The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism was one of the most
important forces in shaping the world of Polish Jewry for almost
two centuries, but our understanding of it has long been dominated
by theories based on stereotypes rather than detailed analysis of
the available sources. In this award-winning study, Marcin
Wodzinski challenges the long-established theories about the
conflict by contextualizing it, principally in the Kingdom of
Poland but also with regard to other parts of eastern Europe.
Covering the period from the earliest anti-hasidic polemics in the
late eighteenth century through to the post-Haskalah movements of
the twentieth century, it follows the development of this important
conflict in its central arena. Using source materials (including
many hitherto unknown documents) in Polish and five other
languages, Wodzinski has succeeded in reconstructing the way the
conflict expressed itself. Identifying the motives, the methods,
and the consequences of the conflict as it was played out in five
Polish towns (Lodz, Opoczno, Piotrkow, Warsaw, and Warta), he shows
that it was primarily informed by non-ideological clashes at the
level of local communities rather than by high-level ideological
debates. Much attention is also devoted to the general
characteristics of hasidism and the Haskalah, as well as to the
post-Haskalah movements. Here too Wodzinski challenges the
ideologically charged assumptions of a generation of historians who
refused to see the advocates of Jewish modernity in
nineteenth-century Poland as an integral part of the Haskalah
movement. Extensive consideration is given to the professional,
social, institutional, and ideological characteristics of the
Polish Haskalah as well as to its geographic extent, and to the
changes the movement underwent in the course of the nineteenth
century. Similar attention is given to the influence of the
specific characteristics of Polish hasidism on the shape of the
conflict, especially as regard the size of the movement and the
evolution of hasidic communal involvement. In consequence the book
presents a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth,
contextualizing its subject matter within the broader domains of
the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, hasidism and
rabbinic culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, not to mention
the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself across Europe. An extensive
appendix presents translations of nineteen important and hitherto
unknown sources of relevance to a nuanced understanding of many
aspects of nineteenth-century Jewish history in Poland and eastern
Europe more generally.
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