Shmuel Schneersohn

Fourth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch (1834–1882), known as the Rebbe Maharash, youngest son of the Tzemach Tzedek, who led the movement from Lubavitch after the 1866 split and, according to Chabad accounts, lobbied Russian ministers during the pogroms

Shmuel Schneersohn
Image	250px His grave in Lubavitch (public-domain photograph, Wikimedia Commons)
Born	2 Iyar 5594 (1834) Lubavitch (Lyubavichi), Mogilev province, Russian Empire
Died	13 Tishrei 5643 (September 1882) Lubavitch, Russian Empire
Nationality
Residence
Occupation
Known for	Fourth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch, 1866–1882; the saying "lechatchila ariber"; communal lobbying in St Petersburg and abroad (according to Chabad accounts)
Parents	Menachem Mendel Schneersohn and Chaya Mushka
Spouse(s)	(1) a daughter of his brother Chaim Shneur Zalman (m. 1848, d. shortly after); (2) Rivkah, granddaughter of Dovber Schneuri (m. 1849, d. 1914)
Children	Schneur Zalman Aharon; Shalom Dovber Schneersohn; Avraham Sender; Menachem Mendel; Devorah Leah; Chaya Mushka
Sibling(s)
Education
Predecessor	Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (the Tzemach Tzedek)
Website

Shmuel Schneersohn (1834–1882), known in Chabad by the acronym the Rebbe Maharash (Moreinu ha-Rav Shmuel), was the fourth leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. The youngest son of the third Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, he took over the leadership in Lubavitch itself on his father's death in 1866, while several of his brothers set up rival Chabad courts in Kopys (Kopust), Liadi, Niezhyn and Ovruch. He wrote a large body of Hasidic discourses and is best known in Chabad today for the saying "lechatchila ariber" ("go over in the first place"). Chabad sources present him chiefly as a shtadlan (intercessor) who travelled to St Petersburg and Western Europe to lobby officials on behalf of Russian Jews, above all during the pogroms, which these sources date to 1879–82. Independent historians of the pogroms, notably I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, find no state conspiracy behind them. The only non-Chabad trace of the Rebbe's activity at the time found so far is an unconfirmed police informer's report of 1882, cited by Klier, about fundraising in Vitebsk. The historian Eli Rubin argues that his tenure was not a decline but a "false twilight" for Chabad. He died in Lubavitch in 1882 aged 48, and was eventually succeeded by his son Shalom Dovber Schneersohn.

Early life

According to Shalom Dovber Levin's Kehot history of Chabad in Tsarist Russia, he was born in Lubavitch on 2 Iyar 5594 (1834), and was "the only Rebbe who was born, lived all his days and also died in Lubavitch". Chabad.org calls him "the youngest of seven sons born to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch, the third Chabad Rebbe, known as the 'Tzemach Tzedek,' and Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka", and says that "by the age of seven he was proficient in large sections of the Talmud along with the commentaries".

A timeline compiled by Menachem Mendel Schneerson and published by Kehot records that in 1848 he married a niece, the daughter of his brother Chaim Shneur Zalman, who "dies shortly thereafter", and in 1849 married Rivkah, a granddaughter of the second Rebbe, Dovber Schneuri. Rivkah outlived him by more than thirty years, dying on 10 Shevat 5674 (1914); she was buried near him in Lubavitch.

Early communal work

Chabad accounts date his public role to 1855, when at 21 his father asked him to take up communal work. His first task, according to the Challenge biography, was to attend "a conference called by the Russian Government to discuss the problems connected with the publication of textbooks with a German translation for use in the instruction of Jewish children", chaired by an assistant of the Minister of the Interior. The Kehot timeline lists a journey to Germany "to confer with communal leaders" in 1859; a journey to Kiev in 1863, on which he is said to have rescued "hundreds of families on the verge of being expelled from Volhynian villages"; and a journey to St Petersburg in 1865, where he "successfully lobbies to annul a decree submitted to the Senate limiting rights of Jews in Lithuania and Zamut".

Succession in 1866 and the split

Chabad.org says that a year before his death the Tzemach Tzedek asked Shmuel, then 32, to deliver Hasidic discourses publicly, "a practice normally reserved for Chabad Rebbes", and told his followers to "listen to him [Rabbi Shmuel] as you listen to me." After the Tzemach Tzedek died on 13 Nissan 5626 (March 1866), Levin writes, Shmuel "took upon himself the leadership of the Chabad movement in Lubavitch", while "his brothers, the holy rabbis, settled and opened Chabad centres in the towns of Kopust, Liadi, Niezhyn and Ovruch".

Loewenthal's YIVO article describes the split from outside the movement's own tradition:

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.

