232 Job Y. Jindo
Formative Period: Kaufmann’s Th eoretical Framework
Kaufmann was born in 1889 in the province of Podolia, Ukraine, and died
in 1963 in Jerusalem. His immigration to Palestine in 1928 roughly corre-
sponds to the shift in his intellectual life — from the formative period of
learning and researching to the vocational period of teaching and publish-
ing. In the second period, he was a senior teacher of Hebrew subjects at a
prestigious high school, the Reali Gymnasium in Haifa, from 1929 to 1949,
and later, a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from
1949 to 1957. Th e fi rst period is pertinent to the present topic, namely, his
conception of the Bible.9
In the Russian Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, where Kaufmann was born and raised, the question of Jewish survival
engrossed the minds of Jewish intellectuals. In the face of the onslaught of
pogroms and repressive regulations for the Jews that threatened the exis-
tence of Russian Jewry, a Zionist movement was formed. Odessa, to which
Kaufmann’s family moved in 1907, was the center of a Jewish Enlighten-
ment. A galaxy of the intellectual leaders of eastern European Jewry lived
there, including a prominent Zionist thinker, Asher H. Ginsberg, better
known by his pen name Ahad Ha’Am (1856 – 1927). In this circle, Judaism
was conceived as a cultural entity and the Bible as a formative text of Jew-
ish identity. For them, the Bible was a legacy of their ancestors — a product
of what these thinkers referred to in Hebrew as ruah. le’umi or the collective
spirit of ancient Israel.
In 1907, Kaufmann, who by then had acquired a solid foundation of tra-
ditional Jewish learning, started to attend the modern yeshivah of Chaim
Tchernowitz (1871 – 1949) in Odessa and then, in 1910, the Academy for
Jewish and Oriental Studies of Baron David Günzburg (1856 – 1910) in St.
Petersburg.10 Th e objective of these institutions was to integrate modern
scientifi c scholarship with traditional study, thereby reinvigorating Jew-
ish culture and learning in eastern European Jewry. In these institutions,
Kaufmann developed an abiding interest in the riddle of Jewish survival,
which, for his entire life, he sought to investigate according to the general
principles of empirical analysis. For that reason, while Kaufmann espoused
the notion of the Bible as a product of the ruah. le’umi of ancient Israel, he
insisted on using the term ruah., “spirit” or “mind,” only in the empirical
sense and not in a speculative Hegelian or romanticist sense, which was
how the term was generally used among Jewish thinkers of this period.