Feet of clay

One looks in vain for any evidence of the Vilna Gaon’s alleged scientific genius in Eliyahu Stern’s new book.

By MARTIN SIEFF
The Genius Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (photo credit: Courtesy)
The Genius Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Elijah Kremer, universally known as the Vilna Gaon, was without a doubt the most important figure in the evolution of Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe over the past 400 years.
His voluminous commentaries, organized and published after his death, have shaped Orthodox Jewish studies of the Torah, Mishnah and Talmud ever since. He wrote 30 commentaries on the Zohar. His monomaniacal obsession with the totality of Torah study led directly to the creation of the Volozhin Yeshiva by his greatest disciple, Hayyim of Volozhin.
It is to Rabbi Hayyim that we owe the institution, indeed, the conception, of the 24/7 study yeshiva – the total immersion of the student in the sea of Talmud with all practical and worldly considerations ideally obliterated. This innovation does not date back to the study halls of Yavneh 1,800 years ago or the academies of Sura and Pumpeditha in Babylonia. The Volozhin Yeshiva was founded in 1803.
The Vilna Gaon’s seminal role in this process is certainly not in doubt: However, Eliyahu Stern, assistant professor of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history at Yale University, cannot leave well enough alone. His new tome seeks to raise a monument to Kremer as a giant of modernity. But despite its enormous scholarly pretensions – 171 pages of text with no less than 136 further pages of scholarly notes and bibliography – it topples under the weight of its own absurdity.The combined sloppiness and pretension of Stern’s effort is presented with uncharacteristic brevity and succinctness in his introduction. Elijah, he writes, “distinguished himself by his mastery of rabbinic literature, mathematics and scientific knowledge.” This accords with the popular myth of the Gaon. But while his mastery of rabbinic literature is self-evident, there is absolutely no evidence for either of the other claims.
Stern devotes only four pages of his book to the Gaon’s alleged scientific knowledge. Stern does devote a great deal of effort to an extraordinarily strained attempt to draw intellectual parallels and equality between the Gaon and the great German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. True, the Gaon was aware of Leibniz, who died a few years before Kremer was born in 1720. However, Stern does not mention Leibniz’s greatest mathematical achievement, the development of calculus simultaneously with the English scientist Isaac Newton. Indeed, there is not the slightest evidence that the Gaon knew what calculus was.
Furthermore, Chaim Potok in “Wanderings,” his popular but serious history of the Jewish people, states clearly that the Gaon did not even know who Newton was.One looks eagerly, but utterly in vain, for any evidence of Kremer’s alleged scientific genius. The truth is that nothing suggests he even knew of the scientific method, or what it entailed. The idea of laboratory research or experimentation was totally alien to him. There is every reason to believe he would have abhorred the scientific method and sought to eliminate it from Jewish Orthodox life had it crossed his path.
The Gaon lived not just in the same town as but only a street away from the University of Vilna. In all of his long life – he lived to the age of 77 – there is not the slightest evidence that he invited to his home a single scholar or scientist from that university once, or that he ever sought to engage any one of them in conversation. His concept of “science” was circumscribed by ancient Greek works by Euclid and others that had been translated into Hebrew at least 300 years before his own time.
What we do know from the Gaon’s selfserving and highly subjective, indeed totally unverified, boastings to his own sons and handful of disciples in his old age (he did not attempt to teach a single disciple until he was at least 58, as documented by Arie Morgenstern in his book “The Vilna Gaon and His Messianic Vision”) is that he was obsessed with Kabbala. He hated Maimonides, who lived more than 500 years earlier, because Maimonides rejected belief in the magical powers of amulets which the Gaon revered.
He was convinced that the Messiah would come in 1781. (He later displayed his intellectual flexibility by changing this date to 1789.) He boasted of trying at the age of 13 to create his own Golem, a living magical clay being without a soul. To the end of his life he never doubted he could have done so had he chosen to complete the job. Stern does not mention any of this, despite Morgenstern’s evidence.
The early pioneers of the haskala, the intellectual Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, tried to claim the Gaon as their patron because of this impeccably Orthodox figure’s alleged approval of mathematics and astronomy. But the Gaon’s so-called “approval” of these sciences was based only on his private reading of the medieval Hebrew translations. He should easily have been able to read contemporary scientific works in German, which provides about 75 percent of the vocabulary of Yiddish. But there is not the slightest evidence that this “genius” ever bothered to learn even German properly or to read any modern work of science or learning in it or in any other modern language.
Stern’s delicate claim that Elijah “spoke out only on the most pressing political matters” is also a whopper of Everest dimensions. The only “pressing political matter” he ever intervened in resulted in his calculated unleashing of a wholly unnecessary and truly cruel and vicious civil war within the traditional Jewish world. He used all his energies to try and drive the young Hasidic movement of the Baal Shem Tov and his heirs out of Jewish life entirely.
In this one “pressing political matter,” the Gaon was a total failure.The Gaon’s personal life was bizarre. Married at age 18, he immediately left home for eight years travelling with his close friend Hayyim of Sereje. Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with that. Even when he returned and sired children, his long suffering wife Hannah was left alone to raise them and make ends meet, thanks to her husband’s lordly (Stern of course calls it “saintly”) disdain for making a decent living, which he could easily have done. He paid no attention to his children even when they were dangerously ill.
This was universally acclaimed as more proof of his “saintliness.”
We are justified in asking searching questions about a society and religious civilization that was so ignorant and naïve it could uncritically revere such conduct.Martin Sieff is Chief Global Analyst for The Globalist and a Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow. He is author of ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East’