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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wodziński, Marcin, author.
Title: Hasidism : key questions / by Marcin Wodziński.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057153 | ISBN 9780190631260 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190631291 (online component) | ISBN 9780190631284 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hasidism—Historiography.
Classification: LCC BM198.W63 2018 | DDC 296.8/332—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057153
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
The views and opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Drawings by Noam Nadav.
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Note on Transcription and Place Names xix
Introduction xxi
1 A Definition 1
The History of a Definition 3
A Sect 11
Sectarian Features? 17
Questioning Sectarianism 22
Grassroots Definitions 27
Confraternity 32
Consequences 36
Conclusions 40
2 Women 43
Statements of Identity 47
Prayer 52
Pilgrimages 57
Public Activity 65
At Home 72
Were There Any Female Hasidim? 76
Conclusions 83
3 Leadership 87
The Tsadik as a Holy Man 91
The Tsadik’s Authority: Image vs. Reality 94
The Kvitl 102
The Horizon of Expectations 111
Who Is a Tsadik? 123
Conclusions 130
4 Demography 133
Early Approximations 135
Re-evaluation 139
Extrapolation 158
Conclusions 162
5 Geography 165
The Boundaries of Hasidic Expansion 168
What Stopped Hasidism? 176
Aharon Halberstam of Biała 178
Internal Boundaries 185
Center and Periphery 190
Conclusions 198
6 Economy 201
Images and Their Uses 203
Doctrine and Its Impact 207
Method, Sources, Data 211
How Reliable? 220
Explications 222
Limitations 234
Conclusions 239
7 The End and the Beginning 243
East-European Jews and the First World War 244
The War’s Effect on Hasidism 248
Migrations: A New Geography 251
Urbanization 259
New Ideologies, New Desertions 265
Hybridization vs. Fundamentalization 268
Conclusions 275
Figures
1.1 Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) 6
1.2 The shtibl of the Ołyka Hasidim in Równe (Volhynia) 18
1.3 R. Shneur Zalman of Lady (1745–1812) 20
1.4 The Lurianic-Sephardic prayer book (nusaḥ sefarad) 29
2.2 Hasid and his wife according to Leon Hollaenderski (1846) 49
2.3 Moysei Maimon, U ravina 58
2.4 The kvitl of Tsevi Hirsh ben Lipshe from Uniejów 61
2.5 The wall decoration for the festival of Purim by Maier Schwartz, Vienna 1929 65
2.6 Berek Sonnenberg (1764–1822) and his wife Temerl (d. 1830) 70
2.7 Pauline (Pesele) Wengeroff of Brisk (1833–1916) 74
2.8 Sarah Schenirer 85
3.1 R. Israel Hepstein (1737–1814), known as the Magid of Kozienice 88
3.2 The Hasidic court of Sadagura 96
3.3 R. Eliyahu Guttmacher (1796–1874) 105
3.4 The kvitl found in 1939 at the grave of R. Shlomo Rabinowicz (1801–1866) 107
3.5 The kvitl by R. Yeshaia Kalisz of Pshiskha [Przysucha] 108
3.6 Distribution of requests in kvitlekh of the Guttmacher collection 113
3.7 Władysław Podkowiński; Rebe leczący kobietę 116
4.1 The funeral of R. Ḥayim Elazar Shapira of Munkács in May 1937 138
4.2 Russische Kirche und Markt in Miendzyrzec; postcard 149
4.3 Demography of Hasidism, ca. 1900 152
5.1 Places of residence of the Hasidic leaders, 1740s to the Holocaust 174
5.2 Courts, tsadikim, and shtiblekh of the Sanz [Nowy Sącz] dynasty 179
5.3 R. Aharon Halberstam of Biała (1865–1942) 180
5.4 The Hasidic shtibl in Uciana 188
5.5 Number of shtiblekh and mean distance between shtiblekh and courts, 1900–1939 193
5.6 R. Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn (1789–1866) 195
5.7 R. Tsevi Elimelekh of Bluzev [Błażowa] (1841–1924) 196
6.1 Congress Poland, ca. 1830 213
6.2 Włocławek by Maksymilian Fajans 215
6.3 Hasidim in Aleksandrów, Częstochowa, Koniecpol, and Włocławek, 1820–1837, according to tax brackets (in percentages) 217
6.4 Occupational structure of the Jewish communities in Aleksandrów and Włocławek, ca. 1830–1837 219
6.5 The kvitl from Uniejów submitted to R. Eliyahu Guttmacher 223
6.6 Abraham Jakub Stern (1769–1842) 225
6.7 R. Yitzḥak Kalisz of Otwock in Krynica 238
7.1 A young Hasid in the Russian army 245
7.2 Traditional Jews praying in the war refugee shelter in Różan, Central Poland 248
7.3 The ruins of the synagogue in Husiatyn, Eastern Galicia 250
7.4 R. Ḥayim Szapiro of Płock (1879–1920) 252
7.5 Hasidim in Vienna 254
7.6 R. Israel Friedman of Czortków waving to his followers from the train 255
of Figures
7.7 R. Shlomo Ḥenokh Henikh Rabinowicz of Radomsko in Krynica 261
7.8 Pre-First World War Hasidic centers to which tsadikim did not return 262
7.9 R. Mendele of Radzymin on the streets of interwar Warsaw 264
7.10 The family reunion of the Banoffs, Pabianice 1928 267
Tables
4.1 Hasidim in Podlasie Province, 1823 143
4.2 Hasidim in Minsk Province, 1853 145
4.3 Hasidim in Łomża Province, ca. 1900 154
