Yehezkel Kaufmann

Kaufmann was born in 1889 in Dunajiwzi, in the Podolia region of Ukraine.[1][4] His early education combined traditional Jewish study with exposure to Hebrew language and literature: he was raised by observant parents, studied in a cheder and beit midrash, and received private instruction in Hebrew grammar and modern Hebrew literature.[5] He subsequently studied at the modern yeshivah of Chaim Tchernowitz in Odessa and attended advanced courses given by Baron David Guenzburg in Petrograd.[1] His education also included Oriental studies in St. Petersburg.[4]

In 1913, Kaufmann went to Switzerland to study philosophy and Semitic philology.[5] He received his doctorate from the University of Bern in 1918.[1][2] His later writing encompassed the fields represented in this education: biblical research, philosophy, Jewish history, and questions concerning the character and persistence of Jewish collective life.[1][2]

Kaufmann lived in Berlin from 1920, beginning the scholarly writing that followed his education and the First World War.[1][2] There he worked on Hebrew and Jewish scholarly publications, including the German-Hebrew encyclopedia Eshkol, the Hebrew cultural and educational periodical Atidenu, and a lexicon of biblical and talmudic language.[6] His literary activity also included a story in Haolam, while an early critical article addressed a disagreement with Ahad Ha’am.[6] He contributed articles and research on Judaism, Jewish history, and contemporary Jewish problems to Hebrew periodicals.[7]

He immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1928 and taught at the Re’ali School in Haifa.[1][5] In 1949, he became professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, retiring in 1957.[6][4] His work at the school and university coincided with the publication of his two largest studies: the sociological examination of Jewish history Golah ve-Nekhar and the multivolume history of Israelite religion Toledot ha-Emunah ha-Yisre’elit.[1]

Kaufmann received the Israel Prize in Jewish Studies in 1958 and was twice awarded the Bialik Prize.[2][7] From 1959, he was a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences, and he served on the literary council of the Bialik Institute.[2] He died in Jerusalem in 1963.[4]

Golah ve-Nekhar, translated as “Exile and the Alien Land,” was published in 1929–1930 as a four-volume work issued across two books.[1] It examined Jewish history from antiquity to the modern period through a sociological study of exile, national persistence, and the relationship between religion and collective existence.[1] Kaufmann used it to challenge explanations of Jewish survival that relied on an instinct for national self-preservation, arguing instead that religious faith had sustained Jewish unity through the centuries of dispersion.[1]

His second major undertaking, Toledot ha-Emunah ha-Yisre’elit, or “The History of Israelite Faith,” appeared in eight volumes across four books between 1937 and 1957.[1] Its historical scope extended through the end of the Second Temple period, and its central concern was the origins and distinctive character of Israelite religion.[1] Kaufmann used the work to advance a revision of prevailing approaches to biblical criticism, particularly explanations that placed the emergence of monotheism late in Israelite history.[1][8]

Moshe Greenberg condensed and translated the first seven volumes into English as The Religion of Israel in 1960.[1] The beginning of the eighth volume was translated by C. W. Efroymson and published as The Babylonian Captivity and Deutero-Isaiah in 1970.[1] An English edition of Greenberg’s translation and abridgment, entitled The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, was published in Jerusalem by Sefer Ve Sefel in 2003 and comprised twelve preliminary pages and 486 pages of main text.[9]

Kaufmann also wrote on contemporary affairs and individual biblical books.[5] Be-Ḥevlei ha-Zeman, published in 1936, collected articles and studies addressing contemporary problems.[5] The Biblical Account of the Conquest of Palestine appeared in English in 1953 and in Hebrew in 1956, followed by his commentaries on Joshua in 1959 and Judges in 1962.[5] A further collection of biblical studies, Mi-Kivshonah shel ha-Yeẓirah ha-Mikra’it, was published posthumously in 1966.[5]

Kaufmann located the beginning of Israelite monotheism with Moses, treating it as an unprecedented religious departure rather than the final stage of a gradual evolution from paganism.[1] In his reconstruction, monotheism stood at the beginning of Israel’s religious history, not at the conclusion of a long process through which the worship of several gods progressively narrowed to the recognition of one.[1][4] This understanding shaped both his interpretation of biblical literature and his rejection of chronological schemes that assigned foundational Israelite religious ideas to a comparatively late period.[1][4]

The absence of divine genealogies and battles among gods was central to his argument about the Bible’s religious character.[1] He maintained that the biblical writings did not contain the mythology characteristic of polytheistic religions and concluded that Israel’s struggle against myth had already been won before the Bible was compiled.[1] For Kaufmann, the contrast was therefore not simply between worshipping one deity and worshipping many: the biblical rejection of the mythological world itself demonstrated the distinctiveness of Israelite belief.[1]

His account extended this religious distinctiveness beyond official teaching to the population at large.[1] Kaufmann argued that biblical-period Israelites did not understand polytheism as their neighbors practiced it and that there was no fundamental monotheistic difference between popular and official Israelite religion.[1] He interpreted many practices condemned by the prophets as minor superstition rather than evidence that the people possessed a developed polytheistic religious outlook.[1] In this reading, prophetic denunciations transformed such practices into charges of apostasy, partly because the prophets sought to explain Israel’s repeated reversals through the demands of theodicy.[1]

