Hasidism and Mitnagdism in the Russian Empire: the (mis)use of Jewish music in Polish-Lithuanian Russia

By 1795 the territory that was once the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned between the surrounding powers of Prussia, Russia and Austria. Amidst this political turmoil an intra-communal battle had already begun to play out among the Jews of this part of Eastern Europe. On one hand, under the charismatic leadership of Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), a new mystical branch of Judaism, Hasidism, had emerged, initially in the Southern part of the former Commonwealth. On the other hand, the so-called Litvaks—Jews who traced their roots back to the former lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but by then part of the Russian partition—fiercely defended what they saw as a more traditional Judaism. The most celebrated of the Lithuanian Misnagdim (literally ‘opponents’ to Hasidism) was Rabbi Elijah (Eliyahu) ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–1797), commonly known as the Vilna Gaon. So great was the opposition of the Misnagdim towards their Hasidic rivals that by the end of the 18th century they began to denounce Hasidic leaders to the Russian government as politically subversive and heretical, resulting a number of arrests in Vilna and other parts of what was by then the Vilna or Lithuania-Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire.

This article examines the musical manifestations of this struggle for power, and how its consequences still resonate for some in Jewish communities as far-flung as South Africa and Australia. How was music employed in the Misnagdic resistance to Hasidism? How did the Jewish identity politics of the day shape music within this Russian Imperial context? And how did these political and religious struggles in the former Russian Empire influence future generations of musicians in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, and further afield afterwards?