Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 223features of its culture were concerned, became the primary sphere of hu-
manistic interest.
So it was that Yehezkel Kaufmann, who as a young scholar in eastern
Europe and later in Germany and Switzerland had embraced the national-
cultural revival that swept the educated Jewish world, ultimately settled
in Eretz-Yisrael, there to devote his intense scholarly career to the earli-
est stages of Israel’s national development. He pursued this study with the
fullest possible acceptance of scholarly method. Kaufmann was not suspi-
cious of science or critical inquiry, and he belonged to the new generation
of Jewish literati — unencumbered by religious inhibitions, curious and in-
novative in the extreme, iconoclastic to a fault. Kaufmann rather rejected
what he perceived as uncritical in the works of the critics: not critical in-
quiry per se but its misapplication, not objective, philological study but the
highly speculative, preconceived, and at base negative view of Israel’s an-
cient culture that informed much of the philological study of the Bible in
the nineteenth century.13
Th ough Kaufmann made his major contributions to biblical scholar-
ship, he was not only a Bible scholar. He was an independent thinker, an
essayist on issues of Jewish national importance, and a historian par ex-
cellence. He aimed to write a comprehensive history of the Jews and of
their religious civilization from ancient times down to the destruction of
the Second Temple. Toledot Ha-emunah itself was begun with this express
aim in mind and had been preceded (in 1929 – 30) by Golah ve-Nekhar (Ex-
ile and Alienation), in which Kaufmann imposed a systematic conceptual
structure on Jewish history that was to inform all of his later works as well.
He was ultimately prevented from carrying out his entire plan, preferring
to concentrate on the earliest stages of biblical history. Aft er completing
three volumes of Toledot — arriving at the end of First Temple times — he
turned to the study of the conquest of Canaan and remained occupied with
this period, writing full-length commentaries on Joshua and Judges. To -
ledot came to a close with the appearance of the volume on the postexilic
age (1957; Kaufmann died in 1963). But though the essence of the work was
a strictly philological study of the biblical literature, the entire structure, as
expressed in the name of the work, was religio-historical.
It bears emphasizing that Kaufmann was probably the fi rst Jewish
scholar to appreciate fully the import of Higher Criticism. Kaufmann
alone recognized that the Wellhausenian structure was not simply a mat-
ter of how many authors participated in writing the Torah and how much
substantive disharmony can be found in its pages. Kaufmann saw that the