Merchant Princes and Tsadikim: The Patronage of Polish Hasidism

The vast expansion of Hasidism after the death of the movement's spiritual founder, R. Israel Ba'al Shem Tov ("The Besht," d. 1760), and his preeminent successor, R. Dov Ber, the "Great Magid" of Międzyrzecz (d. 1772), has long fascinated scholars of East European Jewry. Most commonly, this expansion is attributed to the charismatic personalities and innovative doctrines of Hasidic leaders, or tsadikim. Yet few have paused to consider how those leaders were able to achieve the institutional and financial stability needed to cope with the distinct contextual challenges presented by the new regions into which they expanded.¹ Particularly intriguing is Hasidism's spread into Central Poland, a relatively economically advanced area that was partitioned, conquered, or ruled indirectly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by several regimes—Prussian, Austrian, French (the Duchy of Warsaw), and Russian (the Congress Kingdom of Poland). As the setting of Eastern Europe's nascent industrial revolution, Central Poland comprised both an urban, industrializing center and variegated rural expanses, and its Jewish communities consequently encompassed a broader social spectrum than was found elsewhere in Eastern and East Central Europe. The success of tsadikim in winning over adherents along Central Poland's entire Jewish social spectrum, from urban entrepreneurs to impoverished rural inhabitants, revealed them as something more than small-town East European folk leaders. The case of Polish Hasidism accordingly entails, in and of itself, a corrective to the misleading older historiographical portrayal of the movement as a social revolution fomented on behalf of an allegedly impoverished, desperate populace.²

The tsadikim and Hasidic foot-soldiers who infiltrated Central Polish study houses, synagogues, and kahals (communal governments) during this period were not acting alone; they were backed by a cadre of remarkably influential Jewish merchants in the capital city of Warsaw. As patrons who subsidized, protected, and promoted the movement, these grands notables formed an absolutely vital component in Polish Hasidism's success formula. If tsadikim ignited a great deal of enthusiasm and grassroots support on their own, all the merriment, religious ecstasy, comforting advice, and miracles still ultimately rested on a sturdy foundation of patronage. Members of the Jewish mercantile elite helped bolster the movement's health and durability, for it was they who facilitated Hasidic victories over apparently more sophisticated and better-connected foes, and it was they who stabilized Polish Hasidic society.³ The significance of their patronage is far-reaching, since it implies that Eastern Europe's industrial revolution, rather than undermining a doggedly antimodernist movement like Hasidism, actually enabled its sponsorship on an unprecedented scale. It also adds an ironic twist to the story of the region's modernization that, it turns out, was pioneered by adherents of the very movement that contemporary critics blamed for Jewish "backwardness and superstition." This article highlights the central role of one very significant family, the Bergsons, in transforming Polish Hasidism into a thriving mass movement.

The role of such mercantile elites in the expansion of Hasidism largely escaped notice in the older historiography of Hasidism as well as in the current literature on Polish Jewish economic history, each of which seems prisoner to a certain economic determinism that automatically associates wealth with acculturation and assimilation. Many historians of Hasidism, following the pioneering endeavors of Simon Dubnow, tended to depict tsadikim as heroes of the allegedly impoverished, uneducated, and economically backward masses.⁴ They were "lowly folk" deriving from "plebian origins," members of a disenchanted secondary intelligentsia, and a "religious elite itself arising out of the mass of the people" who set aside the "existing 'aristocracy' of spiritual possession."⁵ Complementing this older view, economic historians continue to follow Artur Eisenbach in characterizing Polish Jewish mercantile elites as assimilationists, bearers of enlightenment, and advocates for emancipation.⁶ Few seem prepared to consider a convergence between economic modernization and a retrograde movement like Hasidism.⁷ As this article will show, the tsadikim were in fact...