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Updated: May 21, 2025
The old struggle between Hasidism and Rabbinism had long been fought out, and the Tzaddiks rested on their laurels as teachers and miracle-workers. The Tzaddik dynasties were now firmly entrenched. In White Russia the sceptre lay in the hands of the Shneorsohn dynasty, the successors of the "Old Rabbi," Shneor Zalman, the progenitor of the Northern Hasidim.
Even the Hasidim, who had until then remained contumacious toward modern ideas, were reached by its influence. It was, however, the Hebrew language that profited most by the development of journalism in it. The demands of daily life enriched its vocabulary and its resources, completing the work of modernization.
But in the midst of his ceaseless toil the spectre of his simple wife and his former innocent life appears before him and "will not down." Is Haskalah worth the sacrifices he and his like are daily bringing on its altar? Is not the materialism of the emancipated Maskilim often greater than the medievalism of the fanatical Hasidim?
Hasidism was thus a plant the seeds of which had been sown by the various sects. Like the former Hasidim, or even the Assideans of nearly two thousand years before, their latter-day namesakes rigidly adhered to the laws of Levitical purification, and, to a certain extent, led a communistic life.
But he soon escaped to Austria, and settled in 1841 in the Bukovina, in the townlet of Sadagora, near Chernovitz, where he established his new "court." Many Hasidim in Russia now made their pilgrimage abroad to their beloved Tzaddik; in addition, new partisans were won among the hasidic masses of Galicia and the Bukovina.
But it is not so much his Talmudic or secular scholarship that makes him interesting to us to-day. His true greatness is revealed by his attempts, the first made in his generation perhaps, to reconcile the Hasidim with the Mitnaggedim, and these in turn with the Maskilim. He spoke a good word for manual labor, and proved from the Talmud that burdensome laws should be abolished.
The reforms introduced by the Gaon, and propagated by his disciples, began to bear fruit. Protests by Hasidim themselves against the irreverent spirit that developed after the death of the Besht, had in fact been heard before.
His reminiscences of the Hasidim, whom he opposed all his life, are the best of his prose writings, and put him in a class with the realists. Gottlober was the Mehabber personified, the type of the vagabond author, who is obliged to go about in person and force his works upon patrons in easy circumstances.
As a result, Jost, Zunz, and Samuel David Luzzatto devoted themselves to the thorough examination of the Judaism of the Middle Ages. The outcome was a new science, the Science of Judaism. Rapoport published also a pamphlet against the Hasidim and their wonder- working Rabbis, and various articles on the necessity of promoting knowledge and civilization among the Jews.
This high regard for antiquity produced a belief in the infallibility of the rabbis on the part of the Mitnaggedim, similar to that in their zaddikim by the Hasidim. No scholar of a later generation dared disagree with the statement of a rabbi of a previous generation.
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