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8935 results in Judaism

Page 351 of 447

  • 21 - The Source Value of the Basic Recensions of Shivḥei ha Besht

  • from PART V - THE HASIDIC TALE
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 354-364

  • Summary

    IN spite of its admittedly legendary character, Shivḥei habesht has served the scholars of early hasidism as an important, if not the main, basis for their reconstructions of the beginnings of the movement in the eighteenth century. Modern hasidic scholarship should therefore address itself to the question of the source value of the text of this important and early collection of narrative hasidic lore.

    The text is available in two versions, the Hebrew version published in Kopys in 1814, our understanding of which has been much enhanced by the publication of the important Mondshine edition, and the Yiddish version published in Korets in 1815. This has given rise to a number of questions:

  • Is the Yiddish Korets edition a paraphrastic translation of the Hebrew Kopys edition, or does it represent an earlier, independent tradition?

  • Did the editor of the Hebrew edition deliberately understate the notion of the founder of hasidism as a ba’ al shem engaged in magical practices?

  • Is it possible to discern in the book an early stratum of ‘authentic’ tales in which the subtle supernatural element is totally dependent on the subjective perception of spectators and narrators, since nothing extraordinary takes place on the plane of external reality? If this is so, then the more extravagantly fantastical tales could be distinguished from the ‘authentic’ core as belonging to the universal genre of hagiography.

    • All these questions would have a bearing on any attempt to gauge the source value of the tales as they have come down to us.

    Numerous scholars, such as B. Dinur, I. Halpern, A. Ya'ari, A. J. Heschel, J. G. Weiss, I. Bartal, and J. Barnai, have all pointed to historical connections between the tales and extraneously verifiable facts and I do not wish to question the value of their work. However, Bartal has remarked that the problem of the reliability of such historical facts as are contained in the hasidic tales is a complex one:

    It is connected … with the difficulty of distinguishing between, on the one hand, the literary elements of structure and theme and, on the other hand, historical material which is unique or bound to a specific and well defined period. The hasidic tale uses historical material ahistorically; it is liable to combine separate elements, to antedate events and to mingle the natural with the supranatural, the earthly with the celestial.

  • 9 - The Paradigms of Yesh and Ayin in Hasidic Thought

  • from PART III - THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF MYSTICAL IDEALS IN HASIDISM
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 168-179

  • Summary

    THE social manifestations oflate hasidism-its successes as a popular movement, the new patterns of communal organization that it created, as well as the overtly messianic orientation adopted by some hasidic circles in recent times-have all distracted scholarly attention from the early conceptual foundation of the hasidic experience.

    Hasidism is a complex phenomenon, marked by extraordinary literary diversity, a wide variety of social expressions, and a history which spans two and a half centuries. It does not lend itself to general characterization or definition. Nevertheless, certain shared conceptual patterns can be shown to have served as a premiss underlying diverse strands ofhasidic thought.

    The present discussion focuses on the final decades of the eighteenth century. This was a period of rapid expansion for hasidism, with hasidic leaders reaching out to a wider audience not least through the publication and dissemination of the earliest formulations of hasidic ideas in writing.

    At the core of hasidic thought lies the idea of the dual nature of reality. The two contradictory aspects of all existence are bound to one another dialectically. This duality applies to all dimensions of reality and mirrors the perception of the deity as a dialectic unity of oppositions.

    The deity is perceived as a dialectic process of reversible and variable opposites. This unity of opposites is expressed in pairs of contradictory concepts: ‘expansion and limitation’, ‘emanation and withdrawal’, ‘revelation and concealment’, ‘creation and annihilation’, ‘unity and differentiation’, ‘being and non-being’, ‘yesh and ayin'. All these concepts clearly derive from the kabbalistic heritage of hasidism. But while the kabbalistic interest in dialectic opposites relates only to the heavenly realm, the new hasidic concern encompasses all aspects of reality. The principles of yesh and ayin are thus projected in hasidism from the domain of the Godhead onto the domain of religious awareness and divine service.

    The concern with these dialectical processes has found diverse expression and emphasis in hasidism. The Maggid of Mezhirech, for example, was concerned primarily with the mutual transformations of the two poles. Bratslav hasidism expressed the tragic dimension of the paradox. Habad is more concerned with the dialectical movement between yesh and ayin. Polish hasidism has highlighted the embodiment of the opposites in the figure of the zaddik.

  • 25 - Yitzhak Schiper's Study of Hasidism in Poland

  • from PART VI - THE HISTORY OF HASIDIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 404-412

  • Summary

    By the beginning of the Second World War, Yitzhak (Ignacy) Schiper was a recognized authority on Polish Jewish history. We know now that in the very midst of the war, while incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto, Schiper kept up his research and continued to write, persisting up to the very end.

