The Formation of Ḥaredism—Perspectives on Religion, Social Disciplining and Secularization in Modern Judaism

Abstract

This article proposes a reassessment of the development of Ḥaredism, that is, the application of strict, maximalist, commandment-oriented Judaism to increasingly large lay publics, in light of confessionalization processes in Europe. Whereas historiographical and sociological convention locates the sources of Ḥaredism within the development of 19th century orthodox Jewish responses to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Reform, and secular Zionism, this article argues that Ḥaredi structures and practices preceded these movements, and, in some cases, influenced their development. The basis for the priority of Ḥaredi identities to Jewish secular identities is rooted in the social disciplining and religious engineering of Jewish societies in the early modern era, until just before the Haskalah, and beyond. This disciplining was predicated on the imposition of religious, social, and ascetic education systems on growing segments of the population. Ḥaredism as a concept and as a phenomenon emerged in 16th century Safed (Ottoman Palestine); there, previous Jewish ascetic patterns were reworked, reorganized and structured under the aegis of the print era, and became a basis for mass, super-regional education. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ḥaredi religiosity steadily percolated through European Jewish societies by means of works of personal ethic and conduct that were written, printed, and reprinted many times, in Hebrew and Yiddish, through works that enumerate the commandments, and through popular works that make the Jewish halakhic code, Shulḥan Arukh, accessible to the masses by abridging or reworking it. Starting in the early 19th century, with the mediation of the Ḥasidic and Lithuanian religious movements, this process massively penetrated broad strata of society.

1. The Study of Ḥaredism

Over the past half century, numerous studies and monographs on Ḥaredism have appeared (for example: Liebman 1965; Friedman 1991; Waxman 1991; Heilman 1992; Soloveitchik 1994). These studies have greatly enriched perspectives on the phenomenon, its diversity, and its manifold ramifications, giving readers a broad, rich background with which to examine it. Nevertheless, the general characterization of “Ḥaredism” and the bulk of its underlying history remain underdeveloped due to the adherence of scholars to a social-historical model of Ḥaredism whose principles were articulated in the 1960s. This venerable model locates the sources of Ḥaredism within the development of Jewish Orthodoxy in the 19th century. Orthodoxy itself, in its various forms, from extreme (“Ultra Orthodoxy”) to moderate (“Neo Orthodoxy”), is characterized as a post-traditional rabbinic reaction to the cluster of developments defined as “modernity” within Jewish society. More specifically, Orthodoxy is defined in relation to the emergence of ideological alternatives such as Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and Reform (Katz 1986; Samet 1988; Silber 1992), and later, in relation to the emergence of Zionism (Salmon 1990).

During the past decade, reservations to this historical portrait have been articulated (Sorotzkin 2011, 2020). It seems that the time has come to address these episodes using additional historical and sociological tools and methods, which will enable different discursive frameworks from the ones that shaped the scholarly discourse about Ḥaredism. The focus of the article will be to trace, genealogically, historically, and sociologically, the foundations of Ḥaredism as a concept and as a phenomenon.

Positing a new genealogy and additional frames of reference does not necessarily undermine the existing scholarly framework. The objective is to propose a new perspective that broadens and can incorporate the existing one, even though it alters some of the accepted claims and periodization, or at least casts them in a new light. The historical and sociological observation of prolonged processes taking place in Christian and Jewish Europe and awareness of the parallels and differences between them is a key element of the discursive frameworks that I will propose, but it is not the only element. In this article, I will focus on the relationship between Ḥaredism and the disciplining and religious engineering of Jewish societies in the early modern era until just before the Haskalah, and beyond.

The Structure of the Article

Given the scope of the article and its aspiration to create a synthesis of different periods and a wide variety of materials, and to aid readers, I will briefly outline its various sections. Section 2 and Section 3 begin with an attempt to redefine the term “orthodoxy” within a Jewish context, briefly examining it in light of parallel usages of the term within scholarly discourse about Christianity and Islam. The definition of orthodoxy leads me to examine the relationship between orthodoxy and the spheres of the historical growth of Ḥaredism (Section 3), while articulating the parameters of these spheres and locating them in context of the confessionalization, routinization, and disciplining of religion that took place in early modern Europe. In this section, I periodize the developments included within this article to the era between 1601 and 1933, from the moment that Ḥaredism was first defined until it became a mass religious movement that unified different religious groups. On this timeline I indicate the moments of historic significance and major figures on which the article will focus.

Section 4 describes the popularization of Jewish pietistic (mussar) and Jewish legal (halakhic) literature, which led to the entry of Ḥaredi trends into ever-expanding segments of the population between the 17th and 19th centuries. This section will also elaborate the genealogy of the term “Ḥaredim”, the religious phenomenology it entails, its assimilation by influential rabbinic figures, and its impact on social processes.

Section 5 and Section 6 reassess Weber’s work on the ascetic and disciplinary infrastructure of modern society and addresses how this assessment can be understood and applied to the context of early modern Jewry. Here I claim that religion began penetrating and reshaping neutral, “secular” segments of society starting in the 17th century, bringing these segments into the realm of the sacred—a process that I call “sacralization”. I further claim that this process shapes, in parallel, both Ḥaredi and bourgeoisie social spheres, leading to the conclusion that it is comprised of both religiofication and secularization, processes occurring simultaneously. Section 7 models this claim using test cases from the 17th and 18th centuries. The article concludes with an attempt to show how the web of processes described drain into the forces affecting European Jewry in the 19th century and how modern Jewish ideological movements share a common disciplinary platform, even when they oppose one another vehemently.

2. Distinguishing Jewish Orthodoxy from Ḥaredism

I wish to clarify, from the outset, that the historical development of Jewish or rabbinic orthodoxy or orthodoxies, must be distinguished from the emergence of Ḥaredi Judaism. According to my approach, the development of orthodoxy is a cluster of institutional processes that occurred within Judaism at different stages, some as early as the medieval era (Sorotzkin 2019, pp. 108–9; 2022). Each of these stages must be described both on its own and in context of the other stages. I note that I use similar methodology and periodization to examine “religiofication”, which is intertwined with “secularization”, as I will elaborate below. By “religiofication” I refer to the application of normative Judaism from various rabbinic centers on increasingly large lay, non-rabbinic, publics.1 Orthodoxies developed in various ways in all Jewish centers, in both the Islamic world and Christendom. As for Ḥaredism, though significant elements of this phenomenon originate in Ottoman Palestine, it flourished primarily in modern Europe. Therefore, I will relate mainly, but not exclusively, to European Jewish developments in my descriptions.

In the early modern period, both orthodoxy and religiofication were an important tier in the modernization of European society, within Christianity and Judaism alike. In western Christianity this modernization is related to the confessionalization of European societies (Brady 2016; Reinhard and Schilling 1995; Schilling 1995) that established the variability and splitting up of religions in Europe; In Judaism it was manifested against the background of numerous elements of early modernity, including: the formation of the canonic printed collection; the super-regional codification of halakhic rulings and the resulting halakhic uniformity; the confessionalization processes as reflected in Jewish religious and social structures and the gradual emergence of Judaism as a modern system of faith; and the growth of voluntaristic religious trends, which bypassed the formal institutions of Jewish communities. These trends included additional rules of religious conduct, in the form of literature on the commandments, proper conduct, ritual instructional manuals, supererogatory stringencies, the appearance of voluntary associations and societies, and other trends, some of which will be detailed below.

3. Defining Ḥaredism

I define Ḥaredism as follows: Ḥaredism is the general name for a manifold social-historical phenomenon founded on ascetic behavioral practices and on voluntary ritual expansion of the function of the sacred in daily life, at the expense of the function of the secular. In other words, Ḥaredism is based on the steady expansion of the realm of the sacred within the neutral space of secular, be it private, public, or communal, while shaping and engineering them, even during the historical stages that preceded the formation of secularist ideologies.

I will begin by clarifying the link between Ḥaredism, which originated in the 17th century, and rabbinic orthodoxy more generally. According to my approach, the sources of Ḥaredi Judaism are rooted in two main factors: first, the polemics, canonization, and censorship that had been part of Rabbinic Judaism from its first phases and which gained a great deal of momentum from the high middle ages and throughout the modern era; and second, the development of models of ascetic Judaism, from their individual medieval origins to their consolidation, routinization, and institutionalization in normative social structures in the modern era. Let us survey these two factors.

3.1. The Fundamentals of Ḥaredi Judaism: Canonization, Censorship, and Sanctification of Custom

The first factor is the polemics against the Jewish tradition and the accompanying processes of canonization and censorship in the various rabbinic centers. This element is rooted in the centuries-long historical development of rabbinic orthodoxy after the closing of the Talmud and its spread through Islamic lands and Christendom.

The term “orthodoxy” is associated with developments in Christianity, but it can be used distinctively to describe institutional dynamic that occurred, in various ways, in Rabbinic Judaism and Islam as well.2 The dynamic entails the establishment of a religious canon (Halbertal 1997) and shared practices, the development of set of regulations meant to demarcate the boundaries of the canon and the social body, and the attempt to exclude and censor individuals and groups that deviate from these boundaries. Under this definition, “orthodoxy” accompanies Rabbinic Judaism from the earliest founding of its institutions, and orthodox principles can be found in early Rabbinic Literature, in the Mishnah and Talmud.3 After the Talmud was sealed and its text fixed, orthodox principles of inclusion and exclusion were reformulated throughout the ensuing historical periods—the period of Geonim in Babylonia (7th–11th centuries CE), and the period of the Rishonim (11th–15th centuries CE) (Kelner 1986; Sorotzkin 2019), in accordance with the regional context. Although after the period of Geonim, there was an absence of an institutionalized religious center equivalent to the church in Christianity, local rabbinic centers were developing, and practicing power, in accordance with universal orthodox principles and practices, articulated in the Talmud, and shared a broad common denominator.

