The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature

Marina Zilbergerts

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253059420
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Jüdische Theologie

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature argues that the institution of the yeshiva and its ideals of Jewish textual study played a seminal role in the resurgence of Hebrew literature in modern times. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the origins of Hebrew literature in secular culture, Marina Zilbergerts points to the practices and metaphysics of Talmud study as its essential animating forces. Focusing on the early works and personal histories of founding figures of Hebrew literature, from Moshe Leib Lilienblum to Chaim Nachman Bialik, The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature reveals the lasting engagement of modern Jewish letters with the hallowed tradition of rabbinic learning.

1

MEN OF LETTERS

Textuality in Eastern European Jewish Culture

SCHOLARS (AND MANY OTHER READERS) OF THE NEW Hebrew literature that emerged in the nineteenth century, because it was a child of modernity, have tended to see it as a secular phenomenon.¹ At the same time, they have often recognized the extent to which the language of modern Hebrew fiction and poetry was laden with echoes, references, and allusions to the sacred Judaic canon and therefore indebted to the tradition of Jewish textual learning.² This literature contained the dual qualities of modern and ancient, religious and secular, sacred and profane. Thus, the question of modern Hebrew literature’s relationship to the tradition of Jewish textual learning has been central to scholarly efforts to describe and explain it. Most of the accounts of the emergence of Hebrew belles lettres in the modern period are predicated on the idea that Hebrew literature represented a revolt against the Jewish religious tradition and the modes of life that it governed.³ In the title of his seminal work of Hebrew literary scholarship, the Israeli critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) posed the question as follows: Our New Literature: Continuation or Revolution? Kurzweil described modern Hebrew literature in the early period of its development as a disenchanted pursuit that rejected the divinity of sacred texts and attempted to sever Hebrew writing from the rabbinic monopoly on textual production.⁴

Indeed, in the narratives of Kurzweil and, before him, of such influential Hebrew scholars as Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), the first attempt to create a Jewish literary tradition independent from rabbinic culture had been made already by the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, movement in the late eighteenth century. Specifically, Mendelssohn and the maskilim who formed around him attempted to rehabilitate the Hebrew Bible and its particular Hebrew language, which the rabbis had long and deliberately sidelined in favor of the Talmud.⁵ Klausner and Kurzweil, among others, continued the direction first embarked on by Jewish writers in Russia. These scholars were actively involved in the project of the formation of secular Jewish culture themselves, and the bulk of their scholarship was devoted to describing the break with the rabbinic tradition rather than its continuation.⁶ From a historical vantage point, it appears that their efforts were successful. Today, secular Jewish literature and culture and its scholarship thrive. The mechanism by which the tradition of Talmud study in eastern Europe creatively precipitated the formation of modern Hebrew literature, however, has not yet been adequately brought to light.

While the present narrative acknowledges that the emergence of modern Hebrew literature in Russia required nothing short of a revolution to first undermine and then reinvent Jewish literature and culture, I argue that this revolution originated in the world of tradition. Thus, this chapter begins the story of modern Hebrew literature by examining the world of traditional Jewish texts, which provided the intellectual and linguistic context that enabled the formation of modern Hebrew literature in Russia even prior to the popularization of the ideas of the Haskalah.

The study of the Talmud and the entire corpus of traditional Jewish texts has been practiced since antiquity. It was the eighteenth century, however, that brought with it the flourishing of a revitalized rabbinic scholarly culture known as the “yeshiva movement,” which revolutionized Jewish culture.⁷ Grounded in the thought of the Vilna Gaon and his student Chaim of Volozhin, the movement gradually gained power and social esteem beginning in the late eighteenth century and transformed Jewish culture.⁸ The movement was marked by the rise of the new framework of the yeshiva and the figure of the lamdan, or learner—a scholar of Jewish sacred texts. Chaim of Volozhin’s founding of the first and most influential yeshiva in Volozhin (located in present-day Belarus) in 1803 set off a chain reaction that gave rise to the Mir Yeshiva in 1815, Reb Mayle’s Yeshiva in Vilna in 1831, the Slobodka Yeshiva in 1863, and many other yeshivot until the end of the nineteenth century.⁹ Due to the Vilna Gaon’s strong opposition to the Hasidim, the adherents of this rabbinic movement became commonly referred to as the “mitnagdim”—the opponents.¹⁰ The yeshiva model was so successful, however, that it was soon adopted by different streams of Hasidim and became the prime model for higher Jewish learning in eastern Europe.

The yeshiva, literally translated as “sitting,” housed men of various ages who sat in the study of the classical texts that Jews had been studying for generations. The institutional organization of the yeshiva, however, introduced many new features that were previously not characteristic of the traditional modes of study practiced in earlier periods. Among the most important innovations of the yeshiva was the high status afforded to Talmud study, which was reflected in the learning practices as well as the in the organizational structure of the yeshiva.

