Philip Rubenstein
Hasidism, Part 2: Dynasty, Calamity, and Recovery

Philip Rubenstein | Hasidism, Part 2 Dynasty, Calamity, and Recovery | 05.24.22

- Actually, you know what? While people are still arriving, let me just say, just from the first question from last week. If you’re listening today, Judith Heyman, Judith asked about her family because her father was an Amdurer, or Amdura, and she asked about the Amdura Hasidim. And just… So you know that we, at Lockdown University, like to go above and beyond. This is just to let you know that I’ve been in touch with a member of the Amdurer, or Amdura, clan in Israel, and I was in touch with someone whose son has done an entire family history and family tree. So if you’re interested, I can put you in contact. But I mean, the Amduras, they’re Hasidic royalty. Rebbe Chaim Chaykl was the founder, and he founded it in the 1770s. And he was one of the leading disciples of the Maggid of Mezeritch. And my understanding is that these days, there still are some independent Amdurers living in Indura, where they’re from, but most of them seem to have been subsumed into other Hasidic groups, particularly to Chabad. So anyway, Judith, if you are interested in following this up, please, if you wouldn’t mind just letting me know, just through Judi. So it’s four minutes past the half past, so I think we should get going. Okay.

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So for those of you who were here last week, this is part two of the history of Hasidism. I feel, in putting this one together, I’ve been a little bit over-ambitious in terms of covering the time period. It probably merits at least another session, but I’m going to try and cover everything in the next hour, and then we might revisit bits and pieces of Hasidism in later session. So part two is “Dynasty, Calamity, Recovery.” And we’ll start with a story, which may or may not be true, in the spirit of Hasidic history, And it takes place in a dinner party in the 1930s. A biologist is seated next to a prominent aeronautical engineer, and they get chatting. Now, the biologist asks, “I’ve always wondered, how is it that bumblebees can fly?” And so the engineer’s interest is piqued. He gets out his pen and he starts scribbling calculations on his napkin. And he works out the bee’s probable weight and its wingspan, and then he calculates the lift that the wing would need to generate in order to get the bee off the ground. And he concludes, based on all of his calculations, that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly. The biologist is very impressed with this, but says, “There’s just one small problem, which is that no one seems to have told the bumblebee that it can’t fly.”

The fact that Hasidism has continued to exist after the last 300 years is a complete mystery to many, in much as the same way that the flight of the bumblebee is also a phenomenon that would appear to defy intuitive logic. So many people over that period, at different times, have predicted its imminent demise. And we’re not just talking about the critics. So for example, Simon Dubnow, who many see as really the first proper modern Jewish historian, when he wrote his “History of the Jews” in 1931, he’d just heard that the Soviets had destroyed the tombs of the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. And he, himself, Dubnow himself, he was in exile from Russia at the time, and he was despairing. And he wrote that it seemed to him that Hasidim… That Hasidism had finally run its course. More recently, writing in 2000, Professor Samuel Heilman, who’s a professor of sociology in New York and an eminent authority on contemporary Orthodox Judaism, this is what he wrote at the time about Hasidic Jews. “What strikes so many of us in the midst of the modern city when we encounter sidelocked and bearded Jews dressed in black and white, and apparently framed in tradition, relics of another time, is how can they still be here? What does that presence tell us about where we are going? If ultra-Orthodox as a whole seems to belong to a bygone age, Hasidism seems like its most bizarre and exotic manifestation. Existing out of place and trapped in a peculiar time warp.”

And these observations, as I say, from sympathetic sources, they echo the depiction of Hasidism from the 19th century Maskilim; Those supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment who saw Hasidism as frozen in time and obstructing the natural course of Jewish history. And they were offended by Hasidism because they felt that Jewish history was finally shedding off the last vestiges of its dark ages and coming into the light of the modern world. Now, last week… Oops, let me just get… Let me just get the slides up. Whoop. Here we go. Okay, last week, if you recall, we looked at the birth, rise, and opposition over the first 100 years in the history of Hasidism. And we started with the Baal Shem Tov, the “Besht,” who was acknowledged as the originator of the Hasidic idea, and whose powers were probably greatest extended in and around the 1740s. And then, how the baton was passed to the Maggid of Mezeritch, who was his successor, perhaps anointed, perhaps not anointed, but certainly is seen as his successor. And he’s the one who is the builder of the organisation, and who tells his disciples to go out to the towns and cities of Poland-Lithuania, as it then is. And finally, they encounter, a little later in the 1760s and 1770s, their first real opposition, in the shape of the Mitnagdim, the Lithuanian rabbinical establishment, which is led by the Vilna Ga'on, and is the first attempt of many to destroy them over the years. And now, along come the Maskilim, and whereas the Mitnagdim had been critical of the Hasidim for what they saw was their outrageous novelty, the way that they reinterpreted Judaism, their new ideas, the Maskilim criticise the Hasidim for exactly the opposite reasons.

