The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik

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СКАЧАТЬ a millennia-old problem, offers us a window into the mind of one Eastern European Jew in modernity who courageously confronted what Jews mostly took for granted: the irreconcilability of Judaism and Christianity. The history of the twentieth century was not kind to Soloveitchik’s prediction, and, perhaps partly as a consequence, his work wallowed in obscurity until now. Perhaps in this century, we can examine it anew, not necessarily as a template for the reconstruction of Judaism and Christianity as much as a valiant attempt to bend the arc toward an era of coexistence and tolerance built on the dunghill of mutual animus and hatred.

      Notes

      1 The phrase derekh eretz kadma le-Torah was popularized by R. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch but was based on midrash Leviticus Rabbah 9:3. It literally means “derekh eretz precedes Torah.” The Kotzker rebbe turns the word kadma from a verb to a noun to mean “introduction” (hakdama).

      2 See Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 190–233; and see Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003).

      3 See J. A. Vorster, “Jewish Views on Jesus: An Assessment of the Jewish Answer to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pretoria, 1975), 89, 90. Cf. Donald Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 28n19: “Probably the first Jew to write a commentary to the New Testament was Elie Soloweyczyk, who wrote in Hebrew and published his work in Paris in 1875. It was later translated into French and German.” Hagner gets the publishing information a bit wrong. It was originally written in Hebrew and first published in French, German, and Polish before it was finally published in the Hebrew original, soon before Soloveitchik’s death.

      4 One exception to the rule is the work of Jacob Emden (1697–1776). While Emden did not translate the Gospels, his work on Christianity from a rabbinic perspective was not polemical but quite conciliatory. Below I will discuss Emden and how Soloveitchik viewed him as a role model. Work of Jews on Jesus and Christianity flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, but Soloveitchik seems to have been the first to publish a commentary on the Gospels.

      5 Montefiore sought the help of Israel Abrams for his commentary. Abrams was an expert in rabbinic literature and a professor at Cambridge University. His own work on Christianity was published in 2 vols. as Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (1902 and 1929).

      6 On Hayyim of Volozhin, see Norman Lamm, Torah Lishma (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989); M. S. Shmuckler, Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin [in Hebrew], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1968); Esther Iznamin, “The Structure and Content of Nefesh Ha-Hayyim of R. Hayyim of Volozhin” [in Hebrew], in Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003), 185–196; and my “Deconstructing the Mystical: The Anti-Mystical Kabbalism in Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Hayyim,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 9, no. 1 (1999): 21–67. Most recently, see Avinoam Frankel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2015). I will explain Soloveitchik’s relationship to Hayyim of Volozhin in the section below on Soloveitchik’s lineage.

      7 See Hayyim Karlinsky, First in the Genealogical Chain of Brisk: The Gaon Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, His Life, Times, and Activities [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute, 1984).

      8 See ibid.; and Dov Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik: The Man and His Writings [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Published privately by author, 1995). On the closing of the Volozhin yeshiva, see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 190–233.

      9 Much literature has been written on the Brisker method. For one concise yet seminal essay, see Aharon Lichtenstein, “What Hath Brisk Wrought: The Brisker Method Revisited,” Torah U-Maddah Journal 9 (2000): 1–18.

      10 See I. Cohen, Vilna, 253–282.

      11 In general, see Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Vilna was also a center of secular Jewish literary activity, Yiddishism, Zionism, and religious reform. Before World War II, about 160,000 Jews were living in the region that would become Lithuania; about 7 percent of the population was Jewish, many of whom were murdered by the Nazi onslaught.

      12 On the Vilna Gaon, see Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); and Immanuel Etkes, HaGra: Yaḥid be-Doro (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2000). On the history of the Jews of Vilna, see I. Cohen, Vilna; and Etkes, “Vilnius,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Vi.

      13 See Yisrael Klausner, Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania: The First Generations 1495–1881 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1988).

      14 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 8. Cf. Eliyahu Stern, Jewish Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), chap. 2.

      15 The printing of the entire Talmud by the Romm family went through various printings in the 1820s, 1850s, and 1880s. In many ways, the Vilna printing was a reproduction of a less-known Slavuta edition. The appearance of the Slavuta edition largely coincided with the opening of the Volozhin yeshiva, which created a much broader need for the production of Talmudic tractates to serve the growing student body. See, e.g., Samuel Meir Feigensohn, “The History of the Romm Printing,” in Yahadut Lita, ed. H. Bar Dayyan (Tel Aviv: Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, 1959–1984), 268–296; Mordechai Breuer, Ohalei Torah: The Yeshiva, Its Structure, and Its History [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2003), 269 ff. Cf. Michael Stanislawski, “The ‘Vilna Shas’ and East European Jewry,” in Printing the Talmud, ed. S. Lieberman Mintz and G. Goldstein (New York: Yeshiva University, 2005), 97–102; and Barry Wimpfheimer, The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

      16 Those figures include the first chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935); the poet laureate of the Hebrew language, Hayyim Naḥman Bialik (1873–1934); and one of the major literary figures of Zionism, Yosef Micah Berdyczewski (1865–1921).

      17 On Hayyim of Volozhin’s attitude toward educational reform, see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 43.

      18 See ibid., 58. Stampfer is unsure of what Yiṣḥak of Volozhin’s intentions were in attending this conference.

      19 However, as we can see from the contemporary descendants of that family dynasty, Joseph Dov Baer Soloveitchik (known as the Rav) (1903–1993) and his son Haym Soloveitchik (b. 1937), both chose less than predictable paths within the Orthodox world. Joseph Soloveitchik became the founder of Modern Orthodoxy in America, and his son Haym became an internationally acclaimed historian of medieval Jewish literature.

      20 E.g., in the 1846 Königsberg German translation of Maimonides, “Book of Knowledge.”

      21 E.g., in Hayyim Karlinsky’s exhaustive study of the Brisk (Soloveitchik) dynasty, there is a long section on Isaac Zev and merely a mention of Elijah Zvi. See Karlinsky, First in the Genealogical Chain of Brisk, where Elijah Zvi is mentioned, in passing, twice, on pp. 42 and 296.

      22 Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 11.

      23 I will discuss the printing history of Qol Qore below. It seems that there are slight, but insignificant, changes in the 1985 Jerusalem edition.

      24 The attention paid to Isaac Zev Soloveitchik in Karlinsky, СКАЧАТЬ