The Making of Modern Judaism: Interview with Eliyahu Stern

On Thursday, November 7th, Eliyahu Stern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, will appear at YIVO for a talk about his new book, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale University Press), with moderator Jeremy Dauber, professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia University.

The beginnings of contemporary Jewry are often associated with Jewish figures in Western Europe such as Moses Mendelssohn. But in The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, Stern offers a new and provocative narrative for understanding contemporary Jewish life, which begins in the East, with the leading Eastern European mystic and rabbinic scholar of the 18th century, Elijah ben Solomon, or the “Vilna Gaon.”

Eliyahu Stern was the Tell fellow at the YIVO Institute in 2004. He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

RN: Who was the Vilna Gaon? Why did he, of all the scholars of his time, become such a legend?

ES: Elijah of Vilna was born in 1720, in Vilna. He distinguished himself from a young age with his mastery of Talmudic, kabbalistic, as well as mathematical and, what at the time Eastern European Jews would have considered scientific knowledge.

There are two legacies that make him important in the annals of Jewish history. One is the elite legacy, the fact that he wrote more commentaries on classical Jewish texts than anyone else in Jewish history. In his lifetime, he was known to have written commentaries to works on the kabbalah, Talmud, and the Bible, as well as stand-alone essays on mathematics and grammar. On the other hand, there emerged a popular legacy based on what his mastery of knowledge represented: He came to be identified as a certain kind of Jewish genius. Elijah ends up becoming a folk hero for his intellectual accomplishments in an age where intellectual achievement becomes a means toward upward social mobility.

RN: Can you say a little more about the connection between learning and upwards mobility?

ES: For most of the nineteenth century, Jews were barred from enrolling in Russian universities.  So the yeshiva becomes the primary institution where those who are gifted are able to continue studying and distinguishing themselves in Jewish life through their intellectual achievements. Later on in the century, when Jews are finally permitted into Russian universities, there will be other ways of intellectually distinguishing one's self—like getting a law degree or a doctoral degree. Both those who would attend yeshivot as well as those who would enter universities grew up looking at the picture of the Gaon. It was the most popular Jewish picture in Eastern Europe. It featured him with a book in one hand, and a quill in the other hand. It conveyed his erudition and his knowledge—both his role as a commentator and as someone who has mastered the entire canon of Jewish knowledge.

There emerges a folk expression in the latter part of the 19th century: "Vil nor gaon," which meant in Yiddish, "only through your own will can you become a gaon," a genius. To some, a gaon signified a traditional rabbinic title of authority, or a statement of pride, as the word gaon means in the Bible. And to others, it came to be understood simply as genius, a kind of ideal intellectual status.

RN: The figure of Vilna Gaon is often conflated with the emergence of the Haskalah. Is this true? Why did he end up with this reputation?

ES: It's very important to distinguish between the reality and the legend of the Gaon. In reality, the Vilna Gaon had absolutely nothing to do with the Haskalah. He lived in Eastern Europe. We don't even normally speak of a Haskalah, a Jewish Enlightenment, in Eastern Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century after he had already passed away.  There were students or disciples of the Vilna Gaon, for instance, one by the name of Menashe Illya, who expressed certain Enlightenment sentiments. But the Gaon himself had nothing to do with the Haskalah.

However, virtually every major European, maskilic (Enlightenment) figure in the 19th century up until the 1870s identified their cause with the Gaon. And these range from Isaac Baer Levinsohn and Menashe Illya, who claimed that Elijah emphasized the study of the Bible and the interpretation of classical rabbinical texts according to their sensus literalis, to Peretz Smolenskin, the Zionist journalist, who would claim hagiographically—and, of course, this was not what really happened —that Elijah influenced Moses Mendelssohn and not vice versa.

Various groups would claim him, such as Zionists, enlighteners, and secular Jewish literateurs affiliated with the Yiddishist movement. This doesn't mean that he was affiliated with any of them. He wasn't! He was an eighteenth-century, rabbinic kabbalist thinker who had nothing to do with any of these nineteenth-century movements. But, and here is the rub, there are unique aspects of his life and thought that that lend themselves to be picked up and reinterpreted in very different ways.

RN: So I guess we would say that there is a line only from the legend of the Vilna Gaon to those movements, not from the man himself or his ideas.

ES: This is a very important distinction. When we look at someone like Moses Mendelssohn, there is no direct line from him to the Conservative, Reform and Orthodox movements. Although they may claim him, Mendelssohn did not speak about any of them. What we have is the way in which a certain body of knowledge, a certain type of expression lends itself to certain groups. Each generation picks and chooses different things from what came before them.

