The attempt to capture aspects of the Besht's life is dependent on the sources that are extant. As noted in the introduction, the sources connected to the Besht present difficult methodological challenges to scholars. Not only are they relatively few, but they actually grew in quantity and detail during the fifty years or so following the Besht's death. Most of the sources originate in oral traditions that constitute a rather weak historical foundation and lead scholars to decide unsystematically what information is reliable and what can be safely ignored. My aim here is to enumerate, characterize, and assess the historiographical weight of the various Besht sources.

Most of the material relating to the Ba'al Shem Tov is in Hebrew. Its ready accessibility has ensured that it would be the basis of representations of the historical Ba'al Shem Tov. In my opinion, the items in this group of sources should be placed on a scale of decreasing a priori reliability, based on their temporal proximity to the Besht's lifetime and the closeness of the relationship of a given author to the Ba'al Shem Tov. This means beginning with things written during his lifetime by the Besht himself and then by his contemporaries, proceeding to descriptions by contemporaries after his death, and then evaluating hearsay depictions and citations.

This progression from the Besht's own writings to contemporary testimonies to later testimonies and finally to traditions about what he did and said is virtually the reverse of what has typically been done. Most Besht descriptions begin with the traditions about the Besht's activities collected in Shivhei Ha-Besht, published more than fifty years after his death, and then employ other sources as illustrative or supplementary to the image they have derived from the traditional stories.

This conventional approach builds the foundation of scholarly treatment on a very methodologically problematic category of sources and gives the post-Besht compilers and editors of these traditions a large, and largely unacknowledged, role in determining what have been seen as the basic motifs in the Besht's character and life story. As an example of this, I have already suggested that the Shivhei Ha-Besht view of the Besht's ba'al shemism as an obstacle to communication with establishment religious figures may reflect attitudes toward ba'alei shem in the late eighteenth century more than in the Besht's lifetime.