388 A History of Judaism
famous was in part a product of his unusual training. Born in Vilna in
1720, he was a precocious child and so rapidly mastered the standard
rabbinic curriculum that from the age of ten he was able to devote him-
self to direct study of the texts without becoming a student at any
particular yeshivah. His reputation spread during his teens and early
twenties while he travelled from one Jewish community to another in
Poland and Germany, and by the time he returned to Vilna in 1748 he
was considered by his home town to be a precious ornament of the city,
to be treasured and protected. As a result, the Gaon was able to spend a
secluded life devoted to study, supported by a weekly allowance from the
Vilna community. He had only a small group of disciples, so his immense
influence derived not from any formal position but simply from his rep-
utation as a scholar – none of his voluminous works appeared in print
during his lifetime, although a large number of his manuscripts were
published by his followers soon after his death in 1797.^14
Despite a devotion to the study of kabbalah, the Gaon insisted on the
supremacy of rational argument and scientific method in the interpret-
ation of the ancient writings, adopting philology and grammar when
they help to clarify a complex passage or correct a defective text and
seeking to establish talmudic authority for halakhic rulings cited with-
out a talmudic base in the later codes. As his sons insisted in their
introduction when they published his commentary on the Shulhan
Arukh, the student should avoid altogether the casuistic approach of
pilpul, through which ‘transgression increases, iniquity grows, pleasant
speech is lost, and truth driven from the congregation of the Lord’. ‘Pil-
ing up difficulties’ for its own sake was to be avoided. For the Gaon,
traditional rabbinic scholarship was best preserved by a rational, intel-
lectual, methodical approach to the texts which emphasized the ability
of the dedicated individual to penetrate the correct meaning of ancient
texts, even, if necessary, by ‘correcting’ the text, or reconstructing it, to
ensure a rational meaning.
The Gaon’s lifestyle became an ideal for many east European Jews in
the following century. Not all could hope for fame as a child prodigy,
but many could opt for a cloistered life removed from communal affairs
and dedicated to abstruse study. One of the Gaon’s students founded
the great Volozhin yeshivah in the nineteenth century where hundreds
of students devoted themselves to just such a dream. The city of Vilna,
with its medieval town hall and castles and florid baroque architecture
in a Baltic landscape, and its hot summers and freezing winters and
lakes devoted to ice fishing, became known in the eighteenth century as