new certainties and new mysticism 389
‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’ through the reputation of the Gaon. The
1795 census recorded 3,613 Jewish poll- tax payers in Vilna and its
environs, with Jews a virtual majority in the city and the community
established as a pre- eminent centre of Jewish learning.^15
Nowhere in the Sephardi world developed a comparable reputation
for yeshivah learning in the early modern period, and Sephardi yeshivot
developed very differently, with study of Bible and midrash included in
the curriculum. Different again was humanistic study of the variety of
Jewish customs (minhagim ), as by Leone Modena of Venice, or the
approach of those in Renaissance Italy who combined the study of
Torah with the study of science. Talmud study was in any case impeded
in Italy after the Talmud had been banned by the pope in 1559, and
systematic instruction in the halakhic codes became common in its
place. And students in the yeshivot in Italy, as in the Jewish communities
in the Levant under Ottoman rule, could also expect (unlike their fellow
students in Ashkenazi lands) formal instruction in the kabbalah, which
itself developed greatly in the early modern period, as we shall see.
The Followers of Luria
In Meiron in Upper Galilee, against the backdrop of a monumental
synagogue of the fourth century ce, crowds of pilgrims gather on Lag
BaOmer, to mark the anniversary of the death of Shimon bar Yohai at
the reputed site of his grave. It is a time for enthusiastic celebration,
with bonfires and dancing, and many small children, since it is trad-
itional for sons to receive their first haircut on the following day, the
locks of hair being thrown into the fire. The custom was already well
established by the time it is first mentioned in an account by Moses
Basola, an Italian rabbi, of his travels in the land of Israel in 1522. Shi-
mon, as we have seen, was believed to be the author of the Zohar, and
the Zohar itself relates in the name of Abba that when Shimon bar
Yohai died, a voice was heard calling on worshippers to ‘ascend and
gather’ at his tomb to celebrate the anniversary of his death:
All that day the fire did not leave the house, and no one could get near it.
They were unable, because the light and the fire surrounded it the whole
day. I threw myself upon the ground and groaned. When the fire had gone
I saw that the holy light, the holy of holies, had departed from the world.
He was lying on his right side, wrapped in his cloak, and his face was