Tanya

Foundational work of Chabad Hasidism by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, first published in 1796, noted for its doctrine of the Jewish and non-Jewish soul

Tanya
Original title	תניא / Likkutei Amarim (ליקוטי אמרים)
Author	Shneur Zalman of Liadi
Country	Russian Empire
Language	Hebrew
Subject	Hasidic theology, Jewish mysticism, Lurianic Kabbalah
Genre	Religious text
Publisher	First edition: Slavita; standard edition: Kehot Publication Society
Published	1796 (first edition, as Likkutei Amarim); 1798 (second edition, as Tanya); 1814 (complete five-part edition)

The Tanya (Hebrew: תניא, "it has been taught"), also published as Likkutei Amarim ("Collected Sayings"), is the foundational text of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, written by Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), the movement's founder and first Rebbe. It was first printed anonymously at Slavita in 1796, and the YIVO encyclopedia dates it to 1797. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Chabad Hasidim call it the "written law of Chabad" and "designate it for daily study". It is unusual among Hasidic works in being "a complete systematic exposition" by the founder of the system himself rather than a collection of sermons.

The book sets out a mystical psychology built on Lurianic Kabbalah. At its centre is the beinoni ("intermediate person"), whose two souls are locked in continual struggle. The same teaching that gives every Jew a "divine soul" also holds, in the words of chapter one, that the souls of the nations derive "from the other, unclean kelipot, which contain no good whatsoever". That passage has drawn repeated charges of racism or Jewish supremacism, which Chabad rabbis reject.

Under the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, printing the Tanya became a worldwide campaign. Chabad's own magazine counted more than 6,700 local editions by 2016, including editions produced by Chabad soldiers inside the Gaza Strip in 2024.

Authorship and composition

Before he committed his teachings to writing, Shneur Zalman of Liadi preached them orally. According to Chabad's introduction to the book, his discourses were "recorded from memory by his disciples" and circulated in manuscript. Many of these copies were "replete with errors as a result of repeated copying and transcription, or by the malicious mischief of opponents", which prompted him to publish an authorised outline of his system. He called the work Likkutei Amarim ("Collected Sayings"), presenting it as a selection of discourses drawn "from books and scribes, heavenly saints". The subtitle Sefer shel Beinonim ("Book of the Intermediates") signalled that it was written for the ordinary believer rather than the saint.

The book appeared during the bitter conflict between Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents, the Mitnagdim. YIVO reports that in October 1798 Shneur Zalman "was arrested and interrogated as a result of being denounced to the Russian authorities as a threat to the state". The informer alleged that Hasidism was "a new religion, forbidden by law" and that its leader was sending money abroad without permission. He was freed in Saint Petersburg on 19 Kislev, a date Chabad still celebrates. A second arrest followed in 1801, after a denunciation by Avigdor ben Ḥayim, the deposed rabbi of Pinsk. The Israeli historian Immanuel Etkes has reconstructed both imprisonments from Russian interrogation records, and his biography gives a chapter to Sefer shel Beinonim.

Publication history

The first edition (Slavita, 1796) carried the title Likkutei Amarim. The second (Zolkiew, 1798) promoted the opening word, Tanya, to the title and kept Likkutei Amarim as a subtitle. The other parts were printed separately at Shklov: the short Iggeret ha-Teshuvah in 1799 and its longer version in 1806. The Shklov edition of 1814, published after the author's death, was the first to contain all five parts, "and this form has since been retained". The standard modern Hebrew–English edition and commentary are published by the movement's publishing house, Kehot Publication Society.

The campaign to print the Tanya everywhere

According to Chabad's own account, Menachem Mendel Schneerson reasoned that a Tanya printed in a Jew's own city would "carry the same influence" that books shipped from elsewhere could not. His followers were therefore asked to print local editions "in every country and in each and every city where Yidden live". By 2016 they had produced "over six-thousand seven hundred editions". Each edition records its place of printing, and the Kehot edition carries a list of all editions.

