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

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СКАЧАТЬ pages of the 1870 edition were lost at the printers, so he republished his commentary to Matthew in 1874 and 1875. Regarding the French scene, it is worth noting that Joseph Salvador, born of a Jewish father of Spanish descent and a Catholic mother, published (in 1838) his Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine, one of the earliest works by a Jew (Salvador identified as a Jew) on Jesus. It is unclear whether Soloveitchik knew of Salvador’s work. One would assume that Wogue knew of its existence.

      45 Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 95.

      46 Ibid., 110. Hyman notes differences in the 1985 edition, but they did not seem to be substantive enough to question the use of it as our base text.

      47 The history of Hebrew translations of the New Testament goes back to Shem Tov Ibn Shaprut (mid-fourteenth century), who translated Matthew into Hebrew in his ‘Even Bohan, known as “The Shem Tov Matthew,” published in 1380. Other Hebrew editions of Matthew appeared in the Middle Ages as well, including Munster Matthew (1537), by Sebastian Munster; and Du Tillet Matthew (1553), by Jean du Tillet. In modern times, we have a Hebrew translation of Luke published in Leipzig in 1735 by Immanuel Frommann that includes a rabbinic commentary. Frommann was a Jewish apostate as well as a kabbalist. The London Society for Promoting Christianity, founded in 1809, supported a Hebrew translation of the New Testament undertaken by Judah d’Allemand. Matthew was published in 1813, Mark in 1815, and Luke in 1816. Alexander McCaul, who ran the London Society for Promoting Christianity, solicited a revision of earlier Hebrew translations employing Jewish apostate Stanislaus Hoga and Johann Christian Reichardt. This new edition appeared in 1840. Another Hebrew translation of note is that of the Jewish apostate Isaac Salikinsohn, who lived in London, where he served as a Presbyterian minister. His Hebrew translation of the New Testament was published in 1886, but Delitzsch’s was considered more reliable by many scholars. Delitzsch used all these translations in his own edition, which appeared around the time Soloveitchik was writing his commentary.

      48 Pinchas E. Lapide, Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish–Christian Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), esp. 82–94. The original Hebräisch in den Kirchen was published in 1976. In his Israelis, Jews and Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 49, Lapide notes that Delitzsch’s Hebrew translation of the Gospels was used in Israeli secondary school curricula to teach students about Christianity.

      49 Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 197.

      50 Cited in Lapide, Hebrew in the Church, 84. It should be noted that Delitzsch was also a figure who attracted the attention of other traditional Jews who were engaged in Hebrew printing. For example, Michael Levi Rodkinson was in contact with Delitzsch about various matters of Hebrew and translation. See Michael Levi Rodkinson, Pentateuch: Its Languages and Its Characters (Chicago, 1894); and Meir, Literary Hasidism, 34.

      51 One strange feature of the French Mark commentary is that it is obviously edited in order to match the common Christian French Bible translation that they used. Jordan Levy was able to discern this by reading the French translation of Matthew that exists as she was simultaneously translating it from Hebrew.

      52 Kaufmann wrote glowingly on Delitzsch as a scholar and translator. See David Kaufmann, “Franz Delitzsch,” in his Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1908). In English, see Kaufmann, “Franz Delitzsch,” Jewish Quarterly Review (o.s.) (1890): 386–399.

      53 Lapide, Hebrew in the Church, 91.

      54 On Delitzsch, see Alan Levenson’s superb essay, “Missionary Protestants as Defenders and Detractors of Judaism: Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92, nos. 3–4 (January–April 2002): 383–420.

      55 Ibid., 385.

      56 Ibid., 408–412.

      57 Ibid., 392–394.

      58 Ibid., 394. I say certain caveats because Delitzsch remained a firm believer in the superiority of Christianity. While defending the Talmud, he did so only to view it as a legitimate and worthy precursor to the Gospel. What Delitzsch did accomplish was to resist the liberal Protestant attempt to sever Judaism from Christianity that is perhaps most famously articulated a few decades later by Adolf Harnack in his What Is Christianity? (later published as The Essence of Christianity).

      59 On the Tübingen School, see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F. C. Bauer (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1990).

      60 See Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. Tal argues that much of this theological activity was geared ard a negative assessment of Judaism that led to more activist anti-Jewish movements. For a different analysis, see Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelmischen Deutschland (Tübingen: de Gruyter, 1999).

      61 See S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 106–161.

      62 See Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and the Jew, ed. B. Cheyette and L. Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143–156. Cf. A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 387, 388.

      63 George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 14 (1921): 197–254.

      64 In English, see Hermann Strack, Introduction to Talmud and Midrash (New York: Meridian, 1959). It was reprinted by T & T Clark in 1991 and by Fortress Press in 1992 and 1996.

      65 Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 1–13.

      66 See A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 401. In sum, Levenson claims that Strack and Billerbeck were both philosemitic and anti-Semitic simultaneously, what Bauman called “allosemitic.” “They compartmentalized their theological philosemitism and antisemitism, allowing each full play.”

      67 Later scholars, such as Samuel Sandmel, E. P. Sanders, John Collins, and Daniel Boyarin, continue the exploration of Jesus with regard to his fidelity to the Judaism of his time.

      68 Whether Moore was correct in his assertion about the representative nature of rabbinic texts is a matter of scholarly debate.

      69 Moore, “Christian Writers,” 241.

      70 Ibid., 243.

      71 The Tosafists were a circle of medieval French commentators of the Babylonian Talmud, some descended from Rashi, who initiated a method of Talmudic analysis called pilpul, or casuistry, solving textual dilemmas, many of their own creation, by evoking other rabbinic passages that they would then connect to the problematic text at hand. In the Lithuanian centers of Talmud study, this method was widely adopted. For a definitive study in English, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012).

      72 See Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Secrecy, Suppression, and the Jewishness of the Origins of Christianity,” in idem, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). I want to thank Reed for sharing her chapter with me in draft form. The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies claims to be an account of Clement of Rome’s conversion to Christianity and his travels with the apostle Peter. Its importance is the way it depicts Judaism and Christianity as two parts of one larger system, not meant to stand in opposition to each other.

      73 See Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism.

      74 Four-fifths of the Jews lived in Eastern СКАЧАТЬ