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Most non-Jews, for whom one set of sidelocks is much like another, assume Hasidism to be synonymous with observant Judaism, or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ as it has become anachronistically known. But this is not and has never been the case. Hasidic cosmology owes almost everything to the Kabbalists of Safed – the redemption of the divine sparks of the creation from their entrapment in the base matter of the qelippot husks in particular – and this gives the Hasidim of Brooklyn something in common with Madonna Ciccone. But for the Ashkenazim of eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ...more
The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present
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