THE PROMINENCE of the Jewish Question in the political debates of the last years of the Commonwealth, as well as in the later journalism of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, does not mean that there was a similarly lively interest in hasidim; quite the opposite, in fact. The main reason was that, when the debate was crystallizing in the 1780s and 1790s, hasidim were still few in number in central Poland and not yet politically active. The reason for the development will be considered in detail later, but by way of introduction it seems relevant here to offer a brief characterization of the origins of what was later to become a significant movement.

The cradle of Polish hasidism (from the Hebrew ḥasid, meaning ‘pious’) was Podolia and Volhynia, the south-eastern borderlands of the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth, where from the 1740s to 1760 the putative creator of the group, Israel ben Eliezer (c.1700–60), also known as the Besht (an acronym of Ba'al Shem Tov, or Master of the Good Name) was active. This group, whose members came to be known colloquially as hasidim, emerged from and coexisted with other, similar, Jewish mystical groups that had arisen earlier, and was often confused with them. Like other Jewish mystical groups of this period, the hasidim borrowed abundantly from Lurianic kabbalah. The elements that fundamentally distinguished them from related groups were a decidedly anti-ascetic attitude and an interest in the broad propagation ofmystical ideals and practices. Particularly impor-tant were the ideas of devekut, or cleaving to God (unio mystica), and of tikun olam, or each person's responsibility to do good deeds that have the divine power to ‘repair the universe’. Though one anti-hasidic critic wrote that the ‘sickly bud’ of hasidism did not promise to develop well, the doctrinal base and organizational success of hasidism began to take shape as early as the 1770s. Supporters of this new form of religiosity acquired more and more followers in Red Ruthenia, Ukraine, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as in central Poland—in other words, in almost all the territory of the old Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth.