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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, of Judaism is that it posited a God removed from the world against the more intimate notion of God as a “heavenly Father” in Jesus’ teaching. Moore responded: “The historian can only characterize the notion that the fatherhood of God is the cardinal doctrine of Christianity and its cardinal difference from Judaism as a misrepresentation of historical Christianity no less of Judaism.”⁷⁰ It is true, as Moore notes, that Bousset was not a historian; yet this kind of presentation prevents a more nuanced view of the religion in Jesus’ time.

I briefly mention Moore’s attempt to expose the underlying supersessionism of Christian writing on Jews and Judaism because Soloveitchik implicitly argues similarly, without knowing the historical trajectory of Moore’s subjects. Soloveitchik’s assumption in his commentary is that rabbinic teaching—including Maimonides—can help clarify the sayings of Jesus that are often misunderstood (by both Jews and Christians) when viewed outside the rabbinic orbit. Unlike Moore, Soloveitchik is not a historian; and unlike Bousset and the others, both Christians and Jews, Soloveitchik does not view Judaism and Christianity as categorically distinct. Like Moore, he argues that it is the rabbinic corpus that can help us clarify what Jesus was teaching. According to Soloveitchik, such teaching reveals that Jesus says nothing that stands in opposition to rabbinic teaching, making Jesus’ “Christianity” nothing more than a form of Judaism. Unlike Reform Jewish thinkers, from Abraham Geiger to Kaufmann Kohler, Soloveitchik does not view Jesus as a “reformer” or even a rabbinic rebel but rather a normative teacher of the Mosaic message. It would thus be interesting to ponder what Moore would have thought about Soloveitchik’s commentary, which he apparently had not seen. It is a good example of precisely what Moore was suggesting, even though it, too, had a theological agenda: the undermining of supersessionism as well as the Jewish claim of Jewish superiority.

The Attempt to Convert the Jews in the Nineteenth Century: Situating Qol Qore as a Response to Conversion

Before turning to the Sitz im Leben of Soloveitchik’s commentary, a short methodological note is in order. Much of New Testament scholarship in the time of Soloveitchik was based on the historical-critical method, initiated largely by the Tübingen School. In the case of the synoptic Gospels, this meant focusing on the differences between the Gospels in an attempt to decide which version was the earliest and also distinguishing the setting of each Gospel in relation to the historical Jesus. One interesting thing about Soloveitchik’s resisting this method is that it has often been thought that the historical-critical method enabled modern Jewish thinkers to engage with the New Testament to make their case against it—or in favor of its proximity to rabbinic ideas.

Soloveitchik was a harmonizer and a throwback to premodern renderings of the New Testament. His Lithuanian Talmudic training resulted in his reading the New Testament the way a Tosafist would read the Talmudic text, noticing contradictions in the text or its commentaries (usually Rashi) and using other texts to resolve the discrepancy.⁷¹ Soloveitchik often notes an apparent contradiction in the text or its reception (that is, the way it has been viewed as anti-Jewish or against rabbinic ideology) and looks for a precedent in Talmudic literature to debunk that claim that he then reads into the text in the Gospel to solve a misunderstanding. The result is that he often offers readings of the text that, stripped of an entire history of Christian interpretation—not only historical interpretation but also Christian anti-Jewish interpretation—yield a Gospel that may have actually been closer to earlier Jewish-Christian texts in late antiquity. One example would be a comparison of Soloveitchik with the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (fourth century), which espouses a reading of the Gospel of Matthew and an understanding of Christianity that is strikingly similar to Soloveitchik’s views.⁷² Since I assume that Soloveitchik did not read Pseudo-Clementines, I do not engage in comparing the two; I simply point out that Soloveitchik’s attempt to erase the categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in his time takes us back to a much earlier time of what was later called “Jewish-Christianity,” likely with different considerations and different goals.⁷³ And it is his rabbinic training in harmonization that enables him to do that.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century were incredibly fertile as well as precarious for the Jews of Eastern Europe, both for those who remained there and for those who immigrated to the West yet remained attached to the ways of their Eastern European ancestors. The Haskalah that had blossomed in Berlin with the circle around Moses Mendelssohn a few generations earlier had now made its way deep into the recesses of the Pale of Settlement, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where most Jews lived.⁷⁴ For example, Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861, as part of a larger project of reforms, enabled Jews to be more integrated into the empire.⁷⁵ More important for our purposes was the reign of Alexander I during the Napoleonic period (1801–1825). As Israel Bartal suggests, Alexander I’s spiritual, even mystical, nature and traditional inclination were viewed positively by many leading rabbinic figures of the period—for example, Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of the Chabad dynasty.⁷⁶ In his Beit Rebbe, Chabad historian Hayyim Heilman writes: “On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, [the rebbe] said to me: ‘If Bonaparte is victorious, Israel will become wealthy, and its material status will rise, but they will become distant in their hearts from their Father in heaven. But if Alexander wins, Israel will be poorer, and its material status will decline, but their hearts will be closer to their Father in heaven.”⁷⁷ Shneur Zalman’s astute observation of the devil’s bargain facing the Jews of his time in the Napoleonic period had another consequence that he may not have seen. Alexander’s spirituality also resulted in the initiation of a concerted effort to convert the Jews of Russia to Christianity, what Alexander firmly believed was the true spiritual legacy of the Russian Empire.⁷⁸ As Bartal notes, Alexander I “believed with a full heart that he could enable the Jews to see the true tradition of the Tanakh and remove the barrier placed before them by the Talmud that prevented their belief in Jesus. And they would truly become Hebrew Christians. At this time, the Russian czar opened the gates of the empire to Christians from the West to initiate an international campaign to rectify the citizenship states of the Jews of Europe.”⁷⁹ In 1817, Alexander I established the Society of Israelite Christians, whose purpose was to support converts and to serve as a resource for Jews interested in converting to Christianity. Part of the spiritual bargain that Shneur Zalman spoke about but could not quite see was that religious freedom included in Alexander’s victory would be a concerted effort to convert the Jews as part of a broader and enlightened emancipatory program. As we know, Shneur Zalman’s own son Moshe converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.⁸⁰

Given that this story predates Soloveitchik’s time, a few important features will play a role as we move into the nineteenth century. The first is the introduction of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews to Eastern Europe.⁸¹ This Protestant missionary organization based in England was active in the empire and Poland for much of the nineteenth century, often using Jewish converts such as Nehemiah Solomon (1790–n.d.) and Stanislaus Hoga (1791–1860) as translators and emissaries to approach Jewish communities and teach them about conversion. This resulted in the appearance of Yiddish translations of the New Testament, the first likely translated by Solomon in 1821. As Jews were experiencing a loosening of restrictions in Russia and Poland during the Napoleonic period and emancipation was slowly exposing Jews to the wider world, the program of converting the Jews, not necessarily as an act of malice but ostensibly as an act of inclusion (at least in the case of Alexander I), became a serious issue for Jewish communities.⁸²

Todd Endelman argues in his comprehensive study Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History that, for the most part, Jewish conversion to Christianity in the modern period was an act of convenience rather than conviction, certainly during the Enlightenment but even beyond. It was, as he coins it, a component of “radical assimilation” whereby Jews could more easily, and more thoroughly, become part of European society.⁸³ Endelman writes that “with few exceptions conversion was a secular rather than a spiritual act.”⁸⁴ While his thesis remains a matter of scholarly debate, no one has yet looked at the obscure figure of Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik and his work as a response to this phenomenon. Aside from the fact that Soloveitchik remained largely under the radar in these debates and, as far as I have been able to determine, contributed nothing overtly to them, his interest in Christianity as illustrated in his Jewish commentary to the Gospels, written in the very decades when conversion activity was at its height in Eastern Europe, suggests that he had at least basic knowledge of what was going on.⁸⁵

The role of conversion in Soloveitchik’s project is conspicuous in its absence. It seems clear, however, that as part of Lithuanian ultra-traditional society, he seemed to be a man for whom religious conviction mattered above all. While we can never know how Soloveitchik felt about conversions of convenience, his commentary does not address that audience nor would it be convincing to it, since most converts of convenience had abandoned Judaism anyway. Endelman states: “For most Jewish converts, baptism was a desacralized rite of passage and often no more than a bureaucratic formality. It was formulaic, not transformative.”⁸⁶ Soloveitchik seemed to focus on those for whom doctrine and religious truth reigned supreme; thus, he utilized the entire weight of the rabbinic tradition to make his case. That is, the extent to which he is responding to conversion at all would be a response to the convert of conviction who still lived inside the orbit of Judaism.

