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This chapter examines the relations between Torah scholarship and the institution of the rabbinate in nineteenth-century Lithuania. It discusses the apparent contradiction between the ideal of Torah lishma and the rabbinate and analyzes the roles played by the heritage of the Vilna Gaon and that of Rabbi Hayyim in shaping the ideal of Torah study. This analysis is based on the biographies of rabbis written by their descendants or their admiring students, and the personal letters of traditional scholars.

This chapter describes the unusual distinction of the Gaon of Vilna's achievements as a Torah scholar, a distinction that made him a symbol and model of greatness in Torah scholarship in the eyes of his disciples and in the eyes of many others. It attempts to reconstruct the figure of the Gaon as it was conceived and interpreted by those few who saw his face based on the introductions written by the Gaon's two sons and a few of his students to his posthumously published works. The analysis reveals that in various ways the Gaon's disciples and sons expressed their conviction that before them was a person of superhuman dimensions and that the sum of his writings represented merely a drop of the sea of his wisdom.

This chapter cites Simcha Emanuel, who has referred to a lacuna in the rabbinic leadership of German Jewry during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It recounts how rabbinic figures did not flourish in Germany for nearly a generation following the passing of several distinguished Tosafists and halakhic authorities who had been active throughout the first two decades of that century of Cologne. It also probes the crisis of leadership that lasted until Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, which succeeded in re-establishing the highest levels of Torah scholarship and teaching in Germany during the second half of the thirteenth century. The chapter analyses why the cohort of leading rabbinic scholars did not cultivate any students who could serve as their successors in Germany. It talks about Ya'akov Sussman, who showed that the connections between the Tosafist study halls in northern France and in Germany.

This chapter reviews the Jewish culture of early medieval Europe, which is largely hidden by the mists of time and emerges into the light of surviving literary evidence only in the eleventh century. It refers to R. Isaac ben Jacob of Fez and R. Gershom ben Judah of Mainz, who provide a starting point for solid information about what rabbinic Judaism looked like in Spain and Germany. It also mentions R. Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), who inaugurated the most creative Talmud centre in medieval Europe after he travelled from his home in northern France to the academies of the Rhineland. The chapter talks about historians who theorize about what was going on in the Midi while the Spanish and German academies were putting down roots. It also probes the scholarly consensus that detects an early Ashkenazi orientation in southern France.