Space and spirit: on boundaries, hierarchies and leadership in Hasidism

This article examines spatial aspects of Hasidism, arguably one of the most important socio-religious movements in modern Eastern Europe. More specifically, it focuses on the relationship between religious leaders in their courts and their followers in towns scattered across Eastern Europe. The article starts with the argument that in the wake of the exponential growth of Hasidism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it developed an innovative institution of shtiblekh, or Hasidic prayer halls. These prayer halls, often far from the court, became the basic structure for the influence of Hasidism. Their number and geographical distribution allow us to establish the internal boundaries of Hasidism and the Hasidic groups' internal hierarchy. Most importantly, the article argues that the size of the group and the spatial distribution of their shtiblekh were closely correlated with the type of religious leadership employed by this group: from distant charismatic leadership at the great dominant courts through many intermediate forms down to small ephemeral groupings with intense, intimate relations of close charismatic leadership. •Examines meso-scale data on the spatial distribution of a religious movement.•Shows the persistence of nineteenth-century phantom borders in twentieth-century Judaism in Eastern Europe.•Analyzes the correlation between spatial distribution and the type of religious leadership.•Examines the types of charismatic leadership employed in Hasidism.