Hasidism and Habitat

Wayne State University Press © 2011 Holy Dissent Wayne State University Press © 2011 Wayne State University Press © 2011 Holy Dissent Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe Edited by Glenn Dynner Foreword by Moshe Rosman Wayne State University Press Detroit Wayne State University Press © 2011 © 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holy dissent : Jewish and Christian mystics in Eastern Europe / edited by Glenn Dynner ; foreword by Moshe Rosman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3517-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mysticism—Judaism—History. 2. Mysticism—Catholic Church—History. 3. Mystics—Europe, Eastern—History. 4. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 5. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 6. Sabbathaians—History. 7. Cabala. 8. Hasidism—Europe, Eastern. I. Title: Jewish and Christian mystics in Eastern Europe. BM723.H66 2011 296.8'2—dc22 2011005437 Designed by Norman E. Tuttle Typeset by Alpha Design & Composition Composed in Goudy Old Style Wayne State University Press © 2011 Contents Foreword vii Moshe Rosman Introduction 1 Glenn Dynner I. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD “You Will Find It in the Pharmacy” 13 Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Shvartze khasene 55 Black Weddings among Polish Jews Hanna We$ grzynek R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia” 69 Widening the Besht’s Cultural Panorama Moshe Idel Hasidism and Habitat 104 Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland Glenn Dynner The Rise and Decline of a Hasidic Court The Case of Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye Paul Radensky Wayne State University Press © 2011 131 vi Contents II. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah 171 Some Sabbatean and Hasidic Affinities Elliot R. Wolfson The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith 223 The Quest for a Common Jewish-Christian Front against Frankism Pawel Maciejko From Poland to London 250 Sabbatean Influences on the Mystical Underworld of Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, and Blake Marsha Keith Schuchard Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri? 281 The Help of Jacob Frank and His Daughter, Ewa Harris Lenowitz Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity 309 The Practices of the Early Dukhobors and the Prophecies of Maksim Rudometkin J. Eugene Clay In Search of the Millennium 334 The Convergence of Jews and Ukrainian Evangelical Peasants in Late Imperial Russia Sergei I. Zhuk The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks) 359 Nicholas Breyfogle Contributors 393 Index 397 Wayne State University Press © 2011 Foreword Moshe Rosman In the not-too-distant academic past, Jewish communities were typically portrayed as cells of a worldwide Jewish people who lived with iterations of an original, common, authentically Jewish culture. The Jews (living in self-contained communities, in semi-isolation from the “host” society) and their culture (functioning autonomously) were “in dialogue” with the “surrounding” culture. The result of such interaction was often non-Jewish cultural inﬂuence on authentic Jewish culture at salient points. This inﬂuence might be salutary (“acculturation”), as when the Hasmoneans refashioned the Hellenistic practice of establishing commemorative holidays to create H˘anukkah; or negative (“assimilation”), as when the so-called “salon Jewesses” of eighteenth-century Germany engaged with Christians in social and cultural settings that led to conversion and mixed marriage. However, as academic research intensiﬁed, it began to appear that virtually all aspects of Jewish culture were shaped by the encounter with larger, stronger surrounding cultures. It seemed that Jewish ideas, institutions, rituals, and the like were at base reactions to, reﬂections of, even derivatives from, the people with whom Jews were in close contact. Jews mostly adopted and adapted things from their environment: medieval Jewish philosophy, a late variety of Neoplatonism or Aristotelianism; piyyut (medieval Jewish religious poetry), a calque on Christian liturgical poetry; classical biblical commentary, modeled on Islamic Arabic templates; Jewish autonomy institutions, copies of standard medieval European local governing arrangements; and so on. It seemed that Jewish culture was not merely in contact with other cultures; it was embedded within and culturally indebted to them. The reigning metaphor shifted from cultural dialogue to cultural hybridity. Jewish Wayne State University Press © 2011 viii Foreword culture everywhere was hybrid with the hegemonic culture, meaning that it was a skewed duplication of the majority culture. Jews of Arab lands were “Arab Jews.” Iberian-descended Jews constituted their own quasi-Portuguese “nation.” Poland consisted of “Jews and other Poles.” It followed that there is no common Jewish history; only Jewish histories. These are held to be, as David Ruderman (who disagrees) phrased it, “radically singular, diverse, and heterogeneous; lacking common features that might link them together.”1 Holy Dissent challenges both the autonomous and the hybrid models of the relationship between Jewish and other cultures as inadequate. It examines types and cross-types of religio-cultural exchange. From the studies offered in this book, it is apparent that Jewish and nonJewish religio-cultural exchange occurred on multiple planes, permutated in numerous combinations, and ﬂowed in different directions. For example, laws intending to immunize non-Jewish culture by restricting Jews and inhibiting their cultural efﬂorescence might also have had the unintended effect of shaping Jewish culture and nurturing new Jewish cultural trends and institutions. Thus residential laws favoring, but segregating, enlightened secularizing Jews from traditional ones gave Hasidim and other traditionalists the space they needed to cultivate their lifestyle and institutions relatively unchallenged. The Russian government’s decree that prevented Ukrainian Hasidic rebbes from traveling away from their homes to visit centers of their followers resulted in the creation of large and elaborate Hasidic courts where these rabbis lived in regal luxury, attracted huge numbers of Hasidic pilgrims and established formidable power bases. Non-Jewish social ecology and material culture also could potentiate Jewish culture. In Congress Poland, the many small towns with their signiﬁcant Jewish communities (shtetls) presented Hasidic leaders with an arena where—as opposed to villages that had no Jewish communities and cosmopolitan cities that had large and variegated ones—they could easily come to dominate the Jewish community and carefully control the border between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Part of this control entailed the adaptation of Polish and Ukrainian folktales, songs and dances as expedients for promoting Hasidic group solidarity. This has been termed “insularity through acculturation.” There was more straightforward acculturation as well. It may be that the putative founder of Hasidism, Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, was inspired by the mystical practices of hesychastic ascetics whom he perhaps observed in his childhood. In the other direction, various Christian spiritualist, mystical, and messianic groups took on and reshaped certain Jewish beliefs and practices. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Foreword ix At the margins of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism, distinctions could dissolve and syncretistic amalgams, ﬁtting no conventional religious rubric, might emerge. Sometimes the conventional organized religions even overcame their mutual antagonism to ally against these upstart creative, religious conﬂations. On yet another level, the term “acculturation,” connoting as it does a hierarchical process of one group (the Jews) adopting and adapting from another (the gentiles), can be misleading. Unconsciously, these and other groups shared a “common band of culture,” which often pre-dated their particular cultural interactions and where neither side exerted inﬂuence over the other. This band’s existence is exempliﬁed by such shared cultural constructions as differential gender roles, tacit economic and political theories, folk medical beliefs, Paracelsian-style medical practice, and the ubiquity and standardization of the early modern apteka or pharmacy. As the Jewish “black wedding” ceremony demonstrates, the concept of cultural hybridity is not limited to minority groups doubling the culture of the majority within which they are physically embedded. A group’s culture can also be hybrid with a common overarching culture (e.g., European culture), with its own historical culture or with other subcultures belonging to the same ethnic group (e.g., other Jewish communities). Finally, if the cultural border between groups was frequently traversed and occasionally even disappeared, the cultural border for individuals could also be porous and cultural identity a fragile thing. With determined effort, in the space of one generation, someone like Jacob Frank’s daughter, Ewa, the daughter of renegade Jews, could become a central European Christian lady of “quietened manners and talents.” Against the backdrop of the history of mystical religion in eastern Europe, Holy Dissent explores many of the intricate pathways of the interrelationship between Jewish and other cultures. The examples adduced above lend an idea of the range of concrete cases examined here, which together provide a ﬁrm foundation for mapping these pathways of interchange and formulating more general notions of how cultures interact. NOTE 1. David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Wayne State University Press © 2011 Introduction Glenn Dynner Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined Biblical airs with Polish song and Slavic sorrow. —Antoni Slonimski, “Elegy of Jewish Towns” (1947) Dissent from eastern Europe’s state-sanctioned religions was often both mystical and Jewish. This held true not only for Jews themselves, but for a host of Judaizing Russian Christian sects, including Dukhobors, Molokans, Jumpers, Subbotniks, Stundists, and “ﬂagellants” (khlysty).1 That dissent assumed a mystical form is not surprising: the mystical enterprise tends to be trans-institutional since, as Steven Ozment has noted, the impulse to achieve a more direct, intimate communion with God often demands “more than the normal institutional structures of the church can give.”2 But the pervasiveness of Judaizing tendencies in a region so often singled out for its anti-Jewish outrages is more puzzling. While most Russian Christian sectarians initially based themselves on a conception of Judaism in the abstract, that is, as portrayed in the Old Testament, many gradually made contact with living Jews and were profoundly shaped by the interaction.3 It would seem that Jews, by virtue of their exceptional, ofﬁcially tolerated status and, paradoxically, their sporadic suffering at the hands of the state, had for many Russians come to epitomize dissent. The way that east European Jewish mystics related to the dominant Slavic Christian culture seems counterintuitive, as well. Jewish popular medicine, folk rituals, and messianic and mystical movements may have been Wayne State University Press © 2011 2 Introduction rooted in Kabbalah, an internal Jewish development, but they absorbed a great deal from a non-Jewish environment that is usually construed as aloof or hostile. Jewish mystics thus resembled Christian dissenters in their selective appropriation and nativization of a foreign, rival religious culture. One should not push the comparison too far—many Christian dissenters remained, in varying degrees, close to the dominant Christian culture and were less vulnerable to lethal physical violence. But an increasingly shared sense of victimization at the hands of the state led to convergence and, in certain cases, outright integration. In other parts of Europe, this connectedness might come as less of a surprise.4 But the main strands of Jewish life in eastern Europe (a term used here as shorthand for eastern and east central Europe) seemed to form a knot of insularity. The region contained the largest concentration of Jews in the world by the eighteenth century, affording a sense of “safety in numbers.” The Jewish vernacular, Yiddish, a combination of German and Hebrew with some Slavic elements, divided the Jewish masses from their Christian neighbors socially, or was perhaps a symptom of social division. Rabbinic and mercantile elites cultivated an abstruse literature in medieval Hebrew. The increasingly distinctive modes of dress adopted by adherents of the emerging Hasidic movement only accentuated the exoticism of Jewish piety. Haskalah, a movement for Jewish enlightenment-based reform, made limited inroads outside of select urban centers.5 Residential restrictions in many Polish towns and cities, while never quite ﬁtting the deﬁnition of “ghettoes,” ensured that the bulk of the Jewish population lived and worked in their own neighborhoods under the scrutiny of a traditionalist-oriented Jewish leadership. Russian Jewry was largely conﬁned to the Pale of Settlement. Economically, Jews formed a kind of captive service sector, often as lessees of