Main Edition
US
FR
Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
According to the story we commonly tell ourselves, the modern world begins with the eighteenth century – the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, the Industrial Revolution and so on. It’s a story that assumes increasing secularisation, the dominance of technology and the triumph of market capitalism. “Modernity is a deal” writes the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” But the eighteenth century, this crucible of modernity, was also the century of powerful religious revivalism.
In England, John Wesley by-passed the narrow confines of establishment Christianity, preaching directly to the poor, with emotion and passion. And in doing so helped light the fire of the so-called first Great Awakening. From this movement, modern Charismatic Christianity was born.
At the same time, in south eastern Poland, an almost exact contemporary of Wesley, Israel ben Eli’ezer – or the Ba’al Shem Tov or Besht – began a comparable awakening within Judaism that came to be known as Hasidism. Like Wesley, the Besht wasn’t a formal theologian. He emphasised popular devotion and the religion of the heart. Drawing upon older Kabbalistic traditions, the Besht and his followers encouraged Judaism away from what they regarded as a dry and elitist Rabbinic legalism and towards greater enthusiasm, popular story telling and the unselfconscious joy of divine worship.
Hasidism had its opponents, of course. Lithuanians, under the leadership of the serious minded Vilna Gaon, looked down upon the excitable Hasidim. And the growing movement for a Jewish Enlightenment wanted Jews to find their place in the modern world of progress. Nonetheless, throughout the nineteenth century Hasidism became the dominant form of popular Jewish piety in central Europe.
And whilst the whole ultra-orthodox family – Hasidim and Lithuanians and others, known collectively as Haredi – were almost wiped out in the Holocaust, their post-Holocaust revival has been extraordinary. No longer based in central Europe, they have nonetheless taken the dress code and customs of their eighteenth century predecessors and transported them to New York and Israel, and also to places like Stamford Hill in North London.
And the Heredi family are growing fast – both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the Jewish community as a whole. In Israel, the Heredi community are forecast to become 40% of the Israeli population by 2065 – up from 14% in 2015. Likewise, in the UK, the Heredi community
continues numerically to flourish and is set to overtake the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community in the mid to latter part on this century.
For a group that was very nearly wiped out by the Nazis, this revival has been astonishing – and, if the forecasts are correct, is set radically to change the demographics of Jewish life, both here and in Israel.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeSo, non-celibate monks who are discouraged from earning to support their large families! Sounds great for them, but not so good for their women or for the earth!