1772 · the Vilna Gaon signs the ban

The rabbinic leadership of Vilna, with the Vilna Gaon at its head, issues a herem — excommunication — against the Hasidim. Their books are burned, marriage with them forbidden, their ritual slaughter declared unfit. The bans are renewed in 1781 and again in 1796.

The most consequential internal quarrel in modern Jewish history, and it is a quarrel about theology, not manners. The charges that stuck were: an unlearned leadership displacing the scholar, a changed liturgy, ecstatic prayer at the wrong hours — and, underneath all of it, the claim that God is literally present in everything, which the Gaon's circle read as denying the distinction between holy and profane.