Similar to Elijah, Mendelssohn is also a figure whose popularity in modern Judaism rests precisely on the fact that he was not affiliated with any of the vastly different movements that claimed him.

If you twist and turn Mendelssohn’s legacy you can see how he could be claimed by the Reform, Conservative and even Orthodox Judaism. But however you read Mendelssohn you can't get Zionism out of him, the rise of large scale yeshivot nor the turn to neo-spirituality. To understand the back-story to those features of modern Judaism one needs to look to the history of Eastern European Jewry and to the legacy of Elijah of Vilna.

RN: Was his opposition to Hasidism the reason he was seized on as a figurehead by Zionists and maskilim?

ES: The main aspect of his legacy was his genius, his mastery of the canon, his investment in the Hebrew language, and his attempt to travel to Palestine. Even those maskilim who would claim did so largely because of importance he placed on the Hebrew language, as well as his penning a mathematical work called Ayil Meshulash, an introductory primer to mathematics. The Zionists pulled from his boldness vis-a-vis certain aspects of the rabbinical tradition, his ability to interpret texts in a non-traditional manner.

Certainly, some Hasidim, notably Lubavitch, claimed that there was a strong connection between Elijah and the Haskalah, but, of course, that was wrong. There's no connection between Elijah and the Haskalah in terms of his own life.

RN: Was there anything you found in your research that took you down an unexpected pathway?

ES: My big find was what I didn’t find. When I started my research I kept thinking about Jewish modernity through the lens of Western Europe. I kept coming back to the experiences of religious reform, acculturation, and emancipation. I kept asking myself, what on earth does Elijah of Vilna have to do with these experiences? At some point, the penny dropped and I said, "Wait a second." All those categories are based on the experiences of Jews in Western Europe. And I realized, of course he had nothing to do with those experiences or intellectual currents because he was living in Vilna. And those experiences were mainly happening to Jews in Western Europe and not to Jews living in Eastern Europe. That brought me to ask, what would it look like to redescribe Jewish modernity not using the categories of emancipation, acculturation, and religious reform?

Instead of beginning in Western Europe and then looking East, I decided to put front and center the experiences and ideas of Jews who lived as “virtual majorities” in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the difference between Elijah of Vilna and Moses Mendelssohn’s intellectual products were also a function of different demographic and social situations.

RN: So, do we need to fundamentally reexamine our understanding of the rise of modern Jewish life and culture?

ES: There are two narratives for understanding modern Judaism. One is the history of Jews being minorities and the story of Jewish acculturation, emancipation, and religious reform. That story usually starts in Western Europe, specifically in Germany, more specifically in Berlin, and oftentimes around the figure of Moses Mendelssohn. And it largely deals with the degrees to which Jews identified with a larger political or national group. That's one story of Jewish modernity. That story explains the rise of denominations, anti-Semitism and Jews becoming citizens of nation-states.

The problem with that narrative is that it only explains half of the modern Jewish experience. The other half largely comes from what the historian Gershon Hundert has described as the experience of Jews who lived as “virtual majorities.”

So, Moses Mendelssohn lived in a population of 2,000 Jews that was part of a population of 100,000 residents of Berlin. By the late eighteenth century, Elijah of Vilna was living in a population of around 9,000 Jews of a total population of 20,000 residents in Vilna. And out of that situation, there emerged radically different religious and cultural identity markers. At least three of those markers must be seen in the context of Elijah’s life and influence.  The first and foremost is the idea of Hasidism being a countercultural religious expression. He famously excommunicated the Hasidim in an argument over what constitutes a proper form of spirituality. The second thing that comes out that kind of experience, of living as a majority, is a privileging of your own intellectual heritage. Elijah of Vilna emphasized the importance of Jewish study as a central feature in Jewish life. Whereas Mendelsohn wanted to translate the Bible into English, Elijah wanted Euclid translated into Hebrew.

The third major impact that he has, that has to be seen in context of his specific social background, is the emigration of his students to Palestine and the establishment of the first yishuv in Palestine, the idea of living in a “Jewish space” were one is able to be immersed in Jewish life.

What I tried to do in my book was answer some very fundamental questions about certain aspects of modern Judaism that are largely ignored  when we are only looking at modern Judaism through a certain Western European model of modernity. I wanted to begin a process of better understanding the historical forces animating the most dynamic ways in which Jews are identifying with Judaism today.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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