The Forgotten Prophet of Jewish Survival

Yehezkel Kaufmann may well be the greatest Jewish intellectual you’ve never heard of.

Considered one of the foremost biblical scholars in the mid-XX century, he gained prominence in the young State of Israel, specifically at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as the long-serving Dean of Bible Studies. However, despite his voluminous scholarship, he remains largely forgotten beyond the Hebrew-speaking world.

“What initially drew me to him was the wide range of his scholarship,” says Shalem College historian Dr. Asael Abelman, who is leading a series of lectures about Kaufmann at Beit Avi Chai. “I’ve been teaching him for quite a long time, and his monumental works on the Tanakh and Jewish history both provide a broad understanding of things, which I like.”

A pessimistic understanding of the Jewish question

Born in 1889 in the Pale of Settlement, Kaufmann later moved to Odessa, where he belonged to Jewish intellectual circles alongside Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927) and others. Initially enthralled by the cultural and political renaissance they represented, his scholarship – which he pursued in Switzerland during the First World War and in Germany in the following decade, until his immigration to Palestine in 1928 – led him to a very bleak conclusion about the prospects of Jewish existence in the diaspora. “He turned against Ahad Ha’am’s idea of ‘spiritual Zionism’ and became more aligned with Herzl’s idea of Zionism, which was unexpected for a man with his biography,” says Abelman. “He had a very pessimistic understanding of the Jewish question; he foresaw the destruction of Jewish civilization long before the Nazis came to power.”

The impossibility of assimilation

In fact, Kaufmann’s all-embracing scholarship could be seen as an intellectual underpinning to Herzl’s political project. Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), Herzl’s formative text, was an attempt to address the failure of emancipation at a time when it was seen as a success, overall. “For Jews in exile, especially in Western countries, emancipation meant that exile was over,” says Abelman. “They believed that it was redemption from exile without the gathering of the exiles. But anti-Semitism remained. The so-called Jewish question throughout the XIX-century resulted from the belief that the Jews, despite being completely assimilated, were still a people apart. Kaufmann believed that the only solution would indeed be the final solution.”

He developed this idea in “Exile and Estrangement,” one of his two monumental studies. “It is an impressive attempt to describe the full history of the Jews, with a very long detour to ancient Jerusalem and the Temple, then the Middle Ages and finally modernity,” says Abelman. “It is a meticulously erudite analysis of Jewish history, but it’s clear that he seeks answers to the burning questions of his time.”

“On the face of it, the title of the book is a contradiction in terms: the natural tendency of an exilic people is to assimilate into its surroundings and sooner or later disappear,” says Abelman. But because of the distinctive cultural and religious dimensions of Jewish existence, the process was never completed, nor could it ever be completed. “In this sense, Kaufmann polemicizes both with Marx, who believed that material conditions are the stumbling block to emancipation, as well as Spinoza, who believed that it was the hatred of Jews that led them to build a wall around themselves, not the other way around.”

Monotheism and the modern soul

Abelman’s lectures explore Kaufmann’s other monumental study, the four-tome “The Religion of Israel”, which reflects his view on the central role the Hebrew Bible played in history and is considered to this day a seminal milestone in bible scholarship. “For Kaufmann, the basis of the cultural strength that kept the Jews alive was the fundamentally monotheistic basis of their faith,” Abelman says. “This was the constitutive element of the ancient Hebrews that set them apart from the rest of civilization, with an abyss between them.”

Kaufmann’s contention was that the Jews were single-handedly responsible for introducing monotheism to human civilization, which critics saw as attributing a far outsized historical role to the Jews. Elements of monotheism existed in other ancient cultures too, they said, albeit not necessarily as crucially central as it was in Judaism. Kaufmann gave the Jews much of the credit for it – too much, per his detractors.

“‘The Religion of Israel’ is a huge polemic against the academic field of biblical criticism, mainly the German school,” says Abelman. “Kaufmann’s basic claim was that the creators of modern biblical criticism in Germany had a religious motivation that emerged from a Protestant understanding of faith and the relationship between Jews and Christians. The way they described the bible and Jewish history was an application of their religious faith.”

One example is Kaufmann’s treatment of the Prophet Isaiah. “He goes through the whole bible, book by book, but there are some figures he likes better, and Isaiah is his favorite,” says Abelman. “German scholars would say that Isaiah’s prophecies were a premonition for Jesus’ arrival. For Kaufmann, it was very important to put it back into a Hebrew-Jewish context.”

The destruction of the soul

A two-time Israel Prize winner, Kaufmann was a frequent interlocutor of David Ben-Gurion, a well-known bible aficionado. Ben-Gurion admired Kaufmann and saw the scholar’s intimate knowledge of the bible, as well as his fervent belief in Zionism, as giving impetus to his political project. Kaufmann was not a political man – “his weakness was that he offered a brilliant critique but never translated it into any prescriptive agenda,” Abelman says – but from the 1920s he weighed in on public affairs.

“One element in his thought that is particularly relevant today is what he called ‘the destruction of the soul,’” says Abelman. “He called out the Jews for their tendency to internalize anti-Semitic ideas about them and to use external critique to highlight what they believed was their own problems. This is very much like it is today, that you can find Jews who criticize Jewish behavior by internalizing external critique.”

It’s a diagnosis Kaufmann never softened with a solution. Perhaps that’s precisely why he still matters: a thinker who offered no comfort, only an unflinching account of a problem the Jewish people has yet to resolve.

For more, see Dr. Asael Abelman’s English-language online series at BAC, “Yehezkel Kaufmann: Historian, Biblical Scholar, and Zionist Thinker.”

Main Photo: Yehezkel Kaufmann\ Wikipedia