| Popis: |
Innovative and multidisciplinary in approaches, the book discusses the most cardinal features of any social or religious movement: definition, gender, leadership, demographic size, geography, economy, and decline of Hasidism, one of the most important religious movements of modern Eastern Europe. This is the first such attempt to respond to those central questions of Hasidism in one book. Recognizing the major limitations of the existing research on Hasidism, the book offers four important corrections. First, it offers an anti-elitist corrective attempting to investigate Hasidism beyond its leaders into the masses of the rank-and-file followers. Second, it introduces new types of sources, rarely or never used in the research of Hasidism, including archival documents, Jewish memorial books, petitionary notes, folk texts, and quantitative and visual materials. Third, it covers the whole classic period of Hasidism from its institutional maturation at the end of the eighteenth century to its major crisis and decline in wake of the First World War. Fourth, instead of focusing on intellectual history, it offers a multidisciplinary approach with the modern methodologies of the corresponding disciplines: social and cultural history, sociology and anthropology of religion, historical demography of religions, historical geography, gender studies, economic history, and more. |
