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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.

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 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 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 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 discusses Vilna Gaon's outlook and practice regarding the relationship between the value of Torah study and that of yira. It describes the character and purpose of the Gaon's ascetic withdrawal and attempts to clarify his conception of the reciprocal relations and correct equilibrium between the value of yira and that of Torah study. It highlights the influence of the Gaon in the struggle against Hasidism and the flourishing of the world of Torah in Lithuania.

This chapter discusses the controversy between Mitnagdim and Hasidim focusing on Rabbi H. Hayyim of Volozhin's response to Hasidism. Hayyim waged the struggle against Hasidism in a style entirely different from that initiated and led by his teacher and master, Vilna Gaon. It explains that while Vilna Gaon waged an unrelenting war to eliminate the deviant sect, Hayyim chose to struggle against Hasidism on the plane of ideas and education. It also discusses Hayyim's realization that Hasidim were not heretics and their motives were pure and his establishment of the Volozhin yeshiva.

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 assesses the relationship between hasidism and the kahal in eastern Europe. Contrary to the opinion of a number of historians, neither the revolutionary or radical religious teachings of the new movement, nor its alleged opposition to the oligarchic structure of the traditional leadership institutions of the kahal, were the reason for the eruption of the anti-hasidic polemic of 1771–2. Rather, it was the personal intervention of Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, which brought it about. The Gaon of Vilna, who was not a communal officer as such, and who was described in all the documents of the polemic as ‘the hasid’—a mystically oriented pietist—was himself the moving force behind the campaign to eradicate the heretical ‘sect’ (kat) of the hasidim, a violent campaign which lasted for a quarter of a century. The first initiative to oppose hasidism may have come from the leaders of the community of Shklov, but it did not gain wider support until the Gaon of Vilna was mobilized to lend it his personal authority.

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 addresses the question: What is Talmud? According to Gaon, the Talmud originated from a project of emending the printed Talmudic texts based on considerations of his own and others' intellectual experience of Talmudic learning. In the 19th century, the Vilna Gaon's view on the Talmud won another continuation. The book of the Talmud therefore became a source for Jewish culture. However, the neo-Kantian, cultural-historical, universalistic view of the Talmud as a book had not only a philosophical manifestation, but a philological one as well. This time the Talmud emerged as a cultural-historical object, belonging only and exclusively to its authentic historical period which was during late antiquity.

In the second chapter of his memoir, Menachem Mendel Frieden con- tinues telling about his background, this time focusing on his mother’s family. This chapter, like the preceding one, again provides insights into matters of East European Jewish life more generally. Here, for example, there is further reference to the world of Hasidism, with a long reflection on the use of the word hasid early in the chapter and with much discussion of the way Hasidism faced opposition in Eastern Europe, especially from mainstream Orthodox Jews. In this chapter Frieden also illuminates the nature of traditional Jewish education, he writes of the attempts of Jews to avoid military service in the tsar’s army, and he provides an indication of the dispersion of Lithuanian Jews to various corners of the world.