governments who persecuted the Jewish masses, represented by the Hasidic movement. However, even if anti-Jewish prejudice was a factor affecting the behavior of many officials toward Hasidism (as well as toward other Jews), it never became official policy, either in Poland or Russia, let alone in the Habsburg Empire. The rigid legalism and paternalistic arrogance that the Hasidim faced differed little from what other underprivileged groups encountered, and usually had no specific anti-Hasidic character. Thus, although it is hard to call the authorities’ policies toward Hasidism benevolent, they were not particularly anti-Hasidic either. Indeed, as we shall see, the authorities in the different states with large Hasidic populations often refused on the grounds of religious toleration to acquiesce to demands by the Maskilim to suppress Hasidism.
The Habsburg Empire
The oldest known ruling by the Austrian authorities—indeed by any non-Jewish authorities—on the subject of Hasidism dates from August 8, 1788, sixteen years after the Austrian annexation of Galicia. A directive sent from the Imperial Chancellery to the district authorities in Rzeszów set the tone for much of subsequent policy: “Hasidim or pious Jews cannot be persecuted, because the law of toleration of the Mosaic religion also applies to them.”6 After the third partition of Poland in 1795 and the incorporation of a section of Central Poland, the Austrian government launched a series of investigations of Hasidism in both Galicia and Central Poland. In January 1798, the authorities of Sandomierz district took an interest in “how Hasidim differ from other Jews,”7 although the cause of this interest remains unknown. In August 1798, the same authorities began an investigation into a conflict between a Hasidic ritual slaughterer and a rabbi, and the resulting boycott of kosher meat in Połaniec, also in the Sandomierz district. The conflict, instigated by the kahal’s imposition of a candle tax on Hasidic slaughterers and leaseholders, did not lead to an investigation of Hasidism itself (although the official leading the investigation did point out negative Hasidic practices), but rather the financial and administrative violations committed by those who were the subjects of the complaint. The Habsburg authorities consistently refused to investigate Hasidism as such; they were interested only in whether Hasidim, as individuals and not as Hasidim, might have violated civil, criminal, or fiscal laws.
In 1798, an imperial decree for the lands of the third Austrian partition (so-called Western Galicia) allowed for the establishment of private prayer houses, which it called miniam (instead of minyan), on condition that they pay a yearly fee of 25 florins. Its direct model was the analogous decree for Eastern Galicia issued by Emperor Francis II in 1792, which in turn was an updated version of the Emperor Joseph’s minyan law of 1788. None of these decrees specified whether it included Hasidim, or even mentioned them, but the decrees are probably evidence of the emergence of the Hasidic shtibl (see the discussion of the shtibl in chapter 16). Austrian imperial decrees aimed to regulate the establishment of Jewish private houses of prayer—as it had done with all other private prayer houses—so as to reduce conflicts, but the decree had the paradoxical effect of increasing the number of Jewish institutions outside the control of the kahal. As was typical of Habsburg taxation policy, annual charges for running the shtibl had to be submitted to the treasury with the declared goal of the future financing of state Jewish schools, although these never came to pass in Western Galicia. Thus the Hasidic community was able to avoid paying taxes to the kahal. The basis for applying this law to the Hasidic community seems not to have been clear to the provincial authorities, since the following year they reversed themselves by ruling that Hasidic prayer meetings should take place in community synagogues.
Also in 1798, the anti-Hasidic works Sefer Viku’ah and Kiverot ha-Ta’avah by the Mitnagged/Maskil Israel Löbel of Slutsk arrived in Galicia (on Löbel, see chapters 3 and 18). The books reached the office of the censor of Hebrew books in Lwow, Herz Homberg, who admitted that although they did not break any censorship laws, owing to their anti-Hasidic character, they could lead to social unrest; hence the final decision should be taken by higher authorities. The provincial office passed on the matter to Vienna, and there the trail goes cold. The rejection of Löbel’s subsequent appeals suggest that the distribution of his books had been banned, and his assertion that he had had an audience with the Emperor Francis II and that “meetings of this sect were forbidden on pain of severe penalty,”8 was pure invention.
Galician officialdom revisited the Hasidic issue at least twice more in 1799, but over the next few years the number of official investigations into Hasidism fell dramatically, which can be explained by the wars with which Austria was preoccupied. It was only in 1814, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, that isolated local investigations into Hasidism reappeared, while the provincial and central authorities began to be more acutely aware of the phenomenon. In reply to a query by the district authorities in Zlotshev, the Imperial Chancellery confirmed that the principle of religious toleration extended to Hasidism too. Also in 1814, the Vienna censor’s office ordered particular attention to be paid to Hasidic books, which may have been appearing outside the censor’s control (see chapter 17 for a discussion of book censorship). Two years later, when a herem was placed by persons unknown on the Maskilim in Lwow, thus violating state law against religious bans, the provincial authorities recognized that the culprits might be Hasidim, who thus needed careful watching.
The result of this increasing attention was a series of regulations and accompanying government actions in 1823–1824. On August 23, 1823, the Austrian authorities adopted a new law about minyanim, now placing on them the same restrictions that for a long time had applied to Christian houses of prayer. Permission to create such private prayer congregations was limited to those not suspected of “religious enthusiasm” (Religionsschwärmerei), and to those who, on account of ill health, age, or distance, were unable to attend the local synagogue. In October of the same year, the Maskil Yehudah Leib Mieses approached the authorities in Galicia with a request to recognize Hasidism as a form of religious enthusiasm and to forbid it setting up its own houses of prayer. The authorities rejected the request, claiming that the law did not define any Jewish sect as a form of religious enthusiasm and thus the principle could not be extended to Hasidism. Moreover, and crucially for how we should understand Hasidism generally, the officials ruled that the Hasidim were not a sect at all and were no more harmful than other Jews.
The definitive statement of toleration of Hasidism was the law that the government adopted on April 4, 1824. The decree assumed that the Jewish religion was tolerated in the Austrian Empire, so the state would interfere only in areas defined by the law—for instance, in the election of rabbis, the construction of synagogues, the organization of cemeteries, and so on. Since “there are no differences between the so-called Pietists [that is, Hasidim] and the rest of the tolerated Jews, except with respect to prayer, however this difference has no more influence on the state than do their fasting, wall knocking, and similar customs,”9 the principle of religious toleration was extended to them too. Therefore, the activities of the Hasidim were permitted unless they broke the law.
However, despite this clear statement of toleration, when the authorities on the local level dealt with Hasidism, they were often more hostile. An example of such abusive official behavior beset by incompetence was when the Galician authorities decided between 1826 and 1829 to again investigate Hasidism, this time under the influence of Yosef Perl’s attempt to publish an anti-Hasidic pamphlet, Sefer Viku’ah. A list of fifteen Hasidic leaders provided by the provincial authorities contained names that were so mangled as to be unrecognizable (for example, Suszentanepoler instead of Zusya of Hanipoli), and of the fifteen, fourteen were no longer alive and thirteen had never lived in the territory of the Habsburg Empire.
An illustration of typical anti-Hasidic action on the local level was what happened in Jasło in 1824. The local district authorities had come into the possession of information representing Hasidism as an antisocial sect, plotting the death of Christians and non-Hasidic Jews, and following seditious leaders. The police arrested the Hasidim at their synagogues in Dukla and Żmigród, and also confiscated their books with the aim of checking their potentially harmful contents. Justifying his actions, the district commissioner referred to the prohibition on forming sects, as well as the prohibition on religious enthusiasm. After a complaint by Naftali Tsvi Horowitz of Ropshits, the provincial authorities reminded the district commissioner in Jasło that the authorities could intervene only if the Hasidim broke the law.
That same year, Tsvi Elimelekh of Dinov was arrested in Hussaków and accused of illegally collecting money. A similar incident took place in Mosty Wielkie. Tsvi Hirsh Eichenstein of Zhidachov as well as Meir of Premishlan were also arrested on a number of occasions. These arrests may well have been the result of prejudice on the part of certain officials about the alleged fanatical character of Hasidism as harmful to the state. For instance, in 1838, the chief of police in Lwow, Leopold Sacher, described in a lengthy report the threat posed to the state by Hasidic leaders: “The rules, even if absurd, on which the Hasidim depend with their bodies and souls, might counteract the objectives of the state administration and spread among the Jews superstition and fanaticism instead of enlightenment.”10 Adhering to the principle of toleration helped to spread this dangerous movement and it should be abandoned, claimed Sacher. Nevertheless, despite this and similar voices, religious toleration remained the foundational principle of the Austrian Empire’s policies toward Hasidism, even if it fell victim at times to bureaucratic caprice.
