⚠ Scholem on Hasidism — the neutralisation thesis

Gershom Scholem's reading: Hasidism arose in the wreckage of the Sabbatian catastrophe, and its historic function was to take the explosive messianic energy of that movement and neutralise it — turning a public, imminent, world-ending redemption into a private, interior, immediately available devekut.

⭐⭐ The most influential single claim about the movement, and it is contested. Moshe Idel argues Hasidism draws on ecstatic and magical traditions much older than Sabbatianism, and that the neutralisation thesis reads the movement through the lens of the one thing Scholem was most interested in. ⚠ This app reports both and adopts neither: what is not in dispute is that Hasidism arose within living memory of Sabbatai Zevi, in the same region, among people who had been burned by it.