noble-owned enterprises. And in 1881, the ﬁrst series of pogroms ripped through southern Russia and parts of the Congress Kingdom of Poland.6 Yet Judaizing tendencies among Christian dissenters and the heavy Slavic imprint on Jewish popular culture call into question the presumed binary nature of culture in eastern Europe. Evidently the shtetl—the Jewish small town settlement—was not so hermetically sealed after all. Evidently east European Jewish culture itself, so celebrated by early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals for its authenticity, was not so impervious to inﬂuence. And perhaps the region’s infamous antisemitism was not quite so consistent and pervasive.7 The spread of Sabbateanism in the region only further destabilized the lines of demarcation. The sordid tales of Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–76) and his Wayne State University Press © 2011 Introduction 3 self-proclaimed Polish reincarnation, Jacob Frank (1726–91), have been retold many times. In brief, Sabbatai Tzevi, born in Izmir, was proclaimed Messiah by the renowned Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza in 1665. After a tour though major Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai arrived back in Izmir where, despite (or perhaps because of ) his open ﬂouting of Jewish law, scores of Jews fell to the ground in ﬁts of prophetic vision, proclaiming him Messiah. The messianic fever spread throughout the Jewish world. But upon his arrival in Constantinople, Sabbatai was imprisoned by the sultan and, presented with a choice between conversion and death, converted to Islam. “Sabbateanism,” a movement whose radical adherents indulged in ritual violations of their own, nevertheless endured thanks to the continued efforts and apologia of Nathan of Gaza.8 The extent of the spread of Sabbateanism in eastern Europe is still debated by historians.9 But among the several Sabbatean messiahs who appeared after Sabbatai’s death in 1676, none proved as successful in amassing a following as the Polish adventurer Jacob Frank. After a stint in Thessaloniki as leader of the Doenmeh—Jews who had followed Sabbatai Tzevi into Islam—Frank returned to Poland in 1755 and presented himself as Sabbatai Tzevi’s reincarnation. Eastern and central Europe proved fertile ground for Frank’s radical form of Sabbateanism, which included ritual violations of a sexual nature. On the night of January 27, 1756, in Lanckoronie, Frank and his followers were discovered conducting orgiastic ceremonies. Frank ﬂed to the Ottoman territories and converted to Islam while his followers, who admitted to ritualistic wifeswapping and harboring Sabbatean beliefs, were placed under ban (herem). But Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski extended his protection to the “Frankists,” who presented themselves as anti-Talmudists with Trinitarian beliefs. A disputation held in Kamieniec Podolski from June 20–28, 1757, resulted in a victory for the “Frankists.” Their rabbinic opponents were ﬁned and ﬂogged, and copies of the Talmud were burned. Bishop Dembowski’s death on November 9, 1757, deprived the Frankists of their protector. But as potential converts to Christianity, the Frankists were given another opportunity to engage in a disputation by King Augustus III himself. This time, they charged that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes. The dangerous disputation, held from July 17 to September 19, 1759, in Lwów, was prematurely halted by the Vatican, and Frank was baptized along with around 3,000 of his followers. Suspicions about the sincerity of Frank’s conversion resulted in his imprisonment in a Cze$stochowa monastery. Freed by the Russians in 1772, Frank moved to Brünn (Brno) in Moravia and resumed his activities until his death in 1791. Wayne State University Press © 2011 4 Introduction TOWARD A NEW METHODOLOGY It is therefore more useful to think in terms of a permeable border zone than a sharp borderline dividing eastern European Jews and Christians. This conceptual shift is indebted to several recent scholarly developments. First is the ﬂourishing discourse on cultural hybridity, which underscores the crossfertilization that inevitably occurs among variant cultures as they come into contact with one another. Scholars now doubt whether it is ever advisable to use terms like “authentic” when describing cultures or religions.10 Second is the dawning recognition of the need to bridge the artiﬁcial divide between theology (i.e., text) and social history (i.e., context). Steven Ozment drew attention to this divide back in 1973: “That history which views men as only thinking minds and immortal souls without bodies and involvement in time must be protested. But that history which preys upon the past with grand ‘scientiﬁc’ models and typologies, summarizing whole centuries with a handful of statistics, must also be reminded of its overweening modern bias.”11 Historians have since come to realize that capturing the multivalence of religious culture requires a reintegration of theology and praxis into their original context, conceived broadly as “outside” ideas, customs, rituals, socioeconomic and political realities, and so on.12 A generation of scholars of eastern and east central European religion has meanwhile emerged with almost unfettered access to archival sources, thanks to the revolutionary events of 1989, as well as the linguistic tools necessary for undertaking this project. On May 18–19, 2008, Professor Matt Goldish and the Melton Center of Jewish Studies at Ohio State University hosted a Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium entitled “Jewish Mystical and Messianic Movements in Their Social and Religious Contexts: The Eastern European Case.” This symposium constituted an unprecedented gathering of historians of Judaism and Christianity in eastern Europe interested in the encounter between Jewish and Christian mystics in the region. Wary of the reductionism that so often bedevils comparative religious approaches, participants made an effort to focus on well-substantiated, if more modest, instances of inter-connectedness and remain sensitive to cultural speciﬁcities.13 Their papers—enhanced by fruitful exchanges that occurred during the symposium—form the basis of this volume. Chapters in the volume’s ﬁrst part examine the impact of the eastern European context on Jewish mystics who remained within the Jewish fold. Chapters in the second part address more thoroughgoing border transgressions among Jewish and Christian mystics alike. The overall focus on religio-cultural exchange in this volume Wayne State University Press © 2011 Introduction 5 is intended to help overcome a stereotyped, diachronic conception of Jewish life in eastern Europe and uncover multiple levels of ambiguity. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD While mystics are often associated with insularity, even misanthropy, Jewish mystical praxis in eastern Europe reveals a high degree of external inﬂuence. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern illustrates the extraordinary intercultural exchange inherent in magic, folk medicine, and healing. Mystical practitioners known as ba‘alei shem, though well versed in Kabbalah, did not hesitate to consult Christian doctors or borrow remedies and incantations from other Christian sources; and their Christian counterparts borrowed from them. Jewish and Christian healers also drew upon a common, earlier source, the Renaissance physician-philosopher Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), and both depended on a single institution—the pharmacy— for ﬁlling their often bizarre prescriptions. A similarly complex interplay is described by Hanna We$grzynek in her study of Polish Jewish black weddings, cemetery ceremonies held in hopes of persuading the dead to intercede with the divine to halt epidemics. Slavic Christian, pan-European, and earlier Jewish ritual alike resonated in those ceremonies. The several chapters on Hasidism depart in signiﬁcant ways from the extensive historiography of the popular mystical movement. Since the ﬁeld’s inception, social historians have been preoccupied with Hasidism’s alleged class basis: Jews were attracted to Hasidism because they were poor and disenfranchised or because Hasidic gatherings offered the hope of business opportunities.14 Such explanations were probably driven less by romanticization, as is often assumed, than by a more intractable functionalist understanding of religion that rejects the signiﬁcance and quality of religious belief and practice as such in favor of a totalizing view of economic pragmatism. But the social history of Hasidism need not be burdened with such skepticism. Revisionists have shown that Hasidism’s charismatic leaders enjoyed the sanction and support of elites, that they usually derived from the elite themselves, and that they appealed to Jews along the entire socioeconomic spectrum.15 Contributors to the present volume attempt to move the social history of Hasidism beyond socioeconomic characterizations, so prone to overgeneralization, by exploring the ways in which the movement’s crucial theology and institutional development was shaped by contextual realities like geography, space, and the surrounding non-Jewish population. Wayne State University Press © 2011 6 Introduction Hasidism’s spiritual founder, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), is usually assumed to have been born and raised in Okopy, a small town in Podolia (present-day Ukraine). Moshe Idel exposes the frailty of this assumption, arguing that a more likely setting for the Besht’s early formative years is a region in the northern Moldavian portion of the Carpathian Mountains known as “Walachia” during that period. This region was then under the inﬂuence of hesychastic asceticism, a movement whose techniques for attaining calmness (Hesychia) and communion with God in a state of seclusion bear a striking resemblance to the Besht’s earliest phase of mystical praxis. As Hasidism blossomed into a full-ﬂedged movement during the nineteenth century, its charismatic leaders, known as tzaddikim (or rebbes in Yiddish), established full-ﬂedged courts. My own chapter introduces the case of an aspiring tzaddik named R. Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna) Unger (d. 1883). Unger’s choice of the town of Pia$tek as venue for his ﬂedgling court is representative of a wider phenomenon: when establishing their courts, most tzaddikim tended to eschew cities and villages in favor of small urban settlements with a pronounced Jewish presence known popularly as shtetls, where it was much easier to both dominate the local Jewish community and regulate interactions with local Christians. Paul Radensky analyzes the rise and decline of the opulent court of the “Tolner Rebbe” (Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye). In accounting for the court’s extravagance, Radensky points not only to the tzaddik’s charisma but to external factors as well: placed under house arrest by the tsarist government as a result of his overzealous expansionist initiatives, R. Duvid made a virtue of necessity and transformed his court into a thriving pilgrimage center. At its peak, the Tolner court was a town unto itself. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS Some mystics ventured further into the border zone or traversed it altogether. Elliot Wolfson provides an arresting view of the kabbalistically inspired messianism of Immanuel Frommann, a Jewish convert to Christianity. Frommann’s spiritualized approach to commandments not only resembles that of Sabbateans, but also bears an uncanny resemblance to the messianic gnosis that would be developed by the ﬁrst Hasidic leaders a generation later. Wolfson shows that, while early Hasidim resisted Frommann’s hypernomian extremes, they drew upon the same kabbalistic clusters of symbols to emphasize inward spirituality as the key to redemption. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Introduction 7 The most famous case of Christianizing Jews is the messianic movement that emerged around Jacob Frank, discussed earlier. But Pawel Maciejko ﬁnds that Frankists were not the only ones to seek a Jewish-Christian rapprochement. Their chief adversaries, led by Jacob Emden, urged Christian leaders to join ranks with them in combating the Frankist heresy, an effort that forced Emden to recognize certain positive aspects of Christianity. Marsha Keith Schuchard examines the Frankist phenomenon from the Christian perspective, taking us on a tour of the erotically-charged mystical underground in mid-eighteenth century Europe and uncovering a whole web of relations between Frankists or other Sabbateans and prominent Christian mystics like William Blake, Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, and Baron Emanuel Swedenborg. Harris Lenowitz provides a ﬁrst analysis of the aspirations of Frank’s daughter, enabler, and messianic successor, Ewa (pronounced “Eva”). The messianic pretender had much to gain from Ewa: her gender allowed him to project female religious identiﬁcations onto her; and her education and manners gained him entry into aristocratic court life. Lenowitz describes Ewa’s struggle to break free of her narcissistic father’s hold, if only in her dreams. As mentioned earlier, several Russian Christian dissenting sects embraced overt Judaizing. Eugene Clay portrays the career of the Spiritual Christian prophet Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin (d. 1877), who ordered his followers to observe Old Testament festivals, founded an apocalyptic movement based on Christian and Jewish sources, and consequently suffered lifelong imprisonment. Sergei Zhuk shows how members of the evangelical dissenting sect known as Stundists found common cause with Jewish revolutionaries like Iakov Gordin and Iosif Rabinovich, combining evangelical ideals of social justice with communist utopianism and in some cases converting Jewish revolutionaries to evangelical Christianity. The volume closes with Nicholas Breyfogle’s study of what was perhaps the most extreme Judaizing case, that of Subbotniks. Members of this sect adhered to the tenets of Judaism in varying degrees, actively sought out Jews to teach them, and in certain cases joined the Jewish community outright. Breyfogle uncovers a messianically inspired form of Zionism among Subbotniks, with some members claiming a preeminent place in the new messianic order on the logic that they—in contrast to Jews by birth—were voluntary converts to the “true path.” The publication of this volume owes a great deal to the efforts of Matt Goldish, who conceived and organized the initial conference at Ohio State Wayne State University Press © 2011 8 Introduction University and offered his continual guidance and encouragement throughout the volume’s preparation. We are indebted to the crucial logistical support provided by the Melton Center of Ohio State University and the Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium. Thanks are also due to Terrie Bramley and the Institute for Advanced Study, and to Sarah Lawrence College. Finally, mention must be made of the late Richard Popkin, whose copious scholarship provided a reference point for symposium participants and undergirds the studies collected in the present volume. NOTES 1. The case of the Towianists in the Kingdom of Poland and their relationship to Jews and Judaism is not treated in this volume, but has been covered extensively by Abraham Duker. See, for example, his “Wladyslaw Dzwonkowski, an ‘Enlightened’ Towianist, on the Jewish Problem, 1862,” in Meyer Waxman Jubilee Volume ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1966), 57–75; Duker, “The Tarniks (Believers in the Coming of the Messiah in 1840),” in Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 191–201; and Duker, “The Polish Great Emigration and the Jews” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1956). 2. Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 8. 3. For a summary of early east European Judaizing trends and government reprisals, see John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 25–28. 4. See the studies on scientiﬁc interactions among Jews and Christians in western and central Europe in David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientiﬁc Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). For an application of models of crosscultural exchange and “connected histories” to Jewish history, see Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 223–25. 5. The most convincing case for a Haskalah “movement” in eastern Europe is made by Mordecai Zalkin in Ba‘alot ha-Shah≥ar ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000). By focusing on institutions, patrons, subscribers, students, and entire families, as opposed to a narrow stratum of celebrity authors, and by mapping Haskalah-oriented schools in key geographical centers, Zalkin uncovers a few hundred foot soldiers in the movement. But Zalkin’s efforts still create the impression of a comparatively small movement. 6. For an overview of many of these themes, see Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in PolandLithuania: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On pogroms in particular, see John Klier and Sholomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms and Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 7. See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History,” in Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 1 (New York: Yiddish Scientiﬁc InstituteYivo, 1946), 86–106. 8. The deﬁnitive biography is still Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Tzvi Werblowsky (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), and is Wayne State University Press © 2011 Introduction 9 retold with concision and slight revision by David Halperin in Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), introduction. See also crucial revisions with respect to Sabbatai Tzevi’s followers by Matt Goldish, in The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666–1816 (Oxford; Portland: Littman Library, 2011). On Jacob Frank, see see Meir Balaban, Toward the History of the Frankist Movement (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:23 (Hebrew); Alexander Kraushar, Frank i frankiści polscy (Cracow, 1895), 1:70–73, trans. as Herbert Levy, ed., Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbatarian Heresy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001); Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 236–61; and Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford, 2001), 167–98. A more sanguine view of Frank and Frankism is found in Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 9. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 153–56; and Michal Galas, “Sabbatianism in the Seventeenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: A Review of the Sources,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism: Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 17, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem, 2001), 51–63. Jacob Barnai argues that the Chmielnicki massacres in the Ukraine were an important impetus for Sabbateanism. See “The Outbreak of Sabbateanism—The Eastern European Factor,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994): 171–83. 10. For the application of this approach to Jewish history, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), esp. chapter 5, and Adam Teller and Magda Teter’s introduction to Polin 22 (2010): “Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” 3–46. 11. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, xi. 12. Examples within the present scope include Matt Goldish and Richard Henry Popkin, eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001); Richard Henry Popkin, James E. Force, and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets; Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Jewish Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reﬂections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 1–52; Harvey Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s ladder: Abraham Abulaﬁa, the Franciscans and Joachimism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, esp. 176–79; and Adam Teller, “Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 1–29. For pioneering studies on medieval Jewish culture, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also the observations about Judaizing sects by Bernard Weinryb in The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972); and Mark Steinberg and Heather Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), on the impact of the modernization process. 13. On the dangers of an overgeneralized comparative religious approach, see Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–73. Wayne State University Press © 2011 10 Introduction 14. Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-H≥asidut (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1975), 8–9 and 36; Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 1, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1916), 220–34; Benzion Dinur, “The Origins of Hasidism and Its Social and Messianic Foundations,” in Gershon Hundert, Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York: New York University Press, 1991), esp. 136–37; Joseph Weiss, “Some Notes on the Social Background of Early Hasidism,” Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1985), 3–26; Raphael Mahler on the “plebeian” origin of tzaddikim in Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, ed. Eugene Orenstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 7–10. The ﬁrst claim about Hasidic business connections was made by Klemens Junosza, in his Nasi Zy{ dzi w miasteczkach i na wsiach (Warsaw, 1889), 67. 15. See Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Yeshayahu Shahar’s systematic analysis of Hasidic attitudes toward wealth actually ﬁnds less concern for social justice in Hasidic literature than in its non-Hasidic counterparts. See Bikoret ha-h≥evrah ve-hanhagat ha-tzibor be-sifrut ha-musar ve-ha-drush be-Polin ba-meah ha-shmonah asar ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1992). Mention should also be made of Ignacy Schiper’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Przyczynki do dziejów chasydyzmu w centralnej Polsce, ed. Zbigniew Targielski (Warsaw: PWN, 1992), esp. 62. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland Glenn Dynner Kotzk, home to a legendary Hasidic court during the mid-nineteenth century, is a medieval town hedged in by rivers, lakes, and wetlands about an hour’s drive from Warsaw. The very ﬁrst site that greets the visitor is a corner building topped with a small tower at the intersection of Wojska Polskiego and Polna Streets, the former dwelling of the ﬁery Kotzker rebbe (Hebrew, tzaddik), Menah≥em Mendel Morgenstern (1787–1859). It is subdivided into apartments for ﬁve Polish families, each with its own beautiful ﬂower garden, and there is a single communal water pump out front. The attic where the rebbe secluded himself during the latter part of his life hovers over the complex, vacant and condemned. From the building it is but a short walk to the market square, now a park bordered by an eighteenth-century classicalstyle church and blaring commercial storefronts that every so often permit the hoary wooden remains of prior centuries to gleam through. Walking to the outskirts of town, one approaches the palatial former residence of Jan Meissner, the German banker who owned the town during the Kotzker rebbe’s reign. The palace, now a convalescent home, is ﬂanked by an old church that still holds services. Approaching the palace, I felt my mind was playing tricks on me—mournful strains of a Hasidic melody (niggun) seemed to drift along the breeze. But on closer inspection, the sounds were real. They were coming from the Catholic mass. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 105 Recent advances in cultural hybridity theory have given new impetus to the search for parallels, inﬂuences, and counter-inﬂuences among Jews and Christians.1 In the case of Hasidism, which has become associated with insularity in our own day, the appropriation and nativization of the surrounding Slavic religious culture by its leaders and adherents presents a particularly intriguing avenue of inquiry.2 But discussion about cultural boundaries can become better grounded through a consideration of space and place: What was the literal terrain of Hasidic and local Christian interactions, and how might those interactions have varied along the urban spectrum? A topographical focus can help us make sense of the movement’s spatial and intercultural strategies and set a comparative religious analysis on ﬁrmer footing.3 The present chapter considers the signiﬁcance of Hasidic topography in the Kingdom of Poland where, at the very moment when Jews were beginning to migrate to urban centers in signiﬁcant numbers, aspiring Polish tzaddikim and their inner circles relocated to the shtetl—a small-town setting with a pronounced Jewish presence.4 Zygmunt Vogel, Kotzk: Parish Church and Town Hall, 1796. Wayne State University Press © 2011 106 Glenn Dynner WHERE NOT TO LIVE: HASIDISM AND THE VILLAGE R. Ze’ev Wolf of Stryków, disciple of R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk, poet, and eventual tzaddik, penned the following lament about village life: I prefer the clamor of town living5 And reject the stillness of village lodgings. There, young and old delight in each other Here, sheep surround me and bulls encircle me. A gentile girl afﬂicted with leprosy and running wild Covered with sores, abscesses, and white spots6 Should be quarantined Yet she wears a gold crown.7 A Jew would surely avoid contact with the village’s contagious foreign culture (“a gentile girl afﬂicted with leprosy”), but he could not apparently resist the village’s lucrative business opportunities (i.e., her “gold crown”). Why was the gentile supposedly more contagious in the village? Assimilation and acculturation are typically associated with the city, where modern ideas and fashions made their ﬁrst appearance. The memoirist Solomon Maimon’s adventure as a village tutor sheds some light on the much overlooked phenomenon of rural Jewish assimilation. His Jewish hosts were not only ignorant of Hebrew, but could not speak a word of Yiddish—their only language was “Russian, the common patois of the peasantry.” The family consumed cabbage and red beets, the principal food of Lithuanian Christians.8 The fact that a village economy could usually support only one Jewish family, often lessees of the local tavern, all but guaranteed interethnic fraternization. In the Congress Kingdom of Poland, according to census data from 