The Gaon, yeshivot, the printing press and the Jewish community - a complicated relationship between a scholar and society

ENIt would only be natural to assume there was a connection between the Elijah b. Zalman, the Vilnius Gaon and the yeshivot of Lithuania. The Gaon was arguably the greatest Torah scholar in Lithuania in his time. The rise of the world famous yeshivot of Lithuania began in the generation of his disciples and the best known of them, Volozhin, was founded aroimd 1803 by R. Haim b. Isaac who was his closest student. It would thus seem very reasonable to assume that this was not by chance and that it was because of the Gaon's influence that the Lithuanian yeshivot developed as they did. In parallel, it would be reasonable to expect that a figure like the Gaon would have had a major impact on the Jewish community of Lithuania and of Vilnius in particular. However, these assumptions are not correct. The Gaon did not seem to have had a direct influence on the establishment of the Lithuanian yeshivot though he very probably had a strong indirect influence. While the Gaon was often mentioned, it is also difficult to pinpoint his influence on the community at large. The first part of this paper will attempt to prove this and to explain why the Gaon's impact was so limited. This analysis is not a systematic and full survey of the impact of the Gaon. That would require a much broader study than this. The goal is to clarify some points about the complex ties between scholars and communities.It would be equally reasonable to assume that the Gaon's writings were quickly brought to press and often reprinted. High levels of distribution of his works would be a very clear reflection of the Gaon's impact on Lithuanian Jewry. Vilnius was a major center of Jewish printing and given the Gaon's fame, certainly in his home town, there were near ideal conditions for publishing his works. This, as well, was not the case. The printing of his works was erratic. Apparently the Gaon was remembered but not studied but this raises certain questions about his image. As we shall see, it turns out that, to some degree, the image of the Gaon did not attract readers as much as it itself was a partial product of the publication of popular biographies about the Gaon. This development will be explored in detail in the second part of this paper. The limited influence of the Gaon on yeshivot - on the one hand, and the significant role of the media on the other, are both aspects of the complex relationships between East European Jewish scholars and contemporary Jewish society. The final section of this paper will deal with some of the implications of the findings of this analysis [p. 257-258].

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