    A description of Schiper at that time appears among Emanuel Ringelblum's notes from the Warsaw ghetto, and brief and imprecise remarks about Schiper's wartime writings are also to be found in two memorial volumes, one in Hebrew and one in English, which were published in Schiper's honour. Ringelblum, who knew Schiper quite well, mentioned that Schiper had been working on several studies. One was a comprehensive work on the Khazars and their role in the earliest phase of Jewish settlement in eastern Europe-a topic which had occupied him in the years before the war. 'His other work written during the present war,’ Ringelblum wrote, ‘was a history of hasidism in the nineteenth century. This work was based on records of the Jewish community of Warsaw and on Polish archival material. These two works, together with a manuscript on Jewish autonomy and a number of other very valuable items, have been lost.'

    It now appears that most of Schiper's manuscript on hasidism did in fact survive. Two of the original three bulky notebooks into which Schiper had copied his completed work were discovered several years ago by a young student of Hebrew at Warsaw University, Zbigniew Targielski. The two notebooks contain a total of 330 pages of Polish text, which Targielski has now published with his own introduction. I should like to take this opportunity to express heartfelt thanks to Mr Targielski for identifying and rescuing the manuscript, as well as for permitting me to use material from what was, at the time of writing, his as yet unpublished introduction. Schiper's monograph is a brand plucked from the fire, a remnant of the fine historiographicalliterature produced by Polish Jewry, and testimony to the author's refusal to abandon the historian's mission even in the face of disaster and destruction.

  • 19 - R. Naphtali Zevi of Ropczyce (‘the Ropshitser’) as a Hasidic Leader

  • from PART IV - DISTINCTIVE OUTLOOKS AND SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT WITHIN HASIDISM
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 321-342

  • Summary

    WHAT we know of the life of R. Naphtali Zevi Horowitz of Ropczyce is drawn mainly from collections of hasidic hagiography published many years after his death. These are: Devarim arevim (Munkacz, 1903-4); Eser tsaḥtsaḥot (Piotrkow, 1910); and Ohel Naftali (Lemberg, 1910). The hagiographicalliterature of hasidism-a large body of oral traditions committed to writing long after the events they describe-is highly problematic and its validity as historical source material has been frequently questioned, not least in connection with the figure of Israel Baal Shem Tov (the Besht), the founder of hasidism. Reports of his activities were circulating by word of mouth for several decades but they were not printed until 1814, some fifty-five years after his demise. No methodology for the exploitation of such source material has yet been proposed, and an examination, for example, of G. Scholem's classic biographical study of the Besht reveals that he utilized almost every possible exegetical instrument to extract historical information from Shivḥei haBesht. Although in the case of R. Naphtali of Ropczyce a much longer period had elapsed before his ‘life’ was committed to writing, we are fortunate in having at our disposal a number of contemporary or near-contemporary sources, including his own correspondence with his circle of associates (Imrei sheftr (Lemberg, 1874)). Furthermore, it is possible to cross-check the information contained in the hagiographical collection Ohel Naftali against other hagiographical works written in R. Naphtali's own times. D. Ehrman, who first gathered all this material between 1881 and 1903, presents a wide range of traditions and notes all his sources. Additional information is contained in the responsa volume entitled Derekh yivḥar (Munkacz, 1893) by Hayyim Bezalel Panet, where the redactor, Dov Friedman, also supplies his sources.

    In general, my approach in utilizing these traditions has been to distinguish between didactic material, which offers virtually no insight into the historical reality of R. Naphtali, and such concrete historical details as do occasionally occur in the tales, furnishing the background against which the plots are developed. The historical details are usually incidental to the tales, and this, on the whole, lends them greater credibility, particularly as in many cases they can be verified by comparison with parallel sources.

  • 28 - Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions

  • from PART VIII - THE PRESENT STATE OF RESEARCH ON HASIDISM: AN OVERVIEW
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 441-446

  • Summary

    THE following are some general remarks on the question of where we stand in the historiography of hasidism at present, and especially after the conference of which the present volume is the proceedings. I would like to suggest, only half tongue-in-cheek, that the proceedings, dedicated to the memory of Jose ph Weiss, should have been entitled 'Via Negativa in Early Hasidism’. That seems to me an appropriate characterization of the present scholarly situation. In reopening the two great questions-hasidism's origins and its success-contemporary scholarship has negated almost all the once clearly established answers. We can no longer say that hasidism began because of persecution, especially not that it arose in reaction to the Chmielnicki massacre a century earlier or its long aftermath, as was once widely claimed. Nor can we say that hasidism was primarily or necessarily a reaction to Sabbateanism. We certainly do not think of it as a necessary reaction to Sabbateanism, as Gershom Scholem once suggested. Studies included within this volume serve to diminish the importance of the Turkish-Podolian connection with hasidism's origins. We have long known that we can no longer take Shjvḥei haBesht and its account of the early days at face value as a source for how hasidism began. Our use for historical purposes of the tales included in that work is ever being refined.

