Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 217delegitimize its fi ndings and, by default, to reinstate tradition. It does not
seem to have occurred to him that the critics could occasionally be wrong
without tradition thereby being proven right.
Th e mention of a few Jewish scholars roughly contemporary with Hoff -
mann should suffi ce to show that his approach was not decisive or even
characteristic and that throughout the period, Jewish scholars responded to
Pentateuchal criticism in various ways. At one extreme, mention should be
made of I. M. Wise (1819 – 1900) and Harold Wiener (1875 – 1929). Th e for-
mer, though a leader of American Reform, simply declared that the written
Torah was divine, subject to only such inquiry as upholds its divine nature.
Th e latter, a more traditional Jew devoted to Jewish rebirth in Palestine,
also vigorously rejected Pentateuchal criticism but attempted, by scholarly
means, to uphold the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. At the other extreme
is the Polish-born American scholar Arnold B. Ehrlich (1846 – 1919), who,
like Kalisch, diverged from the path of the conventional Documentary
Hypothesis but engaged in his own brand of Higher Criticism, as well as
extensive text-critical speculation, in his commentaries on the Torah and
other biblical books. Ehrlich’s work is characterized by a thorough accep-
tance of the critical method.
Th ough biblical scholarship continued to develop among Jews in Amer-
ica, it cannot be denied that the Jewish religious agenda exercised an infl u-
ence on the directions it took, at least as long as it was mainly confi ned to
the rabbinical seminaries. Th e great rabbinic scholar and religious leader
Solomon Schechter, who vehemently opposed Higher Criticism (which
he famously branded “Higher anti-Semitism”), refrained from appointing
a critically oriented Bible scholar to the faculty of the Jewish Th eological
Seminary of America, of which he was the head, and his policy of keep-
ing Pentateuchal criticism outside the pale of Jewish studies remained in
force for decades, not only at the Seminary but in Jewish scholarship in
general. Th e only real exception was the American-born Julian Morgen-
stern (1881 – 1976), who began to publish his source-critical and historical-
critical studies of the Pentateuch in the early 1920s. He too was known for
his idiosyncratic divergences from the accepted source theory; it would
seem that among Jewish scholars, even those who accepted Higher Critical
methodology could not shake their aversion to the theory associated with
the name of Wellhausen.
Following the establishment of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Jeru-
salem in 1924, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem became a major center
for biblical studies. Here, too, Pentateuchal criticism was initially avoided,