218 Baruch J. Schwartz
and only with the passage of time did the growing community of biblical
scholars in Eretz-Yisrael begin to take up this arm of the discipline. Not
all of them were willing to do so with the same dispassionate objectivity
they reserved for other areas of biblical studies. Noteworthy in this con-
text is M. Z. Segal (1876 – 1968), professor of Bible at the Hebrew University
from 1926.11 Segal, born in Lithuania, received traditional rabbinic training
as well as an English university education and began his career in biblical
studies while serving in rabbinical positions in England. He applied the
most rigorous critical methods in all areas of biblical studies, including the
history of the Hebrew language and lexicography, biblical poetics, canon-
ization, text criticism and biblical historiography, Apocrypha, and Dead
Sea Scrolls. Yet when he came to the Pentateuch — and he did so regularly
in his teaching, though he wrote on the topic only late in life (in his articles
appearing from 1938 on; in his Mevo HaMiqra [1946]; and, in English form,
in Th e Pentateuch, Its Composition and Authorship [1968]) — he insisted
not only on Mosaic authorship (with some minor exceptions) and literary
unity but on the divinely inspired nature of the Written Torah. Th e Torah
was sui generis for Segal; its origin was divine, and its literary nature had to
be explained on the basis of that postulate alone.
Two scholars may be credited with having brought Pentateuchal studies
to Jerusalem and thence to mainstream Jewish academia: the Italian-born
rabbi Umberto (Moshe David) Cassuto (1883 – 1951) and the Ukrainian-
born Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889 – 1963). Both, not surprisingly, were trained
in European universities and had begun their scholarly activity in bibli-
cal studies before coming to Israel. Th ough Cassuto was the later to ar-
rive (1939), his approach to the Pentateuch had already been articulated in
an Italian article appearing some eleven years earlier (“Studi sulla Genesi,”
1928) and presented in detail in his full-length work La Questione della
Genesi (1934). Kaufmann had settled in Eretz-Yisrael in 1928 and pub-
lished earlier contributions to biblical studies (“Probleme der israelitisch-
jüdischen Religionsgeschichte”) in 1931 and 1933, but his detailed work on
the Pentateuch began to become available with the appearance of the fi rst
volume of his Toledot HaEmunah Hayisre’elit (Th e History of Israelite Reli-
gion) in 1937. Th e two scholars were independent of each other, owing fi rst
of all to their introverted personalities and dissimilarity of approach but
also to the fact that Kaufmann was not invited to the faculty of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem until 1949, having spent the intervening years, his
most productive ones, in Haifa.
It will be convenient to begin with Cassuto.12 Cassuto was a trained and