Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (Tzemach Tzedek)

Third Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch (1789–1866), halakhic authority known after his responsa as the Tzemach Tzedek, and Hasidic delegate to the 1843 St Petersburg rabbinical commission

Menachem Mendel Schneersohn
Image	250px Traditional portrait (unknown artist; public domain)
Born	1789 (eve of Rosh Hashanah 5550) Liozna (Lyozna), Russian Empire
Died	1866 (13 Nissan 5626) Lubavitch (Lyubavichi), Russian Empire
Nationality
Residence
Occupation
Known for	Third Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch, 1827/29–1866; Tzemach Tzedek responsa; editor of Torah Or and Likkutei Torah; Hasidic member of the 1843 rabbinical commission
Parents
Spouse(s)	Chaya Mushka (daughter of Dovber Schneuri; m. 1803)
Children	Baruch Shalom; Yehuda Leib (Kopust); Chaim Shneur Zalman (Liadi); Yisroel Noach (Niezhyn); Yosef Yitzchak (Ovruch); Shmuel Schneersohn; daughters including Devorah Leah
Sibling(s)
Education
Predecessor	Dovber Schneuri
Website

Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789–1866), known after the title of his collected responsa as the Tzemach Tzedek, was the third leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. A grandson of the movement's founder, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, and son-in-law of the second Rebbe, Dovber Schneuri, he led the movement from Lubavitch for nearly forty years under Nicholas I and Alexander II. Russian ministers identified him as the chief Hasidic obstacle to the state's Haskalah school reforms; he was investigated and placed under secret police surveillance in 1841, sat on the government's 1843 rabbinical commission in St Petersburg, and was later made an "honorary citizen". After his death his sons divided the movement into rival courts at Lubavitch, Kopust, Liadi, Niezhyn and Ovruch.

Early life

According to Shalom Dovber Levin's Kehot history of Chabad in Tsarist Russia, he was born on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5550 (1789) in Liozna. His father was Shalom Shachna (son of Noach Altshuler, a disciple of Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk) and his mother Devorah Leah, a daughter of Shneur Zalman. The Chabad.org timeline, compiled by Mordechai Rubin, states that she died on 3 Tishrei 1792, aged 26, and that Shneur Zalman then "took him under his wing and raised him as his own". The Challenge biography reproduced by Chabad.org says his mother "passed away three days after the Menachem Mendel's third birthday, and from that day the young orphan was reared and educated by his illustrious grandfather."

On 5 Kislev 5564 (1803), aged fourteen, he married his first cousin Chaya Mushka, daughter of Dovber. Chabad sources say that in his teens Shneur Zalman set him, with the Maharil (Yehuda Leib, Shneur Zalman's brother), to research and answer halakhic queries. He followed Dovber to Lubavitch in 1813–14. The Challenge biography describes "a period of fourteen years seclusion" after 1812, ending in 1826 when he organised a committee to defend Dovber after his arrest.

Loewenthal names him among the transcribers of Shneur Zalman's oral discourses, with Dovber, Moshe and Pinhas Reizes of Shklov, under a system in which every transcript was checked by a team led by Shneur Zalman's brother Yehudah Leib of Yanovitch. Of the grandson's first anthology he writes: "When the latter compiled his first anthology of his grandfather's teachings under the title Torah Or, he based the work on texts from the pen of R. Yehudah Leib." He adds that "By 1795-96, the discourses of R. Shneur Zalman were sufficiently close to their final form for R. Menahem Mendel, the Zemah Zedek, to consider a small number of them suitable for inclusion in his anthologies of Habad discourses, Torah Or and Likkutei Torah." The Tzemach Tzedek is also Loewenthal's authority for the fact that "in the following year, 1807, there was no Purim discourse. This is stated explicitly by the Zemah Zedek, the grandson of R. Shneur Zalman".

During the 1820s, as Dovber's health failed and he partly withdrew from private audiences, senior Hasidim in each community took on counselling. Loewenthal writes that "problems too difficult for them were to be referred to R. Dov Ber's brother, R. Haim Avraham, and to his son-in-law, R. Menahem Mendel, later known as the Zemah Zedek. Only in the last resort was the matter to be brought before R. Dov Ber himself." When Dovber went to Karlsbad for his health in 1825, he wrote to his son-in-law: "here they think that I am a merchant, not a Rabbi".

