WHAT is the place of hasidism in the religious history of the eighteenth century? Is there any use in macrohistorical discussions that seek to incorporate hasidism within the general body of widespread movements of religious emotionalism, enthusiasm, revival, or quietism that swept across western Europe and New England between about 1730 and 1760? The latter movements are usually interpreted as a popular rejection of the cold logic of the Newtonian Enlightenment championed by the educated preachers of the age.

The leader of what in New England was called the Great Awakening, a movement that began in 1740, was Jonathan Edwards. The movement was condemned by the Harvard faculty as an orgy of emotions; they dismissed it with contempt as mere enthusiasm (and no word in their vocabulary was more opprobrious). The historian Perry Miller has claimed that the Great A wakening could only properly be understood in its American context and, indeed, only in terms of the particular development of the beliefs and values of the Protestant churches of New England. At issue, in his view, was those Christians’ quest for the saving experience that was eluding them. Edwards addressed this increasingly urgent problem and struck a responsive chord in the following way, according to Miller: ‘By 1740, the leader had to get down amongst them and bring them by actual participation into an experience that was no longer private and privileged but social and communal.’ This passage is, of course, so strikingly reminiscent of the remarks of Gershom Scholem and others about the social function of mystical ideals as to be remarkable.

Like most of the others who have raised this question, I am not prepared to argue, in the absence of systematic study, that Wesleyan Methodism, the Great Awakening, or the schismatic groups in the Russian Church discussed by Y sander were, together with hasidism, part of some general movement.4 Nor am I prepared to argue that there is more than a superficial similarity of one to the others, however striking and unexpected some of those similarities may be. The custom among historians has been to make some vague reference to the Zeitgeist and to leave it at that; what I am suggesting here is that some further consideration be given to this problem.