The 1848 revolutions swept away old restrictions, but did not lead to the full emancipation of the Jews. Judaism remained merely a “tolerated” religion, which meant that Hasidism’s formal status did not change. Only the 1867 constitution that created the dual Austro-Hungarian Empire removed the remaining restrictions, emancipating the Jews, and so the Hasidim gained equal status with every other religious group.
Russia
Between 1772 and 1795, the Russian Empire annexed the Lithuanian, White Russian (Belarus), and Ukrainian territories of the former Poland-Lithuania, which included most of the oldest Hasidic communities. Even though Hasidism rapidly spread to the west and northwest into Galicia and Central Poland (which after 1815 also came under Russian control as the Kingdom of Poland), major Hasidic centers remained in what the Russians came to define as the “Pale of Settlement” (see chapter 10). Unlike the Austrian bureaucrats, who were obsessed with regulating every aspect of life, the Russian approach was more hands-off. Nevertheless, the first investigations into Hasidism appeared as early as the eighteenth century, before Russia had even managed to formulate a Jewish policy in the lands newly acquired from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. To a certain extent, the Russian authorities were forced into action by the conflict between the Hasidim and the Mitnaggdim, whose main battleground was Vilna, which was in Russian hands after 1795. The arrest and interrogation of Shneur Zalman of Liady provided the first government inquiry into Hasidism (see the discussion in chapter 3 on opposition and chapter 5 on Chabad).
This initial inquiry may have contributed to the formulation of the principles of Russian policy toward the Jewish population. In the Statute on the Status of the Jews, adopted in 1804, paragraph 53, stated: “If in any place there arises a separation of sects and a split occurs in which one group does not want to be in a synagogue with the other group, then it is possible for one of them to build its own synagogue and select its own rabbis.”11 The document does not actually mention the Hasidim, but as in Austria and Poland, it was almost certainly a response to the emergence of the Hasidic shtibl. As in those countries, this was an expression of a more general government policy of support for forces weakening the unity of the Jewish local community. The Russian government’s strategy toward Hasidism was thus in principle broad toleration, but not unqualified support. It was reluctant to become involved in Jewish internal quarrels, but was also hampered by the bureaucratic inertia.
The initial Hasidic responses to Russian rule varied. Some, such as Pinhas of Korets, as we have seen, were hostile, or, at least, later legends about Pinhas used him to express anti-Russian sentiments. Others, though, were more favorable. For example, at the end of the 1790s, the Jewish inhabitants of Kamenets, in the Hasidic cradle of Podolia, who had been expelled from their town by the Polish authorities in 1750, noted in the record book of the local burial society that “the Jews were destined to come under the auspices of the mighty and great Tsar of justice and mercy, Pavel Petrovich.… The Tsar granted the Jews [permission] to return to the place of their previous residence and to dwell anywhere they saw fit. And the previous authorities vanished like the mist.”12
The positive responses intensified during the Napoleonic Wars. From the perspective of traditional Jews, Napoleon’s army carried the European Enlightenment in its wagon trains and Russia was therefore the primary bulwark against modernity. Tradition attributed to Shneur Zalman of Liady unequivocally anti-Napoleonic and pro-Russian sentiments. This too was the view of Nahman of Bratslav, who intuited the danger of the European Enlightenment for the Jews.
Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825–1855, overturned the relative policy of toleration from the reigns of the Emperors Paul and Alexander I. Nicholas’s policies reflected his simplistic military view of the world, faith in police methods, and recourse to stereotypes and prejudices. As for the Hasidim, Nicholas had the worst opinion of them and believed that they committed ritual murder, a subject to which we will return. Nevertheless, Russia’s tolerant policy toward Hasidism remained largely intact for quite a while, probably because Nicholas spent little time on issues as marginal as Jewish “sects.” The arrest of Dov Ber Schneersohn in 1825, accused of antigovernmental activities, was probably the result of a denunciation, not a change in policy.
A good example of this approach was an investigation into Jewish printing shops. We have seen in chapter 17 that even when most publishers of Jewish books were shut down, the porous borders made it possible to smuggle them in from abroad. In 1833, Aleksander I. Sawicki, a geometry teacher at the Volhynian Lyceum in Krzemieniec (Volhynia), and two Jewish printers, Leib Mikhel and Ya’akov Berenstein, petitioned the minister of internal affairs, Prince Dmitri Nikolayevich Bludov, stating that illegal Hasidic publications were flooding the western provinces of the Empire. A search of all books owned by Jews was to be carried out and non-Hasidic books were to be stamped, Hasidic books destroyed, and all Jewish presses in Poland and Russia liquidated, replaced by three licensed printing houses in Zhitomir, Brest-Litovsk, and Shklov.
A governmental investigation turned up anti-Hasidic reports by Maskilim from Vilna, including the censor, Wolf Tugendhold, whose brother Jakub Tugendhold, the Warsaw censor, was at the same time defending the Hasidim. The authorities eventually came to the conclusion that they needed to extend control over all Jewish books, and in 1836 Jewish printing houses in Russia were closed, with the exception of two (not three, as was suggested) in Vilna and Zhitomir. However, this action should not be interpreted as specifically anti-Hasidic. Although the investigation began with an anti-Hasidic denunciation, the government was motivated more by the desire to control book publication altogether.
An important and in some ways symbolic event for Nicholas’s policies was an investigation beginning in 1836 into Israel of Ruzhin, accused of colluding in the murder of two Jewish informers in Ushits, Podolia (see chapter 11). After Israel spent three and a half years in jail, the charges were dropped. Following a period of wandering, Israel fled Russia and settled in Bukovina in the Austrian Empire. While the investigation of Israel had anti-Hasidic dimensions (the role of the tsaddik, for instance, was a major topic), the actual case focused more on discovering a plot against the lives of the murdered informers, not on Hasidism as such.
Nonetheless, the case managed to turn just about every Hasidic group, even those far beyond Russia’s borders, against the Russian state. The result was not only Israel’s flight from Russia to the Habsburg Empire but also a long-lasting hatred on the part of the Ruzhin/Sadagora dynasties and a great many other Hasidim toward Russia. The Galician tsaddik, Shalom of Belz, supposedly went blind in one eye weeping over Israel of Ruzhin’s misfortune. Menahem Mendel of Kotzk praised Israel for “subduing the powers of the kelippah (the demonic forces)—the well-known evil king who reigned at the time”13—that is, for opposing Tsar Nicholas I’s demonic power. Hasidic folklore added a rich layer of legend by describing a battle between the two giants—Tsar Nicholas I and Rabbi Israel—as a cosmic conflict between evil and good:
It was said that the Tsar nurtured a fierce personal enmity toward the Ruzhiner and persecuted him. The government ministers were amazed and once asked Nicholas: “Why are you persecuting the Ruzhiner? Is it appropriate for a great monarch like yourself to devote his life to chasing a despicable Jew?” Nicolas jumped up and angrily shouted: “What do you mean ‘a despicable Jew’? I spend my life twisting the world one way, and he twists it the other way, and I can’t get the better of him!”14
Hasidic imagination greatly inflated importance of the Ushits case for the Russian authorities, but it is possible that it did contribute to the rising awareness of the existence and importance of Hasidism on the side of the Russian administration and, fueled by Nicholas I’s phobias, contributed to the increase in the number of anti-Hasidic investigations, especially in the final years of his reign. For example, as the result of a denunciation, between 1841 and 1847, the tsarist secret police kept Menahem Mendel Schneersohn of Chabad-Lubavitch under surveillance. It is hard to understand the interest of the tsarist police in a tsaddik with decidedly pro-Russian views and a moderately positive attitude toward the government policy of reform of Jewish society, except as the consequence of paranoia on the part of the regime.
In 1843, a denunciation in Kiev Province focused the authorities’ interest on tsaddikim of the Chernobyl dynasty. During 1846–1847, a series of investigations was conducted in the Volhynia and Kiev provinces into the tsaddikim in those areas on the basis of a report by one Abraham Kuperband, who denounced Ya’akov Yosef of Ostróg and the three sons of Mordechai of Chernobyl: Nahum of Makarov, Avraham of Trisk, and David of Vasilikov (and later of Talne). During the course of the investigation, a letter was found on Ya’akov Yosef from Avraham of Trisk supposedly planning an assassination of the tsar; however, this letter turned out to be a forgery produced by Kuperband. So, the tsaddikim were released and Kuperband arrested.
