Few movements within Judaism have attracted as much attention as Hasidism. Romanticized and vilified, orientalized and scrutinized, Hasidism has become a common feature in literature, theater, film, art, and media coverage. Since its inception in the nineteenth century, academic Jewish studies has also focused on this unique Jewish mystical mass movement. Glenn Dynner’s new book seeks to address a gap in the scholarship by providing an overview of the movement’s developments in interwar Poland (1918–39) and its tragic fate during the Holocaust. In contrast to narratives of pre-Holocaust East European Jewish history that depict it teleologically as a steady decline leading to a catastrophic end. Dynner presents the short and tumultuous interwar years as a period of social and cultural ferment. Specifically, Hasidism underwent a significant rejuvenation, coalescing into a “culture of resistance” against state-sponsored efforts aimed at the “eradication of Jewish distinctiveness” (6), which included compulsory education, discriminatory policies, and physical violence. At the cornerstone of this vibrant Hasidic counterculture, Dynner argues, was a “pedagogical revival” (6): A renewed focus on Torah study accompanied by an immense institution-building effort that led to the rapid development of Hasidic-run hadarim (religious literacy schools), Bais Yaakov schools for girls, and yeshivas (rabbinical academies for young men).
The Light of Learning examines Hasidic history in interwar Poland through the lens of postcolonial theory. By interpreting the newly established Second Polish Republic and its ethno-nationalist character as “colonial,” the book employs tools developed by thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Saba Mahmood to elucidate the mechanisms of countercultural Hasidic mobilization, with schooling as its focal point. After setting the stage, the book elaborates on this pedagogically centered revival over six chapters, arranged in a mixed chronological and thematic order. The first chapter addresses the crisis that Hasidic communities underwent during World War I, detailing theological and institutional responses, including attempts at political organization and educational innovations in schooling both boys and girls. Chapter 2 focuses on schooling, presenting the development of Hasidic-run networks of schools and yeshivas in independent Poland as a response to state-mandated compulsory education, and as an alternative to the social, cultural, and intellectual fulfillment offered by non-Orthodox Jewish schools. Chapters 3 and 4 explore Hasidic politics: First the party Agudat Israel as the dominant player in the Polish Orthodox scene, then the political activities of Hasidic leaders outside of the Aguda framework. Chapter 5 returns to a chronological order, depicting the final prewar years marked by increased antisemitic legislation and violence, and the chapter aims to present Hasidism’s response to these dire developments. The sixth and final chapter deals with the destruction of the Polish Hasidic community, detailing attempts to rescue rebbes and Hasidim, as well as instances of spiritual and physical resistance. Overall, the book documents Hasidism as a vibrant, adaptive, and assertive subculture of alternative Polish Jewishness, a culture that not only was far from decline but even managed to plant the seeds of its future revival in the post-Holocaust world.
The depiction of Hasidism in The Light of Learning is indeed vibrant. Its narrative weaves together multiple sources, including newspaper reports and interviews, autobiographies, letters, sermons, and archival materials. The broad array of sources and the swift narrative style are among the book’s strengths. However, several shortcomings undermine these advantages and limit its potential to become the definitive study of interwar Hasidism in Poland. In what follows, I will focus on what I see as the major conceptual and methodological drawbacks of the book.
First, the book essentializes education as the key to Hasidic renewal in Poland, and this assumption adversely affects its structure. This argument is most coherent in the second chapter on “the Hasidic pedagogical revival in interwar Poland,” which aligns neatly with the overarching thesis. Unsurprisingly, it is arguably the strongest, most coherent, and best-argued chapter. In contrast, other chapters exhibit a noticeable discord between the central claim regarding the “pedagogical” orientation of the revival, and the diverse sources that tell a much broader story. This dissonance is most evident in chapter 4, which focuses on the conflict over the rabbinate between Chabad Hasidim and non-Hasidic Orthodoxy in the town of Głębokie. The book interprets the establishment of a short-lived Hasidic yeshiva in town as evidence that: “Even in the midst of a furious battle over the rabbinical post, educational objectives remained paramount” (126). However, the story of this yeshiva suggests otherwise: That Hasidim, too, instrumentalized education in their struggle for local political, spiritual, and economic power.
