Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2013)

Eliyahu Stern has set for himself a daunting task and argues his case with conviction. He intends to correct a widespread assumption shared not only by the general public, but by the scholarly community as well. According to this narrative, the Vilna Gaon (hereafter the Gaon) should not be seen as a traditionalist defender of the past, but actually a modern Jew and one who helped usher in the modern era in Jewish history. In Stern’s words, “I [have] come to believe that [Jacob] Katz’s and [Michael K.] Silber’s notion of tradition and traditionalism fails to explain the experience of the overwhelming majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eastern European Jews who did not spend their days either combating the Western European secular pursuit of science, philosophy and mathematics or holding onto the same political and social structures of their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ancestors. Katz and Silber might have been right about [R. Moses] Sofer. . . . But figures such as the Gaon of Vilna or Hayyim of Volozhin (the Gaon’s student and Sofer’s contemporary), who did not express hostility toward modernity, elude their grasp” (p. 7).

This is quite a claim, and it would be a major revision of the historical picture if Stern could prove the point. Stern also argues that the Gaon’s notes to the sixteenth-century legal code Shulhan Arukh were influential in Jews moving away from a “code-based learning culture supported by the kehilah” (p. 11).[1]

After mentioning that the Gaon is embodied in the Jewish residents of Tel Aviv and New York, who live as though they are majorities, Stern concludes his book with this striking assertion: “From the birth of the State of Israel, to the Jews’ involvement in radical anti-statist modern political movements, to the creation of a robust vibrant Jewish life in the United States, Jewish modernity derives much of its intellectual dynamism, social confidence, and political assertiveness from an astonishing source: the brilliant writings and untamed personality of Elijah ben Solomon” (p. 171).

As with all revisionist theses there is bound to be reluctance to accept a new paradigm. The successful revisionist thesis is the one able to withstand the initial skepticism. Does Stern’s thesis fall into this category? Despite his enthusiastic and tempting arguments, I am not convinced. Reading the book, I could not help wonder if, for example, drawing contrasts with the thought of Leibniz offers any real insight into the thought of the Gaon. We know that the Gaon was fearless in emending rabbinic texts, but for Stern, “Elijah’s emendation project addresses the charge that Leibnizian idealism leaves no room for the possibility of progress, redemption, and critique. . . .  Elijah embroidered the theological concept of evil around the idea of textual error” (p. 61). Isn’t this reading too much into what the Gaon had in mind? Why does the approach of the Gaon have to be given such theological weight that Stern can conclude that “emendation is the path toward redemption and a restored original harmony” (p. 62)?[3]

In another example of his revisionist approach, Stern argues that the Gaon did not oppose philosophy. Rather, “Elijah’s problem with Maimonides revolves around issues of linguistics, interpretation, and hermeneutics and not whether it is permissible to read secular philosophy” (p. 130). As noted already, Stern also assumes that the Gaon did not really believe in “demons, magic, charms and other irrational objects” (p. 129). There is no question in my mind that Stern is in error here. Because the Gaon was a traditional Jew, whose approach to the classical rabbinic texts was not influenced by rationalist philosophy, this is precisely why he believed in demons, magic, and charms. The only reason to reject these things, as did Maimonides, is because one is influenced by rationalist thought.

I see no evidence that the Gaon was influenced in any substantial way by such knowledge, and his occasional use of Aristotelian terminology does not by itself indicate real influence. Furthermore, everything in his writings leads one to believe that when it came to the occult his mental universe was no different than the great rabbis of his time and subsequent to him, for whom demons did indeed exist. In his famous attack on Maimonides, found in his comment to Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 179:13, he specifically mentioned the efficacy of magic, and contrary to Stern this is to be taken literally.[4]

Stern leaves it as an open question whether the Vilna Gaon called philosophy “accursed” (p. 245). This is obviously an important issue, since if Stern is correct that the Gaon was not really opposed to philosophy, one would not expect him to use the word “accursed.” Yet there is no doubt that the Gaon did indeed use this word. It appears in the first printing of the Gaon’s commentary to the Shulhan Arukh, and its authenticity was attested to by R. Samuel Luria who examined that actual manuscript. Only later was the word removed by the publisher. Contrary to what Stern states, Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Matisyahu Strashun, and Hillel-Noah Maggid Steinschneider do not claim that later editors put in this phrase. The one to make this assertion was R. Zvi Hirsch Katzenellenbogen, and he was hardly a neutral observer.[6]

Several other issues emerge in the book. Stern quotes Aliyot Eliyahu as stating that before the age of thirteen the Gaon was “studying books on engineering for half an hour a day” (p. 38). I am not sure why Stern mentions anything about “thirteen,” as the text is explicit that he was around eight years old. Furthermore, the text says nothing about “engineering.” Rather, it states that the Gaon studied astronomy (tekhunah).

Stern writes that the Gaon “rejected outright” the Shulhan Arukh (p. 60). This is a strange statement being that the Gaon wrote a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh. Furthermore, this commentary was designed to show the earlier rabbinic sources upon which the Shulhan Arukh‘s laws were based. It is true that there are many times when the Gaon disagreed with the Shulhan Arukh. However, what is significant with the Gaon is precisely that he accepted the Shulhan Arukh. He had the stature to reject it had he chosen, and to write his own code, yet he did the exact opposite. By attaching his notes to the Shulhan Arukh he was affirming the work. He personally did not need the Shulhan Arukh and would decide halakhah from the Talmud and rishonim. But when the Shulhan Arukh decided the halakhah correctly, he was content to show the sources for the law, meaning that the work had value and that is why he affirmed it.[7]

Contrary to Stern (pp. 77-78), there is no evidence that the Gaon was influenced by Elijah Levita and the Gaon never mentioned him. When the Gaon wrote that the Masorah disagreed with the Talmud, he was referring to how to spell certain words, and this formulation comes from the Tosafists. He was not in any way identifying with Levita’s notion that the Hebrew vowels originated in post-talmudic times, and was certainly not addressing “the veracity of the cantillations of the Bible” (p. 78). When the Gaon’s son cited Levita, he was also not referring to his view of the vowels, only of the spelling of words.

I do not know what Stern means by “following Nachmanides, the Gaon argues that the book of Deuteronomy was written later than the other four books of the Bible” (p. 80). Quite apart from Nahmanides, this position is found in Gittin 60a, where one view is that the Torah was given “scroll by scroll.” Also on p. 80, Stern states that “the Gaon, in contrast, builds on the historical position laid down by Ibn Ezra that the last verses, though inspired by Moses, were actually ‘arranged’ by Joshua.” This has nothing to do with Ibn Ezra as the Talmud already contains the view that the last verses were written by Joshua (saying nothing about being “inspired” by Moses. [Ibn Ezra also says nothing about the last verses being “inspired” by Moses])

On page 133, Stern quotes a passage from the introduction to R. Judah Epstein’s Minhat Yehudah (Warsaw, 1877) where he writes of “thousands who came to study and the miracle it would take for one to emerge with any teaching ability.” In the Hebrew the final words are “yatza le-hora’ah.” This has nothing to do with teaching but refers to the ability to decide halakhic questions. The expression originates in Kohelet Rabbah 7:49.

Finally, he writes that “when the Volozhin yeshiva opened its doors in 1802, it was the first time that young men from all economic and social backgrounds were afforded the opportunity to study” (p. 150, see also p. 162). I know of no evidence to support this assertion. Both before the Volozhin yeshiva’s opening and after, opportunities for study were limited to those who could afford to support a child away from home, and give up the income he would bring in for the family.

Even though I am not convinced by Stern’s thesis, there is no doubt that this book is filled with learning and insight and has understandably created a good deal of excitement. To appreciate Stern’s efforts and ingenuity, one must read very carefully, and this reading will be rewarded in many ways.