Soloveitchik’s case, as we will see, is not that Judaism and Christianity are mutually exclusive, the former being true and the latter being false, or even idolatrous. This would be closer to the medieval Jewish polemics against Christianity and, in a more moderate way, the Reformers’ polemical project from Abraham Geiger to Leo Baeck.⁸⁷ Soloveitchik does not write his commentary to falsify Christianity or even to show its deficiencies but rather to show its common cause with Judaism—that is, to claim that it is true as Judaism is true. As I read it, Qol Qore is a text for Jews seriously considering Christian claims, wherever they have been exposed to them, and to Gentiles who have been taught to believe that Judaism is an inferior religion; thus, emancipated Jews should become Christians.

This may partially explain why Soloveitchik published Qol Qore in French, German, and Polish before publishing the Hebrew original. This work essentially argues that the attempt to convert the Jew to the “true religion” is not necessary—not because Christianity is false but because both Christianity and Judaism are true. The rabbinic materials that he brings to bear in his commentary serve each community differently. For the Jew, it is to make the New Testament part of Torah. For the Gentile, it is to enable him to understand Judaism through reading it next to, and often intertwined with, rabbinic literature. Soloveitchik hoped to convince the Gentile reader that without the rabbinic lens, the Gospel cannot be fully understood. In short, Christianity needs rabbinic Judaism for its truth to shine.

For Jews who would respond by saying: “If both are true, I will convert for the sake of convenience because my lot in this world will be better by living as a Christian,” I am not sure how Soloveitchik would have responded, aside from saying that because you are born a Jew, you should remain a Jew. From his commentary, I do not think he would say that the Jewish convert has moved to a false religion. In any case, Qol Qore is an insider’s guide to the truth of Christianity through the lens of the truth of Judaism. It is a work for those seeking answers to religious questions and not an apology for Judaism against Christianity (although he does claim that most Christians simply misunderstand their Gospel).

Moving to the time of Soloveitchik’s commentary, the work of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (the London Society) continued and became more popular and arguably more effectual through the work of the missionary Alexander McCaul (1799–1863).⁸⁸ McCaul was a professor of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at Kings College, London, and was offered the bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841. A fascinating and important figure of the nineteenth century, he published numerous works related to Judaism and Christianity. One of his most popular—and, for our purposes, most important—works is The Old Paths: Or, the Talmud Tested by Scripture: Being a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism, with the Religion of Moses, published in London in 1836. McCaul was learned in rabbinic literature and fluent in its requisite languages, spent considerable time in Palestine, and lived for years among Jews in Poland, where he mastered classical Hebrew and Aramaic. Even as a missionary, he was quite a philosemite.⁸⁹ He strongly defended the Jews in the 1840 Damascus blood libel, organizing a document signed by fifty-seven Jewish converts to Christianity that Jews never use Christian blood for any ritual purpose.⁹⁰ He also criticized Napoleon’s brother Jerome’s handling of the Jews in France.⁹¹ He was clearly not typical of missionaries of that period.

The Old Paths cites copiously from the body of rabbinic literature to argue that the rabbinic sages erred in their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and that modern Judaism, as an heir to the rabbis, is mistaken. In a later text, McCaul compares rabbinic Judaism to popery. “If asked to give you a concise yet adequate idea of this system [of rabbinic law], I should say it is Jewish popery; just as popery may be defined by Gentile rabbinism. Its distinguishing feature is that it asserts the transmission of an oral or a traditional law of equal authority with the written law of God, at the same time, like popery, it resolves tradition into the present opinions of the existing Church.”⁹² McCaul’s missionizing message was for Jews to return to their authentic Mosaic religion that is best represented by Protestant Christianity.⁹³ This can be contrasted with other works, such as August Rohling’s (1839–1931) The Talmud Jew (Münster, 1871), which was an indictment of Jews and Judaism as a primitive religion that mandated attacking Christians. This was also a popular book, and Soloveitchik could have been aware of its existence, especially given its title.

McCaul, in line with missionaries such as Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack, had a deep and abiding respect for both the Jews and Judaism, even as he maintained the superiority of Christianity. McCaul even received accolades from prominent Jews such as the important historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793–1860). The Old Paths was popular during Soloveitchik’s lifetime. When it first appeared in 1837, it sold ten thousand copies in its first year and was reissued in a second edition in 1846.⁹⁴ While it may be unlikely that Soloveitchik read McCaul’s Old Paths in the original, as we do not know his command of English, more likely he knew of the Hebrew translation, Netivot shalom, translated by the Jewish apostate and member of the London Society Stanislaus Hoga.⁹⁵ Hoga, who died in 1860, is another fascinating personality of this period whom we will discuss below.

I suggest that Soloveitchik likely knew of Netivot shalom because it was a widely disseminated text on a topic that was clearly important to him. Moreover, it was covered in the Hebrew press and was the topic of numerous critical responses by well-known Jewish writers.⁹⁶ Four lengthy responses to McCaul’s work came from the pens of Isaac ber Levenson (1788–1860), Samuel Joseph Fuenn (1819–1881), Eliezer Zweifel (1818–1871), and Raphael ben Elijah Kazin (1818–1871). Levenson, Fuenn, and Zweifel were prominent maskilic figures in Russia. Kazin was a rabbi in Syria. While these responses may not have been particularly well-known, they were covered in the Jewish press and illustrate the seriousness with which Jews in Russia took to McCaul’s work.⁹⁷

The work of these maskilic figures was focused on the emancipation of the Jews in Russia and on civil rights. McCaul claimed that adherence to the Talmud prevented Jews from being trusted members of Russian society. This represents a nonracial kind of anti-Semitism, quite different from the hateful work of people such as Houston Stuart Chamberlain (1855–1927), Wagner’s son-in-law, whose Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is the classic anti-Semitic work of that period; or Johann Eisenmenger (1654–1704).⁹⁸ McCaul seemed to have wanted Jews to retain a sense of their Mosaic tradition and to become “Hebrew Christians.”

