acts as a way to elevate oneself into a state of spiritual ecstasy; and hitbonnenut
(contemplation) means avoiding the rote observance of commandments and
performance of religious rituals. The most vivid manifestation of these ideas
was the way Hasidic Jews prayed. In contrast to the mundane recitation of
prayers by rote in non-Hasidic synagogues, Hasidic Jews sang, danced, and
jumped into the air while they prayed.
Dov Ber, “Maggid of Mezerich,” was the institutional architect of the
movement. More than anything else, he defined the function of the move-
ment’s central institution: the zaddik. The zaddik(literally, righteous man,
also referred to as the rebbe) was the charismatic leader of a circle of Hasidic
followers. He was believed by his followers to have a special connection to the
realm of the divine and the resulting special abilities. Thus, Hasidic Jews
would ask the zaddikto evaluate the prospects of a prosposed marriage or eco-
nomic endeavor, and to provide aid in times of sickness or danger. As
Hasidism spread, each circle of Hasidim clustered around its own zaddik.
Oddly, the Hasidic notions of hasid(pietist) and zaddik(righteous man)
inverted the conventional rabbinic understandings of these terms. Zaddik
typically refers to an ordinary observant Jew; hasidto the Jew who is uniquely
immersed in a world of mystical piety and attains a higher spiritual level than
those around him.
By 1772, Hasidism had spread through much of Poland and Ukraine, and
was heading northward toward Lithuania. In 1772, the movement encoun-
tered opposition from two directions. In Brody, the leaders of the Jewish
community objected to the Hasidic refusal to accept the community’s ritual
slaughterers as legitimate, and their preference for a slaughterer endorsed by
their zaddik. Initially a conflict over revenue from the meat tax, this conflict
soon revealed the real issue of contention: the fear that Hasidism threatened
the authority of the kahaland the unity of the Jewish community.
The major opposition to Hasidism formed in Lithuania when, in 1772, a
circle of Hasidim formed a Hasidic prayer group in Vilna, the center of rab-
binic scholarship. In response, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, also known as the Vilna
Gaon (the Sage of Vilna), the leading talmudic scholar of the age and an old-
style pietist and mystic, condemned the Hasidic Jews as heretics. Rabbi
Elijah thus became the leader of the mitnagdim(literally, opponents), as the
opponents of Hasidism came to be known.
Rabbi Elijah was by nature a controversialist like Jacob Emden. Previously
he had been involved in communal disputes with the chief rabbi of Vilna. He
had no official standing in the Vilna Jewish community; rather, he was the
head of his own independent yeshiva. Like the Hasidic leaders he was chal-
lenging, his leadership was charismatic, deriving in his case from his
towering scholarship. Thus, the conflict between Hasidic Jews and the oppo-
nents was on an elemental level a contest between two charismatic forms of
Jewish leadership.
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 135