Hasidism made little headway in Lithuania, where the traditional rabbinic class, under the leadership of Elijah ben Solomon, was able to stave off its influence by issuing a ban of excommunication (ḥerem, “anathema”) against the new movement. The tactic, which involved a complete boycott and cutting off of communication, was widely embraced by non-Hasidic rabbis, who were given the title of Mitnaggedim (“Opponents”) by the Hasidim. In areas where the rabbis had lost the respect of the masses, however, the ḥerem proved largely ineffective, and it called forth a round of counter-excommunications by the Hasidic rebbes. With the passage of time, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim abandoned their conflict and came to see each other as allies against the threat to all Orthodox Jewish religion posed by Haskala and secularization. The impact of Hasidism on eastern European Jewry cannot be overemphasized; even in Lithuania, where it did not take firm hold, it stimulated the growth of a homegrown pietism in the Musar (ethicist) movement of the mid-19th century, and it renewed the Talmudic energies of its opponents. Developments in scholarship
As the Jews of central Europe moved into mainstream society, a group of young Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to Jewish scholarship of a type far different from traditional Talmudic learning or medieval philosophy. In 1819 Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Moses Moser (1796–1838) founded the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning. The original group quickly dissolved, however, and Zunz became the unofficial leader of a generation of scholars dedicated to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“science of Judaism”).
The Wissenschaft movement sought to prove that the Jewish past was intellectually respectable and worthy of study, and hence that the Jews deserved an equal place within European societies. Jewish scholarship was enlisted as a weapon in the battles for change. Thus, Isaac M. Jost (1793–1860) wrote a general history of the Jews to promote Reform, Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (1832; “The Worship Sermons of the Jews, Historically Developed”) served to legitimize the modern innovation of the sermon in the vernacular, and Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the outstanding leader of German Reform in the 1840s and ’50s, interpreted the Pharisees as the forerunners of the reformers of his own day. In their work, these intellectuals presented archetypes of what modern Jews should become. To support their claims of academic respectability, the Wissenschaft figures highlighted those aspects of the Jewish past that were closely integrated with general fields of study. In particular, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who owes his fame to towering achievements in bibliography, was concerned above all with the contribution of Jews to science, medicine, and mathematics. These scholars set out to praise Judaism as one of the cofounders of the Western tradition; they argued that, because the Jews produced great culture whenever they were not excluded from European society, they would repeat such accomplishments under conditions of social and political equality.
The Wissenschaft movement stimulated the critical study of the Jewish past, and great works of synthesis written from a variety of perspectives began to appear: the multivolume Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76; History of the Jews), written from a romantic-national point of view by Heinrich Graetz (1817–91); Dorot ha-rishonim (1897–1932; “The First Generations”), by Isaac Halevy (1847–1914); Toldot Yisrael (1894; “History of Israel”), written from an orthodox standpoint by Zeʾev Jawitz; and Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (1925–30; “The World History of the Jewish People”) by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), reflecting his belief in secular, nationalistic communal autonomy. After the 1920s this tradition of great synthesis was carried on in the United States by Salo W. Baron (1895–1989), who by the early 1980s had produced 18 volumes of his Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–83), and in Israel by Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973), whose chief work was Yisrael ba-gola (3rd ed., 5 vol., 1961–66; “Israel in the Exile”). Many other first-rank scholars in Europe, Israel, and the United States have made notable contributions to the study of Jewish history, rabbinics, and mysticism. Jewish-Christian relations
Jewish-Christian relations in the 19th century were strained at best and often broke down during periods of open conflict. The established Christian churches, particularly Roman Catholicism, were staunch upholders of the old order; they identified the Jews as the major beneficiaries of the French Revolution and as the carriers of liberal, secular, anticlerical, and often revolutionary doctrines. Clerical anti-Semitism allied itself with the anti-Semitism of the traditional right in France, and both forms contended with movements that supported the results of the French Revolution in the great convulsion of the Dreyfus Affair in the last years of the 19th century. In Russia the conflict between the Jews and the Orthodox Church released the most open and virulent manifestation of religious anti-Semitism. In the view of the church, the Jews were seeking to undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the very foundations of Russian society. The church and the tsarist authorities condoned—and even encouraged—violent pogroms against the Jews in 1881–82 and again in 1905.
Russian Orthodoxy was also active in spreading the blood libel, a superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder of Christian children whose blood would be used to make unleavened bread at Passover. The blood libel first emerged in the 12th century and often led to the persecution of Jews; it reemerged in Damascus in 1840 (in which instance the French consul in Syria initiated the accusation) and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882. In both cases, torture was used to obtain false confessions, though the accused were ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence of the blood libel in modern times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish bookkeeper in Odessa who was accused of ritual murder by the tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more than two years, he was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury.