new certainties and new mysticism 387
talmudic passage which says that from the hour of noon of the eve [of
Passover] to the conclusion of the feast the mere declaration of destruction
does not free a person from the responsibility of having leavened matter in
the house; for since he is absolutely forbidden to enjoy it, he has no claim
to the ownership, which he renounces by such a declaration.Aryeh Leib’s virtuoso reasoning continues through many more steps, cit-
ing a number of further talmudic texts, until he feels able to conclude
from the method of the talmudic argument that the Tosafistic opinion,
represented by R. Nissim, the Ran, who taught in Spain in the mid-
fourteenth century, is right and Rashi is wrong. In such a pilpul, the topic
of discussion and the conclusions reached were less significant for a mas-
ter of pilpul than the display of logical reasoning and ingenuity. Brilliance
in argument could all too easily become an end in itself, and young stu-
dents from the age of thirteen would travel from one yeshivah to another
in search of the inspiring instruction which would bring them renown.^12
Pilpul was not in itself a wholly novel method of study. The term is
already found in the Talmuds to describe the penetrating reasoning
which straightens out apparent difficulties in the text, and it had been
employed too by the Tosafist scholars of France and Germany, and some
of their contemporaries in Spain, as they hammered out the apparent
contradictions in the talmudic commentaries of Rashi. But the popular-
ity of the method in the Ashkenazi world in the early modern period
reached unprecedented heights, with the intuition of the greatest minds
seen by some kabbalists as evidence of divine inspiration. The masters
of pilpul became celebrities, courted for marriage alliances and offered
positions of communal leadership as a form of local pride, especially for
the yeshivot supported by that community through taxes and grants to
poorer students. The medieval yeshivot in Ashkenazi lands had in many
cases survived as the more or less private academies of the rabbis who
headed them, but from the sixteenth century local communities saw the
upkeep of a yeshivah as a religious duty. A resolution of the first ass-
embly of the Council of Lithuanian Jewry in 1622 even obliged every
community with a rabbi to maintain a yeshivah of suitable size.^13
The enthusiasm for pilpul did not escape without fierce criticism
from within Ashkenazi Jewry, most significantly by Elijah b. Solomon
Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna, who was widely recognized in his own life-
time as the most erudite halakhist not only of eighteenth- century
Lithuania but of all rabbinic learning since the Middle Ages. The in -
dependence and clarity of thought which made Elijah b. Solomon so