The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary to the Gospels

The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament

The Bible, the Talmud,

and the New Testament

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary to the Gospels

Edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Shaul Magid

Translated by Jordan Gayle Levy

Foreword by Peter Salovey

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center

for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Herbert D. Katz Publications Fund of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review

or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form

by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Solovaitsik, Eliyahu Tsevi, ha-Levi, author. | Magid, Shaul, 1958– editor, writer of added commentary. | Levy, Jordan Gayle, translator. | Salovey, Peter, writer of foreword. | Translation of: Solovaitsik, Eliyahu Tsevi, ha-Levi. Kol kore, o, ha-Talmud veha-Berit ha-hadashah. | Commentary on (work): Solovaitsik, Eliyahu Tsevi, ha-Levi. Kol kore, o, ha-Talmud veha-Berit ha-hadashah.

Title: The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament : Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s commentary to the Gospels / edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Shaul Magid ; translated by Jordan Gayle Levy ; foreword by Peter Salovey.

Other titles: Kol kore, o, ha-Talmud veha-Berit ha-hadashah. English | Commentary on (work): Bible. Matthew. | Commentary on (work): Bible. Mark. | Jewish culture and contexts.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049427| ISBN 9780812250992 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0812250990 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Matthew—Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish. | Bible. Mark—Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish. | Bible. New Testament—Relation to the Old Testament. | Rabbinical literature—Relation to the New Testament. | Judaism—Relations—Christianity. | Christianity and other religions—Judaism. | Solovaitsik, Eliyahu Tsevi, ha-Levi. Kol kore, o, ha-Talmud veha-Berit ha-hadashah.

Classification: LCC BS2575.53 .S6513 2019 | DDC 226/.206—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049427

Frontispiece. Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik. From Yahadut Lita: Temunot ve-Tsiyunim

(Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1959). Courtesy of Menachem Butler.

To Annette

There is always something limitless in desire.

—Simone Weil

It is vain to think of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity before Christians themselves are converted to Judaism.

—Stanislaus Hoga

The emergence of Christianity belongs to the history of Judaism.

—Franz Delitzsch

Contents

Foreword, by Peter Salovey

Introduction: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the Jewish Jesus, Christianity, and the Jews

A Note on the Text

A Translator’s Foreword, by Jordan Gayle Levy

THE COMMENTARIES

Dedication

A Word to the Reader

Author’s Preface

The Gospel According to Matthew, with Commentary

The Gospel According to Mark, with Commentary

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Texts

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s maternal grandfather was Hayyim Volozhin, the disciple of the Vilna Gaon, who founded the great yeshiva in Volozhin. And his brother, Isaac Zev Soloveitchik, was the father of a rabbinical dynasty. That dynasty began with Isaac Zev’s son, Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (the Beit ha-Levi), who was the father of Hayyim Soloveitchik (the Brisker Rav), who was the father of the next Isaac Zev Soloveitchik (Velvele Brisker) and Moses Soloveitchik (a distinguished rabbi who emigrated from Volozhin to Khislavishi to Warsaw to New York, where he taught at Yeshiva University), who was the father of Joseph Dov Baer Soloveitchik (the Rav), late of Boston and New York, and one of the founding figures of what we now think of as Modern Orthodox Judaism. So that’s the side of the family that I think of as the Volozhin-Brisk [Brest Litovsk] connection.

But if we track Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s direct descendants (rather than his brother’s), we come first to his son, Simcha Soloveitchik, who emigrated to Jerusalem, where he was known as the Londoner. His son was Zalman Yosef Soloveitchik (after whom my brother is named), who lived in Jerusalem, where he was an apothecary and community leader. His son was my grandfather, Yitzchak Leib (Louis) Soloveitchik, who emigrated from Jerusalem to New York, where he changed the family name to Salovey. And his son, my father, Ronald Salovey, was a retired professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who passed away in June 2018. And I am Ron and Elaine Salovey’s eldest child. Perhaps we should call this part of the family the Jerusalem connection.

Writing about one’s lineage (yichis, in Yiddish) can sometimes come across as bragging, and there is an old saying in Yiddish that translates, roughly, as "Yichis is like a potato; the best part is in the ground." But in case you find all this mildly intriguing rather than absolutely confusing, the bottom line is that Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik is my great-great-great-grandfather, and he was the brother of the Rav’s great-great-grandfather.

I take you through the primary boughs of my family tree, I must admit, with some pride. And growing up, I heard many stories of the famous rabbunim in my family, as well as about life in the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem, immigration to the United States (and the changing of our name, with its odd spelling but including in it my grandfather’s desire to preserve love), as well as about various family connections from Hayyim Volozhin down to the Rav. But the one person I never heard about growing up was Elijah Zvi, whose writings are the subject of this fascinating book. Perhaps this was because he was an obscure figure, or perhaps it was because his direct decedents did not become rabbunim like his brother’s. But since learning about his book on the Gospels, I have always wondered if, in reality, the family knew about his writings, and chose to hide him from view.

