HASKALAH literature and the historiography of hasidism have always been interrelated. The maskilim and their writings had an enormous effect on the evolution of modern hasidic scholarship, while the depiction of hasidism in Haskalah literature bears the imprint of certain modern historiographical sensibilities and conventions.

The early historians of hasidism clearly drew most if not all of their information about the movement from maskilic texts. I. M. lost, the author of the first history-a work conceived in the spirit of Wissenschaft des Judentums-culled much of his material from the writings of the maskilim Joseph Perl and Judah Leib Miesis. His other sources, Peter Beer and Henri Grégoire, had relied almost exclusively on Per! and on Israel Loebel. Beer himself, and Heinrich Graetz, had drawn extensively on the autobiography of the maskil Solomon Maimon. Thus, practically all the early attempts to explain hasidism historically had gestated in the minds of scholars who were strongly imbued with Haskalah ideas and who wrote under its direct impact. Even some of Simon Dubnow's observations and insights undoubtedly originated in the tradition of maskilic discourse about hasidism.

Alongside this ideological impact, both direct and indirect, of the maskilim and their writings on the early historians of hasidism, the decline of the Haskalah as a viable intellectual and social movement signalled the beginning of another relationship between modern hasidic historiography and the literary legacy of the maskilim: hasidic historians began to utilize Haskalah literature as historical source material. Haskalah literature is virtually the only or at any rate the richest source of information we possess about the social, political and economic orientation of hasidism. The studies of Raphael Mahler, Chone Shmeruk, and Mordechai Levin are but a few examples of this intensive, and highly effective, utilization of Haskalah sources, both Hebrew and Yiddish, by the modern historians of hasidism.

Admittedly, Haskalah literature was extremely hostile to the hasidic movement; but this should not obscure the fact that it was at the same time the first systematic expression of a modern European critical interest in the new phenomenon of hasidism. This interest was prompted primarily by the desire to collect the evidence against a movement which was perceived to be an ideological rival.