The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik
[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute, 1984).
8 See ibid.; and Dov Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik: The Man and His Writings [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Published privately by author, 1995). On the closing of the Volozhin yeshiva, see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 190–233.
9 Much literature has been written on the Brisker method. For one concise yet seminal essay, see Aharon Lichtenstein, “What Hath Brisk Wrought: The Brisker Method Revisited,” Torah U-Maddah Journal 9 (2000): 1–18.
10 See I. Cohen, Vilna, 253–282.
11 In general, see Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Vilna was also a center of secular Jewish literary activity, Yiddishism, Zionism, and religious reform. Before World War II, about 160,000 Jews were living in the region that would become Lithuania; about 7 percent of the population was Jewish, many of whom were murdered by the Nazi onslaught.
12 On the Vilna Gaon, see Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); and Immanuel Etkes, HaGra: Yaḥid be-Doro (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2000). On the history of the Jews of Vilna, see I. Cohen, Vilna; and Etkes, “Vilnius,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Vi.
13 See Yisrael Klausner, Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania: The First Generations 1495–1881 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1988).
14 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 8. Cf. Eliyahu Stern, Jewish Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), chap. 2.
15 The printing of the entire Talmud by the Romm family went through various printings in the 1820s, 1850s, and 1880s. In many ways, the Vilna printing was a reproduction of a less-known Slavuta edition. The appearance of the Slavuta edition largely coincided with the opening of the Volozhin yeshiva, which created a much broader need for the production of Talmudic tractates to serve the growing student body. See, e.g., Samuel Meir Feigensohn, “The History of the Romm Printing,” in Yahadut Lita, ed. H. Bar Dayyan (Tel Aviv: Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, 1959–1984), 268–296; Mordechai Breuer, Ohalei Torah: The Yeshiva, Its Structure, and Its History [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2003), 269 ff. Cf. Michael Stanislawski, “The ‘Vilna Shas’ and East European Jewry,” in Printing the Talmud, ed. S. Lieberman Mintz and G. Goldstein (New York: Yeshiva University, 2005), 97–102; and Barry Wimpfheimer, The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
16 Those figures include the first chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935); the poet laureate of the Hebrew language, Hayyim Naḥman Bialik (1873–1934); and one of the major literary figures of Zionism, Yosef Micah Berdyczewski (1865–1921).
17 On Hayyim of Volozhin’s attitude toward educational reform, see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 43.
18 See ibid., 58. Stampfer is unsure of what Yiṣḥak of Volozhin’s intentions were in attending this conference.
19 However, as we can see from the contemporary descendants of that family dynasty, Joseph Dov Baer Soloveitchik (known as the Rav) (1903–1993) and his son Haym Soloveitchik (b. 1937), both chose less than predictable paths within the Orthodox world. Joseph Soloveitchik became the founder of Modern Orthodoxy in America, and his son Haym became an internationally acclaimed historian of medieval Jewish literature.
20 E.g., in the 1846 Königsberg German translation of Maimonides, “Book of Knowledge.”
21 E.g., in Hayyim Karlinsky’s exhaustive study of the Brisk (Soloveitchik) dynasty, there is a long section on Isaac Zev and merely a mention of Elijah Zvi. See Karlinsky, First in the Genealogical Chain of Brisk, where Elijah Zvi is mentioned, in passing, twice, on pp. 42 and 296.
22 Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 11.
23 I will discuss the printing history of Qol Qore below. It seems that there are slight, but insignificant, changes in the 1985 Jerusalem edition.
24 The attention paid to Isaac Zev Soloveitchik in Karlinsky, First in the Genealogical Chain of Brisk, is due to the fact that his son Joseph Baer (Beit ha-Levi) became a famous rabbinic scholar.
25 This is somewhat ironic, as the Soloveitchik dynasty was known for not publishing much of their work in their lifetimes—in most cases, one book of teachings, usually after the death of the author.
26 Two examples among many from Soloveitchik’s generation who converted and published on Christianity were Alfred Edersheim (1825–1889), who converted to Christianity and wrote The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1988); and Moshe Margoliouth (d. 1881), who wrote numerous anti-Talmud missionary tracts. There is also Nehemiah Solomon, who likely produced the first Yiddish translation of the New Testament; and Stanislaus Hoga, the convert who translated Alexander McCaul’s missionary tract The Old Paths. Below, I will discuss Solomon and, more extensively, Hoga. Another example would be Augustus Neander (1798–1850), born David Mendel, a German Jewish convert who became perhaps the most prominent Church historian of his generation. Soloveitchik may have also been aware of Luigi Chiarini, who published a scathing attack against the Talmud, Theorie du Judaïsme, in 1830. Chiarini was part of a Christian committee established in Warsaw in 1825 to encourage Polish Jews to assimilate. Leopold Zunz knew of his work. See Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity Is Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 66. There were, of course, many Jewish converts to Christianity who wrote works on the New Testament, some in Hebrew. One striking example is Immanuel Frommann, who converted to Christianity and wrote a Hebrew kabbalistic commentary to Luke. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, ed. G. Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 171–222.
27 See, e.g., in Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and George Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). Cf. Eliyahu Stern, “Catholic Judaism: The Political Theology of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Jewish Enlightenment,” Harvard Theological Review 109, no. 4 (2016): 483–511. An exception to this rule might be Moses Mendelssohn, who lived in an earlier generation but exhibited a sympathy toward Jesus, at any rate, that coheres with Soloveitchik. See, e.g., the lengthy discussion in Jonathan M. Hess, “Mendelssohn’s Jesus: The Frustrations of Jewish Resistance,” in idem, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 92–135. Hess argues that Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, more than a defense of Judaism, is a critique of Christianity—in particular, a critique of Christianity’s distortion of Jesus, who Mendelssohn held was a gentle Jewish reformer and one who argued in favor of the law. Hess argues that Jesus was, for Mendelssohn, “as both a critic of Christian imperialism and a polemicist for Jewish emancipation” (96).
28 See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Graetz was especially critical of the “Jewish-Christianity” of works like Pseudo-Clementine’s Homilies, which, quite similar to Soloveitchik (who likely did not know this text), argued for the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. On this, see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Modern Jewish Rediscovery of ‘Jewish Christianity,’” in idem, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 320–324.
29 See, e.g., Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich 1870–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 160–222.
30 Soloveitchik, Qol Qore (Hebrew ed., 1879), 15; and Hyman, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, 132.
31 See Hyman, Eliah Zvi Soloveitchik,