I am sure that some in my family cringed when they read the title of Shaul Magid’s article about Elijah Zvi in Tablet, The Soloveitchik Who Loved Jesus. I did not, although I am not sure whether Elijah Zvi actually loved Jesus or had other motives for writing about Christian thought. I like to believe that he was a brave soul—blind and seeking treatment in London at the end of his life—who wanted to provide a basis for Christians and Jews to respect each other, and he did that from the perspective of an observant Jew aware at all times that he was the grandson of Hayyim Volozhin. I like to believe that he chose Matthew as a focus (perhaps his first focus) in part because Matthew’s Jewish origins are revealed through his writings. I like to believe that Elijah Zvi was, quite simply, ahead of his times (at least among nineteenth-century Soloveitchiks) and that he wanted to enable what we now call on campus a difficult dialogue.

Thank you, Jordan Levy, for the translations of my great-great-great-grandfather’s work, and thank you, Shaul, for authoring this thoughtful and respectful—and intriguing—study of an overlooked thinker from a notable rabbinical family. His interests differed so obviously from those of his forebears and nephews, but he models for my generation of the family the significance of independent thinking (even in the context of religious orthodoxy) and the importance of seeking to understand the other.

Peter Salovey

President of the University

Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology

Yale University

Introduction

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the Jewish Jesus, Christianity, and the Jews

The master from Gastinin said in the name of master from Kotzk: All authors write instructions to their books, and it is common for people to say that a book without an introduction is like a body without a soul. God also wrote an introduction [hakdama] to God’s book, and it is civility [derekh eretz], as it says: "Civility is the introduction [kadma] to the Torah."¹

—MENACHEM MENDEL OF KOTZK, Emet ve-Emunah, 69

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik: The World of Lithuanian Yeshivas and the Soloveitchik Dynasty

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik (also known as Elias Soloweyczyk) was likely born in Slutzk, Russia, in 1805. He died in London in 1881. He was the grandson of Hayyim ben Isaac of Volozhin (1749–1821), founder of the Volozhin yeshiva in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Elijah Zvi was an early member of the Soloveitchik family, which became a rabbinic dynasty during and after his lifetime. He was educated in the Volozhin yeshiva, the most prestigious Jewish institute of higher Jewish learning in the nineteenth century.² Later, Elijah Zvi lived mostly an itinerant existence, traveling between Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Poland, France, and England. His work Qol Qore, which is translated here, is his Hebrew commentary to the New Testament written over the course of about a decade and published in several languages. Qol Qore’s distinction is that it is a New Testament commentary written in Hebrew by a rabbinic insider in the nineteenth century who believed that he could prove, through the use of the classical rabbinic sources, that Judaism and Christianity do not stand in contradiction to each other. Soloveitchik was the first modern Jew to write an actual commentary to the New Testament.³ Most other similar works at that time were written by Jewish converts to Christianity or by rabbinic figures who polemicized against Christianity.⁴ Soon after Soloveitchik, Claude Montefiore penned a two-volume commentary to the New Testament, The Synoptic Gospels, first published in 1909 and in a second edition in 1927.⁵

The first known Soloveitchik dates back to 1751: Isaac ben Joseph Soloveitchik, who moved from Brisk to Kovno, where he served as a rabbi. Isaac, his son Moshe, and grandson Joseph were considered important Jewish figures in Kovno and its environs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Isaac ben Joseph’s grandson Joseph Soloveitchik married Rilke, a daughter of Hayyim ben Isaac of Volozhin, and became his third son-in-law.⁶ Joseph died quite young, leaving Rilke with two small sons: the elder, Isaac Zev; and the younger, Elijah Zvi. Isaac Zev’s son was Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1820–1882), known as the Beit ha-Levi, after his gloss on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Code of Law).⁷ He became the chief rabbi of Slutzk and then Brisk, both in Lithuania. Joseph Dov was probably the second most well-known Soloveitchik of that period, next to his own son Hayyim Soloveitchik (1853–1918), known as the Brisker Rav, who was a teacher and lecturer (maggid shiur) of the Volozhin yeshiva until the yeshiva was closed by the Russian government in 1892.⁸

The Soloveitchik dynasty is often viewed as identical to what has become known as the Brisker method of Talmud study, a highly abstract method of reasoning less interested in the legal implications of a Talmudic pericope (sugya) than its logical progression. The Brisker method was named after its originator, Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk. He initiated this highly original and controversial method of study that changed the way many traditional Jews approached the Talmud.⁹

Volozhin was a fairly small and unremarkable town in what was then known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the name given to a bi-confederation of Poland and Lithuania ruled by one monarch who held the titles of king of Poland as well as the grand duke of Lithuania. In its most expansive iteration, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the commonwealth encompassed a wide swath of Eastern Europe, including present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and parts of northeastern Poland. By the time Soloveitchik lived there, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the commonwealth was under the protectorate of the Russian empire (1793–1914). It was only in 1918, after Soloveitchik’s death, that Poland and Lithuania were established as independent countries.¹⁰ In Jewish circles, the area where Soloveitchik was born and raised was known as Lithuania (or Lita). Jews there were called Litvaks, and it was the home of the anti-Hasidic movement knows as the Mithnagdim (Opposers of Hasidism).¹¹