From 1851 to 1853, an investigation into Hasidism by the authorities in Minsk Province produced the following scathing conclusion: “The ‘Kitajowcy’ [men of silk] (or skokuny [jumpers], Hasidim) [… are] stubborn enemies of Christianity; their sect comes from the Pharisees who criticized Christ. In everything it does it is hostile not only to Christianity, but also to other Jews.”15 The governor general of the Belarusian provinces, Pavel Nikolaievich Ignatyev, carried on a parallel investigation with information provided by Moses Berlin, a Maskil with the status of “learned Jew” (an official advisor on Jewish affairs to the provincial authorities). In 1853, Berlin drew up a report titled The History of Hasidism, which was influential in government circles. Ignatyev sent Berlin’s report, together with his own critical comments on Hasidism—and especially Menahem Mendel Schneersohn—to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Jewish Committee, under the auspices of the same ministry, soon recommended that Hasidism be tightly controlled and “that special measures be taken to prevent illegal gatherings called by the tsaddikim.”16 At the beginning of 1854, the tsar approved the first anti-Hasidic directive based on Berlin’s report. This action was part and parcel of the restrictive policies during Nicholas’s last years but was also the result of a confluence of forces rarely seen elsewhere.
With the death of Nicholas I in 1855, a Hasidic campaign denouncing Moses Berlin and Governor General Ignatyev’s departure from the Pale of Settlement (he was promoted to St. Petersburg) together brought about an end to this anti-Hasidic measure. However, relations between the government and Hasidim did not improve significantly even after the accession of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II. The machinery of denunciation, social conflict, and administrative intervention, set in motion over the preceding years, could not easily be dismantled. Liberal Jews, expecting enlightened reforms, became even more hostile to the forces of backwardness, especially the Hasidim. In addition, the crisis of Jewish communal institutions, precipitated by Nicholas I’s policies, loosened social controls and denunciations to the government became rampant, since successful informers were paid substantial rewards. As the Yiddish memoirist Yehezkel Kotik wrote: “In those days there was almost no town without its informer.”17 And so it was that, between 1857 and 1858, the authorities launched an investigation, instigated by anonymous informers, into the tsaddik Avraham Twersky of Trisk. A year later, in 1859, as the result of a denunciation by a certain Binshtok, the governor general of the Ukrainian provinces ordered an inquiry into the antigovernment and antieducation activities of the Hasidim and their leaders. Reports from local authorities corroborated some of the charges.
In the summer of 1864, the authorities conducted an investigation into David of Talne triggered by a report by “progressive Jews” in Biała Cerkiew, which described visits by David to their town and his alleged abuses during these visits: riots, money extortions, social disorder, and more. In November 1865, the governor general responded to these denunciations by prohibiting tsaddikim from leaving their places of residence. This directive, known as the Tsaddikim Decree, was reissued in 1885 and was in force until 1896, when it was finally rescinded. The thirty-year life of this decree undoubtedly had a major impact on the history of Hasidism in Ukraine during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Although tsaddikim were able to circumvent its stipulations by bribes, or trips for supposed health reasons, it definitely affected their mobility, an important element in a geographically dispersed movement. It is possible that this measure played a role in the decrease in support for Hasidism in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, although it was applied solely in Ukraine, and perhaps only in Kiev Province or even just to the Twersky dynasty. From the government’s point of view, the decree was a moderate measure, adopted in place of harsher ones, such as imprisonment or exile. The central government generally avoided such measures, since it could antagonize the followers of Hasidism and create martyrs. Moreover, in the later part of the century, the Russian government began to consider Hasidism as a possible conservative ally working against revolutionary movements.
The Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland)
“Not only Maskilim, assimilationists calling themselves ‘Poles’ … but even Hasidim, strictly observant Orthodox, devout Jews observing the religious laws and commandments—they are all Polish patriots,”18 observed a nineteenth-century Jewish memoirist from Lithuania. Of course, often the pro-Polish opinions expressed among representatives of the traditional Jewish community originated from concepts of “Polishness” and the “Polish state” very far from those nurtured by the non-Jewish majority. Still, contrary to the erroneous assumptions of Russian bureaucratic opinion, as well as later historiography, sympathy for Poland and its yearning for independence was surprisingly common in traditional Jewish circles in nineteenth-century Poland, including the Hasidim.
For some Hasidim (and other traditional Jews), the resurrection of the Polish state promised to bring back the legal and political framework of Jewish autonomy from the premodern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For others, pro-Polish leanings were simply a reaction to the oppressive tsarist regime, commonly associated with all the calamities the modern state had brought on the Jewish community. For still others, pro-Polish attitudes were entangled in messianic and mystical concepts. According to a rabbi-informer Avraham Hersh Rozynes, the local Hasidim in Będzin, in Central Poland, especially followers of the tsaddikim of Ger and Sadagora, possessed and studied “secret books where it is written that as long as the Russian Empire exists, the Messiah they are expecting cannot come, … but when the Kingdom of Poland begins to stir, this will be the great sign that the Messiah is nigh.”19
This anti-Hasidic denunciation finds confirmation in a fascinating document coming from the court of Ger, in which the expansion and future defeat of the Russian Empire are interpreted in apocalyptic terms as a rise and fall of the demonic powers. Salvation was synonymous with the defeat of the Evil Empire. As another nineteenth-century tsaddik, Shmuel Abba of Żychlin (1809–1879), declared:
It [that is, the rebirth of Poland] touches very directly on the salvation of Israel, for it is known that Poland has great merit before God, may he be blessed, since it accepted Israel with open arms after expulsions from Germany and other lands. Therefore, they deserve the reward of having a state once again, before the general salvation of all the children of Israel, with the coming of the Messiah speedily and in our time.20
Other leading Polish tsaddikim such as Menahem Mendel of Kotzk and Hanokh Henikh of Aleksander were all known critics of the tsarist regime and supporters of the Polish yearning for independence. According to Hasidic tradition, Yitshak Meir Alter participated in organizing a national loan on behalf of the Polish Uprising government in 1831 and felt personally threatened by its defeat, fleeing with other tsaddikim to Brody, in the Habsburg Empire. He was also involved in improving Polish-Jewish relations during the period leading to the next national uprising of 1863.
Such pro-Polish leanings were not limited to the Hasidic leadership, but were nurtured by some rank-and-file Hasidim. A nineteenth-century Jewish memoirist remarked that: “Even the Hasidim, who speak broken Polish, are total Polish patriots, and are loyal to their pact with this nation, with whom they have stood in sorrow and captivity, the captivity of Russia.”21 Yekhezkel Kotik gives an account in his memoir of a follower of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, the only Kotzk Hasid living in Kotik’s town of Kamieniec, as an ardent supporter of the Polish Uprising of 1863–1864. As evidence of the pro-Polish sentiments of Hasidism, during the uprising, provincial authorities watched tsaddikim with special vigilance and considered prohibiting them from leaving their place of residence. As proof of their traitorous inclinations, informers claimed that the sermons of these tsaddikim spread Polish national aspirations.
The Kingdom of Poland, the quasi-autonomous part of the Russian Empire state that was closest to embodying Polish statehood in the nineteenth century, did not reciprocate these positive feelings displayed by so many Hasidim toward Poland. Neither was it better than the Russian or Habsburg administration in recognizing Hasidism as a distinct phenomenon, just as it was quite ignorant of the Jewish community as a whole. Here, too, bureaucratic indolence mixed with prejudice. The incompetent and poorly prepared bureaucracy was unable to handle a new phenomenon, even when it had long ceased to be new and indeed figured prominently in the conflicts within the Jewish community, complaints about which reached government bodies almost daily.
The “new sect” of Hasidim emerged for the first time in governmental investigations in 1817 around the issue of Hasidic prayer houses, or, more precisely, whether to extend the Austrian minyan law of 1798, since the lands of the Austrian third partition became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815 and the Austrian civil law still applied in those provinces. After some deliberation, the government decided that since the constitution ensured freedom of rite to any denomination, private minyanim ought to be authorized free of any charge. The Kingdom of Poland thus adopted the same rule of toleration as the Habsburg Empire, at least for territories of former Austrian rule.
Not until 1823–1824 did the realization that Hasidism was an important component of Polish Jewry penetrate the minds of the bureaucrats. The most distinguished among them, Stanisław Staszic and Józef Zajączek, attempted to link government politics concerning Hasidism with the broader issue known as the Jewish Question—namely, the plans to “civilize” the Jews of Poland. On September 20, 1823, the gendarmerie commander in Parczew sent to Viceroy Zajączek a report regarding what he considered as illegal gatherings of Hasidim. The report initiated the kingdom’s largest and most important investigation into Hasidism, including reports from a number of mayors, district commissions, the Warsaw Jewish Community Board, and the Committee for Censorship of Hebrew Books and Periodicals. Based on those opinions, in February 1824 the ministry and the viceroy issued a decree rendering Hasidic prayer halls illegal.
