new certainties and new mysticism 423
Shneur Zalman was thrown into prison in 1798 after being formally
accused by the rabbi of Pinsk of creating a new sect, and of committing
treason by sending money to the land of Israel, which lay within Otto-
man territory. The release of Shneur Zalman on 19 Kislev in the
same year is still celebrated by Habad hasidim as the ‘Holiday of
Deliverance’.
Solomon Maimon in Berlin claimed in the 1790s that the hasidic
revolution had already come and gone:
This sect was, therefore, in regard to its end and its means, a sort of secret
society, which had nearly acquired dominion over the whole nation; and
consequently one of the greatest revolutions was to have been expected, if
the excesses of some of its members had not laid bare many weak spots,
and thus put weapons into the hands of its enemies ... Men began to find
out their weaknesses, to disturb their meetings, and to persecute them
everywhere. This was brought about especially by the authority of a cele-
brated rabbi, Elias of Wilna, who stood in great esteem among the Jews, so
that now scarcely any traces of the society can be found scattered here and
there.The claim was premature, for Hasidism was still very much alive. Des-
pite the virulence of polemic between hasidim and mitnagdim, it is
evident that the causes for conflict were much weaker than had been the
case with the opposition to Jacob Frank in the 1760s. The hasidim did
not endorse antinomianism, and many of the mitnagdim were also
involved in study of the kabbalah, even if the Vilna Gaon, who (accord-
ing to his disciples) saw visions from heaven every night and wrote a
celebrated commentary on the Zohar, preferred to reveal little about his
mystical insights to others, relying instead on study and argument as the
basis of his kabbalistic as well as his halakhic teachings and Bible
commentaries.^65
In 1774, after the first two bans on hasidim, Shneur Zalman had
gone to Vilna with his hasidic colleague Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk,
in a vain attempt to reach an understanding with the Gaon, only for the
Gaon to refuse to meet them. In 1805 the Russian general Kutuzov,
impatient with appeals for intervention from different sides in an internal
Jewish debate of little interest to the secular government, instituted an
inquiry into whether Hasidism was really a sect and required suppres-
sion by the state. On deciding that this was not the case, Kutuzov
instructed both sides to cease their hostilities and to allow each other to
build separate synagogues and choose their own rabbis. When the