The Vilna Gaon as a portender of Zionism - pseudo-epigraphy in the service of the movement

ENNational movements attempt to rewrite the past of the people that occupies the forefront of their consciousness. Some even say that modern nationalism equips its people with a past that had never been. The modern Jewish national movement is not an exception. Certain figures from the pre-national past are reconfigured in the national memory in accordance with the new national criteria, given an anachronistic overhaul, and inserted into the new pantheon. At the practical level, the fashioning of the regenerated national memory is manifested in the adoption of exemplary figures from the past, in their "reconfigured" version, by the education, information, and propaganda systems of the nation-state. Textbooks, observances, memorial days, and even gravestones reinforce the new image of the old heroes. Sometimes the opposite occurs: other historical figures are deleted from memory and vanish as if they had never existed. Their names are not mentioned in the state textbooks, memorial days are not celebrated for their actions, and monuments to commemorate them are not built. Thus, for example, the Jewish national movement has consecrated the memory of Joseph Trumpeldor, the hero of Tel Hai, and banished from memory Berek Josselevich, a Jew who fought for the freedom of Poland. The former, portrayed as a warrior in the right place at the right time, has been eternalized in song, rituals, and monuments. The latter, whom Zionists deem to have been a warrior in the wrong place at the wrong time, was stricken from the list of persons who deserve remembrance in the regenerative national consciousness.Although anyone who observes how nationalism has put history to use may agree with the foregoing, one should note, restrictively, that this statement is extremely inclusive. It is true that various groups within the Jewish national movement have put, and are still putting, various figures from the Jewish past to various uses. The gallery of figures at the forefront of historical inventionism among the proponents of socialist Zionism does not resemble the corresponding gallery among the national-religious. The case of the Vilna Gaon, the epitome of a religious scholar of extraordinary intellectual capacity and accomplishments, may illuminate the way a personality from the pre-national period has been inserted directly into the center of the national-religious portrait of the past [p. 157-158].