4.4 The Number of Hasidic Leaders by Country 159
4.5 The Approximate Number of Hasidic Leaders per 10,000 Jewish Inhabitants by Country 160
4.6 Approximate Number of Hasidim by Country 162
6.1 Hasidim in Aleksandrów, Częstochowa, Koniecpol, and Włocławek, 1820–1837, According to Tax Brackets 216
6.2 Occupational Structure of the Jewish Communities in Aleksandrów and Włocławek, ca. 1830–1837 219
Acknowledgments
The idea of this book emerged many years ago at the weekly discussions of the research group “Towards a New History of Hasidism,” hosted in 2007–2008 by the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of which I had the honor to be a fellow. Since then, it went through many stages and received extensive support from numerous people and institutions. To them I want to express my deepest gratitude. First of all, I am grateful to the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Republic of Poland (grant No 11H 12 0290 81), within the National Program for the Development of the Humanities, 2013–2018, for financing the research project, which led to the publication of this book. Chapter 4 is the result of a research fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where I was a fellow in the 2008–2009 research group Jews, Commerce, and Culture. In the final stage, the project was also supported by the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations, Tel Aviv University, which kindly hosted me in the spring and autumn of 2016. I express my deepest gratitude to these institutions, and even more to all of those who represent them.
I also had the privilege of discussing sections of this research project at seminars and open lectures, kindly hosted by the following institutions: Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig; Tel Aviv University; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley; University of California, Davis; Columbia University in New York; University of Potsdam; Oxford University; and last but not least the doctoral seminar of the Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław University. I am most grateful to all of the participants at these events for their comments and criticism.
Further thanks are due to the institutions that allowed me access to their collections. Among them are the library of Wrocław University; the
Acknowledgments
Warsaw Central Archives of Historical Records; the National Library of Poland and the Library of the University of Warsaw; the Jerusalem Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People; the National Library of Israel; the library and archive of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York; and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich we Wrocławiu; the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Toruń; National Archives in Kraków; Diocesan Library in Sandomierz; National Museum of Przemyśl; the National Library in Warsaw; the Jewish community in Bielsko; Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław; the National Digital Archives in Warsaw; the National Archives in Prague; AKON/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the National Library of Israel; Yad Vashem Institute; YIVO Institute of Jewish Research; Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; as well as the individuals William Gross, Agnieszka Traczewska, and Jan Paweł Woronczak shared their iconographic materials with me.
Of individuals, I would like to thank David Biale, Semion Goldin, Christhardt Henschel, Nachum Karlinski, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Michał Kopczyński, Artur Markowski, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, Shaul Stampfer, Wojciech Tworek, and Chava Weissler who shared with me their comments and gave advice on the sections of this book. Their suggestions and opinions inspired me to critically revise many parts of this study. During the course of too long a process of collecting and processing materials for this book, I was greatly helped by Dariusz Dekiert; Piotr Grącikowski; Agnieszka Jagodzińska; Lidia Jerkiewicz; Anna Kałużna; Kamil Kijek; Yair Ha-Levi; Małgorzata Lipska; Katarzyna Liszka; Gadi Sagiv; and Dror Segev. Agnieszka Jagodzińska, as well as Lidia Jerkiewicz, Adam Kaźmierczyk, Jacek Proszyk, Natan Shifris, and Shaul Stampfer, helped me greatly to complete the illustrative material. Iwona Jarosz prepared infographics. Waldemar Spallek prepared the maps. Jarek Garliński translated Polish sections of the manuscript into English. Joyce Rappaport helped me polish my own English. Wojciech Tworek helped me with Hebrew transcriptions. I should also like to thank the staff at Oxford University Press, especially Theo Calderara and Aiesha Krause-Lee. Last but not least, I thank my family for their patience and their continuous support.