The campaign has repeatedly followed Israeli military operations. In 1982, during the Lebanon War, the Rebbe "directed a group of Chassidim to print the Tanya in various Lebanese cities, including the capital city of Beirut". His instructions included printing "the name of the city where it was printed in both Hebrew and Arabic". In January 2024 Israel Defense Forces Major Ezzy Morgenstern, a Chabad rabbi and military chaplain, joined an armed convoy into the Gaza Strip and printed 100 copies at an IDF outpost. Chabad.org described it as fulfilling "a mission started by the Rebbe during the 1982 Lebanon war". Israel National News reported that the Khan Yunis printing was managed by Tzeirei Agudas Chabad together with IDF soldiers. It was accompanied by the laying of tefillin and the fixing of a mezuzah, and Tzeirei Chabad chair Yosef Aharonov spoke of the Rebbe's "special attention to soldiers". Further printings followed in Rafah, according to the Chabad news site Anash.org.

Structure

The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists the five parts of the book as follows:

• Sefer shel Beinonim / Likkutei Amarim ("The Book of the Intermediates"), 53 chapters. The psychological and devotional core of the work.
• Sha'ar ha-Yiḥud ve-ha-Emunah ("The Gate of Unity and Faith"), called Ḥinukh Katan in the first edition. On divine unity and the continuous creation of the world.
• Iggeret ha-Teshuvah ("Epistle on Repentance"), also called Tanya Katan.
• Iggeret ha-Kodesh ("Holy Epistle"), pastoral letters published in 1814.
• Kuntres Aḥaron ("Final Tract"), Shklov 1814.

Core teachings

Two souls

Likkutei Amarim teaches that every Jew has two souls. One "originates in the kelipah and sitra achara". It is "clothed in the blood of a human being, giving life to the body", and is the source of both natural virtues and vices. The second is a "divine soul". In the Jew the first, "animal", soul is said to derive from kelipat nogah, a husk "which also contains good". According to Balk, Shneur Zalman holds that the Jewish soul is "literally a part of God and the Divine essence" (ḥelek Elokah mima'al mamesh).

The beinoni

YIVO identifies the book's "main innovation" as the distinction between the tzaddik, who "has completely purified his soul from evil", and the beinoni, or "middling" person. The beinoni still feels evil impulses but never acts on them in thought, speech or deed. The subtitle Sefer shel Beinonim reflects the book's address to "the average Jew".

Mind over heart

The name Chabad (ChaBaD) is an acronym of three intellectual faculties: ḥokhmah (wisdom), binah (understanding) and da'at (knowledge). In the Tanya these faculties come first and are meant to govern the emotions. Rachel Elior describes the system's "essential innovation" as a religious outlook that "concentrated upon perceiving the divinity: its essence, its nature, the stages of its manifestation", a conception that "generated a profound transformation of religious worship and was the cause of great controversy throughout the Jewish world".

Bittul (self-nullification)

Naftali Loewenthal identifies bitul (self-abnegation) as the central esoteric concept of the second Rebbe, Dovber Schneuri, who developed his father's system. He also argues that the early Chabad school was distinguished by a "communication ethos encouraging the transmission of esoteric [teachings] to the broad reaches of the Jewish world".

Intellectual context

Lurianic Kabbalah

YIVO describes the Tanya as "anchored in the doctrines of divinity and the soul taught by Lurianic Kabbalah", the system of Isaac Luria (1534–1572) of Safed. The key passage on the nations explicitly cites Ḥayyim Vital's Etz Ḥayyim (Portal 49, chapter 3) as its authority. The book's language of kelipot (husks) and divine sparks is taken from the Lurianic tradition.

Talmudic sources

The book takes its name from its opening word, which introduces a teaching from the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Niddah) on the oath administered to the soul before birth, "be righteous and be not wicked". The passage on the nations relies on the Babylonian Talmud's reading (Bava Batra 10b) of Proverbs 14:34, "the kindness of the nations is sin", which the Tanya explains as charity done "only for their self-glorification".