The review you have just read (with the exception of notes 1-5, 7, and one sentence in brackets) appeared on the H-Judaic listserv on July 19, 2013. In the review I was limited in terms of space and I also could not use Hebrew. So let me now add some additional points and corrections that could not be included in the original. Before doing so I want to stress that I enjoyed Stern’s book a great deal, and I also learnt much from it. The Gaon’s scholarship is so wide-ranging that anyone who attempts such a daunting task as to write on him must be commended.[8]

Stern’s first chapter, which puts the Gaon and Vilna in historical perspective, was particularly interesting to me. How many people, for instance, are aware of the following (p. 70): “The roughly 5,500 Jews in and around Vilna (Wojewoda) made up nearly 30 percent of the population, and the 3,500 to 4,000 Jews living within Vilna proper formed an overwhelming majority of the local population.”

I strongly recommend that people read the book, if only to see how the talented author attempts to create a completely new perspective on the Gaon. Almost every page of Stern’s book raises issues that I can comment on, and I could easily have written a hundred page post. I agree with much in the book, and can cite sources in support of a number of points Stern makes. Yet this does not change the fact that I was not convinced by his major arguments. Rather than cite all the things I agree with, let me offer some more comments correcting errors, or offering different interpretations, as well as some tangential observations.

P. 14. Stern tells us that the Gaon’s mother was from Slutzk, and on p. 181 he cites a source that supposedly claims that the Gaon was also born in Slutzk. Yet this is incorrect. The town referred to is not Slutzk but סעלץ. This is the shtetl Selets (or Selcz) around 150 kilometers south-east of Brisk.[9]

P. 15. Stern records how the Gaon wanted to study medicine but was discouraged by his father who wanted his son to devote himself to Torah study. I don’t know if this has any relationship to the Gaon’s unusual (but not unique) view in opposition to using doctors as opposed to turning to God. According to one report, the Gaon only had this view when it came to internal medical problems, but not external ones (e.g., a burn).[12]

P. 17. Stern mentions the report by R. Samuel Luria that the Gaon travelled throughout Europe to find rabbinic manuscripts. Among the legends of these travels is one recorded in the name of R. Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld, quoting R. Joshua Leib Diskin, that when the Gaon visited the Munich library and saw the famous manuscript of the Talmud, he said that he would give all the money in the world in order to put it in genizah, because this Talmud was only R. Ashi’s first version (and thus of no authority). This story appears in Menahem Mendel Gerlitz’s Mara de-Ar’a Yisrael (Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 1, p. 57 n. 49. I can’t say whether or not R. Sonnenfeld ever made this comment (and Gerlitz’s book in general is quite unreliable). What I can say is that the story never happened as described for the simple reason that the manuscript only arrived in Munich in 1806, as noted by R. Raphael Rabbinovicz in the introduction to Dikdukei Soferim, vol. 1, p. 35.[13]

P. 44. “He [the Gaon] and his students reinterpreted a strand of kabbalah developed by Abraham Abulafia. . . . Elijah’s circle borrowed heavily from his ideas regarding the mathematical underpinnings of the world.” Unfortunately, this influence is never sufficiently explained and there is confusion about an important text. Thus, Stern writes:

As Menachem Mendel of Shklov wrote, “The word cheshbon [calculus] comes from the word machshava [thought] and this [calculus] is the first form that emerges from the essence of thought.”[14]

To begin with, I don’t know why cheshbon should be translated as “calculus.” I assume it means mathematics.[15]  But that is a minor point, as the general meaning of the passage is clear and R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov tells us that this approach was shared by the Gaon. The more important point, however, is that the sentence quoted as having been stated by R. Menahem Mendel was not stated by him at all. R. Menahem Mendel tells us explicitly that the sentence comes from an early book, one that predates R. Isaac Luria. What we learn from Moshe Idel is that this is actually a quotation from Abulafia.[16] Yet this information does not appear in Stern’s book, even though it would have strengthened his case.

Stern also states: “Elijah’s son Avraham approvingly cites the much-maligned Abulafia, and bestows the honorific “z”l” (the Hebrew acronym for “may his memory be blessed”) on the controversial medieval thinker.”

Here is the page in R. Avraham’s Rav Pealim.

Unfortunately, Stern must have read too quickly and instead of וז”ל [= וזה לשונו] he read the abbreviation as ז”ל, or perhaps he mistakenly connected the ז”ל on the previous line to ר’ אברהם הרואה

Pp. 44ff. Stern argues that according to the Gaon, matter existed eternally and the world was created from this eternal matter. If this was the case, it would be quite significant. Yet I believe that Stern misunderstands what the Gaon is saying. Stern himself quotes the Gaon as explaining that creation means “created from that which exists above.” As I see it, what this means is that matter “found” in the Divine was brought into the world, e.g., through emanation. But this is not the same as speaking of eternal matter, even eternal matter that is lacking form, as these exist apart from God.

With regard to the Gaon and creation, see also R. David Luria’s commentary to Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 51 n. 17, where he cites a manuscript comment of the Gaon that the world is eternally created. This same viewpoint is shared by R. Hayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh ha-Hayyim ch. 13. I don’t see how this can be reconciled with the Gaon’s comment at the beginning of Aderet Eliyahu that time itself is a creation, and he further speaks of an actual moment of the world’s creation:

בראשית: ב’ הוא ב’ הזמניי. כמו ביום. מפני שהזמן עצמו נברא והב’ מורה על עת הבריאה שהיה בחלק הראשון מהזמן הנברא

If matter is eternal, as Stern claims, or even eternally created, then time is also eternal. But this is clearly not what the Gaon says in the text just quoted.

P. 80. Stern notes that the Gaon’s interpretation of the Mishnah was not bound to how the Talmud explained matters. This is correct, and many people have written on the matter. I mention this only to call attention to the comments of the great genius, R. Meshulam Roth, in his Kol Mevasser, vol. 2, pp. 120-121, 128-129, who felt constrained to argue against this notion. I think it will be obvious to readers that R. Roth’s interpretations of the Gaon are based on his own dogmatic assumption, which he states explicitly, that it is unacceptable to interpret the Mishnah in a way that diverges from the talmudic interpretation.

P. 97. Stern writes:

Contrast Elijah’s vision with the picture of intimacy expressed by Rabbi Pinchas of Korzec (1726-1791): “Prayer is like intercourse with the Divine Presence. At the beginning of intercourse there are motions. Similarly, there is a need for motion in prayer. One should move when beginning to pray. Later on, one can stand without moving, attached to the Divine Presence with a powerful bond. As a result of the motions alone one can attain dvekut.”

In the note the source for this quotation is given as Likutim Yekarim, 18, and the bibliography tells us that the edition used is Lemberg, 1792 (the first edition). Yet there is some confusion here. R. Pinchas of Koretz indeed wrote a book entitled Likutim Yekarim, but the book where the passage cited comes from is another Likutim Yekarim, one that records the teachings of other early Hasidic teachers. Here is the title page.

Furthermore, the reader looking at page 18 in the first edition of (the correct) Likutim Yekarim will not find anything, as the text is on page 1a. In the 1974 edition the text is found in section 18, but as far as I can tell, these sections were only added in this edition.[17]

Here is the relevant page from the first edition, and the comment referred to is in the last paragraph. The last sentence of the translation quoted above (“As a result . . .”) is not an accurate rendering of the Hebrew sentence that begins מכח מה שמנענע

P. 102: “While it is doubtful that Elijah endorsed or defended Eibeschuetz’s or Luzzatto’s Sabbatian tendencies, he never publicly condemned their works.” Instead of the word “doubtful,” which leaves some room for question, the sentence should say that “it is certain that Elijah never endorsed or defended . . .” I leave aside for now the question of why Stern is so certain that Luzzatto had Sabbatian tendencies, and simply note that the Gaon would have rejected such an assumption in the strongest terms. The Eibeschuetz case is more complicated,[18] but I don’t understand how “Eibeschuetz’s Sabbatian proclivities were revealed when his son Wolff was unmasked as a closet Sabbatian” (p. 99). Since when do the actions of a son determine the stance of a father?

