to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance.

 The young Martin Buber, in 1902

"At the turn of the century,  a young philosopher, a graduate of the University of Vienna equally at home in German letters and traditional Eastern European Jewish folk culture, suggested an alternative response to the "Jewish question", neither conversion nor traditional separatism but rather a conscious embrace of Jewish history as part of one's German culture. The young man, Martin Buber, postulated nothing less than a "renaissance" of Jewish secular and literary identity through folktale amd myth. Buber introduced Hasidism - a conterculture of pietistic and ecstatic mysticism outside "official" Judaism, widespread since the eighteenth century in Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine - to enlightened Jewish and non-Jewish germans, popularizing it as no one in the West had done before.  Hasidism resembled other Eastern European traditions of ecstasy and worship of charismatic, miracle-working saints. Although Hasidism's "wonder rabbis" were often not learned Talmudic scholars, they were widely regarded to be men of great wisdom and experience, linked to the divine through mystic contemplation: some were also healers, working with magic formulas, amulets, and spells. Their concern for the poor and downtrodden attracted thousands to their "courts" to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hasidism was still alive in Eastern Europe but, like cabala, was overlooked or derogated in the West as mere superstition and primitive belief. A story was told of the great German Jewish bibliphile Moritz Steinschneider, the father of modern Jewish bibliography. One day as he was proudly showing a young scholar through his vast library, the visitor pointed to a room full of obscure Hebrew texts on Hasidism and remarked, awestruck: "And you Herr Professor, have studied them all!" "Certainly not, young man," Steinschneider responded. "You don't expect me to read that nonsense."

It was just such emphatic insistence on dry rationalism that Buber opposed, hailing instead the creative "lefe-giving" force of Hasidism. (...)

In trying to bridge the old gulf between German and East European Jews, Buber hoped to expand and enrich the possibilities of German Jewish identity. His vivid and colorful interpretation of Hasidic tales and homilies appealed all the more young Germans - Jews and Gentilles - as it coincided with an upsurge in Germany of interest in spirituality and the "exotic" cultures of Asia and Africa. Buber called on secular young German Jews to seek, as he put it, a genuine Erlebnis - an "inner experience" - of the popular "soul" of Judaism, a Judaism beyond the restrictions and injunctions of Talmudic law, which most German Jews, including Buber, no longer observed. Though ridiculed by some as a pretentious neo-Romantic affectation, his message was taken up by a new generation.

Hasidism came to be hailed (especially be secular Jews) as a vital force, more genuine and robust than fossilized orthodoxy or secularized reform. After watching a troupe of Yiddish actors perform in Prague's café Savoy, Kafka concluded that here was a genuine folk spirit, warmer and more humane than the stiffness and self-denial of Western Jews. "

                           Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 237-239.