Jewish Customs

Shmuel Aba Horodetsky was born in Malyn, near Kiev in the Russian Empire (today Kyiv, Ukraine), where he received a traditional education in heders and yeshivas in the region. Drawn to maskilic studies as a young adult, he began to write in Hebrew in the style of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Living in Berdichev (today Berdychiv, Ukraine) in 1905, Horodetsky witnessed a wave of pogroms that drove him to leave the Russian Empire permanently. He lived in Switzerland and Germany before settling in Palestine in 1938. Over his career, Horodetsky produced a great deal of scholarship on Jewish mystics and mystical sources, in particular breaking with the traditionally antagonistic orientation of the Haskalah toward Hasidism to write histories of Hasidic thought and mysticism. he also wrote about East European Jewish history and customs generally. He died in Tel Aviv.