THE question of the connection between strains in Jewish society and the development of hasidism has attracted the attention of historians for generations. For many years it was common to posit the rise of hasidism as somehow related to a putative social crisis in the Polish Jewish community. Over the last three decades, some have downplayed this connection and portrayed early hasidism as essentially a movement with a religious message that was not socially activist and did not see resolving social problems as one of its aims.2 More recently, Gershon Hundert has suggested that hasidism may have derived its early vitality from the generation gap that resulted from a population explosion within eighteenth-century Polish Jewry and subsequent economic dislocations. According to this view, hasidism may have been in large part a movement of the disaffected young.

My own approach to this question, following the general method I have been trying to develop for the study of early hasidism, is to ask: what was the situation in Międzybóż, the place where it all began? Whatever generalizations one makes about the Baal Shem Tov and early hasidism, it seems reasonable to expect to find concrete examples in the sources stemming from the place where he was most active. If, then, social conflict had a role in preparing the ground for the establishment of the new movement, or affected the Baal Shem Tov's activities, this should be evident in the sources from Międzybóż. These can be found in the Czartoryski Library in Cracow where the archive of the Czartoryski family, the owners of the town, is located.

In the work I have done so far on this subject, I have noted the prevalence of social controversy in Międzybóż in the years preceding as well as during the Besht's sojourn there. My objective here is to describe some of the forms the conflicts took, to characterize the alignment of various social groups in the town, and to suggest implications that these may have had for the Besht's status in the town and for the development of early hasidism.

Discussions of social conflict in the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century Poland generally tend to consider the phenomenon in terms of the élite class versus the ‘common people'.