While the mitnagdim and the yeshiva movement, as opposed to the Haskalah, were the representatives of orthodox Jewish culture, it would be a mistake to think of the mitnagdim as traditionalists. Although the yeshiva movement placed itself in opposition to the cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century, the movement nonetheless adopted some of the philosophical and social assumptions of the European Enlightenment. Among these was its admiration for reason and for a rationalist methodology applied to the study of Jewish texts, with which it is still identified today. Another Enlightenment idea that the yeshiva movement internalized and enacted in eastern European Jewish life was the separation between public and private spheres.¹¹ The rise of a new private culture of learning, embodied by the yeshiva, brought with it the erosion of centralized rabbinic power and of the institutions capable of enforcing Jewish law, such as the local synagogue or communal government, while shifting power and cultural capital to the individual pursuit of textual learning.¹² The founding of the Volozhin Yeshiva and the learning frameworks that followed, argues the historian Olga Litvak, created a Jewish counterculture marked by intellectual detachment and elitism—a culture whose values ran against the larger Jewish society, identified with the institution of the synagogue.¹³ Whereas the synagogue, as a community institution, still possessed cultural power, it commanded none of the prestige of intellectual brilliance and achievement associated with the yeshiva.¹⁴ In the thought of the mitnagdim, moreover, the synagogue, as a community institution, became associated with boorishness and impiety. This is exemplified in the writings of the Vilna Gaon, who urged his wife to frequent the synagogue “as little as possible,” lest she and their daughters succumb to “jealousies, folly, and libelous speech.”¹⁵ The yeshiva movement’s deliberate distancing from the synagogue and from the Jewish community at large signified its movement toward elitism and resulted in the separation of religious textual learning from all other spheres of Jewish life and practice.

The modern institution of the yeshiva in Europe was unprecedented both in size and scope, raising new challenges regarding its financing.¹⁶ An important characteristic of the new structures of the Lithuanian yeshivas (true to a lesser extent of smaller learning frameworks, such as the kloyz or the beit midrash) was their independence from the central Jewish synagogues and community. Large yeshivas were often located in small towns, isolated from large Jewish centers to safeguard the elitism and aloofness of the mitnagdim from the interference of Jewish society. Yeshivas supported themselves by funds from itinerant emissaries reaching out to distant and international patrons.¹⁷ This allowed the yeshiva to be mostly autonomous in its intellectual pursuits, with the local Jewish community having no control over the yeshiva’s governance. The Volozhin Yeshiva, for instance, was supported by a system of independent patronage, somewhat akin to the patronage of art. A portion of these funds were distributed to students as small weekly stipends in order that they no longer be obliged to rely entirely on charity or the support of community members. Under this new system of autonomy, as the historian Eliyahu Stern observes, the students of the yeshiva were “no longer beholden to parents, rabbis,” or part of a larger Jewish community; rather, they regarded themselves first and foremost as the “children of the yeshiva.”¹⁸

The intellectual character of the yeshiva can be encapsulated in the idea of Torah lishmah, that is, the study of Torah—a term inclusive of all sacred Jewish texts—“for its own sake.” Originating in Tannaitic texts, the term Torah lishmah underwent a radical transformation in the works of Chaim of Volozhin, who established this activity as the ultimate end to which Jews should strive. The unprecedented importance that the leaders of the mitnagdim assigned to Torah study not only elevated it above the practical needs of society, such as employment and livelihood, but also placed it, at times, above the basic principles of piety and even the observance of the other commandments.¹⁹ Chaim of Volozhin designed the Volozhin Yeshiva to be the embodiment of this ideal—a place of never-ending study, where students were expected to learn all day and all night without engaging in any extraneous activities. Although the Russian authorities believed it to be a rabbinical training school, the yeshiva did not aim to ordain rabbis; nor was its aim to establish any pesak, a practical legal “decision.”²⁰ Instead, the study of the practical applications of Jewish law became secondary to the study of the most obscure sections of the Talmud. It was a place entirely devoted to the ideal of Torah lishmah, the pursuit of Torah knowledge for its own sake, whose utter impracticality was exalted by its adherents as the highest attainable form of freedom and pleasure.²¹

This milieu of the rabbinic world—its values, practices, and institutions—composed the traditional system in which all the central writers of Hebrew literature in nineteenth-century Russia had been educated. I will refer to this milieu, its practices, and its institutions as Talmudic culture, treating it as a franchise of transferable practices pertaining to Jewish writers’ attitudes about textuality.

Textuality in Rabbinic Thought

The theological status of Torah study within Talmudic culture is based in idealist metaphysics that date back to the earliest strata of Jewish texts. The very first words of Midrash Genesis Rabbah, commenting on the first verse of Genesis, encapsulate the idealist approach:

Rabbi Hoshaya opened [with the verse in Proverbs 8:30]: “I [the Torah, or Wisdom] was to Him an amon; I was his delight each day.” Amon means “pedagogue,” amon means “covered,” amon means “hidden,” and some say, amon means “great.” . . . Alternatively, amon means “artisan.” The Torah said: “I was God’s artisan’s tool.” . . . When a mortal king builds a castle, he does not do so from his own knowledge but consults an architect, and the architect does not build it from his own knowledge but from scrolls and blueprints in order to know how to make rooms and doorways. So too, God looked into the Torah and created the world. (Genesis Rabbah 1:1)

The midrash here is not only interested in the clarification of scripture but in answering fundamental metaphysical questions about the nature of the universe and about God. Drawing on the verse from Proverbs, the midrash develops the idea that the Torah was God’s “pedagogue,” a sort of an architectural plan at whic...