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These trends can be seen by describing the numerically dominant Hasidic population in early nineteenth-century Galicia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire; similar phenomena occurred throughout the Yiddish-speaking, religiously fundamentalist culture area of Eastern Europe, most of which came to be governed by the Russian empire.21 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, there were increasing restrictions on Jewish economic activity, such as edicts preventing Jews from operating taverns, engaging in trade, and leasing mills. There were restrictions on where Jews could live, and ghettos were established in order to remove Jews from competition with nonJews; taxes specific to Jews were imposed; there were government efforts to force Jewish assimilation, as by requiring the legal documents be in the German language. These laws, even though often little enforced, reflected the antiJewish animosity of wider society and undoubtedly increased Jewish insecurity. In any case, a large percentage of the Jewish population was impoverished and doubtless would have remained so even in the absence of anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation. Indeed, the emigration of well over three million Jews to Western Europe and the New World did little to ease the grinding poverty of a large majority of the Jewish population.

It was in this atmosphere that Hasidism rose to dominance in Eastern Europe. The Hasidim passionately rejected all the assimilatory pressures coming from the government. They so cherished the Yiddish language that well into the twentieth century the vast majority of Eastern European Jews could not speak the languages of the non-Jews living around them.22 They turned to the Kabbala (the writings of Jewish mystics), superstition, and anti-rationalism, believing in “magical remedies, amulets, exorcisms, demonic possession (dybbuks), ghosts, devils, and teasing, mischievous genies.”23 Corresponding to this intense ingroup feeling were attitudes that non-Jews were less than human. “As Mendel of Rymanów put it, ‘A Gentile does not have a heart, although he has an organ that resembles a heart.’ ”24 All nations exist only by virtue of the Jewish people: “Erez Yisreal [the land of Israel] is the essence of the world and all vitality stems from it.”25 Similar attitudes are common among contemporary Jewish fundamentalists and the settler movement in Israel.26 Read more »