Chabad compared with other Hasidic, Haredi and Litvish currents

The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that the book was "criticized adversely by both maskilim and Mitnaggedim", and even by the Hasidic leader Abraham of Kalisk. Loewenthal argues that, faced with modernity, most traditional Jewish communities either secularised or retreated "into enclave religiosity". Chabad, by "stressing communication", took a third path, and he presents this as the root of its later outreach. Etkes devotes chapters to Chabad's "front line against the Mitnagdim" and to the founder's conflict with Abraham of Kalisk. Within the Hasidic world, Chabad's stress on intellect and on systematic study of a single text set it apart from courts centred on the charisma of the tzaddik.

Teachings on non-Jews

The text

The doctrine is set out in the opening chapters of Likkutei Amarim and depends on its two-soul scheme.

Chapter 1: the animal soul (nefesh ha-behamit). Every Jew has a soul that "originates in the kelipah and sitra achara" (the "other side"). In Jews this soul "is derived from kelipat nogah, which also contains good". The Kehot translation then continues:

"The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatsoever, as is written in Etz Chaim, Portal 49, ch. 3, that all the good that the nations do is done from selfish motives. So the Gemara [Bava Batra 10b] comments on the verse, 'The kindness of the nations is sin' [Proverbs 14:34]—that all the charity and kindness done by the nations of the world is only for their own self-glorification…"

Chapter 2: the divine soul (nefesh ha-elokit). "The second soul of a Jew is truly a part of G‑d above", derived "from His thought and wisdom" in the way that "a child is derived from his father's brain". The Hebrew phrase ḥelek Eloah mi-ma'al mamash ("literally a part of God above") is the basis of the claim that the Jewish soul is different in kind, not merely in degree.

Chapter 6: the three impure kelipot. The kelipot are divided into two grades. The lower grade consists of "the three kelipot which are altogether unclean and evil, containing no good whatsoever". The text then states:

"From them flow and derive the souls of all the nations of the world, and the existence of their bodies, and also the souls of all living creatures that are unclean and unfit for consumption… as well as the existence and vitality of all forbidden food in the vegetable kingdom…"

Chapter 19. Holiness is defined as self-nullification before God. It is "the very opposite of the kelipah and sitra achara, from which are derived the souls of the nations of the world who act for their own sake and say, 'Give, give' and 'Feed me'… [wishing] to be an independent entity". For this reason, the chapter continues, "they are called 'dead'". The same chapter, however, applies the "dead" label to "the wicked and transgressors of Israel" as well, until they are tested and willing to sanctify God's name.

Two printed versions of chapter 1

The Hebrew of the key sentence differs between editions:

• The vocalised Kehot text on Sefaria reads nafshot umot ha-olam ("the souls of the nations of the world") and, in the next clause, ha-umot ("the nations").
• The unvocalised text reproduced by the French Orthodox site Torah-Box reads nafshot umot ovdei gilulim ("the souls of the idol-worshipping nations") and ha-umot ovdei gilulim in the next clause.

Koren's Steinsaltz edition states that, "by specific directive from the Lubavitcher Rebbe", it reproduces the Hebrew "as it was printed in the Vilna edition in 1900". Substituting narrower terms such as "idolaters" or "star-worshippers" for words meaning gentiles in general was a standard practice of the censors who supervised Hebrew printing in Catholic Europe and the Russian Empire. An anonymous reader's comment under the 2008 Jewish Chronicle exchange claimed the narrower wording was "merely the result of censorship by the Russian authorities". This matters because Chabad apologists rely on the narrower reading. Rabbi Yitzchok Schochet, for example, argued that the passage "speaks of idol-worshippers devoid of revealed religion".

