The movement was resisted hard by the rabbinic establishment of Lithuania, and the opponents took their name from the resistance: Mitnagdim, those who object. Bans were issued from Vilna from 1772, and the objections were concrete rather than vague. The new groups prayed at their own times and in a different rite, they slaughtered with their own knives, they elevated a living man to a position between the worshipper and God, and they appeared to prize fervour above the study of Talmud, which was the whole shape of Lithuanian religious life.
The conflict was serious enough that both sides at moments appealed to the imperial authorities against the other. It cooled in the nineteenth century when a larger challenge arrived, because the Haskalah and then the movements of emancipation, socialism and Zionism gave the two camps a common opponent. By the twentieth century what they shared, a comprehensive traditional observance and a defence of it against the modern world, mattered more to both than what had divided them, and the yeshiva model of the opponents was adopted inside Hasidic communities as well.
The Holocaust destroyed the geography the movement had grown in. What survived was rebuilt by a small number of rebbes who reached New York, Israel and London, and it grew from that base at a rate that has made Hasidic communities a rising share of Orthodox Jewry, with Yiddish still spoken daily in the largest of them.