As far as they’re concerned, they’re the very bastions of regression and conservatism. These Maskilim, of course, who are so impatient for a break with tradition, and they see Hasidism as standing in the way of modernity. One of the most vociferous of all of them is this individual, Joseph Perl, who is born in Galicia, and who begins his life, as a youth, as a follower of Hasidism. But he later turns against it and he joins the Haskalah camp. And he writes polemic after polemic about the Hasidim. And he even writes a satirical novel in which he satirises Hasidic singing, and dancing, and other practises. He writes the novel in Hebrew, which is the language that the Maskilim are trying to promote. But of course, irony of ironies, it doesn’t capture their vernacular well enough, and so he’s forced to rewrite it in Yiddish so that it can be disseminated to the audiences who he wants to be influenced by it. In 1838, he writes to the Czarist authorities because the… It’s now Czarist Russia that is now, since the Napoleonic wars and since the division of spoils, is now in charge of most of the areas where the Hasidim are. He writes to the authorities suggesting that Hasidic schools be closed because, he says, “These are places of refuge for vagabonds, thieves, "a nest of demoralisation, "and of nefarious and scandalous deeds.” He attacks a number of the Hasidic Rebbes by name to the authorities. And for this, he earns the sobriquet from the Hasidim, of “Joseph the Malshin,” Joseph The Informer. Perl dies in 1839, a year later, on Simchat Torah, the rejoicing of the law festival. And a group of Galician Hasidim take the opportunity to celebrate the festival by dancing on Perl’s fresh grave immediately after he’s buried.

So the Hasidim, as I say, are attacked on two principal flanks. The Mitnagdim, the Orthodox establishment, and the Maskilim, the supporters of the Enlightenment. But instead of being diminished by these attacks, they seem only to derive strength and nourishment and encouragement from them. Hasidism, over the course of the 19th century, grows like wildfire. And not for nothing is the 19th century known as the first golden age of Hasidism, given that many people would regard its post-war renaissance as the second golden age. By the middle of the 19th century, after only four generations, this movement has captured half of Eastern European Jewry. Half, it’s absolutely incredible. Not so, of course, in Western Europe, where Jews were far more drawn to emancipation because the possibility of integration into mainstream society was on offer. But certainly in places like Galicia, Ukraine, Belarussia, Hungary, Romania, and much of Poland, this is where Hasidism takes off. I’ve circled a few of the communities that we’re going to be talking about over the course of the next hour, but you can see it goes as far north as Lyady and Lubavitch, which of course is the home base of Chabad. As east as Breslov and Uman.

Breslov is where Nachman of Breslov reigned and Uman is where he’s buried. And then, down to Satu Mare, which is the Romanian name for the Hungarian town of Szatmar. And to the east, Belz, Ger. And I’ve put Indura in for Judith because that was the home base of the Amdur Hasidim. These new Hasidic communities are infused with young men who are filled with pioneering fervour, and they’re happy to travel to their Rebbe in order to stay with him on Shabbat and over the festivals. And so this brings us really to the institutions that are starting to develop in the 19th century, and even in the late 18th century in Hasidut, because of course what starts as a rebellion against the mainstream slowly settles down and begins to establish itself, and has its own social structures, its own institutions, and its own rituals. Principal among these is the Rebbe’s court, the “hoyf” in Yiddish, or “hoff” in German. It’s centred around the Rebbe’s house, as is all Hasidic life centred around the Rebbe’s house, and his beit midrash, ha-midrash, the study hall or the prayer hall. And each court, each of the Rebbe’s “hoyfs,” has its own artisans, its own religious functionaries, and it evolves its own customs, rituals, and music. The place where the Rebbe lives defines both the name and the location of the court. So for example, the Belzer Rebbe originally comes from Belz, the Gerrer Rebbe comes from Gora, and so on and so on. And then, there’s the Shtiebel, and this is the prayer gathering, originally in a private home, which also serves as a recruiting ground in towns for Hasidism.

And unlike mainstream synagogues, the Shtiebel allows its members far greater freedom in terms of worshipping how they please and when they please. Various rites and rituals start to emerge around the Rebbe, and probably most well known among all of these is the Tisch. This is… This image obviously is a modern day Tisch, but the structure of the Tisch hasn’t changed very much in the last 150 years or so. So on Shabbat, and festivals, and sometimes special ceremonies, the Rebbe will hold a Tisch. Tisch is Yiddish and German for “table” of course, and it’s a large feast for all the Hasidim. Everyone sings, dances, eats, and the Rebbe will usually deliver a sermon afterwards. There may be Chozer, a repeater, who will be selected for his good memory, who’ll write down the text when the Sabbath is finished. And often, the remnants of the Rebbe’s meal, which he’s touched, are now of course suffused with holiness. They’re handed out and the Hasidim will often fight to touch them, so that they can… They too can be touched by the Rebbe’s holiness. If all of this sounds to you a little bit grand and regal, and it feels that the Rebbe is being treated almost like a king, well, you may well be right. You may well be more right than you think you are. In many cases, these courts become extremely lavish. The first truly lavish court is that of Boruch of Medzhybizh, who’s the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. And he claims his legitimacy as the grandson. And he holds a grand court in Medzhybizh. And he even employs a jester, Hershel of Ostropol.

Now, if anyone’s interested, I have to say you could do a whole lecture on Hershel. Hershel is… He’s a jester in the kind of the great tradition. So he brings humour and jokes, but he’s also a truth-teller. And he develops a reputation across the whole of… Of parts of the Ukraine as something of a teller of truth to power because he likes, with his humour, to skewer the rich. So he becomes something of the kind of an ethnic folk hero. But for a while, he’s jester in the courts of Boruch. Probably the most extreme of all of the kingly pretensions is Rabbi Yisrael Friedman, who’s the Ruzhiner Rebbe. And he begins his reign in 1815. He’s young, he’s charismatic, he’s popular, and he attracts thousands of followers. And he ostentatiously displays his wealth, pretty much like a Polish magnate. So he lives in a palatial home, he has splendid furnishings, he rides in a silver-handled carriage drawn by four white horses, and he wears a golden yarmulke. He wields significant influence in Western Ukraine, and he does this because he has 10 children, and he marries off his six sons and his four daughters both into other Hasidic courts and into wealthy banking families.

