Many leaders attempted to arise from the occasion as Jewish leaders, but none of the flames could endure; no one could truly captivate the people enough to make his/her movement credible in the mind of the public. Then, in the early 18th Century, enters Israel Ben Eliezer, the man known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, or Besht, the founder of Hasidism. He truly captivated the public as a strong, able leader whose philosophi

es were consistent with that of the working class, anti-intellectual, faithless Jew. Therefore, the entrance of Hasidism into the lives of Polish Jews, and eventually Jews around the world was a result of the need for blind faith in hard times, dissatisfaction with options available, and previously unseen able leadership.

Common Jews felt disconnected with Judaism, unable to spiritually connect very similarly to the self-deemed rejects of many Protestant factions. However, Jews were unique in their separation in how they, unlike Protestants and even Catholics, had no Reformation or Age of Humanism to “save” them from the evils of status quo organized religion; the physical seclusion of Jews in the ghettos had now made them unable to receive any kind of religious education other than the one provided by traditional educators: the Talmud. Talmudic Education was not only thought of as irrelevant and overly formal, but now increasingly became the area of a diminutive set of scholars. By the times of Besht in the 18th Century, this scholarship was too exclusive and spiritually meaningless to common Jews for them to include it in their daily lives [Baron, 138-39].

Besht, along with not being the only Ba’al Shem, was not the only leader of “simple faith” movements after the Ukrainian uprisings.

This “frenzied apocalypticism” was one of the many convenient fuels to feed the fire of Hasidism. This spiritual dissatisfaction fed by a fear of religious incomple

Some topics in this essay:
Shem Tov, Polish Jews, Christianity Frank, Impoverished Jews, Jews Historians, Ba’al Shem, Talmudic Education, Tov Tov, Age Humanism, Tov Besht, ba’al shem, ba’al shem tov, shem tov, israel ba’al shem, israel ba’al, polish jews, ukrainian uprisings, sabbatai zevi, merchants perceiving, 18th century, jewish merchants, jewish laborers,