The Talmud (23 page)

The traditional Talmudists, many of whom were not averse to mysticism themselves, had little interest in this sort of approach. They wouldn’t have denied that studying the Talmud was a religious activity that brought spiritual reward. But their prime motivation was to understand the law, not to become mystically enriched.

Hasidism emerged and expanded rapidly in those parts of Poland which were home to the dissenting Raskol community, which had broken away from the Orthodox Church half a century earlier. Yaffa Eliach believes that the
Besht
was heavily influenced by this community and may even have spent his formative years amongst them. She sees parallels between their rituals and those of the early Hasidim, for which they were roundly condemned by their opponents. These included dressing in white, whirling, dervish-like dances in which they waved white handkerchiefs, feasting on the anniversary of a parent’s death and allegiance to a deeply spiritual leader.
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There is no doubt that some of the early Hasidic practices were very alien to traditional Talmudists. It seems that they even worried some of the Hasidic leaders themselves. A nineteenth-century Hasidic leader, Menahem Mendel of Lubavitch, paid tribute to those Talmudists who had fought bitterly against the early manifestations of the movement. Had it not been for those battles, he claimed, the Talmud would have been scorched ‘by the fire of Kaballah’.
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Practical observance would have become worthless in the face of the intense fire of mystical introspection. In particular he singled out one man, Elijah of Vilna, the fiercest of all their opponents and without doubt the greatest Talmudist for many generations, for particular thanks.

The
Gaon
of Vilna

The title
gaon
hadn’t been used much since the days of Baghdad. But it had not disappeared altogether. It was still applied occasionally, to people of such sharp intellect that the designation rabbi, which means teacher, did them no justice at all.

Elijah of Vilna, or Vilnius, in Lithuania was one such man. He wasn’t a community rabbi, he didn’t head up a college, he didn’t even really have any students in the usual sense of the word; the only people who studied under him were mature, respected scholars in their own right. He’d been a child prodigy, delivered a sermon in the local synagogue at the age of six and answered probing questions on it. He spent his life in endless study, shut away from the world, rarely sleeping for more than half an hour at a time and for no more than two hours in total during a night. It is said that he spent his nights in an unheated room with his feet in a bowl of cold water so that he would stay awake. He had an unrivalled command of the Talmud, its associated literature and of
kaballah
. They called him the Vilna
Gaon
.

The enthusiasm which greeted Hasidism in its heartlands, in Polish Ukraine, wasn’t repeated in Vilna. It was a populous city, regarded as the intellectual centre of the Lithuanian Empire. Its university was one of Europe’s most respected institutions of learning. The majority of its inhabitants were Jews, and even though they were excluded from the university, they shared the city’s
temperament for culture and scholarship.
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They regarded the mystical exercises of the rural Hasidim as frivolous. That’s not to say they ridiculed mysticism, the Vilna
Gaon
was as immersed in
kabbalah
as he was in Talmud. But for them mysticism was a route towards intellectual understanding, not to spiritual ecstasy.
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Elijah was an implacable opponent of the Hasidim. He saw the Hasidim as a deviant, heretical sect. As far as he was concerned their panentheistic belief that God was in everything conflicted with the traditional view of both the Talmud and
the kabbalah.

Elijah condemned the Hasidim for their attitude to Talmud study and its place in religious life. The highest of all virtues, for Elijah and his followers, who became known as the
misnegdim
or opponents, was a life devoted to Talmud study and the lifestyle it demanded. The Hasidim didn’t deny the value of Talmud study. But it was just one of several potential routes to mystical ecstasy, alongside prayer, joy and devotion. The dispute between the Hasidim and the Vilna
Gaon
hinged on which was the correct form of religious worship, study of the Talmud or prayer.
16

This might seem trivial to modern, secular minds. But all organized religions have had divisions at some point in their history, some have had them through the whole of their history. Often starting with apparently minor matters these disputes can escalate to a magnitude that is unfathomable to anyone not caught up in them. Religions are conservative institutions and in a conservative world all change has the power to threaten. The traditionalists had not forgotten the Sabbatean and Frankist affairs. They had no wish for anything else that disturbed their time-hallowed world view.

