210 Baruch J. Schwartz
anew — the Jewish religion in each generation. Th e specifi c nature of re-
form has diff ered with time, place, and movement and has been character-
ized by greater or lesser loyalty and adherence to traditional Jewish law and
practice, but this loyalty, even at its greatest, has been a matter of religious
conservatism rather than a dogmatic commitment to revealed norms. Th e
common denominator remains the same: the notion that Pentateuchal
criticism has rendered the belief in Judaism as revealed religion obsolete.
Jewish OrthodoxyTraditional rabbis remained aloof from the fi ndings of, and the threat
posed by, Pentateuchal criticism for some time. Th e yeshivah world of cen-
tral and eastern Europe was unaff ected in the main by secular learning, and
the eff ect of modern biblical studies on the Torah commentaries produced
by eighteenth-century rabbinic sages is confi ned to matters of grammar
and lexicography. Th is tendency simply to ignore nontraditional learning
has never ceased to prevail: even aft er the destruction of European Jewry
in the Holocaust and the reconstruction of the traditional academies in
America and especially in Israel in the late twentieth century, the emphasis
on Talmud and disdain for secular knowledge, particularly in humanistic
disciplines, led to an increased ignorance of critical study of the Bible and
indeed to ignorance of the Bible itself.
Two interrelated factors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
brought occasional representatives of the rabbinic world into the critical
discussion of the Pentateuch: the Jewish Enlightenment in western Europe
and the threat posed by the reformers in these countries. Rabbinic ortho-
doxy thus entered the fi eld of Bible criticism not out of any desire to fur-
ther the study of the Pentateuch but rather as a reaction to a danger that it
perceived as approaching from two directions: practical and intellectual.
Western European Orthodoxy’s response is typifi ed in the writings of
S. R. Hirsch (1808 – 1888), who, like some of his eighteenth-century prede-
cessors, was a vehement opponent of Reform. His polemical aim fi nds am-
ple expression in his commentaries. He viewed the divine word as primary
data not subject to inquiry and utterly rejected the idea that the ancient
historical context in which the Torah came into existence could be of any
importance in determining its meaning.
Th is disregard for history and this maximalist position with regard to
the divine role in revelation ultimately became defi nitive of modern Or-
thodoxy, of which Hirsch is rightly seen as a founder. Hirsch’s writings