We are at an exciting moment in the efflorescence of literature on Hasidism when the crosscurrents of scholarship on the history of everyday life and sociology of religion have intersected with digital mapping technologies and quantitative studies to produce a radical reenvisioning of what Hasidism meant for its rank and file practitioners in eastern Europe. Marcin Wodziński's new synthetic works on the history, geography, and demography of Hasidism come as part of a flurry of scholarship on religious orthodoxies and attention to the tenacious hold and creativity of religion in the modern age. Although Hasidism as a religious revival movement or great spiritual revolution in the modern age developed in an age of European pietistic movements, historians have not uncovered any causal links. Hasidism has thus garnered the reputation as a wholly internal movement, the last mass movement in Jewish history, and one intimately bound up with the history and culture of Jewish eastern Europe. Wodziński succeeds in liberating the scholarship on Hasidism away from elites and intellectual history without disconnecting the movement from its political and ideological centers.

Wodziński's monograph, Hasidism: Key Questions, takes a myth-busting approach to narrating the history of Hasidism from below. First, he argues that Hasidism was not a sect but rather a male confraternity. Second, women were not Hasidim insofar as they did not engage in the performative or behavioral aspects of Hasidism, which consisted of spending time in a Hasidic shtibl (prayer hall) and making periodic pilgrimages to a tsadik (Hasidic leader). Women's participation in and identification with Hasidism would only come in the interwar period when the movement was in decline and tried to counter assimilation trends through educational and youth work. Third, Wodziński reframes the role and function of the tsadik from the point of view of an ordinary believer who saw the tsadik less as a spiritual intermediary or political leader and more as a manipulator of heaven for material and medicinal aid and as a business arbitrator with sound, this-worldly commercial advice. Fourth, Wodziński argues that the demographic heyday of the movement was in the mid-, not early, nineteenth century. Fifth, its borders shifted overtime towards the south and west and then towards large urban centers in the interwar period. Here, Wodziński revisits the critical historical question of why Hasidism remained an east European phenomenon until WWI. Wodziński fine tunes the question by using archival data to draw a detailed line of the movement's borders, especially its western and northern boundaries, which did not cross into the northern provinces of Congress Poland and the northern and northwestern provinces of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He hypothesizes that more than a product of the linguistic boundary of eastern Yiddish, Hasidism tried but was not able to penetrate into areas with a strong German cultural influence. It found fertile ground in places where traditional or Orthodox Judaism was dominant and where there was a density of Jewish settlement (hence its eastern and southern borders in the interior of the Russian empire and the provinces of New Russia). In his turn to quantitative history to revise old narratives, Wodziński uses the case study of Hasidism's unsuccessful incursion from Biała, western Galicia, into its twin-town Bielitz at the Silesian border to map in real time the construction of the movement's western boundary (Hasidism, 178–85). Sixth, despite a once Marxist bent to scholarship that painted the movement as the oppressed, marginalized poorer classes rising up against Jewish communal and economic elites, Wodziński and others have shown that many Hasidim encompassed the upper crust of Jewish society. Driven by four microstudies of Hasidim in Congress Poland based on community lists and tax records, Wodziński shows that Hasidim in a variety of small to big town settings were overrepresented among secondary financial and commercial elites and religious functionaries, and relatively underrepresented among artisans and petty traders. Seventh, Wodziński takes his analysis of the movement up through the early twentieth century and argues that the Holocaust was the near final erasure of a movement that already started to falter during WWI as both external forces of violence and dislocation and internal forces of modernization and youth disaffection drove the movement into decline. This decline also initiated a set of modern Hasidic experiments in institutionalized girls’ and boys’ education, mass political organization, and new media technologies to respond to the largescale shifts in urban Jewish life and ideologies in the twentieth century.

Wodziński's synthetic history is at its strongest when it argues that from a social history perspective, not only was Hasidism not a sect, but the barriers to entry, exit, and circulation among Hasidic courts and shtiblekh were extremely porous. This is most vividly demonstrated by: the presence of mixed shtiblekh in some towns in which a variety of Hasidim gathered and prayed together irrespective of court allegiances; from memoir recollections of Hasidic wives and daughters praying in non-Hasidic synagogues and the routine occurrence of daughters of Hasidim marrying into non-Hasidic families; and the transactional nature of kvitlekh, or request notes, that Hasidim sent to tsadikim in which court patronage was often a function of a successful petition rather than exclusive dynastic loyalty. Much like the innovative social history of Karaites in the medieval Mediterranean that contrasted the shrill Karaite-Rabbinate polemics against everyday interactions and even intermarriages, Wodziński exposes Hasidic difference from below in which intra-Hasidic and intercommunal boundaries with Hasidic opponents, mitnagedim, were much more fluid than the polemical and intellectual literature allows.

Alongside his synthetic social history of Hasidism, Wodziński published together with the cartographer Waldemar Spallek the Historical Atlas of Hasidism. In many ways, this publication is an atlas-length rebuttal to Eli Barnavi's atlas, no longer in print but a wonderful teaching tool, which devotes one entry to Hasidism with one map illustrating its initial growth and spread together with the opposition it inspired in the late eighteenth century. Barnavi's map correlates to the traditional historiography of the movement that Wodziński seeks to reframe. Wodziński thus turns the static-synchronic map of Barnavi into a dynamic-diachronic one, powered by GIS data, to illustrate and analyze the relationship between geography and spirituality up till today (Atlas, 7).

