Central Europe

Central Europe is the belt between the German lands and the Russian plain, and its religious history begins with a question about language. In 863 the Byzantine emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine, later called Cyril, and Methodius, to Moravia at the request of its ruler. They devised an alphabet for the Slavonic speech of the region and translated the liturgy and the scriptures into it, which put them at odds with the Frankish clergy already working there, who held that worship belonged in Hebrew, Greek and Latin only. The brothers took the case to Rome and won permission; after their deaths their pupils were driven out and carried the Slavonic books south and east instead.

The consequence was enormous and mostly fell outside the region. Old Church Slavonic became the liturgical language of Bulgaria, Serbia and eventually Russia, so the alphabet devised for Moravia ended by carrying Orthodox Christianity across eastern Europe, while Moravia itself finished in the Latin sphere.

The second great argument in the region also concerned who could say what, and in what language. Jan Hus, a Prague preacher, was condemned at the Council of Constance and burned in 1415 despite a safe conduct, and the Hussite wars that followed produced one of the earliest large-scale challenges to Roman authority in Europe, more than a century before Luther.

For roughly five centuries the largest Jewish population in the world lived in this region, mostly in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor territories, and the institutions it built there are the direct ancestors of most Jewish religious life today.

Hasidism began in its southeastern corner in the eighteenth century, in Podolia and Volhynia. Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, gathered a circle around a piety centred on joy, on prayer as attachment to God, and on the figure of the righteous man as a channel between his followers and heaven. Moshe Rosman's study of the sources shows how much of the familiar biography comes from tales collected long afterwards and how little from documents of the man's own lifetime, which is a caution rather than a debunking. The movement organised itself into courts around particular dynasties, spread rapidly, and was fiercely opposed by the rabbinic establishment of Lithuania before eventually being accepted as part of the tradition.

Almost all of it was destroyed between 1939 and 1945. The communities of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech lands were murdered in place or deported to killing centres built in the same region, and the yeshivas and Hasidic courts that survived did so because individuals reached Israel, the United States or Britain and rebuilt them there. The map of Jewish religious life was redrawn by that, permanently.