Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov

Moshe Rosman is a historian of early modern Polish Jewry, and this University of California Press book is his archival study of Israel ben Eliezer, the Ba'al Shem Tov, separating what can actually be documented about the historical man from the extensive hagiographic tradition that grew up around him within Hasidism. Its strength is genuine archival discovery, Rosman located and used Polish civic and legal records that let him establish concrete facts about the Ba'al Shem Tov's life independent of the later devotional stories, a real methodological advance over sources that worked only from the hagiography itself. Its limit is that, precisely because so little documentary evidence survives, large parts of the Ba'al Shem Tov's inner religious life and teaching remain accessible mainly through the hagiographic tradition this book is explicitly working to distinguish from established fact.