Let us now return to the issue of the Gaon’s view of philosophy, which was mentioned earlier in this post, and when I refer to philosophy I have in mind rationalism. Stern, p. 129, argues that the Gaon was not opposed to philosophy and as evidence for this proposition notes that the Gaon uses Aristotelian terms, cites the Guide once in his Aderet Eliyahu, and procured a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics. He then writes, “This evidence has led some to suggest that Elijah objected to a materialistic or epicurean lifestyle often associated with philosophy, but not to philosophy’s heuristic value.”

While I think that Stern is indeed correct that the Gaon saw heuristic value in philosophy, I was still quite surprised when I read this sentence, since I had never heard of anyone who argued that the Gaon’s only concern with philosophy was the materialistic lifestyle associated with it. When I looked in Stern’s note (p. 246 n. 55) it didn’t help. This is what appears in the note:

See Moshe Philip, ed., Sefer Mishlei im Biur ha-Gra (Petach Tikvah: 2001), 441 and Eliyahu Stern, “Philosophy and Dissimulation in Elijah of Vilna’s Writings and Legacy,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie (forthcoming). On Elijah reading Aristotle, see his letter to Rabbi Shaul of Amsterdam recorded in Tzvi ha-Levi Horowitz, Kitvei ha-Geonim (Warsaw: 1938 [should be 1928]), 3-10.

I don’t know what is intended by the first reference, as there is a typo since the volume does not contain 441 pages. Stern’s forthcoming article can only be discussed when it appears in print, but the book under review does not give any reference to others who argued that the Gaon had no substantive opposition to philosophy. Also, contrary to what Stern states here, the Gaon did not write to R. Saul of Amsterdam asking him to send him the Ethics. The letter Stern refers to was actually written by the Gaon’s brother, R. Yissakhar Ber.[19]

In the note directly following the one just referred to, Stern concludes based upon the introduction of R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov to the Gaon’s commentary to Avot and R. Israel of Shklov’s introduction to his Peat ha-Shulhan that “Elijah was secretly positively inclined to the study of philosophy.” He again refers to his forthcoming article where he develops this point. As mentioned already, discussion of this article must wait until it appears in print. In the meantime, however, it is difficult to accept this point without a clear articulation of what exactly Stern means by “study of philosophy”, since in R. Israel of Shklov’s introduction to Peat ha-Shulhan he writes as follows:

ועל חכמת הפילוסופי’ אמר [הגר”א] שלמד אותה לתכליתה ולא הוציא ממנה רק ב’ דברים טובים . . . והשאר צריך להשליכה החוצה.

R. Israel of Shklov also notes that the Gaon knew חכמת הכישוף which contradicts Stern’s statement that according to the Gaon “references to demons, magic, charms, and other irrational objects and ideas cannot be ignored—though not per se because he thinks they actually exist.” (p. 129).

See also Ma’aseh Rav (Jerusalem, 1906), Siah Eliyahu, p. 21b (no. 61(, which states that the Gaon would not study R. Bahya Ibn Paquda’s philosophically based Sha’ar ha-Yihud (in the Hovot ha-Levavot):

והי’ מחבב הגר”א ז”ל ס’ מנורת המאור וס’ חובת הלבבות זולת שער היחוד ובמקום שער היחוד הי’ אומר שילמדו בס’ הכוזרי הראשון שהוא קדוש וטהור ועיקרי אמונת ישראל ותורה תלוין בו.

There is another passage that is relevant, but as far as I know has not been cited in any of the scholarly discussions about the Gaon and philosophy. R. Hillel Rivlin, Kol ha-Tor (Bnei Brak, 1969), ch. 5:2, quotes the Gaon as saying the following about philosophy, and you can’t get any clearer than this:

את חכמת הפילוסיפיה למדה לתכליתה ולא מצא בה כי אם דברים אחדים שמקורם לוקח מחז”ל ועל השאר אמר, שאין בה לא הגיון ולא צדק ומיוסדת על אפיקורסות אווילית.

As mentioned, you can’t get any clearer than this, but I realize that this is not the Gaon speaking but rather a student, so it is possible to argue that he, and also R. Israel of Shklov, didn’t properly portray their teacher.

The passage that creates so many problems for Stern’s thesis is found in the Gaon’s commentary to Yoreh Deah 179:13. In this text, the Gaon famously attacks Maimonides for being led astray by “accursed philosophy.”

Stern argues that the Gaon does not oppose the study of (even rationalist) philosophy per se. Rather, his opposition is directed at how “a philosophical approach may ignore linguistic nuance” (p. 129). I think this is very unlikely, and it appears to me that Stern is trying to force his interpretation into the words of the Gaon when the more likely, and natural, interpretation is that the Gaon indeed opposes the study of (rationalist) philosophy.[20] (On p. 130 Stern claims that the Gaon was not opposed to the study of “secular philosophy” which is an even more far-reaching claim.) Beyond what the Gaon writes in his comment on the Shulhan Arukh, there is the way he writes it, which unfortunately is not reflected in Stern’s translation. Here is how Stern renders the first part of the text:

All those who came after Maimonides differed [because they did not use his rational allegorical interpretive technique]. For many times we find magical incantations mentioned in the Talmud. Maimonides and philosophers claimed that such magical writings and incantations, and devils, are all false. However, he [Maimonides] was already reprimanded for such an interpretation. For we have found many accounts in the Talmud about magical incantations and writings. . . . Philosophy is mistaken in a majority of cases when it interprets the Talmud in a superficial manner and destroys the sensus literalis of the text. But one should not think that I in any way, Heaven forbid, actually believe in them or in what they stand for.

In this comment the Gaon writes:

והוא נמשך אחר הפלוסופיא הארורה         .

This means that Maimonides “followed after the accursed philosophy.” However, Stern mistakenly translates these words: “Maimonides and philosophers claimed.”

Later in his comment the Gaon writes:

והפלסופיא הטתו ברוב לקחה לפרש הגמרא הכל בדרך הלציי

Stern translates this as “Philosophy is mistaken in a majority of cases when it interprets the Talmud in a superficial manner.” This too is a incorrect translation. What the Gaon is saying is that philosophy misled Maimonides to falsely explain the Talmud. So again, we see the great dangers of philosophy, and how it was able to lead astray even Maimonides. (There is nothing in the Gaon’s comment about “a majority of cases”). The final words quoted from the Gaon, בדרך הלציי, do not mean “superficial manner.” They mean “in a figurative sense.”

What can we say about the Gaon and Maimonides’ Guide? Although I hadn’t investigated the matter properly, for awhile I thought that the Gaon didn’t study the Guide in a serious manner. Anyone who reads Stern will see that this is incorrect. In fact, the Guide was even studied in Vilna during the Gaon’s time. The following passage from Aliyot Eliyahu (Vilna, 1892), p. 13a, should have been cited in the text by Stern as exhibit no. 1, as it is a strong piece of evidence in support of his position. For some reason, it is only summarized in a note (p. 246 n. 58):

וסיפר לי הרב כו’ הישיש מ’ ישראל גארדאן רב בווילנא (אשר היה מכיר היטב את הגאון נ”ע ודירתו היה בחומת אביו וקודם פטירתו היה דר הגאון בחצר בהכנ”ס) אשר היה נכנס ויוצא כפעם בפעם בבית הגאון נ”ע ושמע פ”א אשר בא הרב ר’ טרייטיל ז”ל לפני הגאון והרעיש על אשר ראו עיניו שאנשים קבעו למודם בבהמ”ד בספר מורה נבוכים וביקש שהגאון ימחה בידם והגאון השיבו בחרי אף ואמר ומי יעיז לדבר נגד כבוד הרמב”ם וספרו אשר מי יתנני ואהיה עמו במחיצתו בגן עדן.