Kaufmann nevertheless accepted important components of modern biblical criticism.[1] He accepted the Documentary Hypothesis concerning the sources of the Pentateuch and acknowledged multiple authorship in Isaiah and Hosea.[1] His objection was not to every distinction between sources or authors, but to the increasingly fragmentary division of biblical books into ever-smaller units.[1] He combined these critical positions with an early dating of the Priestly Code, which he placed before the exile.[1]

He also rejected the account associated with Wellhausen that located Israelite theocratic ideas in the post-exilic period and explained them through priests’ rewriting of earlier history.[10] His disagreement concerned the antiquity of these ideas and the reconstruction of Israel’s religious development, rather than a blanket rejection of literary analysis.[1][10] In his broader treatment of biblical chronology, material assigned a late origin by higher criticism could instead preserve early features of Israelite faith.[4]

Kaufmann used the concept of theoretical, or ideational, universalism to explain the relationship between belief in one God for all humanity and Israel’s particular religious role.[1] His account distinguished the universal implications of monotheism from the historical circumstances in which its teaching was communicated beyond Israel.[1] While Israel lived in its own land, recognition of God by other nations remained a future hope; during the exile, Israel began carrying its monotheistic teaching beyond its territorial borders.[1]

Isaiah occupied a central place in this reconstruction.[1] Kaufmann interpreted Isaiah’s vision as anticipating the end of paganism and an age of enduring peace, connecting Israel’s faith with a universal religious future.[1] He understood Jeremiah as extending the rejection of idolatry to nations as well as individuals, and identified Deutero-Isaiah with the preaching of monotheism to gentiles.[1] The exile thus marked a change in the outward reach of monotheistic teaching rather than the initial creation of monotheism itself.[1]

His formulation of the relationship between Judaism and the other monotheistic religions emphasized covenant: “The quarrel between Judaism and Christianity and Islam is a quarrel of covenants.”[1] This statement belonged to a body of work that examined both the distinctive history of Israelite faith and the broader religious significance of its belief in one God.[1]

Kaufmann maintained that the Book of Joshua accurately recounted the conquest of the land, and he interpreted the removal of the Canaanites as a religious act intended to purify it for Israelite monotheism.[1] His sustained interest in these narratives produced both The Biblical Account of the Conquest of Palestine and separate commentaries on Joshua and Judges.[5] In his treatment of the two books, he distinguished Joshua’s picture of a rapid campaign from Judges’ account of gradual conquest, continuing Canaanite presence, and Canaanite religious influence.[11]

The essay “The Book of Joshua as a Political Classic” presents Kaufmann’s reconstruction as a conquest undertaken mainly at one time, with the tribes acting collectively and establishing a common polity.[12] In that account, he connected the conquest to Egypt’s loss of Canaan around 1200 BCE and argued that Israel took advantage of the resulting regional power vacuum.[12] He proposed the conquest of a large contiguous area that nevertheless contained unconquered pockets, with subsequent expansion of tribal borders accounting for the developments described in Judges.[12]

The same essay interprets Kaufmann as emphasizing the political distinctiveness of the Israelite edah, in contrast to Canaanite kingship and systems centered on local deities.[12] It also identifies the orderly division of the land in the biblical narrative as part of his argument for a unified enterprise rather than unrelated local campaigns.[12] In this reconstruction, the conquest narrative concerned the establishment of a shared political order as well as military occupation and religious change.[12]

Kaufmann rejected Ahad Ha’am’s explanation of Jewish nationality as a form of biological nationalism.[3] He argued that national feeling was not instinctive but arose from a conscious will to belong to a national entity.[3] The persistence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, despite pressures toward assimilation, therefore required an explanation beyond an assumed natural attachment to the nation.[3] In Golah ve-Nekhar, he identified religion as the decisive historical force behind Jewish national unity and survival.[1]

Religious faith, in this interpretation, was closely integrated with Jewish nationality rather than merely accompanying it.[3] Jews preserved those elements of their spiritual culture that had acquired religious sanctity, while religious adherence maintained a boundary between Jewish communities and surrounding societies.[3] This boundary resisted assimilation and sustained the will to remain a people.[3] Kaufmann summarized the relationship by explaining Jewish national existence in the Diaspora “by the force of religion, which is the source of its national will.”[3]

His concept of galut, or exile, encompassed more than physical displacement from a homeland.[13] He applied it to processes he associated with ethnic ruination, including destruction, enslavement, migration, ghettoization, assimilation, and negative natural increase.[13] Some of these processes, in his analysis, belonged to the period following the French Revolution, so modern emancipation did not make exile less real than it had been in the medieval world.[13] His treatment of exile consequently addressed the continued vulnerability and possible dissolution of Jewish collective existence as well as geographical dispersion.[13]