Soloveitchik’s Environs

Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the nineteenth century lived a life largely commensurate with other parts of Eastern Europe. They had a religious and cultural hero in Vilna known as Elijah ben Solomon, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797).¹² Vilna was Lithuania’s Jewish center, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.¹³ Largely because of the Vilna Gaon, it became the center of traditional Jewish learning. But it was also a center of maskilic (Enlightenment) activity including reformers, Zionists, and secular Jewish literature, in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. Along with Odessa, Warsaw, and Lublin (the Jerusalem of Poland), Vilna served as one of the great centers of Jewish creativity in modern Europe, attracting young men in search of high-level Torah study, as well as a venue for freethinking. By the 1860s, there were eighty-six study houses in Vilna alone.¹⁴

In addition to the Vilna Gaon and the Volozhin yeshiva, when scholars think about Lithuanian Jewry in the nineteenth century, they think of the Vilna printing of the Talmud, known as the Vilna Shas, which became the gold standard of subsequent printings.¹⁵ The three (the Gaon, Volozhin, and the Vilna Shas) are interconnected. The influx of students from around Europe to the yeshiva in Volozhin contributed to the increased demand for Talmudic tractates that standardized the Vilna printing of the Talmud for future generations. This is where Elijah Zvi acquired his knowledge of classical Jewish literature. The deans of this yeshiva, including a number of Soloveitchiks, were often viewed as the luminaries of Talmud-centered Judaism of that period, with the Vilna Gaon as their figurehead. The yeshiva in Volozhin also produced some of the greatest Jewish figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in addition to members of the Soloveitchik dynasty.¹⁶

While an institute of traditional study, the yeshiva in Volozhin had a complicated relationship to educational reforms. Some of the great leaders of Jewish secularism studied for a time within its walls.¹⁷ Yiṣḥak, Hayyim of Volozhin’s son who took over the yeshiva after his father’s death in 1821, when Elijah Zvi was an adolescent, was conversant in numerous languages and may have been open to limited forms of secular studies. For example, he attended a conference on Jewish education in 1843 sponsored by the ministry of education of the Russian government and attended by Jews of various branches of Judaism, including the German maskil Max Lilienthal.¹⁸ It was unusual for a traditional rosh yeshiva (yeshiva dean) in Lithuania to mingle with such reformers. I mention the complex nature of the Volozhin yeshiva regarding broader education only to suggest that Elijah Zvi’s unorthodox decision to devote his life to proving the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity may be part of a larger trend that emerged from Volozhin that included others who passed through the yeshiva to pursue less than traditional paths. Given that Elijah Zvi was a consummate insider, a grandson of the founder of the institution, and part of the Soloveitchik dynasty, his career choices were unusual and, one might say, unique.¹⁹ He never adopted modernity, in thought or in practice the way many others did at the time; yet he departed from the traditional mind-set that would have made his work on Christianity impossible. Unfortunately, we have almost no record of his thought processes in these matters.

An Itinerant Life

The birthplace of Elijah Zvi is not known for certain, although in some of his books he adds to his name from Slutzk, Russia.²⁰ There is much more known about Elijah Zvi’s elder brother, Isaac Zev, partly because Isaac Zev’s son Joseph Dov (Beit ha-Levi) became a major figure of Talmudic learning.²¹ The absence of Elijah Zvi in the documented histories of the period may also speak to the ways in which the family and their students found Elijah Zvi’s work problematic. There is some mystery about Elijah Zvi among those familiar with the Soloveitchik dynasty. When interviewing Jacob Dienstag, librarian at Yeshiva University in New York from 1940 to 1970, who was very knowledgeable about the Lithuanian sages of that period, Dov Hyman asked about Elijah Zvi. Hyman writes: I once asked him about our Soloveitchik (Elijah Zvi). He deflected my question to something else and didn’t want to talk about him at all.²² It seems safe to say that Elijah Zvi is the forgotten Soloveitchik in the world of Jewish scholarship, even as his works, as we will see, had some cachet among Protestant clergy who maintained interest in his project, even reprinting the Hebrew original of Qol Qore in Jerusalem in 1985.²³

There is very little known of Soloveitchik’s life, largely because he never held an official rabbinical or teaching post and, in contrast to his brother, Isaac Zev, none of his children became world-renowned Talmud scholars.²⁴ We also must consider that Elijah Zvi’s professional choices would not have found much favor in his illustrious rabbinic family. Most of what we know about him is through his publication activities, not only as a commentator but also as an editor and a publisher.²⁵ Elijah Zvi was active in publishing editions of classical texts, including his own work, in numerous translations (as we will see in the next section, on the text Qol Qore). Much of his publishing activity, at least early on, appears to be generated by poverty and medical needs. We know, for example, that he left Slutzk in 1844 or 1845 to seek medical help for various ailments that plagued him. He often writes of fighting illnesses throughout his adult life and is referred to in one approbation of his work as sagi nahor, a Hebrew euphemism for blindness. We don’t know when he became blind, or how, but it seems that he was blind in his later years, while living in London.

