new certainties and new mysticism 421
Alongside the dynasties, it was still possible in the late eighteenth
century, as Hasidism developed, for new charismatic leaders to emerge
as the Baal Shem Tov had done. ‘The Seer of Lublin’, Jacob Isaac
Horowitz, who had been a follower of Dov Ber of Mezeritch and of
Elimelech of Lizhansk, spread a novel version of Hasidism through
Poland and Galicia. A renowned miracle worker, the Seer believed in
bringing material comfort to his hasidic followers. He argued that the
practical role of the tsaddik is to look after his ‘children’ so that ‘the
people will be free to worship God’. The Seer himself founded no dyn-
asty, and not all his disciples agreed with the social aspects of his
teachings. One of his disciples, Yaakov Yitzhak of Przysucha, known as
the Holy Jew, who had served as a spiritual guide in the Seer’s court,
objected to the Seer’s emphasis on material welfare and on magic, and
set up a competing hasidic school which emphasized Talmud study and
sincerity in worship as part of the quest for individual spiritual perfec-
tion by an elite rather than focusing on the needs of ordinary Jews. The
response of the Seer was bitter, and the controversy about the correct
focus of spiritual endeavour was to divide Polish Hasidism for many
years, into the mid- nineteenth century.^62
The elitism of Yaakov Yitzhak of Przysucha ran counter to the main
trend in Hasidism. The attraction of Hasidism for most ordinary Jews
in eastern Europe lay precisely in the opportunity for spiritual fulfilment
through piety it opened up for the many uneducated village people who
felt excluded from the intellectual Judaism of the yeshivot. Prayer in
small side rooms (stieblach ), away from the rest of the population, gave
a sense of being special, as did the fervid atmosphere of the court of a
tsaddik, with crowds of young men in a state of religious enthusiasm. In
both the stiebl and the court, music and dance played a central role
from the start of Hasidism, enlivening a liturgy that many felt had
become overburdened with words. Distinctive dress, in particular the
girdle to separate the upper part of the body from the lower, marked the
dedication of the hasid to a holy life, as did the insistence that the knives
for the kosher slaughter of animals for consumption be sharpened to a
greater degree than was customary among other Jews.
This last issue, the sharpening of the knives, became a charge against
the hasidim in the often bitter attempts to crush their movement from
the early 1770s. The bitterness of the struggle was exacerbated by the
lack of Jewish communal authority following the demise of the Council
of the Four Lands in 1764, after a decision by the Polish Sejm to estab-
lish a new system for collecting the Jewish poll tax without the Council.