So of course, he starts to make enemies because he’s now wielding a good deal of influence. And his enemies are particularly in the camps of the Maskilim, and also the Czarist government. He’s framed for the murder of two informers. He’s imprisoned for two years, and then he escapes to the Carpathian region of Austria-Hungary. And he finds himself in Sadigura. And you can see this is a contemporary postcard, “ Sadagora,” which is “Greetings from Sadigura.” So this is his palace, and it was made into a… The image was made into a postcard because, of course, it’s the local… It’s the most famous local landmark. So the key change that Hasidism is going through in this period with these Rebbes and their courts is that they start to adopt a dynastic tradition, and they become dynasties. After the Maggid dies, a group of his disciples, and we’re now talking about the third generation, they found their own autonomous courts. This is what the Maggid tells them to do. So they go to places like Vitebsk, and Lyady, and Karlin-Stolin, and the Maggid has given them licence to develop their own organisations, and their own organisational styles, and their own rituals and doctrines. And this flexibility is going to prove to be a huge strength to the movement because there is no one single leader of the Hasidim. Each court has its own Rebbe, its own Tzadik. I’ve put this up…

This is an old-fashioned Hollywood joke, but I’ve put this up because when you have a dynasty, you then have a problem of succession. And succession has dogged many of the Hasidic courts over the years, particularly in the early years. The first to claim legitimacy, by right of a bloodline, is the Besht’s grandson, who I just mentioned, Boruch of Medzhybizh. He’s appointed in 1782, and he kind of sets the tone for how the succession is going to be handed on. And this is solidified only a few years later when, on the death of Menachem Twersky of Chernobyl, five years after his death, his son, Mordechai, is chosen as successor. So we are now starting to see, even in the late 18th century, there’s a belief emerging that the Tzadik, the Rebbe, can bequeath his religious aura, his charisma, to his own offspring. And the reason why this is taken up is, quite frankly, this is a practical solution to what would otherwise be an extremely knotty problem. But it’s not without difficulty. I’ve mentioned before, in a previous session, that I happen to work in the area of family businesses. And there’s a metaphor that’s often used by family business people when talking about succession, and the metaphor is flying a plane.

The lowest risk of accident when you are flying a plane is when the plane is 30,000 feet and it’s cruising in the air. It’s at takeoff and landing that the craft is far more vulnerable to an accident. Succession periods, in other words, are like landing and takeoff periods. They represent a radically greater threat of dissent, and divisiveness, and danger to an organisation than it experiences it any other times. The Lubavitch Hasidim, the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, for example, experienced a bitter struggle after the death of their founder, Shneur Zalman, in 1812. The rivals were his son, Dovber, and Aharon HaLevi Horowitz, who was a disciple. And the struggle was both doctrinal, and, as these things are, it was also personal. It was bitter and it split the movement right down the middle. It only ended after a year with victory for Dovber, who then, as the genetic heir, became the next Rebbe. So from that time until today, really, I’d say from around about the 1820s until today, the default has been that succession in most dynasties goes to either the son or the son-in-law. So it’s either the bloodline or it’s a male who marries into the family. But there is an important exception, and that exception is the Breslover Hasidim; The successors to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. The Breslovers, they’re known for their intense joy, their joyous relationship with God. And every year, they famously visit the grave of Nachman of Breslov in Uman, which as you saw earlier, is only 30, 40 miles away from Breslov itself. And they go here every Jewish New Year, every Rosh Hashanah. And here’s an image of the Breslovers by the cemetery.

The movement has had no central living leader since Nachman, so for the last 200 years, and this is because during his lifetime… He himself had a lineal claim because he was a great grandson of the Besht. But he rejected the idea, during his lifetime, of hereditary Hasidic dynasty. He taught that every Hasid must, “Search for the Tzadik within himself.” And therefore, he named no successor. He died in 1810. And true to his wishes, the Breslovers have never appointed another Rebbe again. This caused ire, of course, with other Hasidim, and it provoked them to call the Breslovers, and they still do, in Yiddish, “The Hasidim,” The dead Hasidim. The Breslovers were vilified by virtually every other Hasidic group for the next 100 years, although this is a period when they still manage to build an incredibly impressive following of thousands over the course of that time. So the 19th century, as I mentioned earlier, this is really a golden age for Hasidism. And this is when Hasidism really takes off and really starts to capture the heart of Eastern European Jewry. And in the first half of the century, it’s particularly buoyant. The movement starts to develop thinkers and philosophers who write a number of works. So many of the classic Hasidic texts are written in this period, especially on subjects like ethics and Kabbalah. And also, we start to see many of the folk tales and legends that Hasidism is famous for.

They start to be written in and around this period. Lubavitch Hasidim are particularly proud of the fact that it was their Rebbe, who was probably the first Rebbe, who ever committed pen to paper. Most of the early Rebbes had their words written down by their disciples. But the first Lubavitch Rebbe, Shneur Zalman, wrote his own text, which is called “The Tanya,” which, if you’ve met Lubavitchers, if you’ve studied with Lubavitchers, you know they’re very enthusiastic about and they still teach it today. And this was published as early as 1796. So this period spawns a variety of ideas, and of course many of them are conflicting ideas. And probably the biggest division is between the so-called theoretical… The theoretical thinkers and the practical thinkers. So the theoretical thinkers like ideas, they like to talk about mysticism, and Kabbalism, and what it means. And their practical… The practical writers scorn them, and they’re much more interested in a non-intellectual form of Hasidism. And they’re normally the ones who are spawning the folk tales. And inevitably… And we see this today, of course, but inevitably, rivalries start to develop.

