Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as the Gaon of Vilna, never held a rabbinic post and never led a congregation. He studied, mostly alone, in a room the community supported him in, and his authority came from what he knew: the whole of the Talmud and its commentaries, the legal codes, the kabbalistic literature, and enough mathematics and astronomy to work on the calendrical passages. He was prepared to emend the text of the Talmud where he judged it corrupt, and he pushed students towards the plain sense of a passage rather than towards the ingenuity that dominated the yeshivas of the time.
When the Hasidic movement spread north from Ukraine, he opposed it absolutely. Bans were issued from Vilna in 1772 and again in 1781, forbidding marriage with Hasidim, closing their prayer houses and ordering their books burned. What he objected to was not warmth in prayer but the doctrine of a leader through whom the divine is accessed, and the displacement of study from the centre of Jewish life. The Hasidim answered in kind, and both sides at various points denounced the other to the imperial authorities.
The consequence was a Lithuanian style of Judaism, whose adherents were called Misnagdim, opponents, defined by rigorous textual study. His student Hayyim of Volozhin founded a yeshiva in 1803 as an institution in its own right, drawing students from everywhere and funded by the wider community, and every non Hasidic yeshiva since is descended from that model.