The decision triggered a series of protests submitted to the ministry and the viceroy’s office by several influential Hasidim. These led to additional investigations, which concluded that “the Jewish sect of Hasidim, or Kitajowców, did not hold any principles that were against good custom, and only wished to have their own separate synagogues, to distinguish themselves from other Jews.”22 Therefore, “there is not the least need to persecute [the Hasidim].”23 As had happened previously and elsewhere, what started as a hostile investigation concluded that Hasidism could be tolerated and should enjoy full freedom of religious assembly. The investigation was a turning point in the history of Polish Hasidism, since it resulted in granting the movement fully legal status. Hasidism had become the only Jewish group whose freedom of meeting was specifically guaranteed by the state. This explicit writ of toleration set the direction of political relations between the Hasidic movement and the kingdom’s authorities for the years to come.
At the same time, the authorities pressed forward with efforts to “reform” the Jews. They established an officially sanctioned Rabbinical School in Warsaw to promote Enlightenment. The Hasidim reacted vigorously against this threat. Yitshak of Vurke, the most illustrious of the Hasidic shtadlanim (singular: shtadlan; a traditional lobbyist or intercessor) of the time, whom we met in chapter 12, vigorously opposed attempts by the government to use the graduates of this school to undermine traditional rabbinical authority.
Yet initiatives to reform the Jews faded rapidly with the deaths in 1826 of Viceroy Zajączek and of Stanisław Staszic, the leading politician promoting reform and, later, with the antitsarist uprising of 1830–1831. After 1831, the authorities initiated no actions against Hasidism, even though the movement figured with increasing frequency in reports and in the investigations resulting from these reports. In fact, Congress Poland abandoned any pretense of having a Hasidic policy at all. Shorn of its ambitions for reform, the state now confined itself to tax collection, military recruitment, and policing.
Once the state had abandoned its plans for reform of the Jews, the issue of Hasidism became marginal. The government was simply not interested in which liturgy Jews used, as long as it was not hostile to the state, and the prayer book had been approved by the censor. It likewise did not care where Hasidim prayed or which ritual slaughterer the Jews used, as long as they paid all appropriate taxes. The state was also indifferent to pilgrimages to the tsaddikim, provided that such travel did not lead to social disturbances, illegal gatherings, or antistate activities. The only case when pilgrimages to a tsaddik were actually banned concerned those to Menahem Mendel of Kotzk for Rosh Hashanah in 1852. Cholera was rife that summer, and the government feared that such a large gathering “from communities near and far of about 5,000 people”24 could cause the spread of disease. The ban, then, had nothing to do with the reports of “fanatical secret meetings” and Enlightenment plans to fight the “Hasidic ringleaders;” the motivation was solely to stop the spread of disease, not the spread of Hasidism.
Strikingly, the state withdrew from active intervention exactly when the movement experienced a surge of growth and thus increasingly became involved in the turbulent politics of community conflicts (see chapter 16). From the point of view of the state, however, so long as Hasidism did not appear to be subversive, government officials lost no sleep over the internal politics of local communities. Hasidism in Poland was largely free to develop on its own and without interference.
Figure 19.1. Exemptions from the Dress Decree of 1846. People who paid a special fee were allowed to wear traditional Jewish dress. These exemptions ended in 1850 with a total ban on traditional dress for both men and women. Courtesy of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw (AGAD).
However, in the 1840s, the Russian Empire undertook a new initiative intended to modernize the Jews in the form of a Dress Decree banning traditional Jewish dress, which was applied to the whole Empire, although differently in Russia and Poland (see figure 19.1). The decree mobilized the Hasidim in defense of what they viewed as their traditional attire, which soon acquired holy status. As the abandonment of the traditional dress was to erase the visual distinctiveness of the Jews, some of Hasidic leaders, most notably Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger, perceived this step as conscious governmental attempt to accelerate the number of conversions. These leaders declared a holy war and called for collective martyrdom in defense of the old attire. The Dress Decree enforcing standard European dress on the Polish and Russian Jews thus became the touchstone for opposition by traditional Jewish society, including Hasidim, against the absolutist state. Resistance naturally provoked increasing repression as the state attempted to compel compliance with the law (in chapter 20, we will return to the question of when a distinctive Hasidic dress arose).
A sign of this resistance was the Rosh Hashanah sermon of Aryeh Leib (Lejbuś) Hirshberg, a follower of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk and the rabbi of Pilica, who in 1850 after the introduction of the ban allegedly announced in the synagogue:
Gentlemen, the time is now; rouse yourselves from the slavery of the government and monarchy, or they will take your children to the army, take our traditional clothing and tell them what to wear, and shave their beards. Today is the time our prayers before God will be heard; wake from your great sadness and bitter tears and pray to God that the monarchy meet with misfortune and doom.25
This seditious speech met with the immediate reaction of the authorities, and Hirshberg was dismissed from his post of rabbi. Characteristically, though, the investigation ignored the Hasidic dimension of the controversy, even though the Hasidim saw their costumes as badges of their specific identity. Unclear on this dimension and unable to formulate a general policy, the tsarist administration limited itself to individual repression.
Here is a small example of how the Dress Decree and Hasidic resistance to it played out in Lublin. On October 26, 1853, the provincial governor in Lublin was walking along the street when he happened upon a drunken Hasid in “traditional Jewish dress, that is, with hair cut short and long peyes (side-locks) around his ears and in a chałat or silk kapote (coat), clothes forbidden by law to be worn.”26 The Hasid not only showed no remorse but also openly mocked the authorities. In the presence of the mayor and the governor, he testified that he had been drunk on the occasion of Simhat Torah, so that he did not know what he was wearing or whether the hair around his ears was longer than allowed since he couldn’t see his ears. The report offers proof of the officials’ frustration at a situation that did not conform to official regulations and thereby challenged the administration’s authority.
By the 1850s, the Enlightenment idea of “civilizing” the Jewish population, although no longer official policy, still remained the dominant rhetoric that might occasionally result in anti-Hasidic actions. When the St. Petersburg Committee for the Organization of Jews in the Empire asked the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland in 1858 to prepare a report on the state of Polish Jewry, the most negative section was on the Hasidim. The committee suggested that
members of this sect not be admitted to any positions of honour, such as community elections, members of Jewish community boards, or rabbis, and that they not be allowed to maintain separate prayer houses or to gain any kind of prerogative intended for Jews making progress on the road to civilization.27
In disqualifying such candidates for the Jewish community board of Warsaw, the committee was acknowledging that Hasidism had now emerged as the most organized and determined enemy of modernity.
The Uprising of 1863–1864 dramatically changed the political situation of the country, causing the loss of Congress Poland’s remaining autonomy and the introduction of an aggressive policy intended to crush Polish national ambitions. The new anti-Polish stance of the tsarist government reformulated political relationships in the country, including with the Jewish population. The tsarist authorities looked with increasing suspicion on the relatively rapid progress of Jewish acculturation and its pro-Polish direction. By the mid-1860s, the government abandoned the Enlightenment policy of integrating the Jews and moved to block the increasing Jewish identification with Polish nationalism. One possible strategy was to reach out to those traditional groups within the Jewish community that had hitherto been defined as fanatic but now seemed the least attracted by Polish national ideas. This strategy led the Russian administration to Hasidism, although, as we have seen, there certainly were Hasidim who sympathized with Polish nationalism.
The first opportunity to formulate a new policy came with the reform of Jewish community board regulations. In this context, the government issued the following:
The Jewish population is divided into two parties, one more wealthy and civilized, inclined to innovation and showing in recent times a sympathy for unrest, the other less progressive Hussites [that is, Hasidim] more inclined to support the legal government. Given that these parties are divided into still smaller sects, members of the Jewish community board and the rabbi cannot belong to one and the people to a second party; at the same time the religious freedom of these groups should not be limited: progressive Jews should not be favoured by the government and the Hasidim should not be harassed.28
The ruling unequivocally identified the “wealthy and civilized party” as politically unreliable, and the “less progressive Hussites” as loyalists and supporters of the monarchy. However, this policy was based on false assumptions about the loyalties of the Hasidim and turned out to be a failure.
Bureaucratic ignorance was, if anything, even greater after the 1863–1864 Uprising than it had been before, perhaps owing to the involvement of new personnel from Russia who knew little about the Kingdom of Poland. The new pro-Hasidic policy was also far from consistent. The provincial government of Lublin, which in 1866 ordered the support of Hasidic representation on Jewish community boards, almost simultaneously blocked the nomination of Hasidim as board members, closed down shtiblekh, and carried out minor acts of harassment against “Hasidic fanatics.” In sum, Russian policy concerning the Hasidic movement in Poland after 1867 was as chaotic and ineffective as the policy of their predecessors had been in decades past.
