[Footnote 1:  On the bahur or Talmud student see Vol.  I, p. 116 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  On the yeshibah in Volozhin, in the government of Vilna, see Vol.  I, p. 380 et seq.  Mir is a townlet in the government of Minsk.]

[Footnote 3:  An old Hebrew expression for secular learning.]

Instructive in this respect is the fate of one of the most remarkable Talmudists of his time, Rabbi Menashe Ilyer.  Ilyer spent most of his life in the townlets of Smorgoni and Ilya (whence his surname), in the government of Vilna, and died of the cholera, in 1831.  While keeping strictly within the bounds of rabbinical orthodoxy, whose adepts respected him for his enormous erudition and strict piety, Menashe assiduously endeavored to widen their range of thought and render them more amenable to moderate freedom of research and a more sober outlook on life.  But his path was strewn with thorns.  When on one occasion he expounded before his pupils the conclusion, which he had reached after a profound scientific investigation, that the text of the Mishnah had in many cases been wrongly interpreted by the Gemara,[1] he was taken to task by a conference of Lithuanian rabbis and barely escaped excommunication.

[Footnote 1:  The Mishnah is a code of laws edited about 200 C.E. by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi.  The Gemara consists largely of the comments of the talmudic authorities, who lived after that date, on the text of this code.]

Having conceived a liking for mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, Menashe decided to go to Berlin to devote himself to these studies, but on his way to the German capital, while temporarily sojourning in Koenigsberg, he was halted by his countrymen, who visited Prussia on business, and was cowed by all kinds of threats into returning home.  By persistent private study, this native of a Russian out-of-the-way townlet managed to acquire a fair amount of general culture, which, with all its limitations, yielded a rich literary harvest.  In 1807 he made his debut with the treatise Pesher Dabar ("The Solution of the Problem"), [1] in which he gave vent to his grief over the fact that the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people kept aloof from concrete reality and living knowledge.  While the book was passing through the press in Vilna, Lithuanian fanatics threatened the author with severe reprisals.  Their threats failed to intimidate him.  When the book appeared, many rabbis threw it into the flames, and made every possible effort to arrest its circulation, with the result that the voice of the “heretic” was stifled.

[Footnote 1:  Literally, “The Interpretation of a Thing,” from Eccl. 8.1.]