A Litvak, in prosaic terms, is simply a Jew whose family happens to come from Lithuania; mythopoetically speaking, however, being a Litvak is a state of mind. The Litvak thinks of himself (especially vis-à-vis his traditional “enemy,” the Polish Jew) as endowed by Providence with a true sense of values: he is committed to reason and realism instead of fantasy—he is intelligent, open-minded, ironic (in the style of Hamlet) but immovable on principle. The enduring purpose in Jewish life, he is sure, is expressed in the Litvak connection.

Hamlet found the truth about his inner feelings conveyed to him by a ghost from the past. Litvaks turn in the same way to a man whose legendary presence has haunted them now for two centuries—Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720-97), the Gaon of Vilna. Vilna, ancient capital of Lithuania, was the Litvak’s Jerusalem. “Gaon”—supreme scholar—is the accolade Litvaks gave their hero.

The fascination he exerted was not at the time, and has never been since, merely a tribute to scholarship, though in this regard Elijah Vilna (his “secular” name) was undoubtedly outstanding in a recognized rabbinical pattern—descendant of a long line of rabbis, a talmudic prodigy at six, master in every field of Jewish study. Perhaps his contemporaries recognized—as we certainly can in retrospect—that there was a peculiar radiance in his intellect through which a rabbinic tradition that had been running to seed for centuries was clarified, shorn of excrescence, almost revolutionized, through a return to first principles. Looked at this way the Gaon has become, for the instinctive Litvaks of this world, a symbol of what they feel far beyond the confines of talmudic study itself. Like the Gaon, a Litvak is liable to be a Mitnagged—a n “opposer,” a spurner of Polish Hasidism, in connection with which the term originated. The Gaon took a stand both in public action and in scholarly writing against the early spread of Hasidism in his time, and we can see today how significant this was for the emergence of a Litvak type of mind. In his memory a Litvak is encouraged to break a lance with the hasidic chic of our own time.

Nothing of what the Gaon wrote was published in his lifetime, but notes on a great range of subjects—Bible, Talmud, Midrash, Zohar—were collected and published later by disciples. The introductions to these books include a good deal of first- and second-hand information about his life, and even more about his personal ideas, sometimes highly evocative. Most important in this regard are the comments and memories of his main disciple, Rabbi Chaim ben Isaac of Volozhyn.

The raw material is often desultory, originating sometimes in notes scribbled in the margins of the books the Gaon read. What gives his work unity is the originality of his approach. In his own terms he would have said that all he was doing was encouraging the “correct” study of the Torah and Talmud by getting back to the original texts, throwing out guesswork and pilpul (logic-chopping), establishing the simple thread of meaning (p’shat) before turning to commentary (d’rash); and he called also for a study of “other knowledge,” including philosophy, the “science of the Greeks,” since by definition all true knowledge was consistent with—and would therefore amplify—the Jewish faith.

This last point has often been misunderstood. It had nothing very “liberal” about it; the aim was to make his students better Jews. A former pupil, Rabbi Baruch of Sklow, who translated Euclid into Hebrew at his request, quotes the Gaon as saying: “For each single thing that one fails to understand in ‘the other kind of knowledge ,’ one will lack a hundredfold in understanding of the Torah.” One sees immediately how different this is from the policy of the German-Jewish movement of Enlightenment, the Haskalah, as expressed, say, by Moses Mendelssohn—to drag Jews into the mainstream. Historically, as we shall see, the Gaon’s work was liberating, but in a form that gave priority to the survival of Jewish values. As someone once said: Mendelssohn translated Hebrew works into German to give them a German tinge, while the Gaon wanted to have works from other languages put into Hebrew “to make them Jewish.” The truth from Mt. Sinai would always be what mattered: it was in this sense that he opposed what were to him the distractions—the false tendencies—in Hasidism.

The story of the Gaon’s confrontation with Hasidism is usually told in simplistic terms. Hasidism itself is described, for example, in Cecil Roth’s Short History of the Jewish People as a “revivalist movement,” reflecting “the messianic stir” of the times of Sabbatai Sevi (1626-76), and given shape by the mysterious saint Israel ben Eleazar (1700-70), “a simple Podolian lime-digger . . . a tenderhearted mystic of rare personal magnetism,” who became known to disciples as “Baal Shem Tov,” or “Besht” for short.¹ Marvelous legends were told of him. His followers were devout in new ways (hasidim means “pious ones”). The fervor of worship was held by them to be more illuminating than study. Anyone, however ignorant, could achieve communion with God if he approached Him in surrender and joy; but there were certain Righteous Ones (tzaddikim) who were uniquely close to the Almighty and whose intercession could work wonders. The movement spread north, permeated with ecstatic worship and always geared to a local tzaddik. When it began to take root in Lithuania, the Gaon issued a number of edicts of excommunication, and the fight between Hasidim and Mitnaggdim (“opponents”) was launched.

