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.
