424 A History of Judaism
campaigns of Napoleon in 1812 threatened to do away with this liberal
approach and subject the hasidim in Russia to centralized rabbinic
authority, such as Napoleon had set up in the Paris Sanhedrin in 1806
(as we shall see), the hasidim threw their support behind the Russian
resistance. The name of Levi Yitzhak b. Meir of Berdichev – another of the
surviving pupils of Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, who had founded
a hasidic movement in central Poland and gained a wide following
through his populist use of Yiddish when singing his prayers – headed a
list of Jewish contributors to the funds raised by the Russian state as it
prepared to face and defeat Napoleon. To both hasidim and mitnagdim,
the threat of Napoleon was far more than political: the forces of the
Enlightenment he represented would be a challenge to all east European
Jews.^66
The remarkable success of Hasidism in developing from a movement
of religious renewal by small groups of enthusiastic Torah scholars and
kabbalists to a mass movement among Jews across eastern Europe must
owe much to a loss of trust in communal rabbis as representatives of
traditional leadership structures. In part this was because those leaders
had come to be identified with the interests of the Polish nobility from
whom they increasingly derived their authority, particularly after the
abolition of the Council of the Four Lands in Poland in 1764. But there
was also a palpable sense of freedom for a young rabbinic student from
the margins of Jewish society in his ability to select for himself his rebbe,
and the religious world to which he would devote his life, on the basis
of pious instinct rather than intellectual capacity.
But the same freedom had been available for the followers of Sab-
betai Zevi and Jacob Frank, who by contrast were relegated to the
margins of Judaism by their fellow Jews far more severely than the hasi‑
dim. The saving grace for Hasidism in contrast to Frankism was not just
the comparatively conservative attitude of hasidim to the halakhah but
their more circumspect views on messianism. The Baal Shem Tov had
envisaged a gradual coming of the kingdom when the preconditions for
the coming of the Messiah have all been fulfilled. He did not preach an
immediate eschatological expectation. From the time of the Baal Shem
To v, hasidim had been accused by their opponents of Sabbatean sym-
pathies, but the charge could not be made to stick. The Baal Shem Tov is
said to have lamented the conversion of the Frankists to Christianity in
1759 because ‘the Shekhinah wails and says that as long as a limb is
attached to the body there is hope for its cure, but when it is severed, it
cannot be restored – and every Jew is a limb of the Shekhinah.’ The