He counts Shmuel's retention of his father's manuscript collection in Lubavitch as an important factor in his leadership. In Communicating the Infinite Loewenthal notes that a split at a generational transition recurs in Habad history, "in Habad we meet it again after R. Menahem Mendel, the Zemah Zedek, passed away in 1866", and that after the Tzemach Tzedek his sons led several branches of Habad, the differences between which still need research. Of the rival lines, the Kopust branch, founded by his brother Yehuda Leib and continued by Yehuda Leib's son Shlomo Zalman, lasted longest. Outside Chabad's own literature, David Assaf and Gadi Sagiv note that "the claims that the will of the Tsemah Tsedek had been forged" accompanied the split, and refer readers to Ilia Lurie's history of Habad in the Russian Empire for details. A 2021 study by Eli Rubin, based on manuscript fragments of the Tzemach Tzedek's instructions, argues that "the Ẓemaḥ Ẓedek never issued a single and complete 'will' in the conventional sense" but declared his wishes "via a fragmented series of notes (tsetlekh)". By 1865, he writes, the Tzemach Tzedek's sons in Lubavitch functioned "as a constellation of satellite courts", and "By 1865, it seems, the five sons shared jointly in the leadership", with his son Yehuda Leib (Maharil) acting as "his father's foremost proxy". Rubin suggests that Shmuel's discourses of the winter before his father's death, which argued "against an acosmic interpretation of Chabad doctrine", "played a role in the controversy surrounding the question of succession". In his reading, "if not for Maharash's ascendance, Maharil would have retained his status as the first among equals"; instead "Maharil left Lubavitch and established his court in Kopust, leaving Maharash, the youngest son, to fill his father's seat."

The court in Lubavitch

The Lubavitch court burned down again in summer 1868. Levin describes how Shmuel, faced with his father's will forbidding his sons to live in his house, which was to become a school or study-house, wrote a responsum on whether he might rebuild on the site; in the end he bought more land to the east and built his home there. In 1872 he built a large hall, 30 by 30 cubits, on the site of his father's house, used for the High Holy Days and large gatherings, and a smaller prayer hall joined to his home. Levin's following chapters describe the manuscript and book collections that passed through his hands, including his own large collection of transcripts of earlier Rebbes' discourses.

Teaching

Loewenthal writes that Shmuel "likewise is noted for his activism and also for the profundity of his thought as an exponent of the mystical Hasidic teachings", and that he left a considerable library of discourses, published in chronological volumes. Kehot has published them in the series Torat Shmuel, arranged by year (for example Torat Shmuel 5626); Chabad.org states that "Over twenty volumes of his works have thus far been published". His best-known extended work is the discourse series Ve-kakhah (Hemshekh Vekakhah ha-Gadol) of 5637 (1877). Rubin disputes the claim made by the sociologist Samuel Heilman that Shmuel's creation of the post of mashpi'a (spiritual mentor) was "a reflection of his charismatic limitations". He argues that it testifies instead "to his vision for the perpetuation of the Chabad way of life and worship, and to the confidence with which he asserted his authority". Citing government reports used by Ilia Lurie, Rubin writes that "Maharash became wealthy by investing in stock exchanges and other businesses, and that he kept a wine cellar", and that "he was the first Chabad rebbe to wear clothing cut in the European style". He concludes that "independent testimonies do uphold the underlying claim that Maharash boldly embraced the economic and technological innovations of his time, engaged the world beyond Lubavitch, and carried his charisma and wit lightly."

On the teaching, Rubin describes Hemshekh ve-kakhah ha-gadol as Shmuel's "best-known and most influential contribution": a series of discourses "whose initial installment was delivered in the spring of 1877, on the festival of Passover", "totaling forty-six discourses in all". He finds that the discourses "are notable for the bold brevity with which he reconstrues and reconceptualizes theological concepts", and that "the rhetoric of acosmism would be increasingly displaced" in later Chabad thought. He concludes that "the presumption that he was merely the unremarkable heir to the waning vitality of his predecessors cannot be upheld", and that the period was "a false twilight, in which a new foundation was laid for the perpetuation and expansion of Chabad-Lubavitch as both an intellectual and activist movement in the century that followed."

"Lechatchila ariber"

Chabad.org gives his best-known saying as: "The world says: If you can't go under [an obstacle], leap over; I say: In the first place, go over!" In Yiddish the key phrase is lechatchila ariber, "over, in the first place". Chabadpedia, a Chabad wiki, gives the Yiddish as it appears in a letter of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who says he heard it from his father, the Rashab, who heard it from Shmuel: "Di velt zogt az men kon nit arunter, darf men ariber; un ikh halt az men darf lechatchila ariber." The saying became a watchword in the seventh Rebbe's time; Menachem Mendel Schneerson used it in his letters, for instance to urge a sick correspondent to rejoice in advance of recovery.