Succession, 1827–1829

Dovber died at Niezhyn on 9 Kislev 5588 (28 November 1827). Levin writes:

אחרי הסתלקות כ"ק דודו וחותנו אדמו"ר האמצעי, בשנת תקפ"ח (1827), קיבל עליו את נשיאות תנועת חב"ד.

("After the passing of his uncle and father-in-law, the Mitteler Rebbe, in the year 5588 (1827), he took upon himself the leadership of the Chabad movement.")

The Chabad.org timeline, by contrast, says he "was reluctant to formally accept the position of rebbe" for "approximately a year and a half", until the eve of Shavuot 5589 (1829), when a delegation of senior Hasidim prevailed on him.

Loewenthal sets out the succession: "Although R. Dov Ber left two sons, he was succeeded as Rebbe by R. Menahem Mendel, the grandson of R. Shneur Zalman, who had married R. Dov Ber's daughter, Hayah Mushka." He led for nearly forty years, and later Chabad came to call Dovber the "middle" (Mitteler) Rebbe, between Shneur Zalman and Menachem Mendel. On the Staroselye schism that followed Shneur Zalman's death, Loewenthal notes that "the Zemah Zedek is said to have defended the memory of R. Aaron, saying that in his case, his ecstasy truly was Divine in nature, and he had shown great self-sacrifice on behalf of R. Shneur Zalman."

The cantonists

In 1827 Nicholas I extended military conscription to the Jews through the Recruitment Statute of 1827. Michael Stanislawski notes that "The 1827 statute did not stipulate any quota at all for the Jews, leaving them liable to the general norm", but that Jews were draftable from ages 12 to 25: those under 18 went to Cantonist battalions until majority, after which the full twenty-five-year term began. He writes that "Only with regard to the Jews, however, was this device used systematically against an entire population", and estimates that "some 70,000 Jews were conscripted in Russia from 1827 through 1854; of these, approximately 50,000 were minors." Communities, not the government, chose the recruits; because most men over eighteen were already fathers, "The brutal decision facing the Jewish leaders was whether to conscript fathers or their children." Hired abductors known as khappers ("from the Yiddish verb khapn, to catch") "soon became permanent fixtures in the Pale and earned the hatred and the scorn of the masses of Jews."

Chabad's Challenge biography credits the Tzemach Tzedek with a "special council" and a clandestine society called Techiat Hameitim ("revivers of the dead"), which paid officials to report captured children as dead so that they could be hidden and sent to distant chadarim. It also says he sent representatives to Jewish troops to resist missionary pressure, and that "this underground program was successfully carried out and was never betrayed." The Chabad.org timeline names the organisation "Chevras Techiyas Hameisim", citing A. C. Glitzenstein's Kehot Sefer HaToldot of the Tzemach Tzedek (1986), p. 96. Loewenthal notes that he also addressed groups of ordinary cantonist soldiers.

Investigation of 1841 and the Haskalah school reform

Under Count Sergei Uvarov, Minister of Education, the government planned to set up state Jewish schools and hired the German rabbi Max Lilienthal to promote them. Levin, using documents published by Shaul Ginzburg and in the Hebrew press, reconstructs how maskilim presented the Hasidim, and above all their head, as the main opposition. A report from Vilna in the German-Jewish Israelitische Annalen (no. 6, 5 February 1841) prompted Uvarov to write to the Interior Minister, Count Stroganov, on 28 March 1841. In Levin's Hebrew translation of that letter the Hasidic sect in Belorussia has as its head and leader "a man named Mendel Lubavitcher" (אדם אחד ושמו מענדל ליובאוויטשער), who works by every means to frustrate the government's plans. Two days later Uvarov wrote on the same subject to Benckendorff, head of the Third Section (the secret police).

