Introduction

Summary

THIS IS A STUDY OF HASIDISM, particularly of Habad-Lubavitch hasidism, from its beginnings to the present. Much of the focus is on the thought and activities of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–94). We encounter a variety of contrasts: premodern/postmodern, enclave/outreach, particularism/universalism, faith/reason, rationality/ mysticism, and so on. When I consider what led me to this field of study and research, which has occupied most of my adult life, it seems that its roots were there in my own immediate family history, which, like that of many others, straddled the gap between tradition and modernity.

My maternal grandparents were both from hasidic families. But my grandfather, Mosheh Yosef Morgenstein, was an Aleksander hasid, while his wife, Esther Wiernick, was from a family of Gerer hasidim. At the time that they married, probably around 1905, Ger and Aleksander were fierce rivals for the title of the leading hasidic group in Poland. There may have been an interesting ‘story’ about their marriage, which I do not know. But it expressed some form of joining of contrasts, probably due to the force of modernization, which also led them in 1917 to move to London, together with my 7-year-old mother, Chawa. My grandfather became the ḥazan (cantor) of a small synagogue in Soho Square, and the family lived in Mornington Crescent, NW1. It was a very English environment, in which the neighbours raised their eyebrows upon seeing them carrying food to the sukah during the Tabernacles festival.

A more pronounced contrast may be seen in my parents’ marriage. As a young woman my mother became a Zionist, like her younger and more adventurous sister Bertha, whom she followed in 1933 to the Land of Israel. On the boat my mother met a young man, my father, from the Orthodox Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, fleeing Hitler. My father had with him his smart top hat from Frankfurt. My mother told me that during the journey he threw it overboard into the sea. Eventually, they married and lived in Haifa. True, it was a time of turmoil. But how did their respective parents view this match of a yekke (German Jew) with an ostjudin ( Jewess from eastern Europe)?