_____________

The foregoing outline is fair enough, but the Gaon’s response calls for a fuller picture. There is, first of all, little in the origin of Hasidism that connects directly with the failed messianism of Sabbatai Sevi, since his impact on Polish Jewry was very diffuse.² Moreover, Hasidism, viewed simply as a new realization of direct communion with God, leaves out of account something less idealistic—the central and long-entrenched role among Jews of magic, incantation, and superstition generally. As far back as the period in which the Talmud was being formulated in Babylonia (3rd-6th centuries C.E.), the Jews, as Jacob Neusner has shown,³ were deeply involved in these practices, which were part of the “uniform mythic structure” of all religious communities of the Middle East. If much of this became softened in later centuries, it is still no surprise to find a faith in magic surviving or surfacing in the remote and primitive areas of southern Poland in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bernard Weinryb’s The Jews of Poland provides lively detail. “Baal Shem,” a general name applied to a holy man, came to mean “a healer, quack doctor, miracle worker, or charmer.” Such men treated patients with folk remedies (herbs, ointments) or with amulets, prayers, and incantations; some of them could expel evil spirits, predict the future, or perform miracles.

The father of Hasidism spent the first part of his life as just such an itinerant healer, “ministering to the needs of Jewish leaseholders, tax-collectors, and innkeepers, and occasionally to a non-Jewish nobleman.” At this stage he was less the otherworldly saint that legend later projected than a kind of workaday rabbi, occasional shohet (ritual slaughterer), and (in early American terms) a medicine-man with a gift for storytelling. Yet a movement of powerful influence grew around him when he finally settled down in Medzibezh, and it provoked a struggle that split Jewry apart. What we need to know, especially in relation to the Gaon, is to what extent Hasidism created (or stumbled upon) some new deep truths about man and God, and to what extent it has been a diversion, and a misleading one, from the abiding message of Jewish experience.

To see Hasidism simply as a folk-movement expressing fervor and a longing for joy does not take us very far. It was soon evident that even if its hallmark was emotion, it had an implicit theology, and one which ran counter to established ideas. In conventional Jewish thought, God was a personal Being, Master of the Universe, who had imposed a moral order on man by giving Jews the Torah. Through obedience to it, the Jew became aware of the concepts of right and wrong. The world of man was an arena of reality: man, responsible for his own conduct, applied his reason to the achievement of God’s purpose—a world of order and compassion. To Hasidism, by contrast, the quest was for a transformation of the individual soul through mystery. God relied on man as an active participant in the metaphysics of the universe, and the tzaddik had a special insight into this, each tzaddik in his own way. “Ordinary” men, attached to a tzaddik, were transformed in living out their attachment to his person. Every aspect of life—including the basic concepts of right and wrong—could receive a new emphasis through him. “Personality took the place of doctrine,” as Gershom Scholem has put it.

According to Scholem, Hasidism in its original form was both revolutionary and conservative. The new element was the role—and effect—of the tzaddik: but in the background were the long-established mysteries of Kabbalah. The ancient lore of the Kabbalah had acquired a new hold on the Jewish people in the 16th century through the work of an outstanding scholar-mystic, Isaac Luria (1534-72), who expounded a mythos of “exile and redemption.” In the Lurianic view, “sparks of the divine life and thought are scattered in exile over the entire world, and they long through the actions of men to be ‘lifted up’ and restored to their original place in the divine harmony of all being.” Though these theosophical ideas were not fully developed in the popular expression of Hasidism, the language of early hasidic writings reflected them. Even for the “ordinary” Hasid the “sparks” were everywhere, to be “lifted up” through religious intensity. For the scholar there were mysteries beyond this—the study of signs and portents in numbers, letters, and constellations—and the scholar could also reach out into “practical Kabbalah,” the achievement of the supernatural, of which one might not speak to the uninitiated.

