The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism by Eliyahu Stern (review)

Twentieth-century historiography was marked by a tendency to present modernity as a kind of immense cultural earthquake, originating somewhere in western or central Europe, and then gradually propagating eastward and southward. This massive upheaval was said to have shaken the very foundations of every culture it frequented, subsequently eliminating the world which once was, to make way for a new, secular age. The past few decades however, have witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with this paradigm of historical crisis and discontinuity, and a new, more nuanced view of modernity and modernization has emerged. Scholars today tend to envision a much more gradual, often timid modernity, which seeped in through complex networks of traditional life, at once changing the various locales it infiltrated, and being changed by them. Indeed, we tend to speak now not of one, but of many modernities, whose overarching characteristics are the subject of much debate.

Eliyahu Stern's recent book on the Vilna Gaon offers an important contribution to this debate. Stern's Gaon joins an ever growing list of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Jewish authors, such as Pinchas Horowitz, Yaakov Emden, and Menachem Mendel Lefin, who challenge the rigid distinction between tradition and modernity. But Stern does more than just point to Elijah's ambivalent position in the tradition-versus-modernity scheme. Rather, he calls for a thorough reappraisal of the image of the Gaon as no less than harbinger of modernity in his own right. The Gaon, he argues, was the founder of an unapologetic Jewish modernity, which was of paramount importance for East European Jews, and which remains relevant for many today.

Stern begins his account by following the intertwining images of the Gaon and his city of Vilna. This is one of the most enjoyable parts of the book. Vilna emerges as a vibrant, exciting and, at times, downright strange center of Jewish culture, where young converts to Christianity are dressed in drag and coerced back into the Jewish faith, and the chief Rabbi engages in a host of quasi-criminal activities. Another engaging discussion is found in the book's third chapter, in which Stern argues for the need for a new model of modernization for East European Jewry, which takes its unique sociopolitical circumstances into account. Here we find the crux of Stern's book, and though the author's zeal to prove Vilna's distance from Berlin often leads him to tread on less-than-stable ground, the arguments are bold, unapologetic and thought provoking. Stern has a way of turning the scholarly tables, which may at times lead to somewhat exaggerated observations, but also affords some important insights. This is the case in chapter 4, where it is argued that it was not Hasidism that offered a radically new worldview, but rather its greatest opponents, spearheaded by the Gaon. Parenthetical explanations of Jewish terms are a welcome addition, which will help make this book more accessible to scholars outside the field of Jewish studies, who may find great interest in it.

Of course, the ambitiousness of the project invites a variety of critical responses. Sorely missing from the book is some sustained methodological reflection. Indeed, there is a certain ambiguity at the very heart of this study, which has to do with one of its central foci—the meaning of modernity. Barring some fleeting reflections throughout the text body and endnotes (8, 128n26, 211n2), the reader must wait until the conclusion to encounter a (somewhat undertheorized) definition of the term (170).

In one of these rare moments of methodological reflection, Stern amply observes that: "modernity was not just a movement . . . that only certain elite sectors of society experienced. Rather, it was a condition that restructured all aspects of European life and thought." (8, see also 170). Yet, this poignant observation notwithstanding, what Stern has written is an intellectual history in its most radical form, one which views history as the working of great, philosophical...