The purpose of this research is to provide an analysis of Hasidism, the Jewish "revivalist movement" of the 18th century.
The research will include analysis of the opponents of the Hasidic movement, including the Mitnagdim.
As Gershom G. Scholem immediately makes clear in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism that the "Polish and Ukranian Hasidism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had nothing to do with medieval Hasidism in Germany. The new Hasidism was founded shortly before the middle of the eighteenth century by that famous saint and mystic Israel Baal Shem ("Master of the Holy Name") who died in 1760 . . . " (Scholem 325).
What we are dealing with here, then, is essentially a relatively modern movement which is heavily identified with one personality.
In essence, writes Max Dimont in The Indestructible Jews, Hasidism
was a Jewish revivalist movement in which, as
in Christianity, personality took the place of
doctrine. Unencumbered by higher learning,
Bal Shem (various spellings exist of the
leader's name) stripped kabalism of its
metaphysics, which he did not understand.
Ne neutralized the messianic content of
Sabbateanism and substituted frenzied religion
for the sexual frenzy of Frankism (Dimont 229).
The development of Hasidism, therefore, closely paralleled the development of the personality of Bal Shem himself. He was
born in 1700 in Podolia, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, in or near the province of Bukovina. Abram Leon Sachar, in A History of the Jews, makes clear the dependence of Hasidism on the person of Bal Shem.
Sachar says that Bal Shem was in the truest sense a "religious revivalist, akin in spirit to the saintly John Wesley . . . . The sect which he founded, known as the Hasidism, depended as much upon his own radiant personality as upon his teachings. Indeed, the Baal Shem himself is still the real center for the Hasidis...