The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik

Harnack in his What Is Christianity? (later published as The Essence of Christianity).

      59 On the Tübingen School, see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F. C. Bauer (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1990).

      60 See Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. Tal argues that much of this theological activity was geared ard a negative assessment of Judaism that led to more activist anti-Jewish movements. For a different analysis, see Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelmischen Deutschland (Tübingen: de Gruyter, 1999).

      61 See S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 106–161.

      62 See Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and the Jew, ed. B. Cheyette and L. Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143–156. Cf. A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 387, 388.

      63 George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 14 (1921): 197–254.

      64 In English, see Hermann Strack, Introduction to Talmud and Midrash (New York: Meridian, 1959). It was reprinted by T & T Clark in 1991 and by Fortress Press in 1992 and 1996.

      65 Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 1–13.

      66 See A. Levenson, “Missionary Protestants,” 401. In sum, Levenson claims that Strack and Billerbeck were both philosemitic and anti-Semitic simultaneously, what Bauman called “allosemitic.” “They compartmentalized their theological philosemitism and antisemitism, allowing each full play.”

      67 Later scholars, such as Samuel Sandmel, E. P. Sanders, John Collins, and Daniel Boyarin, continue the exploration of Jesus with regard to his fidelity to the Judaism of his time.

      68 Whether Moore was correct in his assertion about the representative nature of rabbinic texts is a matter of scholarly debate.

      69 Moore, “Christian Writers,” 241.

      70 Ibid., 243.

      71 The Tosafists were a circle of medieval French commentators of the Babylonian Talmud, some descended from Rashi, who initiated a method of Talmudic analysis called pilpul, or casuistry, solving textual dilemmas, many of their own creation, by evoking other rabbinic passages that they would then connect to the problematic text at hand. In the Lithuanian centers of Talmud study, this method was widely adopted. For a definitive study in English, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012).

      72 See Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Secrecy, Suppression, and the Jewishness of the Origins of Christianity,” in idem, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). I want to thank Reed for sharing her chapter with me in draft form. The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies claims to be an account of Clement of Rome’s conversion to Christianity and his travels with the apostle Peter. Its importance is the way it depicts Judaism and Christianity as two parts of one larger system, not meant to stand in opposition to each other.

      73 See Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism.

      74 Four-fifths of the Jews lived in Eastern Europe in this period. On the Haskalah more generally, see Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), challenges many of Feiner’s claims about the Haskalah and focuses on its flourishing in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. She argues that, as opposed to the rational frame in which it is usually understood, the Haskalah, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, was much closer to the Romantic movement and far less antagonistic to tradition than normally thought.

      75 See W. Bruce Lincoln, Alexander’s Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).

      76 See Israel Bartal, “British Missionaries in the Environs of Chabad” [in Hebrew], unpublished manuscript. I want to thank Professor Bartal for making this available to me in advance of its publication. Cf. Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “English Missionaries Look at Polish Jews,” Polin 27 (2015): 89–116.

      77 Hayyim Heilman, Beit Rebbe (Berditchev, 1902), 93, 94, cited in Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 1.

      78 See, e.g., John Klier, “State Politics and the Conversion of the Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Rovert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 92–112. As it happened, Shneur Zalman of Liady’s son Moshe converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. See David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 29–95. For two important studies of conversion to Christianity in an earlier period, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Todd Endelman, Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

      79 Bartal, “British Missionaries,” 17 (my translation).

      80 See Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 29–95.

      81 See William Thomas Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews from 1809–1908 (London, 1908); and Agnieszka Jagodzinska, “Reformers, Missionaries, and Converts: Interactions Between the London Society and Jews in Warsaw in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Converts of Conviction, ed. D. Ruderman (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 9–26.

      82 The stewardship of Nicholas I, who ruled 1894–1917, limited the work of the London Society and did not support the project of converting the Jews.

      83 See Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 6–10. Endelman does, of course, treat important cases of conversion from conviction. See ibid., 225–276. Responding to Endelman, Litvak writes: “Trained in the Anglo-American school of social history, Endelman was more interested in Jewish ‘peddlers and hawkers, pickpockets and pugilists’ than in rabbis, reformers, and their middle-class patrons.” See Litvak, Haskalah, 51. On the project of the Russian government’s programto convert the Jews and more about educating them to be good Europeans, see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 66–69.

      84 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 117.

      85 I have checked a series of databases of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish periodicals in England during Soloveitchik’s lifetime, and his name does not appear either as an author or as a subject. This suggests that he was not an active participant in these debates, although the extent to which he knew about them remains unknown.

      86 Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 362.

      87 Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism, first published in 1905, was a direct response to Adolf Harnack’s attack on Judaism titled The Essence of Christianity (German title was Was ist Christentum?), published in 1902. In a later essay, “Romantic Religion,” Baeck takes aim at Pauline Christianity and argues for Judaism’s superiority as a rational religion. For another example of a Jewish thinker who tried to argue for the utter incompatibility of Judaism and Christianity, see Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Judaism and Christianity: The Differences (New York: Jewish Book Club, 1943).

      88 On McCaul, see David Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: The Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799–1863),” Jewish Historical Studies 47 (2015): 48–69; and E. Stern, “Catholic Judaism.

      89 McCaul served as a missionary for the London Society in Warsaw, 1821–1830. On the London Society in Warsaw, see Jagodzinska, “Reformers,