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The Vilna Ga’on, an extraordinary Talmudic scholar, inspired in his disciples a sense that he was a supernatural phenomenon, with a messianic mission to redeem the Jewish nation by disseminating the true knowledge of Torah and by settling the Land of Israel. Although he himself never succeeded in immigrating to the Land, many of his disciples did so. They had a profound sense that the End of Days was approaching, and they developed the doctrine that redemption was not contingent on repentance but would come at its appointed time no matter what; repentance bore only on how it was to come about and on whether it might be accelerated. They likewise regarded as no longer applicable the prohibition in the “Three Oaths” against efforts on Israel’s part to hasten the End (“ascending the wall”). Rejecting the traditional emphasis on passivity, they held that the awakening above (i.e., God’s redemptive actions) could be triggered by the awakening from below (human actions directed toward hastening redemption), such as settling the Land of Israel and rebuilding it in order to “raise the Shekhinah from its ashes”.

Between 1815 and 1848, the forces of liberalism and nationalism contended with those of reaction orchestrated by the Austrian chancellor Metternich. Governments generally expected universities to enforce political and religious orthodoxy. University professors and students, mostly drawn from the growing middle class, had a central part in these conflicts. In Germany, the Burschenschaft student movement voiced the demand for German national unity, but was severely repressed after 1819. In France and Italy, professors and students were often involved in political movements, sometimes violent, in the 1820s and during the 1830 revolutions. A particularly dramatic episode was the Polish rising against Russian rule in 1830, which led to the suppression of Vilna University and the diffusion of Polish intellectual exiles. During the 1848 revolutions, students were active on the liberal side in Germany, at Vienna, and in France.

After American rejection of the Covenant, which London could not influence, the League was overshadowed by the Allied Supreme Council which tackled the main post‐war issues. The British supported the Canadian attempt to delete article 10 (the territorial guarantee) but this was not seen as an important issue. Nor was the elaboration of procedures for sanctions under article 16 (the guarantee of peace) through the nineteen resolutions of 1921. Lord Curzon succeeded Balfour as Foreign Secretary. Rejecting balance of power politics, he valued the League as embodying moral principles in the conduct of international affairs. The League was involved in the resolution of several crises including Armenia (1920), North Persia (1920), Vilna (1920–3), Upper Silesia (1921), and Albania (1921). Its record was mixed. Meanwhile, Cecil, aiming to replace Lloyd George with a high‐minded coalition under Grey, turned the League of Nations Union into a significant force in British politics.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Vilna Education Society from the peculiar situation of the war and the subsequent incorporation of Vilna into Poland. It demonstrates the Vilna Education Society's attempt to champion nonpartisan Jewish cultural autonomy as an outgrowth of the particular circumstances and personalities in Vilna. It also highlights how the Vilna Jewish community had to adjust its goals and expectations to those of the country they were now a part of. The chapter explores how education, youth, and a preoccupation with the future of Polish Jewry were intensely intertwined with the political and cultural rights of the Polish Jewish minority in the Second Polish Republic. It mentions Jewish pedagogues and intellectual and political leaders that considered language as the basis for identity formation, especially in the city of Vilna with its multi-ethnic population.

This chapter details the development of the image of the Vilna Gaon, one of the best-known east European Jews. The Gaon left few disciples and a very problematic literary heritage. He wrote enigmatic notes rather than clear and readable comments on the Talmud, so that reconstructing his interpretation of a talmudic text is a difficult and arduous task. For this, and probably other reasons as well, he was not often cited. One consequence of this was that later generations could not even learn of his ideas secondhand. If the Gaon's works were not widely studied, how then was his memory preserved? In his lifetime, the Gaon had a very strong impact on a small circle of individuals close to him and a leading role in the Vilna community and region. Therefore, biographies seem to have had an important role in the maintenance of his memory. However, while they preserved his memory, they also helped shape it. Interestingly, one of the elements that seems to have been underemphasized in these biographies was the Gaon's opposition to hasidism.

This chapter takes a look at Elijah Judah Schochet's The Hasidic Movement and the Gaon of Vilna. Schochet sets out to answer two related questions in this book: What problems did its opponents perceive in the hasidic movement and why did the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (known as Hagra), reject it? The book presents the problems of hasidism through the eyes of the edicts and polemical tracts against it. The chapter reviews how Schochet presents his arguments and how the Gaon is presented within the book. Schochet's scholarship is also analysed, and certain possible influences to his work drawn. To conclude, the chapter offers some critiques on Schochet's analysis could be improved.

This chapter presents Hirsz Abramowicz’s compilation of essays, arranged in five chapters. The first chapter deals with Lithuanian Jewish life and traditions, examining among other topics rural occupations, the shtetl, diet, and mental illness. The second is an account of reform and upheaval before the First World War, with sections on Jewish public figures such as Joshua Steinberg, Hirsh Lekert, and Anna Lifshits, and on tsarist prisons, Jewish gymnasiums, and so on. The third examines the First World War and its aftermath, with sections entitled ‘Joining the Militia’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘April 1919’. The fourth is a description of Jewish vocational education, focusing on ‘help through work’, agricultural schools, and other programmes. The final chapter consists of profiles of Vilna Jews such as Mark Antokolsky, Eliezer Kruk, and Moshe Shalit.