1844, there were 74,749 such village Jews, constituting about ﬁfteen percent of the Jewish population.9 A modest corpus of Hasidic hagiography grew around the ﬁgure of the village Jew. Some tales functioned like jokes, in which the village Jew’s presumed ignorance concealed unexpected piety or wisdom.10 A village Jew came to Przysucha to drink, but found all the taverns closed. Upon learning the reason—there was a public fast because the tzaddik Jacob Isaac, the “Holy Jew,” had fallen ill—the village Jew prayed fervently that the tzaddik would Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 107 recover quickly so that the taverns would open again. The tzaddik attributed his recovery to the sincerity of this village Jew’s prayer.11 The tzaddik Ber of Radoszyce met an elderly Jew from Ulishija village, a childhood friend, and asked him how he was. Naively addressing the tzaddik by his ﬁrst name, the elderly villager replied, “Beryl, Beryl, what can I tell you? As soon as a man no longer works [i.e., retires], he has nothing.” The tzaddik thrilled at the simple wisdom of this remark, interpreting “work” (avodah) as “divine service.”12 The ironic impact depended on the audience’s preconceived notions about the village Jew’s cultural level.13 The piety of village Jews was so suspect that Hasidim refused to trust meat slaughtered and prepared by them. Among the ﬁrst miracles of future tzaddik Simh≥ah Bunem of Przysucha was his ability to eat meat “in places where Hasidim do not eat, such as villages and the like,” apparently because he possessed the supernatural ability to divine that it was kosher.14 This attitude is corroborated in responsa literature: when R. Isaac Meir Alter of Ger (Góra Kalwaria) (henceforth the Gerer rebbe) was asked to determine the kosher status of an unknown species of fowl, probably turkey, he dismissed as irrelevant the consideration that village Jews habitually consumed it, since “we know that there is a great deal of ritual laxity in villages.”15 In hagiographic literature, the village Jew is more vulnerable to apostasy. A Jewish lessee from the village Samot, who was accustomed to give generously to tzaddikim, eventually succumbed to his surroundings and apostatized. He was buried in the Christian cemetery; but the Gerer rebbe made the earth eject his corpse so that it could be buried in a Jewish cemetery.16 The Polish tzaddik Solomon of Radomsko met a village lessee whose daughter had apostatized and married a Christian. R. Solomon’s blessing caused the daughter’s husband to not only miraculously convert to Judaism but to become a Hasid who sported a shtreimel and long side-locks.17 Whether these traditions reﬂect fantasy or history, they undoubtedly signaled to audiences that the risk of contracting the gentile girl’s “disease” outweighed any beneﬁts to be derived from her “gold crown.” Historians have sometimes missed this Hasidic aversion to village life.18 The most dangerous “gold crown” appears to have been the rural tavern lease. Most taverns continued to function on the Sabbath and festivals by means of legal ﬁctions in contracts that, drawn up reluctantly by rabbis, allowed for the “sale” or “lease” of taverns to gentiles on these days.19 Hasidic leaders inherited a mistrust of Jewish tavern keeping, deeming it a business “of ill repute and thus impervious to all blessings.”20 The Galician tzaddik Wayne State University Press © 2011 108 Glenn Dynner Menah≥em Mendel of Rymanów (1745–1815) attempted to “expel” Jewish tavern keepers from the Galician countryside.21 In the Kingdom of Poland, Jewish tavern keepers had to contend with an ever-tightening noose of concession fees designed speciﬁcally to drive them out of the trade, and some converted to Christianity to escape the prohibitive fees.22 The tzaddik Moses of Kozienice complained bitterly about such conversions that, in his view, had occurred under duress. In Be’er Moshe we read: “That your people Israel not be dependent on each other, nor on another people” (BT Yoma 53b, High Priest’s prayer on Yom Kippur). According to the teaching’s simple meaning, this [prayer] is recited because of our many sins and the decrees of gentiles, who issued economic decrees against Israel and increased her tax burden. And in particular, they taxed the village dwellers who leased arendas until they could no longer bear it. And because of our many sins, several (kama ve-kama) of the villagers were forced to apostatize because of their need to make a living. And because of this, we pray: “May your people Israel not be dependent on each other” to make a living; “nor on another people” so that they will not have to apostatize, heaven forefend. . . .” The nations heap sorrows upon us and confuse our minds with their evil thoughts, for they constantly think up onerous decrees to impose on every Israelite’s means of making a living, until there remains in this bitter exile no means of making a living and supporting one’s wife and children. And we cannot prepare our minds to properly direct our prayers because of the heaviness of the yoke of exile, which weighs upon us so much that we can barely carry it. And therefore the Lord shall clothe himself in the clothing of envy and revenge and wreak vengeance upon those who hate us and repulse all of our enemies from us. And bring down casualties upon casualties before us until there remains not a single faction that will decree a single [harsh] decree upon Israel. But to the contrary, they will decree good, salviﬁc, comforting decrees upon us which greatly increase our happiness so that we will be ever happy and lighthearted in order to become a ﬁtting and pure vessel for the holy presence of God (shekhinah ha-kedushah).23 But however acute the economic pressures, such rural tavern keepers had violated Jewish society’s most solemn taboo, further tarnishing the image of the village Jew. The passage was censored out of subsequent editions. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 109 HASIDISM AND THE CITY The tzaddik Simh≥ah Bunem of the small town of Przysucha once sent his Hasidim to Warsaw to ﬁnd out the latest news. During their walk around the city they did not hear any news, but they did overhear two peddlers discussing the biblical verse about Abraham and the non-Jewish Avimelekh: “And they made a covenant, the two of them” (Gen. 21:27). One peddler noticed that the phrase “the two of them” seems superﬂuous, since Abraham and Avimelekh were the only people there. The peddler then resolved the apparent superﬂuidity by explaining that Abraham foresaw that “we, Israel, will be scattered in exile among the idol worshippers and will do business with them and need other things from them.” For this reason, Abraham made a covenant with Avimelekh to be, emphatically, “two of them,” meaning that “there will never be a union between them nor any friendship which will cause them to emulate their ways, God forbid.” When the Hasidim repeated this teaching to R. Simh≥ah Bunem, he claimed that this was precisely why he had sent them to Warsaw, so they would realize that “even if one must be around uncouth folk who lack reﬁnement, because of business needs and the like, one must interact with non-Jews as ‘two,’ not in union.”24 Even the simplest urban Jew, we learn, understood the dangers of inter-religious fraternization. One might expect Warsaw Jews to have followed a course similar to that of Jews in Odessa and St. Petersburg, where a direct line may be drawn between the acquisition of wealth, acculturation, and cosmopolitanism.25 But the cities of the Kingdom of Poland suggest a different model: urban centers with equally entrenched religious and secular-oriented groups, and where economic prosperity did not favor one group over another. Warsaw, Lodz, and other Polish cities hosted thriving communities of Hasidim, mitnaggdim (non-Hasidic traditionalists), maskilim (Enlightenment-based reformers), and more radical integrationists. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, they would be joined by “Litvaks” (Russiﬁed Jews from historical Lithuania) and representatives of the New Jewish Politics (Zionists, Bundists, and others).26 Hasidism was entrenched in Warsaw well before Jewish settlement was legalized in 1802, although it is difﬁcult to quantify.27 Jacob Shatzky’s claim that two-thirds of the city’s 300 prayer houses were Hasidic by 1880, invoked as evidence repeatedly in contemporary scholarship, turns out to be a castle built on air.28 Eleonora Bergman’s data yields a total of only 167 Warsaw prayer houses in 1869, and the number had dwindled to 117 by 1910.29 Wayne State University Press © 2011 110 Glenn Dynner Warsaw’s hospitality to variant religious subcultures was to an extent a product of the kingdom’s residential segregation policy. From its inception in 1809, the policy had a built-in exemption feature for wealthy and acculturated Jews that was to prove deeply consequential. In Warsaw, Jews who possessed 60,000 złoties, eliminated their beards and other distinguishing sartorial marks, enrolled their children in public schools, and ﬁt a desired professional proﬁle were eligible for permission to live and work on restricted streets.30 This exemption policy had the effect of sifting prominent acculturated Jews out of the Jewish quarter, leaving behind a more traditionally oriented and traditionalist-led mass. In this manner, ofﬁcial segregation policies inadvertently consolidated what would come to be known as “Ultra-Orthodoxy.” The comfort level of Hasidim in Warsaw was such that many walked the streets wrapped in their tallit and teﬁllin, and belted out their prayers in public during the sanctiﬁcation of the Moon.31 Ezekiel Kotik, an aspiring maskil who arrived in Warsaw in 1868, was so disappointed by the Jewish community’s traditionalist bent that he considered retiring to some village and leasing a tavern, since “it was better to be a little man in a village than a nothing in Warsaw . . . a hypocrite, a fanatic among fanatics.”32 Franciscan Street in those years was a potent mix of Hasidic and non-Hasidic study houses. In the “Shas Association,” Kotik amused his anti-Hasidic friends with caricatures of tzaddikim he had encountered back home; but both camps united to form a “Sabbath Guard” that saw to it that female street vendors ceased all business before the Sabbath, pouring out their baskets into the gutter whenever they tried to squeeze in a ﬁnal sale.33 And when it came to issues affecting the entire Jewish community, prominent Hasidim and mitnaggdim cooperated with even the most acculturated Jews in combating the government’s perceived assaults on the traditional Jewish way of life.34 In cities, the watchword was accommodation. At most, urban enclaves could come to be dominated by Hasidim. If Franciscan Street appeared to Kotik as a mix of traditionalist subcultures in the 1860s, it had gained an overwhelmingly Hasidic tenor by the 1880s. Ya‘akov Milkh describes Franciscan Street during this later period as a Hasidic street, where “every Hasidic shtibl in Warsaw” coexisted, including Kotzk, Ger, Grodzisk, Biala, Warka, Radzymin, Neushtadt, and “even Trisk.” A passerby could hear any Hasidic melody or see any Hasidic dance.35 One could usually avoid acculturated Jews. During a walk with his cousin, Kotik was relieved to ﬁnally meet an acquaintance of his, who was dressed in the Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 111 “German-style.” But when he looked around, he realized that his cousin had ﬂed. Later, Kotik’s cousin threatened to never go out in the street with him again if he ever stopped to talk to another acculturated Jew.36 Contact with Christians was usually conﬁned to the economic realm. On Franciscan Street there were, besides prayer houses, shops where Jews “deal in everything on which proﬁt is to be gained,” according to one traveler. When Russian soldiers obtained a few hours’ leave, they went straight to Franciscan Street. “As soon as a Jew spies a soldier, he seems to read in his countenance what he was looking for, whether thread, pipe-clay, blacking, or soap.” There were few indications of intimacy or even familiarity in those encounters.37 Contact with Christians in the city also occurred during times of emergency. A responsum by the Gerer rebbe concerning a grass widow (agunah) case provides some rare insight. One witness was strolling by the Vistula River on the Sabbath behind Elijah Jonah’s house when he came upon Lifsha, the wife of a local Jew named Kopel Leder, in the company of several Christians. According to the witness, “She asked me to go with the gentiles to the village Zoran, because they said they found a drowned man there.” So the witness traveled there with the gentiles and three other Jews and found the corpse in the river among the rushes early the next morning, identifying him as Kopel Leder.38 The scenario suggests a blend of trust and mistrust. The non-Jews were kind enough to seek out a Jewish woman in Warsaw who might be missing her husband. The Jewish witness agreed to go with them to identify the body (Shifra could not go with them because of her gender). However, for safety’s sake he took along three additional Jews, more than the required number of witnesses. If the Hasidic rank-and-ﬁle thrived in Warsaw’s Jewish neighborhoods, Hasidic courts gained surprisingly little traction. The Gerer rebbe resided in Warsaw for much of his pre-tzaddik career but felt