The Vilna Gaon

Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, known in his lifetime simply as the Gaon, was born in 1720 and astonished his elders as a child. He refused office and salary, lived in a small room attached to a study house, and learned almost without pause.

His contribution was method. He restored the primacy of an accurate text, collating manuscripts and correcting scribal corruption in the Talmud, Tosefta and Midrash; his emendations are still printed in the margins. He brought the Jerusalem Talmud, nearly forgotten in Ashkenazi yeshivot, back into use. He demanded the plain sense rather than artificial distinctions, and deferred to no authority where the text said otherwise. He was at the same time a profound kabbalist who commented on the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah, and he held that mathematics, astronomy and grammar were necessary tools for Torah — writing a treatise on geometry and asking a disciple to render Euclid into Hebrew.

He founded no school in his lifetime, but his students founded a world. R. Chaim of Volozhin opened the Volozhin yeshiva in 1803, the 'mother of yeshivot', and his Nefesh ha-Chaim became the philosophical answer to Hasidism. Others went up to the Land of Israel. For a century and a half Lithuanian Jewry was 'the Gaon's Jewry': rigour, precision, and the primacy of study.