There is no question that this report complicates the picture and shows that the Gaon’s view of the Guide was more complex than often portrayed. We see from it that unlike others, the Gaon, despite his strong criticism of Maimonides and general opposition to rationalist philosophy, nevertheless believed that the Guide had value and qualified scholars should not be prevented from studying it. 

After quoting this passage in Aliyot Eliyahu, R. Shlomo Korah adds, “There is a story about someone who asked his rebbe if it is permitted to study the Guide. He replied, ‘The Rambam permits it —הרמב”ם מתיר ”.[21]

Alan Brill has also made the case that the Gaon saw value in philosophy and calls attention to the fact that in a text attributed to the Gaon, there is a summary of a section of the Guide. See his “Auxiliary to Hokhmah: The Writings of the Vilna Gaon and Philosophical Terminology, in Moshe Hallamish, et al., eds., Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (Ramat Gan, 2003), p. 10. This shows that philosophy has value, as I too acknowledge, but this has nothing to do with rationalism, which the Gaon strongly opposed.

It is also worth noting that R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, in responding to the reported theological objections that the Gaon expressed about early hasidut, wrote as follows[22]:

ומי יתן ידעתיו ואנחהו ואערכה לפניו משפטינו להסיר מעלינו כל תלונותיו וטענותיו הפילוסיפיות אשר הלך בעקבותיהם, לפי דברי תלמידיו הנ”ל, לחקור אלקות בשכל אנושי

In other words, and this is really ironic, R. Shneur Zalman assumes that Gaon was led astray by philosophy and that explains his objections![23]

The reason I had my mistaken assumption that the Gaon didn’t study the Guide in any significant way was because the Gaon didn’t refer to it in his commentary to the Shulhan Arukh, even when he had the opportunity, such as in his note to Yoreh Deah 179:13. Another place where he could have referred to the Guide is in the very first halakhah in Orah Hayyim. R. Moses Isserles is quoting from Maimonides’ Guide, and rather than refer the reader to this, the Gaon offers sources for the Rama’s formulation from rabbinic literature. Yet even before reading Stern’s book I should have seen that the Rama in Darkhei Moshe tells us that he is quoting the Guide, and one should assume that the Gaon saw this text.

This is how R. Isserles begins the Darkhei Moshe (and he begins the Shulhan Arukh similarly):

כתב הרמב”ם בספר מורה הנבוכים חלק ג’ פרק נב שמיד שאדם ניעור משנתו בבוקר מיד יחשוב בלבו לפני מי הוא שוכב וידע שהמלך מלכי המלכים הקב”ה יתעלה חופף עליו שנאמר (ישעיה ו, ג) ) מלא כל הארץ כבודו.

R. Isserles quotes Maimonides as saying that as soon as you wake up in the morning you should think about God. Yet if you look at Guide 3:52 that he is quoting you find something interesting. Here is the passage in Ibn Tibbon’s translation (which is what the Rama used).

מי שיבחר בשלמות האנושי ושיהיה איש הא-להים באמת יעור משינתו וידע שהמלך הגדול המחופף עליו והדבק עמו תמיד הוא גדול מכל מלך בשר ודם ואילו היה דוד ושלמה, והמלך ההוא הדבק המחופף הוא השכל השופע עלינו שהוא הדבוק אשר בינינו ובין הש”י . . . וכבר ידעת הזהירם מלכת בקומה זקופה, משום מלא כל הארץ כבודו.

Where does the Rama get his formulation that as soon as one awakes – מיד שאדם ניעור משנתו – he should think of God? It comes from Maimonides’ words we just read: יעור משינתו. As pointed out by Raphael Speyer,[24] it seems that the Rama simply misunderstood what Maimonides (in Ibn Tibbon’s translation) was saying. The words יעיר משינתו have nothing to do with awakening from sleep in any literal sense. Rather, the expression simply refers to people who are figuratively awakening from their slumber and can now recognize God’s presence. Therefore, there was no need for the Rama in seeking to make his point to include anything about getting up in the morning.

In the Datche’s editor’s response to Speyer, he pointed out another problem with the Rama’s formulation. While the Rama writes of  מלך מלכי המלכים הקב”ה יתעלה חופף עליו, this is not what Maimonides says. According to Maimonides, “this king who cleaves to him and accompanies him is the intellect that overflows toward us and is the bond between us and Him, may He be exalted.” In other words, Maimonides is speaking about the Active Intellect yet the Rama turns this into God Himself. It is because of things like this that Yeshayahu Leibowitz was led to declare that the Rama “didn’t understand philosophy and didn’t understand the Guide of the Perplexed.” He also referred to the Rama’s Torat ha-Olah as a work of “pseudo-philosophy.”[25]

This might seem like an unfair statement, and I am sure that Yonah Ben Sasson would reject it,[26] but consider the following. No one could be regarded as a rabbinic scholar if all he studied was the Mishneh Torah, without examining the talmudic passages upon which the Mishneh Torah is based. In fact, I think all would agree that one can’t really understand the Mishneh Torah without knowing the talmudic sources. By the same token, one can’t really understand the Guide without knowing the Aristotelian sources upon which so much of Maimonides’ words are based. Yet the Rama tells us, in his famous letter to R. Solomon Luria,[27] that he never actually studied Aristotle and his only knowledge of him comes from Maimonides’ Guide and other Jewish sources.

כי אף שהבאתי מקצת דברי אריסטו מעידני עלי שמים וארץ שכל ימי לא עסקתי בשום ספר מספריו רק מה שעסקתי בספר המורה שיגעתי בו ומצאתי ת”ל [תהלה לא-ל] ושאר ספרי הטבע כשער השמים וכדומיהין, שחברו חז”ל ומהם כתבתי מה שכתבתי מדברי אריסטו.

Interestingly, I found one place, Torat ha-Olah 3:47, where the Rama speaks very disrespectfully of Maimonides’ philosophical knowledge, referring to it as foolishness.

ואין לך סכלות חכמתו גדולה מזה

Nevertheless, the Gaon placed the Rama together with Maimonides in his other sharp criticism of the latter[28]:

אבל לא ראו את הפרדס, לא הוא [הרמ”א] ולא הרמב”ם

Information about my summer trips to Spain, Central Europe, and Italy will be available soon. Anyone interested should check out the Torah in Motion website. Marc Glickman, one of the participants on last year’s tour to Central Europe, described it as follows: “It was great to meet Marc and he was a fantastic guide. The trip was like a living Seforim Blog post (I follow his posts religiously).” Thank you Marc!

Also for those interested, I will be speaking on R. Ovadiah Yosef at Ohab Zedek in NYC on December 17 at 8:15pm. 

By Mitchell  First

(MFirstatty@aol.com)

           Critically, the name Chashmonai is not found in any form in I or II Maccabees, our main sources for the historical background of the events of Chanukkah.[7] But fortunately the name does appear in two sources in Tannaitic literature.[8] It is only through one of these two sources that we can get a handle on the identity of Chashmonai.

————

       Already in the late first century, the identity of Chashmonai seems to have been a mystery to Josephus. (Josephus must have heard of the name from his extensive Pharisaic education, and from being from the family.) In his Jewish War, he identifies Chashmonai as the father of Mattathias.[9] Later, at XII, 265 of his Antiquities, he identifies Chashmonai as the great-grandfather of Mattathias.[10] Probably, his approach here is the result of his knowing from I Maccabees 2:1 that Mattathias was the son of a John who was the son of a Simon, and deciding to integrate the name Chashmonai with this data by making him the father of Simon.[11] It is very likely that Josephus had no actual knowledge of the identity of Chashmonai and was just speculating here. It is too coincidental that he places Chashmonai as the father of Simon, where there is room for him. If Josephus truly had a tradition from his family about the specific identity of Chashmonai, it would already have been included in his Jewish War.