In the 1830s or 1840s, Elijah Zvi seemed to fall in love with Christianity and began a lifelong project of composing a Hebrew commentary to the New Testament. Unlike other Jews in his time with similar interests, he did not convert, and we have no record as to what might have precipitated this interest.²⁶ As far as we know, he remained an ultra-Orthodox Jew throughout his life. It is striking how different Soloveitchik’s work on Christianity is from that of other Jews of his time, who wrote about Jesus and Christianity.²⁷ One classic example would be the historian Henrich Graetz, whose third volume of his History of the Jews offers a strongly polemical assessment of Christianity that became standard in subsequent generations, even among liberal rabbis. The other well-known case is the Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger.²⁸ Many of these mostly liberal rabbis who were maskilim (freethinkers) were critical of Christianity and focused largely on the historical Jesus to argue that Judaism was the religion of Jesus while Christianity was the religion about him—implying that Christianity and the teachings of Jesus need to be viewed as distinct. For most of them, their positive appraisals of Jesus was also a veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) critique of Christianity while using their Jewish Jesus as part of their case for emancipation and the inclusion of Jews into European (Christian) society.²⁹

Soloveitchik’s approach was different. He argued for the total symmetry between the teachings of Jesus and the teaching of Moses that he sought to prove through rabbinic literature and the works of Moses Maimonides. He was well aware of how his interest in Christianity would be received in the Jewish world. He expresses both the frustration and his deep commitment in the following remark he made in the introduction to the first Hebrew edition of the commentary in 1879:

I know that I will not escape from the criticism from both sides [Jews and Christians]. My Hebrew brethren will say, What happened to R. Eliyahu! Yesterday he was one of us and today he is filled with a new spirit?! And my Christian brethren will say, This one who is a Jew comes to reveal to us the secrets of the Gospel?! How can we accept that he speaks correctly and a true spirit dwells within him? These two extremes are really saying one thing. That is, it cannot be that what he is speaking with his mouth is what he believes in his heart. On this criticism, my soul weeps uncontrollably. Only God knows, and God is my witness that in this I am free of sin.³⁰

One can see from this the way Soloveitchik understood the complexity of his project and the formidable barriers he faced. This was not, for him, merely a scholarly exercise but driven by a deep belief in the benefits—even the redemptive potential—of his work.

In 1845, Soloveitchik left Slutzk and traveled to Danzig and then Königsberg, seeking financial help from various rabbis, including Jacob Joseph Zalkinor of Sklov.³¹ In the same year, Soloveitchik published an edition of Toledot Adam, the life of Shlomo Zalman, brother of Hayyim of Volozhin and great-uncle of Elijah Zvi, written by Ezekiel Feivel of Vilna in 1801. This was apparently done for financial reasons. During this time, he also began contemplating publishing an edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, only some of which was eventually printed.

A curious thing about Soloveitchik’s publishing life is its lack of consistency. For example, he began publishing portions of Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge (the first volume of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah) soon after Toledot Adam but without Maimonides’ Laws of Idolatry (which is integral to the book). He eventually published the Laws of Idolatry in a separate volume with his own commentary, part of his multivolume project called Qol Qore, which I will detail in the next section (not the same as his commentary to the New Testament, but a prelude to it). The first volume of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, likely published in Danzig or Königsberg, included a commentary likely by him; but there is no attribution of the author of the commentary or the publishing house on the frontispiece.

In his separate commentary to Maimonides’ Laws of Idolatry published a few years later, we can see the beginning of Soloveitchik’s intellectual trajectory, which will culminate in our Qol Qore on Mark and Matthew. Commenting on Maimonides’ history of idolatry in chapter 1 of Laws of Idolatry, Soloveitchik writes: Our teacher [Maimonides] brings proof from Jeremiah that even when Jeremiah was rebuking Israel for abandoning God and going after other gods of wood and stone, he said that all nations know that only God is one; they only err by elevating those that God himself elevated. This is a fairly close, conventional reading of Maimonides’ text, but this sentiment will again appear in his commentary to the New Testament many times, where Soloveitchik will criticize his fellow Jews who think that Christianity maintains that Jesus is God, even in one place defending the Trinity as a great mystery. If the ancient idolaters even knew that God was one, certainly those in antiquity who had already been exposed to the monotheism of the Israelite religion must have known so.

During this early period in his publishing career (the 1840s), Soloveitchik was already interested in reaching beyond the Jewish world through translation. We have no information as to what brought him to this, although below I will discuss possible motives. He published a German translation of his edition of Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge in 1846 in Königsberg. In the introduction, he writes: I decided to print these holy words, to publish this book as an aid to all. I am now here [in Königsberg] to seek help for my illness…. I have already published the first volume [in Hebrew]. And now I publish the second edition in German translation for those who do not know the original Hebrew. Does this refer to Christians? We do not know.³² However, Dov Hyman found two approbations for the German edition that were apparently from non-Jews, suggesting that a non-Jewish readership existed and was desired.³³

After this period, we have little knowledge of Soloveitchik’s whereabouts until at least the early 1850s. We do know that in 1853, he was likely in Volozhin because he was asked by Eliezer Yizhak Fried, who became dean of the Volozhin yeshiva sometime in the late 1840s, to travel to Berlin to raise money for the yeshiva, which he did.³⁴ We also have a letter of introduction dated August 17, 1857, from a Rabbi Ettinger from Berlin. Such letters were common for Jews traveling to new communities.³⁵ This letter was apparently used when Soloveitchik traveled to London.