compelled to leave shortly after his ascension as tzaddik. A police report from 1859 describes throngs of unkempt Hasidim pouring in from the provinces upon the death of R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk hoping to gain audience with the new tzaddik in his residence at 1015 Krochmalna Street. Certain Jewish residents complained to the authorities.39 The Gerer rebbe ﬁrst attempted to move his court to Eisengas Street, which was more sparsely populated, but less than a year into his reign as tzaddik he decided to move his court to the small town of Góra Kalwaria.40 The nature of the Gerer rebbe’s Warsaw career may hold a key to his decision to relocate to the shtetl. It was a career distinguished by collaboration, Wayne State University Press © 2011 112 Glenn Dynner negotiation, and compromise with anti-Hasidic traditionalist and acculturated Jewish leaders alike in an effort to mitigate perceived threats to the Hasidic way of life like army conscription, primary educational reform, and language ordinances.41 Hagiography admits that such collaborations forced the Gerer rebbe to witness acculturated Jews eating non-kosher food and smoking on the Sabbath.42 Even driving down Jerusalem Street in his droshky could be hazardous, forcing the tzaddik to shake hands with acculturated Jews eager to meet a celebrity.43 Warsaw was signiﬁcantly larger and more non-Jewish (41,062 Jews and 115,500 Christians) at mid-century than the two other cities in which Hasidic courts were brieﬂy established during the nineteenth century: Lublin (8,588 Jews and 6,901 Christians) and Płock (5,251 Jews and 7,152 Christians). Lublin represented the most successful case. Yet there was a forty-year lag between the demise of the ﬂourishing court of the Seer of Lublin upon his death in 1815 and the next full-ﬂedged court, established in 1854 by Judah Leib Eiger, grandson of the legendary Akiba Eiger. Lublin Hasidim found it difﬁcult to dominate the Synagogue Council as well.44 For much of the century, only rank-and-ﬁle Hasidim, conﬁned to the area in front of the Castle, were able to thrive in Lublin.45 AN IDEAL SETTING FOR A HASIDIC COURT Most aspiring tzaddikim relocated to a shtetl. To understand this choice of habitat, it will help to examine the case of an aspiring tzaddik who moved from Warsaw to the shtetl Pia$ tek, a bishop-owned town. Although formally off-limits to Jewish settlement, Pia$ tek contained a designated Jewish quarter. The town was split evenly between non-Jews and Jews throughout the 1850s—807 Christians and 805 Jews, the latter being further split between Hasidim and non-Hasidim.46 As in many Jewish communities, Hasidim and non-Hasidim in Pia$ tek had achieved an uneasy modus vivendi: for the past twenty-ﬁve years the town rabbi, Szmul Izrael, had been Hasidic, but the Synagogue Council was dominated by non-Hasidic lay leaders. In 1860, the balance of power was suddenly upset with the arrival of the rabbi’s ﬂamboyant brother-in-law, Chuna Unger, from Warsaw. Unger not only possessed a passport permitting him to settle in the town (notwithstanding an old Christian privilege restricting Jewish settlement to native-born Jews) but a patent for spiritual leadership, as well.47 According to the anti-Hasidic Synagogue Council member Baruch Gajzler, the Hasidic Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 113 party immediately made Unger their leader and began collecting funds for him. Unger issued a decree forbidding the consumption of local meat and refused to attend synagogue services, even on religious holidays.48 Instead, he began assembling local Hasidim under the pretext of prayer, “addicting them to drunkenness and demoralization,” in the words of his opponents.49 Unger may be identiﬁed with Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna) Unger (d. 1883), son of the tzaddik Mordecai David Unger (1770–1846) of Dombrov (Da$ browa Tarnowska) and son-in-law of the tzaddik H˘ayyim Meir Yeh≥iel of Mogielnice. Unger initially achieved renown as the publisher of the Hasidic classic Avodat Yisrael ( Josefów, 1842), which contains the teachings of R. Israel, the Maggid of Kozienice. He was wealthy, pedigreed, and charismatic, although little is known about his scholarly ability.50 Unger’s supporters elaborated an interesting counter-charge. Rabbi Szmul Izrael had fallen ill and needed to go to Warsaw for a cure, but Unger’s inﬂuential non-Hasidic opponents—Gajzler and his colleague Mordka Goldberg—had refused to grant him a leave of absence. Rabbi Szmul Izrael was forced to depart without the Synagogue Council’s formal permission. Upon his return, he found himself banished from the synagogue, a state of affairs that lasted several months. The anti-Hasidic Goldberg, for his part, had a quarrelsome reputation: he had inﬂicted punishments—including ﬂoggings—on town residents, had accused members of the Burial Society of wrongdoing, and had convinced the mayor to dissolve the body. And now, Unger’s supporters claimed, he had insulted a rabbi renowned for his learning and spotless reputation. In the spring of 1862, the communal balance of power was put to test in a Synagogue Council election. The declared winners were two Hasidim, Michał Ciosnowski and Szyja Szternfeld, and the anti-Hasidic Mosiek Zylberberg. The Hasidim had achieved a majority on the council. In addition, 75 of 140 taxpayers signed a petition in Unger’s defense (although one petitioner signed his name twice), reﬂecting support for the Hasidim among just over half of the community’s taxpayers. The election results were disputed with the support of local Polish ofﬁcials. According to County Commissioner Le$ czycki, Unger had “inﬂicted harm on the kosher meat lease,” held by Goldberg, and had engaged in “questionable methods of tax collection during an election year.” Unger had issued a ban against anyone buying meat in order to hurt Goldberg and had induced the rabbi to quit the town on the High Holidays without Wayne State University Press © 2011 114 Glenn Dynner obtaining a leave of absence so that no one could ensure the kosher status of meat. Unger was “a social menace who does not fulﬁll his spiritual functions, but rather engages in trade in corn and lumber.” According to the director of the State Council, Unger and the rabbi had conspired to remove Goldberg and Gajzler from the Synagogue Council in 1860, going so far as to accuse Goldberg of a capital crime. Unger had thereby hoped to install council members who “obeyed his will” so that he could take over the ﬁnances and governance of the community. And thus he did. During the new elections in 1862, he had extracted the votes of the poor “through terror and corruption” and had managed to ram through the election of his relatives, Ciosnowski and Szternfeld. Since their election, Unger, the rabbi, Ciosnowski, and Szternfeld had “immediately employed a variety of abuses.” They had established fees for the slaughter of cattle and poultry, seized control of the burial society, prevented relatives of the dead and wealthy members of the community from attending burial rites, and attempted to conceal expenditures exceeding 1,500 silver rubles resulting from suits against Ciosnowski for his physical assaults against community members. In spite of the best efforts of the anti-Hasidic leaders and their powerful Christian allies, however, the Hasidic victory was upheld. In 1863, Gajzler and Mosiek Zylberberg, the sole non-Hasidic Council member and new meat tax lessee, brought suit against the leaders of the local Hasidim. They now claimed that the rabbi had improperly extracted unspeciﬁed payments, refused to eat “ofﬁcial” meat, issued bans against slaughtering to the detriment of Zylberberg, collected fees for his own slaughtering, quit the community and appointed the unqualiﬁed Unger in his place, and had moreover never taken the exam now required of rabbis. The suit also asserted that Unger had held Hasidic gatherings involving lawlessness, drunkenness, and other harmful acts. But Unger apparently had connections of his own in the central government in Warsaw. The State Council acquitted the rabbi and Unger of all charges and reafﬁrmed the legality of praying in separate prayer houses. Since the complaints were “unsubstantiated,” Gajzler and Zylberberg had to pay the costs of the investigation. The Interior Ministry in Warsaw conﬁrmed the Hasidic candidates and formally annulled the 1860 election of Gajzler and Goldberg. The latter now stood accused of delivering false testimony and other criminal offenses. Although the Le$czycy Police Court acquitted Goldberg of all charges the following year, the Hasidim had carried the day.51 Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 115 Table 1. Pia$ tek Jewish Communal Election Results Votes Received Name Josek Towunczyk Michał Ciosnowski* Szyja Szternfeld* Szyja Adamowicz Lewek Lewin Mordka Goldberg (*) Mosiek Zylberberg* Josek Dominkiewicz Lejbel Orzechowski Baruch Gajzler Chune Unger (March/February) Tax Bracket 3/0 63/62 63/62 63/62 0/0 63/61 64/60 60/60 2/2 n/a n/a 2nd 1st 5th 5th 4th 2nd 2nd 2nd 4th 1st 1st Afﬁliation Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Hasidic *declared winners The 1862 election results disclose the tax status of Gajzler, Unger, and the nine candidates, giving us a sense of the economic level of the Hasidim and their adversaries. Table 1 reveals how delicate the balance of power truly was. With the arrival of Unger, the Hasidim now had two members in the top tax bracket compared to only one non-Hasid, Gajzler. At the same time, Hasidic candidates occupied both the highest and lowest tax brackets. One of the poorest members of the community, Szyja Szternfeld, won a seat—perhaps Unger had appointed him as a “stand-in” (Gajzler apparently tried something similar with Lejbel Orzechowski). The non-Hasidic candidates, on the other hand, were clustered mainly in the second tax bracket, appearing to comprise a “secondary elite.”52 This socioeconomic balance differs from that of other known cases, further conﬁrming Hasidism’s lack of any distinctive class make-up.53 But the data reveal something else, as well: in a small town like Pia$ tek, it only took the arrival of a single individual—albeit a wealthy, pedigreed, and inﬂuential one—to dramatically shift local power relations. Before Unger, the Hasidic community had been moribund. His arrival was a jolt to local Hasidim, who now formed their own prayer quorum, began celebrating Sabbaths and festivals in rapturous Hasidic style, showered their new tzaddik with money, opted out of the community’s kosher slaughtering, and soon took over the Synagogue Council. Pia$ tek was suddenly home Wayne State University Press © 2011 116 Glenn Dynner to a Hasidic court, notwithstanding the best efforts of wealthy Synagogue Council members in coalition with local Polish ofﬁcials. The case, dramatic as it may have been, was indicative of a wider trend. The vast majority of aspiring Polish tzaddikim from the middle decades of the nineteenth century chose to set up their courts in towns like Pia$ tek. The presence of courts in those towns caused local Jewish populations to swell to enormous proportions around the Sabbath and festivals. British missionaries described Warka, home to Isaac Kalisz (1779–1848), as “the Capital of Hasidism” in 1846. The missionaries asked two Jews where all the Hasidim were and were told “that nearly everyone is Hasidic, and that last month on the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, 4,000 Jews from various locales came to this rabbi.”54 Anything even approaching these numbers would have dwarfed the town’s permanent Jewish population of around 1500.55 Demographic shifts occasioned by the establishment of Hasidic courts were sometimes manifested less in a court town’s permanent Jewish population, which was more subject to restriction and regulation by Polish authorities, than in surges in temporary Jewish migration around Sabbaths and festivals.56 Village and city Jews alike journeyed to provincial towns to meet tzaddikim and revel in the vibrant Hasidic court life. Of course, the pilgrimage experience itself varied according to one’s own habitat. For the villager, it meant rare company with fellow Jews. For the urban Hasid, it was more of a retreat, an escape from the hustle and bustle of daily affairs. But for all Hasidim, the small town that hosted a court was nothing less than a manifestation of ancient Jerusalem.57 Pilgrimages became increasingly convenient with improvements in transportation: after the death of the tzaddik Yeh≥iel Meir Lifschitz (1816–88), who had established a court in the small town of Gostynin, logbooks of the steamship that continually stopped there reported a loss of 22,324 passengers.58 Not only did such towns offer little in terms of economic opportunity, they often had legally sanctioned restrictions on Jewish settlement. In the early nineteenth century, Jewish quarters called rewiry were established or reinstated based on earlier privileges in a total of thirty-one towns and cities, including Warsaw.59 In towns like Pia$ tek that were formally off limits to Jewish settlement (de non tolerandis Judaeis), another type of Jewish quarter called an obre$b, or “compass,” was delineated. In all, ﬁfty-ﬁve Jewish quarters existed by the 1830s.60 Yet moribund local economies and residential restrictions were no deterrents to aspiring tzaddikim. If the local economy