Critics

Orthodox and rabbinic critics

• Hanan Balk (Ḥakirah, 2013) called the doctrine "uncomfortable and racially charged" and an "inconvenient truth". He argued that it "was undoubtedly… the prominent position maintained by authorities of Jewish thought" and that its familiarity among Jews today comes mainly from "the Ḥabad movement, due to its outreach efforts". He went on to search the tradition for an "equally authentic" alternative view.
• Menachem Kellner, professor emeritus of Jewish thought at the University of Haifa, writes that the "particularism of Halevi, Zohar, and Maharal finds a muted but undeniable expression in Chabad writings", and that the Tanya "maintains that Gentiles, because of the nature of their souls, cannot aspire to the level of holiness to which Jews can". He sets this against Maimonides, who "denies that there is any ontological difference between Jew and Gentile". Had Maimonides been "the author of the Tanya", Kellner writes, the Jew–Gentile distinction would have been "part of the very fabric of the universe".
• Rabbi Assaf Bednarsh of Yeshivat Har Etzion summarises the Tanya view this way: the gentile soul "is purely animalistic and not Godly", so that "a gentile is not merely a lower form of life, but is essentially and irredeemably evil". He notes the problem this creates for the theology of conversion.

Academic critics

• Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky identify the Lurianic doctrine as the root of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism: "one of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body".
• Elliot R. Wolfson argues that Schneerson built "a fundamentalist ideology" that could also subvert "the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile". He devotes a chapter, "Apocalyptic crossing: beyond the (non)Jewish other", to the question.
• Rachel Elior notes that the Tanya's theology "was the cause of great controversy throughout the Jewish world".

Communal and journalistic critics

• Dan Rickman, a member of Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue, objected to a Tanya course there in 2008 and the synagogue dropped it. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, he argued that "within the Tanya there is no direct counter-text", that "the view presented is that non-Jews are a different and lesser type of human being than Jews", and he asked: "is 'our' racism better than 'their' racism?"
• Joe Mintz, writing in the same paper a month earlier, called the text "stark".

Political implications

Kellner describes Torat Hamelekh (2009) by Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar as "a truly blood-thirsty contemporary expression of the view that Jews are ontologically distinct from and profoundly superior in every fashion to Gentiles". He notes that it carried an approbation from the Chabad-affiliated kabbalist Yitzhak Ginsburgh, "author of Barukh haGever, a booklet memorializing Baruch Goldstein". Kellner places Torat Hamelekh within the same particularist current to which he assigns the Tanya. He does not claim that the book quotes the Tanya directly. Shahak and Mezvinsky link the soul doctrine to the settler movement in the occupied West Bank.

Chabad counter-arguments

• Scope. Schochet argued that the passage refers to idolaters, that "the 'pious of the nations'… are excluded", and that critics misunderstand the kabbalistic term "impure shells": "in Judaism… there is no such thing of something devoid of Divinity".
• Universal divine spark. Schneerson wrote that the kelipot do not lack "a spark [of G‑dliness] at all. For without a spark of good, it is impossible for any entity to exist".
• Chosenness is mainstream. Schochet argued that critics "proclaim this distinction… at the conclusion of every Sabbath" in the Havdalah blessing, and that the Jewish "additional soul" exists to carry out "their mission to be a Divine beacon to the nations".
• Noahide outreach. Rickman himself acknowledged that "the late Rebbe had campaigned for non-Jews to keep the seven Noachide laws". The campaign is cited as evidence that Chabad does not regard non-Jews as beyond moral worth.

How successive Rebbes presented the passage

In what follows, text means the printed words of the Tanya, translation means renderings into other languages, and exegesis means interpretation that leaves the text as it is.