Most of the rivalries we see today, this is when they really start to begin, between different Hasidic groups, particularly when they’re competing with each other for recruits. There’s many personal power struggles, which are often dressed up as ideological arguments. There are bitter feuds between groups. There’s an attempt to excommunicate the Peshischa Hasidim in the 1820s. And as I mentioned earlier, the Bresloves… The Breslov Hasidim are persecuted throughout the century. So I think it’s time now that we talked about a subject I’ve been dodging so far, but which we have to turn to inevitably, and that’s Hasidic dress. Why is it that Hasidim dress as they do? There are various symbolic reasons which are put forward within Hasidic communities for the motivations, the reasons, why they dress as they do. For example, the gartel. And you can see a gartel here. The gartel is the belt which is used either over or under the long coat. The reason for the gartel, apparently, is a reason of modesty. It’s meant to divide the Hasid’s upper parts of his body, where the brain is, from the lower parts of the body. And so, this is done for modesty reasons. Now, there are a number of these reasons that were put forward and I wouldn’t wish to denigrate them, but to an extent, they’re all rationalisations after the fact. And what we have to look at really is the historical and cultural origins of this dress. Much of this dress is similar to the clothing that was common to Eastern European Jews, and which was effectively copied from the way that the Polish nobility used to dress circa late 18th century. Hasidim in the early 19th century are already adopting these costumes.

So these are the costumes of their fathers, and, in some cases, even their grandfathers, as a form of rejecting the influence of the Maskilim who’ve shed them, and who they derisively call… Who they derisively say, “Dress like the Deutsche,” the Germans. But what really seems to solidify the Hasidim in this mode of dress seems to be a fight against a Czarist… A particularly petty Czarist law in the mid 1840s, and it’s called “the dress decree.” And this is a decree, a law, which the Russian government tries to enforce on the Pale of Settlement from 1845 or so onwards, and it specifies the clothes that Jews within the Pale are permitted and prohibited from wearing. So prohibited are certain styles of fur hat, such as the shtreimel; silk caftans, the kapote; and garter sashes, the gartel; the yarmulke; and payot, the sidelocks that Hasidim wear. Women are prohibited from wearing turbans, headbands, and from shaving their heads after marriage. Permitted clothes include the German style, so a short jacket, long trousers, hat, and maybe a short beard, or Russian style, which consists of a long coat below the knee, trousers tucked into the boots, and a cap with a brim. Most non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews tend to adopt the Russian style because the Maskilim are adopting the German style, so they want to distinguish themselves from the Maskilim.

But also, if you go with the Russian style, you can get away with a longer beard, so that’s another positive for it as well. The Hasidim meanwhile wager a long battle against the decree, and the wearing of the shtreimel, and the kapote, and the gartel become a statement of resistance to modernity and to Czarist control. And so, it only comes to stand for tradition later, but it starts in the 1840s, as I say, as a symbol of resistance to others trying to control what they can wear. Now, for those of you who’ve walked around in Hasidic areas, be it in Europe, or the US, or Israel, you’ll have noticed, particularly on a Shabbat, on the Sabbath or on a festival, you’ll see that Hasidim seem to be… Seem to wear quite distinct clothing from each other, and each sect seems to have its own type of clothing. And this is a relatively modern phenomenon that started in the 1920s and has continued onwards. For the first time, Hasidim started to find themselves living not in small towns in Eastern Europe, but in large conurbations in central Europe or in the West, and they start living in close proximity to each other. And so, they start to adopt different forms of dress, kinks in their dress, if you like, that will mark them out from other Hasidic dynasties. So that’s really when these distinctions really, really start to happen, and they happen through the use of fashion. And of course, it’s ironic that so much of modernity and materialism was rejected, but actually it’s fashion that’s being used as a statement of distinctiveness by Hasidim.

Towards the end of the 19th century, we start to see a slow and steady decline in the influence of Hasidism. Young people start to be drawn by other trends, new trends. Secular education is available, labour movements are starting to get popular, socialism is starting to get popular, Zionism is attracting many young people. And not only that, but non-Hasidic Orthodoxy is also in the resurgent. So Hasidism is finding that it’s threatened on all sides. And Hasidism, once seen as radical, new, and exciting, is now seen by many as conservative. I mean, even ossified. The period of pogroms from the 1980s onwards also has a weakening effect on Hasidism because the mass immigration from the Russian Empire is starting to syphon off thousands of actual and potential adherents, many of whom are going to move and abandon religion when they leave the old country, bound for the new world and elsewhere. Hasidic leaders realise they need to respond and they need to respond, above all, to secularisation. It’s secularisation that they see as the greatest enemy of Hasidism. And they’re finding that once wealthy courts are in financial straits, their education system, incapable as it is of giving students a general education or vocational training, is seen as wanting. So how are they going to respond? Some of them respond by setting up political organisations.