In 1863, Soloveitchik, likely living in London, continued his work on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, publishing an English translation of Maimonides’ Laws of Kings, which appears in the last volume of Maimonides’ multivolume collection. The frontispiece states only that the work was translated by Learned Writers and edited and revised by Elias Soloweyczyk. In the preface to his English edition, Soloveitchik writes: "The wise observations, sound judgment and true impartiality, which stamp this learned word—Yad Hazakah³⁶ of Moses Maimonides—has induced me to translate his pages into modern languages, as to bring it within the pale of the modern reader. I have thus issued two editions in Germany, which met with great success not only among the Jewish doctors, but also among the most eminent Christian scholars. While we cannot be sure why Soloveitchik specifically published Maimonides’ Laws of Kings at this point, we may surmise that it was part of his larger work on Christianity, since the Laws of Kings" includes Maimonides’ understanding of the criteria of messiah. Thus Soloveitchik’s Maimonides publications seem to function as a preface to his work on the Gospels. I will discuss his use of Maimonides in his commentary in a separate section below.

Before we turn to the complex nature of the present translation of the text Qol Qore, we must mention an earlier work by that same title that Soloveitchik published in English in London in 1868. The book Qol Qore: A Voice Crying, the Law, the Talmud and the Gospel was published without Soloveitchik’s name in London, only stating that it was written by Several Learned Men. This text was discovered by Jacob Dienstag and given to Dov Hyman. There is no mention of this work until the preface of the 1985 reprinting of our Qol Qore in Jerusalem by Protestant printers that mentions that the work had been translated into French, German, Polish, and English. No other record had an English translation. The reason may be that this 1868 Qol Qore is not the same book as the other editions that begin to appear in 1870 with the French translation. Our Qol Qore is a commentary on the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke (Luke was lost). The 1868 English Qol Qore is an elucidation and commentary on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. After some prefatory remarks, Soloveitchik devotes an entire chapter to each of the principles of faith, arguing that none of them stands in contradiction to Christianity. His prefatory remarks make clear that this is part of his larger project on New Testament commentary that will appear in French in 1870.

Hyman makes the very plausible suggestion that Soloveitchik’s New Testament commentary was likely written in Hebrew between 1863 and 1868, at which time he published the English Qol Qore on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles.³⁷ In fact, in the 1868 English edition, Soloveitchik begins by saying: It may, perhaps, appear presumptive of us to undertake writing a commentary on a book like the New Testament, and to choose a path that has seen trodden by so many…. But our object is not to comment; but be impelled by the circumstances of the times…. [W]e desire to institute an inquiry into the cause of an existing misunderstanding. This assumes that this work on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles is part of what will later be published as his commentary to the Gospel. By misunderstanding, it is not clear whether he means the desire to convert the Jews of Eastern Europe, which was becoming popular at that time, or the rising anti-Semitism fueled partly by theological precepts.

Writing in a Christian voice, the author (or translator) states that the misunderstanding has three components: (1) "Our Jewish brethren have no faith and that the summit of the Christian belief centers in the eradication of the Law of Moses [italics in the original]; (2) That we Christians are their opponents and merely seek their subversion; and (3) That the generality of Jews, as well as Christians, being unacquainted with that which constitutes the Judaism of the present day (viz. the Rabbinic Tradition) look upon the chasm that separates Judaism from Christianity to be of such great magnitude as to render all efforts of reconciliation in vain."³⁸

Making this even more complicated, there appear to be two editions of the 1868 English translation of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles. The second one includes Soloveitchik’s name as the author on the frontispiece (but still translated by Several Learned Men) and includes a letter addressed to My Christian Brethren in Soloveitchik’s own voice that begins with I much regret to find that there exists amongst you a deeply rooted aversion to the sayings of the Talmud.³⁹ This will become relevant when we examine the work of Alexander McCaul and his Old Paths below, which is a running critique of the Talmud published in London around the same time, which may have been a motivation for Soloveitchik’s project.⁴⁰ One notices a few differences from the 1868 version reproduced by Hyman and what appears to be a second edition. First, the version in Hyman has the subtitle The Law, the Talmud, and the Gospel; and this second version has The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Second, the version reproduced by Hyman has a verse from Ezekiel 37:17 as an epigraph: And join them one to another and there shall become one in thine hand, while the other edition has a verse from Isaiah 57:17 that reads: Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him. There are many substantive differences in the body of the text as well. Most pronounced, and relevant to our concerns, is that what appears to be a second edition has a long chapter, The Doctrine of the Trinity, and a commentary on the first three chapters of Matthew, ending abruptly after verse 8 in chapter 3. A version of the chapter The Doctrine of the Trinity also appears in the first Hebrew edition published in Paris in 1870.⁴¹

The confusing nature of the two versions of the 1868 English Qol Qore will likely remain unresolved. For us, what matters is that by the early 1860s, Soloveitchik appears to have completed a draft of his Hebrew commentary and began a long process of securing its translation into numerous languages. Of note before we transition to the history of the text itself is a brief mention of Soloveitchik’s relationship with Xavier Branicki (1816–1879), a Polish nobleman whom Soloveitchik seems to have greatly admired.⁴² Soloveitchik notes in his Hebrew edition of Qol Qore that Branicki had seen the text, apparently the 1870 French edition, and was so impressed that he personally financed its translation into Polish. As we will see below, Branicki was involved with numerous editions of Qol Qore and a constant supporter of Soloveitchik’s work. Soloveitchik mentions Branicki numerous times, noting that Branicki had a nephew who was a priest and worked in the Vatican library and that Branicki had sent him a copy of Qol Qore to be cataloged there. Branicki is one of the few Christians whom Soloveitchik mentions, apparently proud that such a nobleman and learned Christian valued his work and certainly appreciative of the financial support that he provided. Branicki also wrote a letter of support for the 1877 German edition of Qol Qore. We don’t know anything about their relationship aside from Soloveitchik’s brief remarks; but even with that sketch, we can see that he was open to engaging Christians about his project and believed them to be supportive of what he was trying to do.

