Youth and Education
Legend has it that by the age of three he had committed the Tanach to memory. At the age of seven he was taught Talmud by Moses Margalit, rabbi of Kėdainiai and the author of a commentary to the Jerusalem Talmud, entitled "Pnei Moshe". The young Elijah was said to have already known several of the tractates by heart. He is well known for having possessed an eidetic memory. By eight, he was studying astronomy during his free time. From the age of ten he continued his studies without the aid of a teacher, and by the age of eleven he had committed the entire Talmud to memory.
When he reached a more mature age, Elijah decided to go into "exile" and he wandered in various parts of Europe including Poland and Germany, as was the custom of the pious of the time. By the time he was twenty years old, rabbis were submitting their most difficult halakhic problems to him. Scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish, sought his insights into mathematics and astronomy. He returned to his native town in 1748, having by then acquired considerable renown.
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Famous quotes containing the words youth and, youth and/or education:
“When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
““I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)