And as early as 1878, the Belz Rebbe establishes a coalition of Galician Hasidim, which is called the Machzikei Hadas, translated roughly as “The Defenders of the Faith,” to oppose the Maskilim and promote the interests of Hasidic orthodoxy using modern political tools. So it’s a lobbying organisation, it publishes newspapers, and even participates in the Austro-Hungarian parliamentary elections. Another innovation, surprise surprise, is the founding of the first Hasidic Yeshivas. Until then, yeshivas were just something the Mitnagdim did. But the Hasidim have realised that if you have a yeshiva, you have young men who are captive and who are protected against the dangerous ideas of secularism. So we are now getting towards the end of the 19th century on our whistle stop tour of Hasidism, and Hasidism is now poised to enter The Great Upheaval, its most turbulent century, the 20th century. And rather than providing a linear history at this stage, what I thought I would do is share two parallel stories of two very different Hasidic courts, and to look at how each of them responds to the events and the terrible challenges of the 20th century. And these two dynasties are, to the northeast, Chabad-Lubavitch. I’m going to use the words “Chabad” and “Lubavitch” interchangeably for the purposes of this talk. And in the southwest, we have Satmar, or Satu Mare, as it was known when it fell into Romanian hands.

Let’s start with Chabad-Lubavitch. Chabad was founded, as I’ve said, by Shneur Zalman, who was one of the Maggid’s disciples. He originally moves to Lyady, and then he settles in the town of Lubavitch , which is not far. Chabad… And by the way, his name is Schneur Zalman, and every Rebbe since has been known by the name of “Schneerson,” and “Schneerson” just means “the son of Schneur.” So that’s why they’re all called Schneerson, in case you were wondering. Chabad, for its first 100 years, so throughout the whole of the 19th century after that bitter succession battle, is one of the most stable dynasties, and it’s only going to be the 20th century in which it changes. And it’s going to change in three fundamental ways, and I’m going to go through each one of them. The first way in which it changes is its adoption of Messianism. For those of you who were listening last week, Trudy gave a fantastic lecture on the history of Messianism in Jewish history, and she touched on Lubavitch in the lecture. And what’s interesting is the Messianic idea was never acutely prominent in any of Hasidic doctrine in the 18th and then the 19th century. It’s present in a way that it’s always been present in the Jewish tradition, but it was never something that was going to happen imminently. Hasidic teaching, the accent was always on this world, not on what’s going to happen in the next world.

The first Chabad leader who changes this, who adopts an active Messianic narrative, is the fifth Rebbe, Sholem DovBer Schneerson. He… I mean, you can see, he’s born in 1860, so his first 20 years are in that period of relative stability. But then he just experiences utter, utter chaos for most of the rest of his life. It starts with the pogroms and then mass migration, and it culminates in the horrors of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. And it seems to him that the world as he knew it, as a boy, is just collapsing all around him. He reads all of these events and he processes them as the birth pains of the “Mashiach,” of the Messiah. He’s feeding into this longstanding belief and tradition that the period immediately before the advent of the Messiah is going to be the worst imaginable, the most catastrophic, and only out of this will redemption come. So his language is deeply apocalyptic. By the way, what’s interesting is this is the same time, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence, that the idea and the popularisation of the rapture is starting to emerge. This is the Christian evangelical view of the end of times that’s going to sweep across much of the Bible belt of America. And it’s happening at the same time, and in large part in response to the same events, particularly World War I.

So the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe takes over in 1920 when his predecessor dies, and he builds on this apocalyptic vision. He experiences the interwar years and the turbulence of those years, and also the Shoah. And he often speaks about a great fire that’s going to engulf the world and purge it of all evil. The last Lubavitcher Rebbe, the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, he continues the Messianic tradition but he totally reinterprets it. And for him, the coming of the Messiah is a far more benign event. It’s not connected in any way to catastrophic collapse and suffering, but instead… It’s not about subduing evil, instead it’s going to transform evil into goodness. And of course, we all know, during his lifetime and beyond, many of his followers believed, and still believe, that he is the Messiah himself incarnate. So I mentioned that there were three transformations that Chabad undergoes in the 20th century, and the first one is Messianism. And the second one, and this is probably what most of us know Chabad for more than anything else, is its outreach policy. From the very beginning, Shneur Zalman, he’s a communicator. Probably more than most of the Hasidic Rebbes of his age, he had an educator’s approach. He was one of the few who gave sermons, which contained ideas, Kabbalistic ideas and other ideas. And as I say, he also committed his words to writing because he wanted to disseminate them to groups who went beyond just the mere coterie who turned up to listen to him speak.

But it’s really the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, who begins the tradition of outreach in a form that we know it today. And I’ve put both of these two images of him as a younger man, as an older man, just because I just really like them both. And particularly, the one on the right, of him laughing and smiling. I just thought it was just such a fabulous photograph. Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson becomes the Rebbe in 1920, and this is just after the revolution. One of his very first acts is to flee Russia. The Bolsheviks have just closed down Lubavitch activities and the main Lubavitch Yeshiva, and he’s convinced that there’s no future for Judaism, and certainly for Hasidic Judaism, in the Soviet Union. So he moves temporarily to Riga, and then in ‘33 he moves to Warsaw. And of course, this is the interwar years where there’s an independent Poland. And as far as he’s concerned, the future of Hasidic Jewry is going to be in Poland. There’s a huge Orthodox Jewish population in Poland, so this is where he’s going to build. He brings over with him a tiny band of Chabad Hasidim, and they join an equally small band who had been settled there since the end of the 19th century. So here he is, in this town, in this largely Orthodox Jewish town, which is densely populated by other Orthodox… By the Hasidic and non-Hasidic groups. And most of the Hasidic groups are much, much larger than Chabad, and the small group he’s managed to bring over with him.

