Immanuel Etkes is emeritus professor of history of the Jewish people at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement (1993); The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image (2002); The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (2005); and The Invention of a Tradition: The Messianic Zionism of Gaon of Vilna (2023).
Founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement and its religious thinking have dramatically transformed modern Judaism. The...
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), in imperial Russia, was the founder and first rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism that flourishes...