The Hasidic lines: from the Baal Shem Tov to the courts

The root that has no heir by blood. The Baal Shem Tov left no court to a son: after him those who had learned from him led. Hence Hasidism is not one line but a bush: each disciple settled in his own town, and the town gave the court its name.

Mezritch is the school from which all disperse. The Maggid hardly travelled and hardly wrote; he sent disciples out to the regions: one to Lithuania, another to Poland, a third to Volhynia. Almost every line further on in this route begins with the words 'a disciple of the Maggid'.

Lizhensk: the teaching about the tzaddik, written down in Noam Elimelech, and the school out of which came nearly all of Hasidic Galicia and Poland — the Seer of Lublin, Ropshitz, Rimanov, Dinov, Kozhnitz.

Zlotchov: a line that went not through disciples but through sons. From them rose the courts of Volhynia, and among them Zvhil, which reached Jerusalem and stands there still.

Chernobyl: the most branching line of them all. His son Rabbi Mordechai had eight sons, and nearly each of them founded a court of his own — Skver, Tolna, Rachmastrivka, Makarov, Trisk. The name Twersky is read to this day as 'of Chernobyl'.

Karlin: Hasidism that entered Lithuania itself, where it met the harshest resistance. From here come Stolin and, beside it, the Lechovitch branch and its continuations: Kobrin, Koidanov, Slonim.

Chabad: the one line that answered Lithuania with Lithuania's own weapon — a book and order in learning. The Tanya sets the path not through the tzaddik but through the Hasid's own mind; the court settles in Lubavitch and stays in one family for seven generations.

Lublin: the house out of which the courts came. The Seer gathered a whole generation of future rebbes around him — and from him Peshischa departed, disagreeing with wonders and with crowds.

Peshischa: the turn inward. A disciple leaves his teacher not in quarrel but for the sake of truth without wonders — and begins a line where one demands of oneself rather than asks of the rebbe. From here will come Kotzk, Ger, Vorka, Sochatchov.

An apothecary in German dress who became the second rebbe of Peshischa. Under him the line becomes a school of seekers once and for all, and out of his disciples come Kotzk and Vorka — the two courts from which the whole of Hasidic Poland then diverges.

Kosov: the root of the Carpathian line. From here comes Vizhnitz, and from Vizhnitz — Vishova, Seret and the houses that gathered themselves anew in Bnei Brak after the war.

Breslov: a line with no second rebbe. After Rabbi Nachman the Hasidim chose no successor, and the court is led by books and by the grave in Uman. The one case where a line holds without a living head — and holds longer than many.

Vorka: the quiet branch of Peshischa. From here comes Amshinov, the house that held to its own longer than any — prayer without a clock and doors left open.

Belz: a court built around a synagogue that took thirteen years to raise. The firmest line of Galicia: it survived two exiles one after the other and stands today in Jerusalem.

Kotzk: the line taken to its limit. Twenty years of seclusion and not a line published — and yet out of Kotzk come the two largest houses of Polish Hasidism: Ger through a disciple and Sochatchov through a son-in-law.

Sanz: a line where Hasidism and halakhah are in the same hands. From the Divrei Chaim came Bobov, Gorlice, Shinova, and after the war Sanz-Klausenburg, rebuilt by a man who had lost his wife and eleven children.

Ruzhin: a court kept in royal state. Six sons, six houses: Sadigura, Chortkov, Husiatyn, Stefanesti, Boyan and Ruzhin itself. No other line spread so wide in a single generation.

Ger: the largest court in Poland. A disciple of the Kotzker gathered those left without a rebbe and built a line where learning comes first; by the Sfat Emet and after it grows into a house of tens of thousands.

Hungary: the line that came from the west. A disciple of the Seer of Lublin takes the rabbinate of Ujhely, and from his house come Siget and Satmar — two courts of one family, parted by an argument still audible today.

How lines end and how they begin again. It was not courts that came out of Europe but people: the Satmar Rebbe builds his house anew in Brooklyn, the Belzer and the Gerrer in Jerusalem, the Sanzer in Netanya. Nearly every court in this route stands today in Israel and America, and nearly every one begins again from a single man.