Qol Qore: The Text

As I mentioned above, accurately putting together the publishing history of Soloveitchik’s Qol Qore on the New Testament is complicated by various factors. First, he published an earlier work by that name, which is not a commentary to the New Testament (the text translated and annotated here) but an extended commentary on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith; one edition includes a commentary to the first few chapters of Matthew. This seems to have been a prefatory text to his work on the New Testament. Second, while Qol Qore was written in Hebrew sometime in the 1860s, the first edition is a French edition translated by Rabbi Lazare Wogue (1817–1897) that appears in Paris in 1870, followed by a German edition and a Polish edition, and only then followed by the original Hebrew version.⁴³ Since the original Hebrew commentary to Mark is not extant, we used Wogue’s French translation for Mark.⁴⁴

In 1877, a German edition of Qol Qore appeared, translated from the 1870 French by Moritz Greenfield and published in Leipzig. This edition also includes a German translation of Soloveitchik’s essay on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith that had appeared earlier in English translation in 1868 but does not appear in the 1870 French translation. In 1879, a Polish edition of Qol Qore appeared from the French translation and was financed by Branicki. It was published in Paris in the printing house of Adolf Reiff. This apparently was the edition that Branicki sent to his nephew Vladimir Chatzki, who worked in the Vatican library.

There is some mystery behind the first Hebrew publication of Qol Qore. The frontispiece of the Hebrew edition has it published in Paris, with no date. Hyman notes that it could not have appeared before 1879, when the Polish edition appeared, and not later than the end of 1880, when we know that Soloveitchik was already living in Frankfurt am Main. We assume that he was in Paris to oversee the publication of the Polish translation.⁴⁵ The 1985 Jerusalem edition published by a Protestant mission is the text that we used in our translation although we compared it to the first Paris edition. Hyman notes that he found a Jewish apostate, Joseph Azmon, from Givatayim in Israel, who had copied the original Hebrew edition from the Alliance Israélite library in Paris (a copy now exists in the National Library in Jerusalem, where we obtained a copy) and brought that to Israel to use for the Jerusalem translation.⁴⁶ To ensure as much accuracy as possible, we consulted the original Paris printing (circa 1879) and the 1970 French translation of Matthew from the original Hebrew when translating from the 1985 Hebrew reprint. We found only very small, insignificant changes (e.g., a few grammatical corrections) between the original Paris printing and the Jerusalem edition. We found the 1870 French and 1985 Hebrew basically identical except for a few instances when the French version skipped some redundancies.

One unresolved problem in Soloveitchik’s commentary is determining what New Testament translation, or translations, he used. This poses a particular problem for the translator of a commentary, who would preferably like to know what version of the text the commentator was reading when he wrote his commentary. It seems clear that Soloveitchik did not know enough Greek to use the original. He likely had some facility with German and perhaps French (any English would have come later), but, given his desire to offer a decidedly Jewish reading of the Gospel, texts like The King James Bible would not have sufficed as our base text. A few Hebrew translations existed in Soloveitchik’s time, and we determined that he likely used at least one of them, and perhaps more than one;⁴⁷ but we did not know which ones. One possibility we considered was Nehemiah Solomon’s Yiddish translation of the Gospels that appeared in 1821. Solomon was a convert who worked for Alexander McCaul. We thought, however, it more likely that Soloveitchik used a Hebrew translation.

We chose to use the Hebrew translation of the New Testament by Franz Delitzsch (1813–1890), a noted Lutheran theologian and Hebraist who was a professor at Leipzig University. Hebraist Pinchas Lapide devotes a chapter to him in his Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish—Christian Dialogue.⁴⁸ Ismar Schorsch called Delitzsch the finest Christian Hebraist of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ Soloveitchik’s attraction to Delitzsch’s translation would have been Delitzsch’s attention to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew grammar and syntax. In his 1870 Hebrew translation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Delitzsch notes that translating the New Testament into Hebrew requires not only a basic understanding of the New Testament text but the language which conditioned the thought and expression of the sacred writers even though they were writing in Greek.⁵⁰ Delitzsch’s first choice was biblical Hebrew; but when he could not find a proper word in biblical Hebrew, he chose Mishnaic Hebrew. A salient characteristic of Delitzsch’s translation is also his choice to retain the Hebrew names of the New Testament people and places.⁵¹