Parts of this study have been previously published elsewhere, as listed below:
Excerpts from chapter 1 have appeared in “The Question of Hasidic Sectarianism,” Jewish Cultural Studies 4 (2013), 125–148. They have
Acknowledgments
been used here with permission from the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.
Chapter 2 is based on my “Women and Hasidism: A ‘Non-Sectarian’ Perspective,” Jewish History 27 (2013), 399–434.
Chapter 5 uses sections of my “Space and Spirit: On Boundaries, Hierarchies, and Leadership in Hasidism,” Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016), 63–74.
Chapter 6 appeared as “The Socio-Economic Profile of a Religious Movement: The Case of Hasidism,” European History Quarterly 46 (2016), 4:668–701.
Chapter 7 was published as “War and Religion, or, How the First World War Changed Hasidism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106 (2016), 3:283–312.
All previously published material, reprinted here with the permission of the original publisher, has been amended and re-edited.
Note on Transcription and Place Names
The T ranscrip T ion of Hebrew in this book reflects the pronunciation of modern Hebrew rather than Ashkenazi pronunciation used by the Hasidim themselves, in the spelling most familiar to the English-speaking reader. No attempt is made to indicate the distinctions between alef and ‘ayin (both represented by apostrophe), tet and taf, kaf and kuf, and sin and samekh because these are not relevant to pronunciation. Likewise, the dagesh is not indicated except where it affects pronunciation. However, transcriptions that are well established have been retained even when they are not consistent with the system adopted. On similar grounds, the tsadi (usually represented by “ts”) is rendered by “tz” in such familiar words as bar mitzvah or when it could create a confusion before “h” or “ḥ”; hence, Yitzḥak instead of Yitsḥak. Likewise, the distinction between ḥet and khaf has been retained, using ḥ for the former and kh for the latter. The final heh is indicated too. Prefixes, prepositions, and conjunctions are followed by hyphens: be-toledot ha-’am ha-yehudi. Sheva na’ is represented by e. The transcription of Yiddish follows the YIVO system.
In both Yiddish and Hebrew, capital letters are used only in cases of proper names and for words that are capitalized in English, for example, r. Yisra’el mi-Ruzhin u-mekomo be-toledot ha-ḥasidut. For names of people in both Yiddish and Hebrew, the spellings they used or became common in popular use—for example, Assaf (not: Asaf), Peretz (not: Perets)—have been retained.
With regard to place names, I have used the Polish form for all localities in territories of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; Hungarian for the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary; and Romanian for Moldavia, Wallachia, Bessarabia, and Bukovina, excepting cities that have well-known English names (e.g., Warsaw, not Warszawa). Where Yiddish form is markedly different from its Polish/Hungarian/ Romanian equivalent, I add transcription of the Yiddish name in the
xx Note on Transcription and Place Names
standard northeast dialect in brackets: Mstów [Amstov], Biała Cerkiew [Shvartse Tume]. The rule is reversed in case of Hasidic courts and several personalities (e.g., the Maiden of Ludmir), for which transcription of the Yiddish name, typically associated with the court, tsadik, or other personality residing there, is followed by its Polish/Hungarian/Romanian equivalent: Amshinov [Mszczonów], Ger [Góra Kalwaria]. However, when Yiddish form differs from the Polish/Hungarian/Romanian one only by omission of diacriticals or very minor alteration, I use the latter only: Słonim, not Slonim; Radomsko, not Radomsk.
Introduction
aT d isney World in Orlando Florida, in the section presenting the nations of the world, the representatives of Israel—in other words the only Jews portrayed there—are a Hasidic couple at a wedding ceremony. The display’s creators, clearly untroubled by the fact that Hasidim represent barely 5% of the population of the state of Israel, saw them as the most representative, or at least the most recognizable, group of Israelis.1 Little figurines of the archetypal Jew sold on the streets of Warsaw, Prague, or Budapest invariably have Hasidic features: fur hats, sidelocks, white knee stockings. Similarly, traditional Jews in Hollywood movies from Fiddler on the Roof to Yentl, and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, have to be Hasidic. It is hard to find any more eloquent examples of the fact that Hasidism has become in the globalized collective imagination the personification and quintessence of traditional Jewish culture. This image is prevalent both among Jews as well as among non-Jews, both in places where current Hasidim are numerous, as well as in others where there is no and never has been any trace of them. In 2010 in Lublin, Poland, for example, the logo entitled The Eye of the Tsadik referring to the figure of the tsadik R. Ya’akov Yitzḥak Horowitz, known as the “Seer of Lublin,” was chosen for the visual emblem of the city. Today, the eye of R. Ya’akov Yitzḥak is visible on every municipal item in the city, from the town hall to the bus tickets.
