Marcin Wodziński

Hasidism, Shtadlanut, and Jewish Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland: The Case of Isaac of Warka

The paper examines political activities of R. Isaac of Warka, the best known Hasidic intercessor in Poland, against the background of both Jewish tradition of shtadlanut and the political environment of the nineteenth-century Congress Poland. It focuses on the strategies, tactics and tools of this activity, which, I clam, differed from those employed by the shtadlanim in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The thesis of the paper is that these new forms of political activism were made possible only by the changed political system of nineteenth-century Poland. I claim that this political system and the policy of the Polish government both contributed to the unique form of the Polish Hasidism resulting from Hasidic responses elicited in part by Polish social policy. The sources for the paper are mainly archival documents of the governmental origin, including a series of Isaac of Warkas petitions to the government, governments responses, internal ministerial correspondence etc. These sources has never been utilised before. They shed a new light on the social and political history of the Hasidic movement in Poland.

Jewish Studies in Poland

As in many other post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish studies in Poland have undergone a process of very intensive development and transformation in recent years. From being close to non-existent, to the impressive institutional, teaching, research and publishing developments, Polish-Jewish studies have changed beyond all recognition in the past three decades. There is certainly an element here of a more general transformation affecting other countries of the region, and even of global phenomena. The former encompass, first of all, the fall of Communism and the lifting of the institutional and political barriers hindering the development of Jewish Studies in the former Soviet bloc countries. The latter include a general development of research in the world (causing a plague of scholarly overproduction today), an increased interest in minority cultures, growing political interest in the Middle East conflict, which translates into a growth of related research activities, and the development of technologies facilitating access to scholarly resources located far away from the discipline’s main research centres—which, in our case, are Israel and the United States. It seems, however, that beside those general factors, there also exists a Polish specificity that adds to the development of this discipline, and it is this issue that I would like to address in this essay. I will present, in turn, a short history of the development of Jewish studies in Poland during the past three decades, the main factors of this development both in the past and today, the main areas of interest of Polish-Jewish studies, and, finally, the most significant problems currently afflicting or emerging on the horizon of the development of these studies in Poland.

How Modern Is an Antimodernist Movement? The Emergence of Hasidic Politics in Congress Poland

The various efforts to reform Jewish society in Poland from the late eighteenth century on elicited reactions among the representatives of Jewish society, both among those who supported the reforms and among others, much more numerous, who were less favorably inclined toward reform. The hasidim were, of course, among the latter. All the reforms affected the hasidim, just as they did other members of the community, but certain actions directed against their movement as such affected them specifically. It seems natural, therefore, that hasidim were not simply passive victims of the deeds undertaken by the central and regional organs of the state. It would be hard to expect otherwise because, after all, the hasidim were a party most interested in the favorable resolution of antihasidic government investigations.

War and Religion; or, How the First World War Changed Hasidism

What were the effects of the Great War on religious life of East European Jews, as exemplified by its most visible, Hasidic section? What was unique in Hasidic experience of the Great War? This essay discusses the human and material losses suffered by the Hasidic movement, changes in the movement’s geography, ideological and political transformations surrounding and within Hasidism, and—most importantly—the specific changes in Hasidism caused by these transformations. It agues that Hasidism after 1918 found itself in a radically new situation, and despite the fact that many of its institutions were, on the face of it, working more or less as they had done before the war, the movement experienced a profound transformation of its geography, social roles, institutional bonds, and, often, identification with Hasidism. In this regard, the First World War was a key accelerator of the processes which transformed the Hasidic movement during the interwar period, and eventually to a significant extend shaped its resurrection and renaissance after the Holocaust.

Modernity and Polish Jews: Recent Developments in Polish-Jewish Historiography

Abstract: The article investigates the differing meanings employed in the concept of modernity by historians of the Polish Jews of the nineteenth century and how it has evolved over the last thirty years. It traces two essential traditions of modernist discourse on the nineteenth-century Polish Jews as following either process-oriented or project-oriented approaches. It also asks whether modernization theory and the concept of modernity are helpful in understanding the nineteenth-century history of the Polish Jews and whether there is anything specific that, when applying these notions to Polish-Jewish history, distinguishes it from the modernity discourse on other European Jewries.