   The standard printed text at Megillah 11a implies that Chashmonai is not Mattathias: she-he-emadeti lahem Shimon ha-Tzaddik ve-Chashmonai u-vanav u-Matityah kohen gadol…This is also the implication of the standard printed text at Soferim 20:8, when it sets forth the Palestinian version of the Amidah insertion for Chanukkah; the text includes the phrase: Matityahu ben Yochanan kohen gadol ve-Chashmonai u-vanav…[12] There are also midrashim on Chanukkah that refer to a Chashmonai who was a separate person from Mattathias and who was instrumental in the revolt.[13]

        But the fact that I Maccabees does not mention any separate individual named Chashmonai involved in the revolt strongly suggests that there was no such individual. Moreover, there are alternative readings at both Megillah 11a and Soferim 20:8.[14] Also, the midrashim on Chanukkah that refer to a Chashmonai who was a separate person from Mattathias are late midrashim.[15] In the prevalent version of Al ha-Nissim today, Chashmonai has no vav preceding it.[16]

        If there was no separate person named Chashmonai at the time of the revolt, and if the statement of Josephus that Chashmonai was the great-grandfather of Mattathias is only a conjecture, who was Chashmonai?

           Let us look at our two earliest sources for Chashmonai.  One of these is M. Middot 1:6.[17]

                        …המוקד בבית היו לשכות ארבע  [18]…ייון מלכי ששיקצום המזבח אבני את חשמוניי בני גנזו בה צפונית מזרחית

From here, it seems that Chashmonai is just another name for Mattathias. This is also the implication of Chashmonai in many of the later passages.[19]

             The other Tannaitic source for Chashmonai is Seder Olam, chap. 30. Here the language is: malkhut beit Chashmonai meah ve-shalosh =the dynasty of  the House of Chashmonai, 103 [years].[20] Although one does not have to interpret Chashmonai here as a reference to Mattathias,  this interpretation does fit this passage.

          Thus a reasonable approach based on these two early sources is to interpret Chashmonai as another way of referring to Mattathias.[21] But we still do not know why these sources would refer to him in this way. Of course, one possibility is that it was his additional name.[22] Just like each of his five sons had an additional name,[23] perhaps Chashmonai was the additional name of Mattathias.[24] But I Maccabees, which stated that each of Mattathias’ sons had an additional name, did not make any such statement in the case of Mattathias himself.

         Perhaps we should not deduce much from this omission. Nothing required the author of I Maccabees to mention that Mattathias had an additional name. But one scholar has suggested an interesting reason for the omission.  It is very likely that a main purpose of I Maccabees was the glorification of Mattathias in order to legitimize the rule of his descendants.[25] Their rule needed legitimization because the family was not from the priestly watch of Yedayah. Traditionally, the high priest came from this watch.[26] I Maccabees achieves its purpose by portraying a zealous Mattathias and creating parallels between Mattathias and the Biblical Pinchas, who was rewarded with the priesthood for his zealousness.[27] Perhaps, it has been suggested, the author of I Maccabees left out the additional name for Mattathias because it would remind readers of the obscure origin of the dynasty.[28] (We will discuss why this might have been the case when we discuss the meaning of the name in the next section.)

—–

             We have seen that a reasonable approach, based on the two earliest rabbinic sources, is to interpret Chashmonai as another way of referring to Mattathias.

        The next question is the meaning of the name. The name could be based on the name of some earlier ancestor of Mattathias. But we have no clear knowledge of any ancestor of Mattathias with this name.[29] Moreover, this only begs the question of where the earlier ancestor would have obtained this name.[30] The most widely held view is that the name Chashmonai   derives from a place that some ancestor of Mattathias hailed from a few generations earlier. (Mattathias and his immediate ancestors hailed from Modin.[31]) For example, Joshua 15:27 refers to a place called Cheshmon in the area of the tribe of Judah.[32] Alternatively, a location Chashmonah is mentioned at Numbers 33:29-30 as one of the places that the Israelites encamped in the desert.[33] In either of these interpretations, the name may have reminded others of the obscure origin of Mattathias’ ancestors and hence the author of I Maccabees might have refrained from using it.

        Whatever the meaning of the word חשמנים, I would like to raise the possibility that an ancestor of Mattathias lived in Egypt for a period and that people began to call him something like Chashmonai upon his return, based on this verse.

                                             Conclusions

       Even though Josephus identifies Chashmonai as the great-grandfather of Mattathias, this was probably just speculation. It is too coincidental that he places Chashmonai as the father of Simon, precisely where there is room for him.

        The most reasonable approach, based on the earliest rabbinic sources, is to interpret Chashmonai as another way of referring to Mattathias, either because it was his additional name or for some other reason. A main purpose of I Maccabees was the glorification of Mattathias in order to legitimize the rule of his descendants. This may have led the author of I Maccabees to leave the name out; the author would not have wanted to remind readers of the obscure origin of the dynasty.

       Most probably, the name Chashmonai derives from a place that some ancestor of the family hailed from.

—–

       A few other points:

            º Most probably, the name חשמונאי did not originally include an aleph. The two earliest Mishnah manuscripts, Kaufmann and Parma (De Rossi 138), spell the name חשמוניי.[49] This is also how the name is spelled in the two passages in the Jerusalem Talmud.[50] As is the case with many other names that end with אי (such as שמאי), the aleph is probably a later addition that reflects the spelling practice in Babylonia.[51]

      Since there is no evidence that the name was used as a family or group name at the time of Mattathias himself, the common translation in Al ha-Nissim: “the Hasmonean” (see, e.g., the Complete ArtScroll Siddur, p. 115) is misleading. It implies that he was one of a group or family using this name at this time. A better translation would be “Chashmonai,” implying that it was a description/additional name of Mattathias alone.

——

      Postscript: Anyone who is not satisfied with my explanations for Chashmonai can adopt the explanation intuited by my friend David Gertler when he was a child. His teacher was talking to the class about Mattityahu-Chashmonai and his five sons, without providing any explanation of the name Chashmonai. David reasoned: it must be that he is called חשמני because he had five sons (i.e., חמשי metathesized into חשמי/חשמני)![64]

Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press 2013, pp. xiv+322.*

            In this regard my father was not unique. As Eliyahu Stern states at the beginning of his important and ambitious study, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism:

For two centuries Elijah has been known simply by the name “Genius,” or “Gaon.” His biographers claim that “one like him appears
every thousand years.”… By the time of his death… he had written commentaries on a wider range of Jewish literature than any writer in history…. His originality, command of sources, and clarity of thought… establish him as the equal of… religious and intellectual giants such as Aquinas and Averroes. (1)

Not surprisingly, not very long after the Gaon’s death traditionalist scholars began writing biographies extolling his piety and, even more so, his brilliance, an enterprise that continues until today.  Despite their hagiographic nature and often strongly ideological bent, these biographies are often serious attempts, granted from within a traditional perspective, to document the Gaon’s life and works and paint his personality, and, if used selectively and critically, they can be of great value to academic historians. Thus, to take a very recent example, R. Dov Eliakh’s 1300 (!) page, three volume biography from 2002, Ha-Gaon[1]  clearly has a Haredi ideological agenda, doing its best to distance the Gaon from, heaven forbid, any “enlightenment” tendencies, and further waging a fierce campaign against all the ”distortions”
that the dastardly “enlighteners” perpetrated on the Gaon and his disciples.[2] Yet this biography, ironically enough, has been condemned in certain extremist Haredi  circles for displaying its own enlightenment tendencies, perhaps alluding to its very full (and useful) documentation and its ”sin” of every now and then referencing academic articles and even worse identifying their authors![3]

