8 - The Closure of the Volozhin Yeshiva

Summary

ON 2 FEBRUARY 1892 the authorities ordered the closure of the Volozhin yeshiva. The hundreds of students were dispersed and an institution that had represented a pinnacle of Talmud study for generations ceased to exist except as a memory. Although it reopened a few years later, it never regained its former status, either in importance to the Jewish community or, apparently, in its level of scholarship. Analysis of the developments that brought about its closure leads to surprising conclusions that illuminate both the yeshiva's internal politics in the late nineteenth century and its precarious status.

The ostensible reason for the closure of the yeshiva was its refusal to accept the government demand for far-reaching changes in the curriculum so as to incorporate secular studies and to devote a significant number of hours to these studies.However, it is highly probable that this was not the real reason.

If the concern for general studies was so important to the government, it is difficult, if not impossible, to explain why it was only the Volozhin yeshiva that was required at this time to include such an extensive programme of secular studies and why it was only the Volozhin yeshiva that was closed down. Other yeshivas were active in eastern Europe at this period, but only one, the Ramailes yeshiva in Vilna, was also required to introduce secular studies, though to a lesser extent than Volozhin: it was ‘forced to introduce the study of the official language and of arithmetic’. If the government really wanted to change the nature of the yeshivas of the Russian empire, why did it not present similar demands to all of them? The theory that it made an example of Volozhin in order to show other institutions the fate that awaited them is untenable, because after the closure of Volozhin there was no attempt to change the curriculum elsewhere. Nor was the closure of Volozhin used as a threat to those who did not accede to its demands. If Volozhin was intended to be an example, this was certainly a rather odd policy.What ismore, it reopened after a relatively short time and without a programme of secular studies.