When Elijah was born, Vilnius was recovering from war. Its wooden dwellings had been ravaged by fire and its population decimated by plague. As a young man he would have fretted with the other Jews as the citizens of the town petitioned to have them expelled, a consequence of the king’s gift to them of trading rights. But by the time he reached middle age the city was recovering economically, low infant mortality was boosting the population of both the Jewish and Catholic communities and a new spirit of tolerance abounded, brought about by the encroaching Enlightenment. The Church, under the
leadership of Bishop Massalski, stopped seeking converts, and even drove away those who sought voluntary apostasy.
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Vilna’s Jewish community became large, thriving and confident. The vast majority were opposed to the Hasidim. In the city they had the numbers, and the civic autonomy, to do something about it.

In 1772 they launched a fierce and uncompromising campaign against the Hasidim. Hasidic leaders were arrested, imprisoned and excommunicated, their writings seized and burned, Hasidic gatherings were prohibited. The
Besht
was dead by now but two of his most prominent followers, Schneur Zalman of Liady and Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, travelled to meet the Vilna
Gaon
. They wanted to explain Hasidism to him, to defuse the conflict. The
Gaon
refused to see them. Not only was he unwilling to compromise, he didn’t even want to give the impression that he was open to dialogue.

The leaders of the Vilna community recognized that in Elijah they had a rare and valuable treasure in their midst. They took it upon themselves to support him. They paid him a stipend that far exceeded that of the communal doctor, and was nearly as much as that paid to the judge.
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Some people objected. Communal funds came from taxation, and many felt that they were already being taxed too heavily without taking on the support of a reclusive scholar. Complaints began to be hurled at the leaders of the community, and in particular one man, Abba Wolf, a staunch supporter of the
Gaon
. In 1787, Abba Wolf’s son, Hirsch, walked into the local monastery and asked to convert to Christianity. The monastery took him in, notwithstanding Bishop Massalski’s strictures. His father was distraught.

Abba Wolf went to see the
Gaon
Elijah. Together they concocted a plan. They bribed another convert to Christianity to befriend Hirsch in the monastery. They gave him a large sum of money and asked him to win Hirsch’s trust. Eventually, when Hirsch was confident in his new friend, they went for a walk together. Hirsch’s brothers were waiting outside. They grabbed him, dressed him in women’s clothing, threw him into a carriage and smuggled him out of the city.

Five days later the local authorities arrested Elijah and Abba. Elijah refused to answer any of their questions and was sentenced to twelve weeks in gaol. He was in prison for the festival of Sukkot, when Jews leave their homes and live in a temporary dwelling, as a reminder of the Israelites’ wanderings in the
wilderness. Being in prison Elijah could not fulfil the obligation of sleeping in the temporary hut. Those incarcerated alongside him reported that for the whole week of the festival he paced up and down his cell, holding his eyes open, so as not to be guilty of the offence of sleeping in the wrong place.
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Elijah of Vilna’s legacy was not his battle against Hasidism. That was merely something he felt he had to do. His personal contribution to the life of the Talmud was intellectual, and his influence was most keenly felt in the world of Talmudic education. He had an encyclopedic command, not just of the Talmud itself but of all the sources that lay behind it, and of the commentaries and law codes that had emerged from it. Unlike those earlier Talmudists who had rejected the ‘wisdom of the Greeks’, Elijah of Vilna saw the value of science and mathematics, albeit as a way of gaining a better understanding of the Talmud. He even encouraged one of his students to translate Euclid, the classical master of geometry, into Hebrew. All in all his system of study was far more methodical and analytical than his forerunners. He laid the foundations for a new, rigorous approach to Talmud study, one which would be developed further by his outstanding disciple, Hayyim of Volozhin.

From the point of view of both the Hasidim and their opponents, the struggle had not been good for the Talmud. It had become neglected, a victim of all the quarrelling and invective. Hayyim of Volozhin bewailed the fact that in the villages the communal study houses were full of books devoted to ethical conduct but rarely contained a full edition of the Talmud.
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The focus of education had shifted from theory to behaviour, to how, not why.