Levin writes that a special police officer then came to Lubavitch, questioned him and searched his house, and that the Rebbe fell ill from fear. Secret police surveillance followed. According to Levin it "lasted until spring 5607 (1847)" (נמשכה עד אביב תר"ז (1847)), when the government concluded there was nothing wrong in his conduct. The historian Claire Le Foll, working from the Third Section file (GARF f. 109, 1st exp., 1841, d. 14), confirms that he was accused of using his influence "s'opposer aux vues et aux prescriptions du gouvernement" ("to oppose the views and instructions of the government") and investigated in 1841. She adds that "L'enquête policière ne révéla rien de dangereux ni dans son comportement ni dans sa moralité" ("The police investigation revealed nothing dangerous in either his conduct or his morals").

Lilienthal wrote to him and visited Lubavitch, probably in 1842. Levin quotes Lilienthal's reports to the ministry, describing "Mendel Schneersohn" as the leading rabbi whose consent to the government's wishes would be, in Levin's Hebrew rendering, "law to the Hasidim" (לחסידים לחוק). Chabad.org's account of the visit says Lilienthal "did not deem the visit a success" and that, according to Hasidic sources, children in Lubavitch chased him shouting "Here is the German apostate!"

Stanislawski places the school policy with Uvarov: "for the first time, the government, in the person of Uvarov, was consciously and seriously embarking on a policy of spreading enlightenment to Russian Jews." He rejects the "simple, straightforward morality tale" of an evil minister designing missionary schools, and argues that "Uvarov's purpose in establishing the new schools was not to convert the Jews. Rather it was to transform them into educated Europeans". Most communities boycotted the local advisory committees of 1840. Lilienthal's January 1842 visit to Minsk met organised traditionalist opposition, including Hasidim; children jeered "Shkoles nie zhelaem" ("we don't want any [secular] schools"), and he fled. After a similar confrontation in Vilna he proposed that Uvarov "convoke a rabbinical synod, based on Napoleon's Sanhedrin, to approve the ministry's plans", which became the 1843 commission. From July to December 1842 he "crisscrossed the Pale" under police escort; "In most cities his reception was cordial but not warm; in the southern strongholds of the Haskalah he was greeted triumphantly."

The 1843 St Petersburg rabbinical commission

An imperial edict of 22 July 1842 called a meeting of rabbis in St Petersburg to "support the efforts of the government". The Hasidim first proposed Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac of Orsha, but then decided the Rebbe should go himself. The governor-general approved, and he was confirmed as a member in Nissan 5603 (spring 1843). Levin says he had first pleaded ill health "since the house search and the interrogations", but agreed to go so as to head off unwelcome decisions. He took two aides, one of his sons and one Hasid, and the commission met through the summer of 1843; he returned to Lubavitch in August. Levin stresses how little is known, quoting Beis Rebbi that the proceedings were "closed and sealed" (סתום וחתום) because no permission was given to disclose them.

Stanislawski dates the sessions from 6 May to 27 August 1843. The members were the two rabbis, the financier Israel Halperin of Berdichev and Bezalel Stern of the Odessa modern school, with Uvarov, his aides and Lilienthal for the government and Leon Mandelshtam as interpreter. R. Yitzchak of Volozhin joined, in Stanislawski's reading, as a moderate hoping to steer the reforms from within, and under pressure from Lilienthal's warnings. Schneersohn joined for different reasons: stopping in Vilna, "the Liubavicher rebbe announced that he was starting on a holy mission to counter the designs of the government". The proceedings left no official Jewish record. Stanislawski, working from ministry archives that were briefly opened after 1917, lists six projects on Jewish education and concludes that "it is most likely that they were drafted by him [Uvarov] and his staff and merely rubber-stamped by the members of the commission". An aide praised the Jewish members for "their boundless loyalty to the Crown and their absolute obedience to the Imperial will". Schneersohn's later letter (5608 / 1847–48) to Mandelshtam insisted that the curriculum the commission had set for teaching according to Torah and Talmud was one "from which nothing, God forbid, may be deleted."

