502 A History of Judaism
was long- lived, dying in 1933, and his influence overlapped that of a
much younger contemporary, Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz. The career
of Karelitz, as a talmudic scholar (known popularly as the Hazon Ish
(‘Vision of a Man’), from the title of his own anonymous commentary
on part of the Shulhan Arukh ) was similar to that of the Hafets Hayyim
in his reliance on his wife’s store for economic support. In his mid- fifties
he emigrated from Vilna to Bnei Brak in the land of Israel and became
the spiritual leader of the haredi community – first in Mandate Palestine
and then, in the 1940s and early 1950s as the impact of the Holocaust
sank in, worldwide.^6
The authority of the Hazon Ish derived in large part from an explicit
refusal to speculate or compromise in the observance of Torah. He
detached his followers from other Jews who saw themselves as orthodox
with as much vehemence as the Hatam Sofer had opposed Reform and
secular ideologies: ‘The same way that simplicity and truth are synony-
mous, thus extremity and greatness are. Extremity is the perfection of
the subject. He who partisans Middle- Way and mediocrity, and despises
extremity, should find his place among falsifiers or reasonless people ...
Naive faith is the sharp response, that clarifies the truth and settles that
which is in doubt.’^ The need to rule on issues to do with everyday living –
which for the Hazon Ish after his emigration in 1933 included practical
matters for the observation of rulings pertaining specifically to the land
of Israel, such as the laws of the sabbatical year – gave these rabbinic
leaders a particularly close bond to their followers. The ‘great men of the
generation’, as the haredim thought of them, have become de facto polit-
ical as well as spiritual guides to increasing numbers of yeshivah students,
particularly in Israel, over the past half- century.^7
Yeshivah students provided the massed infantry in support of
these quiet, pious authors in the war against secularism and laxity.
Devotion to Torah study had been the ideal of rabbinic Judaism, at least
for males, for many centuries, as we have seen, but new in the nine-
teenth century was the practical implementation of this ideal in the
proliferation of yeshivot over eastern Europe as large- scale, total insti-
tutions in which crowds of young men devoted much of their lives to
the study of religious law – and especially the Babylonian Talmud and
its commentaries – for its own sake. The first such modern yeshivah was
established in Volozhin in 1803 by a disciple of the Vilna Gaon to coun-
ter the influence of Hasidism by replacing the casuistry of pilpul with
study of the true meaning of classical texts. It had 400 students by the
second half of the nineteenth century. Some of these students founded,