the end of the nineteenth century, there were three distinct traditions among the religious Jews of central and eastern Europe. There was the hasidic strain of Ba’al Shem Tov. There was the strain of musar or Moralism, based on the writings of the Orthodox Lithuanian sages, reinvigorated by Israel Salanter (1810-83) and spread by the yeshivoth. Then there was the strain of Samson Hirsch, ‘Torah with Civilization’, which attacked secularization with its own weapons of modern
