The history of Hasidism is the history of Judaism at its best, Judaism at its worst, Judaism at its most liberating, and Judaism at its most confining. Of all the movements that have transformed Judaism in the past three centuries, only Zionism, perhaps, has had more of a transforming impact on how Jews understand their religion. These thoughts are occasioned by reading a massive new doorstop of a book, tipping the scales at almost 900 pages, Hasidism: A New History, collectively written by eight historians.

As a modern history, the new history corrects many misconceptions about the somewhat misty origins of the movement. It is not entirely clear if Israel ben Eli’ezer, (c. 1699–1760) better known as the Baal Shem Tov, was quite as central in the birth of Hasidim as his later hagiographers indicated. The authors of the book reject older theories that Hasidism can be seen as a reaction to the short and inglorious career of the would-be Jewish Messiah Shabbatai Tzvi (though both movements were inculcated in the mysteries of Luranic kabbalism), to the raids of Klmelnytsky, or to an overriding sense of the separation of galut.   It is not entirely clear what was its cause, but its context was the relative peace and openness of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18^th century, in which the state was weak, usually distant, and relatively benign, and Jewish communities had a large degree of self-government.

The new history shies away from any strong class-based explanation of Hasidism, but there is no doubt that the movement, once it really got underway in the late 18^th century, exposed and then widened fissures and tensions within the Jewish community. The history does not challenge the widely accepted view of Hasidism as rejecting older views of Jewish piety as ascetic and life-denying, instead replacing it with a view of worship as essentially joyful, emphasizing singing, some dancing, and the occasional somersault in worship. As it developed in the 18^th century, its charismatic leaders and their followers set up their own institutions, alternatives to those already existing, and this created great tension with their opponents the Mitnagdim, led by the formidable Gaon of Vilna. The book makes clear that, from the beginning, Hasidism was defined by its misogyny, not even allowing women the relatively minimal role they had in traditional Judaism. Families did not join Hasidic communities. Hasidim were only the men who attached themselves to a rebbe; a man might be a Hasid, his wife would generally not so identify, and since Hasidism often did not emphasize education, children, even male children, weren’t generally raised Hasidic.

The late 18^th and early 19^th century saw the consolidation of Hasidism and the rise of Hasidic dynasties. Although the authors of the history caution against seeing later 19^th century Hasidism as undergoing an intellectual and spiritual decline, and I am sure that is so, they spend much time with the famous tzaddiks and rebbes from the late 18^th and early 19^th century; the Maggid of Mezritsh, Levi Yitzhak of Barditshev, Nahman of Bratslav, and Shneuer Zalman of Liady, the founder of Chabad. Certainly, in the 19^th century, the so-called Golden Age of Hasidism, the movement was at its greatest extent, with between 10 to 50% of the population in different areas of Eastern Europe, with well over 150 Hasidic courts dotting the landscape. The book does an excellent job in explaining the crucial question of the geography of Hasidism; the difference between Hasidism in Poland, in Galicia, in Western Russia, and in Hungary, making much clear for those of us who tend to view “Eastern European Jewry” as an undifferentiated blur.

The geography of Hasidism was increasingly problematic. Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation after 1795, gobbled up by Prussia, Russia, and the Hapsburgs, and with the rise of the nation-state, all Jews, Hasidim and non-Hasidim alike had to deal with the sovereign state as their master. Hasidism also confronted the growing movement toward secularism and non-traditional forms of Judaism. These forms of modernity increasingly dominated Hasidism, and Hasidism became a bastion of reactionary anti-modernism. The Hungarian rabbi Moshe Sofer (1762–1839) summed up what increasingly was the motto of Hasidism, “innovation is prohibited by the Torah.” If traditional Judaism emphasized the continuity of Jewish tradition, Hasidism (and Eastern European Orthodoxy as a whole) now emphasized the extent to which Judaism was unchanging and unchangeable, something hard and cold, something not to creatively interact with, something just to accept.   Throughout the 19^th century, Hasidism, primarily located in shtetls and small towns rather than big cities, fought a war against the encroachments of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, socialism, and by the end of the 19^th century, Zionism as well. It didn’t lose the war, exactly, but it didn’t win the war, either. Hasidism became defined by what it was against rather than what it was for.

