The Genius
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- $40.99
Publisher Description
Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence.
While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism andanti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this surprisingly accessible take on "the most influential rabbinic figure in modern Jewish history," Stern, assistant professor of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history at Yale, provides a highly original analysis of the Gaon (meaning genius or wise man) of Vilna's thought and polemics. He reveals the Gaon as something of an ascetic misanthrope who "was known to donate the family food to the poor" and never wrote to his children when traveling. In comparing the Gaon to the other major Jewish thinker of his time, Moses Mendelssohn, Stern inverts the traditional perspective of Mendelssohn as the father of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Gaon as a traditionalist by noting that while Mendelssohn "tirelessly defended the historical legitimacy of the rabbinic tradition," the Gaon overthrew its canons. In his educational approach, as in his intense denunciations of Hasidism, the Gaon emphasized the primacy of Torah and Talmud study against performing commandments and praying devotedly. Stern devotes too little space to the Gaon's writings on Jewish mysticism, given that he "spent most of his time focused on the kabbalah," and at times the author overstates his influence on modern Judaism. Still, this is a profoundly erudite and sometimes scintillating look at a pivotal rabbi.