            Primarily, however, traditionalist scholars undertook to preserve and disseminate the Gaon’s vast intellectual legacy by transcribing, editing, publishing, and commenting on his works.  Here one must state that while no one will deny the Gaon’s “originality [and] command of sources,” for Stern to speak of his “clarity of thought” is misleading.  While a few of his works, like his Commentary on Proverbs, are full and clear, most of his  writings, as scholars have noted and Stern himself concedes, are exceptionally concise and concentrated, often consisting entirely of learned but obscure allusions and references, the relevance of which can be  deciphered  only by exceptionally knowledgeable readers.[4] Indeed, many of his “commentaries” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, but simply glosses and annotations entered by the Gaon into the margins of the texts in his rabbinic library. Most of his works were not prepared for publication; many were dictated in oral form to his students and exist in varying recensions. At times the Gaon’s original manuscripts are missing, and the accuracy of the printed texts prepared from them is not certain.  The magnitude of this on-going effort cannot be overstated, and even today the job is far from completed.[5]

            In contrast to traditionalist scholars, academic scholars until fairly recently focused, by and large, only on selected aspects of the Gaon’s personality and legacy. They examined the famous and exceptionally fierce  campaign which he, together with the Vilna community leaders, waged against the new spiritual pietistic Hasidic movement; took note of his interest in a broad range of secular disciplines, to be sure, only as ancillaries to the study of the Torah, and asked to what extent he could be seen as a forerunner of the East European Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment); and finally posed the question as to what extent his views regarding the interplay between piety (yirah) and study of the Torah anticipated those of the mid-nineteenth century ethical-pietistic “mussar” movement. In all these instances the scholarly interest was not so much in the Gaon per se, but in his relationship to either contemporaneous or subsequent religious movements.[6]

            Over the past two decades, however, scholars have sought to extend these rather limited horizons and take stock of the broader contours of the Gaon’s intellectual legacy. Important attempts have been made to probe the Gaon’s original Kabbalistic thought; show how, despite his presumed anti-philosophical stance,  he drew upon the medieval Jewish philosophy in forming his world view; examine his hermeneutics and the connected issue of how he conceived of the relationship between the plain-sense meaning of the biblical text and its rabbinic interpretation; and finally assess his immense more strictly Talmudic legacy, looking at his many innovative and unconventional legal rulings and interpretations of rabbinic texts.[7]

            Stern’s The Genius both synthesizes and builds upon this recent scholarship, and is the first attempt to undertake an intellectual biography and cultural profile of the Gaon, placing him firmly within the concrete social and political reality of the Vilna of his day and taking into full account his dizzyingly wide ranging and varied intellectual and literary activity. Of particular interest is the colourful, warts and all, personal portrait that Stern paints of the Gaon, examining the connections between the Gaon’s eccentric, highly reclusive and ascetic lifestyle—for example, he limited his sleep to two hours a day and almost ruthlessly cut all emotional ties with his immediate family—and his genius, or to be more precise the connections drawn between these two facets of his personality by his disciples. As Edmund Morris notes[8] when speaking of the slightly later Beethoven, a genius’ admirers expect him to be unlike ordinary men and wholly devoted his calling—music for Beethoven, rabbinic learning for the Gaon. If Beethoven’s admiring patrons viewed him, to cite Morris, as an ”undisciplined freak”—and all the greater for that—the Gaon’s admiring students appeared to have viewed him as a highly disciplined, indeed, over-disciplined, one—and,
again, all the greater for that.

            Yet, as the book’s subtitle, Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, indicates, Stern has an even bolder agenda. For in addition to limning the Gaon’s life, thought, and personality, Stern in his book’s Introduction and Conclusion advances a novel thesis regarding the nature of modern Judaism and the role of the Gaon in its making, seeking to unsettle the binary opposition generally drawn between tradition and modernity.

            For Stern, modernity is not “just a movement based on… liberal philosophical principles,” but “a condition characterized [among other
things] by democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion… that restructured all aspects of European thought and life in diverse and often contradictory ways,” (8) and that in the case of Judaism “gave rise to [both] the Haskalah and institutions such as the Yeshiva” (8).  It is in this light Stern maintains that we should understand the historical significance of Gaon’s great work on Jewish law, his Bi’ur
or commentary on Joseph Karo’s sixteenth century code of law, the Shulhan Arukh. Here, to sharpen Stern’s analysis, we may point to an instructive paradox. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, thanks to the primacy of the Shulhan Arukh, the study of the Talmud was neglected and scholars focused their attention on codes of law. The Bi’ur might seem to fit into that pattern, but in actuality it served to subvert the Shulhan Arukh’s authority. For by tracing in great and unprecedented detail the source of the Shulhan Arukh’s rulings back the Talmud and its classic commentaries and then by often challenging those rulings in light of those sources the Bi’ur spurred a return to Talmudic study.

            Stern suggestively, if perhaps a bit mechanically, links the move, sparked by the Gaon, from study of Codes to study of the Talmud to the decline of the kehilah, the Jewish community, and the rise of more privatized forms of traditional Judaism. As long as a kehilah possessed the power, granted to it by the local non-Jewish authorities, to govern itself by Jewish law, study of the codes, which served as guides to practical communal legal decision making, occupied center stage. With the kehilah’s decline, study of the Talmud for its own sake emerged as the highest form of religious worship and pushed the study of the codes to the margins.  Thus, Stern notes, the Yeshiva of Volozhin, founded in 1803 by the Gaon’s leading disciple, R. Hayyim of Volozhin, which served as the primary center of Talmud study in Eastern Europe through the nineteenth century, was a new type of Yeshiva that “functioned independently of any communal governing structure, and …recruited students and funds from across European Jewry” (138). Moreover, this detaching of Talmudic study “from practical code-oriented learning” encouraged “an ethos of innovation, originality, and brilliance” (139) where intellectual battles were won by “pedagogic persuasion and not coercion” (140).

            This perception of the Volozhin Yeshiva as exemplifying the rise of a more privatized and democratic form of religion thus connects directly with Stern’s broader thesis that the modern condition manifested itself in both “enlightened” and “traditional” forms of nineteenth century Judaism, despite their apparent opposition. This analysis is very suggestive, but open to two objections.

            First, while the Gaon certainly played an important role in the move from the study of Codes to study of the Talmud, Stern exaggerates the extent of that role.  It would appear that Stern rather uncritically relies on the understandably hyperbolic claims made by the Gaon’s students, who credited him with almost singlehandedly reviving the study of Talmud in traditional circles. In truth, however, the Gaon’s approach appears to be a part of a broader return to Talmudic study in the eighteenth century, which occurred for reasons we cannot enter into here, as exemplified by, among others, his slightly older central European rabbinic contemporary Rabbi Jacob Joshua Falk (1680-1755) and, in particular, by his Lithuanian contemporary R. Aryeh Leib Ginzburg (1695-1785), both of whom, unlike the Gaon, actually wrote full scale commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, as Yisrael Ta-Shma has noted, Falk’s commentary, the famed Pnei Yehoshua, with its penetrating questions but often not entirely satisfactory answers, spurred a whole spate of commentaries on the Talmud, seeking to provide their own answers to Falk’s questions.[9] And, as Ta-Shma has further noted, Ginzburg’s equally famed writings, the Turei Even, Gevurot ha-Ari, and, in particular, the Sha‘agat Aryeh, with their rejection of pilpul, independent approach, amazing control of the far-flung reaches of classic halakhic literature, and very close attention to the peshat of the Talmudic text, resemble in many ways the Gaon’s approach to the Talmud.[10]

            Indeed, Stern admits that “it is puzzling that Elijah composed a commentary on the Shulhan ‘Arukh but not on the Talmud itself” (131). His suggestion “that in the eighteenth century it was much easier to purchase a set of Karo’s code than to acquire a full set of Talmud” (131) is painfully weak, as Stern himself appears to realize. After all, if such a consideration did not deter Rabbis Falk and Ginzberg from writing their commentaries, it is hard to imagine it deterring the even more independent minded Gaon. Moreover, the Gaon wrote full scale commentaries on recondite sections of the relatively neglected Palestinian Talmud and on other obscure works of rabbinic literature despite
their relative inaccessibility.