Second, the book refrains from engaging with scholarship exploring the interwar Hasidic renewal. Recent studies have challenged the biased paradigm that portrays interwar Jewish culture, and Hasidism in particular, as in a state of decline. Works such as Marcin Wodziński’s Hasidism: Key Questions (2018), as well as David Biale et al.’s Hasidism: A New History (2018) have analyzed the interwar years as a transformative period for Hasidism, reshaping its institutional and doctrinal frameworks for years to come. The concept of “Hasidic renaissance” has been explicitly addressed in Jonatan Meir’s published lectures, while Wodziński has developed the concept of interwar Hasidism as a form of “counter-Reformation.” While The Light of Learning footnotes this scholarship, it does not build upon it, and in doing so misses an opportunity to shape the debate on Hasidic history, correct other scholars’ findings, and confront its own methodological choices with competing theoretical frameworks.
A conversation with these and other works on interwar Polish Jewry could have enriched Dynner’s most significant methodological intervention: His use of postcolonial apparatus. While The Light of Learning employs postcolonial theory to explain the emergence of Hasidic counterculture, it falls short of conceptualizing the patterns of transformation that Hasidism underwent under the pressure of the Polish “civilizing” mission to Jews. Almost thirty years ago in The Politics of Tradition (1996), Gershon Bacon demonstrated the deep entanglement of Agudat Israel in Polish political culture. More recently, Naomi Seidman in Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement (2019) showed the impact of Polish electoral politics on the development of the Bais Yaakov school system. Wodziński in Key Questions has argued that interwar Hasidism underwent processes of fundamentalization and hybridization. Kamil Kijek in Dzieci modernizmu (2017) has demonstrated that Jewish youth countercultures (including the Orthodox one!) drew heavily from the Polish symbolic reservoir (full disclosure: Wodziński and Kijek are my departmental colleagues). How Polish, then, was interwar Polish Hasidism, and how can postcolonial thought help us understand its internal dynamics? The Light of Learning does not provide an answer, despite offering a theoretical framework capable of doing so. For instance, the military-style “commanders” among Gur Hasidim, or the university-like Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin, or the afternoon Bais Yaakov schools supplementing the state-provided day education, could exemplify Babha’s concept of mimicry, complicating the narrative of Hasidic resistance and its entanglement with the oppressor’s culture.
Finally, a comment on the use of sources. As strange as it sounds, scholars of East European Hasidism rarely engage with sources in languages other than Hebrew or Yiddish. The Light of Learning is an important exception, as it utilizes both primary sources and secondary literature in Polish. However, it does not always approach these sources critically; for instance, it presents Adolf Rudnicki’s literary work Lato (1938) as a straightforward description of the Gur Hasidic court rather than as a product of the writer’s creativity (159–60). Even more critically, the book erroneously reads things into some sources. The most pronounced example is the diary of Jula Wald, the daughter of an innkeeper from a town she identifies as “L.” (42–46; Dynner supposes that L. refers to Liszki, but the topographic details provided in the diary indicate Myślenice). This exceptional work is described in the book as “the wartime diary of a Hasidah” (42)—a testament to the strong and explicit self-identification of a young woman as a female Hasid, and an argument against unnamed scholars who assert that Hasidic female identity developed gradually only in the interwar years. But contrary to The Light of Learning, Wald never identifies herself as “Hasidah”; the word chusyta the book references on page 78 of her diary (42) is a masculine noun chusyt (a Hasid) in the accusative case. The sentence simply reads: “They will marry me off to some Hasid [za jakiegoś chusyta], who will not even know my needs; he will probably only know that he has a wife so she could help him in business and take care of him” (Julia Wald, YIVO Archives, RG 4, RG 3838, 78). Similarly, she does not chide herself for being “Hasidic” and never experiences “her Hasidic identity as burdensome” (44). In her diary, she reflects the language used by men who mock her as chusytka for being “sanctimonious” or “goody-goody”—akin to what one might call “frummie” today—for rejecting their advances. The book notes the mocking and dismissive meaning of chusytka in a similar case (46) and yet treats it as an affirmation of female Hasidic identity in the case of Wald. Ultimately, Wald’s diary reveals something different from what the book suggests: It testifies to the girl’s detachment from her father’s Hasidic identity and shows that her interest in a Hasidic groom arises from her romantic fantasy of Hasidic men being more refined than “progressive” Jewish boys (Wald, 250).
In sum, The Light of Learning tackles a crucial and fascinating period in modern Jewish history, narrating a vibrant, albeit erratic, revival of Hasidism in the face of cultural, political, and economic pressures in the short-lived Second Polish Republic. It brings together a diverse array of compelling sources and proposes a promising methodological intervention, but it does not fulfill its theoretical potential. The book’s strength—its swift and occasionally captivating narrative—ultimately becomes its pitfall, overshadowing source criticism and analysis. As a result, while the book beautifully conveys the effervescence of interwar Hasidic culture, it largely leaves readers to discern its meaning and significance on their own.