The Socio-Economic Profile of a Religious Movement: The Case of Hasidism

This article revisits the once popular issue of the socio-occupational profile of Hasidism, arguably the most important socio-religious movement of modern Jewry. Well-known anecdotal materials are confronted with much broader archival sources, mainly from central Poland in the first half of the nineteenth century. These are both rich narrative sources (anti-Hasidic denunciations by the kahal elders, official reports on the Hasidic conflicts in the communities, etc.) and, most importantly, quantitative materials, which allow for the analysis of four Jewish communities in central Poland and one in Belarus. These materials provide a unique picture of the occupational and financial profile of the Hasidic groups in these localities (as confronted with the picture of the entire communities) and, by implication, of the whole Hasidic movement. Contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, these new materials point to Hasidim’s relative affluence, as well as to their tendency to cluster in commercial professions and to avoid the crafts. More broadly, it points to the dynamic character of class–church interdependence and the ideological and cultural factors creating them. It also confirms the correlation between a religious group’s strictness and its strength and attractiveness.

Menashe Unger. A Fire Burns in Kotsk: A Tale of Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland. Translated by Jonathan Boyarin, introduction by Glenn Dynner. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. 238 pp.

is thoroughly researched, based on primary and secondary sources in half a dozen languages, written with energy, and packed with vibrant anecdotes of fascinating Jewish figures who exist on the margins, or completely off the pages, of Jewish history. Beyond this Jütte issues important corrections to accepted narratives going back to the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Those scholars were obsessed with Jewish “contributions,” insisting, for example, that “Jews’ importance for the emergence of modern science was undisputable” (225). More specifically, just as German-Jewish scholars denied premodern Jewish interest in Kabbalah, they also disparaged Jewish alchemical activity. But, Jütte wisely notes, premodern Jews were greatly attracted to alchemy for many reasons, among them that it served as a “language of mediation” in early modern Europe (35, 164). Jütte’s mission is praiseworthy: to acknowledge and rehabilitate facets of the historical Jewish experience that have been expunged from the record. Jütte excels in one final area. He identifies and undermines the fallacy according to which Jews’ activities are notable only when they contribute to the forward march of European progress. He remarks “the Christian idea of a New Science ... cannot be the only yardstick for interpreting all manifestations of Jewish activity in natural science” (231–2). Indeed. Jewish professors of secrets who lived in an age of secrecy deserve a fair hearing, too.

A rabbi‐informer and the Hasidim of Będzin. Dimensions of Hasidic politics

This study analyses the interplay between the high and the low, or local, level of Hasidic political engagement, an important matter, that has been so far neglected. The best‐known actions of Hasidic shtadlanim (political intercessors), such as interventions by Rabbi Isaac of Warka or Rabbi Menehem Mendel Schneersohn, occurred at the highest state levels, and attempted to influence regulations of a general nature. This portrays Hasidic politics as being chiefly engaged in solving general problems for the whole Jewish community. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that significant sections of Hasidic politics were not concerned with general issues at state level, but rather, with small local conflicts and individual problems. Thus, seeking to find similarities and links between Hasidic macro politics and local community politics appears to constitute a legitimate question. Were these local activities in any way connected or dependent on wider national politics? Did any structural similarities exist between them and, if so, what was their source? What implications did this have on the relations between the leaders and community in a non‐democratic political system such as the Kingdom of Poland? The article discusses an episode from Będzin, a medium‐sized town in the south of the Congress Kingdom, where the local Hasidic group clashed with the communal rabbi‐informer, Hersz Rozynes. The detailed analysis of the case demonstrates that in a highly bureaucratised and centralised state, there were no political undertakings that could be classified as purely local. Every intervention in a local matter required state‐level competences and triggered administrative procedures reaching far into the central government. This made local, communal politics dependent upon state‐level professional intercessors, and so paved the way to the increasing professionalisation of Hasidic – and more generally Jewish – politics in the course of the nineteenth century.

Languages of the Jewish communities in Polish Silesia (1922–1939)

Polish Silesia, between 1922 and 1939 was the locus for a model confrontation between three distinct cultural groups of Central European Jews: Jews assimilated to German language and culture, traditional, Yiddish speaking, Orthodox Jews, and still other Jews assimilated to cultures that competed with the originally dominant German one: in the case of Upper Silesia, Polish culture. The linguistic changes these groups experienced are indicative of cultural assimilation and change. All three groups had to respond to a significant emigration of German oriented Jews in the early 1920s, the immigration of Jews assimilated to Polish culture and Yiddish speakers coming from the former Polish Kingdom and Galicia, and an increase in Polish anti-Semitic propaganda in Upper Silesia. A fourth factor was the growing distancing between these Jews and the German state and its direct cultural influences, especially after 1933. A first, and most visible, result of these factors was a rapid rise in declarations of the use of Polish language matched by a rapid fall in declared Germanophones. Initially these declarations were politically motivated: the number declaring Polish its language exceeded by far the actual number of Polish-speakers. By the late 1930s, however, the change was real. Silesian Jews had become essentially Polish speakers, and, on occasion, they had adopted other Polish cultural forms as well. Change of language is thus an important signifier of broader cultural change.