Relevant to our concerns is the chosen path of Levenson’s and Fuenn’s critiques. As opposed to arguing for the essential truth of Judaism over the falsity of Christianity, each claimed in different ways that McCaul misunderstood the status of the Talmud in Judaism. Eliyahu Stern summarizes Levenson’s and Fuenn’s positions succinctly: “Levenson and Fuenn differed in important respects regarding the nature of Christianity and Judaism, but they proffered a similar basic line of defense against the charges issued by McCaul against the Talmud. Namely, they both argued that—like Catholic teachings—the Talmud was but one expression of the Jewish tradition, which was based on reason and constantly rearticulated and transmitted anew in each generation. In contrast to McCaul, who misunderstood the Talmud as a piece of sacred scripture, Levenson and Fuenn both employed the Latin word ‘tradition’ to explain the Talmud and the development of the Oral law.”⁹⁹ These responses had in mind framing the Talmud not unlike the Russian Orthodox notion of “tradition” to argue that if Orthodox Christians can be trusted citizens of the empire, so can believing Jews. That is, as Stern notes, “by arguing that each religion possessed its own independent tradition Levenson hoped to persuade Russian officials that supporting the Talmud was in line with the government’s general support of ‘orthodoxy’ within each faith.” In addition, these traditions are malleable and can be altered to conform to state policies.¹⁰⁰

While these concerns were largely political and intended for the Russian regime, Fuenn also delved into more theological reflection; he claimed that “the majority of Christian beliefs and positions were in no way opposed to Jewish beliefs and those that were, could be traced back to what was espoused in the New Testament.”¹⁰¹ This sounds close to Soloveitchik, although Soloveitchik would likely argue that divergences between rabbinic law and Christian doctrine are likely the result of an error in our understanding of one or the other, or both. While it is not clear that Soloveitchik had seen Levenson’s, Fuenn’s, or Zweifel’s responses to McCaul (although he certainly could have), his approach is different, perhaps toward similar ends. Soloveitchik, who was not a maskil or reformer, would agree with McCaul on one point and disagree on another. He would agree that the Talmud is an authoritative text and that Jews are bound to it (here he would disagree with Levenson and Fuenn). That is, he would reject the reformist diminution of the Talmud to deflect McCaul’s claim that it stands in the way of an enlightened Jewish polity. But he would disagree with McCaul that the Talmud is an impediment to good citizenry. Soloveitchik’s commentary is devoted precisely to show the symmetry and not the dissonance between the Talmud and the Gospel. From one perspective, Soloveitchik presents his case as a staunch traditionalist; and from another perspective, as someone open to the truth of Christian claims, albeit from a traditionalist perspective. In this sense, and when contrasted with the likes of Levenson, Fuenn, and Zweifel, he seemed to be a distinctive, even dissonant, voice among the Jews, even as his goals may have been idiosyncratically close to the maskilic position.

Stanislaus Hoga, the Jewish apostate and collaborator with McCaul, is closest to Soloveitchik.¹⁰² This seems odd because Hoga was a convert to Christianity, albeit one who later seemed to return to the Jewish fold (although that is far from certain) and then defended Judaism against McCaul’s missionizing. Hoga was born as Yehezkel ben Aryeh Leib in Kuzmir, Poland, in 1791. His father, a maggid named Aryeh Leib, was a disciple of the celebrated Hasidic master R. Jacob Isaac Hurwitz (1745–1815), known as the Seer of Lublin. Like Soloveitchik, Hoga was raised in an ultra-traditional world of extreme piety and Talmud study. His prodigious talents resulted in attracting the attention of Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, who took the adolescent (who was already married) with him to Palawy, not far from Casimir, to study modern languages. Through a series of bizarre events, including abandoning his wife and family and running off with a local woman named Yitta, with whom he eventually had another family, Hoga converted to Christianity (with Yitta and his two daughters) and took the name Stanislaus Hoga (in his home region, he was referred to as Ḥaskel Hameshumad—Ezekiel the apostate).¹⁰³ He likely met McCaul during one of McCaul’s residences in Warsaw and, according to David Ruderman, Hoga likely followed McCaul back to England and became involved with the London Society and McCaul, translating McCaul’s Old Paths into Hebrew as Netivot shalom, which became popular in Eastern Europe.¹⁰⁴ The remaining details of Hoga’s bizarre, colorful, and tragic life are fascinating but not relevant except for the fact that he returned to Judaism later in life—although that, too, is a matter of debate—and published two works relevant to our topic. The first is The Controversy of Zion: A Meditation on Judaism and Christianity, in 1845; the second is Zir Ne’eman: The Faithful Missionary, published in 1847.¹⁰⁵

The Controversy of Zion is a scathing critique of missionaries who attack Jewish law and practice as antithetical to Christianity (this may be driven partly by McCaul’s Old Paths, which Hoga knew better than anyone). Ruderman suggests that the message of this later work is clear: “It is possible for a Jew to believe in Jesus without abrogating his observance of Jewish law”; thus, undermining what both religions share, by criticizing the very ritual acts that “remind Jews of their belief in one God,” is a grave error. “Christ is the crown and perfection of the law. But a Jew can only believe in him through his observance of the mitzvot, his natural covenant with God.”¹⁰⁶ Hoga’s attack is not only against Christians but also Jewish converts who functioned as missionaries, such as Moses Margoliouth (1820–1881) whose The Fundamental Principles of Modern Judaism Investigated (1843) promoted McCaul’s anti-Talmudic agenda.¹⁰⁷ Hoga argued that being a believing and practicing Jew was the only way for the Jew to be a good Christian. Jews need to know that. And Christians need to know that. Whether this is a repudiation of his conversion remains unclear, but it certainly changes the pattern of missionizing of the London Society.

Hoga’s final work, Zir Ne’eman, goes much further than The Controversy of Zion and declares war on McCaul’s entire body of work, including The Old Paths, which Hoga translated into Hebrew; it is this work that convinces Lask Abrahams and others that Hoga was a real baal teshuvah, that he repudiated his conversion to Christianity and returned to the traditional Jewish fold (even as a convert, Hoga was critical of Jewish Reform).¹⁰⁸ Ruderman is less convinced. While it is true that Hoga seemed to be embraced by at least some Jews in London, indicated by the fact that he published regularly during those years in the Jewish Chronicle, which is odd if he were still considered an apostate, there is no real indication or tangible evidence that Hoga ever turned his back fully on Christianity.¹⁰⁹

If Ruderman is correct, Hoga would represent one who embodies what Ruderman calls a “mingled identity,” both Jew and Christian, or, perhaps, neither Jew nor Christian. This Hebrew Christian identity fits nicely with an oblique remark that Holga makes in The Controversy of Zion: “It is vain to think of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity before Christians themselves are converted to Judaism.”¹¹⁰ We can see how close Hoga comes to Soloveitchik, albeit from the opposite end of the conversion divide. My reading of Soloveitchik is that Jews need not convert to Christianity because all that is true in Christianity is part of Judaism. And Christians need not try to convert Jews for the same reason.

As I mentioned above, this may be one of Soloveitchik’s goals of his commentary Qol Qore. Both religions, for Soloveitchik, express the same core value of divine unity expressed in different forms. Exhibiting this shared goal need not require diminishing the status of the Talmud (Levenson, Fuenn, et al.) or claiming the superiority of Judaism (medieval polemical literature). Many reformers in Soloveitchik’s time, such as I. M. Jost, David Friedlander, and Lazarus Bendavid, argued that rabbinic Judaism (the Talmud) had corrupted the true form of Israelite Mosaism.¹¹¹ While this may have bothered him, to the extent that he was familiar with these writings, Soloveitchik seems more focused on the diminution of the Talmud as a tool of missionizing. For Soloveitchik, conversion becomes unnecessary; for Hoga, it becomes irrelevant. Hoga believed that a Jew could believe in Jesus and still live by the law. This was the essential message in his Controversy of Zion. If I am right about Hoga—and I agree with Ruderman that his choices seem more complicated than simply renouncing his conversion—he would not have to refute his conversion to return to Judaism. And Soloveitchik would not have to convert to Christianity to acknowledge its truth; he can do so solidly within his Jewish milieu—not as a reformer but as a Volozhin-trained Talmudist.