_____________

Kabbalah had a fascination for medieval rabbis; and the Gaon was himself an ardent student of its doctrines, experimenting even in “practical Kabbalah.” How is one to reconcile this with his denunciation of the spread of Hasidism? Is it not, as the 19th-century historian Heinrich Graetz thought, a fatal objection to any claim made for him as an intellectual—a rationalist? Graetz, a product of the German-Jewish Enlightenment and full of contempt for Hasidim (“tricksters,” he called them), had tried in his pioneering History of the Jews to turn the Gaon into a paragon of rationalism. But there was a flaw: the Gaon “had been seized with the delusion that the hateful Kabbalah was a true daughter of Judaism and contained true elements.” Even when the excesses of Hasidism were brought to his notice, “he could not relinquish his blind fondness for the Kabbalah.”

It is quite true that the Gaon was not the tireless public foe of Hasidism that legend has established. He disliked many things he had heard about the movement—its contempt for study, tzaddik-worship, exaggerated fervor, changes in ritual. More seriously, he felt that there were specific heresies in hasidic theology, and these he criticized in scholarly argument. For the most part, nevertheless, he drew back from direct confrontation. It has been argued, indeed, that he was impelled into denunciation of the Hasidim less by theological than by social considerations. Bernard Weinryb, putting this idea forward, suggests that the Gaon was probably a tool of community politics in the nasty, quarrelsome, indeed ruthless atmosphere of 18th-century Vilna. In this view, Hasidism, as it spread from the primitive areas of the south and began to find a foothold in Lithuania/White Russia, was less a new breath of religious ardor than an expression of social protest. For the “ordinary people” of Vilna, joining a hasidic minyan (prayer group) was an act of rebellion, a stick with which to beat communal leaders who clung desperately to the status quo—their financial control of the community and their privileged position with the government authorities. The Gaon, though not the official rabbi, was supported financially by the leadership, and they had no hesitation in exploiting his prestige in what was basically a socio-political battle. By taste, the Gaon might have preferred to pursue his thoughts within the confines of his study, but he did what the establishment told him to do. The proof can be seen, Weinryb argues, in the timing of his pronouncements—their relation to the high points of community conflict.⁴

An earlier social historian, Simon Dubnow, belittled the Gaon from another standpoint, yet came around in the end, oddly enough, to a paean of praise for what the Lithuanian background—exemplified by the Gaon—achieved for Jewish experience in alliance with Hasidism. In Dubnow’s great populist History of the Jews, the Gaon as an individual is treated unsympathetically: he is backward-looking, “the venerable knight of rabbinism.” But Lithuania itself was for Dubnow a liberating environment, imparting a strong intellectualism to the primitive ideas of Hasidism and to this extent steering the movement into the mainstream of Jewish life.

The rabbinic tradition alone, Dubnow says, was “doomed to sterility,” even in the hands of the Gaon. Hasidism also, though for different reasons, was not geared to the future. But though in its original form in the south it was anti-intellectual—“a cult of the tzaddikim”—the social conditions in the north (around Vilna) allowed different influences to make themselves felt. This explains how it was that as Hasidism spread northward into Lithuania, one strand of the movement, under the leadership of a really creative thinker, Shneur Zalman of Lyady, had a chance to break away from primitivism. This new element in Hasidism increasingly reflected the emphasis on Talmud study that characterized Vilna, “seeking to adapt the emotional pietism of the Baal Shem to the intellectualism of the Lithuanian schoolmen,” as Dubnow puts it.⁵

Dubnow’s praise for Vilna’s “rationalization” of Hasidism (it “transformed the ecstasy of feeling into an ecstasy of thinking”) is a sharp contrast to the view of Gershom Scholem, for whom the value of Hasidism lies precisely in its emphasis on feeling and mystery. It is illuminating when, with a tzaddik, there is “a complete irrationalization of religious values [and] he himself becomes Torah.” The tzaddik-cult may have lent itself to “unlimited emotionalism,” but mystery and ecstasy are valid elements in Jewish experience. In these terms we should give up any idea that the sustaining force in Jewish life and thought is its underlying emphasis on the role of reason.

If we turn back to the Gaon, we find him handling the role of mysticism very comfortably within the priority he gave at every point to a consistent theology and the intellectual satisfaction of Talmud study. This must have been true of many talmudists absorbed in Kabbalah—a point brought out very convincingly by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky in his revealing study of the author of the Shulhan Arukh, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic. In general, Werblowsky says, the kabbalists always aimed at drawing knowledge out of their ecstasies, and not simply mystical experience. As against Scholem’s view that “under the cover of the bewildering and often bizarre theosophical speculations of the kabbalists there hides a genuinely mystical life,” Werblowsky argues that to some extent the mystical exercise was just another form of Talmud study. It is fallacious, he says, to set the mystical (and psychical) experiences that were very common among rabbis “over and against the sternly rationalist and moral type of rabbinic piety.” We should, rather, envisage “a religious attitude which, far from subscribing to the rationalist denial of mystical phenomena, actually takes them in its stride, as it were, but dismisses them as completely irrelevant to the spiritual life.”