Even though Soloveitchik maintained that the Gospels were originally written in Hebrew (commonly assumed among Jews and some Christians at that time) and Delitzsch held that they were originally written in Greek, Delitzsch readily acknowledged that Hebrew and Aramaic were the languages that the authors of the Gospels likely thought in, and thus his translation tried to replicate that as much as possible. Delitzsch’s translation was appreciated by Jewish scholars of his time. In a memorial to him, David Kaufmann of the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest noted: Delitzsch’s New Testament is a priceless enrichment of Jewish literature.⁵² In addition, when the first Hebrew-Greek concordance was published in Tiberias in 1974, the authors based their concordance on Delitzsch’s translation.⁵³

I have not found evidence that Soloveitchik was familiar with Delitzsch’s work; but given their shared interests in Judaism and Christianity, as well as Delitzsch’s stellar reputation among many Jewish scholars, it is likely that he was familiar with it.⁵⁴ Delitzsch received his doctorate at the Leipzig University in 1842 in philology and theology and, working with Leopold Zunz, created an inventory of Hebrew manuscripts in the Leipzig city library. His work with Zunz continued, producing a version of The Tree of Life, by the Karaite Aaron ben Eliyahu; later, he worked on a translation of the Psalms with Rabbi Issacher Ber.⁵⁵ Delitzsch was sometimes viewed as an apologist for Judaism in Christian circles, and he was considered philosemitic, even as he remained a missionary. As Alan Levenson notes, he retained certain anti-Semitic beliefs.⁵⁶

Delitzsch emerged on the scene in 1836, in his twenties, with the publication of A History of Jewish Poetry (here one can see the affinity to Zunz, whose work focused on Hebrew liturgy). His book Jewish Artisan Life in the Time of Jesus (published in London in 1906) offered a positive rendering of Jews in the time of Jesus and placed Jesus solidly in his Jewish context. Finally, in the early 1870s, around the time Soloveitchik completed his commentary, Delitzsch published a novella, A Day in Capernaeum, which depicted a day in the life of Jesus. Important for our concerns is that the endnotes to the novella are replete with rabbinic sources to verify his reconstruction of a day in the life of Jesus, something that Soloveitchik would certainly have enjoyed.⁵⁷ In fact, Levenson’s assessment of Delitzsch squares well with Soloveitchik, with a few caveats, when he writes: Delitzsch saw no gap between the two testaments. In fact, in an extraordinary image, Delitzsch portrayed the old covenant and the new covenant standing side-by-side in the three days between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection.⁵⁸ Soloveitchik, of course, would extend that symmetry much further. Yet Delitzsch never quite overcame his devotion to keeping Judaism and Christianity apart.

The exact date of the publication of Delitzsch’s full Hebrew translation is not known; but we have evidence that he published the work as Eine neue hebräische Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments (A new Hebrew translation of the New Testament) in 1864 (some online references have it as 1877). It was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, where Soloveitchik was living at the time. If the first date is correct, Soloveitchik, who likely wrote his original Hebrew commentary between 1863 and 1868, could easily have used it as his base text. Even if the correct date is 1877, Soloveitchik could have used it, as he continued to revise his Hebrew text until its publication. Delitzsch was said to have spent over forty years on this translation, consulting and correcting all previous translations and separately publishing a Hebrew translation of some of Paul’s epistles beforehand. Given his stature in the field of biblical scholarship, his attention to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew—which would have attracted Soloveitchik—and the fact that it appeared at a time and in a place where Soloveitchik could have easily consulted it, we chose to use Delitzsch’s The Delitzsch Hebrew Gospels: A Hebrew English Translation as the base text of the New Testament. We made some small changes—for example, we substituted YHWH (referring to God) for Delitzsch’s Ha-Shem. Delitzsch tried to replicate what he thought was the language of the time, as best he could. Even if Soloveitchik did not use Delitzsch, or did not use him exclusively, Delitzsch’s attention to Mishnaic and early rabbinic Hebrew, including Aramaic, coheres with Soloveitchik’s project better than any other New Testament text that we consulted.

I conclude this section with a few observations on the state of Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism of this period and with observations regarding the Jewish roots of the Gospels. Much of the modern Christian assessment of Judaism and its role in Christianity comes from the Tübingen School, founded by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), a Hegelian by training, who viewed Christianity as an interweaving of two forms of early Christianity; what later became known as Jewish-Christianity (also known as Petrine Christianity) and Gentile Christianity (also known as Pauline Christianity).⁵⁹ This school took many forms, some leading to more positive assessments of Judaism, and some to more negative ones.⁶⁰ Jewish scholars interested in Christianity, such as Abraham Geiger, in many ways were responding critically to various elements of the Tübingen School.⁶¹ One element worth noting is how Jewish sources were used to separate the two religions and how Christian scholars and missionaries became Hebraists in order to assess the value of rabbinic Judaism to the Gospels. In his study of Delitzsch and Strack, Alan Levenson introduces what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called allosemitism to describe at least some of these Hebraist missionaries. Allosemitism is the Christian idea that we should offer positive appraisals of Judaism while maintaining a strict separation between the two religions. Allosemitism took both positive and negative forms in the modern Christian West, sometimes even in the work of one thinker.⁶² A classic example of this general approach can be found in the seminal essay by George Foot Moore, Christian Writers on Judaism, published in 1921.⁶³ Another striking example of the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism of this period, even more relevant to us, was published only one year after Moore’s essay. The multivolume Strack-Billerbeck Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, published in 1922, was the most comprehensive collection of rabbinic sources structured as annotations to the Gospels to date.

