Find out: What did the Vilna Gaon do to make his name go down in Jewish history for centuries? The | You know?

Extend the veil of ignorance on the portal 15 minutes Assisted by the Historian Doctor of Humanities, Head of the Judaica Department of the National Library of Lithuania, Dr. Lara Lempertienė. She told the portal in an interview about why the Vilnius Gaon is important to Jewish culture, how special his works are, and what his life in Vilnius looked like at the time.

Before the interview, we will remind you of the most important facts of Vilnius Gaon’s biography.

Vilnius Gaon Biography

The word “Gaon” means “wise men”. Gaon’s title in the Jewish tradition deserves those who know how to work carefully and creatively with texts.

Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, later famous as the Vilna Gaon, was born in 1720. in the small town of Selcai, in the territory of present-day Belarus, and spent the first year of his life in Vilnius.

Already as a child, he was famous for his intellectual maturity, legends say he gave a sermon at the Great Synagogue in Vilnius for six years.

At the age of seven, Elijah and his family moved to Kėdainiai, where they studied with Mosali Margaliot, a rabbi, a famous religious sage of the time, and a Talmudic commentator. Later he returned to Vilnius, at the age of ten he began to study independently.

Elijah married early and had children. His wife Chana was from Kėdainiai, the marriage was probably arranged as usual at the time. Among the educated Jews of that time, it was common for a wife to come to a family with a dowry, run a small business and maintain it, and a husband to study.

This was likely the case in the Gaon family as well. The wife ran a small store and Gaon was in charge of science. The family lived modestly, satisfying only the minimum needs. On the other hand, searching should never have been the Gaon’s goal.

At the age of 20, Elijah traveled to wander the cities and towns of Poland and Germany, where he met and interacted with the most famous Judaism authorities of his time.

1745 He returned to Vilnius, a city where he had spent the rest of his life and where he deserved the name of the Gaon of Vilnius, which was acquired by Elijah when he was still alive.

Until his death in 1797. Gaon devoted most of his time to studying the Torah and correcting the Talmud. The Vilna Gaon himself did not publish anything: it was done by his sons, sons and students after his death. Nor did he hold any official position, devoting all his time to studies.

These are the basic facts of Gaon’s biography. However, in themselves they do not reveal the whole story. What has the Vilnius Gaon done to such fame? What were your studies like, your life in Vilnius, what was your relationship with the Jews? These aspects are not reflected in the dry facts of the biography, but help to know the life of Gaon.

About all this: an interview with dr. Lara Lempertiene.

– Vilnius Gaon givesžnai presents himself as one of the best thinkers of his time. To what extent do you think such an epithet is justified?

– My opinion has little to do here. Because such an opinion on Vilnius Gaon has been formed for a long time. It was formed by high-ranking Jewish thinkers and authorities of the time.

It began to take shape when Vilnius Gaon was still very young and, paradoxically, before publishing any of his works. After the publication of Gaon’s texts after his death, his glory only grew.

I would say that, in general, today’s Lithuanian society is not ready to appreciate Gaon’s works, because in our country the relationship with the classic Jewish texts is lost. But it is very good that we retain at least the comments and works of others on the Vilnius Gaon, perhaps one day we will fully appreciate the importance of his texts.

– What makes Vilnius Gaon’s texts and Talmud interpretations so special and exclusive? Why did they get so much fame?

– Here are some things to distinguish. But first you must understand what the Talmud is. It is a collection of religious writings, a compilation of rabbinical discussions on laws, customs, morals, and almost every aspect of life, a central text of rabbinical Judaism.

For the traditional Jewish community, the Talmud has been and continues to be the foundation of lifestyle and worldview, the foundation of religious law and the source of lessons for daily life.

The Talmud was formed more than 1,500 years ago, bringing together in a collection the discussions and comments of the rabbis who had lived until then on the Jewish holy book Torah. Until then, in Jewish culture, these teachings and discussions were verbally extended.

In the 18th century, when the Gaon of Vilnius lived, Talmudic studies formed the axis of religious teaching. And Gaon’s work in these studies is important for several reasons.

Long after its creation, the Talmud spread by rewriting it and, with the advent of printing, reprinting it.

Therefore, Vilnius Gaon’s work with the Talmud was not limited to Talmudic printed publications. He suspected that they contained errors that date back to a time when there was no printing and the Talmud spread through manuscripts.

Because the Talmud is a book particularly revered in Jewish culture, until then few had dared to question even those places in the Talmud that seemed vague, illogical.

