1939–1945 · the world it grew in is destroyed

The Hasidic world was almost entirely concentrated in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. The courts, the towns they were named for, and the overwhelming majority of their people were murdered.

⚠⚠ What survives is a rebuilding, in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Antwerp, London and Montreal, by remnants — and it is not a continuation in the ordinary sense. ⭐ The demographic recovery is one of the most extraordinary facts in modern religious history, and it has shaped what came back: the courts that rebuilt fastest were those that were most separatist, and the movement that began as a popular revival against elite religion is now among the most rigorously bounded communities in the Jewish world. A wing that told the eighteenth-century story and stopped would be leaving out what the story turned into.