In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov

Jewish writing in the period spanning 1750–1880 reflects the profound changes that confronted Jews in modernity. Some writers self-consciously broke with traditional and religious models; others definitely embraced it.

The “return to history” of Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and engagement between Jews and their majority cultures offered new models for imaginative writing beyond those within their ancestral traditions.

Hasidism, with its focus on pietism and spirituality, is one among the genuinely new forms of Jewish identity to develop in the period 1750–1880.