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The Tzaddik cult was equally diffused in the Kingdom of Poland. The place of Rabbi Israel of Kozhenitz and Rabbi Jacob-Isaac of Lublin, who together marshalled the hasidic forces during the time of the Varsovian duchy, was taken by founders and representatives of new Tzaddik dynasties.
His eight sons divided among themselves the whole territory of the Kiev and Volhynia province. Aside from the original center in Chernobyl, seats of Tzaddiks were established in the townlets of Korostyshev, Cherkassy, Makarov, Turisk, Talno, Skvir and Rakhmistrovka. This resulted in a disgraceful rivalry among the brothers, and still more so among their hasidic adherents.
Heshel's successor was Rabbi Moyshe Savranski, who established a regular hasidic "court," after the pattern of Chernobyl and Ruzhin. The only Tzaddik to whom it was not given to be the founder of a dynasty was the somewhat eccentric Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, a great-grandson of Besht.
In this moral disorder, the masses of the people permitted themselves to be carried along unresistingly by the current of Hasidic views, which had long been waiting to capture the last fortress of rational Judaism. The Rabbis stood by alarmed, unable to do anything to arrest the growing encroachments of the mystic movement. Yet there was an adversary ready and equipped.
It would be manifestly unjust to view the hasidic indulgence in alcohol in the same light as the senseless drunkenness of the Russian peasant, transforming man into a beast. The Hasid drank, and in moderate doses at that, "for the soul," "to banish the grief which blunteth the heart," to arouse religious exultation and enliven his social intercourse with his fellow believers.
It was in vogue at the court of the Tzaddik during the rush of pilgrims; it was indulged in after prayers in the hasidic "Shtiblach," or houses of prayer, and was accompanied by dancing and by the ecstatic narration of the miraculous exploits of the "Rebbe."
After his death, the Bratzlav Hasidim, who followed the lead of his disciple Rabbi Nathan, suffered cruel persecutions at the hands of the other hasidic factions. The "Bratzlavers" adopted the custom of visiting once a year, during the High Holidays, the grave of their founder in the city of Uman, in the government of Kiev, and subsequently erected a house of prayer near his tomb.
The scholastic education resulted in producing men entirely unfit for the battle of life, so that in many families energetic women took charge of the business and became the wage earners, while their husbands were losing themselves in the mazes of speculation, somewhere in the recesses of the rabbinic Betha-Midrash or the hasidic Klaus.
Outside of a handful of assimilated "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion," who were imbued with Polish chauvinism, the hasidic rank and file was permeated by extreme separatism, fostered by "the Kahal through its various agencies, the Congregational Boards, the rabbinate, the heders, and a host of special institutions."
Only in point of disabilities were the Jews of Poland gradually placed on an equal footing with their Russian brethren. In 1845 the Russian law imposing a tax on the traditional Jewish attire was extended in its operation to the Polish Jews, descending with the force of a real calamity upon the hasidic masses of Poland. Fortunately for the Jews of Poland, the other experiments, in which St.
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