Communal activism and the pogroms

Loewenthal describes Shmuel's "direct involvement in the Jewish community" as that of a latter-day shtadlan, who travelled abroad to seek foreign help to protect Russian Jews. The Challenge biography says that in 1869 he "organized a permanent council of leaders of the St Petersburg Jewish community", whose task was "to be well-informed in all matters concerning the Jewish people and to be on constant guard to defend their interests and rights".

The 1879–82 pogroms

In the Chabad account, he went repeatedly to St Petersburg as anti-Jewish agitation grew and was assured by officials that it would be stopped, "but pogroms broke out again in 5640 (1880) in Kiev and Nieshin". Returning from abroad, he went to the capital and, "with the aid of Professor Bertenson, court physician to the Czar", obtained an audience with the Minister of the Interior. There he is said to have reproached the minister for breaking his word, and warned that foreign financiers were asking him how to respond. The Challenge account has the minister reply: "Rabbi of Lubavitch, do you dare to intimidate the Russian government with threats of the power of foreign capitalists? Are you threatening a revolution in this country?" Shmuel answered that "it is the negligent and weak conduct of the Imperial Government in the past that could now bring about a revolution in this country". He was then kept under house arrest at his hotel for two days, and on the third day the minister gave "a positive reply to his request". The Kehot timeline sums this up as "1880: Successfully lobbies to halt pogroms." The story derives from the Rayatz's Sefer ha-Toldot Admur Maharash, in which the Rashab is quoted recounting it; that version names the intermediary as "Professor Josef Bertenson".

Historians date the wave of pogroms that began in the southern provinces to spring 1881, after the assassination of Alexander II. In August 1881, at the request of the Interior Minister Count Nikolai Ignatiev, provincial commissions were set up in the Pale to investigate "Jewish economic harm"; they led to the restrictive "May Laws" of 1882. Russian Jewry's traditional leaders, centred on the Gintsburg family in St Petersburg, responded through lobbying and two meetings of communal representatives in the capital in August 1881 and early 1882. A police report of 1882. The only non-Chabad trace found so far comes from a Russian police file. On the selihot fast and services held across the Pale in early 1882 (10 Shevat, 1 February 1882) in response to the pogroms, Klier writes: "Interestingly, given Vital's equation of the Habad tradition with political quietism, the Lubavitcher Rebbe made use of the occasion of the selihot service to impose a tax on the Jews of Vitebsk, reportedly to collect funds to bribe Ignatiev." Nikolai Ignatiev was Interior Minister from May 1881 to May 1882. Klier's source is an informer's claim. His footnote says that "The police file provides the name of the informer who made this claim, one Ber Abramovich Gittel'son. It would be interesting to establish the possibility that he was a maskilic or mitnagdic foe of the rebbe." The report therefore concerns alleged fundraising in 1882 and does not confirm the ministerial lobbying described in Chabad accounts. Klier sets it within a wider point: "some orthodox religious leaders engaged in political activity that incorporated modern elements."

Other accounts of the 1881–82 pogroms

The Chabad narrative assumes that the pogroms were instigated "from Government circles", a view widely held at the time. Three other bodies of writing see the period differently. They are set out here by viewpoint and weighed by the evidence each offers.

Revisionist archival scholarship. I. Michael Aronson's Troubled Waters (1990) set out to test "the idea that the pogroms were planned, which for the sake of convenience I call the conspiracy theory", and concluded that "there was indeed no conspiracy behind the pogroms of 1881." He traces the violence instead to popular rumour, including the belief that "the new tsar had issued an ukaz (a decree or edict) calling on the people to beat the Jews"; "The rioters were convinced they were acting out of loyalty to the regime." He also holds that the Judeophobe press "contributed a great deal to creating an environment conducive to pogroms." Aronson records that "On 11 May 1881, Alexander III met with a delegation of Jewish notables." Klier later wrote that Aronson "provided a definitive rejection of the myth that the pogroms of 1881 were organized, instigated, and spread by officials of the imperial government or by 'dark forces' close to them." John Klier, working in post-Soviet archives, went further. His 2011 book states that "Contemporary research has dispelled the myth that Russian officials were responsible for instigating, permitting, or approving the pogroms." In an earlier essay he wrote:

One of the most enduring myths of the pogroms of 1881–1882, of course, is that they were instigated, encouraged, or tolerated by the authorities – if not at the highest level, then at least at the local one. The strength of belief in this myth does not make it true. ... The research of I. Michael Aronson effectively disproves the claim that there was a conspiracy which underlay the pogroms. My work in post-communist archives supports my contention that the Russian government opposed pogroms at every level