Alongside these principles, medieval interreligious polemics in both Christian and Muslim lands provided a broad foundation for shaping of rabbinic orthodoxy. In the polemical frameworks that flourished in these regions, Rabbinic Judaism was defined as a deviation from the written Torah, stemming from distortion, falsification, or blindness that prevent the Jews from seeing the religious truth.4 The various attacks on Rabbinic Judaism targeted its various literary and ritual focal points—Talmudic law (“halakhah”), lore (“aggadah”), and custom (“minhag”)5—and endured for centuries. In the face of these attacks, the prolonged processes of canonization and orthodoxization intensified within Rabbinic Judaism.

In sum, from this perspective, the formation of rabbinic orthodoxy and, eventually, of Ḥaredi Judaism is rooted in prolonged historical processes in which the Rabbinic canon (all parts of the Talmud, halakhic and non-halakhic), legal codes (culminating in Shulḥan Arukh, its commentaries, and its successors), and Jewish custom (including distinct norms of behavior and dress) were socially regulated and sanctified. These three elements were all seen by Christians as “scales” that blind the Jews, causing them to distort the meaning of the Torah text and preventing them from recognizing the Christian truth. Subsequently, all these elements solidified as rigid religious dogma for Jews.

3.2. The Fundamentals of Ḥaredi Judaism: Asceticism and Social Disciplining

The second factor, which is intertwined with the first factor, is the emergence of Jewish models of asceticism in the Middle Ages and their subsequent spread. This process began with the appearance of a rabbinic strain of the Jewish pietistic (“mussar”) literature in the 13th century (Dan 1975; Tishby and Dan 1970). This literature developed in parallel to the codification of halakhah and also complemented and strengthened it—starting with the cornerstone of halakhic codification, Maimonides’s code, Mishneh Torah, composed at the last quarter of the 12th century, continuing with subsequent codificatory projects like Rabbi Shlomo ben Adret (Rashba)’s Torat Ha-Bayit and Rabbi Ya’akov ben Asher’s Sefer Ha-Turim in the 13th and 14th centuries, and culminating with Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulḥan Arukh (“Set Table”) in the 16th century. During this period, halakhah, rabbinic ethics, and voluntary religious conduct gradually coalesced into a complex social fabric, which gradually spread out from rabbinic centers and penetrated the surrounding social peripheries.

This amalgamation occurred along three primary parallel and complementary tracks: (1) the codification track, described above, which funneled toward Shulḥan Arukh and its commentaries, reworkings, and abridgments; (2) the popularization track; and (3) the ethical track.

Popularization is a process by which normative commandments are applied to increasingly large segments of the population. The vehicles for popularization were primarily the literary works that enumerate the 613 commandments, expand the realm of their application, assert their control over daily life, and make them accessible to the masses, as well as the Oraḥ Ḥayim section (lit. “Way of Life”; the section that codifies laws concerning daily observance, the Sabbath, and holidays) of Shulḥan Arukh.

The ethical track refers to the rabbinic mussar literature, which integrates the demands of personal and public ethics with normative religious demands, as mediated by the Rabbinic Jewish public leadership in various places.

All three of the tracks were developed and refined in the modern era by means of the modern branches of halakhic literature, the literature that enumerates the commandments, mussar literature, and behavioral manuals containing guidance and instruction. As we will further see in this article, these popular branches of literature, especially from the 17th century on, reflected and shaped central aspects of the emergent Ḥaredi Judaism.

There is no contradiction in asserting that these same tracks reflect the penetration of early modern European behavioral mechanisms into the Jewish societies, and their consolidation in a framework of a social discipline that would eventually characterize the emerging middle class. From this vantage point, Ḥaredism emerges as the radicalization of the ascetic and disciplinary framework that underlies bourgeois society. It follows that Ḥaredism is linked both to religious self-segregation and to the processes of religious rationalization and secularization. These two effects—segregation on one hand and religious rationalization and secularization on the other—sometimes converge and sometimes diverge. To the first effect, segregation, I have devoted other works. In this article, I will focus mainly on the second effect.

The term “bourgeoisie” requires clarification, as it can refer to a variety of social groups in different places and historical phases (Dejung et al. 2019, pp. 8–10; Seigel 2012, pp. 4–6). My current use of the term relates to absorption of rules, norms, tastes, forms of behaviors, and, more generally, to the disciplining of the body and the self, the control of emotions, the arrangement of labor and of leisure, and of the production of public and private spaces, inter alia, as forms of gender power relations. All these elements played a central role in the development of Ḥaredism.

These elements are related, at least in some respects, to state formation and its assertion of a monopoly on violence, and to the history of customs and manners, included in Norbert Elias’s notion of “the civilizing process” (Elias [1937] 1978). This process includes the molding of uniform taste, custom, and etiquette in their various forms, i.e., the formation of behavioral and emotional patterns that moved gradually toward self-discipline, self-control, and restraint.6 These features were further articulated in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as “the tastes and distastes, sympathies and aversions, fantasies and phobias which, more than declared opinions, forge the unconscious unity of a class” (Bourdieu [1979] 1996, p. 77).

A major limitation of Elias’s analysis is that it ignores the role of religious change in state formation and in the social transformation of European society (Turner 1993, p. 110); furthermore, his “theory does not provide any adequate account of the role of religion in controlling human violence” (Turner 2004, pp. 250, 251–57; Linklater and Mennell 2010, pp. 405–6), and lacks perspective on variability, development of constructs, and modernization within the boundaries of religion. This, too, implies the need to reassess the sociological paradigm for understanding civilizing processes within the broader contexts of the history of behavior and discipline in Judaism, while demonstrating awareness of the boundaries and limitations of the framework suggested by Elias.7

Focusing on the relationship between Ḥaredism and the modern social engineering of Jewish societies will illustrate the religious infrastructure underlying Foucault’s (1977) notion of disciplinary society—that is, the means and mechanisms by which Judaism emerged as a disciplinary social system and how it was reinvented as “a synaptic regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than from above it” (Foucault 1981, p. 39). In order to analyze the social disciplining of European Jewry, I will use a synthesis and reassessment of Weber’s work on the ascetic and disciplinary infrastructure of modern society, Elias’s work on self-discipline and history of conduct and manners, and Foucault’s work, on the mechanisms of power and control which operate from within the social body (O’Neill 1986; Van Krieken 1989; Turner 1993, pp. 203–8; Gorski 2003, pp. 22–34). A reassessment of Weber’s conception of Judaism will be presented further below.

Gorski (2003, p. 32) distinguished between four types of social discipline that characterize the confessional era: self-discipline, corrective discipline, communal discipline, and judicial or institutional discipline. He further noted that “normative and individual forms of disciplining are … more intensive than coercive and social forms because rules that are voluntary accepted are more likely to be obeyed”. This type of discipline is carried out through the internalization of rules and conduct by the subject themselves. Gorski emphasized the importance of “disciplining from below” in a disciplinary revolution led mainly by church representatives, and less by agents of the state. These distinctions are relevant for Jewish disciplining processes as well. Unlike instances in Western Christianity, Judaism was not organized under the umbrella of a confessional state, but underwent processes of religious and social disciplining “from below”, that is, by means of normative and individual forms of discipline that developed through religious, voluntary, both individual and communal, self-imposed norms, rules, and forms of conduct.

3.3. Historical Periodization and Significant Points of Reference

For the purposes of the present discussion and analysis, I chose points in time that will illustrate the periodization suggested and model the processes described herein. These points demonstrate a clear timeline for organizing the ensuing discussion. I do not address them proportionally; some are addressed at length while others not.

As the starting point I chose 1601, the year that Sefer Ḥaredim was published in Venice. This book outlines the meaning of Ḥaredim, both as a concept and as a religious phenomenon.

Another significant point of reference for this analysis is 1648–1649, the years that the book Shenei Luḥot Ha-Berit (“The Two Tablets of the Covenant”, often abbreviated “Shelah”) was first published, in Amsterdam. This work was composed by Rabbi Yeshayah Horowitz, a Bohemian rabbi who served in two of the most important communities in the Old Reich—Frankfurt am Main and Prague—and towards the end of his life moved to Palestine. It is one of the most important, oft-printed (the book itself and its abridgements, in Hebrew and Yiddish) and influential works vis-à-vis the religious engineering and class formation of European Jewry in the modern era. The publication date of Shelah coincides with the Cossack uprising in Ukraine (1648–1649), which signifies the beginning of the demographic movement of Jews westward from eastern Europe, and with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which concludes the confessional age. The importance of this work to the development of both Ḥaredism and the Jewish bourgeoisie will be demonstrated below.

Three other temporal reference points will feature in this analysis. The first is 1745, the year in which Rabbi Yaakov Emden (d. 1776) published his commentary on the prayer book. Emden, who lived most of his life in Altona, Hamburg, is another important rabbinic figure who represents the common processes that produced both Ḥaredi Judaism and the Jewish bourgeoisie and Haskalah. The last years of his life and the decade after his death coincide with the emergence of three major movements of modern Judaism: Haskalah, Ḥasidism, and Lithuanian opposition to Ḥasidism, all in which emerged in various stages, figures, and trends that followed Emden’s complex ideology and public activity.