Of course this extraordinary success on the part of Hasidism in creating an image of itself as the most faithful repository of tradition has consequences. One of them is a specific interest in the Hasidic movement both on the part of public opinion and mass culture as well as on the part of numerous scholars, ranging from philosophers, historians to
1. Similarly, at the Nikulin Circus in Moscow in a show on the same theme of nations of the world, the representatives of the Jewish nation are monkeys dressed in Hasidic outfits. See Epstein, “Disney World and a Moscow Circus Imagining Hasidism.”
anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. The result of this is that today, Hasidism is one of the best-researched areas of modern Jewish history and is without a doubt the most intensively studied religious movement coming out of Eastern Europe, Jewish or non-Jewish. This research has been experiencing a very dynamic expansion, especially over the last two decades, and its state has encouraged attempts to develop a synthetic overall view of the issue.2 This book is just such an attempt. This book, however, was developed both out of a recognition of and admiration for the dynamically developing state of knowledge and equally, a realization that, just as in any other scholarly discipline, the number of publications on Hasidism does not always lead to a uniform improvement in the quality of knowledge on this phenomenon. More focused attention on the state of scholarship suggests that less-studied issues and areas form a somewhat consistent pattern. Simplifying somewhat, the five cardinal sins in this research can be summarized as follows:
1. Elitism. The majority of historical studies of Hasidism have still not found a way of including in the picture of this movement the thousands of rank-and-file followers of Hasidism, focusing instead on the life, activities, and writings of a few Hasidic leaders, writers, and thinkers. This elitism, a focus on high rabbinical culture and its effects, as well as on the life and activities of religious leaders, is especially striking in historical studies. Although there are a growing number of sociological or anthropological studies on contemporary Hasidic communities beyond their leaders, we still do not have in effect a single work on the subject of the whole community, rather than on the Hasidic leadership, in preHolocaust times.3
2. Chronological limitations. Paradoxically, until recently, historical interest in Hasidism was limited to the first decades of its existence in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although this has clearly changed
2. In what follows in the introduction, I will not list examples of the discussed tendencies in either old or contemporary scholarship on Hasidism, as it will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. The review of the current state of research can be found in Rosman, “Pesak dinah shel ha-historiografyah ha-Yisre’elit ‘al ha-ḥasidut.” Bibliographical essays summarizing the state of research can be found in Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History, bibliography; Biale, “Hasidism”; and Wodziński, “Hasidism in Poland,” both available online: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com. See also Petrovsky-Shern, “ ‘Hasidei de’ar’a and hasidei dekokhvaya’.”
3. See, e.g., Sagiv, Ha-shoshelet, which attempts to overcome this tendency; still, it focuses mainly on the leadership.
over the last two decades, thanks to now-numerous publications on Hasidism in the first half of the nineteenth century, the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the following century are to this day still strikingly poorly studied. Many studies continue to focus on Hasidism’s birth and early days and above all, on its alleged founder and its first generation of leaders: 80% of studies focus on 20% of early Hasidic history.
3. Limitations of source material. Although the founding father of academic studies of Hasidism, Simon Dubnow, laid enormous emphasis on the variety of the source material, to this day a large number of studies of Hasidism use, above all, printed religious texts, usually in Hebrew and Yiddish, usually works written by the Hasidim themselves, or religious polemical literature. The result of this was (and to an extent still is to this day) a one-sided and fragmentary depiction of the object of study, not only torn from its natural historical context but also locked into a circle of texts and concepts from elite rabbinical culture.
4. A focus on intellectual history. Many studies concentrate on Hasidism’s intellectual and doctrinal dimensions, limiting their scope to aspects within the reach of practitioners of intellectual history and their methodology. Worse still, even if research in the fields of social history and new cultural history have become more numerous in recent years, too rarely are they integrated into the mainstream of research under the aegis of intellectual history.
5. Essentialism. The emphasis on intellectual history, an elitist, narrow focus on rabbinical literature and on the history of leaders, has naturally led to an essentializing definition of the subject of research. What is Hasidism, and what is it not? Whom do we recognize as a “real” Hasid, and which of his/her opinions and actions do we deem to be “Hasidic,” that is, worthy of interest on the part of a scholar of Hasidism? Is the idea of devekut and avodah be-gashmiyut more Hasidic, or objectively more important, than the custom of throwing thistles at one another on the fast of Tish’ah be-Av, or drinking alcohol on the anniversary of a tsadik’s death? And, after all, is drinking alcohol any less religious an activity than studying the Talmud—or maybe this conviction is merely an image retained in our mind of the bourgeois canon of propriety or the stigmatizing of the vernacular level of religion?4
4. See Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklore,” 45–47. See also Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion.”
