Some Notes on the Social Background of Early Hasidism

Summary

The Hasidic movement, which had its inception at about the middle of the eighteenth century under the impact of a few compelling charismatic leaders in Podolia and Volhynia, was in its character a Jewish revivalism. As such, it aimed at the total mobilization of emotions; Hasidism, wherever it spread, brought in its wake emotional intensification of religious life in a fashion typical of revivalist movements. From the point of view of its atmosphere, Hasidism is somewhat akin to the religious upheaval in seventeenth-century England though naturally no historical connexions existed between the two.

For too long research has been concentrated mainly on the legendary biography, or occasionally also on the personality, of Israel Baalshem (1700-60), often called in both scholarly and popular literature the founder of Hasidism. In another direction Hasidism has been described as a religious movement that sprang spontaneously from the depth of an oppressed Eastern European Jewry. Sometimes the magical formula of the “mystical and rational polarity” of the Jewish soul-whatever this eloquent phrase may mean-was evoked for the understanding of Hasidism. So, too, were philosophical deliberations on the “essence” of Judaism-disregarding, in the hothouse of generalization, the historical, geographical, and sociological background out of which that particular form of Jewish piety arose.

Hasidism has also been explained as the reaction of emotional piety to the legalistic scrutinies of Talmudism and rabbinism, and by others as “the revolt of the illiterate” fighting for full religious rights within a society in which the untutored were, almost by definition, considered incapable of piety.

The varied efforts at understanding Hasidism in these terms are not totally misconceived; even if they do not appear fully satisfactory, an element of truth would seem to be inherent in some of them. And yet they persistently avoid coming to grips with the social situation in which Hasidism arose.

In an attempt to understand the social climate of nascent Hasidism, we have to consider two questions: who were the leaders, and who were those led?