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Hasidism has often been defined and viewed as a sect. By implication, if Hasidism was indeed a sect, then membership would have encompassed all the social ties of the “sectarians,” including their family ties, thus forcing us to consider their mothers, wives, and daughters as full-fledged female hasidim. In reality, however, women did not become hasidim in their own right, at least not in terms of the categories implied by the definition of Hasidism as a sect. Reconsideration of the logical implications of the identification of Hasidism as a sect leads to a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between the hasidic movement and its female constituency, and, by extension, of larger issues concerning the boundaries of Hasidism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which explores the comparison between the role of the cult of the saints in the practice of Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century in Galilee, Israel and the set of practices to the later phenomenon of Hasidism in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. It stresses the importance of the figure of the saints in the Lurianic school, which has not been fully recognized. The effervescence of kabbalistic creativity in Safed to the traumatic aftereffect of the expulsion of the Iberian Jews was ascribed by Gershom Scholem. The research states that the expulsion created several migratory paths along which the Iberian exiles made their way to Palestine.