    Hasidism's success can no longer be attributed to poverty or oppression, as was once a commonplace in the literature. We can no longer say that the Besht and his circle represented the lower classes, because the earliest roots of the movement appear to defy any social stratification. Nor was hasidism a rebellion of the unlettered-not with scholarly leaders such as R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye or Shneur Zalman of Lyady. We know that hasidism was not spread particularly through its books, but rather through oral teaching. It was clearly not the novelty of its ideas that caused the movement to grow. We also know that hasidism was not successful either because it was or was not messianic!

    What, then, is left us by way of explanation? We have cleaned out a lot of cobwebsa lot of claims that had long lain unexamined, but were still taken as truths because we all learnt them from Dubnow and Horodecky-whose name, interestingly, has hardly been mentioned here-the writers we all read on hasidism thirty or more years ago.

  • 5 - Hasidism and the Kahal in Eastern Europe

  • from PART II - TOWARDS A NEW SOCIAL HISTORY OF HASIDISM
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 63-75

  • Summary

    ALTHOUGH the subject has featured in numerous histories of eastern European Jewry in the modern era, we do not as yet possess a thorough and unbiased analysis of the relationship between the hasidic movement and the institutions of Jewish communal organization in eastern Europe during the period in which hasidism began. The main obstacle has been the dislocation and probable destruction of the bulk of the evidence-the minute books (pinkasim) in which community councils (kehalim) as well as the various ‘societies’ (ḥevrot) which operated within their organizational framework had kept their records for centuries. Many hundreds of Jewish communities existed in the region and came under the influence of the hasidic movement during the latter part of the eighteenth century. This influence must have left its mark on communal records, but only a small number of the original documents is known to have survived. Some pinkasim, still available to scholars prior to the two world wars, were subsequently lost or destroyed, with the result that we are now left with only a few selections of documents, compiled at best by professional historians but in some cases by amateurs, or else quotations from various pinkasim which are scattered in a variety of historical publications.

    These selections from the documents are by no means representative; they were often made by editors eager to avoid controversial issues and to suppress what they judged to be unsavoury facts. Moreover, in some of the extant pinkasim, as in that of the Society [for the Study of] Talmud and Mishnah (1:Ievrah Shas Umishnayot) in the Lithuanian community of Radoshkovichi, all the anti-hasidic regulations were blotted out once the controversy between the hasidim and their opponents had died out. From others, as from the pinkas of the community council of Shargorod, it seems that the hasidim had torn out the pages which related to, or which contained the signatures of, leading hasidic personalities in order to keep them as holy relics. Some of the pinkasim may still exist in what was until recently the Soviet Union or in private hands, but they have not so far become available for inspection. For this reason, sweeping generalizations and far-fetched assumptions have been made about the subject on the basis of insufficient documentation.

  • 20 - New Light on the Hasidic Tale and its Sources

  • from PART V - THE HASIDIC TALE
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 345-353

  • Summary

    HASIDIC literature can be classified in two main categories, homiletic-speculative, usually originating in the sermons delivered by the hasidic teachers to the gatherings of the hasidim at the courts and containing ethical, kabbalistic, and hasidic teachings, and narrative, comprising numerous collections of tales. Although research has addressed itself to both categories, it seems to me that the tales, the more popular of the two genres, have not been given the scholarly attention they deserve. A number of important studies have appeared in recent years, but many questions remain unanswered. This chapter is an attempt to address three cardinal questions:

  • What constitutes the literary form to which we refer as a hasidic tale?

  • When did ‘the tale’ first emerge in hasidism?

  • On which literary sources did the authors of the tales draw, and how did these sources contribute to the development of the genre?

    • These questions are, of course, interconnected, and the answer to anyone of them will constitute a partial answer to the others.

    The figure of the Baal Shem Tov (‘the Besht’, as he is known in Hebrew), the founder of hasidism, is crucial to the discussion throughout. His personality is inseparably connected with the emergence of the hasidic tale and its subsequent development.

