Concepts of Scripture in Yehezkel Kaufmann 233Th e inquisitive rigor or what his then-classmate and lifelong friend Zal-
man Shazar (1889 – 1974), the third president of Israel, called the “zeal for
truth” that characterizes Kaufmann’s writings began to be manifest in this
period.11 In 1914, at the age of twenty-four, Kaufmann published his fi rst
major article, titled “Th e Judaism of Ahad Ha’Am,” in which he refuted
Ahad Ha’Am’s seminal notion of Judaism as a product of the collective
will to survival. Instead, Kaufmann argued that it was religion and not the
presumed will that preserved the Jewish people as a distinct minority in
exile. Kaufmann seemed to have little tolerance for what appeared to him
as unfounded quasi-scholarship — including Ahad Ha’Am’s. Th roughout
Kaufmann’s work, there is a missionary sense of intellectual responsibil-
ity, from which he published empirical observations that even he knew his
readership would not accept.12
Kaufmann in turn sought systematic training in modern secular educa-
tion. In 1913, he entered Berne University in Switzerland to study philoso-
phy, Semitic languages, and biblical studies. He completed his Ph.D. in phi-
losophy (summa cum laude) in 1918, aft er which he went to Berlin, where
he devoted himself to the study of history and sociology for about eight
years until his immigration to Palestine. Around this time, Kaufmann also
studied the writings of Willhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911), a German philoso-
pher of history and an intellectual historian who signifi cantly infl uenced
the development of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the methodology
of the social sciences.
Dilthey’s infl uence — especially, his empirical analysis of a lived experi-
ence and worldview as refl ected in cultural phenomena — in Kaufmann’s
work is apparent. In Diltheyan terms, Kaufmann conceived of the Bible as
a cultural expression that manifests a lived experience of ancient Israel. He
sought to explore how the monotheistic mind obtained a deeper insight
into the structures and functioning of the world and life, as contrasted to
the mind-sets of people in surrounding polytheistic cultures.
On the Historical Formation of the Bible —
From Literature to Scripture
As an empiricist, Kaufmann has no trouble assuming that the Torah
originally existed not as a fi xed canonical “book” but as a kind of didactic
“literature,” the roots of which may reach back to the time of Moses. He