The eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystic, Israel ben Eliezer - known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Besht - is one of the key figures in Jewish history. As the progenitor of Hasidism and the perceived spokesman for the warm, humane side of Jewish religious observance, he profoundly influenced the shape of modern Judaism. To understand the Besht is to understand an essential element in the making of modern Jewish life.

The Ba'al Shem Tov is an elusive subject for historians because documentary evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories that were compiled in Shivhei Ha-Besht (In Praise of the Besht) more than a generation after his death. Human forgetfulness and the hagiographic objectives of the storytellers and the editors have assured that many of these stories serve more to mythologize than to describe the Besht.

Rosman's study casts a bright new light on the traditional stories about the Besht, confirming and augmenting some, challenging others. Most important, it overturns the widespread belief that the Ba'al Shem Tov was a religious revolutionary and a rebel against the clerical and communal establishment. Rosman finds, on the contrary, that the Besht was quite representative of the existing social, religious, and political order, a holy man who conformed to expected patterns of behavior.

The evidence indicates that he made moderate changes, which led eventually to the development of Hasidism's mature institutions.