and residence rights were not decisive, then what was? The principal consideration seems to have been manageability. First, Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 117 Table 2. Towns with Hasidic Courts Court Founded Christians (1852) Jews (1852) Góra Kalwaria Warka 1859 ca. 1830 524 1,181 1,298 1,527 Radomsko Alexandrów 1843 1868 1,794 2,524 1,162 971 Biała Podlaska 1873 1,333 2561 Gostynin Radoszyce Bychawa 1875 1831 1828 2,445 1,116 340 634 745 638 Pia$tek 1860 807 805 Ciechanów 1820 1,097 2,241 Piotrków ca. 1820 5,720 4,151 Grodzisko Izbica Kock (Kotzk) Kozienice Lelów Mogielnica Parysów Przedborz Przysucha 1848 ca. 1840 1829 1765 Pre-1814 1828 Pre-1862 1788 1790s 185 1,149 1,270 924 328 1,003 679 1,067 587 786 970c 1,612d 1,961 428 1,202 456 3,181 2,020 1765 1844 1,098 549 2,117 1,062 Z{elechów Z{ychlin Residential Restrictions De non tolerandis Judaeis De non tolerandis Judaeis ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced) De non tolerandis Judaeis De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass) No more than 30 houses ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced) Jewish Quarter (rewir) De non tolerandis Judais De non tolerandis Judaeis, revoked De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass), no non-native Jewish settlement ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced)a De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass)b Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted; yet a separate market square (rynek) for Jews. Unrestricted Unrestricted Sources: AGAD, KRSW 188, fol. 223–254; Maria Łodynska-Kosinska, ed., Katalog rysunków architektonicznych z Akt Komisji Rza$dowej Spraw Wewne$trznych w Archiwum Głównym Akt Dawnych w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1974). aSee also Aleksander Kociszewski, Mazowsze w epoce napoleonskiej (Ciechanów: RSW, 1985), 317–18. bPiotroków’s compass was originally established as a separate “Jewish town” by the Starosta. AGAD, KRSW 188, fol. 224 and 331. cAccording to Wasiutynski, the population of Izbica dropped to 681 ﬁve years later, in 1857, perhaps a result of the death of R. Mordecai Joseph Leiner in 1854. dIt is difﬁcult to explain Wasiutynski’s much lower ﬁgure of 1,480 ﬁve years later, in 1857 (the Kotzker Rebbe did not die until 1859). Wayne State University Press © 2011 118 Glenn Dynner there was the Jewish community itself. As the Pia$ tek case demonstrates, a town with a small but viable Jewish population was relatively easy to dominate politically. Second, there was less likely to be a viable acculturated Jewish leadership to contend with. And third, although Jews would tend to be on more familiar terms with their Christian neighbors in a smaller town than in an anonymous city, the boundaries were well marked. Local Christian reactions to the court of R. Jacob Tzvi Rabinowicz in Parysów (which, ethnographer Stefanija Ulanowska notes indignantly, possessed an unpainted wooden parish church with a shingled roof yet a grand stone synagogue with an iron roof ), elicited a powerful sense of border maintenance.61 Parysów Christians were continually amazed by the hordes of Jewish petitioners streaming into their town from every locale, including even Warsaw, to obtain advice, help, and healing from the local epileptic rabbi whom Jews regarded as a saint. True, the rabbi was charitable: he provided meals for around sixty poor Jews every single day, paid for by his wealthy followers. But he had never even shown himself on the street, preferring to remain somewhere behind the red-curtained windows of his house, and had never bothered to learn Polish. On the holidays the town “swarmed” with Jews, reaching numbers unseen at church fairs. At a certain point, visitors would gather before the rabbi’s window and throw money at him from every side. In return, the rabbi would write prayers on slips of paper, which were then collected and cast through a tiny window in the tomb of his late father.62 Some Christians in Parysów began to worry that the Jews were planning to slaughter them, and that the rabbi was merely biding his time until the numbers of Jews grew even larger.63 In fact, the proportion of permanent Jewish residents to Christians in Parysów had grown from 28.8 percent in 1827 to 43.3 percent in 1857.64 But these worries did not give way to open hostility against Hasidim. In 1865, Christian townspeople complained to the municipality about Jewish-owned houses that lay too close to the church, a perceived encroachment on Christian space, but never about the Hasidic court in their midst.65 Christians occasionally availed themselves of a local Jewish saint’s services. The tzaddik Abraham of Ciechanów (1795–1875) was especially known to grant non-Jewish requests, dispense advice and charity to non-Jews, and arbitrate their disputes. Once, a non-Jewish woman from Neszalsk who “knew how to speak the Jewish language because she had grown up in the midst of Jews” (probably as a servant or wet nurse) disguised herself and presented her petition under a Jewish name. The tzaddik Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 119 perceived that the petition was from a non-Jew and forbade her admission to his room, but still gave her a blessing.66 In another instance, R. Abraham did permit non-Jewish petitioners to enter his inner chamber: A non-Jewish woman came with her husband, an ill farmer, to the rebbe of blessed memory, and the attendant asked if he would let them enter, and the rebbe gave his permission. And they entered the inner chamber, and the rebbe ordered the attendant to ask her—since she was the spokesperson— what was her request. And she replied that her husband was ill. And he ordered him to ask her from what he was ill, and if she had already sought out doctors. And she said yes. And he asked which doctors, and if they were from the vicinity, and other such questions. And she answered everything. And afterward he commanded him to ask her what she wished from him and why she had come to him, and she replied that she came to request that he pray to God for his recovery. (And all the manifold questions were to derive the reason for their coming to him, to make sure that it wasn’t to worship him like an idol, Heaven forfend. And they either realized this intent or a Jew had advised them to answer in this manner.) And he blessed him, as is his manner, with: “May the Holy One Blessed Be He give him a complete and speedy recovery.”67 The tradition has the trappings of any number of Hasidic power-inversion fantasies.68 But certain features argue for its historicity. The Christian petitioners in this case were quite humble; and the original redactor, S., the Rabbi of Kłodawa, preserves a sense of awkwardness during the encounter.69 The attendant had to ﬁrst ask the tzaddik’s permission to bring non-Jews into the inner chamber. The tzaddik had to ﬁlter his words through his attendant/ interpreter, since it was unseemly for him to address a non-Jewish woman directly.70 Nevertheless, as the peasants were in his domain, he controlled the encounter. The redactor’s prejudicial remarks (in parentheses) are less convincing. It is difﬁcult to imagine a peasant actually regarding the tzaddik as a god, and there is no reason to believe that R. Abraham, who interacted frequently with Christians in and around Ciechanów, would have entertained such notions. In addition, there is no reason to assume with the redactor that the woman was coached by Jews. If we disregard the editorializing, we are left with a rather straightforward exchange and a sense of the conditions under which a tzaddik would agree to interact with non-Jews. Outside the tzaddik’s court, Hasidic contact with Christians in the shtetl was perhaps more frequent than in a city, but it was still conﬁned to the Wayne State University Press © 2011 120 Glenn Dynner economic sphere. Hasidic hagiography exudes fear and mistrust of gentiles, even construing them in demonic terms, but acknowledges that one still has to do business with them.71 A male petitioner whose store was frequented by gentiles was accustomed to read from a copy of the Lubavitcher classic, the Tanya, to avoid spiritual contamination. R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk praised this practice, but advised him to also recite the Shema prayer at those times.72 R. Menah≥em Mendel, for his part, was proud of his young wife’s success in attracting “many customers, Jewish and non-Jewish,” to her store.73 Although contempt for members of the dominant culture could result in a double standard in the marketplace, Hasidim were admonished against cheating their non-Jewish customers. R. Abraham of Ciechanów explained to a Jewish store owner that he was unable to make a proﬁt because he had been cheating non-Jewish factory workers by means of weights and measures.74 R. Isaac of Warka rebuked a lessee for stealing from a landowner: it was only permissible to steal “a little time to study Torah” from the nobleman, nothing more.75 Likutei Shoshanim, a tract attributed to both the non-Hasidic chief rabbi of Warsaw, R. Shlomo Zalman Lifschitz, and to R. Isaac of Warka, establishes the following guidelines: Robbing and stealing are forbidden, especially between an Israelite and a gentile. And all swindling in the whole world is forbidden in business transactions, even involving a gentile. For example, if there is a ﬂaw in one’s goods, he must announce it to the customer even if he is a gentile, for not announcing it is ‘stealing his mind’ and causing him to err. If it is but a tiny thing which people are not so strict about, such as taking a splinter to use it as a toothpick, it is permissible. But a Hasid will avoid doing even this.76 To judge by the phrase “even involving a gentile,” it appears that a double standard did prevail among some Jews. Many Christians suspected all Jews of adhering to a double standard. Mazowian townspeople informed ethnographers that Jews supported themselves by swindling drunken peasants, sober burghers, and noblemen alike.77 Polish author E.T. Massalski had his Jewish character explain that “no pagan has a soul, and that is why we are free to cheat and beat them; and if we can’t wipe out these demons and enemies of true belief, then it is our obligation to cheat them and harm them as enemies of God, and at every opportunity increase their losses.”78 But such logic, to the extent it really operated, did not receive religious sanction. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 121 Juifs Polonais (Polish Jews), by August Jacob Theodor Von Heyden, c. 1862–67. A vivid picture of economic engagement and conﬂict in the shtetl emerges from the horde of quasi-Hasidic petitions to Elijah Guttmacher, the non-Hasidic “tzaddik of Gratz (Grodzisk Wielkopolski),” from the early 1870s. Petitioners requested such things as “success collecting debts and success in a court case with the gentile, for he does not want to pay.”79 A gentile owed one petitioner over 1,000 zlotys, the petitioner’s entire fortune; but when he went to collect, the gentile had physically threatened him.80 Another petitioner complained that a gentile hated him for no reason and harmed him in every possible way, destroying his business. The petitioner asked R. Guttmacher to help him ﬁnd favor with the local government minister “so that they will permit me a little business.”81 Petitions concerning members of the nobility usually possess an alarming quality, since the sums involved were often substantial: “and now the noblewoman has fallen ill, and I fear she will demand her money, and I, too, am ill”; or “now it is impossible to get anything from him” because the nobleman had squandered the money the petitioner had lent him.82 But economic conﬂicts were not only Wayne State University Press © 2011 122 Glenn Dynner ethnic-based: when a Jewish tavern keeper’s lease was usurped by two fellow Jews, he blamed them, not the nobleman who accepted their higher bid.83 Relations between Hasidim and gentiles in the shtetl only occasionally transcended the economic realm. Disclosures of such relations in hagiography carry grave warnings: “The nations of the world befriend the Israelites and by this means estrange them from the Israelite religion, God forbid,” according to R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk. Indeed, “one sees this nowadays, because of our many sins, that friendships with the nations of the world have caused this to happen.”84 Audiences were horriﬁed by tales of apostasy, but reassured in the end that the apostate eventually repented or, in some cases, was killed.85 Social drinking, the society’s main pastime, was to occur only between Jews: “As wine enters, the secret (sod) emerges” (BT Eruvin 65): And Israel’s “secret” is “love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19), love and neighborliness. And the gentiles’ “secret” is murder: “And by your sword you shall live” (Gen. 27). Therefore, when the Children of Israel sit together to drink, as the wine enters the secret of love emerges: love of God and love of friends. And when the gentiles begin to drink, we see quarrels and murder among them.86 According to one tale, a Jew fell victim to a gentile’s murderous inclinations in a tavern.87 Yet hagiography occasionally admits that social drinking did occur between déclassé Jews and Christians.88 INSULARITY THROUGH ACCULTURATION In his study of contemporary Hasidic life, Samuel