Reinterpretations of Tanya ch. 1 on non-Jewish souls

Who / when	What was done	Type	Practical effect	Source
Shneur Zalman of Liadi, 1796–1814	Original statement. The nations' souls derive from the three impure kelipot "which contain no good whatsoever" (ch. 1, ch. 6).	Text	The base doctrine.
Uncertain editions (Russian Empire?)	Two Hebrew readings circulate: "nations of the world" and "idol-worshipping nations".	Text (variant)	The narrower reading lets apologists confine the passage to idolaters. Which reading came first is not established.
Tzemach Tzedek (3rd Rebbe), Kitzur Tanya ch. 6	Glosses "no good at all" as meaning no good "in their essence". "Through the mode of exile", the nations nevertheless contain "Divine life-energy, a spark".	Exegesis	Text unchanged. The absolute statement becomes a claim about essence, not existence.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson (7th Rebbe), Letter No. 95	Answers a correspondent who points to the Noahide laws and the "pious gentiles". He cites the Tzemach Tzedek and argues that without a spark "it is impossible for any entity to exist".	Exegesis	Text unchanged. Gentiles are given a sustaining but hidden ("swallowed up") spark.
Schneerson, reply on an English translation (published in Letters from the Rebbe, 1997, pp. 106–7)	Asked whether an English translation should omit the passage for fear of antisemitism, he refused. Citing the world's indifference to the Nazi genocide, he wrote that "the words of the Alter Rebbe may even be an understatement".	Translation policy (no softening)	The text was deliberately not cut or softened in translation.
Schneerson, talk with Hillel students, 7 March 1960	"A non-Jew and every created thing does have a Divine spark, but it is not the same kind of Divine spark that a Jew has."	Exegesis	A hierarchy of souls is affirmed. Balk reads it as "the same hierarchical theory of souls found in the Tanya".
Kehot English edition / Lessons in Tanya (Wineberg; edited under the Rebbe)	A commentary note adds that some among the nations, "the pious ones of the nations of the world", have souls from kelipat nogah.	Commentary added to the translation	Text unchanged, but readers meet the qualification on the same page.
Chabad apologists, e.g. Schochet (2008)	Read the passage as referring to "idol-worshippers devoid of revealed religion".	Exegesis, resting on a textual variant	Narrows who is covered.

In summary: the sources verified here document no deliberate rewording of the Tanya by any Rebbe. The seventh Rebbe expressly refused to cut or soften the passage in English. What did change over time was exegesis (the Tzemach Tzedek's "in their essence" gloss and Schneerson's "spark" teaching) and explanatory apparatus (the Kehot note on the "pious of the nations"). There is also a textual variant ("nations of the world" against "idol-worshipping nations") whose origin, whether the censor or the author, has not been established from a reliable bibliographic source.

Study and outreach

Chabad Hasidim study the Tanya daily. Chabad.org publishes Lessons in Tanya, a five-volume commentary by Rabbi Yosef Wineberg, "translated from Yiddish by Rabbi Levy Wineberg and Rabbi Sholom B. Wineberg", alongside videos and alternative translations. The full text is also freely available on Sefaria. Loewenthal and Balk both connect the book's reach to Chabad's outreach strategy: the doctrine's familiarity today owes most to "the Ḥabad movement, due to its outreach efforts".

Messianism

Wolfson describes Schneerson as "a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda". He argues that the Rebbe's teaching, rooted in the Tanya and later Chabad thought, culminated in a vision of redemption beyond "all duality". Galina Zelenina links the "ardent messianism" of the "Lubavitch mentality" to the movement's political strategy in post-Soviet Russia. The printing campaign, with editions carried into Lebanon in 1982 and into Gaza in 2024, is presented by Chabad as one of the Rebbe's "most 'wondrous'" campaigns.

Reception and scholarship

• Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidism (2014/15): the leading critical biography, drawing on Russian interrogation records.
• Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God (1993): Chabad's kabbalistic theosophy.
• Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite (1990): the first two generations of the Chabad school.
• Roman A. Foxbrunner, Habad: The Hasidism of R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
• Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret (2009): the seventh Rebbe's mystical and messianic revision of Chabad thought.

See also

• Shneur Zalman of Liadi
• Chabad-Lubavitch movement
• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Kehot Publication Society
• Torat Hamelekh
• Yitzhak Ginsburgh
• Chabad in occupied Palestine
• Israel Shahak

External links

• Tanya, full text at Sefaria
• Lessons in Tanya at Chabad.org
• Mivtza Tanya, the Chabad printing-campaign website