In trying to contextualize Soloveitchik’s Qol Qore around the question of missionary activity and Jewish conversion to Christianity during the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe and England, I was forced to remain in the realm of speculation regarding Soloveitchik’s awareness of this activity, as he never mentions it explicitly. However, given that the issue was a popular topic in the Jewish press and was of concern for Jewish communities as they moved into and beyond emancipation, it is hard to imagine that he did not have at least cursory exposure to the phenomenon. We know that late in life, he was blind, which may have limited his ability to regularly follow the press, although we do not know when blindness came upon him. It is safe to say that Qol Qore offers a distinctive contribution to the literature on the conviction among traditional Jews in this period lending a traditional voice to the expansive and provocative rendering of the complex relationship between these two religions.

Soloveitchik’s “Maimonidean Jesus”

One of the more vexing dimensions of the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) is the question of Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah or whether others considered him to be so. In addition, one of the dominant themes in Jewish criticism of the Gospels is that such a claim is, within Jewish thinking, impossible for a variety of reasons. On this question, the legal code of Maimonides is often invoked where, in his “Laws of Kings,” Maimonides delineates the criteria of the messianic vocation.¹¹² On Maimonides’ criteria, Jesus as the true messiah is simply impossible. What, then, do Jews make of this claim of Christianity? One common trope was that Jesus was a false messiah, a category with precedent in Jewish literature before and after Jesus. Contemporary Jews interested in fostering ecumenical dialogue offer less severe rejections of Jesus’ messiahship. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, for example, made the distinction between the “false messiah” and the “failed messiah,” the latter being more applicable to Jesus than the former.¹¹³ Others, such as Byron Sherwin, suggest that Jesus represented the Joseph messiah (as opposed to the Davidic one), an idea whose roots lie in the rabbinic tradition. The Joseph messiah will appear before the Davidic one, and will die and prepare the ground for the final redemption.¹¹⁴

Soloveitchik takes a different tack in his assessment of Jesus’ messianic vocation. Rather than denying Jesus as messiah, something difficult to do, given the plethora of references to his messianic vocation, or making a distinction between a “false” or “failed” messiah, or the Joseph or Davidic messiah, Soloveitchik claims that the central vocation of the Messiah is to teach people the fundamental lesson of Judaism; the unity of the Creator. Thus in almost every reference to the Messiah in Mark and Matthew, Soloveitchik comments on Jesus’ success in spreading the true Gospel, the unity of God. From Soloveitchik’s perspective, this is accomplished by Jesus in a particularly successful way, to his Jewish compatriots and later to the Gentiles through Paul. This notion of divine unity is the centerpiece of Maimonides’ depiction of Judaic monotheism.

In at least one place, Soloveitchik openly denies that Jesus is the Messiah and claims that most people have misread Matthew 24:5, which states: For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the mashiaḥ,” and they will mislead many. Soloveitchik states:

Many will come in my name—there are those who say that Yeshua cautioned them not to be mistaken if a man comes in his name and says that he is the Messiah, that he may not mislead them. However, the meaning of this verse is difficult, for how is it possible that a man would come in the name of Yeshua and make himself out to be the Messiah? Who would believe that Yeshua sent him? And what does he mean by saying, “many will come in my name”? This is the meaning: Yeshua told them that many would come in his name claiming that he was the Messiah, and by this they will mislead many. Therefore, what he is really saying is, “I am giving you distinct signs of when the Messiah comes.”

Rather than being the Messiah, for Soloveitchik Jesus is the one who spreads the necessary condition of belief in divine unity as the prelude to the Messiah (a kind of spiritual, as opposed to political or militaristic, Joseph messiah). The extent of his success makes him a messianic figure but not the final one who comes to redeem Israel.

Elsewhere in his commentary, he is less definitive in terms of Jesus’ messianic vocation. In his comment to Matthew 10:7, And as you go, call out, saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is on the brink of arrival,” Soloveitchik comments: “The main principle that he commanded to his disciples, first of all, to allow the faith in the unity of the Creator to be instilled in their hearts.” Commenting on the “son of man,” a common trope drawn from Daniel 7:13–14 and other places to refer to a messianic figure, Soloveitchik comments on Matthew 10:23: “Before the son of man comes—which is to say, I promise you that even if they persecute you from city to city, you will not complete your travels to all of the cities of Israel until the son of man comes, that is, until one of the men who is persecuting you realizes your righteousness in that you came to instill in the heart of every single man the knowledge of the unity of the Creator.” But even here, Soloveitchik seems to distinguish between Jesus’ messianic vocation (to instill in the heart of every single man the knowledge of the unity of the Creator), which he accomplishes with tremendous success, and his status as the Messiah. On Matthew 14:14, Soloveitchik comments: “Good news of the kingdom—a distinct sign of when the Messiah will come, when all the nations will know the good news of the kingdom, which is the unity of the Creator. Jews and Christians together believe only in one God and that the Messiah will surely come, just as Yeshua promised; and when the good news of the kingdom—being the unity of God—is proclaimed to all the nations, then the end will come.” Soloveitchik uses the unity doctrine as that which unites Judaism and Christianity and Jesus’ teaching as exemplifying this idea. His literal messianic vocation thus becomes, for him, beside the point.

In Mark 11:10, we read: Blessed is the coming kingdom of David our father [in the name of YHWH]! Hoshana in the heights! Soloveitchik uses the opportunity to render the kingdom of David outside its purely historical setting to suggest “whose goal is the triumph of divine unity.” In Mark 14:9, Amen, I say to you that wherever this good news is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done will also be told as a memorial to her, Soloveitchik comments: “As a memorial to her—meaning: Everywhere that my name is mentioned with honor, for having proclaimed and spread the Gospel—the good news—of the unity of God in the world, the name of this woman will also be cited for praise.” The “good news” is never about Jesus as the Messiah but about the unity of the Creator that he preaches. In Matthew 4:23, Soloveitchik renders the good news of the kingdom as “the unity of the Creator.”

Passages that have sometimes been viewed as Jesus’ call for his followers to abandon their families to follow him have been rendered by Soloveitchik as teaching belief in divine unity as the ultimate sacrifice. For example, in Matthew 10:35, we read: For I have come to separate a man from his father and a daughter from her mother and a bride from her mother-in-law. Soloveitchik reads it to say: “I have come to separate—my goal is to teach you that every man must give up his life for the sake of the unity of the Creator. And this faith will cause separation between a son and his father, if the father does not believe in the unity of the Creator, for he will think his son a foreigner and an enemy.” Similarly, in Matthew 16:24: Yeshua said to his disciples, “A man who desires to follow me will disown himself, pick up his cross, and follow me”; Soloveitchik writes: “To follow me—he who wants to follow my teaching. The main principle of my teaching is that man should be prepared to give up his life for the sake of the faith in the unity of the Creator.” Soloveitchik situates Jesus’ main message as in accord with rabbinic teaching refracted through a Maimonidean lens. Spreading the belief in the unity of God is a prerequisite for the final redemption. Jesus, at times better than the rabbinic sages, fulfills that teaching. As such, his messianic role is Judaized.

