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

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

      Qol Qore: The Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Delitzsch emerged on the scene in 1836, in his twenties, with the publication of A History of Jewish Poetry (here one can see the affinity to Zunz, whose work focused on Hebrew liturgy). His book Jewish Artisan Life in the Time of Jesus (published in London in 1906) offered a positive rendering of Jews in the time of Jesus and placed Jesus solidly in his Jewish context. Finally, in the early 1870s, around the time Soloveitchik completed his commentary, Delitzsch published a novella, A Day in Capernaeum, which depicted a day in the life of Jesus. Important for our concerns is that the endnotes to the novella are replete with rabbinic sources to verify his reconstruction of a day in the life of Jesus,