Strack, a student of Delitzsch, began the work but only finished Matthew before he died. The remainder of the work was produced by Paul Billerbeck. Strack-Billerbeck offers extensive source data of rabbinic literature on the Gospels, verse by verse. Strack’s other work on rabbinics, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch (Introduction to Talmud and midrash), published in 1921, is one of the standard Christian renderings of rabbinic Judaism in a positive and even laudatory light and is still used today.⁶⁴ Taken together, these works constitute perhaps the most important intervention of Christian scholarship on rabbinic Judaism in the early twentieth century. Citing thousands of rabbinic sources on New Testament scripture, this work was not treated merely as an anthology. Jewish scholar of Christianity Samuel Sandmel published a systematic critique of Strack-Billerbeck, arguing that even as it ostensibly offered a positive assessment of Judaism, in most cases the underlying claim was that Jesus’ teaching offered a better reading of the cited rabbinic texts.⁶⁵ Thus while rabbinic Judaism may be necessary to fully understand the Gospels, once they are introduced what we find is that the Gospel are superior. As Levenson put it, according to Strack-Billerbeck, the only thing wrong with Judaism was that it was not Christianity.⁶⁶

Of course, this all takes place after Soloveitchik’s time. He likely knew little or nothing about F. C. Bauer and the Tübingen School and predated Strack-Billerbeck and the conversation that ensued. The fact that Soloveitchik wrote a Hebrew commentary to the Synoptics replete with rabbinic sources—that was also published in French, German, and Polish translations four decades before Strack-Billerbeck and that seems to have been unknown to them—makes his work even more significant. The almost total eclipse of Soloveitchik’s commentary fills an important lacuna in understanding the trajectory from the Tübingen School to Strack-Billerbeck. We can say that Soloveitchik’s project and Strack-Billerbeck, while similar in some ways, are quite different. Strack-Billerbeck set out to cite as many relevant rabbinic passages as they could find, what Samuel Sandmel called the piling up of rabbinic passages. In this sense, the work attempts to be a kind of collection even as Sandmel argues that it was not unbiased in its choices, contextualization, and interpretations.

Soloveitchik never claimed to be objective, nor was he interested in simply collecting rabbinic sources. He begins his project with a very open agenda: to prove the symmetry of Judaism and Christianity on theological grounds that he hoped would diminish anti-Semitism. Therefore, he cites a rabbinic or Jewish medieval teaching only if he feels the verse needs such an interpretation to cohere with normative Judaism. Or, in some cases, he offers a rabbinic teaching as a way to clarify an ambiguity in the Gospel text itself. In this sense, he begins with an assumption in concert with many in the Tübingen School about Jesus’ Jewish context. There are, however, two important differences. First, Soloveitchik does not see Jesus as deviating from the basic Jewish teachings of his time; and second, Soloveitchik believed that the Talmud and midrash, and even Maimonides, faithfully transmit normative Jewish life and law that was operative in the time of Jesus. While we now know that such an assumption is no longer viable, Soloveitchik’s rabbinic training in Volozhin trained him to think in such terms and thus he used an ahistorical assumption to make his historical argument, not only about Jesus’ Jewishness (this was assumed) but his fidelity to Judaism.⁶⁷

While both Soloveitchik and Strack-Billerbeck had an agenda in the sense that both wanted us to read the New Testament in a new way, Soloveitchik was more focused on using rabbinic texts selectively to solve a problem in the text of the Gospel, while Strack-Billerbeck may have been more interested in offering the reader a wide plethora of rabbinic sources to show their influence on Jesus and perhaps the way Jesus moves beyond them. In this sense, their agendas stand in opposition: Strack-Billerbeck expressed a certain form of allosemitism while Soloveitchik sought to bring the two testaments, and both religions, closer together. In this, he makes a significant contribution to the larger discussion of Judaism and Christianity, especially coming from a traditionally trained and observant rabbinic Jew.

Before moving to the question of conversion, a few comments are in order about George Foot Moore’s seminal 1922 essay Christian Writers on Judaism. Moore is important here because he may be one of the first Christian scholars to argue that thorough research into rabbinic Judaism is essential to understand not only the historical context but the theological message of the Gospels. He resisted the tendency of Christian scholars to focus on Apocryphal rather than rabbinic materials, claiming that the latter, even if redacted long after Jesus’ time, better represent the lives of Jews than many non-canonical texts that may have been more limited in scope and influence.⁶⁸ As opposed to using Judaism to show the categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity, that is, a supersessionist approach, which extends from Eisenmenger through Adolf Harnack’s (1851–1930) What Is Christianity? (1901) and Wilhelm Bousset’s (1865–1920) The Religion of Judaism in the Time of the New Testament (1903), Moore took a less apologetic, or perhaps less supersessionist, stance regarding how these sources should be read and integrated into the study of the Gospels. Moore focuses on Bousset’s The Religion of Judaism perhaps because Bousset is the most explicit of later authors in using Jewish materials, to prove that the character and teaching of Jesus can be explained, not as having roots in Judaism, but only as the antithesis to Judaism in every essential point.⁶⁹ Bousset claimed that the essence, and error,