Kindle Notes & Highlights
IT WAS THE CENTURY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT and of the American and French Revolutions: the dawn of the modern world. But it was also the century of the Great Religious Awakening in North America, of Pietism in Germany, and of the split in the Russian Orthodox Church between Reformers and Old Believers.
Timeline
Just as secularism was incubated in the womb of religion, so religion since the eighteenth century is a product of its interaction with secularism.
From its beginnings, Hasidism was far more than an intellectual movement. It was also a set of bodily practices, including praying, storytelling, singing, dancing, and eating, all performed within the frame of the reciprocal relationship between rebbe and Hasid. The very physicality of Hasidism played an enormous role in transforming it from an elite to a popular movement.
It was a period in Russian Jewish letters when intellectuals began to intuit the disintegration of the traditional Jewish world and sought to preserve its memory by ethnographic and archival research.
While some also served as communal rabbis, they generally extended their geographical influence beyond specific towns. A new pattern of religious life developed where Hasidim who lived at a distance from their rebbes made pilgrimage to the Hasidic courts one or more times a year. This geographic development would have a profound effect on how Hasidic Jews saw their relationship to place. It also created a social and leadership structure that would serve the traditional community well in the face of the dislocations of modernity. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Hasidic
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What these authors argue: that it all started informally and only in hindsight became what it is; part because of the misnagdim and part because the rebbe wasn't limited to community.
We have heeded Dubnow’s call for work on the later movement even as we depart from his narrative of decline. We argue instead that Hasidism of this later period was entering its first golden age (the second began in the last decades of the twentieth century).
More of their argument: departing from Dubnow's narrative of decline and say that the later period was its first golden age (after Dov Ber, etc, 19th century) and a second was 20th century.
