Hasidism, the Enlightenment and emancipation
A joyful mystical revival sweeps Eastern Europe while, in the West, the Jewish Enlightenment and civil emancipation pull Jews into modern society, splitting Judaism into the movements we know today.
- Hasidism (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
- Haskalah (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
- Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov — Moshe Rosman, University of California Press (1996)
- Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity — Shmuel Feiner, Yale University Press (2010)
- Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History — Robert M. Seltzer, Macmillan (1980)
- Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900 — Simon Schama, Bodley Head (2017)
In the mid-eighteenth century, in Podolia in today’s Ukraine, a healer and teacher remembered as the Baal Shem Tov taught that God could be served with joy and fervent prayer, not only through elite study. His followers, the Hasidim (“the pious”), gathered around charismatic rebbes whose courts became dynasties. Opponents, the Mitnagdim, led by the great scholar the Vilna Gaon, issued bans against them from 1772, but Hasidism spread across Eastern Europe. Its descendants, such as Chabad-Lubavitch, Satmar, Ger and Belz, are central to Orthodox life today.
- Hasidism (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
- Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov — Moshe Rosman, University of California Press (1996)
At the same time, in Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn led the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, urging Jews to learn European languages and science while keeping their faith. In 1791 revolutionary France became the first European state to grant Jews full citizenship; other countries followed slowly over the next century. Emancipation opened universities and professions but brought pressure to assimilate.
- Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity — Shmuel Feiner, Yale University Press (2010)
- Haskalah (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
- Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900 — Simon Schama, Bodley Head (2017)
Jews answered in different ways. Reform Judaism, born in Germany in the early nineteenth century, modernised worship and saw Jewish law as evolving; Neo-Orthodoxy, led by Samson Raphael Hirsch, combined strict observance with secular education; and a middle path became Conservative Judaism. In the Russian Empire, the Haskalah fed a revival of Hebrew and a modern Yiddish literature.
- Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History — Robert M. Seltzer, Macmillan (1980)
- Haskalah (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
Why it matters today
Almost every way of being Jewish today traces back to this period: Hasidic dynasties, the "Lithuanian" yeshiva world, Modern Orthodoxy, Reform and Conservative Judaism, and secular Jewish culture in Yiddish and Hebrew. The same question still divides families: how much of the modern world to embrace, and how much to hold apart.