Book Review: Historical Atlas of Hasidism Sheds Graphic Light on the History and Geography of the Movement

Mar 29, 2019 by Alex Grobman

By Alex Grobman, PhD, senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East

Scholars of the Holocaust and Jewish history, in general, have been waiting a long time for a cartographic reference work on Hasidism, the movement that developed in 18th-century Europe to become one of the largest and most important factions in Judaism.

A major socio-cultural and religious force, Hasidism has influenced the Jewish world beyond the various sects’ own communities in terms of lifestyle, value system, beliefs, and interpersonal relationships.

Marcin Wodzinski, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw in Poland, says Hasidism has become the “icon of Jewishness” in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

With his colleague at the University of Wronclaw, Waldemar Spallek, an assistant professor of geographic information systems and cartography, Professor Wodzinski recently published Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton University Press), a masterpiece containing 74 maps and almost 100 illustrations explaining the history of the Hasidic movement.

Of course, the book covers Hasidic principles, but it goes way beyond discussions of the leaders to show where their thousands of adherents resided, most of them in hundreds of small towns far removed from the centers of Hasidic authority. The atlas focuses on where the average Hasidim prayed and attended religious courts, where they went on pilgrimages, and how they conducted their daily economic lives.

Professor Wodzinski discovered records documenting more than 130,000 Hasidic households in 1,200 locations on six continents.

The book contains tables showing which groups were the most dominant in the years just before World War II and the Holocaust, 1930-1939, when the major centers of Hasidic life were almost entirely in Eastern Europe. A map shows where 80 Hasidic leaders were murdered, most of them in the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

While the Holocaust ended Hasidism in its classic Eastern European version, it did not destroy the movement. Through the efforts of its leaders and followers in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, and, of course, Israel, Hasidism has succeeded in reviving itself. Though the movement has not yet reached the numbers of adherents it once enjoyed in Europe, its influence in terms of Jewish religious, social, cultural, and political life is significant.

The book’s examination of contemporary Hasidic tzadikim and centers, especially in the international Chabad-Lubavitch community, makes Historical Atlas of Hasidism an essential resource for every Jewish home.