The Haskalah And Hasidic Movements

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the Haskalah or "Jewish Enlightenment" and the Hasidic movement that prevailed in Europe during the late 1700s and most of the 1800s. This paper also takes a look at the life and thoughts of Moses Mendelssohn, one of the major revolutionary thinkers of the Haskalah and at that of Dov Ber, one of the great leaders of the Hasidic movement.

From the Paper:

"As a result of Mendelssohn's arguments, the Haskalah movement reduced the Judaic faith to a collection of ceremonial laws while also expanding the movement into a universal religion based on reason and logic. The characteristics of the followers of the Haskalah movement thus influenced a great deal of modern Jewish thought, for in contrast to earlier Jewish philosophies, that of the Haskalah movement sought to bring together revelation and reason as one body of truth and endeavored to show the importance of Judaism as part of the framework of human reason, logic and culture. One other aspect of the Haskalah movement was Zionism which aimed to establish Jewish nationalism in Palestine in order to support the existence of Israel, something that Mendelssohn viewed as being a mission for all Haskalah members in order to justify the continued presence of Judaism and Jewish religious thought.
In contrast to the Haskalah movement, the Hasidic movement was not based on the higher echelons of philosophical thought nor on the ideas of intellectuals like Mendelssohn. The first adherents of the Hasidic movement were teachers that were part of a popular group of evangelists who wandered from one to community to another, usually among the lower classes of poor Jews in Podolia and the surrounding countryside. Some observers at the time thought that these teachers held Shabbatean viewpoints, due to socializing with lesser merchants and the poor, a view that later influenced the development of the Hasidic movement in the 19th century."

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