new certainties and new mysticism 415
they had remarkably little success in the rest of eastern Europe. Why
in the end did Hasidism such as was witnessed by Solomon Maimon,
with its emphasis on the religious experience of the individual hasid
(‘pietist’), succeed in establishing a new form of Judaism accepted by
the majority of other Jews, when Sabbetai Zevi and Jacob Frank had
failed?
The theology preached by Dov Ber was built on the kabbalah of Luria
but emphasized less the intellectual concentration which had characterized
elite kabbalist circles than the immersion of the individual in the divine
presence through prayer, in which all sense of being is lost and union with
the divine is achieved. The true tsaddik (‘righteous man’) is endowed
through such devotions, or mindfulness (da’at ), with a special charisma,
enabling him to mediate between believers and God and to work miracles,
bringing down the abundance of the divine to the material world. Any
ordinary Jew could find a connection with God through allegiance to the
tsaddik for whom he is by nature suited. This theology opened up new
routes for all Jews for personal piety, and also a new and dramatic role
for charismatic religious leaders similar to the leading figures of con-
temporary dissenting Christian sects such as the Doukhobors.^52
By 1766, when Dov Ber had established the court where he was seen
by Solomon Maimon, he was already in his sixties, weakened by a life
of extreme asceticism and devotion to kabbalistic study. He was not
given to the flamboyant rabble- rousing which had brought a following
to Jacob Frank a decade earlier. Nor did he spread the word by intensive
publication – his teachings were published only posthumously on the
basis of notebook jottings by a disciple, Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev. Levi
Yitzhak was a figure about whom tales were told, with many collections
of Yiddish stories about his miracles and love for all his fellow Jews
(which was said to have included a willingness even to argue with God
on their behalf, as Abraham had once argued on behalf of the inhabit-
ants of Sodom and Gomorrah), but Dov Ber was not a powerful
personality of this type, meeting only rarely even with his disciples, let
alone the wider population.^53
Behind Dov Ber stood a figure of immense charisma whose life and
teachings are shrouded in a mist of myth and hagiography, Israel b.
Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, known by the initials of his title as the Besht.
According to legend, Israel b. Eliezer was born in a small town in Pod-
olia in c. 1700 to poor parents. Orphaned at an early age, he made a
living as an assistant in a religious school and sexton in a yeshivah and
later as a digger of clay in the Carpathian mountains. In the mid- 1730s,