Toward a Modern Hasidic Politics
The Hasidim were not simply passive victims of the central and local organs of the state. We could hardly expect otherwise, since, after all, they were the party most interested in the favorable resolution of governmental investigations. Furthermore, what for the government was only one of many social problems (and a marginal one at that), was for the Hasidim a matter of their very existence. Therefore, from the beginning of the government’s interest in the movement, we find petitions written by Hasidim to offices at all levels of the state administration, attempts to gain powerful allies, and various open and behind-the-scenes activities to attain the most advantageous decisions. Hasidic literature is full of legends concerning the intercession of tsaddikim in defense of the Jewish people. For example, one tale has it that Elimelekh of Lizhensk spilled soup, thus causing the Emperor Joseph II to spill ink at the same time and preventing him from signing an anti-Jewish decree.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the actions initiated by Hasidic leaders were episodic and the reliability of the testimonies describing them is questionable. Such is the case with stories of the appearance of Levi Yitshak of Barditshev at the Great Sejm in Warsaw (1788–1792). These stories tend to present the political activities of tsaddikim in magical, miraculous, or even messianic terms. So, for example, when Nahman of Bratslav wanted to combat the undesired aspects of the 1804 Statute on the Status of the Jews, he ordered that “we should pray and beseech a lot” and danced in the hope that God may “answer us and we will have the good luck that it will be abolished.”29 Similarly, when Menahem Mendel of Rimanov wanted to fight the Russians during the Russo-French war, he baked matsa and with each batch that he put in the oven, he said: “‘let five hundred more Russians fall,’ and so it happened in the war.”30
Not all such stories were legendary. Some of them, like the conflict between Hasidim and their opponents in Vilna at the turn of the nineteenth century, are well documented by independent sources. It seems also that certain Hasidic leaders—such as Shneur Zalman of Liady—had natural political talent, and their political activity was ahead of their times. Thus, quite apart from legendary tales, the Hasidim took up actual political activity in defense of their interests, politics that differed at times from that of non-Hasidic traditional Jews. Concerted political action developed slowly and unevenly in the nineteenth century, with some groups, such as the Chernobyl dynasty remaining indifferent toward politics. But as the state became an increasing presence in Jewish life, more and more Hasidic leaders felt compelled to enter the political arena.
In Galicia, the first traces of political activity can be discerned as early as the Połaniec investigation of 1798, but such activity became concerted only in the 1820s, at the same time as in the Kingdom of Poland. In Russia, the Hasidim in Vilna managed to obtain the removal of a hostile kahal board in the early nineteenth century. However, organized politics did not occur there until the 1840s. Hasidic political activism was initially mostly defensive, focusing on the right to establish prayer houses, avoid certain taxes, and license their kosher slaughterers. The Hasidim defended themselves against accusations brought against them by community boards and sometimes appealed to non-Jewish authorities for help in such conflicts, but did not appear interested in politics at the state level.
The individuals involved in these early activities were as a rule not the tsaddikim. In Central Poland, for example, Berek Sonnenberg, the richest Polish Jew and a supporter of Hasidism, who had intimate contacts with the Polish government and legal system, was the primary intercessor, together with others in his circle, on behalf of Hasidism. It seems that Hasidic leaders did not engage in political activism at this stage mainly because they viewed themselves, and were viewed by others, as spiritual rather than political leaders. Politics was an alien phenomenon, foreign to their world, and best left to others.
However, as the number of investigations increased, both tsaddikim and Hasidim began to take a more proactive position. In Poland, for example, in response to the investigation of 1823, Meir Rotenberg of Apt played a leading role in reversing the initially negative decrees. Similarly, in Galicia, the Hasidic community skillfully used the law and administrative procedures to defend their right to separate prayer halls. When in 1825, Tsvi Hirsh Eichenstein of Zhidachov was arrested for maintaining an illegal prayer hall, his followers successfully petitioned the government for his release and for permission for his private kloyz. Similarly, the Hasidim persuaded the provincial government to agree to a Hasidic synagogue in Lwow in 1848. These achievements encouraged them toward more sophisticated political involvement.
As tsaddikim increasingly led such campaigns, they became, in addition to spiritual leaders, also the earthly political protectors of their Hasidim. And this was action that did not involve miracles or magic but rather all the techniques of modern politics. In Galicia, Naftali Horowitz of Ropshits acted as the unofficial representative of the Hasidic community already in the 1820s. In the Kingdom of Poland, this role was fulfilled by Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, Hanokh Henikh of Aleksander, and Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger. In the 1840s, Alter played an active role in the committee for the agricultural colonization of the Jews. Still later, he cooperated with the conservative wing of the Polish Haskalah in limiting educational reform. However, the two Hasidic leaders in the mid-nineteenth century who raised Hasidic politics to a new level were Menahem Mendel Schneersohn in Russia and Yitshak Kalish in Poland.
Schneersohn was not just a Hasidic shtadlan but also the real political leader of the Russian Hasidim. Menahem Mendel significantly augmented cooperation between the government and the Hasidic movement. He exerted political pressure to counter modernizing forces and to persuade the government not to treat Hasidism as a threat to social reform. Chabad was fully represented at rabbinic conferences in Russia, with Menahem Mendel himself participating in the first conference of 1843 (see chapter 11). At the conference of rabbis of 1851, the Chabad Hasid, Yitshak Epstein of Homel, although not an official participant, was an active player. The same was true at subsequent conferences.
Equally noteworthy were Schneersohn’s coordinated campaigns of petitions, formal applications, and legal appeals as well as anonymous denunciations to fight political opponents in the Haskalah camp. Between 1851 and 1853, he organized a series of attacks against the Maskil Leon Mandelshtam and, in 1856, a similar campaign against the “learned Jew” Moses Berlin. These campaigns were largely decided in favor of the traditionalists and against the modernizers. Menahem Mendel was also involved in creating a government school in Lubavitch in 1852, trying as much as possible to steer its curriculum along traditional Jewish educational lines. According to his proposal, the curriculum was to have twenty-eight hours of traditional Jewish studies and only fifteen hours of secular subjects.
Taken together, Menahem Mendel’s activities were qualitatively different from those of earlier Hasidic leaders, including those of Chabad. He initiated political action and cooperated with the government, taking advantage of existing institutions and legal regulations for his own objectives. He knew how to resort to petitioning and letterwriting campaigns. He also created an elaborate, effective political machine, thanks to which he was well informed about current political events. Annoyed local officials even claimed that Schneersohn learned faster than they did about decisions taken in St. Petersburg. Far from medieval shtadlanut, Schneersohn used modern political techniques to defend an antimodern community.
Toward the end of the century, Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, the fifth Rebbe of Lubavitch (1860–1920), took up the mantle from his illustrious predecessor. Schneersohn, a charismatic and authoritative figure, was active mainly from the 1890s onward. At that time, two centers of power vied for the role of representing the interests of Russian Jews: Lithuanian Orthodox leadership, headed by Rabbi Yitshak Elhanan Spector of Kovno (1817–1896) on one hand, and the economic elite in the capital city St. Petersburg, led by Baron Horace Günzburg (1833–1909), on the other. Schneersohn was, of course, much closer to the Lithuanian rabbis, but because he perceived them as compromisers, he withdrew from them and took a more extreme position.
In order to fulfill his political goals, Schneersohn established an intercessory system of his own based on wealthy merchants and businessmen with connections to government authorities. The best known of these were Menahem Monesh Monesohn, who lived in St. Petersburg, and Yeshayah Berlin from Riga. They reported to the rebbe about the various plans concerning the Jews discussed in government circles and tried to either delay or moderate them. The rebbe’s intercessors worked separately from the representatives of the financial and educated elite in the capital, and thus two parallel systems were created that vied for representation and influence.
In Poland, a similar role to that of the Schneersohns was played by Yitshak Kalish of Vurke, whom we met in chapter 12 on Congress Poland. His personality, activities, and achievements influenced not only the policy of the Polish government but also the shape of the Hasidic movement in Poland. However, in addition to his role as tsaddik of a particular group, Yitshak became the spokesperson for all of Polish Jewry, a role that the Rebbe of Chabad was to assume at the end of century in Russia. In 1839, Kalish, in the name of several other rabbis, petitioned the Ministry of Finance to prevent the sale of nonkosher meat as kosher, a result of a change in the state law, which enabled Christians to lease the kosher meat tax, thus effectively shifting the control of kashrut from the hands of rabbis to the Christian leaseholder. After much correspondence and repeated rejections, Yitshak sent the ministry letters—all in good Polish—from the rabbis of nearly all the provincial capitals confirming that they had granted him power of attorney to deal with the sale of kosher meat.
Quite surprisingly, the government did recognize Kalish’s power of attorney, thus making him the first recognized representative of the Jews in nineteenth-century Poland. This recognition reversed long-standing policy. From the beginning of the kingdom’s existence, its most prominent politicians consistently aspired to abolish all Jewish supra-kehillah institutions and their representatives, because they viewed them as a factor strengthening Jewish separatism. A change in this state of affairs took place only in the 1840s, when the government backed down from its plans to “civilize” the Jewish people. Now, the government could recognize such a representative. Indeed, the appearance of such a semiofficial shtadlan was also convenient for the authorities. They could make him partially responsible for the maintaining of social order among Jews. The authorities now began to treat Yitshak of Vurke—as he represented himself—as the official representative of all Polish Jewry. He was even permitted to have audiences with the viceroy of the kingdom, General Paskevich, and to appeal directly to the highest governmental institutions, which was a violation of the usual bureaucratic petitioning procedure.