Kaufmann concluded that assimilation could not end the exile and that national redemption required reclaiming the national heritage.[1] Yehoshua Pfeffer, in “How the Hebrew Bible Can Bring Haredim Back to Zionism”, interprets Golah ve-Nekhar as rejecting biological and racial explanations of Jewish survival, together with the claim that gentile hostility was the decisive cause.[14] Pfeffer emphasizes Kaufmann’s focus on religion, particularly halakhah and the distinctive patterns of time and life it established for Jews in exile.[14]

Kaufmann’s explanation of national survival also created a personal intellectual difficulty, because he counted himself among Jews who had lost their religious faith.[3] He recognized the tension involved when secular Zionists explained their nationalism through a faith they no longer possessed.[3] “Our situation is indeed tragic,” he wrote, adding: “It is hard to reconcile ourselves to the idea that our nationalism derives from a faith that no longer exists in our hearts.”[3]

While writing in Berlin in the 1920s, Kaufmann supported rebuilding Eretz Israel while also treating it as one of several possible territories for Jewish national life and advocating an additional Jewish territory in an unoccupied part of the world.[1][6] His political thought thus joined support for rebuilding Jewish life in the ancestral land with concern for a territorial response to the wider predicament of the Diaspora.[1]

Kaufmann doubted that Zionism would become the central factor in modern Jewish history, bring all Jews to Israel, or solve the Diaspora problem.[4] Nevertheless, he regarded the search for a solution to that problem as a test of Jewish nationalism.[4] He felt an affinity with General Zionism, particularly the HaNo’ar HaTziyoni movement.[4] His emphasis on religion as the historical basis of Jewish survival remained part of his thinking about the possibilities and limits of a modern national movement.[3][4]

Ahad Ha’am was an important target of his criticism, both in his early writing and in his analysis of nationality.[3][6] In “The Failure of Cultural Zionism”, Asael Abelman identifies Kaufmann as one of Ahad Ha’am’s forceful critics and observes that Kaufmann’s Hebrew political writings had largely been forgotten even in Israel by 2016.[15]

Kaufmann’s work reached readers beyond Hebrew through Greenberg’s abridgment of his history of Israelite religion and Efroymson’s translation of part of its final volume.[1] His use of Modern Israeli Hebrew had initially limited his influence largely to Israelis and Jewish religious moderates, at a time when relatively few non-Jewish scholars were proficient in the language.[1] His early dating of the Priestly Code appealed particularly to Jewish readers who regarded its later dating as part of a Christian supersessionist interpretation of biblical history.[1]

Although Kaufmann was secular, his account of monotheism’s origin with Moses could be read by religious moderates as empirical support for divine revelation.[1] His scholarship influenced the Jewish Theological Seminary of America through H. L. Ginsberg and Moshe Greenberg, helping shape the biblical study encountered there by generations of scholars.[1] Kaufmann himself, however, was never invited to teach or lecture at the institution.[1]

In a 2007 interview, philosopher Eliezer Schweid identified Kaufmann as a decisive influence on his own work and said that The History of Israelite Faith had helped determine the direction of his thinking.[16] Schweid credited Kaufmann with being the first biblical scholar to recognize a connection between philosophy and research, and he associated Kaufmann’s understanding of biblical Judaism with the influence of Hermann Cohen.[16]

Kaufmann’s archive covers the years 1913–1963 and preserves personal documents, photographs, correspondence, and press clippings.[2] It also contains manuscripts, drafts, and proofs of articles, books, and lectures concerning biblical studies, history, and philosophy.[2] These holdings preserve material relating to both his published scholarship and the preparation of his intellectual work.[2]

A conference in 2026 marked ninety years of Toldot ha-Emunah ha-Yisre’elit, with sessions on Kaufmann’s life, the history of the book, its arguments and archaeological evidence, its legacy in biblical studies, and the relationship between his scholarship and Zionism.[17] One presentation, by Thomas Krapf, carried the Hebrew title “אין לי ביוגרפיה, יש לי רק ביבליוגרפיה,” translated as “I have no biography, I have only a bibliography.”[17]

The principal scholarly disputes concern Kaufmann’s reconstruction of early monotheism, his interpretation of popular Israelite religion, and his treatment of biblical chronology and conquest.[1] His claim that monotheism began with Moses, rather than emerging through successive religious developments, was an interpretive thesis rather than an independently established chronology.[1] His denial of a fundamental religious divide between ordinary Israelites and official monotheistic teaching also differed from approaches that distinguished popular polytheism from official monolatry or monotheism.[1]

A 1999 survey situated Kaufmann at the strongest end of arguments for an early Mosaic monotheistic revolution: he denied polytheism even among the Israelite masses, locating it in imported royal-court cults and interpreting other practices as fetishism or crude superstition.[18] The survey contrasted this with a later scholarly tendency to explain Israelite religion through stages or successive transformations culminating in absolute monotheism during the Babylonian Exile.[18]

His reading of Joshua likewise differed from critical reconstructions of a prolonged, piecemeal conquest, in which some tribes were already present in the land and the biblical narrative combined later traditions.[12] These disagreements concern the historical interpretation of the texts and the explanatory frameworks applied to them, including his early dating of priestly material and rejection of Wellhausen’s evolutionary account.[1][10]