So he finds himself in an unusual and quite uncomfortable situation for a Lubavitcher Rebbe because he’s come from a place where Chabad Lubavitch were hugely successful, and they were the dominant group. They were the dominant group and they had hardly any competition from any other Hasidic group. And suddenly, here they are in Warsaw, nobody knows them, everyone who encounters them thinks they speak funny. They’ve got a strange… That accent and a strange dialect. And they’re surrounded by lots of other Hasidim and Hasidic leaders who are kings in their own domain. So Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, hatches a plan. He embarks on a programme of outreach, the sole purpose of which is to steal Hasidim from other Hasidic courts. His idea is to convince people that Chabad has something special to offer them. So he trains his students with strategies for outreach activity. He says, “Go to the yeshivot of other Hasidic groups, befriend the students, teach them a little Tanya for no more than half an hour. Get to know them, and befriend them, and bring them over. He says, Listen, these are Polish Hasidim. They’re not like us. They don’t like long expositions and sermons, they don’t like esoteric ideas. They’re much simpler. So don’t try and have long, elaborate discussions of texts, the kind of thing that we do. Tell them stories, tell them folk tales.”

So he begins to write his own folk tales about the old Chabad leaders, what they did and what they said. And this is what they use to give to the Polish Hasidim as fodder in order to bring them in. These are highly targeted strategies. I mean, he’s something of an organisational genius, is the sixth Rebbe. He sends his top students not just to the Hasidic Yeshivas, but to the Litvak Yeshivas, the heart of the enemy, if you like, and he says, “Go there, spend three or four months, find the brighter students, the real illuim and the most talented, they’re the ones I want you to engage. Seduce them and bring them over to us.” So he invents outreach, and the kind of outreach that he invents is designed at the Orthodoxy because he has a tiny group in Warsaw and he needs to build up his base. So this is why outreach is invented in Chabad by the sixth Rebbe. It’s not aimed at secularists, it’s aimed at the Orthodox. Targeting the secular world is the radical step, which is taken by his successor, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, who extends outreach to cover completely alienated Jews who know absolutely nothing, who’ve got no Jewish background whatsoever.

This, of course, is the kind of outreach that Chabad is famous for today. This is why we see there’s a Chabad house everywhere from Bangkok to Timbuktu, anywhere where you’ll find an Israeli tourist or a visiting Jew who might want to visit on a Friday night. So we’ve had two transformations, Messianism and outreach. And the third relates to the role of women. You may have noticed, so far in these two talks, I haven’t mentioned women in Hasidism at all, even though of course they’re 50% of the constituency of the Hasidic community. The reason for their absence in our story is that in the 18th and 19th century, women are simply not seen as part of Hasidism. Until the 20th century, Hasidism is seen as a movement that is exclusively for men. Women could be born into a Hasidic family or they could marry into a Hasidic family, so they had an affiliation, but they weren’t included in any aspect of Hasidic life. So for example, when the Rebbe gave a sermon, the women were not invited and were not welcomed. One Hasidic leader in the 1820s was asked about the place of women in Hasidism, and he simply replied, “Women are not Hasidim.” If you think the Maskilim are any better in the way they characterise women, well, don’t be so sure. was writing a polemic in the early part of the 19th century, arguing that Hasidism is so irrational, so retrogressive, so primitive, that it’s only good enough for mad men and women. Any women in the pre-20th century Hasidic tradition were wiped out of Hasidic literary tradition completely.

So I’d like to just mention Hannah Rachel Verbermacher because she’s one of the few Hasidic women, and even she’s a semi-legendary figure. She’s one of the few that we know about. She was born in Lodomir in the Western Ukraine, and, by all accounts, she was a great scholar of Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah. And she, starts, as a young woman, to actually attract her own following as a kind of a proto-rebel, proto-Tzadik. Of course, she attracts the grave displeasure of local male Hasidic leaders and they force her to marry off. She does so reluctantly. Of course, it’s a disaster, and she quickly divorces. And she spends the rest of her life in Jerusalem. Also, a very interesting character who probably deserves her own hour in terms of a lecture. But it’s not going to be until the sixth Lubavitch Rebbe, as I just mentioned, where we are really going to start to see some kind of sea change in the attitude of Hasidut towards women. The sixth Lubavitch Rebbe, who’s based in Warsaw, as I mentioned, he visits America, visits the US, in the 1920s, and he is shocked by what he finds in America because what he finds is the younger generation are no longer eating kosher, no longer keeping Shabbat. He meets families of people he knew before they immigrated to the US, and while the elderly are still connected to the tradition, many in the younger generation have abandoned it.

And so, in his attempts to halt this erosion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe appeals to women, for the very first time ever in Hasidism, as a distinctive constituency. He appeals to them as “the wives and daughters of Hasidim,” that’s how he addresses them. He writes to them and he calls on them to found associations to preserve what he calls “the purity of the family.” In other words, things like the observance of the that have been abandoned in America. And he says, “It’s your responsibility "to mobilise other women "to raise funds and to build .” By the way, something similar has been going on in non-Hasidic Orthodoxy because a few years earlier, around the turn of the century, the Chofetz Chaim also issued a similar plea to women, and it was also on similar grounds. It was about defending the purity laws. There’s an even more radical innovation that he introduces in the inter-war years, where he starts to allow the dissemination of Chabad Kabbalistic teachings to women, which may sound radical, but this was unheard of at the time. Again, it’s the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, the seventh, Menachem Mendel, who really takes it to the next level. He inherits the title in 1950 and one of the very first things that he does when he becomes the Rebbe is he founds the Association of Chabad Women. And so, it’s really from then on that women start to have a much more prominent role in Chabad than they’ve ever had before. And to this day, Chabad women have the most prominent women… The most prominent role in any Hasidic movement, bar none. And to a far greater degree than they do anywhere else.