On the resurrection of Jesus, Soloveitchik mirrors Maimonides in eliding resurrection with the immortality of the soul. Maimonides does this in his famous “Epistle on Resurrection” in a way that is intended to deflect the criticisms that he does not believe in resurrection from comments elsewhere in his writings (even as he lists resurrection as one of his Thirteen Principles of Faith).¹¹⁵ Because the resurrection of Jesus is such a contentious dimension of the New Testament for Jews (even as resurrection is embedded in prophetic and rabbinic Judaism and confided in Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles of Faith”), Soloveitchik largely deflects the issue by seeing it as Jesus’ call to the belief in the immortality of the soul, an idea that, while normative for Jews, is also not unproblematic, especially if it is presented as a substitute for resurrection.¹¹⁶ For example, in Matthew 16:21: From that time on, Yeshua began telling his disciples that he needed go to Yerushalayim and endure great suffering from the hands of the elders, the leading priests, and scholars, and that he would be killed, but would surely arise on the third day. Soloveitchik comments: “On the third day after my death. Then you will understand that the faith in the immortality of the soul that I instilled in your hearts is the truth.” Earlier in that same chapter (to Matthew 16:12), Soloveitchik claims that the Sadducees did not believe in “the immortality of the soul”—not, as is usually understood, that they did not believe in the resurrection (given the Sadducees’ Hellenistic bent, they may indeed have believed in the immortality of the soul). Resurrection is taken up in a lengthy comment that Soloveitchik makes to Matthew 22:23. It is worth citing his comment in full:

There is no resurrection of the dead—I have already written that the foundation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead comprises two principles: the first is that the dead will rise in the time that the Creator, blessed be his name, wills it; the second is the belief in the immortality of the soul, that is, that the spirit of man does not die when it is separated from the body but that it will remain immortal and forever enjoy the pleasantness of YHWH in accordance to the good deeds that it performed in this world. Both our Jewish and Christian brothers firmly believe in these two principles, for they are united in the foundations of the religion on which the Torah of Moshe rests. Only the Sadducees turned away from the path of the Torah and the commandments and refused to believe in these two principles. Therefore, they asked Yeshua “How will it be for the dead that rise if one woman had seven husbands?”

And in a comment to Mark 12:27, we read: “Let us repeat this, for it is an important and indisputable fact: in the dual belief of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, our Israelite brothers are in perfect accord with our Christian brothers.” Finally, on Mark 8:33, Soloveitchik is the most explicit when he writes:

There was absolutely nothing impossible about them seeing Yeshua after his death, and I cited, in the same place, that according to the Talmud, a sage distinctly revived his deceased colleague and conversed with him. Only his disciples were mistaken on the thought of Yeshua: he did not mean that he would actually resurrect physically, but that he would reappear in order to convince them, by this act, of the principle of the immortality of the soul. Read carefully my commentary in this spot, and you will then understand this passage. Petros, as well, in my opinion, was one of those who “doubted.” He believed that Yeshua spoke of a literal flesh and bone resurrection, and knowing the thing to be impossible in the temporal order, he accused him of announcing unbelievable things to them.

On Matthew 28:17, They saw him and bowed down to him, but there were some of them whose hearts were divided, Soloveitchik cites a passage from BT Mo’ed Qaṭan 28a about R. Naḥman appearing to Raba after his death.¹¹⁷ Soloveitchik thus claims that while Jesus may have appeared to his disciples three days after his death, it does not necessarily follow that he resurrected himself but rather that he appeared to them to teach them about the centrality of the immortality of the soul. Soloveitchik thus maintains two distinct but overlapping Jewish ideas: the bodily resurrection of the dead in the future end-time; and the immortality of the souls that is always operative. Jesus comes to teach his disciples about the immortality of the soul, not about his bodily resurrection (which his disciples believed, in any case). He concludes in his comment to Mark 12:27, “Let us repeat this, for it is an important and indisputable fact: in the dual belief of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, our Israelite brothers are in perfect accord with our Christian brothers.” Soloveitchik never, to my knowledge, relates to the more strident position on resurrection in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15:12–20: But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain…. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. More generally, Soloveitchik did not write a commentary to Paul’s epistles. However, he invokes Paul frequently in his commentaries to Mark and Matthew and almost always in a positive light. While Paul is often viewed as a main source of Christianity’s anti-Judaism in both Christian and Jewish historical-critical scholarship, Soloveitchik views Paul as a Pharisee through and through.¹¹⁸

The move to replace Jesus’ ostensible claim of bodily resurrection with the Maimonidean-infused idea of the immortality of the soul, an idea that is likely the product of medieval, not late antique, Judaism, illustrates Soloveitchik’s larger project of subverting the notion that Judaism and Christianity are categorically distinct and irreconcilable entities.

The Jewish Jesus and Anti-Semitism: The Overt Context of R. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Project

The final theme I want to examine is less endemic to Soloveitchik’s commentary per se and more about the context (Sitz im Leben) of the project more generally. Earlier, I provided a compass to illustrate the ways in which Qol Qore may have been a response to the anti-Talmudic missionizing activity in the mid- to late nineteenth century. I say “compass” because Soloveitchik never discusses the missioning phenomenon openly; thus, even though he likely was aware of it, his intentions regarding his commentary as a response to it must remain conjecture. In terms of rising instances of anti-Semitism, however, Soloveitchik does state that be believes that his work will help resolve that age-old problem founded, in his view, on Christianity’s misunderstanding of Judaism and, just as important, its own scripture.

Qol Qore was written at a time of rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe, pogroms, and the increasingly difficult position of Jews in their countries of residence. The deteriorating conditions of the Jews at this time helped create, among other things, Zionism, which, on Theodor Herzl’s reading, would help relieve anti-Semitism by removing a large segment of Jews from Europe.¹¹⁹ Soloveitchik was more convinced that the roots of anti-Semitism were theological and based on a misunderstanding of the New Testament by both Jews and Christians. He seemed to believe that if Jews and Christians understood the New Testament the way he did, the theological foundations of anti-Semitism would begin to wane. In a long comment to Matthew 2:1, Soloveitchik places part of the blame on the Jews, specifically in the fantastical depiction of Jesus in the anonymous medieval work Toledot Yeshu:¹²⁰ “We find that the mother of Ben Stada was Miriam, and her husband was Pappos ben Yehudah, and her lover was Pandira. Her son was a bastard, and therefore they called his mother Stada because she was a harlot. From this section in the Gemara, those who lack knowledge from among both our Jewish and Christian brothers conclude that this speaks about Yeshua, who is called ‘Messiah.’ Therefore, the Christians think badly of their Jewish brothers and speak against the Gemara without limit.” In this small excerpt of a much longer comment, Soloveitchik seeks to dispel the false Jewish notion of Jesus’ birth insinuated in the Talmud, which he believed made it impossible for Jews to take the New Testament, and thus Christians, seriously; and to serve as fodder for Christian animus toward the Jews. But his most sustained comment about the impetus for his project appears in his prefatory remarks to the 1868 London edition of Qol Qore: The Law, the Talmud, and the Gospel.

