rejection 501
defend traditional Judaism against the innovators. The testament of the
Hatam Sofer to his family laid out in exemplary clarity the lifestyle he
wished to enshrine: ‘Do not change your name, language, or clothing to
imitate the ways of the gentiles. The women should read books in Yiddish,
printed in our traditional font and based on the tales of our sages, and
nothing else ... Do not say that times have changed, for “we have an old
Father”, blessed be He, who has not changed and never will change.’^5
The imposition of such clear laws was enhanced by asserting the
absolute authority of Karo’s Shulhan Arukh. A generation after the
Hatam Sofer an abridgement of Karo’s work by another rabbi in Hun-
gary, Shlomo Ganzfried, summarized in simple Hebrew, for unlearned
but pious Jews, the laws which each individual is required to keep. It
proved so popular that it was issued in fourteen editions between its
first publication in 1864 and Ganzfried’s death in 1886. Ganzfried was
much involved, as a communal leader, in a political struggle against the
spread of Neologist Judaism in Hungary, but his greatest influence came
through this book. The mass printing and dissemination of halakhic
works accounts similarly for the influence of many later haredi leaders,
and many of them have become better known by the title of one of their
influential volumes than by their own names. Thus Yisrael Meir
haCohen, who was a figure of extraordinary authority in nineteenth-
century Lithuania and in the broader ultra- orthodox world but never
held any rabbinic post, is known universally by the title of his first book,
Hafets Hayyim (a legal and ethical treatise on the prohibition of slan-
der), published anonymously in Vilna when he was thirty- five. His
authority was projected in particular through mass circulation of his
Mishnah Berurah, a huge commentary on the first part of Karo’s Shul‑
han Arukh intended as a detailed guide to everyday life for those with
the same pious outlook as Ganzfried had assumed but greater capacity
to delve into minutiae and to countenance variety.
From a small grocery store in the little town of Radun ́ which his
wife managed while he did the book keeping, and then (when business
was poor) for many years as a teacher, the Hafets Hayyim produced a
string of books on practical observance of the laws and wider issues of
morality. In later years he also travelled a great deal, using his personal
reputation for piety to raise funds for the maintenance of yeshivot
throughout Europe in the financial crisis after the First World War,
including the yeshivah that had sprung up in Radun ́ itself as early as
1869 because of the number of students attracted to study with him.^ The
Hafets Hayyim, who took a leadership role in the Agudah (pp. 485–6),