With his authority now secure, Yitshak submitted a new proposal to the ministry. He suggested that the sale of kosher meat in the entire kingdom should be conducted separately rather than together with nonkosher meat and that an inspector controlling kashrut should be appointed to every butcher stall. This new arrangement would protect Jews from breaking religious law and would also result in an increase in income from the kosher tax. And, finally, the rabbi and the inspector would be able to ensure that the sale of giblets did not incur kosher tax, which would be beneficial to the poorer classes. The government ultimately affirmed Yitshak’s proposal. In the next few years, he intervened two more times with peripheral amendments to these regulations, again winning in both cases.
In addition to the issue of kosher meat, Yitshak defended the right of the Jewish communities in Poland to establish their eruvin (wires traditionally hung around Jewish districts in order to allow carrying objects outdoors on the Sabbath), to liberate Jews from the obligation of obtaining a civil divorce before a religious divorce, and to free a community from the threat of a rabbi appointed by the state. He also intervened in defense of Jewish prisoners and in 1846, he asked Moses Montefiore, traveling in Poland and Russia, to approach Tsar Nicholas I about Jewish military service and the restrictions on Jewish dress. The obvious beneficiary of all of these actions was the entire Jewish society and not just Hasidim. As such, it raised the standing of Hasidism as a movement among the Jewish population as a whole, which undoubtedly contributed to the movement’s dramatic growth.
Although Yitshak of Vurke may look at first blush like nothing but an early modern shtadlan of the sort employed by the Council of the Four Lands (disbanded in 1764), he was in fact relying on the techniques of modern politics. He surrounded himself with a group of highly competent administrative-legal aides who maintained personal contacts with representatives of the government. This team understood the bureaucratic process of petitions, the relative importance of various governmental officials, and the complexities of the law and its implementation. This was a professional operation that established Yitshak’s position as the unchallenged political representative of traditional Jewish society in Poland, accepted as such by the government. Following Yitshak’s death, Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger, who had collaborated with him closely, became his political successor.
While these tsaddikim adopted modern political methods, they vehemently rejected the values of the modern world. How did they justify such political activity? Some argued that they were operating within the tradition of the archetypical shtadlan, the biblical Mordechai, who interceded for the Jews in the court of King Ahasuerus. The Hasidic literature on Yitshak of Vurke, as well as his own writings, compared Yitshak to Mordechai and portrayed the latter as if he was a politically active tsaddik. The use of the figure of Mordechai went beyond a simple parallel with his ancient predecessor, however. In an exegetical comment on the book of Esther, Yitshak equated the biblical Mordechai with the people of Israel, and by implication equated the political goals of Mordechai with the will of the people. In this way, the descent of the tsaddik into the muck and grime of politics became aligned with a long and hoary tradition, going back to the Bible. The Hasidic movement could thus remain ideologically antimodern and, in its own view, apolitical, even as its leaders engaged in modern politics.
The next step in the politicization of Hasidism after the intervention of specific individuals was the founding of modern political parties, which took part in elections after the Jews in the Habsburg Empire were emancipated in 1867. Mahzikei ha-Dat was the first such organization, established in Galicia in 1878 in a joint effort of a group of rabbis led by Rabbi Shimon Sofer of Krakow and a group of Hasidic leaders headed by the rebbes of Belz and Vizhnits. The stated mission of this organization, whose headquarters was in Lwow, was to fight against the Jewish Enlightenment and secularism and represent the interests of all ultra-Orthodox Jews. It was not a party in the parliamentary sense but rather a kind of political lobby. These Galician activists may have been inspired by the secession movement of the ultra-Orthodox in Hungary to work toward similar separatism of the traditionalists in Galicia.
Mahzikei ha-Dat’s activists, and particularly Shmuel Margoshes, who was a close associate of the Rebbe of Belz, ran it like any modern organization, taking advantage of the new conditions in the post-emancipation Habsburg Empire. They published a newspaper and tried to promote their agenda through governmental and municipal channels, alongside cooperation with other Hasidic courts and non-Hasidic factions. Although most of the time the tsaddikim were content to remain active behind the scenes and leave the frontlines for Sofer and Tsvi Hirsch Orenstein of Lwow, this was still the first time that Hasidic leaders were politically active in the broader public arena. Cooperation between Orthodox Jews in Galicia and conservative Polish Catholic circles led to an upheaval in the Austrian parliamentary elections in 1879, when liberal forces were defeated. In this election, Rabbi Sofer himself was elected to the parliament in Vienna. After Sofer’s death in 1883, the influence of Belz Hasidism increased in the organization’s activities and it later became identified almost exclusively with Belz.
Mahzikei ha-Dat’s activity in Galicia was a model for the most important political upheaval yet to come in the history of Hasidism, when a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis from Germany would join with the leaders of Ger, the largest Hasidic branch in Poland, to establish Agudat Yisrael, first in Silesia in 1912 and then in Poland in 1916. This organization evolved into a true political party that saw itself as the voice of all ultra-Orthodox Jewry; it would have an important role in interwar Poland and the State of Israel (more about it is found in chapters 23 and 28).
In this context, it is important to note the modern role played by the new Orthodox journalism. Besides its internal publication, Mahzikei ha-Dat, founded in 1876 (first as a bimonthly and from 1886 until 1914 as a weekly), a gathering of rabbis and Hasidic leaders in Lwow in 1882 decided to mobilize newspapers in the service of the ultra-Orthodox cause. Shimon Sofer and the tsaddikim Yehoshua Rokeah of Belz and Menahem Mendel Hager of Vizhnits met with the editor of the Viennese newspaper Yiddisches Weltblatt, Yosef Waltoch, and declared the newspaper as the official mouthpiece of Orthodoxy in Galicia and Bukovina. The even more important weekly, Ha-Levanon, went on to become in the 1870s and 1880s the most significant Orthodox platform for the rabbinical elite to voice their viewpoint. However, because of its “Lithuanian” character, Hasidism found little expression in the newspaper: a united ultra-Orthodox front would not yet fully emerge until the twentieth century.
The politicization of Hasidism had a profound impact on the movement. A key feature of this politics was that the tsaddikim claimed to be acting not only on behalf of the Hasidic community but also on behalf of Jewish society as a whole. This was a revolutionary change. Hasidic political engagement in the nineteenth century in many respects heralded the birth of modern Jewish politics. It was modern in that it appealed to a broad mass constituency and used modern forms of political participation. The Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow remarked insightfully in 1899 that Hasidism represented neither the superstition of the ignorant dark Jewish masses nor, conversely, the sweet angel from the nostalgic tales of Yitshak Leib Peretz. Hasidism had rather become an interest group in Jewish politics. From an elitist circle of mystics of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century Hasidism evolved into a fully modern, even if ideologically antimodern, mass movement with clear political goals.
Public Opinion
The birth of modern Hasidic politics took place not only in relation to the state but also in the context of public opinion as it started to flourish in the nineteenth century. The first texts by non-Jewish writers about Hasidism appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a report from 1804, a professor from Lwow, Joseph Rohrer (1769–1828), addressed Hasidism as part of a larger discussion of the Jewish population in the Austrian Empire. His short remarks on the Hasidim began with a comparison with the Karaites; then the writer pointed to their mystical convictions and messianic zeal. He claimed that the Hasidim believed in the unlimited power of the tsaddikim and that “they are in much closer intercourse with divine spirits and in the closest relationship with the coming Messiah.”31 The passage ends with a description of the peculiarities of Hasidic dress, as well as remarks about the fatal influence of this “pharisaically proud sect” on “the beautiful bonds of harmony, which have hitherto joined members of the family.”32
The most influential writing in Poland on the “Jewish question” in general and on the Hasidim in particular was that of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1757–1841), one of the most prominent Polish writers and politicians of the time. Niemcewicz’s attitude to Jews and Judaism was ambivalent. Despite his declared sympathy for their tribulations, he frequently voiced hostility to their religion and culture, fuelled by what he knew or imagined about the Hasidim. The epistolary romance, in many ways similar to Perl’s Megaleh Temirin, titled Lejbe i Sióra, czyli Listy dwóch kochanków (Lejbe and Sióra, or the Letters of Two Lovers, 1821), is the first Polish novel devoted to Jewish society and depicts the battle between a number of noble individuals and the ruthless, depraved, and unfeeling mass of Jews, who are completely under the control of the Hasidim. Yankiel, their leader, is the embodiment not only of moral depravity and idiocy but also of physical ugliness. He is comic, rather than frightening, in his ferocity and fanatic blindness. Unable to have children owing to his ugliness, he attempts to do so using magical potions, thus exposing his moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
The Hasidim in the novel repeatedly assure one another that only the followers of Judaism have a real soul, that it is right to cheat Christians because they are not real people, and that anything lost by a Christian belongs to a Jew. They also conspire against Christians, and against disobedient Jews; they cheat and smuggle, drive the Polish peasant to drink, deprive him of his property through all manner of deceit, and lead him into a state of physical and moral decline. Niemcewicz thus endowed the Hasidim with all those traits that traditional anti-Jewish journalists and a large number of enlightened reformers deemed to be signs of the moral depravity of the entire Jewish population. For Niemcewicz, Hasidism became the embodiment of Jewish evil.
