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Updated: April 30, 2025
It is no wonder, then, that the animosities, which reached their acme during the last few years of the Gaon's life, were weakened after his death, and that the compromise, pleaded for by Doctor Hurwitz and Manasseh Ilye, was somehow effected. But it was otherwise with the Haskalah.
It would be rash to suppose that an echo of the studies of the Encyclopedists had reached a province double-barred and double-locked by politics and religion. The European languages were unknown in the Lithuanian Jewries of the Gaon's day, and his pupils sought their mental pabulum in the writings of the Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, and Albo, and their compeers.
But the Rabbi suffered considerably from his religion on his journeys. Dr. Schechter tells us how the Gaon Elijah got out of his carriage to say his prayer, and, as the driver knew that the Rabbi would not interrupt his devotions, he promptly made off, carrying away the Gaon's property. But the account was not all on one side.
With the establishment of the rabbinical seminaries in Zhitomir , this former centre of Hasidism became the nursery of Haskalah. The movement was especially strong in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," as Napoleon is said to have called it. From time immemorial, long before the Gaon's day, it had been famous for its Talmudic scholars.
But the Gaon's influence on the Haskalah movement by far surpassed his influence on the study of the Talmud or on the ceremonials of the synagogue. Many, in point of fact, regard him as the originator of the movement. As he was the first to oppose the authority of the Talmudists, so he was the first to inveigh against the educational system among the Jews of his day and country.
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