Note (return) — Chapter II

His views on religion were equally liberal. The same process of reasoning which, spun out to its logical conclusion, led to pilpul in the schools, produced, when turned into the channel of religion, the over-piety culminating in the Shulhan 'Aruk. This remarkable book, with the euphonious name The Ready Table, prescribed enough regulations to keep one busy from early morning till late at night. The Jews found themselves bound hand and foot by ceremonial trammels and weighted down by a burden of innumerable customs. The spirit of freedom that had animated Slavonian Judaism during the Middle Ages had fled. The breadth of view that had marked the decision of many of its rabbis was gone.17 Judaism was a mere mummy of its former self. Here, too, the Gaon came to the rescue. Rightly or wrongly, he "established the importance of Minhagim [religious ceremonies] according to their antiquity or primitivism, regarding those which have originated since the codification of the Shulhan 'Aruk as not binding at all; those which have been adopted since the Talmudic period to be subject to change by common consent; while those of the Bible and in the Talmud were to him fundamental and unalterable."18