Heilman appears amazed by the degree to which Hasidim have integrated themselves into American life: In New York even the bearded Satmar Hasid who sought to live undisturbed in his Jewish ghetto had become a part of New York and its social life and politics like all other ethnics in the city. And at his electronics business in midtown Manhattan, he could sound like any other American businessman, saluting customers and closing transactions with the vapid but quintessentially American “Have a nice day.”89 Heilman interprets such salutations as a desire on the part of Hasidim to “be part of the contemporary world around them.”90 Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 123 But in the mode of acculturation adopted by Hasidim, only those attractions or beneﬁts of the secular world that, paradoxically, helped preserve the society’s core insularity were appropriated. Space and place were crucial to this defensive appropriation: the “quintessentially American” gestures witnessed by Heilman occurred, signiﬁcantly, in the Hasid’s own store rather than on any neutral turf. To prevent an over-reading of such gestures, it may help to remember that Hasidic homiletic literature, despite the occasional ecumenical feint, essentially conceives non-Jews as rooted in lifelessness or, worse, demonic husks (kelipot), existing only as divine instruments to punish Jews sins through persecution or to vindicate Jews through their own downfall.91 A tzaddik’s engagement with the surrounding Slavic popular culture was a miraculous extraction of the pure from the impure: the tzaddik discerns “holy matters” in all the folktales of the world;92 and “is able to elevate the common sayings and stories of peoples of his time,”93 since non-Jewish folktales contain “many hidden and extremely exalted things.”94 The same is said to be true of non-Jewish music: “In all the lieder that the nations of the world sing, there is an aspect of fear and love (of God), extending from above down to all the lower levels.”95 Hasidim danced Polish and Ukrainian folk dances in a state of intoxication, moving one contemporaneous critic to compare them to peasants; but the goal was ostensibly devekut, not amusement.96 Hasidic exorcism ceremonies may have exhibited Slavic inﬂuences; Hasidic pilgrimages may have resembled Christian pilgrimages to Cze$ stochowa, Kobylańska, and Kalwaria.97 But as Polish as these practices may have been, they ultimately functioned to shore up the Hasidic community by stealing thunder from the alluring sounding culture. The notion that under the aegis of tzaddikim one could sanctify profane practices by engaging them with a holy intent justiﬁed the most unabashed appropriations of Polish culture. In the Hasidic imagination, the Polish folktale, song, dance, and any other cultural artifact entered the Hasidic court much in the same way as the Christian farmers approached R. Abraham of Ciechanów: as supplicants in need of repair. The shtetl proved an optimal environment for Hasidic courts because both the local Jewish community and their interactions with the Christian population and its potent culture could be better regulated there. Polish cities also allowed for a high degree of border maintenance, thanks to their legislated Jewish enclaves. However, cities proved much more difﬁcult to dominate politically owing to their multitude of entrenched Wayne State University Press © 2011 124 Glenn Dynner subcultures, each with its own inﬂuential leaders, and a tzaddik could only insulate himself with great difﬁculty. Villages failed on every score: in the absence of a viable Jewish community in the countryside, borders between Jews and Christians could not be policed at all. As a result, Hasidic court life gravitated toward the shtetl, where the tzaddik’s negotiation with the Jewish and non-Jewish community alike could occur from a position of strength. NOTES 1. On the application of “cultural hybridity” to Jewish studies, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), esp. chap. 3. I would like to thank Olga Litvak for reading an earlier draft of this chapter and offering several helpful suggestions. 2. Attempts to locate Christian inﬂuences on Hasidism include Yaffa Eliach, “The Russian Dissenting Sects and Their Inﬂuence on Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, Founder of Hassidism,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 36 (1963); Torsten Ysander, Studien zum B‘estshten Hasidismus (Upsala: Lundeqistka Bokhandeln, 1933); Igor Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity of the Eastern Territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Possible Contacts and Mutual Inﬂuences,” Kabbalah 10 (2004): 73–105; Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 176–79; Adam Teller, “Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 1–29; and Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 6. 3. On topography in Jewish studies, see Anna Lipphardt, Julia Brauch, and Alexandra Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Lipphardt, Brauch, and Nocke (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1–26; and Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Review Essay: The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 155–64. 4. There is some scholarly disagreement over use of the term shtetl. Some consider it a reiﬁed term that serves only a nostalgic purpose and is thus better left out of historical studies. However, I regard shtetl as an evocative term whose closest equivalent, “small town,” fails to capture the relatively autonomous Jewish presence in many of the region’s smaller urban settings. For a summary of the debate, see Adam Teller, “The Shtetl as an Arena for Polish-Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century,” Polin 17 (2004): 35–49. 5. From Sifre to Devarim 43, in reference to Rome. 6. Compare BT Shabbat 62b: “in the place where they perfumed themselves shall be decaying sores . . . the place where they girdled themselves shall become full of bruises.” 7. Yoatz Kayam Kadish, Siah≥ sarfei kodesh (Piotroków Trybunalski, 1923), 2:71. 8. Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 145–46. 9. Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), Komisya Rza$ dowa Spraw Wewne$trznych (KRSW) 202, 166. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 125 10. On the overlap between Yiddish jokes, tales, and eventually modern Jewish literature, see Jordan Finkin, “Jewish Jokes, Yiddish Storytelling, and Sholem Aleichem: A Discursive Approach,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (2009): 85–110. 11. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:80–81. 12. Ibid., 2:112. 13. Authors of ethical treatises from the period used village Jews to shame their audiences, e.g., “even a villager, if he sees a Jew standing in prayer, will not sit next to him and distract him.” See Elazar Tahlgrin, Tokhah≥at musar: Hu sefer Tehilim (Warsaw, 1854), 21. 14. Samuel of Sieniawa, Ramata’im Tzoﬁm (Warsaw, 1880), 170. 15. She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rim ( Józefów, 1867), “Yoreh De’ah,” no. 8. 16. Ibid., 4:118. 17. Yitzh≥ak Mordekhai Hakohen Rabinowicz, Atarat Shlomo (Piotroków, 1926), 38–39. 18. See, for example, Gershon Bacon, “Warsaw-Vilna-Budapest: On Joseph Ben-David’s Model of the Modernization of Jewry,” Jewish History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 103. 19. Israel Halpern, Pinkas Va‘ad arba aratzot: Likute takanot, ketavim u-reshumot ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1989), 483–86; Betzalel ben Solomon Darshan, Korban Shabbat (Warsaw, 1873), 121; cited in Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes Goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, trans. Yoel Lerner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 94–105; Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Sabbath Violation Regulations of Poland and Their Social and Economic Signiﬁcance,” Zion 21 (1956): 183–206 (Hebrew); Solomon Drimer of Skole, Bet Shlomo (Lemberg, 1855), 36 (24a), and “Orah≥ H˘ayyim,” no. 50; Solomon Lipschitz, Hemdat Shlomo-Drushim (Warsaw, 1889), no. 3, p. 13. See my article “Legal Fictions: The Survival of Rural Jewish Tavern Keeping in the Kingdom of Poland,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (2010): 28–66. 20. “Ha-kitrug aleyha, eyn ha-berakha shorah bah.” See R. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk’s letter in Barnai, Igerot H˘asidim me’eretz yisra’el ( Jerusalem: Yad Yitzh≥ak Ben-Tzvi, 1980), 118–20. A full (and alternate) translation appears in Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 48–49. For additional condemnations of tavern keeping and other rural business endeavors, see especially Pinh≥as of Koretz (Korzec), Imrei Pinh≥as ha-shelem, p. 188, no. 32 (“settlers in villages do not succeed [economically] in the end because they are mixed up with the goyim”); p. 210, no. 129 (“even if they would give [R. Pinh≥as] great wealth—apparently he said ten ducats—he would not settle in a village”); and 210–11, no. 130 (“[R. Pinh≥as] told one man not to reside in a village. And the reason was that this man did not have a father who was a scholar . . . and so he needed to guard himself against residing among the goyim”). 21. One tradition is quite explicit: “[R. Menah≥em Mendel] saw that our brothers the Children of Israel who lived in villages—lessees of taverns and lessees of other estate holdings— were descending, thread by thread, ten steps down in their divine service because they could never pray in a quorum or purify themselves in the good waters of a ritual bath (mikveh) even on Sabbaths. And from there they hit rock-bottom and mingled with gentiles. The children in particular, since they had never seen anyone but the gentiles, were slipping into materiality.” Avraham H˘ayyim Simh≥ah Bunem Mikhalzohn, Ohel Naftali (Lemberg, 1911; reprint, Jerusalem, 2004), 185–88; no. 373. 22. Initiated by the Napoleonic regime in the Duchy of Warsaw on October 30, 1812, concessions for Jews running taverns rose from an average of 50 zlotys (1815) to 400 zlotys (1824) to 650 zlotys (1828).The concession amounts depended on the number of households in a given locale. See Jan Rukowski, Historia gospodarcza Polski II (Poznan, 1950), 213; Halina Roz[enowa, Produkcja wódki i sprawa pijaństwa w Królestwie Polskim 1815–1863 (Warsaw: Wayne State University Press © 2011 126 Glenn Dynner PWN, 1961), 60. According to Mahler’s calculations, the liquor concession was eight times the initial fee by 1824, and twelve times the initial fee by 1830. See Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, 178. 23. Moses Eliyakim Beriyah of Kozienice, Be’er Moshe, “Yom Kippur” ( Jozefow, 1858), 1st ed. only. 24. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:46–47. 25. On Odessa Jewry, see Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985); on St. Petersburg Jewry, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 26. For the diversity of Jewish culture in Lodz, see Jacek Walicki, Synagogi i domy modlitwy w Lodzi (Lodz: Druk, 2000). 27. The presence of the tzaddik R. Levi Isaac of Berdyczów in Warsaw during the 1780s is attested in various sources. Warsaw’s assistant rabbi, R. Isaac Benjamin Wolf (d. 1802), was an ardent Hasid. There are indications of a Hasidic presence in Warsaw as early as 1768 (in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht), in 1785 (minute book of the Praga Burial Society), and in 1789 (in an unpublished manuscript). See Rubinstein, “H˘asidut ve-H˘asidim be-Varshe,” 61–84. Yizkor (Memorial) accounts of Hasidism in Warsaw include Avraham Bik, “Etapen fun Hasidism in Varshe,” in Pinkes Varshe 1 (Buenos Aires, 1955), 179–86; Meir Shvartzmann, “Vi Khasides Hat Bazigt des Lomdishe Varshe,” in Das Amalike Yidishe Varshe (Montreal, 1966), 750–55; and Sefer Praga: A Memorial to the Jewish Community of Praga (Hebrew/Yiddish), ed. Gabriel Waisman (Tel Aviv: Orli, 1974), 21–41 and 62–66. 28. Jacob Shatzky, in Geschichte fun yidn in Varshe (New York: YIVO, 1947), 3:364, cites Ya‘akov Milkh, Oytobiagraﬁshe skitzen (New York, 1946), who makes no such claim. Examples of reliance on this false data include Bacon, “Prolonged Erosion, Organization and Reinforcement: Reﬂections on Orthodox Jewry in The Kingdom of Poland (up to 1914),” in Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust: Proceedings of the 9th Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf ( Jerusalem, 1993), 75; Bacon, “La société juive dans le royaume de la Pologne du Congrès (1860–1914),” in Société Juive à Travers L’histoire I, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Fayard, 1992), 653; and Bacon, “Warsaw-VilnaBudapest,” 103–4. The ﬁgure could have been (incorrectly) derived from Hilary Nussbaum’s estimate that Hasidim constituted two-thirds of Warsaw Jewry in 1880. See Szkice historyczne z z[ycia Z{ydów w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1881), 131. 29. Eleonora Bergman, “Nie masz bóznicy powszechnej”: synagogi i domy modlitwy w Warszawie od konca XVII do pocza$tku XXI wieku (Warsaw: DiG, 2007), 136–57 and 91. Bergman reasons that each of the forty tzaddikim buried in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery would have had at least one prayer house in Warsaw (meaning about one-quarter of all the prayer houses), but concedes that there is little concrete data on the issue. 