Jewish upbringing and education. As a young man he was employed as a
schoolteacher, and studied Kabbala secretly at night. At some point, he began
to wander and meditate in the forest. Around 1740, he began to preach a new
prioritizing of Judaism, tailored to the common folk, that emphasized prayer
over study, and melodies over liturgical texts. For rank-and-file Jews, cut off
from the centers of Jewish learning but able to pray more independently, this
was a powerfully attractive message. He attracted a small circle of followers,
mainly from among the Jewish lower clergy – maggidim(itinerant preachers)
and mochikhim(exhorters).
Initially, historians disagreed as to what kind of movement the Besht
founded. Some argued that the movement was exclusively religious; other
argued that it was a religious movement with a powerful underlying social
protest. The most ardent proponents of the latter view were Marxist-Zionist
historians such as Ben-Zion Dinur. True to their Marxist orientation, they
presumed class struggle to be inherent in all facets of Jewish communal life.
For Dinur and other Marxist historians, Hasidism galvanized the protests of
the Jewish masses against an oppressive “Kahal regime” made up of rabbis
and affluent Jewish families.
During the past three decades, the shortcomings of this view were exposed.
Dinur presumed that the Jews of Podolia, the cradle of Hasidism, were
largely impoverished, thus fortifying a movement of social protest. Recent
scholarship has shown that Podolia, and Mienzboz in particular, was in the
midst of a commercial revival for much of the eighteenth century. Dinur’s
claim that the Besht was leading a social protest against the Kehilla was dis-
proved by Moshe Rosman. Rosman, while studying the role of Jews in the
Polish grain trade, examined the records of the Czartoryski family, a Polish
magnate family whose estate included thousands of towns and villages,
including Miedzyboz – the birthplace of the Besht. Among the records of the
Czartoryski family were heretofore unseen tax records of the Miedzyboz
Jewish community – a uniquely impartial account of the Besht’s relationship
with the Kahal. These records showed that the Besht was living in a home
provided to him by the Jewish community – belying the argument that he
was leading a protest movement against the communal leadership. Thus,
there is now a consensus that Hasidism was a movement of religious revival,
but not a movement of social protest.
When the Besht died, the Hasidic movement was still minuscule. His two
major disciples, Ya’akov Yosef of Polnoie, and Dov Ber, “Maggid of Mezerich,”
were responsible for the movement’s rapid expansion after the Besht’s death.
Ya’akov Yosef was the movement’s major ideologue; he consolidated the teach-
ings of the Besht around three kabbalistic doctrines that became the pillars of
Hasidism: devekut, hitlahavut, and hitbonnenut. Devekut(clinging to God) refers
to the importance of directing all observance and belief toward narrowing the
gap between oneself and the divine; hitlahavut(ecstasy) refers to using religious
134 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750