המתנגדים · The opponents

Literally the ones who object — the Lithuanian rabbinic establishment that fought Hasidism for two generations and then built, out of the fight, the modern yeshiva: Volozhin in 1803, and after it the whole Lithuanian yeshiva world.

⚠⚠ They are named for what they were against, which is a historiographical accident that flatters their opponents. ⭐⭐ What they actually did was constructive and enormous: the institution most identified with traditional Jewish learning today — the full-time, non-communal, text-centred yeshiva — is a response to Hasidism. A movement defined by its opposition produced the century's most durable educational form.

⭐ And the war ended by exhaustion and a common enemy. Faced with the Haskalah and then with modernity, the two camps found they were on the same side, and Lithuanian Jewry ended up with Hasidic courts in it and Hasidic courts ended up with yeshivot.