This novel was translated into German, Dutch, and English, where it was one of the first pieces of literature on Hasidism in those languages, although it is hard to judge its actual impact. In Poland, most of its audience may have even had trouble recognizing the name Hasidism, whose supporters in Polish texts were called Hasidisists, Hussites, Kitajowcy (men of silk), or Michałki (Michaels), and in Russian texts skokuny (jumpers) and karlinery (followers of the Rebbe of Karlin). Parenthetically, the term “Hussites” does not refer to the proto-Reformation movement of Jan Hus (1369–1415). Rather, the conflation of the two terms was the result of the fact that the word Hasid (pronounced khusit in the Yiddish of Central and Southern Poland) and the Polish husyt (Hussite) sound the same. This form was common in Polish literature in the nineteenth century, and up to the present day is the most common name for Hasidim in Polish folk culture.
Nonetheless, Hasidic folklore began to make its way into Polish writing, such as the stories of Klemens Junosza Szaniewski (for example, Nasi Żydzi w miasteczkach i wsiach 1889) and Aleksander Świętochowski’s Chawa Rubin (1897), sometimes without recognition that they were Hasidic. Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz was a pioneering poem because the traditional Jew is portrayed positively. Although Mickiewicz’s hero Jankiel was not Hasidic, other traditional Jewish characters who take after him were easily recognizable as such because they are described as wearing silk coats, fur hats (shtreimel), and specific type of belts (gartl). Other works of Polish romantic literature likewise included typically Hasidic figures, frequently in a positive light.
In Germany and Austria, press reports on journeys to tsaddikim and published accounts by missionaries provided non-Jewish readers with images of the Hasidic world. We have already encountered Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose visit to the court of Sadagora led to a vivid description of the lives of the tsaddik and the women of his family. Sacher-Masoch’s intended audience viewed Galicia as an exotic land to the East, a perception he cultivated:
In order to understand the Hasidic sect, one has to understand the land where they live. One has to know Galicia.… Imagine, in a dull, sunless shed, in this wasteland, far from the world, far from civilization … a man who has a great mind, who has a need to investigate and discover the world, to penetrate its secrets to the depths, who has a burning imagination and a warm heart, and who is shut up within his four walls like a prisoner, like a dried flower in a herbarium, who has no well of knowledge to draw from other than his Talmud and his Kabbalah. You will understand that this man, constantly searching and brooding, will become a dreamer and a fanatic, will believe he hears the voice of God, and will be convinced that he converses with angels and demons. No, the Hasidim are not swindlers—they are all Hamlet and Faust, and you shouldn’t be surprised when they end up a little crazy like Hamlet.33
This “Orientalist” image of Galicia and other Polish lands—and thus of Hasidism—was, of course, meaningless to Polish writers, for whom this was not the Orient, but their own land and an outpost of Western civilization on the Eastern “rampart of Christianity.” If Polish writers agreed with German ones on Hasidism’s “exoticism,” they interpreted it as an obstacle to the modernization of Polish lands. Eliza Orzeszkowa’s 1878 Meir Ezofowicz, perhaps the best-known Polish story on a Jewish subject, borrowed her image of Hasidism from Polish-Jewish literature, although the world she described was “neither Mosaism, nor Talmudism, nor Hasidism, but a chaotic mishmash of all of them.”34 This traditional world is contrasted to the Enlightenment figure for whom the story is named. Similarly, hostile to civilization, Christianity and progress were the Hasidim in the stories of Michał Bałucki Młodzi i starzy (1866), as well as in Zyzma (1884–1885) by Ignacy Maciejewski (nom de plume: Sewer).
A particularly striking text of the pre–World War I era that avoided a negative view of Hasidism and a demand for its reform was a short story by Adam Szymański, titled Srul z Lubartowa (Israel of Lubartów; 1905). The narrator is a Pole, who has been exiled to Siberia and for whom a cathartic experience is meeting in that distant land “a typical, small-town Polish Jew,”35 with whom he talks about the beautiful Polish landscape from which they have been exiled. The eponymous Srul of Lubartów turns out to be a Hasid, which paradoxically brings the main protagonists closer, for although all the exiles hate Siberia and long for their homeland, “the fanatical Hasid was unable to hate in moderation,”36 so, just as he hated Siberia immoderately, so his love for Poland was boundless. This story humanizes followers of Hasidism, in whose difference of customs and faith Szymański simply saw human difference.
While the representation of Hasidism in various forms of ethnographic and belletrisic texts ranged from reformist criticism to fascination and even sympathy, a more sinister and deadly expression can be found in the linkage of Hasidim with the modern revival of the accusation of ritual murder. From the late eighteenth century, claims that “fanatical Jewish sects”—often identified with Hasidim—were committing ritual murders proliferated in Russia, Poland, Germany, and elsewhere. These polemics drew their inspiration from the arguments of both Jews and non-Jews that Hasidism was a sect. Even if Jews as a whole did not commit ritual murder, ran this new form of antisemitism, there was a secret sect among them that did. One theme in these polemics was the argument that the innovations introduced by Hasidim in the practice of ritual slaughter were proof that they were up to something nefarious: the ritual slaughter of Christians and not only animals.
The first such accusation directed against Hasidim in the Russian Empire was in 1828, when Tsar Nicholas I ordered searches of Hasidic homes in Kiev Province for books advocating ritual murder by the Hasidim. Even though this investigation did not produce the expected results, the tsar maintained his belief, writing soon after:
Numerous examples of similar murders prove that it is likely that fanatics or sectarians exist among the Jews, who require Christian blood for their rituals.… In a word, I do not believe that this custom is widespread among all Jews, but I cannot exclude the possibility that fanatics, as horrifying as those among Christians, exist amongst them.37
Thus, even though governmental investigations of Hasidism, as we have seen, repeatedly affirmed that the Hasidim were not a sect with their own customs and practices, beliefs like the tsar’s could circulate freely, untethered from any evidence.
In the wake of the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, most Western Europeans came to doubt that Jews as a whole were involved in such practices, but at the same time, there were those who continued to claim that fanatical sects among the Jews did use Christian blood for their rituals. Under the impact of the Damascus affair, Tsar Nicholas charged his adviser Vladimir Dahl to draw up a report on the subject of alleged ritual murders of Christian children by Jews in Russia. In 1844, Dahl published a report in which he declared that murder was not being practiced by all Jews, but only by the Hasidic sect. An identical opinion was voiced by Stanisław Wodzicki, an influential politician and president of the Senate of the Free City of Krakow, who explained: “I am deeply convinced that even though animal blood is forbidden to Jews by the law of Moses, a fact corroborated by the removal of blood vessels from kosher meat, there is one sect, namely Hasidism, which, in spite of this law, requires the blood of Christian children for its rituals.”38
The claim that the Hasidim specifically committed ritual murder gained popularity in Russia during the following decades because of a book by the leading Russian antisemite, Hippolytus Lutostansky, titled The Question of the Use by Jewish Sectarians of Christian Blood for Religious Purposes (1876). In the lengthy dispute following the publication of this work, the Russian press expressed little doubt that the accusation against the Hasidim was legitimate. The anti-Hasidic argument emerged especially during the Beilis trial in 1911–1913, when Mendel Beilis, a Jew in Kiev, was accused of killing a Christian boy for his blood. During cross-examination, a witness named Vladimir Golubev stated that he was “absolutely convinced that Hasidim and tsaddikim used Christian blood.”39 The prosecutors endeavored to prove that Beilis was a Hasid and more specifically a follower of the allegedly dangerous Rebbe of Lubavitch. As such, his guilt was self-evident, since he belonged to the sect using Christian blood for their rituals. When asked about the source of such knowledge, the witnesses cited an extensive corpus of antisemitic literature supporting their claims, but also explained that it was common knowledge. Beilis—who was not a Hasid—was found innocent, but the court ruled that ritual murder was a real practice.
