He had been sick for several years and could hardly be described as charismatic, yet his death yesterday saw up to 400,000 supporters pour into the streets of Tel Aviv to mourn him. Eliezer Schach was a (probably) 103-year-old rabbi renowned in the ultra-Orthodox world for his scholarship, but loved or reviled in the secular world for his political influence.
A rabbi-politician par excellence, the Lithuanian-born Rabbi Schach played a central role in some of the many humiliations handed to today's Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, in his various failed battles to win election as prime minister. He also founded and then fell out with the fastest-growing party in politics, Shas, which today holds 17 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
Most significantly, Rabbi Schach, a small, white-bearded man who died of heart and kidney failure at a Tel Aviv hospital yesterday morning, led the ultra-Orthodox shift from left to right across the political spectrum over the past quarter-century, a move which underpinned the parallel shift in the country's national leadership. Menachem Begin's right-wing Likud Party first won a general election in 1977, after 30 years of uninterrupted Labour Party leadership, and the right has held power considerably more often than not since.
It is unlikely that his death will prompt a reverse slide back across the spectrum. In fact, greater radicalism may actually result. The rabbi always placed life above land, a position which put him at odds with the leaders of the Jewish settlement movement.
The settlement enterprise, he once declared scathingly, represented "a blatant attempt to provoke the international community".
Rather than an endorsement of the right-wing desire to boost the Jewish presence throughout the Greater Land of Israel, Rabbi Schach's preference for the political right was instead a consequence of his perception that left-wing Jews were dreadfully "secular", that they had forsaken the Orthodox roots, teachings and traditions of Judaism.
Ironically, the main victim of this perception was Mr Peres, whose wife Sonia is deeply if privately Orthodox, and who has himself always demonstrated great deference to Orthodox leaders.
Rabbi Schach's political interventions cost Mr Peres the premiership in 1990 and in 1996. The respective victors, the Likud's Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu, boosted by the votes of Rabbi Schach's loyal supporters, used their time in office to slow down peace efforts with the Palestinians.
Rabbi Schach's most bitter adversary was the late Rabbi of Lubavitch, Menachem Schneerson.
Rabbi Schach viciously attacked the messianic cult which surrounded Rabbi Schneerson, while he had no such messianic delusions. He had even instructed that no eulogies be delivered at yesterday's funeral.