A must-read book for understanding this vibrant and influential modern Jewish movement Hasidism originated in southeastern Poland, in mystical circles centered on the figure of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, but it was only after his death in 1760 that a movement began to spread. Today, Hasidism is witnessing a remarkable renaissance around the world. This book provides the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. Written by an international team of scholars, its unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, Hasidism is a product of modernity that forged its identity as a radical alternative to the secular world.
Hasidism is one of the most important religious and social movements to have developed in Eastern Europe, and the most significant phenomenon in the religious, social and cultural life of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Innovative and multidisciplinary in its approach, Hasidism: Key Questions discusses the most cardinal features of any social or religious movement: definition, gender, leadership, demographic size, geography, economy, and decline. This is the first attempt to respond those central questions in one book. Recognizing the major limitations of the existing research on Hasidism, Marcin Wodzinski's Hasidism offers four important corrections. First, it offers anti-elitist corrective attempting to investigate Hasidism beyond its leaders into the masses of the rank-and-file followers. Second, it introduces new types of sources, rarely or never used in research on Hasidism, including archival documents, Jewish memorial books, petitionary notes, quantitative and visual materials. Third, it covers the whole classic period of Hasidism from its institutional maturation at the end of the eighteenth century to its major crisis and decline in wake of the First World War. Finally, instead of focusing on intellectual history, the book offers a multi-disciplinary approach with the modern methodologies of the corresponding disciplines: sociology and anthropology of religion, demography, historical geography and more. By combining some oldest, central questions with radically new sources, perspectives, and methodologies, Hasidism: Key Questions will provide a radically new look at many central issues in historiography of Hasidism, one of the most important religious movements of modern Eastern Europe.
The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism shaped the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries. This award-winning study, a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth, is based on source materials in Polish and five other languages. Its subject matter is successfully contextualized within the broader domains of the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, hasidism and rabbinic culture, as well as the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself.
Moshe Rosman's revolutionary approach has become a cornerstone of Polish Jewish historiography. Challenging conventions, he asserts that the 'marriage of convenience' between the Jews and the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dynamic relationship that, though punctuated by crisis and persecution, developed into a saga of overall achievement and stability. With that fundamental message this book forges a thematic survey of Jewish history in early modern Poland. These essays, written by Rosman over the course of a distinguished career, have all been updated and enhanced with new detail and nuanced arguments, taking account not only of new archival material and research but also of the ongoing evolution of the author’s own knowledge and perspectives. Some appear here in English for the first time. The volume's structure highlights key topics for understanding the Polish Jewish past: relations between Jews and other Poles; Jewish communal life; Polish Jewish women; and hasidism. One section analyses how this past has been presented in both scholarly and popular modes. The essays are crafted to place them in dialogue with each other. Analytical introductions weigh their significance in the light of modern and postmodern Jewish and Polish historiography. An extensive general introduction sets the context of the history portrayed here, while a thoughtful conclusion elucidates the larger motifs that emerge.
Warsaw was once home to the largest and most diverse Jewish community in the world. It was a center of rich varieties of Orthodox Judaism, Jewish Socialism, Diaspora Nationalism, Zionism, and Polonization. This volume is the first to reflect on the entire history of the Warsaw Jewish community, from its inception in the late 18th century to its emergence as a Jewish metropolis within a few generations, to its destruction during the German occupation and tentative re-emergence in the postwar period. The highly original contributions collected here investigate Warsaw Jewry’s religious and cultural life, press and publications, political life, and relations with the surrounding Polish society. This monumental volume is dedicated to Professor Antony Polonsky, chief historian of the new Warsaw Museum for the History of Polish Jews, on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) was a remarkable Hasidic mystic, leader, and educator. He confronted the secularization and dislocation of Polish Jews after World War I, the failure of the traditional educational system, and the devastation of the Holocaust, in which he lost all his close family and eventually his own life. Thanks to a new critical edition of his Warsaw Ghetto sermons, scholars have begun to reassess the relationship between Shapira's literary and educational attainments, his prewar mysticism, and his Holocaust experience, and to reexamine the question of faith—or its collapse—in the Warsaw Ghetto. This interdisciplinary volume, the first such work devoted to a twentieth-century Hasidic leader, integrates social and intellectual history along with theological, literary, and anthropological analyses of Shapira's legacy. It raises theoretical and methodological questions related to the study of Jewish thought and mysticism, but also contributes to contemporary conversations about topics such as spiritual renewal and radical religious experience, the literature of suffering, and perhaps most pressingly, the question of faith and meaning—or their rupture—in the wake of genocide.
Studying Hasidism, edited by internationally recognized historian of Hasidism Marcin Wodziński, introduces previously untapped sources, such as folklore, music, or material culture and shows how they can be employed to answer new questions in the history of Hasidism.
"This source-reader invites you to encounter the world of one thousand years of Jewish self-government in eastern Europe. It tells about the beginnings in the Middle Ages, delves into the unfolding of communal hierarchies and supra-communal representation in the early modern period, and reflects on the impact of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of growing state interference, as well as on the communist and post-communist periods. Translated into English from Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and other languages, in most cases for the first time, the sources illustrate communal life, the interdependence of civil and religious leadership, the impact of state legislation, Jewish-non-Jewish encounters, reform projects and political movements, but also Jewish resilience during the Holocaust"--
This analysis of the political relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the hasidic movement shows that by creating advantageous socio-political conditions the government actually accelerated the growth of the movement, to the extent that unique features of Polish hasidism can be attributed to the impact of government policy. The study also demonstrates the unusually modern character of hasidic political activity, and charts its distinctive path of development in the Kingdom of Poland into ‘anti-modernist modernity’.