Werblowsky justifies this formation in an appendix to his book entitled “The Mystic Life of the Vilna Gaon,” in which he presents a remarkable statement of the Gaon uniquely clarifying what seems to lie at the heart of the Litvak heritage. The Gaon, as we know from his disciple Rabbi Chaim of Volozhyn, was not merely a prolific kabbalistic writer but also consciously aware of psychic messages from “mediators” (maggidim) and “visitations” from the prophet Elijah, the great mystic Isaac Luria, and others. It seemed to him, he told Rabbi Chaim, that God had provided sleep so that man, while his soul floated in the air, could create insights which he could not obtain “while the soul is joined to the body”; but he made it clear that “knowledge” of this kind, obtained without conscious effort, was not wanted by him:

I do not want my understanding of the Torah to come through any mediator. . . . My eyes are to God alone: that which He wishes to reveal to me, and the share He wants to give me in His Torah through my hard labor of study—these alone do I desire.

It is a pregnant remark. Man, aware of a sense of reverence and wonder, has to celebrate it in his own freedom. Reason, unique in man, is what God asks of him. We see here no puritanical denial of the power of imagination and poetry, but an ultimate realism that keeps human reason at the center of the experience.

It was not, then, the joyousness or populism of the Hasidim that moved the Gaon to denounce them as “foes of the Jewish people.” There was something decisively wrong, for him, in their moral stance. Hasidism, as he saw it, was an abnegation of personal will. Its philosophical assumptions—as expressed, for example, in the near pantheism of Shneur Zalman’s book, Tanya—not only obscured the separation between a personal Creator and His universe, but also blunted the moral choice for every individual between right and wrong. To surrender decision to the tzaddik was as mischievous to doctrine as the superstitious acceptance of his miracle-working power. The responsibilities of life could not be shrugged off by the virtual worship of a new breed of “sacred” men who spoke in parables that were no better, very often, than gobbledygook.

The straight words of the Torah were what mattered; rabbinic study simply spelled them out. In itself, this was a conservative attitude, but in the light of history it became, strangely, a tool of transformation. The revolution in modern Jewish life cannot be understood without it.

_____________

The Gaon was living at a time when many, groping for “enlightenment,” saw the answer in a straight break with tradition. History proved that this was not how the Jewish people would find their feet in the modern world. For the force in Jewish experience to be “modernized,” it had to come to terms with the outside world in a way which left the ancient roots alive and potent.

There was never going to be a straight road to freedom, as Jacob Katz, the frankest historian of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, has shown in Out of the Ghetto. The forces both within Jewish life and outside it were powered so much by strong elements of the past that change came only erratically, in ways that constantly defied a priori assumptions of rational behavior. On the political front this is now widely understood, particularly in the wake of 20th-century experience at the hands of Germany and Soviet Russia; but it is equally true that among the Jews themselves there could be no simple breaking of the old mold. The most remarkable feature of the 19th-century experience—in the sense of being so unexpected—was not the extent to which the Jews were increasingly “normalized” but rather the way in which they reacted to “freedom” by clinging to their old distinctiveness. As Katz puts it:

The disintegration that freed Jews from the bonds of traditional society . . . was a dialectical process, which, by its very nature, generated the forces that halted and reversed the tide of dissolution. . . . Jews, having escaped from the traditional Jewish social unit, did not join non-Jewish circles but created new Jewish social entities.

This is a judgment based on the experience of “Western” Jews. Within the Pale, the great masses of Jewry limped along more slowly under the same influences and with infinitely greater persistence of separateness.

Yet it is precisely from this distinctive reservoir of Jewish life that successive generations, as they moved “outside,” astonished the world with a talent and vitality that seemed to have been nursed almost by design for a fertile role in Western life, and a role that would remain in some sense identifiably Jewish. It is as if creativity—whether in business, science, or the arts—gained a particular power by having had roots in an authentic social and intellectual background. In some mysterious manner the East European Jew carried the past with him—turning away, breaking away, yet always impelled to give the past distinctive value.