The other traditionalist member was Yitzchak of Volozhin, head of the Volozhin yeshiva. Chabad accounts present the meeting of the two men as a Hasidic–Mitnagdic rapprochement. The Challenge biography quotes him: "We are not summoned to legislate... We are here to clarify statutes previously decided in the laws of the Mosaic faith". It also says he insisted that "customs are also considered Torah", and claims that "the conference ended without the adoption of any of the changes proposed by the Maskilim". Loewenthal, comparing the two traditionalists, writes that "In the struggles on this issue in the 1840s, precipitated by the maskil Lilienthal, the Lubavitch leader R. Menahem Mendel Schneersohn, the Zemah Zedek, was far more vigorous in his defense of the traditional system than was his colleague in the debate, Rabbi Yitzhak of Volozhin". He reads this not as a retreat into the ghetto but as strength drawn from Habad's spiritual outlook, which had "transformed the rabbi, so to speak, into a mystic leader who was not subject to the temporal power of the non-Jew but rather would wrestle with him for the well-being of his people."

Le Foll's archival assessment is markedly different:

Leurs efforts furent alors vains et Menahem Mendel fut contraint de se soumettre, au moins en apparence, aux exigences impériales en ouvrant une école juive d'État à Lioubavitchi.

("Their efforts were then in vain, and Menahem Mendel was forced to submit, at least outwardly, to the imperial demands by opening a state Jewish school in Lyubavichi.")

The state Jewish school system was decreed in November 1844. Le Foll notes that in 1856 the Ministry of Education defended Schneersohn by citing his support for that reform. It pointed to his 1843 honorary citizenship and to "une école juive d'État où son petit-fils était scolarisé et qu'il subventionnait généreusement" ("a state Jewish school in which his grandson was enrolled and which he generously subsidised").

"Arrested 22 times"

Chabad's Challenge biography says that, despite threats from the chairman, he was "placed under house arrest on numerous occasions during the four-month period of the conference". Stanislawski reports the fuller hagiographic version from Schneersohn's great-grandson: "the rabbi was put under house arrest twenty-two times" during the sessions for defending tradition. In that account, when R. Yitzchak abstained on a vote to abridge the liturgy, Schneersohn denied the ministry any authority over Jewish law and custom—"the Ministry of Culture has no authority over Jewish law and custom"—and threatened to resign; Count A. N. Golitsyn is said to have intervened. Stanislawski himself treats these disciples' accounts as inaccurate but revealing, and no archival confirmation has been found. In 1856 the Minister of the Interior proposed exiling him from Belorussia and placing him under police surveillance, on allegations including misuse of funds. The Ministry of Education and the Jewish Committee blocked the proposal; the Committee argued that removing an influential rabbi "pourrait mettre les Juifs dans de mauvaises dispositions à l'égard du gouvernement" ("could set the Jews against the government").

Aftermath: covert campaign and Habad's rise

According to the Liubavich family account that Stanislawski paraphrases, after returning from the commission Schneersohn "called together the most influential spiritual leaders of Russian Jewry to plan a covert campaign against the schools, the government, and the maskilim." R. Yitzchak of Volozhin was absent; his "collaborationist" politics were now discredited, and his yeshivah lost students. Allowing for Schneersohn-family bias, Stanislawski finds that "the status and power of the Liubavich dynasty of Hasidim rose considerably as the battle against Haskalah and the disintegration of traditional Jewish society intensified." The first Liubavich yeshivah (1841–42) was founded explicitly as "a barrier against the rising tide of the iniquity of Haskalah", and within a few years academies opened in about twenty towns. Stanislawski also treats 1843 as ending the nearly century-long Hasidic–mitnagdic feud: "the two sects of traditional — or rather Orthodox — Judaism joined in an overt alliance against their common enemies, the heterodox maskilim."

Honorary citizenship and agricultural settlement

Levin collects Russian documents showing that after the commission he received the status of "honorary citizen" (pochetny grazhdanin), and later "hereditary honorary citizen". A Russian document of 1858, which Levin quotes in Hebrew translation, says he obtained this for all commission members and then had the Hasidim buy a village in his name in Minsk province, which under the law made him a hereditary honorary citizen. The Chabad.org timeline dates the founding of the settlement of Shchedrin (Minsk province) to 1846, "initially settled [with] about sixty families", and the hereditary title to 1851. The Challenge biography gives 1844 for the purchase of land "from Prince Shzedrinov". It also credits him with persuading the Interior Ministry to issue a decree "forbidding the expulsion of Jews from villages and estates if they were already settled there". Earlier, it says, he urged Hasidim into farming, gave financial help to those who went, and sent Hillel of Paritch to the Jewish agricultural colonies of Kherson province.