But our object is not to comment; but impelled by circumstances of the times, so eventful in themselves, and so important in their bearing as to the cause of the Lord, we desire an institution inquiry into the cause of an existing misunderstanding. For since the fire of dispute has been kindled in the camp of our Hebrew brethren, it has divided the worshipers of God into two sections, the one Jews, and the other Christians. Does it not appear marvelous to contemplate that after the lapse of centuries, when empires have crumbled into the dust, monarchies have ceased to exist, dynasties have fallen into decay … and yet that fire of contention has not ceased, but is still raging with its primitive fury.¹²¹

Locating the roots of Christian anti-Semitism has a long history among Jews, and Soloveitchik is certainly not the first to claim that it is rooted in theological animus initiated by Jewish and Christian scriptures. And most of his colleagues from the traditional world of Eastern Europe were not optimistic about solving this problem, although some maskilim in these areas had more optimistic views. For example, Naftali Zvi Berlin (Neziv), a leader of the Volozhin yeshiva who was likely in Volozhin before Soloveitchik moved to England (Berlin headed the yeshiva during 1854–1892), wrote a short tract, Se’ar Yisrael (Remnants of Israel), which argued for the ontological nature of anti-Semitism on the midrashic principle of “Esau hates Jacob.” This popular work, published numerous times, likely embodied the sentiments of Soloveitchik’s world.¹²² The popular notion that anti-Semitism was somehow embedded in Christianity, or Gentiles more generally, such that it could not be uprooted, was a notion that Soloveitchik openly contested; undermining it was the backbone of his life’s work.

Soloveitchik is one of the few traditional rabbis in general, and certainly in Eastern Europe, who wrote more positively about the possibility of diminishing anti-Semitism, at least in those decades. He claimed that the fault lay with Jews and Christians—Jews because they refuse to take the New Testament seriously and Christians because they refuse to acknowledge the symmetry between the teaching of the Gospel and Judaism. An exception to this rule was Ya’akov Emden (1697–1776), a leading central European rabbinic figure and one of the most celebrated rabbinic authorities of his generation.¹²³ It is thus predictable that Soloveitchik would cite Emden’s thoughts about Christianity, which were, in his time, revolutionary in their own right.¹²⁴

Comparisons between Emden and Soloveitchik are reasonable, and Soloveitchik himself may have viewed Emden as a precedent.¹²⁵ Upon closer examination, however, Emden and Soloveitchik have little in common other than their belief in the morality (and non-idolatry) of Christianity and their belief that Jesus did not come to eradicate the law for Jews. Unlike Soloveitchik, Emden, who was familiar with the Gospels (he cites them often) never wrote extensively about them and never quite claimed, as Soloveitchik did, that there is no categorical distinction between Judaism and Jesus’ “Christianity.”¹²⁶ Emden does mention in at least one place that he thinks that many Christians “would be diligent in the analysis of the Gemara … and still today are found among them many learned ones who love our Talmud and study it.”¹²⁷ But in general, Emden’s positive assessment of Christianity, certainly provocative in his day, especially given his stature, does not make the more radical claims of symmetry between Judaism and Christianity that Soloveitchik proposes in his commentary. Perhaps part of the difference between them is the underlying context of each one’s work. Emden, as J. J. Schachter notes, used Christianity as a way to falsify and demonize Sabbateanism as a new religion, one that should be condemned by Jews and Christians alike.¹²⁸ Soloveitchik may have been responding to the increased conversion of Jews to Christianity through the missionary work of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews and other organizations. His commentary may thus be more focused on teaching missionaries why converting the Jews is unnecessary (which is why he published his commentary in German, French, and Polish before he published the original Hebrew) and to teach Jews why they need not convert in order to live an authentic Jewish life that coheres with the teachings of Jesus. Both Emden and Soloveitchik seem to believe that their positive assessments would curb anti-Semitism, a goal that, as we know, was unsuccessful. At any rate, in looking for some precedent for Soloveitchik’s commentary, Emden, whose work on this subject and others was likely familiar to Soloveitchik, would be a good candidate.

Soloveitchik concludes that his commentary resolved three basic misunderstandings between Jews and Christians: “I. That our Jewish brethren regard us [Christians] as those who have no faith, and that the summit of the Christian belief centers in the eradication of the law of Moses. II. That we Christians are their opponents, and merely seek their subversion. III. That the generality of Jews, as well as Christians, being unacquainted with what constitutes the Judaism of the present day (viz. the Rabbinic tradition) look upon the chasm that separates Judaism from Christianity to be of such magnitude as to render all efforts of reconciliation in vain.”¹²⁹ George Ekeroth, then director of the Jerusalem Center for Biblical Studies and Research, wrote a short introduction to the 1985 reprint of the Hebrew Qol Qore, in which he succinctly made the case for why this obscure book from over a century ago should be reprinted.

The author’s original motivation is an attempt to bring peace and understanding between Judaism and Christianity. He implied that if this could be achieved, it had the potential of bringing peace to the whole world. We don’t have evidence that his objective was realized to any great degree during his lifetime. In view of the great progress that has been made in recent years in dialogue between Jews and Christians, at least at the academic level, it is possible that the book was written “for such a time as this.”¹³⁰

Whether such a prediction is true, I do not know; but it speaks to the overt intention of Soloveitchik’s work, even a kind of messianic optimism that this work could “bring about world peace.”

This commentary, constructed by someone deeply knowledgeable of classical Judaism, executed with passion, candor, and sincerity, and driven by an unyielding, albeit naïve, belief that the author had solved 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, First in the Genealogical Chain of Brisk, is due to the fact that his son Joseph Baer (Beit ha-Levi) became a famous rabbinic scholar.

25 This is somewhat ironic, as the Soloveitchik dynasty was known for not publishing much of their work in their lifetimes—in most cases, one book of teachings, usually after the death of the author.

26 Two examples among many from Soloveitchik’s generation who converted and published on Christianity were Alfred Edersheim (1825–1889), who converted to Christianity and wrote The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1988); and Moshe Margoliouth (d. 1881), who wrote numerous anti-Talmud missionary tracts. There is also Nehemiah Solomon, who likely produced the first Yiddish translation of the New Testament; and Stanislaus Hoga, the convert who translated Alexander McCaul’s missionary tract The Old Paths. Below, I will discuss Solomon and, more extensively, Hoga. Another example would be Augustus Neander (1798–1850), born David Mendel, a German Jewish convert who became perhaps the most prominent Church historian of his generation. Soloveitchik may have also been aware of Luigi Chiarini, who published a scathing attack against the Talmud, Theorie du Judaïsme, in 1830. Chiarini was part of a Christian committee established in Warsaw in 1825 to encourage Polish Jews to assimilate. Leopold Zunz knew of his work. See Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity Is Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 66. There were, of course, many Jewish converts to Christianity who wrote works on the New Testament, some in Hebrew. One striking example is Immanuel Frommann, who converted to Christianity and wrote a Hebrew kabbalistic commentary to Luke. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, ed. G. Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 171–222.

27 See, e.g., in Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and George Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). Cf. Eliyahu Stern, “Catholic Judaism: The Political Theology of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Jewish Enlightenment,” Harvard Theological Review 109, no. 4 (2016): 483–511. An exception to this rule might be Moses Mendelssohn, who lived in an earlier generation but exhibited a sympathy toward Jesus, at any rate, that coheres with Soloveitchik. See, e.g., the lengthy discussion in Jonathan M. Hess, “Mendelssohn’s Jesus: The Frustrations of Jewish Resistance,” in idem, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 92–135. Hess argues that Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, more than a defense of Judaism, is a critique of Christianity—in particular, a critique of Christianity’s distortion of Jesus, who Mendelssohn held was a gentle Jewish reformer and one who argued in favor of the law. Hess argues that Jesus was, for Mendelssohn, “as both a critic of Christian imperialism and a polemicist for Jewish emancipation” (96).

28 See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Graetz was especially critical of the “Jewish-Christianity” of works like Pseudo-Clementine’s Homilies, which, quite similar to Soloveitchik (who likely did not know this text), argued for the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. On this, see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Modern Jewish Rediscovery of ‘Jewish Christianity,’” in idem, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 320–324.

29 See, e.g., Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich 1870–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 160–222.

