Hasidism Hasidism is a Jewish movement dati

Hasidism is a Jewish movement dating from the eighteenth century. It began as a strong movement and then lost much of its force as times changed and because of its own internal failures, but the underlying conception persisted and was revived during the period of Jewish existentialism. Hasidism is not a single sect but an idea and an attitude that has given birth to a number of different philosophical systems, though all are linked in terms of a sense of spiritual community.

The gospel of Hasidism was born in eighteenth-century Europe through the offices of Bal Shem Tov, in Poland. The conditions in Europe at that time were similar to those in ancient Palestine in the first century A.D., and just as Christianity developed out of a period of oppressive rule and strife, so did Hasidism develop in a time of political oppression, social unrest, revelation, penance, and mystic cults. Hasidism sloughed off the obscene, the gross, and the sexual in Sabbateanism and Frankism and kept only the essence of a new religious movement intended to exalt the spirit:

But just as Christianity in its early forms was unrealistic in its attitude toward the state, so early Hasidism was unrealistic in its attitude toward the dual role man has to play on earth--his role in relation to stat, and his role in relation to God (Dimont 287).

Hasidism was a complex belief system. Where the Talmud preached that no ignorant man could be pious, Hasidism taught the opposite,

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rom science to philosophy, the social sciences, and literature. What they wanted, however, was to be westernized without being Christianized, because they wanted to create a Jewish culture that could also be used by the West: As they looked about them, these harbingers of the early Haskala saw half of Eastern Europe's Jews infected with the Hasidic doctrines of salvation. The Hasidists, they realized, were their enemy, and they aligned themselves with the reluctant rabbis to weaken that enemy (Dimont 354). The Jews in the East managed to create for themselves a set of Jewish values with which they could identify. They sought for answers in philosophy and did not switch to Christianity as did many in the West at that time. Over time, the Enlightenment of the West and the Haskala of the East would move closer to one another and reach an accommodation around 1900. By the mid-nineteenth century, as the Haskala was in full swing, the Hasidists were identified as the enemy. Haskala writers expressed this in novels which mirrored the sort of escape fiction popular at the time. The novels were written in Hebrew and were intended to undermine the influence of Hasidism. They were set primarily in Palestine and had Jews as heroe

Category: Philosophy - H