30. There were 22 such families in 1815 and 124 by 1836. Adam Wein, “Z{ydzi poza rewirem Z{ydowskim w Warszawie (1809–1862),” Biuletyn Z{IH 41 (1962): 45–70. 31. Tahlgrin, Tokhah≥at musar, 18b. 32. Yeh≥ezkel Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes (Warsaw, 1913), 78. On similar disappointments among maskilim in Warsaw, see Scott Ury, “The Generation of 1905 and the Politics of Despair: Alienation, Friendship, Community,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 96–110. 33. Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes, 71–73. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 127 34. See Israel Bartal and David Assaf, “Shtadlanut ve-Ortodoksiyah: Tzaddikei Polin bemifgash im ha-zmanim ha-h≥adashim,” Tzaddikim ve-anshe ma‘aseh: mehkarim be-h≥asidut Polin, ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), 65–90. 35. Ya‘akov Milkh, Oytobiagraﬁshe skitzen (New York, 1946), 81–82. 36. Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes, 78. 37. Harro Harring, Poland under the Dominion of Russia (Boston, 1834), 124–25. 38. She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rim, “Even ha-Ezer,” no. 2. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern ﬁnds Jewish-Christian cooperation during a ﬁre in the city of Balta, as well. See “The Marketplace in Balta: Aspects of Economic and Cultural Life,” East European Jewish Affairs 37, no. 3 (2007): 277–95. 39. AGAD Centralne Władze Wyznaniowe (CWW) 1871, 306–7, 39. 40. Ostensibly, he moved his court to shield young followers from the commercial and cosmopolitan inﬂuences of the big city. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 5:33; Yitzh≥ak Alfasi, Gur (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1978), 68; Jacob Shatzky, Geschichte fun yidn in Varshe, 3:357; and Arthur Green, Language of Truth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998), xxv. Eleonora Bergman is dismissive of the traditional view; see her “Gora Kalvariya,” in Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh: Mehkarim be-H˘asidut Polin, ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), 111, no. 2. 41. On this attempted cooperation, see Israel Bartal and David Assaf, “Shtadlanut veortodoksiah-tzaddikei Polin be-mifgash im ha-zmanim ha-hadashim,” in Elior et al., Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh, esp. 86–90. 42. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 3:74. For a similar episode, see 2:112, and also 4:102. 43. Ibid., 4:120. Some tales are more vicious. A wealthy assimilated Jew “of the new generation” who made jokes during the Passover meal was struck with paralysis and died. Ibid., 5:35. Another assimilated Jew claimed to have repented on his deathbed, but the rebbe refused to believe him. Ibid., 3:74. 44. Eiger was also rare in his ability, as a Hasidic leader, to operate as an ofﬁcially recognized rabbi in Lublin and receive an annual pension of sixty rubles from the Synagogue Council. Robert Kuwałek, “Urze$dowi rabini lubelskiego Okre$gu Boz[niczego, 1821–1939,” in Z{ydzi w Lublinie: Materiały do dziejów społeczności z[ydowskiej Lublina, ed. Tadeusz Radzik (Lublin: Marii Curie-Skłodoski, 1995), 39. 45. AGAD, KRSW 188, fol. 239. Płock’s Jews were conﬁned to a Jewish quarter composed of several streets since 1811. 46. AGAD KRSW 188, fol. 229 (for 1852); Bohdan Wasiutynski, Ludność Z{ydowska w Polsce w wiekach XIX i XX (Warsaw, 1930), 50 (for 1857). 47. AGAD, Komisja Wojewodztwa Kaliskiego (KWK) 3224. 48. On this Hasidic tactic, see Chone Shmeruk, “Hasidism and the Kehilla,” in The Jews in Old Poland, ed. Antony Polonsky, Jakub Basista, and Andrzej Link-Lenczowski (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 186–95; Isaiah Kuperstein, “Inquiry at Polaniec: A Case Study of a Hassidic Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Galicia,” Bar Ilan Annual 24–25, ed. Gershon Bacon and Moshe Rosman (Ramat Gan, 1989), 25–40. Shaul Stampfer discusses the legalistic (halakhic) facet of Hasidic slaughtering, in “The Dispute over Polished Knives and Hasidic Sheh≥ita,” in Mehkarei H˘asidut, ed. I. Etkes, D. Assaf, and Y. Dan ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999), 197–210 (Hebrew). 49. AGAD, KWK 3224. The following discussion is based on this file, which is unpaginated. Wayne State University Press © 2011 128 Glenn Dynner 50. His mastery of rabbinic parlance is made evident in a lengthy, fascinating explanation of his strenuous efforts to publish Avodat Yisrael in the introduction to the ﬁrst printing (1842). Several of the approbations to the book mention Unger’s personal ﬁnancial investment. 51. KWK 3224, documents dated 1863–64. 52. In contrast, B. Z. Dinur attempted to argue that Hasidim comprised a “secondary elite.” See Dinur, “The Origins of Hasidism,” 86–208. 53. Compare Marcin Wodzinski, “State Policy and Hasidic Expansion: The Case of Włocławek,” trans. Sean Martin, Jewish Studies 5 (2005–07), esp. 174. 54. AGAD, CWW 1457, p. 575. In Przedborz, the Hasidim were “very numerous here and have a famous Rabbi [Immanuel Weltfreid (1802–1865)].” See AGAD, CWW 1457, p. 507. 55. Ibid., 24. 56. I have stressed the even greater signiﬁcance of large temporary holiday inﬂuxes elsewhere. See “How Many Hasidim Were There Really in Congress Poland? A Response to Marcin Wodzinski,” in Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry 20 (2005): 91–104. On speciﬁc cases, including Warka, Kozienice, Z{elechów, Opatów, and Lelów, see Dynner, Men of Silk, chaps. 1 and 3. 57. On this conception of Kotzk, see Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” in Jewish Spirituality, vol. 2, ed. Green (New York: Crossroad, 1986–87). 58. Klemens Junosza, Nasi Z{ydzi, 77. 59. KRSW 188, fol. 96–97. The towns of Maków and Wschowa do not seem to have been able to reinstate their Jewish quarters after 1821. The following towns planned and mapped Jewish quarters during this period but did not enforce them: Augustów, Biała Podlaska, Bolimów, Chorzele, Ciechanów, Czyźew, Janowo, Kielce, Krasnystaw, Kuczbork, Lublin, Łosice, Maków Mazowiecki, Płońsk, We$g rów, Wyszków, Wyszogród. See Maria ŁodynskaKosinska, ed., Katalog rysunków architektonicznych z Akt Komisji Rza$dowej Spraw Wewne$trznych w Archiwum Głównym Akt Dawnych w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1974). 60. KRSW 188, fol. 223–26. See also fol. 98; and KRSW 6632, p. 68. These statistics, signed “Zarza$ dzaja$ cy Wydziałem Administracyjnym Radca Stanu Biernacki,” conﬁrm the low end of Bergman’s estimate that Jewish quarters existed in between 12–15 percent of towns in the kingdom. “The Rewir or Jewish District and the Eyruv,” Studia Judaica 5 (2002): 85–97. 61. Stefanija Ulanowska was doing ﬁeld research in the nearby village of Łuków, published in a chapter entitled “Niektóre materjalny etnograﬁczne w wsi Łukówcu (Mazowieckim),” in Zbiór wiadomości do antropologii krajowej, Polska akademia umieje$tności komissyi antropologicznej, vol. 8 (Kraków, 1884), 247–50. Originally printed in the nationalistically oriented newspaper Czas. 62. On these slips of paper, known in Yiddish as kvitlekh, see David Assaf, The Regal Way (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 316–18, and the discussion below. On pilgrimages to the graves of tzaddikim, see Assaf, Regal Way, 321–24. 63. Oscar Kolberg, Mazowsze III: Obraz Etnograﬁczne (Kraków, 1887), 360–61. 64. Wasiutynski, Ludność Z{ydowska w Polsce, 65. 65. Katalog rysunków, 240. On the impact of Hasidic courts on local economies, see Dubnow, Hasidut, 361–62; Assaf, The Regal Way, 374, no. 65; and Bergman, “Gora Kalvariya,” in Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh: Mehkarim be-H˘asidut Polin ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk, 111–18. 66. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 3:103. The tzaddik H˘ayyim David Bernhard tended to a sick gentile woman in his Piotroków court, albeit with his eyes closed. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:33. Wayne State University Press © 2011 Hasidism and Habitat 129 67. Ibid., 3:103–4. On this phenomenon in the modern period, see Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995). 68. Note, for instance, a tale in which R. Abraham blesses a colonel, who goes on to become a general; Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:104, and “Siftei Kodesh,” 31. The Seer of Lublin allegedly healed a noblewoman’s son after extracting a promise that she would not raise payments on her Jewish lessees. There are several tales about Prince Czartoryski seeking the Maggid of Kozienice’s counsel in state matters, as well. On the actual event upon which these tales were based—a visit to the Maggid’s court by Czartoryski—see Dynner, Men of Silk, 73–74. In that case, it is signiﬁcant that even the magnate had to meet the tzaddik on his own turf. 69. This tradition was among the written accounts sent to Kadish by Tzvi Yeh≥ezkel Mikhalzohn, who received them from the redactor S. of Kłodawa, a Ciechanów Hasid “who heard them ﬁrsthand or received them [in writing] from trustworthy Hasidim and recorded them on the pages of a book so that they would not be forgotten.” 70. On the “greeting ceremony” at the elaborate Ruzhin court, see Assaf, Regal Way, 319–20. 71. On certain occasions, the tzaddik Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk identiﬁed peasants as demons in disguise. Even a Cossack on horseback who rescued him from drowning in the river was suspected of not being human. See Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:60, 63 and 4:15.Yet gentiles were sometimes admired for their magical powers or soldierly devotion to their king. On the image of gentiles in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, see Rosman, “A Minority View the Majority: Jewish Attitudes Towards the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and Interaction with Poles,” in From Shtetl to Socialism, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman, 1993), 45; Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 57–58. 72. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:62. 73. Ibid., 3:77. Similarly, the wife of the tzaddik Solomon of Radomsko managed a store. See Yitzh≥ak Mordekhai Hakohen Rabinowitz, Atarat Shlomo (Piotroków Trybunalski, 1926), 40:27. 74. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 5:100. 75. Ibid., 4:87–88. 76. Shlomo Zalman Lifschitz, and Isaac of Warka, Likutei Shoshanim (Lublin, 1883), H˘ayyim Yeshayahu Hakohen, ed., Part 4, p. 26. 77. Kolberg, Mazowsze III, 358–59. 78. E. T. Massalski, Pan Podstolic albo czem jesteśmy czym być moz[emy. Romans administracijny (St. Petersburg, 1833), 100. 79. YIVO Archives, “Guttmacher Collection,” RG 27, Uniejów. We cannot know for sure to what extent petitioners considered themselves “Hasidic,” or to what extent Guttmacher considered himself a rebbe; technically, Guttmacher himself was not Hasidic. However, the immense size of the collection suggests a veritable institution of heavenly and earthly interventions on the part of the supposedly reluctant tzaddik for years. It was only during the last year of his life that Guttmacher begged Jews to stop sending him petitions. See his “Request” in Ha-Magid 12 (1874), supplement. 80. “Guttmacher Collection,” RG 27, Uniejów. 81. Ibid., Babinice. 82. Ibid., Ozorków and Osiaków. 83. Ibid., Bielany. 84. Siah sarfei kodesh, 1:130. Wayne State University Press © 2011 130 Glenn Dynner 85. Ibid., 2:114; “Siftei Kodesh,” 36. 86. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:112. 87. Ibid., 3:114. 88. See ibid., 2:13. 89. Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 343. Heilman repeats the anecdote with an expression of shock and adds elements (e.g., the immodest dress of female customers) in the documentary ﬁlm A Life Apart (1997), produced and directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky. 90. Ibid. 91. See Levi Isaac of Berdyczów, Kedushat Levi ha-Shalem ( Jerusalem, 1993), 204, 232, and the crucial continuation, 398–400. However, compare Rosman, “A Minority Views the Majority.” See also Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica, Mei ha-Shiloah≥ (1860; reprint, New York, 1984), Parashat Ki Tavo and “Sefer Tehillim,” on Ps. 92; and Tzvi Elimelekh of Dinów, B’nei Yissakhar (Israel, 1909), Tishrei, sermon 1, “Mahut ha-H˘odesh”; R. Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zabaraz[, in Miles Krassen, Uniter of Heaven and Earth: Rabbi Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zabarazh and the Rise of Hasidism in Eastern Galicia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 180. On the zoharic roots of these teachings, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: Schocken, 1993), 24. 92. Moses H˘ayyim Ephraim of Sudzyłków, Degel Mah≥ane Ephraim, Parashat Lekh Lekha ( Jerusalem, 1995), 17. Emphasis added. 93. Keter Shem Tov, no. 8 (Brooklyn, 1972), 3. 94. Nah≥man of Bratzlav, Sippurei Ma‘asiyot, Nathan Shternharz’s introduction (reprint, Jerusalem, 1991), 4. On this and other forms of appropriation, see Dynner, Men of Silk, chaps. 4, and 5. 95. Degel Mah≥ane Ephraim, Parashat Ve-Yera, 17–18. 96. Gottlober, Zikhronot u-Masa’ot, 1:107; Ephraim Deinard, Zikhronot Bat Ami (New Orleans, 1920), 14. 97. David of Maków, Shever posh’im: zot torat ha-kena’ot, in Wilensky, H˘asidim u-Mitnaggdim ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 2:107. Wayne State University Press © 2011

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