The remedy lay, Hayyim believed, in reforming the educational system. The old
yeshiva
structure had fallen into decline. Its reliance on the charitable support of local communities had been humiliating for the students, whose subsistence had depended upon the goodwill of strangers. It had been obsessed with a technique known as
pilpul
, meaning sharp, or peppery. This was characterized by a search for ingenious but obscure ways of comparing and dissecting two or more pieces of text, or for setting and solving clever but irrelevant problems. In the early eighteenth century Jacob Hagiz
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had poked fun at this trend. He asked his students: ‘According to the law a mourner must not cut his hair until his friends complain about his unkempt appearance. But what is the
law where a person has no friends?’ Two hundred years earlier Jacob Landau had published a book of Talmudic riddles. He’d asked how two people could each be the other’s uncle, without any incest having been involved?
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Many people agreed that this approach, often described as hair-splitting, denigrated the Talmud; it was a way for students to show off their sharp wittedness, but it wasn’t the substance of serious learning. Hayyim wanted something better. He raised funds from people who supported his efforts and established a
yeshiva
in his hometown of Volozhin that would be financially independent. He abandoned the hair-splitting methods of Talmud study and introduced the techniques which characterized Elijah of Vilna’s approach, in which analysing the text and understanding its plain meaning were paramount. He created a round-the-clock system of study, so that when one group went to bed another group arose. His educational system laid the foundations for the modern Talmudic college.

In time the struggle between the Hasidim and the ‘opponents’ played itself out. As we saw earlier, Menahem Mendel of Lubavitch acknowledged that Hasidism had been saved from its own excesses by the strictures of the Vilna
Gaon
and his allies. A modus vivendi was achieved. There were bigger battles looming, the winds of enlightenment were starting to blow in from the west. This was no time for the two camps to irrevocably fall out. Particularly as they were about to face a new and, to the religious mind, far more insidious threat, albeit as yet unacknowledged. It was the threat of secularism.

The seeds of emancipation

The Jews were a confident, secure majority in Catholic Vilnius. Not so, five hundred miles away, in the Protestant city of Berlin. Not that they were persecuted to any great degree, after all Berlin was the heartland of the religiously tolerant Enlightenment. Indeed, full emancipation was on offer to the Jews. All they had to do was convert to the Lutheran Church. They weren’t under
pressure to do so, nobody was burning their Talmuds. But who would choose to remain in a tiny minority, just 3 per cent of the population, with few political and civil rights, when they could become fully emancipated into a tolerant, reasonable, enlightened majority? Conversion, so the Lutherans reasoned, was a small price to pay.

Such reasoning didn’t go down well with Moses Mendelssohn. As a young man he had studied the Talmud, German literature, philosophy, the classics and modern languages. He’d made a name for himself as a philosopher. Unusually for a Jew, he had many friends in the German literary world and was accepted into the cultural salons frequented by Berlin’s Protestant intelligentsia.

As a philosopher Mendelssohn owed a debt to Spinoza.
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Culturally, Spinoza had helped create the conditions that spawned Mendelssohn’s thought and allowed it to propagate. Religiously however, Spinoza caused him a problem. He tried to divorce Spinoza’s philosophy from his attitudes to religion. He admired Spinoza the philosopher, felt sorry for the fate of Spinoza the religious heretic and condemned those who had hated him.
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For many years Mendelssohn concentrated on his philosophy, writing in both German and Hebrew, albeit for different audiences. His reputation grew and grew. He became known as the German Socrates. He kept away from religious disputes. Until the day in 1769 when he was confronted by a Lutheran clergyman, Johann Caspar Lavater who had translated a philosophical, Calvinist work into German. Believing that this work made out an irrefutable case for Christianity, Lavater challenged Mendelssohn either to publicly refute the work or else do what ‘Socrates would have done if faced with an irrefutable truth’, in other words concede the argument and convert.