Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 211turned traditional Judaism into Orthodox Judaism by asserting that the
belief in the divine origin of the Torah is the central tenet of the Jewish
faith. Henceforth the lines were drawn: the “creed” of the Orthodox Jew
consisted of the rejection of Pentateuchal criticism. A life committed to the
classical mode of Jewish piety, it has been argued ever since Hirsch, is pos-
sible only if the Jew concedes that certain areas are closed to inquiry, that
religious life is the result of a “leap of faith” in the divinity of the Torah — a
faith that runs counter to reason. Th ough Hirsch advocated secular learn-
ing and modernity, he rejected any synthesis between them and the study
of Torah. Th is obscurantism — the acceptance of the modern world and
modern science in all areas other than Jewish learning — remained, more
than almost any other single feature, normative in modern Orthodoxy
throughout most of its existence.
Among Hirsch’s more noteworthy successors was the commentary on
the Pentateuch by British Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz (1872 – 1946). Hertz was
the apologist par excellence, explaining away or ignoring the discrepancies
in the text and making highly selective use of the writings of non-Jewish
scholars, generally when he found their positions sympathetic to the tra-
ditional view of the Bible. Th ough he was not a strict creationist and made
some accommodation between the Bible and natural sciences, he was par-
ticularly fond of adducing the evidence of archeology to “corroborate” bib-
lical narratives. Indeed, the tendentious argument that since archeological
evidence occasionally provides partial verifi cation of biblical history, the
Bible is thus proven to be fully factual, and since the ever-unfolding evi-
dence of ancient Near Eastern cultures provides a plausible background
for the biblical accounts, the Bible should at least receive the benefi t of the
doubt, has made its way into scholarly circles as well. Hertz also launched
into fi erce diatribe against the Higher Critics and the Documentary Hy-
pothesis. Hertz’s Humash was the only commentary ever seen or read by
hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Jews for much of the mid-
twentieth century.
Attempts at AccommodationAttempts to bridge the gap between traditional Jewish theology and the
critical view of the Torah generally fl oundered on the apparent impossi-
bility of maintaining Jewish law to be divine if the Torah is not the literal
word of God and rabbinic law and teaching are oft en not the original sense
of the Torah text. Mendelssohn’s option — accepting Jewish practice on the