30 Soloveitchik, Qol Qore (Hebrew ed., 1879), 15; and Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 132.

31 See Hyman, Eliah Zvi Soloveitchik, 11.

32 Another interesting figure of that time who may have known Soloveitchik was Michael Levi Rodkinson. Rodkinson (also known as Frumkin) is a fascinating character, publisher of Hasidic hagiography, editor of numerous journals, translator of the Talmud into English, ex-Hasid and moderate reformer. Rodkinson lived in London at the same time as Soloveitchik and may have traveled in the same circles, although I have not found any evidence of their acquaintance. They shared an aristocratic pedigree: Soloveitchik was the grandson of R. Hayyim of Volozhin; and Rodkinson was the grandson of R. Aaron of Starosselje, the celebrated disciple for R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, who ended up rejecting the dynastic succession of Chabad and began a small branch of Chabad after R. Shneur Zalman’s death. R. Aaron’s Sha’ar ha-Yihud ve-Emunah is considered one of the great Hasidic texts in the Chabad tradition. While as far as we know, Soloveitchik remained an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Rodkinson eventually moved toward the Haskalah. Yet he remained a defender of tradition and produced a “new” Talmud in English translation that removed all the superstitious elements. Rodkinson also worked against anti-Semitism, believing that if Christians knew the Talmud without its irrational components, they would not be against it. Rodkinson was much more in the thick of the Jewish world of his time than Soloveitchik and suffered immense resistance for his work and his personal life. And Rodkinson didn’t seem to have an interest in Christianity, even as he was often accused of collaborating with missionaries. On Rodkinson, see Jonathan Meir, Literary Hasidism: The Life and Work of Michael Levi Rodkinson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016).

33 Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 40.

34 See Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 63, 64.

35 Ibid., 43.

36 Yad Hazakah, or “strong hand,” is the traditional euphemism to describe Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Code of Law).

37 Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 134.

38 Qol Qore: A Voice Crying (London: Elliot Stock, 1868), 3.

39 Qol Qore: The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament (London: Rabbi Elias Soloweyczyk, 1868).

40 See Alexander McCaul, The Old Paths, or the Talmud Tested by Scripture, Being a Comparison of the Principle and Doctrines of Modern Judaism with the Religion of Moses and the Prophets (London: London Society’s House, 1880). Even if Soloveitchik never read The Old Paths, McCaul was part of a much wider circle of missionaries who were attempting to convert Jews at that time. Soloveitchik surely was aware of the larger phenomenon even if he may not have been aware of McCaul.

41 See Qol Qore or The Talmud and the New Testament (Paris: Polyglotte de Charles Blot, 1870), 50–56.

42 Branicki was a wealthy Polish nobleman who accompanied Napoleon during the Crimean War. He was known for becoming owner of the Montrésor Château in 1849 and was a politician and a financier, involved in the creation of the Banc Crédit Commercial de France in 1858. See the blog “Social History in the Touraine: Central France,” https://jimmcneill.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/montresor-sure-%e2%80%98tis-a-little-bit-of-poland-in-the-touraine.

43 Wogue was a respected rabbi who was educated in France. In 1851, Salomon Munk and Adolph Franck established a chair of Jewish history at the Ecole Centrale Rabbinique at Metz; Wogue held that chair until his retirement in 1894. He was prolific and known for his French commentary to the Pentateuch with annotations from rabbinic sources (1860–1869). We do not know anything about his relationship to Soloveitchik but can assume that if he did the translation, he had some regard for the author and his work. His edition of Qol Qore is listed in the bibliography of the entry on him in The Jewish Encyclopedia. For a short, largely positive, review of Wogue’s 1870 translation, see “Bulletin Bibliographique,” in Archives Israélites: Revue Politique, Religieuse et Litteraire (April 15, 1870). I want to thank Eliyahu Stern for this reference.

44 A second edition of the French translation, just to Mark, appears in 1874. Soloveitchik noted that a few 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 Europe in this period. On the Haskalah more generally, see Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), challenges many of Feiner’s claims about the Haskalah and focuses on its flourishing in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. She argues that, as opposed to the rational frame in which it is usually understood, the Haskalah, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, was much closer to the Romantic movement and far less antagonistic to tradition than normally thought.

75 See W. Bruce Lincoln, Alexander’s Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).

76 See Israel Bartal, “British Missionaries in the Environs of Chabad” [in Hebrew], unpublished manuscript. I want to thank Professor Bartal for making this available to me in advance of its publication. Cf. Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “English Missionaries Look at Polish Jews,” Polin 27 (2015): 89–116.

77 Hayyim Heilman, Beit Rebbe (Berditchev, 1902), 93, 94, cited in Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 1.

78 See, e.g., John Klier, “State Politics and the Conversion of the Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Rovert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 92–112. As it happened, Shneur Zalman of Liady’s son Moshe converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. See David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 29–95. For two important studies of conversion to Christianity in an earlier period, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Todd Endelman, Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

79 Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 17 (my translation).

80 See Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 29–95.

81 See William Thomas Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews from 1809–1908 (London, 1908); and Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “Reformers, Missionaries, and Converts: Interactions Between the London Society and Jews in Warsaw in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Converts of Conviction, ed. D. Ruderman (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 9–26.

82 The stewardship of Nicholas I, who ruled 1894–1917, limited the work of the London Society and did not support the project of converting the Jews.

83 See Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 6–10. Endelman does, of course, treat important cases of conversion from conviction. See ibid., 225–276. Responding to Endelman, Litvak writes: “Trained in the Anglo-American school of social history, Endelman was more interested in Jewish ‘peddlers and hawkers, pickpockets and pugilists’ than in rabbis, reformers, and their middle-class patrons.” See Litvak, Haskalah, 51. On the project of the Russian government’s programto convert the Jews and more about educating them to be good Europeans, see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 66–69.

84 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 117.

85 I have checked a series of databases of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish periodicals in England during Soloveitchik’s lifetime, and his name does not appear either as an author or as a subject. This suggests that he was not an active participant in these debates, although the extent to which he knew about them remains unknown.

86 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 362.

87 Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism, first published in 1905, was a direct response to Adolf Harnack’s attack on Judaism titled The Essence of Christianity (German title was Was ist Christentum?), published in 1902. In a later essay, “Romantic Religion,” Baeck takes aim at Pauline Christianity and argues for Judaism’s superiority as a rational religion. For another example of a Jewish thinker who tried to argue for the utter incompatibility of Judaism and Christianity, see Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Judaism and Christianity: The Differences (New York: Jewish Book Club, 1943).

88 On McCaul, see David Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: The Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799–1863),” Jewish Historical Studies 47 (2015): 48–69; and E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism.

89 McCaul served as a missionary for the London Society in Warsaw, 1821–1830. On the London Society in Warsaw, see Jagodzinska, “Reformers, Missionaries and Converts,” 14–21. Philosemitism was not uncommon among Protestant missionaries. Franz Delitzsch also cultivated many friendships with Jews, even learning Yiddish, and defended Jews against anti-Semitic accusations. The same was true of Hermann Strack, who published two works of his defense of Jews in German: May Jews Be Called “Criminals” on Account of Their Religion, court proceedings of his 1893 defense of Jews in Berlin; and The Jews and Human Sacrifice, based on 1891 court testimonies he gave in the trial of Esther Solymosi.

90 See William Ayerst, “The Rev. Dr. McCaul and the Jewish Mission,” Jewish Intelligence and Monthly Account of the Proceedings of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, n.s. 4 (1864): 31–34, cited in Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews,” 51, 52. Cf. Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 246.

