ALTHOUGH the subject has featured in numerous histories of eastern European Jewry in the modern era, we do not as yet possess a thorough and unbiased analysis of the relationship between the hasidic movement and the institutions of Jewish communal organization in eastern Europe during the period in which hasidism began. The main obstacle has been the dislocation and probable destruction of the bulk of the evidence-the minute books (pinkasim) in which community councils (kehalim) as well as the various ‘societies’ (ḥevrot) which operated within their organizational framework had kept their records for centuries. Many hundreds of Jewish communities existed in the region and came under the influence of the hasidic movement during the latter part of the eighteenth century. This influence must have left its mark on communal records, but only a small number of the original documents is known to have survived. Some pinkasim, still available to scholars prior to the two world wars, were subsequently lost or destroyed, with the result that we are now left with only a few selections of documents, compiled at best by professional historians but in some cases by amateurs, or else quotations from various pinkasim which are scattered in a variety of historical publications.

These selections from the documents are by no means representative; they were often made by editors eager to avoid controversial issues and to suppress what they judged to be unsavoury facts. Moreover, in some of the extant pinkasim, as in that of the Society [for the Study of] Talmud and Mishnah (1:Ievrah Shas Umishnayot) in the Lithuanian community of Radoshkovichi, all the anti-hasidic regulations were blotted out once the controversy between the hasidim and their opponents had died out. From others, as from the pinkas of the community council of Shargorod, it seems that the hasidim had torn out the pages which related to, or which contained the signatures of, leading hasidic personalities in order to keep them as holy relics. Some of the pinkasim may still exist in what was until recently the Soviet Union or in private hands, but they have not so far become available for inspection. For this reason, sweeping generalizations and far-fetched assumptions have been made about the subject on the basis of insufficient documentation.