              Perhaps the key here is the Gaon’s daring and its limits. Rabbi Falk in his commentary deferred to and simply expounded the interpretations of the Rishonim, the classical medieval Talmudic commentators. Even the more independent minded Rabbi Ginzberg, who often rejected views of the Aharonim, even those of the classical commentators on the Shulhan Arukh, never directly rejected those of the Rishonim. The Gaon, by contrast, felt free to reject the Rishonim’s views, despite their great standing.  Still, it was one thing for him to offer original and unconventional explanations of the Palestinian Talmud, where there was not an authoritative tradition of commentary, or even to reject the Rishonim’s explanations of the Babylonian Talmud and offer explanations of his own in the course of his Commentary on the Shulhan ‘Arukh, where his dissent might not be that visible. But a full scale commentary on the Babylonian Talmud would have required that the Gaon, who was unwilling to compromise “his own understanding,”[11] take issue much more openly with the explanations of the Rishonim and present his own exceptionally bold and innovative interpretations.  That might have been too bold a move even for the Gaon, given the conservatism of the Jewish community of his day. This would also explain why the Gaon, despite his son’s, R. Abraham’s urgings, never wrote his own Code of Law.  Again, it was one thing to undermine the Shulhan ‘Arukh’s rulings in course of a commentary, another to simply set the Shulhan ‘Arukh’s rulings aside and directly offer competing rulings in a new code of law.[12]

            Second, even if we grant Stern’s point that the Volozhin Yeshiva exemplifies the rise of a more privatized and democratic form of religion that manifested itself in both “enlightened” and “traditional” forms of nineteenth century Judaism, he underplays the difference
it makes whether that privatization and democratization are harnessed in the service of greater acculturation and individual autonomy, as in the case of the Haskalah, or greater insularity and ideological intolerance, as in the case of many Lithuanian Yeshivas. It is striking that while in the book’s text Stern lauds “the freedom and individuation” of Talmudic study in the Yeshivas, in a lengthy endnote he concedes that
“for all the lively debate … bouncing off the [Yeshiva] walls, these walls were soundproof, blocking out those with radically different and conflicting opinions” (264, n. 80).[13]

            More problematic, Stern’s thesis that the Gaon’s activity and image contributed  to the privatization of Judaism and the democratization of rabbinic knowledge leads him to skew his portrait  of the Gaon, exaggerating both his radicalism and modernity. Thus, for
example, the reader never gets a full sense from Stern of the depth of the Gaon’s involvement in Kabbalah nor learns, except in passing, of the sheer number of major commentaries he authored on Kabbalistic literature. Perhaps Stern deemed such a discussion too technical for the general reader,[14] but one inevitably gets the feeling that this minimizing of the Gaon’s Kabbalistic side fits into the modern picture Stern is drawing.

            A fairly mild example of Stern’s modernizing portrait of the Gaon may be found in Chapter 2, ”Elijah’s Worldview,” the book’s most technical chapter. Here Stern, building on the scholarship of Alan Brill,[15]  seeks to show how the Gaon drew upon Greek and medieval Jewish philosophic sources, Kabbalistic texts, and even, indirectly, the eighteenth century German idealistic tradition in constructing his view of God, creation, and nature. The chapter’s centrepiece is an extended comparison of the worldviews of the Gaon and Leibniz. To be sure, Stern concedes, the Gaon never read any of Leibniz’s works; indeed he most probably did not know any language other than Hebrew. Still, he notes, the Gaon was influenced by the work Tekhunot Ha-Shamayyim, written by Raphael Halevi of Hannover, a leading student of Leibniz, as well as by the writings of Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto “who read and appropriated Leibniz’s ideas on theodicy” (38).  More significant, “Elijah, Luzzatto, and Leibniz were working with an overlapping set of Kabbalistic and philosophical texts, ideas, and questions that pervaded eighteenth century European intellectual life” (38). Stern’s comparison, while suggestive and forcefully argued, is not entirely
convincing. He argues that both “Leibniz’s and Elijah’s views converge around the … idea that knowledge can be represented in mathematical terms.”[16]  This contention that the Gaon, like Leibniz, believed “that knowledge can be represented in mathematical terms” rests primarily, however, on Stern’s vocalization of a key word from the Gaon’s commentary on the Sifra de-Tzeniuta (196-198, note 19), a vocalization Stern puts forward in opposition to that of Elliot Wolfson, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in North America. However, R. Bezalel Naor, the noted rabbinic scholar of Kabbalah and editor of the Gaon’s commentary on the Sifra de-Tzeniuta, in a review of The Genius supports Wolfson’s vocalization of the text.[17] This is a highly technical matter, and I do not deem myself qualified to adjudicate this dispute, but at the very least it must be said that Stern is building a very imposing edifice on a very slender base.

            Even if we grant Stern his vocalization, nevertheless, as he himself admits, at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphysics are not so much abstract mathematical points, but monads, which are living, self-contained substances. Here Leibniz, as has often been noted, seems to be in large measure inspired, if only negatively, by Spinoza, and his theory of monads appears to be an attempt to adopt Spinozistic premises while avoiding Spinozistic conclusions. Of course, there is no evidence that the Gaon was aware of Spinoza, whose name, indeed, does not appear in Stern’s book. Thus, while it is true that “Elijah … and Leibniz were working with an overlapping set of Kabbalistic and philosophical texts, ideas, and questions that pervaded eighteenth century European intellectual life,” they were also working with non-overlapping sets of “texts, ideas, and questions.” By focusing on the overlapping issues and scanting the broader and differing contexts within which the Gaon and Leibniz worked, Stern, even granting his mathematical comparison, ends up giving a somewhat unbalanced picture of the metaphysical systems of both these thinkers.  Stern concludes his chapter with a bold, if rather speculative, suggestion that one may draw a link between the Gaon’s highly abstract theological ideas and his daring emendations of rabbinic texts, which, in Stern’s view, should be seen as part of “his broader philosophic project of restoring the rational pre-established harmony of a world confused by unnecessary human error and evil” (56-57). Perhaps.

            Chapter 3, “Elijah and the Enlightenment,” advances the book’s most startling and revisionist claim. Generally, Stern notes, the Gaon’s contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn is portrayed as the founder of modern Judaism, while the Gaon is depicted as the defender of rabbinic or traditional Judaism. Stern, however, as part of his effort to unsettle the binary opposition between tradition and modernity, argues that in certain respects the Gaon was a more radical figure than Mendelssohn. Thus, while Mendelssohn maintained that rabbinic interpretations of the legal passages in Scripture were to be identified with the plain-sense meaning of the text, the Gaon interpreted the plain-sense meaning of the text independently of rabbinic interpretations, which were seen as belonging to another level of Scripture. Stern argues that this difference reflects a greater level of self-confidence on the Gaon’s part, as “the intellectual leader of a majority Jewish culture” (71) than on Mendelssohn’s, living as he did in “Berlin, a cosmopolitan city with a tiny Jewish minority” (64), where rabbinic Judaism and particularly rabbinic law were under attack in Christian academic quarters. Stern, I believe, accords too much weight here to matters to matters of demography. Rather, contra Stern, I support the regnant view that this hermeneutical difference reflects, in large measure, the Gaon’s insularity from as opposed to Mendelssohn’s greater openness and sensitivity to their respective surrounding cultures, deriving, in turn, from the presence of a “beckoning bourgeoisie,” to use Gershon Hundert’s phrase,[18] in Berlin and the absence of one in Vilna.