And the Vilna Gaon expressed the opinion that they were just wrongly rewritten once. And those errors began to be corrected.

The Vilna Gaon expressed the opinion that dark and illogical places in the Talmud were simply wrongly rewritten once. And those errors began to be corrected.

If you are sure of course you can correct the errors of the Talmud. But for others to take your corrections seriously and accept them, they must also trust you. You have to be a highly respected person and have a great charisma. And Gaon’s corrections were accepted.

Imagine the situation in the Jewish world: the Talmud is well known and valued as it is, but suddenly there is a man who decides to make corrections to it. Those amendments are accepted and subsequent editions of the Talmud already incorporate those amendments.

This fact speaks volumes about the authority of the Gaon in Talmudic studies. Because to make corrections, you must know and understand the text very well in a deep way.

And that’s not all. The second thing that was an innovation of Talmudic studies by Vilnius Gaon was the comments and interpretations of the Jerusalem Talmud.

There are two main versions of the Talmud. One is longer, more popular and more frequently studied, it is called the Babylonian Talmud. Another is shorter and less involved in the field of study, called the Jerusalem Talmud. But both are very important.

The Vilna Gaon left many comments and interpretations of the Jerusalem Talmud. That book was long forgotten in Jewish studies, and the Gaon of Vilnius again attracted attention.

– How was the word spread about the work of the Gaon of Vilnius in correcting the Talmud?

– First through his students. Jewish tradition has practiced in-depth text studies since ancient times.

Furthermore, tradition encourages not to study the holy books alone, but to study in groups or with at least one friend of science, a colleague. For a discussion to take place, a discussion to be able to ask something immediately, to delve into the texts together.

Gaon had a small group of faithful disciples. That group had no stable frames: some students were local and came every day, others, who were not from Vilnius, came to study for a while and left.

But he wasn’t learning in the sense that everyone was sitting and his eyes and ears listened to Gaon with what he would say here. It was an argument.

A person with great pedagogical talent, and probably the Gaon of Vilnius, can formulate the discussion questions in such a way that the students also have great ideas. In this way, Gaon studied the Talmud with his disciples.

But those corrections I mentioned earlier were made only to him by studying and comparing various Talmudic manuscripts. There was no other such person of his generation in Vilnius and in all of Lithuania, he did it alone.

– Vilnius Gaon is now inseparable from the Vilnius name. Was the Vilnius Jewish community at that time something special, that such a personality appeared and formed here?

– Since the 16th century. Vilnius was famous as a center of Jewish spiritual and religious education. There was no other teaching at that time, the secular sciences had not yet been developed. Vilnius was really a center of attraction for religious intelligence.

On the other hand, we cannot say firmly that Gaon moved to Vilnius due to the city’s reputation. It is possible that Gaon’s decision to move to Vilnius or return after wandering is due to some completely pragmatic reasons that we don’t know about. But Vilnius and his reputation may appeal to him.

But this is all just speculation. Gaon lived a very ascetic and closed life, he did not occupy any position in the community, he hardly participated in public debates, erudition shows, etc.

Gaon lived a very ascetic and closed life, held no position in the community and hardly participated in public discussions, according to scholarship.

We do not know if it was important to him to live in Vilnius because of Vilnius as such, or if the reasons were much more pragmatic.

What we really know is that it was very important for Vilnius to have a Gaon. Even if he was not involved in community life. Its name only gave Vilnius additional weight as a center of spirituality.

– About how many Jews could live in Vilnius then? Who ran the community? Rabbis?

– Leaders have always been rabbis. But it is important to understand that to be a rabbi in the community, although you need to have a high level of education, you do not have to be the best sage of your time.

Often the greatest sages were not the rabbis of the community, but, for example, the leaders of the yeshiva of religious academies. The Yeshiva leaders had no less authority, if not more, than the rabbis.

According to the 1784. census, around 5 thousand people lived in Vilnius. Jews They divided into several smaller communities. They all had their own religious school.

It is noteworthy that Gaon himself did not establish a religious school and did not go to any address. He had an unfortunate time for large-scale pedagogical work, he did it directly while studying with his students.

Now trying to imagine what Gaon might have been like, I imagine an ultra-Orthodox Jew in a black cloak, a long beard. Is my imagination justified?

– Rather not. Because the ultra-Orthodox Jewish appearance that we know today of Israel and other countries with large ultra-Orthodox communities is Hasidic, whether they are the descendants of Hasidians or the people attributed to them today.