I’ve included this photo 'cause I just thought it was a fantastic photo, which just captured a conference in 2018. And here are all of these female shlichim who were standing in front of the iconic building of Lubavitch, which is their international headquarters, at 770 Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It’s a great photo. So those are the three transformations that Chabad goes through. Messianism, outreach, and the status and prominence that women are given. I now want to turn to a very different group of people, and that’s the Satmar Dynasty. Let’s look at how they respond to the upheavals of the 20th century. Satmar is a distinct grouping. It’s actually established much, much later than most of the other major Hasidic dynasties. The figure who seems the founder is this individual, Rabbi Yoel, or Joel, Teitelbaum, who’s been designated the first Satmar rabbi. And he, as a young man, he moved from the town of Sighet, Hungary, Romania, it’s that Carpathian region. Sighet is the… It’s near Vishnitz, it’s the town where Elie Wiesel was born. He moves to Satu Mare… By the way, I’ve got a… Let me just say at this point, some of the detractors of Hasidim will say, will tell you, that “Satu Mare” means “St. Mary,” and so these are “the St. Mary Hasidim.” This is a total , it’s not true, although it’s a good joke. But Satu Mare actually literally just means “great village,” and… At least I think that’s what it means in Hungarian anyway.

So the family moved to the town of Satu Mare when Joel, or Yoel, is a young man. And Joel’s father, who had been the rabbi of Sighet, he designates Joel’s older brother to take over and to be the rabbi of Satmar, but Joel refuses to accept the decision. And after overcoming strong resistance, both from his brother and from the local community, he ultimately succeeds his father to the leadership of the Satmar community in 1934. So as I say, this is quite late. And what distinguishes him as a leader is his sheer force of will. He has an uncompromising self-belief and a belief in his own ability to lead. He has an extreme zealotry of views. He picks arguments on ideological grounds with local Hasidic rabbis, teachers, and scholars. And of course, he’s extremely well known, and Satmar extremely well known, for its anti-Zionism, it’s bitter anti-Zionism, and this all comes from Joel Teitelbaum. It’s a terrible irony, being such an anti-Zionist, that when the Nazis invade Hungary, he’s only saved from the death camps by being given a place on the Kastner train by, of course, the Labour Zionist, Rudolph Kastner, who famously does a deal with Eichmann for a trainload of Hungarian Jews to get out and go to Switzerland. So… I’m sorry, I’m looking at the time, we’re a little past the out, but I did want to… I did want to conclude, and I can’t do so without having to cover the Shoah and what happens to Hasidim during the Shoah.

The Final Solution delivers a near mortal blow to Ultra-Orthodoxy, but in particular to Hasidic communities in Eastern Europe. Remember, I said earlier that in the mid 19th century, almost half of Eastern European Jewry had gone Hasidic. Well, it’s estimated that something like 90% of all Hasidic communities in Eastern Europe are wiped out during the Shoah by the Nazis and their collaborators. There’s a highly controversial issue around the response of the Rebbes to the Shoah. And the question is whether the leaders should have left or remained by the side of the Hasidim. A number of the Rebbes refused to leave, even when they have the opportunity to do so. The Rebbe of Karlin was visiting Palestine in 1939 in August, this is a month before World War II breaks out, but he insists on returning to his family and his flock in Poland. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of Piaseczno, he runs a secret synagogue when he’s forced into the Warsaw ghetto, and this becomes a centre for providing food to the starving. He’s murdered by the Nazis in Trawniki Labour Camp in 1943. And he is reported to have said, “A Rebbe who is not willing to descend into hell in order to rescue his followers is not a Rebbe.”

But many Hasidim believed it was worth any sacrifice to save their Rebbe. They mobilised whatever wealth they could get their hands on for bribes, and ransoms, and as well as Joel Teitelbaum of Satmar, the res of Belz, and Bobov, and Ger, and Munkacz, and of course Chabad, they all escaped. In many cases, leaving the Hasidim, and sometimes members of their own family, behind to their fate. The survival of the Rebbe and the Rebbe’s children was believed to be crucial for his Hasidism. After the war, the Satmar congregation in Williamsburg in Brooklyn served as a magnet for Hasidim who survived the Shoah, but whose own Rebbes have been killed by the Nazis. And you can see today, I mean, there’s almost 2 million Hasidim worldwide, this is probably under reporting. There are somewhere in the region of 120 dynasties. Most Hasidim live in Israel and the US. And Satmar is, by a long way, the largest of the dynasties. And the reason it’s so large is… Largely, it’s that sheer force of will of Joel Teitelbaum because he offers the thousands of Galician, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom have been members of smaller Hasidic sects that have been completely annihilated by the Nazis, he offers them a home and they become some of the most devout disciples of Satmar over the next generation.

During his 30 odd years leading Satmar in the US, Joel Teitelbaum’s single-minded determination to reestablish and rebuild Hungarian Hasidism, whatever you think of his views and his extremities, but his efforts to rebuild Hasidism have been nothing short of remarkable, in my view. Satmar today, as I said, is the world’s largest Hasidic group. And as well as being based in Williamsburg, it has branches in Montreal, Antwerp, London, Bueno Aires, and Jerusalem. This is Kiryas Joel, which is home to 35,000 Hasidim in upstate New York. Kiryas Joel is a self-standing, homogenous, Yiddish-speaking shtetl, with a legal municipality which is recognised by the state of New York. In other words, this is the Hasidic version of the American dream. So I started today with the metaphor of the bumblebee, and just as the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, if you look at the way that history usually goes, Hasidism should have been consigned to the bin of history long, long ago.