This chapter examines Yung Vilne (Young Vilna, 1929–1940). In the decade preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, a group of young, unknown Yiddish poets, writers, and artists helped turn Vilna into the dominant Yiddish cultural centre in Poland. These young men and women, the majority of them from Vilna itself or its neighbouring towns, emerged at a moment when Jewish Vilna's culture was defined by its commitment to Yiddish culture and youth. Drawn together under the rubric Yung Vilne, the group synthesized the aspirations of individual members for artistic experimentation and freedom of expression with a collective concern for the social, political, and cultural life of the city. In doing so, Yung Vilne earned the distinction of being both the last of the major Yiddish avant-garde movements in inter-war Poland, and the literary group most evocative of the pressures of time and place.

This chapter discusses the transfer of Vilna and the surrounding district to the Lithuanian republic in a 1939 treaty. After this transfer, the Lithuanian republic annulled the previously operating Polish laws and introduced its own legal system. The new Ministry of Education announced that under Lithuanian law the kehilah of the Jewish community, which had exercised authority during Polish rule, would have to be re-elected in May 1940. As a consequence, the kehilah's structure and its operating rules would be changed. This led the leaders of the Jewish community to petition that kehilah's status as a legal entity be restored and to allow it to continue its activities as under the laws of the former Polish state.

This chapter examines the years spent in Vilna, Warsaw, and Russia by Moshe Koussevitzky, one of the greatest cantors of the twentieth century. It recounts Moshe's path to the position of chief cantor at the Great Synagogue of Vilna. It also mentions Shlomo Scharf, who had returned with other Lithuanian refugees from Russia and sang in the choir of Taharat Hakodesh synagogue. The chapter discusses Moshe's marriage to Raya Zrankin and their settlement into an apartment on Dominikanska Street, in the Jewish quarter. It points out how Moshe was deeply influenced by Eliasz Zaludkowski's easy handling of the nusah hatfilah.

This chapter discusses the strategies of resistance beyond Minsk. It focuses on the Kovno ghetto and its efforts to send Jews to the forest. The story of the Kovno ghetto forms a useful point of comparison with the Minsk ghetto underground. In contrast to the approximately ten thousand Jews who reached partisan units from the Minsk ghetto, only about three hundred Jews reached the partisan units from the Kovno ghetto. These differences were caused by geographical and logistical differences between the two ghettos. Like Minsk, the Kovno ghetto was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, however the sentries of the Kovno ghetto were stationed at intervals along it. Kovno was not like Minsk, which was within a day's walk of the partisan forest. It was not possible for the residents of the Kovno ghetto to leave on their own, walk to the forest and search for partisan groups to join. The most important difference between the Minsk and Kovno ghetto was that the Minsk ghetto was part of a united underground movement while the Kovno ghetto did not have external allies. Due to the weakness and the isolation of underground forces outside the ghetto, Kovno was only able to send limited numbers of Jews to the forest. This Kovno story highlights the significance of external allies, such as links to a strong underground organization, and a dense network of ties between Jews in the ghetto and non-Jews outside it. In addition to discussing the story of the Kovno ghetto, the chapter also tackles the ghetto revolt that dominated the ghettos of Vilna, Warsaw, and Bialystock.

This chapter chronicles the unlikely blossoming of Yiddish and Hebrew schools in Vilna during the First World War. It examines the problems of providing education for refugee children raised at the end of Vladimir Horowitz's article that became an opportunity for innovative Vilna-based educators. It also details the wartime flourishing of modern schools that dashed any hopes of a unified system of Jewish education as ideological differences eventually undermined cooperation between various proponents of school reform. The chapter describes multiple organizations, representing different political and cultural ideologies, that competed Jewish school networks by the end of the war. It analyzes the very process of creating new schools that shaped ideological stances and led to political realignments, making education the tail wagging the dog of politics.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about Rabbi Eliyahu, the son of Shlomo Zalman, known as the Gaon of Vilna. This book provides descriptions of the Gaon written by his sons and several of his disciples and examines the works of Gaon in relation to the Haskalah, Hasidism, and Mitnagdim. It also discusses Talmudic scholarship and the rabbinate in Lithuanian Jewry during the nineteenth century and explains the thought and practice of the Vilna Gaon.

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 deals with the myth of the Vilna Gaon as a maskil among both proponents and opponents of Haskalah. It traces this myth as reflected in the historiography of the Haskalah movement and shows that the matter of the Gaon and Haskalah is an instructive example of the continuity between Haskalah literature of the nineteenth century and Jewish historiography of the end of that century and the first half of the next. It discusses the image of the Vilna Gaon as a maskil as a weapon in the hands of Orthodox Judaism and evaluates the influence of the Vilna Gaon on the growth of the Haskalah movement in Lithuania.

This chapter discusses various aspects of the controversy between the Hasidism and the Mitnagdim and evaluates the role of Vilna Gaon in the struggle against Hasidism. The findings contradict the view that the struggle against Hasidism began as an initiative of the oligarchy, and that the Gaon merely served as a figurehead that the establishment was pleased to use. The result reveals that the basic motives underlying the struggle against Hasidism were spiritual and religious, and not political and social.

This chapter examines how the persecuted Hasidim regard their persecutor and how did the Hasidic leaders explain to themselves and to their flocks the fact that their chief opponent, Vilna Gaon, was the greatest scholar of their generation. It analyzes the letters written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady. The findings reveal that Zalman's response to the role played by the Vilna Gaon in the struggle against Hasidism was dual. While he acknowledged the Gaon's eminence as the greatest scholar of his day, he also challenged his authority to determine that Hasidism was a heresy.