242 Job Y. Jindo
intellectual life — a discipline generally avoided by his contemporary Jews
for its potential detriment to Jewish identity. Demonstrating the valid-
ity of this internalization was not a cause but a natural consequence of
Kaufmann’s work.41 For him, the empirical notion of the Bible as cultural
artifact — which categorically relativizes the religious conception of the
Bible as Scripture — is neither detrimental to nor incongruent with tra-
ditional Jewish learning, including the idea of revelation. What gives the
Bible its ultimate value as the living text of the Jewish people is not its tra-
ditional scriptural conception but rather the perception of reality and life
as refl ected in the text. Concomitantly, it seems that the traditional notion
of “the (entire) Torah from Moses,” for Kaufmann, was empirically not un-
tenable either. In his view, every Pentateuchal law and every biblical pas-
sage postulates the original insight of biblical monotheism, which, as he
saw it, ultimately goes back to the Mosaic age. In this respect, the entire
Torah — and in fact the Bible as a whole — is of Mosaic origin.42
Like any scholarly notion or thesis, Kaufmann’s conception of the Bible
must always be corrected or revised in light of new theories, methods,
and fi ndings. Nonetheless, his conception encapsulates a sincere response
to the challenge of modernity, that is, to address, if not resolve, the seem-
ingly irreconcilable tension between two independent sources of truth and
knowledge — that is, between faith and reason — and as such, merits a sig-
nifi cant place in Jewish intellectual history, in the ongoing process of inte-
grating outside cultural infl uences.
NotesTh is chapter is intended for educated lay readers. A longer (original) version, which
includes a fuller treatment of Dilthey’s impact on Kaufmann, appeared in the Jour-
nal of Jewish Th ought and Philosophy 19 (2011): 95 – 129. I thank David Bergman,
Harald Halbhuber, David Perechocky, and Leslie Rubin for reading and comment-
ing on earlier draft s of this essay. I dedicate this (as well as the original) essay to
Yocheved Hershlag Muff s, who has always extended her love and joy to me and my
family, and to the memory of Yochanan Muff s, my mentor, who introduced me to
the profundity of Kaufmann’s work.
- Ernst Cassirer, Th e Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln
and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 186. In this
quotation, Cassirer refers to Spinoza’s notion of the Bible. - On the responses and struggles of modern Jewry — especially in Germany
and in Palestine — against biblical criticism, see Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran,