Why there are no more Misnogdim

Misnagdim

- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Misnagdim or mitnagdim is a Hebrew word (מתנגדים) meaning "opponents". It is the plural of Misnaged or Mitnaged. Most prominent among the misnagdim was Rabbi Elijah (Eliyahu) ben Shlomo Zalman (1720 - 1797), commonly known as the Vilna Gaon or GRA. The term "misnagdim" gained a common usage among European Jews as the term that referred to Ashkenazi religious Jews who opposed the rise and spread of early Hasidic Judaism, particularly as embodied by Hasidism's founder, Rabbi Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer (1698 -1760), who was known as the Baal Shem Tov or BESHT.
  
  The first attacks on Hasidic Judaism came during the times of the founder of Hasidic thought. Two bans of excommunication against Hasidic Jews first appeared in 1772, accompanied by the public burning of several early Hasidic pamphlets. Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (the honorific Gaon meaning "genius" was used in respect of his great Torah knowledge) who galvanized opposition to Hasidic Judaism. He believed that the claims of miracles and visions made by Hasidic Jews were lies and delusions. A key point of opposition was that the Vilna Gaon maintained that greatness in Torah and observance must come through natural human efforts at Torah study without relying on any external "miracles" and "wonders", whereas the Baal Shem Tov was more focused on bringing encouragement and raising the morale of the Jewish people, especially following the Chmelnitzki pogroms (1648 -1654) and the aftermath of disillusionment in the Jewish masses following the millennial excitement heightened by the failed messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank.
  
  Opponents of Hasidim held that Hasidim viewed their rebbes in an idolatrous fashion
  
  

Haskalah

- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Maskilim)

• Haskalah (Hebrew: השכלה‎; "enlightenment," "education" from sekhel "intellect", "mind"), the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the late 18th century that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew, and Jewish history. Haskalah in this sense marked the beginning of the wider engagement of European Jews with the secular world, ultimately resulting in the first Jewish political movements and the struggle for Jewish emancipation. The division of Ashkenazi Jewry into religious movements or denominations, especially in North America and anglophone countries, began historically as a reaction to Haskalah.
  
  In a more restricted sense, haskalah can also denote the study of Biblical Hebrew and of the poetical, scientific, and critical parts of Hebrew literature. The term is sometimes used to describe modern critical study of Jewish religious books, such as the Mishnah and Talmud, when used to differentiate these modern modes of study from the methods used by Orthodox Jews.
  
  The movement
  
  As long as the Jews lived in segregated communities, and as long as all avenues of social intercourse with their Gentile neighbors were closed to them, the rabbi was the most influential member of the Jewish community. In addition to being a religious scholar and "clergy", a rabbi also acted as a civil judge in all cases in which both parties were Jews. Rabbis sometimes had other important administrative powers, together with the community elders. The rabbinate was the highest aim of many Jewish boys, and the study of the Talmud was the means of obtaining that coveted position, or one of many other important communal distinctions. Haskalah followers advocated "coming out of ghetto," not just physically but also mentally and spiritually in order to assimilate amongst Gentile nations.
  
  One facet of haskalah was a widespread cultural adaptation, as those Jews who participated in the enlightenment began in varying degrees to participate in the cultural practices of the surrounding Gentile population. Connected with this was the birth of the Reform movement, whose founders such as Israel Jacobson and Leopold Zunz rejected the continuing observance of those aspects of Jewish law which they classified as ritual, as opposed to moral or ethical. Even within orthodoxy the Haskalah was felt through the appearance of the Mussar Movement in Lithuania and Torah im Derech Eretz in Germany. Enlightened Jews sided with Gentile governments in plans to increase secular education amongst the Jewish masses, bringing them into acute conflict with the orthodox who believed this threatened Jewish life.

My contention is that while it is absolutely true that Misnagdim no longer exist (as a misnagid has to understand && then refute Chassidus and todays misnagdim don't have a handle on WHY the movement ever existed) the majority of those who are leading the 'misnagdim' are in reality 'maskilim'.