Klier adds that rioters were flogged, imprisoned and exiled, that "Local officials who were judged derelict of duty during pogroms lost their positions, and some were prosecuted", and that "as many rioters as Jews died in the pogroms of 1881–1882." Klier does not treat "Jewish exploitation" as an explanation he accepts. He treats it as the officials' own framework: the introduction to his book says that Russian views of Jews' shortcomings "were encapsulated in two slogans, 'religious fanaticism' and 'economic exploitation,'" and that the government "feared that the Jews were exploiting the unsophisticated and ignorant rural inhabitants, thus reducing them to a 'Jewish serfdom.'" On this reading, Ignatiev's provincial commissions on "Jewish economic harm" and the May Laws of 1882 were the state's answer to the pogroms: restricting Jews rather than organising violence against them.

Israel Shahak (critical). The Israeli chemist and civil-rights campaigner Israel Shahak wrote a critical study of rabbinic Judaism in which he places Jews in the old Polish lands as the agents of the landlords against the serfs. In Jewish History, Jewish Religion he writes that "in eastern Poland ... the Jews were both the immediate exploiters of the peasantry and virtually the only town-dwellers", and that Jewish autonomy was used "to justify the Jews' role in the oppression of the peasants in the service of the nobles". On Russia he accepts that the state was involved but limits it: "The Tsarist government, acting surreptitiously through its secret police, did promote pogroms; but it did so only when it was particularly weak (after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 ...)". With Norton Mezvinsky he argues that intra-Jewish violence before 1881 resembled "what were called 'pogroms' when committed by non-Jews against Jews", claiming that "Until 1881 in Russia, the number of riots by Jews against other Jews probably exceeded the number of pogroms by non-Jews against Jews", and that "The previously persecuted Hassids were the major and worst persecutors". In the same chapter the authors go further than Shahak's earlier book, writing that "in 1881 the government instigated Russian and Ukrainian pogroms began". Neither book mentions Shmuel Schneersohn. Shahak's only discussion of Habad's history concerns the Tanya, which he calls "fundamental book of the Habbad movement, one of the most important branches of Hassidism", and the seventh Rebbe; it has no bearing on the Maharash.

Travels

Chabad.org says that "despite his frail health" he "traveled extensively throughout Europe, meeting with government and business leaders and lobbying them to exert pressure on the Czarist regime to halt its instigation of pogroms against its Jewish citizens", helped by "His fluency in languages such as Latin, French and Russian". The Kehot timeline records journeys to Germany (1859) and France (1868) "to confer with communal leaders". Loewenthal confirms the general picture of foreign journeys in search of help for Russian Jews.

Death and succession

He died in Lubavitch on 13 Tishrei 5643 (26 September 1882 Gregorian; 14 September Old Style) and was buried in the ohel built over his father's grave. Chabad.org says that he "throughout his life suffered from many ailments" and died "at the young age of 48". His death was reported in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melitz of 10 October 1882.

Chabad.org says that he "was succeeded by his third son, Rabbi Shalom Dovber of Lubavitch". In fact the leadership stayed formally vacant for about eleven years: his son Shalom Dovber Schneersohn delivered discourses from 1882 but, according to Chabad sources, did not formally accept the leadership until 1893, in deference to his elder brother Schneur Zalman Aharon. That interregnum is covered on the page Shalom Dovber Schneersohn.

See also

• Chabad-Lubavitch movement
• Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (Tzemach Tzedek)
• Dovber Schneuri
• Shalom Dovber Schneersohn
• Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
• 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.
• Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-226-49045-8.
• Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-Toldot Admur Maharash, Brooklyn: Kehot. Chabad-side hagiographical memoir.
• I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-8229-8525-9.
• Eli Rubin, "Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch ('Maharash,' 1834–1882) and the False Twilight of Chabad Hasidism", AJS Review 45:2 (2021), pp. 348–381, doi:10.1017/S0364009421000106.
• John Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-521-89548-4.
• David Assaf and Gadi Sagiv, "Hasidism in Tsarist Russia: Historical and Social Aspects", Jewish History 27 (2013), pp. 241–269.
• Ilia Lurie, Edah u-medinah: hasidut Habad ba-imperyah ha-rusit 1828–1882, Jerusalem, 2006. (Not seen.)
• Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, new edition, London: Pluto Press, 2008 (first published 1994), ISBN 978-0-7453-2840-9. Critical.
• Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, new edition, London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004 (first published 1999), ISBN 0-7453-2090-2. Critical.
• Torat Shmuel (collected discourses), Brooklyn: Kehot, multiple volumes. Chabad-side.

External links

• The Rebbe Maharash – Chabad.org portal
• Lubavitch Hasidism – YIVO Encyclopedia