    One important fact that must be borne in mind is that the printed hasidic tale was preceded by an earlier stage of oral dissemination. This is attested to by allusions to and even the appearance of complete tales in other genres long before the emergence of the narrative literature of hasidism in print. For example, Ephraim of Sudylkow, a grandson of the Besht and the author of Degel maḥaneh Efrayim, refers to tales that his grandfather used to tell. Aaron Samuel Hakohen in his Kore merosh supplies the nucleus of a biographical tale about the Besht in his references to the Besht's visit to his father-in-law and to his ability to understand the song of birds. From other reports in various anthologies of speculative hasidic teaching it becomes clear that the Besht was indeed in the habit of telling stories, many of them about himself.

  • 12 - Personal Redemption in Hasidism

  • from PART III - THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF MYSTICAL IDEALS IN HASIDISM
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 214-224

  • Summary

    HASIDISM has been a bifurcated movement from its inception. It was both a popular movement centred around the charismatic figure of the zaddik who reached down to all strata of the community to elevate them spiritually, and at the same time a continuation of the kabbalistic tradition for a spiritual élite. The question of messianism or redemption is one area where the distinctions between the popular and élitist aspects of hasidism can be clearly discerned. Though messianism in hasidism has been discussed at length, there is very little discussion of personal redemption, a theme closely related to the élitist aspect of hasidism.

    Personal redemption is relevant to a small spiritual élite who attempt to attain this state in their personal lives without regard to the redemptive state of the world as a whole. This concept is found in the writings of R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye who attributes it to the Baal Shem Tov. The Maggid of Mezhirech relates it to his doctrine of unio mystica. His disciples moved away from this concept as the idea of the popular zaddik grew in prominence. Personal redemption again became a central concern with the rejection of popular zaddikism by the Przysucha-Kotsk school. It reached its fullest development in the writings of R. Mordecai Joseph of Izbica who made it the cornerstone of his teachings.

    Gedaliah Nigal has recently called attention to the importance of personal redemption in the writings of R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye. Redemption, like many other concepts in R. Jacob Joseph's teachings, operates on three levels, olam (the sefirotic world), shanah (the physical world), and nefish (the individual). The three levels of exile and redemption are those of the Shekhinah, the Jewish people, and the individual soul. The individual soul is in the exile of the evil inclination (yetser hara) and spiritual darkness. Since this was the first exile, it is also the first redemption that must be prayed for. It is only after attaining the personal redemption of the soul that one can aspire to the other levels of redemption. It would seem to be related to the zaddik's self-preparation for his task of spiritually raising his followers. One must redeem oneself before attempting to redeem others. Personal redemption is intimately related to the major themes in R. Jacob Joseph's thought and can only be properly understood in the context of a comprehensive study of his writings.

  • 6 - Hasidism after 1772: Structural Continuity and Change

  • from PART II - TOWARDS A NEW SOCIAL HISTORY OF HASIDISM
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Book:
    Hasidism Reappraised
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996, pp 76-140

  • Summary

    THE PROBLEM

    THE YEAR 1772 is generally regarded as a critical one, or at least an important turning point, in the history of hasidism. Three decisive events took place in that year which altered both the ideological and the organizational course on which the movement had originally embarked. The spring brought with it the first outbreak of bitter hostilities between the mitnaggedim and the hasidim in Vilna, whence the dispute quickly spread to other Jewish communities in Lithuania and Galicia. During the summer months Belorussia was annexed to Russia, and Galicia to Austria, in the first partition of the disintegrating kingdom of Poland; as a result, parts of the Jewish (and hasidic) community in Poland which until then had formed a single cultural and political entity found themselves arbitrarily separated. At the end of the year, in December, the supreme leader of hasidism, R. Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezhirech, died without leaving an ‘heir’ to take charge of the movement in his place.

    In the light of this historic combination of circumstances, the scholarly literature on hasidism has tended to divide the history of the movement, especially from the point of view of its organizational structure, into two periods separated by a clear line of demarcation: (a) from the foundation of the movement to the death of the Maggid of Mezhirech, the period of centralized leadership under a single universally acknowledged head (first the founder, Israel Baal Shem Tov (the Besht), and then his disciple and successor, the Maggid of Mezhirech﹜; (b) the period beginning immediately after the death of the Maggid in 1772, which was marked by the onset of decentralization: the leadership split up, and the movement began to function as a loose affiliation of distinct communities connected, it is true, by the common legacy of the Besht and the Maggid of Mezhirech, but independent of each other, and each led by its own zaddik.

    This periodization scheme underlies every major historical study of hasidism. Explicit discussions of it, however, have been scarce and lacking in rigour, since the organizational development of hasidism, as distinct from the evolution of its doctrines, has not received much critical scholarly attention. Processes of organizational change, inasmuch as they are observed at all, are treated casually, and up to now no systematic attempt has been made to identify their causes.

