Negative attitudes towards Hasidism held by 19th century Jewish enlighteners, known in Hebrew as "maskilim," found expression not only in numerous and well known literary texts, such as the satires by Josef Perl, but also in visual images. One of the best examples is a drawing published by Leon Hollanderski (or Hollenderski), a Polish Jew sympathetic to the ideas of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and, after 1831, a political émigré in France. In 1845 Hollanderski published in Paris his Les Israelites de Pologne, the very first history of Polish Jews written by a Jewish author. One of the charts in the book depicts "Le Chasside et sa femme," which is today one of the best known nineteenth-century images of a Hasid.

However, this widely known drawing is far from neutral and, in fact, should be understood as a kind of caricature of the Hasidic movement. First of all, one should bear in mind that the elements that todaybo?=s reader tends to understand as Hasidic dress were, in fact, common for most, if not all, nineteenth-century Polish Jews. For example, the spodek (tall fur hat), the kapote (long dark coat), and even the slippers (instead of boots) are not distinctive in themselves. Possibly, the only clearly Hasidic elements of dress that the image depicts are white undergarments and a gartel (wide belt). What, then, is Hasidic about the depicted Hasid? Hollanderski characterizes him by three distinctive social elements: (1) a shabby beard suggesting an untidiness allegedly typical for all the Hasidim; (2) a lulke (long pipe) referring to a well-known Hasidic attraction to tobacco; (3) a red nose and a bottle of brandy in hand referring to a Hasidic custom of drinking tikun (a sacred toast), also reflecting a popular accusation made by maskilim about Hasidic abuses of alcohol. Though each of these elements referred to some historical reality, none of them was accurate and neutral. Together they produced a highly biased and ideologically loaded portrait of a Hasid and, by implication, Hasidism.