1814 · Shivchei ha-Besht, and the problem of the tales

Shivchei ha-Besht — In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov — is printed, fifty-four years after his death: a collection of miracle stories that becomes the single most widely read Hasidic book and the source of almost every popular image of the Besht.

⚠⚠ It is hagiography and it is also the main evidence, and there is no way round that. Modern scholarship (Rosman, Etkes) works partly from Polish and Ukrainian archival records precisely because the Hebrew sources are devotional. ⭐ The honest position, and the one this wing takes: read it as a portrait of what the movement needed its founder to be, which is a fact about the movement even where it is not a fact about the man.