The Genius: Eliyahu of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism by Eliyahu Stern, Yale University Press, New Haven; ISBN 978-0-300-20592-3 ©2013, $27, p. 171, plus notes, bibliography, and index
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — The eighteenth century rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer held the moniker “the Genius of Vilna,” or simply the “Vilna Gaon,” for ample reasons, which include giving his first public lecture at age seven and by ten having mastered numerous Jewish scholarly texts and a number of secular subjects so well that he no longer required a teacher. At age thirty-five he went into self-imposed exile, a not uncommon practice during this period of time, begging his way through Eastern Europe, and finally settling in Vilna. His children recounted that he never slept more than two hours a day, which explains his prodigious output of commentaries on the Bible, Talmud, kabbalistic writings, and books on grammar and mathematics. The Vilna Gaon is arguably among the most influential scholars since Maimonides. As one of his biographers noted, he published on a wider range of topics than any Jewish scholar to his day.
Eliyahu Stern, an assistant professor of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history at Yale University, paints a picture of the Vilna Gaon as both a great scholar and a flawed human being in his newest book, The Genius. Stern explains that the Vilna Gaon embraced modern science as much as he did the ancient Hebrew texts. His worldview cleaved Jewish literature into two parts: First, the Hebrew Bible, an infallible God-given work in which inconsistencies and contradictions result from conceptual errors on the part of the reader, not the giver. Second, all other books, both secular and Jewish, including the Mishnah and Talmud, being human endeavors, are subject to factual and philosophical errors. The Vilna Gaon had no problem critically emending these texts.
Although Elijah shunned appointed offices, everyone considered him the leader of Vilna’s Jews, and indeed the Jewish population of Vilna exploded during his lifetime, bringing its Jews prosperity, some civic autonomy from the Polish government, and earning Vilna the name “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Elijah likewise resisted involvement in day-to-day politics; yet he stood firmly against the developing Chassidic movement, believing that they rejected Torah study in favor of prayer and pantheism, but more importantly concluding that its adherents were resurrecting support for the false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi and his post-conversion followers, the Frankists. Others added to Elijah’s harsh statements against the Chassidim, resulting in a movement whose members were known as the mitnagdim, “the opponents.”
Stern carefully explains how the Vilna Gaon, so fixated on Chasidism, ignored Haskalah, the emerging Jewish Enlightenment movement simultaneously happening in Bonn, under the guiding hand of Moses Mendelssohn. The distance between Bonn and Vilna, nearly a thousand miles, provided the Gaon with the illusion of Eastern-European Jewish isolation from the Western World. Yet in the end, Chasidism, which Elijah bitterly fought on political, theological, and personal levels, and traditional Judaism shared more in common than with Haskalah, which led to Reform Judaism and a secular Jewish culture.
The near universal recognition of the Vilna Gaon’s superior intelligence, erudition, and piety allowed him to reject the reasoning and conclusions of many notable Jewish scholars and philosophers with impunity. In particular, he annotated and emended the influential work of Joseph Karo, author of the authoritative and often-referenced Shulchan Aruch, a legal code with commentaries summarizing appropriate rituals and customs that regulate every phase Jewish life.
Stern meticulously shows that the Gaon’s biur, commentary, with emphasis on the Talmud, reversed the long-standing methodology of training rabbis through the study of Jewish codes via a method known as pilpul, replacing it with the direct study of the Talmud. Drawing on his teacher’s perspectives, Hayyim of Volozhin, the Gaon’s most prominent disciple, started a trend, which exists to this day, by establishing A yeshiva independent of the Jewish community, its finances, and its politics, and whose curriculum “placed the Talmud atop the pedestal of privileged texts.”
Elijah’s deeds do not fit the usual Jewish definition of a gaon, which includes political leadership as much as it does scholarship, so Stern concludes The Genius by explaining how Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman received that title. Stern also tells us that Elijah’s contemporaries described him as anti-social, unengaged with his surroundings, and believed that one should not speak, only study. His own children “interpreted his idiosyncratic familial behavior and practices as necessary for his genius.”
In The Genius, Stern offers a thoroughly researched and enjoyable biography of the successes, failures, and eccentric mannerisms of a Jewish polymath whose pleasures in life came from maintaining traditional Judaism, learning, and emending the perceived errors of ancient scholars. Stern convincingly shows that the Vilna Gaon, while living a cloistered existence, a life with a sparse network of friends and minimal political involvements; a life in which he tries to maintain the status quo, actually sets the stage for many of the changes leading to modern Judaism.
*
Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached through his website, fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.