But over their short history, they were attacked by the Mitnagdim, they were pummelling by the Maskilim, they barely survived their own internal feuds, they were grievously threatened by secularisation at the end of the 19th century, and most improbably of all, after their followers were so massively slaughtered and their homes are obliterated by the Nazis, Hasidism has returned. You could not have imagined in 1946 that the bedraggled survivors in the displaced persons camp will be able to rebuild both their personal lives and their shattered common institutions over the succeeding decades. Reestablishing themselves in new and alien territory in Israel, in North America, in Western Europe, they’ve harnessed the power of their faith and of mutual support among those survivors to create new forms of religious and social life. So this 300 year old saga of Hasidim and Hasidut, I believe, is far from over. So Judi asked us to finish at quarter to because there’s going to be a really fascinating talk given in 45 minutes on Roe versus Wade. So we’ve got… I think we’ve got five minutes, if that’s okay.

• [Judi] That’s absolutely fine. You can go through them as best you can.

Q&A and Comments

• Okay, so we’ll… Well, let’s have a look and we’ll see what we’ve got. Joy Rubenstein says, “Philip, would you be a descendant of Ber Rubenstein of Klaipeda? We’re South African descents.” Thank you, Joy. I’d love to hear more. I’m not. I think there may be a little bit of Chabad on my father’s side, but I think that’s probably as much as I can claim. Rabbi… This is from Arthur Hirsch, “Rabbi Hari Amdura of Ra'anana is the most outstanding Torah scholar, lecturer, author that we Torah students have ever known.” Well, it was actually Rabbi Amdura who I was in contact with last week to ask him… And it’s his son who’s done all the work on the family tree. So thank you for that.

David Garfield said, “There was a song from my childhood to the effect that a bee can’t fly, so there you go.” More support for the apocryphal… For the apocryphal stories. Esther Vestelman, or Westelman says, “Though I’m a conservative, I come from a long line of Hasidim going back to the Baal Shem Tov. ” , my father, “that was a Hasidic rabbi ordained by Rabbi Frank.” So I mean, as suspected, there are going to be a lot of people in the Lockdown University community who were going to be from Hasidic families. (indistinct) says,

Q: “What was the medal on Joseph Perl’s coat?” A: Gosh, that was well observed. It was a medal he was given for his services to education by the Austria-Hungarian state.

Q: “Were you born into one Hasidic group and then couldn’t move to another?” A: No, I don’t think that was the case at all, there was a certain amount of fluidity. But there tended to be dominant groups in different areas. But certainly, there were some areas where there were some clashes. And people like the Ruzhiner Rebbe, when he left… When he left Ruzhina and he fled to his Sadigura, he took with him a flock of his own supporters, but he also managed to capture a number of new supporters over the border.

Q: Marilyn says, “I’m now 80. I don’t recall Hasidim being of any prominence until about the mid to the late 70s. Where did they all come from?” A: Yeah, it’s very interesting. In the 60s and 70s, there was a huge popularity for Hasidic tales, and for non-Hasidic, often secular writers, talking about Hasidism. And Hasidism was seen as charming, humanistic, and their philosophies seemed to attract a lot of interest. And I think what happened is that as Hasidic communities became more prominent in the 70s, 80s, 90s, the charm seemed to have receded for many. And as a result, the popularity of those works… The popularity of those works diminished. Where are we? I don’t…

John says, “I don’t think Machzikei Hadas has been seen as Hasidic, not during the late 20th century.” That’s absolutely right. Machzikei Hadas today is decidedly Litvak, it’s very un-Hasidic. But at the time, it was the name that was given to a particular political lobbying movement. So let’s just take… Let’s just take a couple more comments.

Monique and Danny say, “It was explained to me the idea of the last Lubavitch Rebbe being the Mashiach was a result of the inability of the movement to choose any successor. The way to keep the Chabad movement whole was Mashiach now. It seemed to have worked for the movement and its outreach.” Well, yes and no. But I mean, even during his lifetime, he was proclaimed… He was proclaimed Mashiach by many of his followers, and he seems not to have demurred. I mean, you see… There’s many instances where you see parades of Chabadniks are shouting, “ ”, “He’s here,” and the Lubavitch Rebbe is listening and he’s not disagreeing with them. But yes, you are absolutely right in that since his death, the idea that he’s the Mashiach is certainly being used, and has been used, as a substitute for there being a leader because, of course, immediately after he died, the movement did split, and it looked like it was going to factionalize. And it’s to the great credit of Chabad that it hasn’t done so. So I think we’re going to have to close. One final question,

Q: “How did the term "Chabad” come about and what does it mean?“ A: "Chabad” is an acronym. It stands “Chochmah, Binah, Daat,” which is “Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge.” Chabad is what they… Is what many of them called themselves. And Lubavitch only came about, to a large part, later as a name when they actually left Lubavitch for Warsaw, and then for Crown Heights.

So I’m sorry we haven’t been able to get to everyone. I do hope people come back in 45 minutes for… For Roe versus Wade, 'cause it does look extremely interesting. Thank you everyone very much. And as I say, we may well, in a few months, return to the subject because this has really very much been a whistle stop, and there’s such an incredibly rich history over the last 300 years of Hasidism. So thank you everyone.

• [Judi] Thank you Philip, and see everybody again soon. Thanks, bye-bye.

• Bye-bye.