to Joseph from Aish Hatorah( and once again, just because you say I brought a false accusation, doesn’t make it so. You allege I am wrong, well , document it.
by Rabbi Ken Spiro Initially a movement largely of the poor and uneducated, Hassidism introduced Kabbalah and spirituality into everyday life.
The Hassidic movement — the movement of the “pious ones” or Chassidut, in Hebrew — was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, who became known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, which means “Master of the Good Name.” His teachings revolutionized the demoralized, persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe.
After the pogroms and massacres, (see Part 49), large parts of Eastern European Jewry had slipped into dire poverty. In addition to the tremendous physical destruction wrought by the Chmielnicki massacres, the tremendous disappointment caused by the false Messiah Shabbetai Tzvi (see Part 51) left much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe in a collective state of deep depression. One of the victims of this situation was Jewish scholarship, with only an elite few studying in yeshivas while the rest eked out a meager living. As a result of the decrease in scholarship, Jewish religious life suffered — with the average Jew not connecting either intellectually or spiritually with God. And this is what the Ba’al Shem Tov sought to change.
THE OPPOSITION
Another significant concern of the Vilna Gaon was de-intellectualization of Torah. The Hassidic movement was largely a movement of simple, uneducated Jews, and he worried that Jewish scholarship was going to be replaced by singing and dancing. A religion that was a synthesis of heart and mind would become all heart and no mind.
Finally, the Vilna Gaon, and many other rabbis strongly objected to the fact that the Hassidim had changed the text of the prayer as this was considered a serious break with tradition and wholly unacceptable.
In hindsight we see that the Hassidic movement contributed significantly to the revitalization of Eastern European Jewry. It kept a lot of people connected to Judaism who could well have been lost because they didn’t have the time to study. And the pressure brought by the misnagdim against the hassidim acted as a brake in keeping them from going too far.
THE SPANISH INQUISITION
The Inquisition we are going to cover now is the Spanish Inquisition, which began officially by papal bull issued by Pope Sixtus IV on November 1, 1478.
Unlike its earlier version, the Spanish Inquisition sought to punish Jews who had converted to Christianity but were not really “sincere” in their conversions.
There was another reason for the Inquisition, which had little to do with the sincerity of conversions. Once Jews converted to Christianity they had an open access to the playing field, economically and politically. And, of course, they prospered mightily. That engendered a lot of hostility from the Christians – a pattern we have seen in Jewish history ever since the enslavement of the Israelites by the Egyptians.
The Christians began to call converted Jews “New Christians” to distinguish them from the “Old Christians” i.e. themselves. Derogatorily, Jewish converts to Christianity were called converses meaning “converts,” or worse yet marranos, meaning “pigs.”
The basic accusation was that these Jews were not real converts to Christianity – they were secretly practicing Judaism. That was certainly often the case. There were large numbers of Jews who would be outwardly Christian but who would continue to practice Judaism secretly.
Until this day, there exist Christian communities with clear Jewish roots dating back to this time. There are people in the United States (in New Mexico and Arizona) as well as in South and Central America, who are descended from Spanish or Portuguese settlers, and who have strange customs they cannot explain. For example, even though they are Catholics, on Friday night they go down to the cellar to light candles. They don’t know the origins of the custom, but they do it. These people are clearly descended from Jews who pretended to be Christians and yet were practicing Jewish rituals in secret.