The Healer Invited to Medzhybizh in 1740: the Baal Shem Tov and Hasidism

Hasidism, the Jewish religious movement, emerged in the 18th century in Podillia, then in the southeastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The movement is considered to have its origin in Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”), also called by the shortened name “Besht.” Known as a healer, he lived from 1740 in the town of Medzhybizh, now in Khmelnytskyi Oblast.

According to IEU, by the mid-19th century most Ukrainian Jews had come to belong to Hasidism, and Hasidic Jews later moved from Ukraine to Palestine and the United States as well. What follows draws on the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, and the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The extent of the historical region of Podillia is covered in our article on regional names that differ from oblast names.

Born in 1698, or 1700?

The Baal Shem Tov’s birth year is not settled. YIVO’s biographical entry (written by Moshe Rosman) gives “around 1700,” the same encyclopedia’s entry on the history of Hasidism (written by David Assaf) gives “1698 or 1700,” and IEU gives “1700.” He died in 1760, on which all three accounts agree.

According to YIVO, he was born in the small town of Okopy, then a military outpost near the southern border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a young man he is thought to have lived in several towns in Podillia, working as a ritual slaughterer, children’s teacher, and circumciser, among other occupations. He was not a Talmudic scholar, but he was well versed in rabbinic literature, studied Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), and is said to have learned herbal knowledge even from non-Jews.

At some point in the 1730s, he began using the name “Baal Shem” or “Baal Shem Tov.” It meant one able to help people by handling the names of God, a title for a healer who cured illness and, standing between heaven and earth, tried to resolve the troubles of people’s daily lives. Some Polish-language records refer to him as “Doctor Baal Shem.”

Twenty years in Medzhybizh

Having heard of his reputation as a healer, the elders of Medzhybizh’s Jewish community invited him to the town and gave him a house free of rent and taxes. According to YIVO, this was in 1740. Medzhybizh at the time, owned by the Czartoryski family, was the region’s military, administrative, and trading center, led by a community of wealthy merchant families. There, the Baal Shem Tov served the community as its resident Kabbalah expert, writing amulets, giving treatments, and leading a circle of fellow students of mysticism at the house of study (beit midrash).

According to IEU’s entry on Medzhybizh, the town first appears by name in the Hypatian Chronicle under the year 1146. It received Magdeburg city rights in 1593, became one of the region’s cultural centers in the 17th century, and declined after passing into the territory of the Russian Empire in 1793. Surviving buildings include a stone castle, the 16th-century Dormition Church, and the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity Church.

What did he teach?

YIVO’s entry holds that the core of the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching was union with God (devekut). Because God is present in every created thing, material activities such as eating and working could also become ways of serving God. Focusing the mind on each letter of the words of prayer, and praying in a state of ecstasy, brings God’s light down into this world. And he taught that the path to God lay not in fasting or physical asceticism, but in the joy of observing the commandments, learning, and praying.

The two encyclopedias describe the character of Hasidism somewhat differently. IEU describes Hasidism as a movement that arose in opposition to the dogmatic, ritualistic formalism of existing Orthodox Judaism, a popular movement that preached social reform and attracted, in particular, people from the lower ranks of Jewish society. YIVO’s Rosman writes that the Baal Shem Tov himself never declared that he was starting a new movement aimed at the uneducated masses, that he did not disparage strict observance of the commandments or the study of Torah, and that he founded no new organization. On this view, he came to be regarded as “the founder of Hasidism” only because his disciples built a movement in his name after his death.

Most of his biography was written after his death

Almost nothing written by the Baal Shem Tov himself survives. The sources YIVO cites are references to him and those around him in Polish archival records, four letters that survive as copies, testimony from contemporaries, and traditions collected after his death. Central among these is In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht), a collection of more than 200 tales compiled in manuscript around 1795 and printed in the town of Kopys in 1814–1815. Since it was written as hagiography, its tales are not necessarily factual as they stand.

According to YIVO, it was his disciples and associates — Dov Ber, known as the Maggid (preacher) of Mezhirich, and Yaakov Yosef of Polonne, among others — who turned Hasidism into a major movement. They invoked the name of their teacher, the Baal Shem Tov, as the basis for their own ideas and practices. Organized opposition to Hasidism (the “Mitnagdim,” represented by the Vilna Gaon) arose only more than ten years after the Baal Shem Tov’s death.

A movement that spread from Podillia

According to IEU, the early centers were Mezhirich, Chornobyl, and Medzhybizh. The movement eventually spread into Habsburg territory too, and Hasidic communities formed in Galicia, Bukovina, and Zakarpattia. Hasidic schools and printing houses were established in Korets, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, Zhovkva, and elsewhere. The 1804 statute on the Jews enacted by the Russian Empire recognized the right of Hasidic communities to build their own houses of prayer and choose their own rabbis.

IEU writes that Hasidic folklore — songs, dances, and sayings — draws heavily on Ukrainian material, and that in the 20th century the movement lost momentum along with secularization, and the Holocaust nearly wiped out Hasidism in Eastern Europe. The events of the Holocaust in Kyiv are covered in our article on Babyn Yar, and Jewish society in Ukraine under imperial rule in a section of our article on the history up to the end of Cossack self-rule.

His great-grandson, Nachman of Bratslav

Nachman ben Simcha was the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov’s daughter Odel. According to IEU, he was born in Medzhybizh on April 4, 1772. According to YIVO’s entry (written by Arthur Green), he began gathering disciples after a journey to the Holy Land (the Land of Israel) in 1798–99, and moved to the Podillia town of Bratslav (now in Vinnytsia Oblast) in 1802. His followers are known, after the name of this town, as the “Bratslav (Breslov) Hasidim.”

From 1806, Nachman began telling fantastical tales that wove Kabbalistic symbolism into the material of Eastern European folktales. The tales were published after his death, in 1815, as a Hebrew–Yiddish bilingual book, Tales (Sippurei Ma’asiyot). IEU writes that Nachman told these tales in Yiddish, the everyday language, rather than in Hebrew, the language of the learned, and drew freely on Ukrainian folktale material. YIVO states that, through Martin Buber’s German-language adaptation (1906), they may have influenced figures including Franz Kafka.

In his final year, Nachman, suffering from tuberculosis, moved to Uman (now in Cherkasy Oblast) and died there on October 16, 1810 (IEU). According to YIVO’s entry on Uman, Nachman said he chose the town because he would be able to pray for the souls of the Jews killed there in 1768. His grave in Uman has remained a site visited every year by Bratslav Hasidim, with interruptions during the Soviet era (IEU).