Hasidism Reappraised
  • Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 1996
  • This volume is arranged under seven headings: the social history of Hasidism; the social functions of the mystical ideals; distinctive schools of thought within Hasidism; the Hasidic tale; the history of Hasidic historiography; contemporary Hasidism; and present research on Hasidism.

  • Chapter 1 - Introductory Essay

  • Edited by John M. G. Barclay, University of Glasgow, John Philip McMurdo Sweet, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Early Christian Thought in its Jewish Context
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1996, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    Some women damage feminist causes by vociferating. Others are quiet, even diffident, and might not, in any case, wish to be reckoned as feminists; but they make the point impressively when they rise to the top, and by sheer ability come to occupy positions of responsibility and influence. Nobody who knows Professor Morna Hooker-Stacey can hesitate as to the category in which she belongs. Before I had met her, I recognized the independent mind of a scholar in her early book, Jesus and the Servant (1959). In it, and later, in The Son of Man in Mark (1967), she risked her reputation by unfashionable views. Subsequently, she devoted much attention to Pauline thought (From Adam to Christ is a collection of such studies between 1960 and 1989), though The Message of Mark (1983) and some of her articles in journals show that she was also continuing to work at material for what emerged in 1991 as her magnum opus, the A. and C. Black commentary on Mark. Since then, her Didsbury Lectures of 1994 expound the meaning of the Cross in all the main writers of the New Testament. In the Pauline area, Professor Hooker is known especially for her variations on the theme of ‘interchange’ in the theology of incarnation – Christ became what we are, that we might become what he is.

  • Chapter 4 - Jesus

  • from II - SOME EARLY CHRISTIAN SOURCES
  • Edited by John M. G. Barclay, University of Glasgow, John Philip McMurdo Sweet, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Early Christian Thought in its Jewish Context
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1996, pp 43-58

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    When, in 1973, Geza Vermes published the first of his three major books about Jesus, its title sent shock waves through certain sections of the reading public. Jesus the Jew: the very phrase was polemical, summing up, as only the best titles succeed in doing, the book's content and thrust. Vermes, like a few writers before and a great many since, attempted, by arguing for the essential Jewishness of Jesus, to undermine certain commonplace Christian affirmations. The debate continues.

    But, as it continues, it broadens out. We have learnt – not least through the other labours of Vermes himself – just how many-sided was the Judaism of the first century. The present writer, having in a recent work expanded what had been a single chapter on first century Judaism into five chapters totalling some two hundred pages, was taken to task by a reviewer for making things to simple, for missing out too much data. The more we learn about the Jewish world of the first century, the more we are aware of its multiple diversities.

    Nevertheless, there is still clearly something we can call ‘first century Judaism’. We would not know, otherwise, what this thing was whose multiple diversity we were so firmly asserting. This is, of course, yet another low-grade re-run of the old debate between Platonists and Aristotelians, which emerges in all sorts of contexts.

  • Chapter 17 - Apocalyptic, God and the world.

  • from III - SOME EARLY CHRISTIAN THEMES
  • Edited by John M. G. Barclay, University of Glasgow, John Philip McMurdo Sweet, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Early Christian Thought in its Jewish Context
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1996, pp 238-249

  • Summary

    Second Temple Judaism had an ambivalent relationship with culture. Even when its adherents found themselves in positions of influence, there remained a reserve towards contemporary political arrangements which, however widespread assimilation may have been, prevented Jews from being readily assimilated into the Roman imperium (Tcherikover 1970). Ethnicity and religion intertwined in such a way that it proved impossible for Jews to merge imperceptibly into the cosmopolitan culture of the ancient world and for their religion to become just another aspect of the Roman hegemonic ideology (however much some would have liked to have made it so). Early Christianity continued that ambivalence, and even if it was largely detached from an early stage from the emerging halakhic consensus of rabbinism, it maintained that characteristic reserve towards the demands of political and social culture.

    For both Judaism and Christianity a means of enunciating that reserve and the culture of resistance that was at times required was facilitated by apocalypticism. Even an apocalypse like Daniel, where the vision of hope sits side by side with legends of involvement of Jews in the life of a court of a foreign potentate, evinces a clear sense of the importance of the limits of compromise and the alternative horizon offered by worship and religious practice. For all its hints of imperial approval the book of Daniel provides evidence of the necessity of boundaries of social conformity and a language in which the critique of empire can be maintained (Bauckham 1991; Rowland 1988).

Page 351 of 447