The Rise of Hasidism

This chapter presents a version of how hasidism began. It provides a construction of hasidic history that asserts that Israel Ba'al Shem Tov did not start a ‘movement’. Rather, he introduced some innovations to a traditional style of mystical pietism long denoted as ‘hasidism’ that in subsequent generations developed into a new type of mass movement that constituted a new hasidism. Through the last decades of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, this hasidism gradually differentiated from its traditionalist predecessor, developing a literary canon, religious doctrines, behaviour patterns, leadership models, an array of institutions, and, most of all, a self-consciousness that it was a movement. It was in the nineteenth century that this hasidism reached maturity with numerical strength, geographical spread, institutional stability, financial resources, doctrinal sophistication, and political influence.