But after 1914, the Hasidic movement had bigger problems than polemics against non-believing Jews. We easily forget how devastating World War I was to the Jewish population of Eastern Europe; new countries and borders into which they fit ever more uneasily; the anti-religious policies of the Soviet Union in Russia and Ukraine.

And then, of course, came the other war. Because, for the most part, because Hasidic rebbes had advised their flocks against migrating to America, that treifene medinah (unkosher nation), or emigrating to pre-war Palestine, the Hasidic population of Eastern Europe was especially devastated. There is an interesting controversy discussed in the book, which with I was not familiar, about whether the escape of some of the main Hasidic rebbes from Nazi occupied Europe came at the expense their followers left to their fate, but these questions seem to bother outsiders more than Hasidim themselves, who look at the escapes of the rebbes, whether to New York or Palestine, as miraculous.

There certainly is something miraculous about the survival and flourishing of Hasidim since the end of the war, how the scarred remnants of Hasidic communities resettled in Brooklyn, in Rockland County, and Israel were fruitful and fruitful and multiplied and multiplied, taking what they needed from their new environments, carefully oblivious to the rest. They changed the narrative of both American Judaism and Zionism. By their very existence they refuted the widely held notion that secularization was the inevitable consequence of modernity. And without wanting to call attention to themselves, they called attention to themselves, becoming, for many Jews and probably even more gentiles, the most recognizable image of contemporary Judaism, unambiguous Jews who wear their Judaism, on their sleeves, their heads, and as a sign between their eyes. The three most famous New York Jews in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century were probably Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. And even those who found much to be distasteful in the Hasidic lifestyle, from the rigidity, control of personal freedom and expression, misogyny, indifference and frequent hostility to outsiders, and political conservatism could find something admirable in Hasidism; its dogged, stubborn persistence and fierce commitment to living as they chose, and not as anyone else wanted them to.

This ambivalence towards Hasidism runs through 20^th century Jewish thought. So much of what is best and most interesting in Jewish thinking over the past century consists of a dialogue with Hasidism. After a century in which representatives of the Haskalah generally despised Hasidism, a new attitude began around 1900. The great historian Simon Dubnow wrote of Hasidism as a genuine expression of a people’s anti-elitist folk religion (albeit one that had become badly ossified.) In different ways, both Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem saw in Hasidism a way to reconnect to the mystical, non-rational heritage of Judaism. Thinkers from Hasidic backgrounds, notably Abraham Joshua Heschel and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, infused the prevailing rationalism in American Judaism with a strong dose of Hasidic spirituality and fervor.

A large part of the history of Hasidism is about the complexities of the interaction of modernism and anti-modernism. By the early 19^th century the Hasidic movement identified as its most formidable opponents not its Orthodox opponents, but the inroads of modernity; the rise of the nation-state and Jewish assimilation, secularism, and intellectual trends that either rejected religion outright, or (perhaps even more perniciously to the Hasidim) created forms of Judaism that greatly diverged from traditional practice. Hasidism refused to make the bargain that so many Jews and Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodoxy made with the modern state. They did not see religion as a private and personal matter, or any need to adjust one’s dress, behavior, or even one’s language, to the dominant cultural norms. And in so doing, the anti-modernism of Hasidism became an alternative form of modernity, a modernity on their own terms. Indeed, in Israel, Hasidism has found a way to manipulate the state and empower itself, and make it do its bidding, and something similar, despite stronger church-state barriers, in the United States. In the end, the same features that are attractive about Hasidism, its unbending and unmeltable adherence to its traditions, are the same features that make me fear it.