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David Biale discusses Hasidism: A New History, an important and invaluable history of Hasidism from its origins in the 18th century until the present. We discuss Hasidism and why it matters: Why it was so significant in Europe before the Holocaust and why it remains relevant, what’s at stake in declaring it a “modern” movement, and how and why Hasidism helps us understand the currents of modern Jewish history and the modern world at large.
Hasidism: A New History is co-authored by David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv & Marcin Wodziński, with an afterword by Arthur Green.
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis, where he serves as director of the Jewish studies program. His research focuses on Jewish intellectual and cultural history, and he’s written on the historian Gershom Scholem as well as on themes of power, sexuality, blood, and secularization in Jewish history.
Some of the topics and books discussed in this episode:
Hasidism: A New History is a history of Hasidism, a pietistic form of Judaism that originated in the mid-eighteenth century. Hasidism arose around the figure of the Baal Shem Tov or the Besht, a kind of healer and mystic, who advocated for a type of pietism which was not ascetic in nature. After his death in 1760, the Besht’s followers and disciples developed what would come to be the incredibly influential and important Hasidic phenomena with a diverse set of groups, sects, and even dynasties from the 18th century until the present day.
In the book, David Biale and his co-authors sketch out in detail the history of the “movement of movements,” as they put it. In doing so, they actually decenter the Baal Shem Tov: they argue that he may have helped shape this phenomenon, but that it really flourished among those who followed him and took the movement in many directions. In effect, they simultaneously articulate the various cultural and religious practices and beliefs of Hasidic Jews and also the great diversity among them. If you even just look at the excellent maps, you’ll see how geographically widespread Hasidism was – and naturally, how diverse it has been. Further, it has been profoundly resilient and resonant in modern Jewish culture, with the rise of neo-Hasidism in the twentieth century and also the rebirth or resurrection of many of the Hasidic courts after the Holocaust, when they were transplanted to the United States and Israel. In fact, as we’ll talk about in our conversation, Chabad has become particularly omnipresent because it is essentially a missionizing movement – missionizing to the Jews, that is.
The history of Hasidism is incredibly important because it is one of the most important Jewish religious movements of the modern age. And it is modern, which is a large part of the argument of this book – showing the ways in which Hasidism was a product of modernity, a response to what was happening in the wider world, the possibilities of transportation, and now the internet.
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