The Beginnings: Anti-Hasidic Criticism in the Last Years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

Abstract

This chapter discusses anti-hasidic criticism in the last years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Opposition to hasidism is almost as old as the hasidic movement itself. However, it was not the supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment ideology, the maskilim, but representatives of the rabbinical elite who were the first to begin an organized wave of opposition. Their hasidic opponents therefore called them ‘mitnagedim’ (opponents). The first maskilic voices to criticize the hasidic movement were heard at almost the same time as those of the mitnagedim, or perhaps, as some historians suggest, slightly earlier. The chapter then explores the anti-hasidic criticism of Salomon Maimon, Mendel Lefin, and Jacques Calmanson. Calmanson was the first advocate of the Haskalah associated with central Poland and Warsaw to speak out on the hasidic question. The history of subsequent maskilic polemics on the subject of hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland is, broadly, the history of the reception of the works by these three authors.