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

by Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, Shaul Magid (Editor), Jordan Gayle Levy (Translator), Peter Salovey (Contribution by)

Overview

Born in Slutzk, Russia, in 1805, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik is a largely forgotten member of the prestigious Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. Before Hayyim Soloveitchik developed the standard Brisker method of Talmudic study, or Joseph Dov Soloveitchik helped to found American Modern Orthodox Judaism, Elijah Soloveitchik wrote Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Qol Qore drew on classic rabbinic literature, and particularly on the works of Moses Maimonides, to argue for the compatibility of Christianity with Judaism. To this day, it remains the only rabbinic work to embrace the compatibility of Orthodox Judaism and the Christian Bible.

In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Qol Qore. In his contextualizing introduction, Magid explains that Qol Qore offers a window onto the turbulent historical context of nineteenth-century European Jewry. With violent anti-Semitic activity on the rise in Europe, Elijah Soloveitchik was unique in believing that the roots of anti-Semitism were theological, based on a misunderstanding of the New Testament by both Jews and Christians. His hope was that the Qol Qore, written in Hebrew and translated into French, German, and Polish, would reach Jewish and Christian audiences, urging each to consider the validity of the other's religious principles. In an era characterized by fractious debates between Jewish communities, Elijah Soloveitchik represents a voice that called for radical unity amongst Jews and Christians alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812296136
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Series:	Jewish Culture and Contexts
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
Sales rank:	729,223
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Indiana University, Bloomington and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism and American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society. Jordan Gayle Levy is an independent translator. Peter Salovey is President of Yale University and the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the Jewish Jesus, Christianity, and the JewsThe 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."
—Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Emet ve-Emunah, 69Elijah 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. 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. Most other similar works at that time were written by Jewish converts to Christianity or by rabbinic figures who polemicized against Christianity. Soon after Soloveitchik, Moses Montefiore penned a two-volume commentary to the New Testament, The Synoptic Gospels, first published in 1909 and in a second edition in 1927.

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. 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"). 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.

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.

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. 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).

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). Vilna was Lithuania's Jewish center, known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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." 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.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. 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. However, Dov Hyman found two appropriations for the German edition that were apparently from non-Jews, suggesting that a non-Jewish readership existed and was desired.

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. 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. 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 Hazakah 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." 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."

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." 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. 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.

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. 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. Since the original Hebrew commentary to Mark is not extant, we used Wogue's French translation for Mark.

In 1877, a German edition of Qol Qore appeared, translated from the 1870 French by Moritz Greenfeld 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. 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. 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 JamesBible 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; 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. Ismar Schorsch called Delitzsch the "finest Christian Hebraist of the nineteenth century." 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." 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.

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." In addition, when the first Hebrew-Greek concordance was published in Tiberias in 1974, the authors based their concordance on Delitzsch's translation.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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." 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 DelitzschHebrew 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). This school took many forms, some leading to more positive assessments of Judaism, and some to more negative ones. Jewish scholars interested in Christianity, such as Abraham Geiger, in many ways were responding critically to various elements of the Tübingen School. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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."

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.

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. 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." 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." 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. 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. 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. And it is his rabbinic training in harmonization that enables him to do that.

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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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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." 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.

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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. 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.

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. Endelman writes that "with few exceptions conversion was a secular rather than a spiritual act." 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.

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." 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. 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). 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. 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. He also criticized Napoleon's brother Jerome's handling of the Jews in France. 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." McCaul's missionizing message was for Jews to return to their authentic Mosaic religion that is best represented by Protestant Christianity. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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). 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." 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.

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." 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. 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). 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. 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.

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." 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. 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 TheControversy 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). 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.

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." 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. 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. 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. 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.

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). 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. 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. 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.

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. 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: "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.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. 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. It is thus predictable that Soloveitchik would cite Emden's thoughts about Christianity, which were, in his time, revolutionary in their own right.

Comparisons between Emden and Soloveitchik are reasonable, and Soloveitchik himself may have viewed Emden as a precedent. 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." 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." 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. 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." 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."

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Peter Salovey
Introduction: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the Jewish Jesus, Christianity, and the Jews
A Note on the Text
A Translator's Foreword, by Jordan Gayle Levy

The Commentaries
Dedication
A Word to the Reader
Author's Preface
The Gospel According to Matthew, with Commentary
The Gospel According to Mark, with Commentary

Bibliography
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"[A] phenomenal and ground-breaking volume...This book should be on the bookshelf of any and every rabbi, minister, priest, Sunday School teacher, instructor in Judaism and/or Christianity in modern times, Christian divinity students, Jewish seminarians, and laypersons who care to cultivate the love and compassion taught by precept and example in the very best of Judaism and Christianity, from the time of Jesus to the present. Teachers and students who study Magid’s book will learn to appreciate that the until now relatively obscure Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik was a vital link in that chain of love. Thanks are due Shaul Magid for making him known to the world at large."

The Review of Rabbinic Judaism

"The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament is a fascinating book on one of the most intriguing and forgotten rabbinic characters of the nineteenth century. Elijah Soloveitchik was, to be sure, an idiosyncratic figure, but the story of his life and work is extremely instructive for those interested in the Jewish Enlightenment as well as Jewish-Christian relations today."

Tel Aviv University Ishay Rosen-Zvi

"The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament is a fascinating book on one of the most intriguing and forgotten rabbinic characters of the nineteenth century. Elijah Soloveitchik was, to be sure, an idiosyncratic figure, but the story of his life and work is extremely instructive for those interested in the Jewish Enlightenment as well as Jewish-Christian relations today."—Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Tel Aviv University

From the Publisher