Soloveitchik is one of the few traditional rabbis in general, and certainly in Eastern Europe, who wrote more positively about the possibility of diminishing anti-Semitism, at least in those decades. He claimed that the fault lay with Jews and Christians—Jews because they refuse to take the New Testament seriously and Christians because they refuse to acknowledge the symmetry between the teaching of the Gospel and Judaism. An exception to this rule was Ya’akov Emden (1697–1776), a leading central European rabbinic figure and one of the most celebrated rabbinic authorities of his generation.123 It is thus predictable that Soloveitchik would cite Emden’s thoughts about Christianity, which were, in his time, revolutionary in their own right.124
Comparisons between Emden and Soloveitchik are reasonable, and Soloveitchik himself may have viewed Emden as a precedent.125 Upon closer examination, however, Emden and Soloveitchik have little in common other than their belief in the morality (and non-idolatry) of Christianity and their belief that Jesus did not come to eradicate the law for Jews. Unlike Soloveitchik, Emden, who was familiar with the Gospels (he cites them often) never wrote extensively about them and never quite claimed, as Soloveitchik did, that there is no categorical distinction between Judaism and Jesus’ “Christianity.”126 Emden does mention in at least one place that he thinks that many Christians “would be diligent in the analysis of the Gemara … and still today are found among them many learned ones who love our Talmud and study it.”127 But in general, Emden’s positive assessment of Christianity, certainly provocative in his day, especially given his stature, does not make the more radical claims of symmetry between Judaism and Christianity that Soloveitchik proposes in his commentary. Perhaps part of the difference between them is the underlying context of each one’s work. Emden, as J. J. Schachter notes, used Christianity as a way to falsify and demonize Sabbateanism as a new religion, one that should be condemned by Jews and Christians alike.128 Soloveitchik may have been responding to the increased conversion of Jews to Christianity through the missionary work of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews and other organizations. His commentary may thus be more focused on teaching missionaries why converting the Jews is unnecessary (which is why he published his commentary in German, French, and Polish before he published the original Hebrew) and to teach Jews why they need not convert in order to live an authentic Jewish life that coheres with the teachings of Jesus. Both Emden and Soloveitchik seem to believe that their positive assessments would curb anti-Semitism, a goal that, as we know, was unsuccessful. At any rate, in looking for some precedent for Soloveitchik’s commentary, Emden, whose work on this subject and others was likely familiar to Soloveitchik, would be a good candidate.
Soloveitchik concludes that his commentary resolved three basic misunderstandings between Jews and Christians: “I. That our Jewish brethren regard us [Christians] as those who have no faith, and that the summit of the Christian belief centers in the eradication of the law of Moses. II. That we Christians are their opponents, and merely seek their subversion. III. That the generality of Jews, as well as Christians, being unacquainted with what constitutes the Judaism of the present day (viz. the Rabbinic tradition) look upon the chasm that separates Judaism from Christianity to be of such magnitude as to render all efforts of reconciliation in vain.”129 George Ekeroth, then director of the Jerusalem Center for Biblical Studies and Research, wrote a short introduction to the 1985 reprint of the Hebrew Qol Qore, in which he succinctly made the case for why this obscure book from over a century ago should be reprinted.
The author’s original motivation is an attempt to bring peace and understanding between Judaism and Christianity. He implied that if this could be achieved, it had the potential of bringing peace to the whole world. We don’t have evidence that his objective was realized to any great degree during his lifetime. In view of the great progress that has been made in recent years in dialogue between Jews and Christians, at least at the academic level, it is possible that the book was written “for such a time as this.”130
Whether such a prediction is true, I do not know; but it speaks to the overt intention of Soloveitchik’s work, even a kind of messianic optimism that this work could “bring about world peace.”
This commentary, constructed by someone deeply knowledgeable of classical Judaism, executed with passion, candor, and sincerity, and driven by an unyielding, albeit naïve, belief that the author had solved a millennia-old problem, offers us a window into the mind of one Eastern European Jew in modernity who courageously confronted what Jews mostly took for granted: the irreconcilability of Judaism and Christianity. The history of the twentieth century was not kind to Soloveitchik’s prediction, and, perhaps partly as a consequence, his work wallowed in obscurity until now. Perhaps in this century, we can examine it anew, not necessarily as a template for the reconstruction of Judaism and Christianity as much as a valiant attempt to bend the arc toward an era of coexistence and tolerance built on the dunghill of mutual animus and hatred.
Notes
1 The phrase derekh eretz kadma le-Torah was popularized by R. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch but was based on midrash Leviticus Rabbah 9:3. It literally means “derekh eretz precedes Torah.” The Kotzker rebbe turns the word kadma from a verb to a noun to mean “introduction” (hakdama).
2 See Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 190–233; and see Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003).
3 See J. A. Vorster, “Jewish Views on Jesus: An Assessment of the Jewish Answer to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pretoria, 1975), 89, 90. Cf. Donald Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 28n19: “Probably the first Jew to write a commentary to the New Testament was Elie Soloweyczyk, who wrote in Hebrew and published his work in Paris in 1875. It was later translated into French and German.” Hagner gets the publishing information a bit wrong. It was originally written in Hebrew and first published in French, German, and Polish before it was finally published in the Hebrew original, soon before Soloveitchik’s death.
4 One exception to the rule is the work of Jacob Emden (1697–1776). While Emden did not translate the Gospels, his work on Christianity from a rabbinic perspective was not polemical but quite conciliatory. Below I will discuss Emden and how Soloveitchik viewed him as a role model. Work of Jews on Jesus and Christianity flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, but Soloveitchik seems to have been the first to publish a commentary on the Gospels.
5 Montefiore sought the help of Israel Abrams for his commentary. Abrams was an expert in rabbinic literature and a professor at Cambridge University. His own work on Christianity was published in 2 vols. as Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (1902 and 1929).
6 On Hayyim of Volozhin, see Norman Lamm, Torah Lishma (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989); M. S. Shmuckler, Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin [in Hebrew], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1968); Esther Iznamin, “The Structure and Content of Nefesh Ha-Hayyim of R. Hayyim of Volozhin” [in Hebrew], in Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003), 185–196; and my “Deconstructing the Mystical: The Anti-Mystical Kabbalism in Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Hayyim,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 9, no. 1 (1999): 21–67. Most recently, see Avinoam Frankel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2015). I will explain Soloveitchik’s relationship to Hayyim of Volozhin in the section below on Soloveitchik’s lineage.
7 See Hayyim