214 Baruch J. Schwartz
to the Pentateuch and to the history of ancient Israel. His commentaries
on Genesis and Exodus are philological-critical though not outstanding,
but his encyclopedic commentary on Leviticus is by far the most thorough
critical commentary written on a book of the Torah until quite recently. It
makes extensive use of rabbinic and medieval commentators when these
are found to be in accord with the demands of philological science, and it
contains exhaustive, comparative study of ancient Near Eastern and clas-
sical sources that shed light on the Pentateuchal laws. Kalisch accepted
the then-current view that the law, and the ritual law associated with the
Documentary Hypothesis’s P (Priestly) document in particular, belongs to
a late, postexilic stage in Israel’s development, but since he wrote before the
appearance of Wellhausen’s work, his reconstruction of Israelite religious
history is unconstrained by the doctrinaire system imposed by Wellhau-
sen’s school. Unfortunately, the fact that he preceded Wellhausen caused
his work, like that of most early and mid-nineteenth-century scholars, to
be largely forgotten. It does not seem that Kalisch anywhere accounted
for the anomalous acceptance of radical Pentateuchal criticism by a tra-
ditional Jew (Kalisch served as secretary to the British chief rabbi!); the
intellectual honesty dictated by the climate of the age seems to have been
his only standard.
Far more signifi cant for the history of Jewish scholarship were the works
of the German rabbi David Zvi Hoff mann (1843 – 1921), professor at, and
ultimately head of, the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary established by E.
Hildesheimer in Berlin.10 In some ways a spiritual disciple of S. R. Hirsch,
Hoff mann diff ered from Hirsch in his affi rmation of the applicability of
philological tools to Jewish studies. He is rightly considered the fi rst mod-
ern scholar to place the study of Talmud and rabbinic texts on sound philo-
logical footing, and many of the earliest critical editions of rabbinic texts, as
well as the fi rst strides in the higher criticism of Talmudic literature, were
made by Hoff mann. He was, however, an arch-conservative in his approach
to religion and Jewish practice, and though he did not feel that the histori-
cal study of the later stages of Jewish religious evolution posed a serious
theological problem, he believed that the foundation on which rabbinic Ju-
daism stood was the antiquity and divinity of the Pentateuch and the insep-
arability of the Written and Oral Torahs. Biblical studies were growing by
leaps and bounds, and the accomplishments of the great linguists, histori-
ans, and commentators of late eighteenth-century Europe were too impres-
sive to ignore, yet for Hoff mann, to embrace the now-dominant Wellhau-
senian model of the nature of the Pentateuchal literature was unthinkable.