Yehezkel Kaufmann: Historian, Biblical Scholar, and Zionist Thinker

Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889–1963) is one of the most original and consequential Jewish intellectuals of the modern era – and one of the least known outside the Hebrew-reading world. Born in Ukraine, educated in Bern and Berlin, and settling in Israel in 1928, Kaufmann devoted his life to two interlocking questions: why did the Jewish people survive two thousand years of exile when all historical precedent suggested they should have disappeared, and what was the nature of the ancient Israelite religion that made this survival possible? His answers, developed across two monumental works — Gola ve-Nekhar (“Exile and Estrangement”) and Toledot ha-Emunah ha-Yisra'elit (“The History of Israelite Religion”) – remain among the most ambitious and searching contributions to Jewish thought and biblical scholarship produced in the twentieth century.