millenarian, its day-to-day practice was that of a religion“of the book,”focused on
scripture, law, and teachers.
Russia acquired over 650,000 Jews between 1772 and 1795, amounting to
about 2 percent of the population. After thefirst partition, Catherine II saw in
the existing institutional hierarchy of assemblies (kahal) a ready-made administra-
tive structure and decreed that such assemblies be created at the local, regional, and
provincial levels for the Jewish community, but she established no chief rabbi on
the model of the Muslim mufti. The kahals were primarily administrative organs,
apportioning and collecting taxes, overseeing petty justice, and liaising with the
Russian administration. But they also did confessional duties, settling religious
disputes and administering schools. In the last years of the century under Paul I a
plan was under consideration to turn the kahal organization into a stronger network
of religious educational institutions and clerical supervision, with a chief rabbi, to
“modernize”Judaism, but this came to nothing after Paul’s short reign.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries east European Jewish communities
also developed vibrant sects that diverged from Talmudic Judaism. Essentially
millenarian, like contemporary movements in Protestantism and Catholicism,
they rejected book learning, laws, and dogma as too worldly and developed a
personal, emotional form of worship. Three movements surged through the
Ukrainian lands, particularly in impoverished Podolia, in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
One was led by Sabbatai Zevi, a Jew from near Constantinople who created a
messianic Jewish cult in Galicia in 1648. Zevi declared himself the messiah, although
he was discredited because he briefly converted to Islam, but his ideas struck a chord
and spread in small communities in Podolia in the 1660s. Joseph Frank created a
more extreme movement in the early eighteenth century; he called himself a prophet
and insisted on organizing tight communities that he ruled in an almost totalitarian
manner, eventually drawing them into conversion to Catholicism. His movement
also caught on in Podolia but had little long-term impact. A third major trend,
Hassidism, emerged in the early eighteenth century, again in Podolia. Associated
with Israel Besht (1700–59), Hassidism emphasized the intensity of a personal
religious experience over intellectual understanding. While Joseph Frank had been
a despot, Besht was a humble compassionate man; he did good works and preached
the omnipresence of God and the possibility of union with God through ecstatic
prayer in which dancing, leaping, and whirling brought one to mystical connection
with God. Breaking with traditional Torah-based rabbinical authority, Hassidic
writings took the form of parables, allegories, and metaphors to be interpreted by
leaders regarded as prophets. Hassidism had many parallels with Pietist, revivalist
movements in eighteenth-century Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism that
also focused on personal connection with God, inner light, prophecy, and emotion.
Like Frankism, Hassidism was criticized and banned by Jewish hierarchs across
Polish-Lithuanian lands from the 1772, slowing its spread but not eliminating this
resilient sect.
These three movements emerged andflourished in Galicia and Podolia, among
the poorest and most isolated Jewish communities in the Commonwealth. In that
Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 405