HASIDISM'S BIRTHPLACE

IN 1740, WHEN THE POLISH TAX COLLECTOR surveyed the houses in the town of Mezhbizh, located in the Ukrainian province of Podolia, he found that house 93 had a new resident. The dwelling, owned by the Jewish community council — or kahal — usually housed one of its employees who lived there rent and tax free as part of his compensation "package." The tax collector did not know the new occupant's name, but he did know his occupation: kabalista — that is, a Kabbalist. In subsequent years, the tax man referred to him as Balsem, Balsam, Balszam Doktor — all of which are Polish-Ukrainian variations on the Hebrew Ba'al Shem, a "master of the divine name," who put his esoteric knowledge to work as a healer or, better, shaman. This Ba'al Shem was hired by the Mezhbizh kahal to use mystical and magical rituals to provide his community as a whole and the individuals within it with supernatural security in the quest for health, livelihood, reproduction, and protection from persecution by enemies and demons. Although there were medical doctors who practiced based on classical sources and the more recent, empirically based work of Paracelsus (1493–1541), the meager efficacy of early modern medicine left room for the services of such shamans among Jews and Christians alike.

While ba'alei shem (the plural of ba'al shem) were active throughout Jewish Eastern Europe, the Ba'al Shem in Mezhbizh's house 93 was no ordinary shaman: he was the Ba'al Shem, Israel ben Eli'ezer Ba'al Shem Tov (the Besht), whom history and legend have crowned as the founder of Hasidism. This first mention of the Besht in Mezhbizh suggests not a wandering folk healer at the periphery of his community, as legend would have it, but, quite to the contrary, someone with an established position within his community and a well-defined role in his world. Morever, this status as communal healer conflicts with the image of the Besht as founder of the Hasidic movement, as a tale in Shivhei ha-Besht (the hagiographical stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov first published in 1814) demonstrates:

A story: When the Besht came to the holy community of Mezhbizh, he was not regarded as an important man by the Hasidim — that is to say, by R. Zev Kutses and R. David Purkes, because he was called the Besht, the master of a good name. This name is not fitting for a pious man (tsaddik).

What was wrong with a Ba'al Shem serving as a tsaddik, a leader of Hasidim? Were there Hasidim in Mezhbizh before the founder of Hasidism had arrived there? Did these Hasidim not approve of the founder of their movement? How did Israel Ba'al Shem Tov go from popular healer to progenitor of a social-religious movement that was to have an outsized impact on modern Jewish history?

These questions lie at the heart of this chapter of our history of Hasidism. In order to provide answers, we first need to understand the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious world in which the Besht operated. Was this world one of political and economic crisis, as Simon Dubnow first argued, or rather, as we shall claim, an increasingly stable and prosperous one? Were the Jews persecuted and impoverished, or, rather, relatively secure? And was the religious world surrounding the Besht spiritually stunted, as earlier histories have suggested, or already rich in mystical and magical experimentation?

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

We begin some two centuries before the Besht was inscribed on the Mezhbizh tax roles, since it was then that the political confederation arose in which Hasidism was to emerge. In 1569, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania united into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów — literally, the Commonwealth of Two Nations [Poland and Lithuania]). In common parlance, this is often referred to simply as "Poland." However, as will become apparent in the course of this book, the political geography denoted by the term "Poland" often changed from one period of Hasidism to another. The country formed by this commonwealth stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to just shy of the Black Sea in the south and from the Silesian border in the west to beyond the Dnieper River in the east. This was the largest country in Europe west of Moscow. By the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to repeated partitioning and annexation at the hands of its neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Commonwealth ceased to exist. For most of the eighteenth century, however, and in Hasidism's initial phase until the partition process began in 1772, Poland consisted of today's Poland, Belarus (White Russia) and Ukraine (up to a line running through Smolensk and Kiev, which both belonged to Russia), Lithuania, and western and southern Latvia (see map 1.1). Of particular interest for the...