504 A History of Judaism
known from his voluminous compendium of Jewish law as the Tsemach
Tsedek (‘Righteous Scion’), responded in the mid- nineteenth century by
justifying punctilious observance of the commandments on the basis of
their mystical meaning.^9
Hasidism was thus transformed, from a revolutionary sectarian move-
ment opposed to the rabbinic establishment in the eighteenth century, to
a new role in the nineteenth century in the vanguard of the war waged
by the haredim in support of conservative rabbinic values. Hasidic com-
munities began to set up their own yeshivot for Torah and Talmud study,
to insulate their youth from the harmful influences of the outside world
much as the Lithuanian mitnagdim had earlier tried to protect them-
selves against Hasidism. Some hasidic leaders, such as Yitzhak Meir
Rothenburg Alter of the Gur hasidim, the largest hasidic group in central
Poland, became better known for their writings on Jewish law than for
their mystical teachings. By 1881, following the great waves of emigra-
tion to the west, most haredi Jews in the Ukraine, Galicia and central
Poland, and many haredi Jews in Belorussia, Lithuania and Hungary,
followed a hasidic way of life and used hasidic rites of worship. The dif-
ferent hasidic groups fiercely maintained their identities and traditions,
and their loyalty to their individual rebbes (who continued to develop
mystical interpretations of the Torah), but to the wider Jewish world
they presented a united front in opposition to secular change. Two cru-
cial issues remained, however, on which consensus among hasidim, as
among haredim in general, was (and still is) rare: attitudes to Zionism,
and expectation for the imminent arrival of the Messiah.^10
The clearest expression of religious opposition to Zionism in the
modern haredi world was that formulated by Joel Teitelbaum, rebbe of
the Satmar hasidic sect from Satu- Mare in Hungary (now Romania). In
the eyes of the Satmar hasidim, the Zionist enterprise is an ‘act of Satan’
because no attempt should be made to form a Jewish state until the
Messiah has come. The existence of the current State of Israel has thus
culpably delayed the messianic age and the Holocaust was a divine pun-
ishment for Zionists trying to ‘force the end’. When Teitelbaum, who
was to be the rebbe of the Satmar for over fifty years, escaped from
Europe in 1944, he brought Hungarian Hasidism to the United States,
settling his community in 1947 in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where
they have become a distinct Yiddish- speaking, and wholly unassimi-
lated, enclave in the variegated cultural mix of New York.^11
The Satmar are extreme in their opposition to the Zionist state, which
sometimes extends to a refusal even to countenance the use of spoken