This book has developed out of a recognition of the limitations in current studies of Hasidism, my own included. It is also an attempt to tackle these limitations. This does not mean, however, that it provides a remedy for all the itemized ills, nor even that it has diagnosed them all correctly and has asked all the key questions. Nor do I claim, heaven forbid, that these ills were not perceived earlier and that there are no works effectively tackling them. In reality, the problems of elitism, essentialism, issues with sources and methodology, or chronological limitations have already been addressed many times in a growing number of works, especially during the last decade. Many of these works have been a direct inspiration for my research and analysis. This book is merely an attempt to gather these various recently diagnosed limitations as well as present a synthetic look at their consequences, and thus possible ways to overcome them. I have no pretensions to solving them definitively. Rather, the book proposes one of a number of possible paths to tackle several principal challenges in current knowledge on Hasidism. The direction of focus has been indicated by the five cardinal sins listed previously.
First, it attempts to broaden its sphere of interest beyond the Hasidic leaders to the thousands of their followers, and so abandon the concept of the history of Hasidism as the history of its leaders. Similarly, the shape of the source base, proposed methodological approaches, and research questions are meant to broaden our knowledge of the forms of life, social structures, beliefs, and behaviors of a broad range of followers of Hasidism and not just of its leaders. In a sense, it attempts to challenge what Jonathan Z. Smith called the “imperial map of the world” as seen by the priests from their perspective at the center and the temple, but not by the rank-andfile followers in the provinces.5 The perspective is here consciously antiimperial (hence peripheral) and anti-elitist (hence egalitarian).
Second, it will cover the long period of Hasidism from its institutional maturation at the end of the eighteenth century to its major crisis and decline in the wake of the First World War. One of this book’s central theses is the contention that the long nineteenth century was the period of Hasidism’s greatest growth and the only time when all the movement’s classic institutions and structures were in place—and thus a classical period in every sense of the word.6
5. See Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 292–93.
6. For a similar argument, see Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History, introduction.
Third, it attempts to use consistently a broad variety of sources and their types. Besides Hebrew and Yiddish printed materials, this book explores the following types of sources: late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth-century memoirs, many of them unpublished; archival materials of various origin, mostly collections of official state documents in Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew; a vast corpus of around 800 Jewish memorial books (yisker bikher) written after the Holocaust but depicting Jewish life in Eastern Europe before its destruction;7 Jewish folk literature and ethnographic accounts, often related to Hasidism; several thousand petitionary notes (kvitlekh) submitted to Hasidic leaders by their visitors; the historical Jewish and non-Jewish press; materials of a statistical nature; iconographic materials; and more. Of importance to me is the fact that these diversified types of sources break with the dominance of the rabbinical voice in the historical narrative by introducing mass-scale, low-profile testimonies from the folk perspective. Thus, as I hope to demonstrate, the new sources not only broaden our knowledge about Hasidism but also allow for a radical re-evaluation of the cognitive perspectives, an anti-elitist focus on the rank and file being the most prominent example of such a new perspective, which is impossible without these new types of sources.8
Fourth and fifth, instead of focusing on intellectual history, it offers a multidisciplinary approach, using the methodologies of the corresponding disciplines.
Let me explain this last point a little more precisely. Apart from my more familiar methodology of social history, the book proposes an analysis of the history of Hasidism using the tools of the sociology of religion, of gender studies, of quantitative historical demography, of historical geography, and economic history. None of these perspectives, disciplines, and research methods is completely new in studies of Hasidism. Some of them are
7. For a general analysis of limitations of memorial books as a source for historical research, see Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kopciowski, and Trzciński, “Księgi pamięci jako źródło wiedzy o historii, kulturze i Zagładzie polskich Żydów”; also see Wein, “Memorial Books as a Source for Research into the History of Jewish Communities in Europe”; Kugelmass and Boyarin, “Introduction.” The newest bibliography of the memorial books is to be found in Kopciowski (ed.), Jewish Memorial Books: A Bibliography. Many of the books are available online at http:// yizkor.nypl.org. For the books partially translated into English, see http://www.jewishgen. org/yizkor/
8. The study that most prominently brought to the scholarly focus the issue of sources for the history of Hasidism was Rosman, Founder of Hasidism. For the most comprehensive discussion of different types of resources for the study of Hasidism, see Wodziński (ed.), Hasidism: Sources, Methods, Perspectives.