A parallel debate took place in the Habsburg Empire in the court case between a Jewish Deputy to the Viennese Parliament, Rabbi Josef Bloch, and the notorious antisemite Josef Deckert and his assistant Paulus Meyer. The affair started in 1892 with Deckert’s assertion, based on testimony by the convert Paulus Meyer, that the Hasidim of Ostrów Mazowiecka, and by implication all Hasidim, practiced ritual murder. Meyer, who came from Ostrów, declared that as a pupil of the local tsaddik Yoshua ben Shlomo Leib, he had been allowed to attend the murder and bleeding of a Christian child in 1875. Deckert’s publication provoked Bloch to gather materials that would prove the accusation false and make it possible to prosecute Deckert and Meyer for defamation. Reports in the Hebrew journal Ha-Tsefirah established the identity of the persons Meyer had accused of participating in the murder. They traveled to Vienna, where their depositions denying Meyer’s story led to an action for libel against both purveyors of the blood libel. During the trial, Bloch proved that Meyer had been lying, starting with the fact that the tsaddik in question had died in 1873, two years before the alleged murder. Meyer withdrew his accusation and stated that he had had nothing to do with the declaration printed in the press in his name and that his signature had been forged. Decker, however, stuck to his testimony, saying that he had received the declaration from Meyer himself and that it had been given voluntarily. The trial ended in a spectacular victory for the Jewish side.
The myth of ritual murder had circulated in folk culture throughout Europe since the Middle Ages, and this kind of belief persisted in the modern world. In 1884, for example, a Polish ethnographer noted that the Christian population near Parysów was worried by the crowds of Hasidim gathering to see the local tsaddik, Ya’akov Tsvi Rabinowitz (the grandson of the Holy Jew of Pshiskhe), and “it was told as fact that they were planning to slaughter Christians, but that the rabbi had ordered them to hold off until there were more of them.”40
Yet the renewal of the myth in the late nineteenth century signified something new. It coincided with the birth of modern antisemitism, which, in turn, was a reaction against modernity. As the Jews were emancipated and embraced modern culture, those hostile to them needed to prove that, even if these Jews appeared to be no different from their Christian neighbors, there remained a “medieval” sect—the Hasidim—that practiced secret, murderous rituals. The need to rationalize this myth showed that it had now moved a long way from its folk prototype, in which any authentication was not important. For modern antisemites, the Hasidim were ideal targets because, with their antimodernism, separatism, and deep religiosity, they represented everything that was strange and inimical.
In the debates over ritual murder and Hasidism, it is striking that the Hasidim themselves were the least affected. The opinions of the outside Christian world were not particularly important to them, and they interpreted the anti-Hasidic version of the blood libel as merely another embodiment of the eternal suffering of the chosen people. In the case of Bloch v. Mayer, the Hasidim accused of ritual murder filed a libel action only under pressure from Bloch and the editors of Ha-Tsefirah, Hayim Zelig Słonimski and Nahum Sokolow. A similar pattern emerged too in a number of other cases. Paradoxically, the anti-Hasidic version of the charge was more of consequence to their Jewish opponents, the integrationists, than to the Hasidim themselves.
Those who accused the Jews of ritual murder—including those who specifically targeted the Hasidim—sought to enlist the legal system of the state in their accusations. In some cases, they succeeded, although by and large, the modern ritual murder or blood libel failed in court and instead provoked a backlash of liberal opinion. Yet it is unclear whether public opinion regarding Hasidism did or did not shift as a result. We noted in chapter 16 that on the local level, the peasants’ views of Hasidim were by no means uniformly negative. Hasidim might be seen by conservative Christians as defenders of religious tradition writ large. And, for the same reason, they could also be seen by liberal forces—Jewish and non-Jewish—as stumbling blocks for the modernization of the Jews. But the effort to mobilize the state against Hasidism was largely a failure, for, as we have seen time and again, with only a few exceptions, the East European states in which the Hasidim lived opted for tolerance rather than persecution.
1 Calmanson, Uwagi nad niniejszym stanem Żydów polskich, 19.
2 Cited in Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. from Yiddish by E. Orenstein, from Hebrew by A. Klein, J. Machlowitz Klein (Philadelphia, 1985), 69.
3 Tadeusz Czacki, Rozprawa o Żydach i karaitach (Vilna, 1807), 106.
4 MS Cincinnati, fol. 102; cited in Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov, ed. Samuel H. Dresner (Chicago, 1985), 40.
5 Ibid., 41.
6 Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, 74.
7 AGAD, collection: Sekretariat Stanu Królestwa Polskiego, call no. 199, f. 462v.
8 Israel Löbel, “Glaubwürdige Nachricht von der in Polen und Lithauen befindlichen Sekte: Chasidim genannt,” Sulamith 1/2, no. 5 (1807): 333.
9 English translation of the law regarding Hasidim in Rachel Manekin, “Hasidism and the Habsburg Empire, 1788–1867,” Jewish History 27 (2013): 296–297.
10 Cited in Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment (be-Galiziya uve-Polin ha-Kongresa’it bamahazit harishona shel hame’a hatesha-esre, hayesodot hasoziyaliyim vehamedinayim) (Merhavia, 1961), 441–442.
11 Shmuel Ettinger, Bein Polin le-Russiyah (Jerusalem, 1994), 256.
12 Minute-book (pinkas) of the burial society in Kamieniec Podolski (1799); cited in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 56 (2006): 118; original in the Vernadsky Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Orientalia Division, Pinkasim Collection, f. 231, op. 1, no. 33 (or 61).
13 Cited in Assaf, The Regal Way, 119.
14 S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 2002), 281–282.
15 CNHAB—295–1-1151 fol. 1. K. 49.
16 Ilia Lurie and Arkadii Zeltser, “Moses Berlin and the Lubavich Hasidim: A Landmark in the Conflict between Haskalah and Hasidism,” Shvut 5 [21] (1997): 51.
17 Kotik, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 142.
18 Eliezer Eliyahu Fridman, Sefer Zikhronot (5618–5686) (Tel Aviv: 1926), 263.
19 AGAD, CWW 1481, 408; reprinted in Źródła do dziejów chasydyzmu w Królestwie Polskim, 24.02.
20 Ephraim Meir Gad Zychlinski, Sefer Lahav Esh (Piotrków, 1935), 230–231, as cited in Gershon Bacon, “Messianists, Pragmatists and Patriots: Orthodox Jews and the Modern Polish State (Some Preliminary Obsevations),” in Neti’ot le-David: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni, ed. Yaakov Elman, Ephraim Bezalel Halivni, and Zvi Arie Steinfeld (Jerusalem, 2004), 21–22.
21 M.Y. Frayd, Yamim ve-Shanim (Tel Aviv, 1938–1939), 2:39–40; cited in Bacon, “Messianists,” 27.
22 AGAD, CWW 1871, 213.
23 AGAD, CWW 1871, 187–190; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 11.73.
24 Archiwum Państwowe w Płocku, collection: Akta miasta Płocka call no. 883, 109–13.
25 AGAD, CWW 1473, 69–76.
26 Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie, collection: Akta miasta Lublina call no. 2258, 217; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 33.01.
27 AGAD, collection: Komisja Rządowa Spraw Wewnętrznych call no. 6632, fol. 31.
28 Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie, collection: Rząd Gubernialny Lubelski call no. adm. 1725, 419–421; reprinted in Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 42.01.
29 Hayei Moharan (Jerusalem, 1976), hilhot hashayakhot lehatorot, no. 6; idem, mekom leidato vi-ysehivato, no. 13.
30 Cited in Barukh Mevorakh, ed., Napoleon u-Tekufato: Reshumot ve-Eduyot Ivriyot shel Bnei ha-Dor (Jerusalem, 1968), 187.
31 Joseph Rohrer, Versuch ueber die juedische Bewohner der oesterrieichischen Monarchie (Wien, 1804), 151–152.
33 Cited in Wolff, The Idea of Galicia, 209.
32 Ibid., 153.
34 Eliza Orzeszkowa, Meir Ezofowicz (Warsaw, 1947), vol. 1, 121.
35 Adam Szymański, “Srul z Lubartowa,” in Z Jednego Strumienia, ed. Eliza Orzeszkowa (Warsaw, 1960), 215.
36 Ibid., 218.
37 Cited in Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times until the Present Day, ii: From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III (1825–1894) (Philadelphia, 1918), 83.
38 Stanisław Wodzicki, Wspomnienia z przeszłości od roku 1768 do roku 1840 (Krakow, 1873), vol. 1, 203–204.
39 Ezekiel Leikin, The Beilis Transcripts: The Anti-Semitic Trial That Shook the World (Northvale, NJ, and London, 1993), 54.
40 Oskar Kolberg, Mazowsze, t. 26, s. 360.