The atlas is divided into nine sections that move chronologically and spatially from dynastic leadership of the movement to the prayer houses of its rank and file members, and even to the far-flung off-shoots of the movement in the Land of Israel and North America, which were institutionally marginal until after WWII. The maps are prolific and often complex, but the most value-added ones illustrate the expansion of Hasidism southwestward from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, with huge expansions in Galicia and Congress Poland in the nineteenth century and Hungary and Romania in the twentieth century. Maps also plot the locations of 2,854 rank and file shtiblekh which help to shift the focus of the movement from court locations towards broader networks of courts and local Hasidic meeting places. For those interested in the experience of Jews during WWI, which just marked its centenary, there is an informative map charting various tsadikim and their dislocations and resettlement in the course of the war vis-à-vis the shifting Eastern Front that moved from Galicia eastwards through the heart of Hasidic territory (Atlas, 158–59). The last two chapters on Hasidism's survival and rebirth since the Holocaust will probably be of most value to scholars, students, and readers. Demographically, Hasidim constitute just five percent of world Jewry today, in sharp decline from its nineteenth-century heyday when Hasidism “conquered” 30 to 50 percent of Jews in Congress Poland and Galicia (Hasidism, 148–51). Geographically, like contemporary world Jewry as a whole, 90% of Hasidim live in Israel and North America, with their survival owing in large part to high birthrates, missionary work, and support in liberal environments. Despite the iconic Chabad house in most cities, college towns, and tourist destinations around the world today, the maps show that Chabad-Lubavitch is actually the second largest Hasidic group today (12.7%), dwarfed by Satmar, which constitutes over 20% of the global Hasidic population (Atlas, 198–99).

While Wodziński's work helps to deparochialize the study of Hasidism and put it into conversation with the digital humanities and sociology of religion, it does not analyze the relationship of Hasidism to the rise of east European Jewish Orthodoxies. When precisely did the pietist/opponent split fall away in lieu of a coalescing Orthodoxy, or “counter-reformation” as Wodziński conceptualizes Hasidic modernization in the WWI era (Hasidism, 268–75)? In Israel today, Hasidim are inseparable from 0x1E25aredi or ultra-Orthodox society at large. Yet, Wodziński notes that Hasidism became sectarian in its post-WWII transplantation and rebirth in Israel and North America. How do we square the circle of the collapsing of Hasidism into the sociology of Orthodoxy, yet its sectarian tendencies with strong barriers to entry and exit erected in the past half century? Along these lines, one of the most exciting source bases for understanding the perspective of ordinary Hasidim and their relationship to the Hasidic court and tsadik are kvitlekh, and the only significant database of these notes come from R. Eliyahu Guttmacher, a non-Hasidic rabbi and kabbalist in Grodzisk Wielkopolski, Prussia (Hasidism, 106–11). If the social world of rank and file Hasidim can be reconstructed from the spiritual lives of Jews devoted to a non-Hasidic leader, what does this say about the uniqueness of Hasidism in relation to the rise of Orthodoxy(ies) in the late nineteenth century?

For all of Wodziński's attempts to wrest the history of Hasidism away from its leadership and write a popular history, the tsadik and his court still orient much of the geography and mapping of the movement, especially the twentieth-century trends of dislocation, refugee migration, and urbanization. That being said, Wodziński has creatively used new and old sources to work around the elitist perspectives of standard Hasidic texts. Wodziński mined a variety of state documents from Polish and Russian archives, memoirs, and, my personal favorite, Hasidic telephone books to study the demography and geography of contemporary Hasidic communities. This last source base attests to the difficulties of studying the sociology of religious movements, even in a post-census age, in societies where religion is a voluntary commitment. I also appreciated the renewed usage given to yisker bikher, a rich genre of Jewish memorial books written after the Holocaust about individual communities that were destroyed. While the anecdotal, highly elegiac nature of memorial books have long rendered them unfit for the work of historians, Wodziński reinvests them with meaning for the history of everyday life—including how many Hasidic shtiblekh were in a town, where they were located, and stereotypes about the socio-economic profile of local Hasidic groups.

Wodziński's ability to reframe Hasidic life from the bottom up is in large measure a product of his copious archival research and ability to find a third way to study the movement outside the twin published polemical literatures of the Hasidim and their opponents. Although state sources are removed from intra-Jewish polemics, they are by no means devoid of their own biases towards so-called Jewish sectarianism and the alleged fanaticism of Hasidim. The Russian government invested bureaucratic resources in the second half of the nineteenth century to study Jewish schism, the distinctive culture of Hasidism, and the charismatic authority of tsadikim, which seemed to threaten imperial rule. In citing evidence for the fluid nature of Hasidic allegiance in the nineteenth century, Wodziński cites an interrogation of the tsadik of Apt [Opatów] by a Polish minister regarding Hasidic separatism. Under questioning, the tsadik affirmed that Hasidim do not need separate synagogues nor command exclusive loyalty to one leader (Hasidism, 21). One should read this kind of source with as much criticism as one reads descriptions of Hasidism from the writings of its Jewish opponents.

All in all, Wodziński's synthetic works are a wonderful complement to the long-standing intellectual history focus of studies on Hasidism. He has helped to set an exciting new agenda for the field and for scholars of religion more broadly to explore religion as a social phenomenon and to analyze the relations between the sacred and everyday life in the world.