Works

Loewenthal (YIVO) notes that "the six-volume collection of his responsa (1871–1874) indicates his skill as a halakhist", and that most of his works stayed in manuscript until the 20th century, "when they were printed in more than 40 volumes". Levin's Tsarist volume has a series of chapters (chs. 50–59) on the Tzemach Tzedek responsa: the lost responsa, the early volumes, those written in youth and old age, the editions, and his standing among contemporaries. A large fire in Lubavitch, which Chabad.org dates to 1856–58, destroyed much of his library and manuscripts.

• Tzemach Tzedek – responsa (She'elot u-Teshuvot), first published 1871–74
• Torah Or (Kopys, 1837) and Likkutei Torah (Zhitomir, 1848) – Shneur Zalman's discourses edited from transcripts, with his glosses
• Derech Mitzvosecha (Sefer ha-Mitzvot) – Hasidic explanations of the commandments
• Or HaTorah – multi-volume Hasidic commentary on the Torah and other texts (Kehot)
• Sefer ha-Chakirah: Derekh Emunah (1912) – on Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, Yosef Albo and David Gans
• Igrot Kodesh (letters; Kehot, 2013)

Loewenthal argues that "The Habad writings published by R. Dov Ber and his successor the Zemah Zedek stood up to the sophisticated onslaught of the new knowledge and new perceptions of the Haskalah". He writes that "In the next generation of Habad, Rabbi Menahem Mendel, the Zemah Zedek (1789-1866), was at the forefront of the political battle in the 1840s to defend the Jewish education system from the combined onslaught of the government and the maskilim", and notes his output of Hasidic discourses, printed in more than forty volumes. In his conclusion he writes that the Tzemach Tzedek "combined Hasidic thought with halakhah in an interesting way and thereby considerably broadened the influence of the Habad ideal in society". Like his grandfather he was a noted halakhist, and he also addressed groups of ordinary cantonist soldiers.

Death and the succession split

According to Chabad.org he fell gravely ill in Kislev 5620 (late 1859) and died in Lubavitch on 13 Nissan 5626 (March 1866), leaving "six sons, five of whom became rebbes in their own right". He was buried in Lubavitch. Loewenthal writes:

After Menaḥem Mendel's death in 1866, several of his sons and grandsons became rival Hasidic leaders in the towns of Liady, Kopys, Niezhyn, and Ovruch... There was fierce conflict among the respective groups, although the incidence of interfamilial marriages between the offspring of these leaders suggests that the conflicts may have subsequently subsided, at least at the leadership level.

His youngest son, Shmuel Schneersohn (the Maharash), stayed in Lubavitch and kept his father's manuscript collection, which Loewenthal counts as an important factor in his leadership. Yehuda Leib, the second son, founded the Kopust line in Kopys but died within months, in 1866; the Kopust line continued under his son Shlomo Zalman of Kopust (d. 1900, author of Magen Avot). Chaim Shneur Zalman led at Liadi until 1879, Yisroel Noach at Niezhyn from 1869 to 1883, and Yosef Yitzchak at Ovruch until 1876. His eldest son, Baruch Shalom, held no formal leadership; the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was his direct descendant.

See also

• Chabad-Lubavitch movement
• Shneur Zalman of Liadi
• Dovber Schneuri
• Shmuel Schneersohn
• Shalom Dovber Schneersohn
• Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Kopust (Hasidic dynasty)
• History of Chabad in Tsarist Russia – Selected Chapters, 1770–1920

Bibliography

• Shalom Dovber Levin, Toldot Chabad b'Russia HaTzarit – Perakim Nivcharim, 1770–1920, Brooklyn: Kehot / Otzar HaChassidim, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8266-5327-7. Chabad-side.
• Claire Le Foll, "L'Empire russe et le hassidisme", Slavica Occitania 29 (2009), pp. 99–116.
• Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-226-49045-8.
• Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983, ISBN 0-8276-0216-2.

External links

• The Tzemach Tzedek – Chabad.org portal
• Timeline – Chabad.org