Hasidic is an orientation of Judaism, which is the complete opposite of Litvak Judaism: its branch, which was formed in Vilnius, to which the Gaon also belonged.

It is known that one of the very few public activities in which the Vilna Gaon participated was his signature on a document calling for the exclusion of the Hasidic communities in Vilnius.

It is not entirely clear whether he himself actively fought Hassidics in Vilnius, or whether others did, and simply agreed, but the Vilna Gaon certainly did not look like the people we know in the ultra-Orthodox districts of Jerusalem.

– And how did it look then?

– Hard to say. There are surviving portraits of the Gaon that were not made “by nature”, but perhaps based on the testimonies of the people who saw him. In those portraits, Gaon has a tallit, a prayer cape worn by all religious Jews. He had no special religious “uniform”, especially since he was not in office and did not have to appear in public.

But what it looked like when, for example, he was sitting and studying alone, invisible to anyone, no one can tell.

– What is known about the life of the Vilna Gaon, insofar as it is not directly related to religion? Did you have any other activity or hobby? What is known about your family?

– The question is not entirely accurate, because there was nothing in Vilnius Gaon’s life that was not related to religious life. Definitely nothing. This is not just about Gaon. In his time, there were no other options, no secular-type options.

There was nothing in Vilnius Gaon’s life that was unrelated to religious life.

It was not the case that man’s secular and religious life existed at that time. Rather, it was that there were private and communal lives, but they were intertwined and both obeyed the world order established by religion.

In the case of the Vilnius Gaon, it must be assumed that he had an extreme expression. Suppose you started a family, and when your first wife died, you even got married a second time. But he just couldn’t do it. Because this is one of the main duties of the Torah: creating a family, multiplying.

We don’t know if he liked it or not, but he was a man who did absolutely everything without deviating from the obligations of the Torah. It was not that he paid attention to one duty and ignored others.

Very little is known about his family, which in itself means that involvement in family affairs was not a priority for him. But we know that her sons and sons-in-law later took an active part in spreading their inheritance. They collected their works, collected manuscripts, scattered fragments and turned them into narratives. They also made sure to spend them, allocate money to them, or attract donors.

– Did the Vilnius government, or perhaps the ATR or GDL government, know anything about the works of the Vilnius Gaon? Did you have any opinion on them?

– I do not think so. We have no reason to believe that the Vilnius Gaon was of any importance to the Vilnius authorities or the ATR authorities, who were generally aware of their activities.

We have no reason to believe that the Vilnius Gaon was of any importance to the Vilnius authorities or the ATR authorities, who were generally aware of their activities.

It was during the years of his life that the Vilna residents census was conducted. There, the Gaon family and Gaon himself are mentioned as a simple family, nothing special.

Some census sites mention Vilnius’ specialties, what they do, and in their case it’s not mentioned. He himself is mentioned, his wife and children are mentioned, but nothing else is written.

It can be concluded that the inner life of the Jewish community, the authorities, the religious hierarchy and the values ​​of the Jewish government were of little concern. It was important to her to pay taxes, nothing more.

– And not the government, but, let’s say, intellectuals of that time, priests of other religions, or were you interested in Gaon? Was there communication, exchange of ideas on an intellectual level between Gaon and non-Jews?

– Almost certainly not. We would have left at least clues, memories or comments. But there is nothing, so it is clear that there was no such communication.

As I said, the Vilna Gaon was so closed that it would be better to ask if there was communication between other members of the Jewish community, less closed and with a greater social inclination, and non-Jewish authorities, such as the Christian ones.

But there are few, almost no facts about such communication. What to speak then of a person who has not even socialized much with his community?

– It can be said that he simply did not care about political issues such as the fate of the GDL.

– We have no reason to think otherwise. He was not a politician or a political philosopher. I’ll give another example that will show how separate from everything he wasn’t interested in was Gaon.

When the story I mentioned with the Khazis began, the Khazi movement hostile to the Litvaks first developed in the territories of present-day Poland and Ukraine. But in present-day Belarus, a slightly different branch of Hasidism was formed, less different from Lithuanian Judaism.

The leader of that community in Belarus, who later became a great authority in the Hasidic world, is said to have sought to meet with the Gaon and even reached Vilnius himself. He wanted to speak to the Gaon of Vilnius, participate in a theological discussion, explain his position, perhaps find common ground and agree on something.

But Gaon simply did not go to meet him. He seemed completely disinterested in what that rabbi could tell him. He was simply not interested in such discussions.