The second reference point centers on the years 1810–1814. 1810 is the publication date of Rabbi Avraham Danzig’s major work, Ḥayei Adam; Danzig was an extremely influential popularizer of Shulḥan Arukh and, as I will claim, a key figure in the social spread of Ḥaredism in greater Lithuania. 1814 is the publication date of parts of Shulḥan Arukh Ha-Rav, by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Ḥabad Ḥasidism. According to the declaration of the author`s sons, this project, meant to popularize halakhah and make it accessible, was undertaken at the instruction of the Magid of Mezerich, the disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who transformed Ḥasidism into a popular movement.

The third reference point centers on the years 1840–1849, in which Rabbi Israel Lipkin (Salanter), the founder of the Lithuanian mussar movement, moved to Vilna, became a head of the Ramailes yeshivah (Talmdudic academy), and started to spread his doctrine (Etkes 1993, pp. 108–34). Towards the end of the essay, I will demonstrate how Salanter also provides a clear example of the common social and behavioral basis on which the modern Jewish movements were shaped. Salater’s death date (1883) bears additional significance because it coincides with the pogroms against Russian Jewry and the organization of the early national societies of Ḥovevei Zion (1882).

As an end date I chose 1933, the death year of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Ha-Kohen of Radun (the “Ḥafetz Ḥayim”), probably the most universally accepted and popular figure in 20th century Ḥaredi Jewry (Brown 2017b, p. 105). In 1933 the Nazis seized power in Germany, and this was followed, during the next decade, by the destruction of the European Jewish centers and the establishment of the State of Israel (1948). The State of Israel represents a new phase and mutation of Ḥaredism, owing to the formation of the status of Orthodoxy within the state, financial support for Ḥaredi institutions, and phenomena like migration, nationalization, regulation, and religious institutionalization. Discussion of this phase is very important, and it is being done largely by others (for example: Friedman 1991; Brown 2017a, 2021). Its treatment lies outside the purview of the present article.

Within this date range and the historical developments it encompasses, the ideological, social, and behavioral functions—Ḥaredism, Haskalah, and Nationalism—stand as three phases in the shaping of the modern Jewish societies: the ascetic and disciplinary phase (the shaping of Ḥaredism), the bourgeois phase (the shaping of Haskalah), and the national phase. These phases function both diachronically and synchronically. That is, one phase does not eliminate the earlier phase, rather, they coexist in a state of prolonged, complex symbiosis.

The period under discussion parallels, inter alia, the rise of absolutism and enlightened absolutism, the development of early modern capitalism and the so called “mercantile” state economy, the political revolutions in England, France, and America, and eventually Industrialization and massive urbanization. From the latter part of the 17th century, there was a steadily increasing migration of Jews westward from eastern Europe, mainly to German-speaking lands (Shulvass 1971), and at the end of the 18th century, the largest Jewish population in the world—Polish Jewry—came under the rule of three centralized empires—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—and became rapidly politicized. This politicization imposed new identity structures on the Jewish diaspora, including religious, class and national structures (Sinkoff 2004; Bartal 2006; Batnizky 2011). However, these structures were imposed atop older foundations, which shaped Jewish society in central and eastern Europe during the preceding centuries. It is these religious tendencies that are the focus of this article.

The reason that I use the term “Ḥaredism” to index and map a range of phenomena, some of which are located in the early modern era, stems from the strict religious character of the processes that I describe and the constitutive connections I find between Ḥaredism and other modern identities. Religion, and the changes that took place within it, is fundamental to the development of Jewish and Christian identities in early modern Europe. Ḥaredism, on the other hand, as the descriptor of a distinct social group, gives expression to the processes of religious disciplining and social engineering that European Jewry underwent over the course of centuries. Since these processes preceded the creation of secularist ideologies and even laid the groundwork for the growth and differentiation of modern Jewish movements at later stages, and since the adjective Ḥaredim, which in the course of time became a noun, obtained its definition, its religious phenomenology, and a significant part of its features and nuances in the 17th and 18th centuries, I maintain that, through it, we can open a window into the consolidation of modern Jewish societies as a whole.

I will now turn to describe the popularization of Jewish pietistic (mussar) and Jewish legal (halakhic) literature, which led to the entry of Ḥaredi trends into ever-expanding segments of the population between the 17th and 19th centuries.

4. Literary Genres and Individual and Social Disciplining

4.1. Pietistic Literature as the Basis for the Routinization of Strict Ritual Models in Modern Judaism

The medieval Jewish pietistic literature created an ascetic model, at the center of which, inter alia, was the concept of frugality (lit. “being content with less”), dedication of one’s action to the Creator, reliance on faith, and avoidance of—or at least equanimity toward—the accumulation of wealth. A major expression of this trend is Rabbi Baḥya Ibn Paquda’s Ḥovot Ha-Levavot (Duties of the Heart) composed in Arabic as Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub at the last quarter of the 11th century, and markedly influenced by Sufism (Lobel 2006). It was translated into Hebrew by Yehudah Ibn Tibbon in 1161 (Ibn Paquda 2003). The uniqueness of this work and its significant historical impact stem from its central claim, namely, that in addition to the commandments incumbent upon every Jew, of which, according to Talmudic tradition, there are a set number (613), there are innumerable commandments that depend on the heart and mind. The aspiration to impose sanctity, by means of the heart and the mind, over all human motion is central to the work. However, the ways of the heart are hidden, whereas performance of the commandments is visible to all. Therefore, over time, an amalgamation was formed between Ḥovot Ha-Levavot and popular halakhic and pietistic literature focused on observance of the commandments. This produced a new, stricter ascetic trend: the tendency toward maximal application of the details of the commandments in daily Jewish life and aspiration to fulfill every different halakhic opinion.

From the beginning of Hebrew printing, Ḥovot Ha-Levavot was reprinted many times, whether in its initial translated version or abridged versions, and it had major influence on the shaping of Ḥaredi societies, which inclines toward maximalist application of the commandments in daily life, beyond what is required by the letter of halakhah. This can be discerned from the numerous references to the work by central historical figures from Rabbinic and Ḥaredi Judaism, from the abridgements of it, and from demands to study it routinely and cyclically.8

4.2. Mussar: The Rabbinic Pietistic Literature

Ḥovot Ha-Levavot is one of the most important and influential representatives of the philosophical, mystical strain of pietistic literature, which preceded the earliest examples of the rabbinic strain of pietistic literature—the mussar literature—by over 200 years, as the latter developed only in the 13th century (Dan 1975; Tishby and Dan 1970). The difference between these two variants is that the philosophical pietistic literature deals with the individual’s control over his mental states and desires, whereas the rabbinic mussar literature, which took shape primarily in the wake of the writings of Rabbi Yonah Gerondi in the 13th century, used the accomplishments of the first strain, especially as regards self-training and discipline, and harnessed them to shape the religiosity of increasingly large groups. In my view, this is one of the ways by which medieval rabbinic centers imposed a religion of normative commandments on non-rabbinic social strata and peripheries (Sorotzkin 2019, pp. 140–43). The 13th century is indeed a very important turning point for all that pertains to the history of the literature of Jewish conduct and mussar. It is linked both to the reshaping of the rabbinate in this period, sometimes based on new rabbinic elites, and to the engineering of the religiosity of Jewish communities, primarily in Iberia, the Rhineland, and northern France. This engineering was based both on formal means—through communal reforms and regulations—and on voluntary and educational means, via new literary genres that address the emerging and consolidating urban population. During the ensuing centuries, the rabbinic mussar literature, with its different branches, became the dominant strain of Jewish pietistic literature.

4.3. Enumerating the Commandments

One of the most significant turns in the development of rabbinic mussar literature and codes of conduct is the genre of minyan ha-mitzvot, enumeration of the commandments. The popular potential of describing the duties of the Jew by means of a concise explanation of each of the 613 commandments allowed this genre to penetrate increasingly large swathes of the population over the duration of a centuries-long process. The minyan ha-mitzvot literature goes back to the Geonic era in the work Halakhot Gedolot, but it gained a good deal of momentum from the influence of Maimonides’s Sefer Ha-Mitzvot (“The Book of Commandments”; 12th century)—which formed the basis of his codificatory project, Mishneh Torah—and Naḥmanides’s objections to it (13th century). Ashkenazic exemplars of this genre include Sefer Yere’im, written by the Tosafist Rabbi Eliezer of Metz (northern France) in the 12th century. Rabbi Elazar Azikri mentions Sefer Yere’im in Sefer Ḥaredim, and apparently took inspiration from the earlier work when naming his own book.9 Starting in the 13th century, this literary genre mutated and turned toward popular channels. In my view, the main reason for this was because of an increasing need for normative Jewish education for the urban Jewish population during one of the peak eras of urban culture in Europe. The primary manifestations of the popularization of the literature of enumerating the commandments are Rabbi Moshe of Coucy’s Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (“The Large Book of Commandments”; abbreviated as “Semag”), composed in northern France in the 1240s (Galisnky 2011); Sefer Mitzvot Katan (“The Small Book of Commandments”; abbreviated as “Semak”) by Rabbi Yitzḥak of Corbeil (d. 1280), which was based on Semag, but is shorter and more popular, and the popular works of Rabbi Yonah Gerondi of Catalonia and Castille, especially Sha’arei Teshuvah (“Gates of Repentance”), Sefer Ha-Yir’ah (“The Book of Fear”), and Igeret Ha-Teshuvah (“Epistle on Repentance”). These last works are not enumerations of the commandments in the strict sense, but they certainly classify the commandments and had significant influence over the genre, and in particular over Sefer Ḥaredim. The anonymous, late-13th century Catalonian Sefer Ha-Ḥinukh (“The Book of Education”), composed by a member of Naḥmanides’s circle (Naḥmanides and Gerondi were cousins), should also be mentioned (Ta-Shma 2004, pp. 196–201). During the 14th century, the enumeration of commandments genre entered into Zoharic literature as independent units, and with the collection, printing, and canonization of Zohar in the 16th century (Huss 2016), this trend was reinforced from that angle as well. From the 17th through 19th centuries, the enumeration of commandments genre became very significant for the formation and spread of Ḥaredi types of asceticism, which is strict about observing the commandments generally and in all their minute detail, and it further penetrated non-rabbinic strata of society. Sefer Ḥaredim, which was composed in Safed after the decline of the Jewish centers in Western Europe, can be located within this framework. It gave this trend a new name—Ḥaredim—and pushed for its routinization within Jewish society.

