1780 · the movement acquires a text

Toldot Yaakov Yosef is printed at Korets — twenty years after the Besht's death, the first Hasidic book to appear in the world.

⭐ The sequence is worth noticing. Twenty years of a movement with no book at all, spreading entirely by presence, travel and word of mouth, before anything was printed. And the first thing printed was not a manual of practice but a Torah commentary — the movement establishing that it was reading the same text as everyone else.