The most striking example of how this paradoxical process worked is seen in the history of an institution founded six years after the Gaon’s death to give expression to his teaching. At Volozhyn, some distance from Vilna, the Gaon’s disciple, Rabbi Chaim ben Isaac, set up a yeshivah (rabbinical college) in 1803. Known as Etz Chaim in tribute to its founder, Volozhyn became the prototype of all the great talmudic academies of the 19th and 20th centuries. For the first time, the Talmud was studied under a firm routine, replacing the casual attachment to individual rabbis—and the haphazard attempts to live and eat by one’s wits—Which had been the norm until then. The range of studies was wide, and the standards of scholarship—in the Gaon’s tradition—high: but even allowing for this, it is hard at first to see how an institution which was inward-looking by definition could become a force for emancipation. One is much more inclined to see the “modernizing” Haskalah as the true liberating force. Yet if one is looking for the sources of Jewish intellectual achievement in the 20th century, Haskalah and yeshivah have to be seen in balance and interaction.

The aims of Haskalah could be expressed positively. The young were to be brought out of Yiddish into a familiarity with the languages around them. The barriers of the ghetto were to be broken down through apprenticeship to “normal” occupations. Science and the arts were to be opened up. The Jew as “victim” was to be transformed by reaching out to a new sense of independence. In these terms the yeshivah looks medieval. There the students went on, fettered to the old tradition. Chaim Nachman Bialik’s epic poem, Ha-Matmid, written out of his personal experience of Volozhyn, sums it all up in the mournful drone which he describes rising endlessly from its dismal study-room.

Yet in the same poem, and in the character of Bialik himself, writing almost a century after the foundation of Volozhyn, one can see why a black-and-white contrast between yeshivah and Haskalah is misleading. Throughout the 19th century the Lithuanian yeshivot had apparently ploughed on in isolation from the developing scene; but all this time they were in fact providing a constant stream of fervent intellectual power, a groping toward the world outside in the only terms that could possibly be valid for the great mass of Jews living in that time and place. The yeshivah was like a constantly operating refinery of the intellect, subjecting its raw material to endless processing, spewing out waste and desolation, but with a pure distillation at its heart. The students immured within its walls were in an endless tug-of-war with past and present: the narrower their field of study, the more exciting for some were the prizes and delights that hovered beyond their immediate reach. For some it could lead to rejection of the heritage; for many more, men whose minds were disciplined to the past yet driven also by an intellectual fervor to move into worlds unrealized, it set up a rich counterpoint of dazzling interest.

If one regards this as an expression in some sense of a Litvak heritage, it is not because it remained narrowly localized. The movement of people and ideas was too complex for that, the variety of yeshivot over the whole of Eastern and Central Europe too great. Yet by common consent Volozhyn played a uniquely creative role as a fusing point of rabbinical and Western culture. The Litvak tone had an identifiable resonance, drawing into it, as the century moved on, some particularly liberating qualities that sustained and yet transformed its earlier inspiration.

_____________

The arch-Litvak of our times was undoubtedly Chaim Weizmann, father-figure of the Zionist movement and first President of the State of Israel. He was never himself at a yeshivah, but there was a century of Volozhyn behind him, in which the basically simple qualities expressed in the Gaon had matured slowly into a subtler approach.

Weizmann was an intellectual and a scientist of distinction. The Bible and Jewish history were vibrant in his mind, alive in everything he said. But the special Litvak quality was something one would like to call a healthy form of skepticism. He had faith that being a Jew brought with it a great heritage, but was always ready to question its definition. Irony kept rearing its head.

It may seem odd to speak of irony and skepticism in relation to a man whose whole life communicated idealism and compassion: but this was precisely the combination of qualities that had infused generations of students torn between love of their inheritance and bitterness at what it had produced. Their varied innate talents, turning in many directions in the modern world—business, science, literature, politics—always expressed this underlying conflict. They would never lose the concentration and passion for argument they had imbibed in the yeshivah, but would often think of it with a certain sadness, a feeling that Jewish experience—for all the hold it had on them—was a cloudy story, arousing questions in their minds that God Himself would find hard to answer. It is this feeling which Bialik expressed so movingly in Ha-Matmid.

By Bialik’s time, the old distinctions had been blurred. He was himself of hasidic stock, and in his youth had read Haskalah literature voraciously. It was in search of a secular education that he enrolled in Volozhyn, having heard, wrongly, that concentration on Talmud was combined with a general study of the humanities. Immersing himself there, he felt grievously disappointed; it was desperately narrow. Yet though his poem recalling these bitter years is a lament for a life lost, it is also a celebration of what was being throttled—a salute to the freedom that Volozhyn seemed able to stimulate in varied forms, in his case lyrically, in others with revolutionary power.

