422 A History of Judaism
The Jews of Poland and Lithuania could no longer look to a central
Jewish institution recognized by the state to arbitrate over religious dif-
ferences as the Council had done in the controversy between Eybeschütz
and Emden. The opponents of Hasidism, led for the most part by the
great Vilna Gaon, accused the new movement of destroying tradition by
downgrading the centrality of Torah study and intellectual endeavour in
favour of visions, miracles, enthusiastic prayer and a dangerous rever-
ence for rebbes as if they were more than human. It was hard to show
that any of these attributes actually contradicated halakhah, so more
peripheral matters, such as the knife sharpening and the preference of
hasidim for the Sephardic prayer forms which had been favoured by
Luria, became token charges.^63
The real issues were political, since the hasidic movement quite delib-
erately bypassed the established rabbinic authorities, with their
supervision of synagogues and the rest of Jewish communal life, which had
controlled the Jews in the villages and small towns of Russia, Poland,
Lithuania and Ukraine for generations. The hasidic movement attracted
such hostility only once it began to appear organized through the
authority of Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch. The wonderworking of
the Baal Shem Tov had not been seen as a threat by his rabbinic contem-
poraries. At worst, he evoked derision. But in 1772 two bans were
pronounced against the hasidim, and again in 1781 there was a herem
forbidding Jews ‘to do business with them, and to intermarry with them,
or to assist at their burial’. A pamphlet published by the mitnagdim
(‘opponents’) in 1772 accused the hasidim of treating every day like a
holiday, of excessive consumption of alcohol and of arrogance in daring
to ‘enter the rose garden of the kabbalah’ while still ignorant of the oral
Torah. It is hard to know how much the polemic reflected a real theo-
logical anxiety that hasidic thought tended towards a pantheism in
which there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane as
well as more mundane concerns about the independence from rabbinic
control of these Jews from the margins.^64
In any case, the attacks did not succeed. By 1796, when the oppon-
ents of Hasidism issued a herem on the publications of Shneur Zalman
of Lyady, the hasidim were sufficiently influential in Jewish society to
issue a herem of their own in response, and to seek the support of offi-
cials of the Russian state. They had already, as we have seen, achieved a
certain amount of recognition from the secular authorities, who may
have seen Hasidism as a bulwark against the freethinking encouraged
by the Enlightenment. In this case, however, the appeal backfired, since