– What sources now allow us to know the life of Gaon? Memories of the students?

– There are no memories as a separate genre. They are scattered in various books of a religious nature, in the presentations of the students’ own works. But rabbinic literature is characterized by the fact that when you open a religious book, you can learn not only about its religion.

There are also works by historians. Let’s say there is a famous historian, Israel Kloizner, who wrote a monograph on Vilnius in Gaon’s time. It provides a wealth of data on the context of Gaon’s life. Unfortunately, it has not been translated into Lithuanian. As far as I know, there is only Hebrew.

Virtually every historical work on Vilnius to a greater or lesser extent mentions Gaon and the circumstances of his life. Much has been written about Vilnius Gaon, only little is known in Lithuania.

There is a lot to learn, but the problem is that people are more often interested as a personality, they distance themselves from their works and, for the reasons already mentioned, there is not much to say about it, and those few facts are exposed in books that They have not yet been translated into Lithuanian.

– How important is Gaon from the current perspective? What far-reaching consequences did your actions have? Is any current community associated with your ideas?

– Really so. But his students, who studied with Gaon in a small group, contributed more. The methods used by Gaon were expanded by establishing a network of yeshivahs.

The Lithuanian yeshiva, so named not because of the geographical principle, but because of the Lithuanian learning method, began to spread, first of all to present-day Lithuania, Belarus, part of Latvia.

Yeshivas using that method are now available in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Everywhere it is called Gaon, or Litvak method. Sure, that method is modified, affected by time, but the essence is the same. So that influence is huge.

Gaon’s own works are still being studied. I know of two institutes that are still looking for their manuscripts, printing, reinterpreting even their long-published works. It is believed that not all of Gaon’s manuscripts have yet been discovered, so there may be more discoveries.

– I have found on the Internet that some of the Jews living in Israel who oppose Israel’s existence as a state are followers of Gaon. It is true?

– In no way can they be direct followers of the Gaon. It is, so to speak, a sectarian vision, these people are alienated from all communities in Israel. I wouldn’t call them Gaon followers. They may call themselves that, but there is nothing in the legacy of the Vilna Gaon that says he is against the restoration of the Jewish state.

Attributing a position to Gaon on this point is, in principle, anachronistic and irrational. We don’t know what he should do about it, it is total speculation. They may base their views on the religious teachings of the Gaon, but it cannot be interpreted as a political position.

– I also found information that Vilnius Gaon was trying to create a golem. How reasonable are such languages? Is it just a pop culture thing that breaks out in biographies?

– It is an urban legend, but it has a base. The reason is that Gaon was a famous Kabbalist. This is unusual because Kabbalah was not widespread in Eastern Europe during the Gaon period, but began to spread further here through the Hasidians. They revived an interest in Kabbalah, until then it could be said that it was a hobby of rare religious fanatics.

The Vilna Gaon was interested in Kabbalah, but not because he was a monster. He did not participate only in Kabbalah: he was interested in all branches of religious studies, including Kabbalah.

There is such a traditional notion that every great Kabbalist could create a golem if he wanted to. Hence that legend. Clearly, there is no objective evidence that Gaon has attempted to create something like this.

– Perhaps at the end of the interview, would you like to add something else about yourself?

– I want to encourage more interest in Jewish religious culture. Literature is also available in Lithuanian. The legacy of the Vilna Gaon cannot be understood without knowing what Judaism is and what religious education is. There is something to read about it.

You can extract basic knowledge from the 2005 books “Jews in Lithuania. History. Culture. Heritage”, where there are several articles on this topic. This book covers a wide range of topics, and there are also articles on Judaism and classical religious texts.

There is also a book “Jews of Lithuania. Historical Study”, which appeared in 2012, but is a bit more academic than the first one I mentioned.

There is also a collection of articles “Vilnius Gaon and the ways of Jewish culture”, composed in 1997. Proceedings of the international scientific conference for Gaon held in Vilnius. There are articles about him, about the context of his life and about Vilnius of that time.

The monograph “Formation of Lithuanian Orthodox Judaism” by Aušrelė Pažėraitė, associate professor at the VU Center for Research and Religious Studies, is also very helpful. It is not specifically for Gaon, but there is plenty of useful contextual knowledge to understand the religious tradition there. And here are just a few examples.

All these books can be found in the reading room of the Judaic Research Center of the National Library of Lithuania. It is already possible to visit them, visit them and meet them in the library.

– Thanks for chatting!