Raphael Mahler Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment. Translated from the Yiddish Eugene Orenstein. Translated from the Hebrew by Aaron Klein Jenny Machlowitz Klein

Summary

This is a welcome addition to the slowly growing body of classic studies of Hasidism in English translation. Although Simon Dubnow's still indispensable History of Hasidism remains inaccessible to the English reading public, three important volumes have appeared more or less simultaneously in the last year: A. J. Heschel's essays on a number of early Hasidic masters, Joseph Weiss's collection of articles of which at least some have been hitherto unavailable in English, and the present· study by Raphael Mahler.

The first part of the book, concerning Galicia, was first published in Yiddish in 1942. The second part, which deals with Congress Poland, appeared together with the first in an expanded Hebrew version in 1961. To the German documents from the State Archive of Lwów, appended to the Yiddish edition and expanded somewhat in the Hebrew, were added in the Hebrew edition eight further appendices containing documentary material in Polish from the Central State Archive of Warsaw. Regrettably, all these appendices were excluded from the English translation.

An avowed subscriber to ‘the method of historical materialism’, Mahler presents the clash between Hasidism and Haskalah as ‘the antithesis that reflected the conflicting interests and philosophies of two classes of the Jewish people … Hasidism - the impoverished, suffering retarded petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian masses, and the Haskalah and - the rising Jewish bourgeoisie and intelligentsia associated with it’ (p. 64). The non Hasidic Orthodoxy of Galicia is classified in this scheme as representing the same class interests as those associated with the Maskilim, an affinity which, according to Mahler, accounts for the Enlighteners’ initial hope of aligning themselves with the Orthodox opponents of Hasidism in the campaign to eradicate the socially disruptive and religiously dissenting Hasidic movement. However, by the middle of the 19th century the socioeconomic base and appeal of Hasidism had become completely transformed. The movement abandoned its earlier commitment to the plight of the dispossessed, to make its peace with the growing Jewish middle class of merchant-scholars. This new base of support invested the leadership of Hasidism with power and wealth while taking the sting out of its ‘militancy in the clandestine struggle against Austrian government oppression’ (pp. 23-9).