91 McCaul, The Old Paths, 24–32; and E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 491.

92 Alexander McCaul, Sketches of Judaism and Jews (London, 1838), 2.

93 See McCaul, The Old Paths, 652.

94 See David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 54, 55.

95 Even before coming to England, Soloveitchik likely had at least heard of McCaul’s work. In a letter from Isaac ber Levenson to David Luria in 1872, reflecting back on the late 1830s, Levenson writes: “McCaul’s work was read widely. Circulating in Vilna and St. Petersburg.” Cited in E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” p. 8 in typescript and n. 31.

96 On this, see E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism.”

97 See ibid., 485–486.

98 Houston Stuart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Elibron Classics, 2005). The Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile of the 1911 Munich edition.

99 E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 498. Others, such as Franz Delitzsch, argued similarly. Delitzsch favored Reform Judaism precisely because it diminished the Talmud in favor of prophetic Judaism, thus coming closer to the Jesus movement. See A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 410.

100 E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism,” 501–503.

101 Ibid., 504.

102 On Hoga, see Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga—Apostate and Penitent,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 15 (1939–1945): 121–149; and David Ruderman, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga: From Judaism to Christianity to Hebrew Christianity,” in idem, Converts of Conviction, 41–53. I want to thank Professor Ruderman for making this text available to me before its publication.

103 See Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 139.

104 See Ruderman, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga,” 44. For more on Hoga’s relationship to McCaul, see Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews.”

105 For an analysis of these works in some detail, see Ruderman, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga.”

106 Ibid., 9, 10 (in typescript).

107 Margoliouth studied in the yeshivas of Grodno and Ger before abandoning his family in Poland and migrating to England. He published a book about his trip to Palestine, with much autobiographical information, as A Pilgrimage to the Land of My Fathers in 1850. Cf. Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 242–243.

108 On Hoga’s critique of Reform, see Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 128: “He writes with vigor against the tendency of new-fashioned Jews of our age, and especially of some so-called Rabbis in Germany who wish to not be Jews but Germans.” On Hoga’s return to Judaism, see Shnayer Leiman, “The Baal Teshuva and the Emden-Eibeschuetz Controversy,” Judaic Studies 1 (1985): 3–26

109 See Ruderman, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga,” 14 (in typescript).

110 Cited in Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 128.

111 On this, see Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft,” in idem, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 233–254.

112 See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Kings,” chaps. 11–12.

113 Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), esp. 148–153.

114 See Byron Sherwin, “Who Do You Say That I Am (Mark 8:29): A New Jewish View of Jesus,” in Jesus Through Jewish Eyes, ed. B. Bruteau (New York: Orbis Books, 2001), 31–44.

115 For a lengthy discussion of this idea, see Maimonides, “Epistle on Resurrection,” in Epistles of Maimonides: Crisis in Leadership, trans. A. Halkin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 246–280. More generally, see Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

116 This issue was the subject of debate between Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) and Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840), both of whom lived during Soloveitchik’s lifetime. Luzzatto’s critique of Maimonides’ rejection of resurrection is defended by Krochmal in a sharp letter. See Krochmal, More Nevukhei Ha-Zeman (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2010), 427–432.

117 BT Mo’ed Qaṭan 28a, “Raba sat before Rabbi Naḥman. He saw him going to sleep [dying]…. Raba said to him: “Appear to me, master, in a dream.” He appeared to him. Raba asked him: “Did you, master, suffer pains?” Rabbi Naḥman said to him: “[As little] as taking hair out of a glass of milk [i.e., the separation of the soul from the body is as easy and sweet as that].”

118 See John G. Gager, Who Made Early Christianity?: The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 17–52. Others explore similar views. See, e.g., E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1983); Krister Stendhal, Paul Among the Jews and Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1976); Lloyd Gaston, Paul and Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); Daniel Langton, The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Of those mentioned, Gager makes the strongest case of Paul’s affinity with the Pharisees, which dovetails with Soloveitchik’s view.

119 See Theodor Herzl, “A Solution to the Jewish Question,” repr. in Israel in the Middle East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign Relations, Pre-1948 to the Present, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Itamar Rabinowitz (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 16–20. Cf. Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (Tel Aviv: Herzl Press, 1960), 9–10.

120 See Peter Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus, 2 vols. and database, ed. M. Meerson and trans. Yaakov Deutsch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).

121 Qol Qore (London, 1868), 1, 2; and Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 54, 55.

122 Naphtali Zevi Berlin (Neziv), “Se’ar Yisrael,” first published in his Rinat Yisrael and again as an appendix to Neziv’s commentary to Song of Songs. On the Neziv, see Gil Perl, The Pillar of Volozhin: Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin and the World of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Torah Scholarship (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012). Neziv’s small tract on anti-Semitism was published in English by Howard Joseph, Why Antisemitism?: A Translation of “The Remnant of Israel” (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996).

123 A few other rabbis in this period exhibited a positive view toward Christianity. One, Jonathan Eybeshutz (1690–1764), was a protagonist with Emden on the question of Sabbateanism but, like Emden, was quite sympathetic to Christianity. Eliezer Fleckeles (1754–1826) was also engaged in the anti-Sabbatean controversy but, like Emden and Eybeshutz, was sympathetic toward Christianity. Of these three figures, Soloveitchik mentions only Emden.

124 See, e.g., in his preface to the 1870 Paris ed. to the Hebrew Qol Qore.

125 Much has been written on Emden’s attitude toward Christianity. See, e.g., Harvey Falk, “Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Views on Christianity,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no. 1 (1982): 107–111; and, most recently, Jacob J. Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden, Sabbateanism, and Frankism: Attitudes Toward Christianity in the Eighteenth Century,” in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger, ed. J. J. Schachter and E. Carlebach (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 360–396; and Pawel Maciejko, Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement: 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 127–157.

126 This claim by Soloveitchik is not a novum but has precedent among certain Christians as far back as the third or fourth century, most prominently in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which were viewed by people such as Reform theologian Kaufmann Kohler as proof of the symmetry between the two religions. See, e.g., Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 8.6–7, which reads: “Jesus is concealed from the Hebrews, who have taken Moses as their teacher, and Moses is hidden from those who have believed Jesus…. For there is a single teaching by both, God accepts one who has believed either of these.” Others, such as the eighteenth-century Deist John Tolland, in his Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718), make this case as well. Kohler wrote his essays on Christianity after Soloveitchik, and there is no indication that Kohler knew about Qol Qore (even though he studied with Samshon Rafael Hirsch, who we know had a copy of the book!), and it is not at all clear that Soloveitchik had read Pseudo-Clementines or even Graetz’s work published in his lifetime (Graetz also cites Pseudo-Clementines). See Kaufmann Kohler, “Clementina, or Pseudo-Clementine Literature,” in Jewish Encyclopedia 4:114–116; and, more generally, Yaakov Ariel, “Christianity Through Reform Eyes: Kaufmann Kohler’s Scholarship on Christianity,” American Jewish History 89 (2001): 181–191; and Reed, “Secrecy, Suppression, and the Jewishness of the Origins of Christianity.”

127 Emden, ‘Etz Avot (Amsterdam, 1751), to M Avot 5:22, ‘Etz Avot 58b, cited in Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden,” 366n10.

128 See, e.g., Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden,” 388.

129 Qol Qore (London, 1868), 3. Writing for a Christian audience, the prefatory note speaks of “we” with regard to Christians. Either this was rhetorical on Soloveitchik’s part, or a Christian wrote these words summarizing Soloveitchik’s sentiment.

130 Qol Qore (Jerusalem, 1985), 8, 9; and Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 126, 127.