THE present volume grew out of an international conference entitled ‘The Social Function of Mystical Ideals in Judaism: Hasidism Reappraised’, which was held by the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London on 21-3 June 1988. The idea for the conference was conceived in a series of discussions with my friends Professors Rachel Elior and Immanuel Etkes of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Together we formed an organizing committee and proceeded to invite to London virtually every scholar known to us to be actively engaged in research and writing on hasidism. While we realized that we could not hope to be exhaustive, our intention was to be as comprehensive as possible-to include contributions from specialists in a variety of disciplines, from multiple centres of scholarship, and to cover between us the widest possible chronological, geographical, methodological, and thematic span. The preparations generated considerable excitement: it was to be the very first major international conference dedicated specifically to the study of hasidism, and we all felt that the time for it was ripe; we hoped to capture something of the sense we shared of having reached a certain turning-point in our collective understanding of the subject.

The turning-point was occasioned by the convergence primarily of two factors. On the one hand the libraries and archives of eastern Europe were becomining increasingly accessible. The new data that were becoming available were prompting a re-evaluation of what had been for several generations of historians the received notion of the background, origins, and nature of hasidism. On the other hand, the passing away in 1982 of Gershom Scholem, who had pioneered the academic study of Jewish mysticism and whose approach had dominated the field for at least a half a century, was followed, perhaps inevitably, by a revision of his entire scholarly enterprise. Everyone of his ‘major trends in Jewish mysticism’ was beginning to attract critical scrutiny, and it was becoming clear that his regnant interpretation of hasidism-the ‘last phase’ of the kabbalistic tradition-was no exception.

The coincidence of these two revisionist processes has had considerable implications for the study of hasidism, and the present volume, like the conference that inspired it, constitutes one of its landmarks.