4.4. Ḥaredim, a Social Clarification: From Safed to Central and Eastern Europe

Even as scholarship has adhered closely to the reactionary model of Orthodoxy, which posits the development of Ḥaredism as a reaction to secularization and reformist religious movements, it has neglected a more critical question: How did the social construction of Ḥaredi society, which was comprised mainly of a non-rabbinic laity, come about? The prevailing assumption among scholars of Ḥaredism views pre-Orthodox society as a “traditional society” and takes its religiosity as self-evident. However, this assumption does not withstand critical scrutiny. Religious societies are shaped by epochal processes, and each of them manifests layers and infrastructure that are distinct from subsequent stages—for instance, urbanization in medieval society and confessionalization in Christian societies in the early modern period. These processes find expression in European Jewish societies as well, which are reorganized accordingly.

I will posit that the development of Jewish individual and social forms of asceticism and disciplining, which have their medieval roots in Ashkenaz (Rhineland and northern-France) and Sepharad (Iberian Jewry and its diaspora), are at the center of the processes that I describe herein. They were channeled to individuals and voluntary societies from families that had been expelled from Iberia and who settled in 16th century Safed (in the Upper Galilee, Palestine). There, the concept of Ḥaredim emerged, and these forms of asceticism were reworked and reorganized in light of the print era, that is, they became a basis for broader mass education than there had been in medieval communities. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ḥaredi asceticism percolated into European Jewish society by means of mussar literature and behavioral manuals, which were printed and reprinted numerous times, complete and abridged works that enumerate the commandments, and popular works that made Shulḥan Arukh accessible to the masses by reworking or abridging it. This process lasted for c. 200 years (1600–1800), so by the beginning of the 19th century, it had penetrated broad strata of society. The figures associated with its penetration of society are central figures in both Lithuanian and Ḥasidic circles.

4.5. Ḥaredim, a Conceptual Clarification: From Sefer Ḥaredim to Rabbi Avraham Danzig

Thus far I have offered general definitions of Ḥaredism as a developing historical phenomenon. At present I wish to clarify the adjective “Ḥaredim”, its origins, and its connections to the social dynamics that are bound up with it. To this day, there has been no thorough historical or conceptual scholarly study of the evolution of the concept “Ḥaredim” prior to its entrenchment in the 19th century as one of two main terms used to describe uncompromising religious groups within Jewish society: “Ḥaredim” (lit. “those who tremble” [before God]) and “Yere’im” (“those who fear” [God]).

Let us briefly examine the evolutions of the term “Ḥaredim”. The origin of the adjective “ḥaredim” is, of course, in Isaiah 66, 5: “Hear the word of the Lord, ye that tremble at his word”,10 and in Ezra 10, 3: “and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God”. In 1601, Sefer Ḥaredim—the “Book of Ḥaredim”—was first published in Venice. Its author, Rabbi Elazar Azikri, was from a Sephardic family that settled in Safed after the expulsion from Spain. After meticulously examining the book, I realized that most expressions of the adjective “Ḥaredim” and the phenomenon “Ḥaredism” draw respectively upon the author’s definition of the essence of “ḥared” (fearful, anxious) and “ḥaradah” (anxiety, trepidation, dread). In this work, the author overwhelms the reader with the image of God waving a bloody sword over the head of a believer who is lax in the particular, meticulous, and dense observance of the commandments in all their details (Azikri 1601, p. 4). The book contains a demand for strict, maximalist application of the commandments and the satisfaction of all the different opinions about which commandments are enumerated among the 613. I also found that the reception of Sefer Ḥaredim, and the individuals responsible for its distribution and the distribution of its abridgement, played a critical role in the social crystallization of Ḥaredism.

In other words, Sefer Ḥaredim is a milestone in the formation of the abstractions: Who is a ḥared? What behavior is entailed by Ḥaredim? Sefer Ḥaredim and the concept of Ḥaredim spread and influence central rabbinic figures. Among these figures are Rabbi Yeshayah Horowitz (1555–1630) of Frankfurt am Main and Prague, who I will address at greater length below, Rabbi Yosef Yuspa Hahn Nordlingen (1570–1637) of Frankfurt am Main, whose work, Yosef Ometz, which was published about a century after its author’s death, models all of the processes described here, and testify to their manifestation in the pietistic societies of Frankfurt. Evidently Frankfurt is a key location in the social consolidation of Ḥaredism in early modern Europe, from Horowitz and Nordlingen to Rabbi Moshe Sofer (1762–1839), the “Ḥatam Sofer” (Katz [1968] 1998; Kahana 2015), and Nordlingen’s work is worthy of its own discussion; and Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748–1820) of Vilnius (Vilna). Let us, first, review Danzig’s role in the social spread of Ḥaredism.

Danzig is a key figure in the spread of Ḥaredism in the 19th century, both as a concept and as a lifestyle offered to the public. He was one of the most important popularizers of Shulḥan Arukh. He married his son to a granddaughter of Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (the “Vilna Gaon” or the “Gra”, 1720–1797), and was close to the latter’s circle and disciples. Rabbi Ḥayim ben Yitzḥak of Volozhin, one of the most important disciples of the Vilna Gaon and the founder of the modern, Lithuanian-style yeshivah, wrote a rare approbation to one of Danzig’s major works, Ḥokhmat Adam. Danzig’s books became extremely popular, and small groups of laymen who studied Ḥayei Adam together—called Ḥayei Adam Societies—spread throughout greater Lithuania. In short, Danzig’s works had an extraordinary influence over 19th century’s formation of Ḥaredi society in greater Lithuania. Danzig also frequently mentions Sefer Ḥaredim in his writings, and he even abridged it for popular distribution (Danzig [1817] 1993). In his will he commanded his sons to read the whole abridgement throughout the thirty days of mourning (Danzig [1847] 2012, p. 17). The popularizing trend implicit within Danzig’s writings joins the emergence of the super-regional Lithuanian yeshivah, and the activities of hundreds of community rabbis (Zalkin 2020), in sketching a holistic picture of the components of a Ḥaredi society comprised of both Torah scholars and a broader public. This is an important historical moment in the crystallization of Lithuanian Ḥaredism in the early 19th century, which must be linked to longer processes that preceded this moment and continued afterward.

Danzig’s role in the spread of Ḥaredism has not yet been recognized in the scholarly literature. However, he was one of the most important figures in the spread of Ḥaredi ethics and lifestyle to broad strata of common society—laymen and adolescents (Danzig [1817] 1993, pp. 16–17).11 Additionally, both Danzig and Sefer Ḥaredim had a strong influence on one of the most important figures in the production and spread of the Ḥaredi lifestyle in the 20th century: Rabbi Yisrael Meir Ha-Kohen of Radun (1838–1933), the author of Mishnah Berurah (1884–1907),12 who was known as the “Ḥafetz Ḥayim” after he published a popular mussar work of that name. Evidently, the Ḥafetz Ḥayim was introduced to Danzig’s works as an adolescent in Vilna, was profoundly influenced by them, and made frequent use of them in his own books.

As mentioned, I see in Ḥaredi ethics, asceticism, and practice, and in their penetration of ever-widening strata of Jewish society in the modern era, a cornerstone and platform for the formation of modern Jewish societies, classes and movements that flourished in its wake. To further advance this argument, I will reassess Weber’s work on the ascetic and disciplinary infrastructure of modern society and address how this assessment can be understood and applied to the context of early modern Jewry.

5. Reassessing Weber’s Conceptions of Asceticism and Judaism

Max Weber identified the ascetic religious impulse standing behind rationalization and secularization. Weber affixed modern social structures within a model that he metaphorically called the “iron cage”, an expression for the social scaffolding that had been emptied of its dependence on the religious content that created it, and which operated primarily on its bureaucratic, and structural elements (Weber [1920] 1992, pp. 123–25). Weber’s conception of modernity relies on his description of rationalization, which expresses, inter alia, the neutralization of magical elements (“the disenchantment of the world”), the distinction between the public and private sphere, and the consolidation of social systems that rely on discipline, order, ramified bureaucracy, and tight control of daily life (Weber [1922] 1978, pp. 399–634, 641–900). At the same time, Weber promoted the (mistaken) conception of modernity as the era in which the status of religion was gradually but systematically undermined and divorced from the public sphere (Casanova 1994; Berger 1999).

The primary agents of the change of mentality associated with economic rationalization and “disenchantment” Weber found in “Protestant asceticism”, which included Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism, and Baptism. At the center of his analysis of the sources of capitalism (Weber [1920] 1992, [1922] 1978), Weber posited a unique type of religious ethic, based on an ascetic attitude oriented toward the world (“innerweltliche askese”). This type of asceticism actualizing the religious impulse through inner-worldly actions. This orientation is set up in opposition to the medieval monastic asceticism whose orientation is other-worldly (“ausserweltliche askese”). In addition to an ethic of scrupulous frugality, the various Protestant trends based their mentality of methodical labor and accumulation and preservation of property on a fatalistic conception about the destiny of Christians and on the idea of the Elect. Weber viewed this religious typology as constituting the main features of bourgeois consciousness—which sparked the growth of modern capitalism.

5.1. The Jews and Modern Capitalism: Weber, Sombart and Jacob Katz

It is well known that since Weber’s thesis was first published,13 many critics have arisen to question and undermine its various components, such as the causal relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, the degree to which the ethic that Weber outlined characterized Protestant trends specifically, and the extent to which the spirit of capitalism is the product of an abrupt change that began in the early modern period. One of the earliest critiques of Weber’s thesis was articulated by Werner Sombart in 1911, in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (translated to English as The Jews and modern capitalism. Sombart [1911] 2015). He claimed that the inner-worldly ascetic ethic that Weber addressed is characteristic of Judaism specifically, and that the Jews, not the Puritans, should be seen as the main source for the emergence and spread of capitalism. This ascetic typology, in his view, has long served as the foundation of Jewish practice and halakhic texts. Lately this view has been resurrected and revised somewhat in the works of Slezkine (2004) and Seigel (2012).

Weber, on his part, first described Judaism, in the 1905 edition of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as “traditional” and not as “rational”. However, in the 1920 edition, Weber partially accepted the view of Sombart and claimed, in a direct response, that “Jewish capitalism was speculative pariah-capitalism, while the Puritan was bourgeois organization of labour” (Weber [1920] 1992, pp. 243–5, n. 58; Abraham 1992; Barbalet 2006).

The influential Israeli social historian Jacob Katz accepted several of Weber’s perspectives regarding traditional Jewish society (Katz [1958] 1993, pp. 59–62). These descriptions assisted Katz, inter alia, in his rejection of Sombart. Katz claimed that in Judaism, wealth serves only as a means to a religious end and that the accumulation and consumption of wealth should not become ends in themselves. Katz further claimed that the obligation to set aside time to study Torah prevented the development of a capitalist economic approach. The commandment to study Torah, per Katz, occupied all of a person’s remaining time once he has provided for his physical needs and fulfilled his other religious duties. This characterization helped Katz establish his view of early modern Jewish society as a “traditional society” that did not undergo modernization prior to the emergence of the Haskalah in the 18th century, and which did not significantly take part in the modern reorganization of the state economy, the subject, and money. To this view of Katz, we must add his view of orthodox Judaism as a post-traditional phenomenon, which was founded as a reaction to the reform movement in the 19th century (Katz 1986). Our discussion herein demonstrates that orthodoxy and Ḥaredism have a broader and more comprehensive role in the founding of modern Judaism.

5.2. Shifting the Perspective: The Organization of the Jews within the Framework of Modern Religion

In my opinion, the difference between money as a means and money as an end is razor-thin, and it is hard to base a substantive distinction about economic activity on it. Instead, we may address the relationship between religious ideology and practice and the accumulation of capital, for whatever purpose. In addition, we can sharpen the broader historical perspective, missing from Katz’s analysis, regarding early modern Jewry (Israel 1998; Ruderman 2010; Sorotzkin 2011). This era must be examined within a framework of Jewish modernization without positing any causal or essential link to the problem of the origins of capitalism. “Weber’s error stems essentially from his exaggeration of capitalism’s role as promoter of the modern world” (Braudel 1979, p. 67). Alternatively, we may address the new systematic organization of the Jews within the framework of modern religion, and the place of individual ethics therein. These were tightly linked to the religiofication of early modern European Jewry, and simultaneously to economic and cultural modernization and secularization. World-oriented asceticism creates a discernible connection between religious practice and a rational mentality based on the disciplining of daily life.

As noted, a portrait of the religiofication of society in early modernity emerges clearly from the study of Christianity. In the early Modern era, religions in Europe penetrated additional social strata, and the religious-political communities (confessions) that spread in the wake of the Reformation and wars of religion represent a greater consolidation (“de-differentiation”) between the political apparatus, the social and the religious (Gorski 2000). Western Christianity had been altered, reorganized, rearranged, routinized, and applied to larger populations, given the confessional-political institutionalization of the various churches. These processes reshaped religion in connection with the new organization of society and state and they are foundational to the shaping of the modern individual, who was to become the law-abiding citizen. At the same time, the consolidation of state, church, and society in the early modern period advanced secularization, as religion was becoming a vehicle by which the state controlled and designed its subjects.

As it emerges from the discussion presented here, in Jewish societies, social–clerical consolidation is linked, inter alia, through the imposition of normative, commandment-oriented Judaism over increasing segments of the population and through the formation of a horizontal, synchronic Jewish consciousness with super-regional manifestations—initially, in the late medieval era, among relatively limited elites, and gradually, beginning in the early modern period, among larger populations.

The formation of collective and individual religion in early modernity also gives historical meaning to the term “orthodoxy”, within Judaism and Christianity alike, as an expression of a new form of religious organization against a backdrop of political, collective, centralizing, and behavioral processes. A comparative tracking of these processes within the Jewish literatures of halakhah, mussar, and proper conduct allows us to identify the close links between the shaping of the modern individual—the subject—and the emergence of Ḥaredi trends within European Judaism.

6. Sacralization and Secularization

I will turn now to clarifying my use of the term “asceticism”. There are, I posit, two types of modern Jewish asceticism: positive and negative. With respect to the positive type of asceticism and is function within Judaism, it is necessary to amend the various views articulated by Weber ([1920] 1992); Sombart ([1911] 2015); and later Katz ([1958] 1993).

I characterize positive asceticism using the term “sacralization”, that is, the application of the realm of the sacred to the profane or mundane realm and the broadening of its significance, inter alia, by sanctifying private and communal spheres, social and professional interactions, and economic activity. This trend and its social implications have not yet been described in context of the discussion of the history and sociology of religion and class formation in Judaism, even though it is characteristic of several major branches of modern Jewish society. This application of the sacred realm to the profane also constitutes psychological and social preparation for world-oriented activism. Under certain conditions, examples of which will be given below, it can be an incentive to take positive economic action and accumulate capital.

Another matter that must be clarified vis-à-vis positive and negative asceticism: both configurations can be modern to the same degree. Not only positive asceticism, but even negative asceticism, which negates the accumulation of property, but sanctifies various other aspects of mundane life. To clarify: when speaking of models of modern asceticism, I mean models of asceticism that were cast in organized, methodical structures oriented toward social and textual entities. These entities underwent unification, dogmatization, and routinization due to the spread of print throughout the modern era. This process applied to positive and negative asceticism alike.

As mentioned, one of the central implications of modern Jewish asceticism is the consistent expansion of the realm of the sacred into the realm of the profane. That is, the sacred seeks to expand and swallow up every instantiation of the profane, and thus every aspect of daily life becomes subject to dense, demanding religious practice. This is how daily life underwent change and modernization internally, and how the modern structures of law, social disciplining, economy, and behavioral patterns were cast into them. This direction is a major focus of the literatures of mussar, codes of conduct, Ḥasidism, and even Lithuanian opposition to Ḥasidism. It represents the broad social and structural changes that European Jewry underwent between the 17th and 19th centuries. This direction also represents the major trend of secularization within Judaism, as I will briefly elaborate below.

In the next section, I will examine test cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, which will exemplify the social processes described thus far, and demonstrate how European Jewish ascetic religious trends both contained the essential elements of Ḥaredi Judaism and prefigured bourgeois economic and attitudinal trends.

7. Incorporating the Mundane into the Sacred: Test Cases

7.1. From Safed to Europe

The routinization of ascetic Jewish trends, including civilizing processes, occurs, as noted, by expanding the realm of the sacred into the realm of the mundane. From the perspective of simultaneous processes of religiofication and secularization, this is a sacralizing trend that includes the sacred with the mundane while shaping and engineering daily life. The main work that reflects the trend of imposing the sacred on the mundane is Shelah, by Yeshayah Horowitz. As mentioned, this work was first published in Amsterdam in 1648–1649, and was reprinted innumerable times thereafter, in different formats, complete and abridged, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Abridgments were an important vehicle for spreading strict, normative, commandment-oriented religiosity, among wider populations. The purpose of writing and distributing abridgments was to penetrate lower social strata, frequently comprised of non-urban populations, and to guide them through normative religious practices, simple pietistic ideas, and ascetic behavioral patterns. Within this framework, Shelah was extremely popular both in its original form and in its abridged version.14

The author, Horowitz, was a wealthy merchant, and toward the end of his life he moved from Prague to Palestine. However, even before his immigration to Palestine he was profoundly influenced by Safed mysticism and literature of mussar and proper conduct, mainly Rabbi Eliyahu De Vidas’s Reshit Ḥokhmah (first printed in Venice, 1579), among the most popular and oft-printed books of mussar and proper conduct, and by Sefer Ḥaredim (for example: Horowitz [1648–1649] 1992–2008, Sha’ar Ha-Otiyot, letter kuf, “Kedushah”). Horowitz further developed this literature, yet also deviated from it on certain key points. The deviation from the Safedian approach that Horowitz represents is connected, inter alia, with the trends that shaped the emerging bourgeoisie—trends that would eventually include both orthodox and non-orthodox movements. This deviation finds expression, inter alia, in the notion that every person, including Torah scholars, must make efforts to work and to accumulate and maintain wealth.15 This stance stands in strong contrast to the Safedian approach, which emphasized the values of poverty and devoting one’s life to Torah study, to the degree of completely ignoring work and advising Torah scholars to live off of handouts. De Vidas’s Reshit Ḥokhmah,16 mentioned above, represents this approach.17

The routinization of asceticism in Shelah and its penetration of mundane life is reflected, inter alia, in its explanation of the term “derekh eretz” (lit. “the way of the land”; manners and etiquette) in Sha’ar Ha-Otiyot (“The Gate of Letters”) of Shelah, and in the part of Shelah called “Masekhet Ḥullin” (lit. “The Tractate on the Non-Sacred”). In these contexts, Horowitz broadened the boundaries of the concepts “ḥullin” (the non-sacred; the profane, mundane) and “derekh eretz” and included them among elements with all-embracing, sacral significance. This expansive aspiration is articulated already in one of the units comprising the general introduction to Shelah:

Serving is primarily with the heart. So it is not sufficient for him to perform merely what he is commanded, namely, the 613 commandments that were explicitly spoken, but other virtues as well, which cannot be measured and quantified, and completely depend on the heart …. Therefore, the heart is sanctified in all ways; that the sacred requires purity goes without saying, but even the non-sacred (ḥullin) is handled with the purity reserved for the sacred, as Maimonides wrote (Chapter 5 of the Eight Chapters; Laws of Temperaments 3:3) regarding the verse, “In all your ways, know Him” (Proverbs 3:6).

(Horowitz [1648–1649] 1992–2008, vol. 1, Eser Ma’amarot, Introduction, 146)

In Horowitz’s words we find the synthesis that I pointed out in earlier sections: the service and worship of the heart, which draws on Ḥovot Ha-Levavot—a major influence on Horowitz, which he even abridged and printed as part of his work—is linked here to the enumeration of the commandments, which is likewise deeply embedded in Shelah. The resulting impulse is that a person seeks to impose more and more duties on himself. In this, we see an example of how the mental and behavioral matrix that underlies Ḥaredism is formed.

Horowitz’s contentions in this context exemplify well the expansive, inclusive basis of the literature of personal conduct more generally. It is not sufficient for the practitioner to perform the 613 explicit commandments; they are augmented by numerous practices that depend on the heart and that “cannot be measured or quantified” in order to sanctify one’s environment, body, and limbs—these are “the charitable virtues and the sanctity of the external limbs and internal organs”. Within this framework, even non-sacred, mundane matters, with all of the functions included in that category, must be undertaken “with the purity reserved for the sacred”. The even broader concept of “derekh eretz” is discussed in another section of the book:

Derekh eretz is practiced in three ways: One, in the perfection of a person’s conduct toward himself. Second, in the perfection of a person’s conduct in his home. Thirds, in the perfection of a person’s conduct toward others. In each of these ways, he conducts himself in accordance with three types of perfection, which include all forms of perfection, namely: monetary perfection, physical perfection, and spiritual perfection …

They [the sages] did not say this about this matter alone, but about every one of his actions. So too, with regard to his other organs: He must make his heart greater than his other organs, for the heart understands, and the brain, for it is the seat of thought. He should make them greater through the motion of his engagements, through their need to be clothed, through their purification, and the like …

He should have derekh eretz, that is, he should incline from the animalistic side to side of the intellect in his every action: in his eating, his drinking, and his business engagements, when attending to his needs, speaking, and walking, in his attire, in how he economizes his words, and in his negotiations. All of these actions should be exceedingly pleasant, refined, and arranged.

(Horowitz [1648–1649] 1992–2008, Sha’ar Ha-Otiyot, letter dalet, “Derekh Eretz”)

Horowitz indicates the expansion of the sacred to include business, attire, eating, drinking, speaking, and finances. A person’s entry into the world of action, which in a normal religious framework is conceived as a neutral, non-sacred realm, is described in Shelah as the infinite extension of the sacred.

In the same context, Horowitz quotes Maimonides’s Laws of Temperaments (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, 5:1–2), to which he adds “my own additions”. Maimonides’s words function as a basic text in Shelah, and the additions that Horowitz piles on to the original text reveal the processes that he articulated:

The little that he eats and drinks should be in cleanliness and purity. He should not eat anywhere but in his home, at his table, which should be set with a clean tablecloth. He should eat and drink unhurriedly, not gluttonously. He should eat nothing in a store or in the market. He should not eat or drink standing up. He should not sop up the remnants in the bowl or lick his fingers. He should not eat the entire dish in the bowl, but should leave a bit there, so that he does not look like a glutton.

(Horowitz [1648–1649] 1992–2008, Sha’ar Ha-Otiyot, letter dalet, “Derekh Eretz”)

The elements that Horowitz adds to Maimonides’s text clearly express the percolation of early modern civilizing processes: a clean tablecloth, not to lick the fingers, not to eat everything, and not to sop up the remnants. Interestingly, these additions had already been written in the late 14th century in Rabbi Israel Alnaqua’s Menorat ha-maor. This important text was not printed until much later, but some of its sections, including “Derekh Eretz”, were selected from the manuscript and copied into Rabbi Eliyahu De Vidas’s Reshit Ḥokhmah. However, in Alnaqua’s work, these instructions were directed to Torah scholars only. Thus, their implications for the sacralization of daily life in the 14th century was limited, while in Horowitz’s work they are directed to everyone, Torah scholars and laymen alike. In addition to these instructions, Horowitz also adds the demand for bodily cleanliness, including the removal of bad breath “so that he does not disgust people” (ibid.). He further emphasizes the cleanliness of the body, hair, mouth, and nose.

Through these passages, and many others, we can see the seams in the process of including the mundane into the sacred and the penetration of manners and etiquette into the Jewish world in the mid-17th century. During the 18th century, there was another leap, and the concepts of “derekh eretz” and the non-sacred came even closer to our notions of secularity and etiquette. To trace these processes, I examined the change in attitudes toward bodily discharges in public, and specifically toward spittle, splitting, and nose-wiping from the Babylonian Talmud, through medieval and early modern texts, to texts from the Enlightenment era (Sorotzkin 2011, pp. 304–9). Such an examination reveals the process through which demands that were internalized in the medieval era as proper conduct in the sanctified space of the synagogue—and only there—were gradually copied from the synagogue into the private and public spheres and into mundane life, reaching a climax in the age of Enlightenment. To them were added many other behaviors through which the civilization processes penetrated Jewish spheres.

From our discussion thus far, it can be shown that the literature of mussar and personal conduct was the primary carrier of these processes, which constituted, inter alia, an expression of secularization. As mentioned, this secularization occurred through sacralization, which, in this case, imposed the structures of the sacred realm on the non-sacred realm while disciplining and domesticating the non-sacred. Within this process of secularization, which takes place through the addition of practices and their imposition on realms that had been considered neutral, is, in one sense, unique to Jewish literature revolving around the ritual axis. The application of religious asceticism to mundane realms is thus portrayed as the main process by which individuals and groups are disciplined and domesticated, in order to produce one facet of the multifaceted individual, the modern, disciplined subject, which became the primary addressee of the modern state and the cultural frameworks that were formulated in context of it.

7.2. The Ḥaredi Basis of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie

The common processes that produced both Ḥaredi Judaism and the Jewish bourgeoisie are evident from an examination of 18th century German Jewry. A key figure who represents these trends is Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1697–1776). He was born to a pedigreed rabbinic family that wandered throughout Europe, and lived most of his life in Altona, Hamburg (Schacter 1988). Emden was one of the critical figures produced by German Jewry—one of the staunchest opponents of Sabbatianism and of the corruption that spread in the communities. For most of his life, he held no formal office. Nevertheless, his impact during and after his lifetime was immense.

Emden’s writings reflect the major economic changes that affected Germany in general, and its Jews in particular, in the 18th century, with the notable expansion of moderate and large trading. His writings are filled with economic contents and descriptions, be it his description of his own economic activities, those of his relatives, those of wealthy members of the community, or those of other contemporaries. His brazen autobiography, Megillat Sefer (Emden 1979), is extraordinarily rich in such descriptions, which appear in his other books and polemics against Sabbatianism and its offshoots as well (ibid., pp. 121–23, 187–88, 202–4, 221–22).

In Emden’s commentary on the prayer book, published in the 1740s (and republished many times thereafter), there is ample representation of all the processes I have described. This work gives us perspective on the distance covered during these years with respect to civilizing processes and the internalization of modern values of the physical, mental, and financial economy (Emden [1745] 1993, Moral Conduct and Etiquette at Meals, p. 948). Much of the contents of Emden’s prayer book concerning manners and proper conduct is similar to what remains familiar to us today—for instance, attitudes toward sneezing, saliva, spittle, nose-picking, yawning, hiccups, groaning, and making noises. The civilizing processes become especially prominent when comparing Emden’s treatment with earlier treatments of bodily discharges.

Emden’s prayer book represents the conclusion of the process by which regulations concerning bodily conduct and maximal observance of bodily cleanliness in the synagogue, were expanded to include non-sacred life and included in the framework of manners and etiquette denoted by the term “derekh eretz”. As we have seen, in Horowitz’s work, Shelah, the civilizing processes obtained sacral significance through the view that a person’s bodily movements, attire, mannerisms, and utensils must be pure and clean (“Bodily purity inspires spiritual purity”. Horowitz [1648–1649] 1992–2008, Sha’ar Ha-Otiyot, letter tet, “Taharah”). In Emden’s prayer book, the process is portrayed as a person duty toward his friends and himself, “for he was made in God’s image” (Emden [1745] 1993, Moral Conduct and Etiquette at Meals, p. 948). Here, the process through which the realm of the sacred and the synagogue was copied into the realm of the mundane and secular is expressed succinctly and explicitly: “The general rule is that one must be careful at a banquet, a gathering, or in human society about everything that one must be careful about when standing in prayer in the synagogue, for ‘great is human dignity’” (ibid.). Here, the non-sacred realm is already the social, cultural space familiar to us, in which innumerable practices are embedded. These are the numerous elements that form the bourgeois civilized individual.

7.3. Ḥaredism, Puritanism and Socioeconomic Rationalization

Emden’s writings are very rich with descriptions of the lifestyle, tastes, mentality, and culture of the Jews of his time. In his discussions of the various fashions that were common in Jewish society, Emden describes, with acute attention to detail, the material aspects and clothing styles of the different strata of Jewish society. In particular, he writes at length about features of their attire, the adoption of gentile customs, and the study of “outside” ( = non-Jewish) subjects. He calls this “gentile adornment and outside learning” (Emden [1745] 1993, Sha’arei Shamayim, p. 196). Emden even criticizes the aristocratic stratum of court Jews and wealthy community members who adopted the customs of the nobility and haute bourgeoisie: profligacy, foppishness, educating their children in French instead of Yiddish, and the study of music and dance. Here we find the isolationist impulse that characterizes Ḥaredism, which has a far longer genealogy. The parameters of separation from the decadent culture of courtesans are formulated in the negative and include elements like: the prohibition on cutting the beard or sidelocks, the prohibition on wearing colorful clothes, the duty to provide children with a separate Jewish education, the obligation to reside in separate urban areas, and the duty to speak the “Jewish” language—Yiddish. All these elements became cornerstones in defining Ḥaredism.

Emden’s prayer book reflects the sweeping inclusion of daily routine, bourgeoisie custom, and positive ascetic attitudes toward frugality, in addition to solidly Ḥaredi elements, with which there is no contradiction. It expresses the micromanagement of the entire cycle of life in a clearly Puritanical spirit. It internalizes the elements of social disciplining and economization of life, universal asceticism, and civilizing processes. The commentary on the prayer book, and the mussar work, Migdal Oz, appended to it, include all the components of civilization and asceticism found in Puritan literature, including that of enlightened authors like Benjamin Franklin, and express, in fact, the amalgamation of class and rational conduct that form the basis on which the Jewish middle class was established. For Emden, the rationalization of religion permeates most of relevant issues: the accumulation of money and the prohibition against wasting it; order; quiet and cleanliness; strong opposition to hedonism; and constricting disciplining of the body, sexuality, and the daily routine.

Here we may also mention the figure of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), a financial genius who catalyzed the development of modern finance with respect to credit, banking, and bonds. The figure of Rothschild, like that of Emden, fits many of the features mentioned by Weber ([1920] 1992) in his descriptions of Puritan rationality. Rothschild, a moneychanger from the Frankfurt Judengasse, the scion of a commercial family, said of himself in a Yiddish letter to his brother: “I do not read books; I do not play cards; I do not go to the theatre; my only pleasure is my business” (Rothschild 1816; Ferguson 2008, p. 79). Arendt (1973) addressed the traditionalist orientations of the Rothschilds (see also: Ferguson 1998), which brought them closer to the Orthodox temperament. She even accepted the Weberian description of Judaism as a pariah and developed it in her works. According to Arendt, the Rothschilds engaged in the preservation of a separatist Jewish identity, suited to their economic role, which deviated from the economic activity of the adjacent European bourgeoisie. Emden was born in Germany about 80 years before Rothschild, and he reflects similar dynamics. An analysis of his writings gives us an important vantage point for understanding the class-based mental infrastructure of German Jewry just prior to the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment and the establishment of the House of Rothschild.

Fine expressions of Emden’s aversion to any show of decadence or vanity can be found in many places in his writings, inter alia, in the scorn and criticism that he heaps on Wolf Eybeschutz, the son of his rival, the Sabbatian Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschutz (Emden [1752] 1877, pp. 26–27). Here, Emden’s clear antipathy toward Eybeschutz combines with his profound abhorrence of luxuries, idle matters, and vain coquetry. Over and over again, he repeats the assertion that Eybeschutz wastes money extravagantly and wantonly on worthless things, which alone attests to his corrupt character. Indeed, Emden’s attitude toward financial conduct fits with the austere ethos characteristic of Puritanism. In this, his approach was entirely opposed to the economic attitudes expressed in medieval ascetic works like Ḥovot Ha-Levavot and its abridgements, and like the Safed kabbalistic approaches that found expression, as noted, in the popular work Reshit Ḥokhmah. In his economic approach and in his attitudes toward the non-sacred and to derekh eretz, Emden fits within the trend that is manifest in Horowitz’s Shelah—a trend that opened a wide berth for rational economic activity.

Emden followed the approach of Horowitz in Shelah, but more than the latter, he emphasized not only the importance of work, but also the importance of accumulating money, fiscal austerity, and the prohibition on wastefulness. According to him, a person must safeguard his money and may not lose or waste it. He must not even lose something insignificant, all but worthless. Rather, he must save his money and bequeath it to his children (Emden [1745] 1993, Beit Netivot, Derekh Eretz Conduct and Business, p. 233). Emden’s approach to saving and accumulating money joins his aforementioned aversion to luxuries and criticism of aspects of vanity, profligacy, and wasting time on worthless things to sketch out the image of the Puritan bourgeoisie that spread throughout Europe and the New World during this period. The ascetic Protestant discipline spread its wings over the emergent Prussian state and shaped its various social and cultural institutions, from the family to the army, the bureaucracy, and, of course, the middle class (Gawthrop 1993). Emden thus emerges as an outstanding exemplar of these trends in a conflicted Jewish society that increasingly acquired quintessentially modern cultural and class features.

This concludes our profile of case studies. We will now show how the web of processes described drain into the forces affecting European Jewry in the 19th century and how modern Jewish ideological movements share a common disciplinary platform, even when they oppose one another vehemently.

8. Ideological Schisms in Late Modern Jewish Societies

8.1. The Partition of Poland

At the basis of the profound changes to European Jewish society in late modernity is the partition of Poland, one of the most important political events of the last decades of the 18th century. Poland, which contains the world’s largest Jewish population, was occupied and divided by three centralized empires: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Immediately following the first partition in 1772, and for the next hundred years, Polish Jewry became subject to innumerable political manipulations and legislation that reflected the political, economic, and demographic interests of the ruling empires and the changes they were undergoing. As a result of these events, the eastern European Jewish social body, as shaped during the early modern period, became politicized and splintered into different, competing ideological approaches.

The processes that took place within the scattered Jewish communities undergoing naturalization as citizens of states, gave rise to the class-based society and its originator—the bourgeoisie. The demand of Jews, made during the debates about emancipation and naturalization, to adopt bourgeois educational and behavioral norms was received on ground that had undergone prior social disciplining, as described earlier. The ideological rifts shaped the boundaries between the attitudes that would come to characterize the middle class and the Ḥaredi attitudes that both collaborated with them and competed against them. The basic bone of contention was the question of safeguarding Jewish tradition and the degree of educational autonomy of various communities. In practice, the bourgeoisie, with its different and sometimes contradictory trends, with its various mixtures of ascetic and disciplined structures, and with its underlying economy of spiritual and physical life, played a major role in shaping all modern European Jewish movements: Ḥaredim and adherents of Haskalah, Reform and Conservative Jews.

8.2. Ḥaredism and Haskalah: Social and Behavioral Similarities

The connections between the modern Jewish movements and the rise of class-based society have barely been studied in context of 19th century Jewish historiography, and the fragments of attention they have received do not form a complete historical picture. Scholarly research has tended to emphasize the products of Orthodoxy and Haskalah in contrast with one another, examining the spectrum of Jewish reactions to the “penetration” of the Jewish world by modernity. At the same time, the 19th-century Jewish bourgeoisie has been studied (Mahler 1985; Sorkin 1987, pp. 107–23; Kaplan 1991)—alongside the working class (Mendelsohn 1970)—as the direct result of processes like emancipation, acculturation, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization. The relationship between the early modern formation of the Jewish social-religious bodies, which absorbed customs and behavioral patterns, and the formation of Jewish bourgeoisie, has not been studied and has not even been raised for discussion.