            Even more problematic, Stern’s contrasting portraits of the Gaon and Mendelssohn serve to exaggerate the Gaon’s modernity, while minimizing Mendelssohn’s. Stern begins his chapter, “Elijah and the Enlightenment” with the arresting claim that while ”Elijah believed that Judaism and Jewish texts expressed universal values, Mendelsohn, Leibnitz’s best known Jewish follower … highlighted the social and political limitations of idealism” (63). Really? What of the Gaon’s view (to cite Stern himself) that ”Jew and Gentile do not share the same deity” (109)? And what of his view (something Stern omits to point out) that Jewish souls, as the Kabbalah maintains, differ essentially from non-Jewish souls?[19] Regarding Mendelsohn, Stern himself acknowledges that he believed that philosophy (and we would add Jewish belief) “[are] something universal and cannot contradict natural reason” (79). Furthermore (again something Stern neglects to tell us), Mendelssohn’s criticisms of German idealism flowed from its being in his view not universal enough, still retaining the traces, as in Leibnitz’ affirmation of eternal damnation, of its Christian theological origins. All this is apart from the Gaon’s ready use of the ban to suppress the nascent Hasidic movement, as contrasted with Mendelssohn’s call upon both Church (including Synagogue) and State to renounce any coercion in matters of religious belief.

            A final example of Stern’s skewed perspective is his depiction of the Gaon’s view about the nature and authority of the rabbinic tradition. Stern on the same page (64) first asserts that the “the Gaon called into question the canons of rabbinic authority” and then that
he “challenged the rabbinic tradition.” Both assertions lack any foundation. True, for the Gaon the rabbinic interpretations of the legal passages of biblical text are to be distinguished from their plain-sense meaning, but, as he clearly states on many occasions—and here, incidentally, he is following in Maimonides’ footsteps—their authority is based on their being divinely revealed “laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai,” and after the fact they can all be derived, via the principle of Scriptural omnisignificance, from seemingly minor and trivial superfluities or gaps in the biblical text.  Given this clearly stated view, Stern’s contention that for the Gaon “rabbinic authority is not derived from the rabbis’ connection to the biblical text itself, but rather is based on the fact that the Torah was given to human beings to interpret” (76) cannot be sustained.[20]

            Stern seeks support for his view by referring to a justifiably famous comment of the Gaon to Lev. 6:2. He writes:

The Gaon explains how the [literal sense] of the biblical text allows a [high] priest to enter the [Holy of Holies] whenever he pleases. (According to the rabbis of the Talmud the high priest could only enter once a year.) The Gaon makes a simple but critical historical distinction: during the time of Scripture, biblical law permitted Aaron to go in when he pleased; his access to the [holy of holies] was restricted only later in history when the law changed.  (81)

This is seriously confused. The distinction the Gaon draws in his comment is not between the literal sense of the biblical text and a differing rabbinic view, but between two units of the biblical text itself. Leviticus 16:1-28, the Gaon maintains basing himself on a rabbinic observation in Leviticus Rabbah 21:7,[21] refers just to Aaron, who is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies any time he wishes as long as he performs the ritual outlined in that section. Lev. 16:29-34, on the other hand, refers to all high priests subsequent to Aaron, who are allowed to enter the Holy of Holies only if they perform the requisite ritual and only once a year on Yom Kippur. This accounts for the fact that Yom Kippur is not mentioned in verses 1-28 as well as for the emphasis in verses 16:29 and 34 that this law is “for all time” and the otherwise inexplicable emphasis in 16:34 that this ritual is to be performed only “once a year.” Aside from brilliantly illuminating the biblical text, the Gaon’s analysis also allows him to deftly and convincingly resolve some long standing rabbinic conundrums, such as the rabbinic debate over the
function of the “ram for a burn offering” and the puzzling rabbinic assertion that Lev.16:23 is out of place.[22]

            That Stern misconstrues the Gaon’s observation is particularly unfortunate, since its proper explication would have offered readers a wonderful example of the Gaon’s exegetical genius. This leads to another weakness of Stern’s book. Stern repeatedly and rightly stresses the Gaon’s exegetical originality and incisiveness, but the all too few examples he brings do not, at least in my view, substantiate his claim. There is never any “aha” moment where readers of the book will exclaim ”Wow! This is brilliant; this true genius.” Stern points to the Gaon’s deletion of a passage from a classic rabbinic text on the grounds of its superfluity (55). But while it may take daring to deem a passage inauthentic because it is redundant, it does not require any particular genius to do so. There are many not overly technical examples that Stern could and should have brought where the Gaon’s textual emendations bring light and clarity to what had previously appeared to be a textual and conceptual muddle—say his brilliant transposition in Tosefta Terumot, 7:20 of ”outside” (“mi-be-hutz”) and “inside” (mi-bifnim”)[23] Similarly, there are not overly technical examples of the Gaon’s brilliantly original  interpretations of halakhic texts that Stern could and should have brought—say the Gaon’s famous and oft-cited interpretation of Mishnah Berakhot 4:1 regarding the meaning of the word “keva” in the Mishnaic statement that the evening service has no “keva”.[24]

            In a related, if somewhat different vein, Stern’s scanting the Gaon’s Kabbalistic side deprives him of the opportunity to show the reader how the Gaon often uses Kabbalah to brilliantly explain and illuminate a rabbinic Aggadah. From a critical-historical perspective, of course, such explanations cannot be accepted, since the Kabbalistic concepts the Gaon uses are, as established by historical scholarship, much later than the rabbinic material he is explaining; nevertheless, at times his comments (say his famous explanation of the debate in Bava Batra 15a and Menachot 30a regarding who wrote the last eight verses of the Torah[25]) are so ingenious and so elegantly and powerfully resolve multiple problems in the rabbinic text being explicated that even the critical reader, almost against his or her own better judgment, begins to wonder “Perhaps this is the meaning of the rabbinic text after all!”

            Finally the book is missing a bibliographical chapter, briefly describing the Gaon’s major works, their publishing history, and the problems involved in their editing. Some of this can be found scattered throughout the book, but that is no substitute for a systematic presentation. Such a chapter by detailing the multiple editions of many of the Gaon’s writing and the differences between them would have sensitized the readers to the difficulties in reconstructing his worldview.[26] It would also have driven home the amazing range of the Gaon‘s literary activity. Above all, it might have provided the reader with a deeper understanding of the nature and sheer reach of the Gaon’s literary project. Aside from his commentary on the Shulhan Arukh that, in many ways, is the odd-man out, the Gaon in his writings sought to explicate the totality of biblical and rabbinic literature. But, for him, rabbinic literature includes the liturgy, all of classical rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, Halakhic and Aggadic midrashim (including Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer), the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, and even such historical rabbinic works as Seder Olam Rabbah, all of which for him constitute the exoteric branch of rabbinic literature, as well as such classic Kabbalistic works as the Zohar, Tikkunei Zohar, Raya Mehemna,  Midrash ha-Ne‘elam, Sefer Yetzira, Sifra
de-Tznuiuta, and Sefer ha-Bahir, all of which for him constitute the esoteric branch of rabbinic literature. In this respect Stern’s speaking of the Gaon’s “mastery of the entire canon of rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature” (20) is, without further explanation, somewhat misleading, for in the Gaon’s view these were two branches of rabbinic literature, and his goal was to show that, if properly explicated, both branches not only were they not contradictory, but, more, formed a unified whole, rooted in and deriving from biblical literature. This explains why the Gaon, as seen above, never hesitated to use Kabbalistic concepts to explicate aggadic texts and, perhaps even more important, why, he maintained that, if understood properly, there was no contradiction between the halakhic rulings found in the Zohar and those found in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. Again, the ambition and boldness of this project are breath taking, and, if anywhere, it is here that we find “his broader philosophic project of restoring the rational pre-established harmony of a world confused by unnecessary human error and evil.”

            In sum: Stern’s The Gaon is a pioneering work about an intellectual titan that opens up many important avenues for further research, but I remain unconvinced by its modernizing portrait of the Gaon. Above all, while I am certain that anyone who finishes reading The Gaon with, say, the Appassionata Sonata or Eroica Symphony playing in the background will understand and appreciate Beethoven’s genius, I am not at all certain that, for all Stern’s learning and insight, she will understand and appreciate in what way the Gaon was a genius.