I briefly mention Moore’s attempt to expose the underlying supersessionism of Christian writing on Jews and Judaism because Soloveitchik implicitly argues similarly, without knowing the historical trajectory of Moore’s subjects. Soloveitchik’s assumption in his commentary is that rabbinic teaching—including Maimonides—can help clarify the sayings of Jesus that are often misunderstood (by both Jews and Christians) when viewed outside the rabbinic orbit. Unlike Moore, Soloveitchik is not a historian; and unlike Bousset and the others, both Christians and Jews, Soloveitchik does not view Judaism and Christianity as categorically distinct. Like Moore, he argues that it is the rabbinic corpus that can help us clarify what Jesus was teaching. According to Soloveitchik, such teaching reveals that Jesus says nothing that stands in opposition to rabbinic teaching, making Jesus’ “Christianity” nothing more than a form of Judaism. Unlike Reform Jewish thinkers, from Abraham Geiger to Kaufmann Kohler, Soloveitchik does not view Jesus as a “reformer” or even a rabbinic rebel but rather a normative teacher of the Mosaic message. It would thus be interesting to ponder what Moore would have thought about Soloveitchik’s commentary, which he apparently had not seen. It is a good example of precisely what Moore was suggesting, even though it, too, had a theological agenda: the undermining of supersessionism as well as the Jewish claim of Jewish superiority.
The Attempt to Convert the Jews in the Nineteenth Century: Situating Qol Qore as a Response to Conversion
Before turning to the Sitz im Leben of Soloveitchik’s commentary, a short methodological note is in order. Much of New Testament scholarship in the time of Soloveitchik was based on the historical-critical method, initiated largely by the Tübingen School. In the case of the synoptic Gospels, this meant focusing on the differences between the Gospels in an attempt to decide which version was the earliest and also distinguishing the setting of each Gospel in relation to the historical Jesus. One interesting thing about Soloveitchik’s resisting this method is that it has often been thought that the historical-critical method enabled modern Jewish thinkers to engage with the New Testament to make their case against it—or in favor of its proximity to rabbinic ideas.
Soloveitchik was a harmonizer and a throwback to premodern renderings of the New Testament. His Lithuanian Talmudic training resulted in his reading the New Testament the way a Tosafist would read the Talmudic text, noticing contradictions in the text or its commentaries (usually Rashi) and using other texts to resolve the discrepancy.71 Soloveitchik often notes an apparent contradiction in the text or its reception (that is, the way it has been viewed as anti-Jewish or against rabbinic ideology) and looks for a precedent in Talmudic literature to debunk that claim that he then reads into the text in the Gospel to solve a misunderstanding. The result is that he often offers readings of the text that, stripped of an entire history of Christian interpretation—not only historical interpretation but also Christian anti-Jewish interpretation—yield a Gospel that may have actually been closer to earlier Jewish-Christian texts in late antiquity. One example would be a comparison of Soloveitchik with the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (fourth century), which espouses a reading of the Gospel of Matthew and an understanding of Christianity that is strikingly similar to Soloveitchik’s views.72 Since I assume that Soloveitchik did not read Pseudo-Clementines, I do not engage in comparing the two; I simply point out that Soloveitchik’s attempt to erase the categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in his time takes us back to a much earlier time of what was later called “Jewish-Christianity,” likely with different considerations and different goals.73 And it is his rabbinic training in harmonization that enables him to do that.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were incredibly fertile as well as precarious for the Jews of Eastern Europe, both for those who remained there and for those who immigrated to the West yet remained attached to the ways of their Eastern European ancestors. The Haskalah that had blossomed in Berlin with the circle around Moses Mendelssohn a few generations earlier had now made its way deep into the recesses of the Pale of Settlement, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where most Jews lived.74 For example, Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861, as part of a larger project of reforms, enabled Jews to be more integrated into the empire.75 More important for our purposes was the reign of Alexander I during the Napoleonic period (1801–1825). As Israel Bartal suggests, Alexander I’s spiritual, even mystical, nature and traditional inclination were viewed positively by many leading rabbinic figures of the period—for example, Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of the Chabad dynasty.76 In his Beit Rebbe, Chabad historian Hayyim Heilman writes: “On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, [the rebbe] said to me: ‘If Bonaparte is victorious, Israel will become wealthy, and its material status will rise, but they will become distant in their hearts from their Father in heaven. But if Alexander wins, Israel will be poorer, and its material status will decline, but their hearts will be closer to their Father in heaven.”77 Shneur Zalman’s astute observation of the devil’s bargain facing the Jews of his time in the Napoleonic period had another consequence that he may not have seen. Alexander’s spirituality also resulted in the initiation of a concerted effort to convert the Jews of Russia to Christianity, what Alexander firmly believed was the true spiritual legacy of the Russian Empire.78 As Bartal notes, Alexander I “believed with a full heart that he could enable the Jews to see the true tradition of the Tanakh and remove the barrier placed before them by the Talmud that prevented their belief in Jesus. And they would truly become Hebrew Christians. At this time, the Russian czar opened the gates of the empire to Christians from the West to initiate an international campaign to rectify the citizenship states of the Jews of Europe.”79 In 1817, Alexander I established the Society of Israelite Christians, whose purpose was to support converts and to serve as a resource for Jews interested in converting to Christianity. Part of the spiritual bargain that Shneur Zalman spoke about but could not quite see was that religious freedom included in Alexander’s victory would be a concerted effort to convert the Jews as part of a broader and enlightened emancipatory program. As we know, Shneur Zalman’s own son Moshe converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.80
Given that this story predates Soloveitchik’s time, a few important features will play a role as we move into the nineteenth century. The first is the introduction of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews to Eastern Europe.81 This Protestant missionary organization based in England was active in the empire and Poland for much of the nineteenth century, often using Jewish converts such as Nehemiah Solomon (1790–n.d.) and Stanislaus Hoga (1791–1860) as translators and emissaries to approach Jewish communities and teach them about conversion. This resulted in the appearance of Yiddish translations of the New Testament, the first likely translated by Solomon in 1821. As Jews were experiencing a loosening of restrictions in Russia and Poland during the Napoleonic period and emancipation was slowly exposing Jews to the wider world, the program of converting the Jews, not necessarily as an act of malice but ostensibly as an act of inclusion (at least in the case of Alexander I), became a serious issue for Jewish communities.82
Todd Endelman argues