The argument of the poem—in marvelously lyrical Hebrew—is the contrast between the fire and brilliance of the young student and “the iron walls, the yellowed pages” that face him in the yeshivah. In protesting, Bialik is freeing himself; but he is celebrating, too, the creative power of this place of “weariness and pain.” The yeshivah is “the anvil on which a people’s soul is forged.” There is a power in those yellow pages that “lights flames of passion in a heart outlived, strikes living sparks in eyes that are extinguished.”

No one can doubt that whatever liberation Volozhyn injected, the hasidic child in Bialik was still, in some degree, father to the man. One sees it even more strongly in a very different kind of writer who emerged from Volozhyn, Micha Joseph Berdichevsky—the Nietzsche of Hebrew literature. Born in 1865 of a long line of hasidic rabbis, he too read Haskalah literature deeply in youth, and, like Bialik, enrolled in Volozhyn at the age of twenty-one in the hope of being free to pursue study in all forms, wherever it led. In his case, Volozhyn released an aggressive polemicism that drew strength from every form of contemporary European literature that he could hammer to his purpose. In a vast range of writings—scholarship, folklore, fiction, philosophy—he seemed in some ways to be working for a breaking of the Jewish mold, a transvaluation of values: yet the vehemence of his drive was only the obverse of yeshivah intensity.

What Volozhyn had done was to provide for Berdichevsky, as for countless others, a sense of confidence on which to build. Isolated spirits, groping mostly in the dark, were drawn to something like a university, where ideas could be tested in fellowship. For the ensuing dialectic there had to be a firmly established set of values which one both accepted and fought. This was provided by the inheritance that Volozhyn had come to symbolize—the ultimate respect, generated by the Gaon, for intellectual honesty.

_____________

In the Gaon’s name, a Litvak today still thinks of himself as a Mitnagged, but without too much aggressiveness. It is something to live with but not to die for: the loyalty is fierce, but like that of a Jacobite in modern Scotland rather than a Republican in Northern Ireland. By definition, the Litvak has to have an open mind—to see values even in things which by personal taste are boring, or worse. He likes to think that he is a questioner but not a professional doubter, a reasoner but not a scoffer. In this sense he will admit that Hasidism is not to be shrugged off. It has been fed into the Jewish body politic. It has brought an extra dimension of faith, art, and devotion to the Jewish scene. But is it the lasting force that distinguishes the Jews, keeps them alive, and renews them for the exploration of man’s role on earth?

Looking for objectivity on these matters, I turned recently to a long study of the Gaon published by a distinguished historian, Professor Chaim Hillel Ben-Sasson, in the scholarly Hebrew periodical Zion.⁶ To Ben-Sasson there is unique distinction in what he calls the “amor Dei intellec-tualis of the Gaon’s circle, and the striking intellectualism of the Gaon’s personality.” He shows that the Gaon did not simply excommunicate the Hasidim ex cathedra but presented detailed logical and religious reasons for opposing them. His legacy to the Jewish people, we learn, took two forms of lasting value, both based on the use of reason: the institution of the yeshivah for the elite, and the development of popular instruction through the exposition of the preacher. As a sentimental Litvak, I have tried to broaden this by arguing here that the enduring qualities one would like to see in Jewish life—intelligence, probity, sanity, reliability—emerge most clearly as an echo of the master. Ben-Sasson would seem to agree:

The image of the Litvak as known in past and in contemporary Jewish folklore was given its shape by the Judaism of Lithuania and White Russia by virtue of tendencies immanent in the Gaon’s teachings and by the activities and controversies initiated by his disciples.

This seemed so true to me on reading it that I opened a reference book to see where Professor Ben-Sasson comes from. Without much surprise, I find that he comes from Volozhyn.

¹ The title is usually translated incorrectly as “Master of the Good Name.” It really means “Goodly Possessor, or Wielder, of the [divine] Name.”

² Gershom Scholem traces a number of influences in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1961), pp. 330-1; but see also Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (1973), p. 228.

³ A History of the Jews of Babylonia, Vol. V (1970), pp. 180-6 and 217-43.

⁴ The Jews of Poland, pp. 284-96. See especially Notes 81 and 83, p. 389.

⁵ History of the Jews (1971), Vol. IV, p. 381.

⁶ “Personality of the Gaon and his Historical Influence,” Zion XXXI (1966), pp. 39-86.