On one occasion, the link between the Haskalah and Ḥaredism emerged in the scholarly literature, with no satisfactory explanation to the phenomenon. I refer to the link between the book Ḥeshbon Ha-Nefesh (“Spiritual Accounting”), a work by Galician maskil Mendel Lefin (1749–1828) and the views of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter (1810–1883), the founder of the mussar movement, a major development in the world of Lithuanian yeshivot (Etkes 1993; Sinkoff 2000).18 Salanter posited thirteen basic character traits based on Lefin’s book, which was influenced by the diary of American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin. Lefin’s book itself was printed at Salanter’s recommendation, and it was reprinted in the 20th century by the Slabodka Yeshivah, with a preface by the yeshivah’s head, Rabbi Yitzḥak Isaac Sher (Lefin 1937, pp. 4–9).

Our discussion thus far, which focuses on Jewish behavioral and social disciplining, demonstrates the complexity of the picture of the relationship between Salanter, Lefin, and Franklin. Rabbi Yaakov Emden himself was a contemporary of Franklin, and although it is not necessary to speak of any direct influence of New World spokesmen for the bourgeoisie on Emden—who, of course, mentions the New World (for example: Emden 1979, p. 110)—it is certainly possible to link the mental structures represented by Emden with those trends. Emden’s commentary on the prayer book, and the mussar work, Migdal Oz, appended to it, written in the 1740s, contains many of the character traits mentioned by Franklin. In addition, of course, they share the highly developed and staunchly capitalist attitude toward the accumulation of wealth. Emden’s impact on both Haskalah and Ḥaredi movements, in different and not necessarily contradictory ways, is considerable. His influence on Haskalah is familiar from scholarly research (Shochat 1960; Feiner 2011) and primarily linked to his fight against Sabbatianism and his critical and philological review of the kabbalistic, pseudepigraphic Zohar. Werses (1988) discusses this influence and notes the staunch commitment of Hebrew maskilic literature to Emden. The ideological impact of Emden on Ḥaredism has been addressed by me (Sorotzkin 2011).

From our discussion, it emerges that both the Lithuanian yeshivah world and the 19th century eastern European Haskalah and bourgeoisie grew out of a similar organization of the social body, at least in their foundational stages. That is, it demonstrates the common ascetic and behavioral basis of Orthodoxy, Ḥaredism, and significant components of the 19th century Haskalah. Emden’s writings and the stages of transfer from Franklin, through Lefin, to Salanter attest to similar trends, with Orthodoxy in its various forms and Haskalah in its various forms foremost among them, that steadily diverged over the course of the 19th century. The major impact of the mussar movement on the shaping of the Lithuanian yeshivot in Palestine and elsewhere is well known. In the 19th century, the movement shaped several of the most important Lithuanian yeshivot, and its place among the major contemporary yeshivot in Israel and the United States, including Ḥevron, Ponevezh, Lakewood, Mir, and Telshe, is especially prominent. This further illustrates the link between the disciplining of individual and social life and the formation of the totality of 19th century Jewish movements.

8.3. Ḥasidim and Their Opponents (Mitnagdim)

The disciplining processes expressed in the literature of personal conduct shaped Jewish daily life in accordance with various cultural, ideological, and economic trends. These trends are prominent in the Ḥasidic movement, which broadened and extended concepts of holiness into daily life and reshaped religious and public space. Pedaya (1995) showed that Ḥasidism, in its earliest stages, drew from the idea of sacred poverty, as developed in the kabbalistic mussar literature, and that the turning point heralded by the movement entailed the application of this idea to actual poor populations (Mahler 1985), while also meeting their needs.

In contrast to Ḥasidism’s extension of the sacred to simple folk, the asceticism of the Lithuanian movement in opposition to Ḥasidism—Mitnagdism—turned mainly toward Torah learning and reshaped textual and social study practices. The theoretical basis for this move was provided by the writings of Rabbi Ḥayim ben Yitzḥak of Volozhin (1749–1821), and especially by his Nefesh Ha-Ḥayim (Volozhiner [1824] 1874) and in the foundation of the Volozhin Yeshiva, which became the model for the modern Lithuanian Torah academies (Stampfer 2012).

The Lithuanian mussar movement, which was founded by Salanter, mediated disciplinary structures from the mussar literature, and reshaped the realm of personal conduct within a spiritual economy of daily life, the focus of which was “breaking temptation”. Salanter believed that to achieve the goals of the mussar literature, and the meticulous fulfillment of the commandments, man must constantly struggle with himself. Breaking temptation occurs, inter alia, through cultivating “fear” (yir’ah). unlike in the teachings of Rabbi Ḥayim of Volozhin, in which fear is secondary to the Torah (“for the holy Torah shall itself cloth him with the fear of god”), for Salanter, who was more concern with “the ethical-religious character of society as a whole”, fear “was understood as the ability to behave in an ethical manner within the framework of economic and social life” (Etkes 1993, p. 120). Hence another aspect that sheds light on the historical shaping of Ḥaredism: the establishment of fear as the locus of individual and social life. As stated, the Hebrew concept of fear, “yir’ah”, is synonymous with the concept “ḥaradah” (anxiety, trepidation, dread) which underlies Ḥaredism.

At the same time, throughout the 19th century, powerful educational forces worked to impose Shulḥan Arukh, with all of its myriad details, on broad strata of society. I have noted that the main expression of this is the writings of Rabbi Avraham Danzig. A similar process occurred within Russian and Galician Ḥasidism, especially with the publication of Shulḥan Arukh Ha-Rav (Shneur Zalman of Liadi [1814] 1993), by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), the founder of Ḥabad Ḥasidism. In his words, every Jewish man is obligated to learn “the 613 commandments of the Torah, in all their details and particulars”,19 and where there is disagreement about how to enumerate the commandments, one must follow all of the different views. This is similar to the method of Sefer Ḥaredim, and subsequently the method of Rabbi Danzig. Additionally, recent scholarship stressed aspects of ritualization in early and later Ḥasidism (Gries 1990; Pedaya 1995; Kahana and Evan Mayse 2017; Sagiv 2021). This too points to the powerful disciplining forces which operated from within the Jewish social bodies in eastern Europe.

In 1864, Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried’s abridgment of Shulḥan Arukh (Kitzur Shulḥan Arukh) was published, and in 1875, the Ḥasidic Rabbi Ḥayim Yeshayah Halbersberg published Misgeret Ha-Shulḥan, his glosses on Kitzur Shulḥan Arukh. During the years 1884–1907, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Ha-Kohen of Radun published Mishnah Berurah, his popular and influential commentary on the Oraḥ Ḥayim section of Shulḥan Arukh. These three authors rely, to varying degrees, on Rabbi Danzig’s Ḥayei Adam and Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s Shulḥan Arukh Ha-Rav. All of these popular works, and others, demonstrate the penetration of halakhah, in its strict form, to different Ashkenazic population groups and strata, regardless of their socio-religious affiliation. In this period of unprecedented secularization of Jewish society, powerful religious forces acted to instill the strictest form of halakhah into broad swathes of society. This trend was reinforced by a proliferation of public actions in other fields, designed to consolidate these publics under the umbrella of Ḥaredism, while confronting alternative ideologies and practices.

8.4. 20th Century Ḥaredi Embourgeoisement

I will conclude with a brief remark regarding 20th century Ḥaredism. The analysis that I proposed here enables future reexamination of the changes in Ḥaredi society specifically, and Jewish society more generally, during that period, and especially after the Holocaust. These changes include, inter alia, the melding of Ḥaredi Jewry with cultural configurations characteristic of the middle class in the United States, internalizing the dress, diet, music, and leisure culture typical of that class (Soloveitchik 1994, pp. 74–76). This occurred as commitment to text intensified, along with its stricter halakhic interpretation and the attempt to comply with all halakhic views, as a means to define identity and create separation from the secular environment—Jewish and non-Jewish alike (ibid.). Similar phenomena occurred, and are still occurring, in Israel. This closes the circle: We began with the growth of Ḥaredism out of the ascetic trends and disciplining processes that also nourished the European bourgeoisie, and we conclude with the melding of Ḥaredi social bodies into middle class cultural frameworks after the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust and the waves of emigration, primarily to Israel and the United States.

9. Epilogue

Throughout this essay, I presented a model for the diachronic and synchronic development of the major Jewish movements since the 17th century in the following sequence: the ascetic and disciplinary phase (Ḥaredism), the bourgeoise phase (Haskalah, both religious and secular), and the national phase (both religious and secular). Each of these was preceded by a centuries-long period in which a normative Judaism was formed and applied to increasingly large Jewish populations. The implication of this model is that the disciplinary foundations of Haskalah and nationalism grew out of centuries of social religious and ascetic development, during which modes of action and conduct in public and private spaces were shaped, until they exploded onto the scene as distinct historical and social phenomena—generally in connection with the emergence of parallel phenomena in the confessional and post-confessional Christian world.

We concluded the essay with several notes on the nature of major Jewish movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, all of which were founded on a shared disciplinary foundation. They are predicated on economic and psychological tendencies and ethics that draw from the idea of applying the realm of the sacred to various social elements, like the individual, the community, society, the state, text, and economic activity. The ultimate shaping of sacred dimensions in connection with the particular subjective and social organization is what gives each of these movements its founding ideological direction. At the same time, this shaping also gives every ideological movement the appearance of being static, dissociated from the economic, social, and class history that enabled it, and dissociated from the foundations it shares with its rivals.