Hoga’s final work, Zir Ne’eman, goes much further than The Controversy of Zion and declares war on McCaul’s entire body of work, including The Old Paths, which Hoga translated into Hebrew; it is this work that convinces Lask Abrahams and others that Hoga was a real baal teshuvah, that he repudiated his conversion to Christianity and returned to the traditional Jewish fold (even as a convert, Hoga was critical of Jewish Reform).108 Ruderman is less convinced. While it is true that Hoga seemed to be embraced by at least some Jews in London, indicated by the fact that he published regularly during those years in the Jewish Chronicle, which is odd if he were still considered an apostate, there is no real indication or tangible evidence that Hoga ever turned his back fully on Christianity.109
If Ruderman is correct, Hoga would represent one who embodies what Ruderman calls a “mingled identity,” both Jew and Christian, or, perhaps, neither Jew nor Christian. This Hebrew Christian identity fits nicely with an oblique remark that Holga makes in The Controversy of Zion: “It is vain to think of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity before Christians themselves are converted to Judaism.”110 We can see how close Hoga comes to Soloveitchik, albeit from the opposite end of the conversion divide. My reading of Soloveitchik is that Jews need not convert to Christianity because all that is true in Christianity is part of Judaism. And Christians need not try to convert Jews for the same reason.
As I mentioned above, this may be one of Soloveitchik’s goals of his commentary Qol Qore. Both religions, for Soloveitchik, express the same core value of divine unity expressed in different forms. Exhibiting this shared goal need not require diminishing the status of the Talmud (Levenson, Fuenn, et al.) or claiming the superiority of Judaism (medieval polemical literature). Many reformers in Soloveitchik’s time, such as I. M. Jost, David Friedlander, and Lazarus Bendavid, argued that rabbinic Judaism (the Talmud) had corrupted the true form of Israelite Mosaism.111 While this may have bothered him, to the extent that he was familiar with these writings, Soloveitchik seems more focused on the diminution of the Talmud as a tool of missionizing. For Soloveitchik, conversion becomes unnecessary; for Hoga, it becomes irrelevant. Hoga believed that a Jew could believe in Jesus and still live by the law. This was the essential message in his Controversy of Zion. If I am right about Hoga—and I agree with Ruderman that his choices seem more complicated than simply renouncing his conversion—he would not have to refute his conversion to return to Judaism. And Soloveitchik would not have to convert to Christianity to acknowledge its truth; he can do so solidly within his Jewish milieu—not as a reformer but as a Volozhin-trained Talmudist.
In trying to contextualize Soloveitchik’s Qol Qore around the question of missionary activity and Jewish conversion to Christianity during the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe and England, I was forced to remain in the realm of speculation regarding Soloveitchik’s awareness of this activity, as he never mentions it explicitly. However, given that the issue was a popular topic in the Jewish press and was of concern for Jewish communities as they moved into and beyond emancipation, it is hard to imagine that he did not have at least cursory exposure to the phenomenon. We know that late in life, he was blind, which may have limited his ability to regularly follow the press, although we do not know when blindness came upon him. It is safe to say that Qol Qore offers a distinctive contribution to the literature on the conviction among traditional Jews in this period lending a traditional voice to the expansive and provocative rendering of the complex relationship between these two religions.
Soloveitchik’s “Maimonidean Jesus”
One of the more vexing dimensions of the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) is the question of Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah or whether others considered him to be so. In addition, one of the dominant themes in Jewish criticism of the Gospels is that such a claim is, within Jewish thinking, impossible for a variety of reasons. On this question, the legal code of Maimonides is often invoked where, in his “Laws of Kings,” Maimonides delineates the criteria of the messianic vocation.112 On Maimonides’ criteria, Jesus as the true messiah is simply impossible. What, then, do Jews make of this claim of Christianity? One common trope was that Jesus was a false messiah, a category with precedent in Jewish literature before and after Jesus. Contemporary Jews interested in fostering ecumenical dialogue offer less severe rejections of Jesus’ messiahship. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, for example, made the distinction between the “false messiah” and the “failed messiah,” the latter being more applicable to Jesus than the former.113 Others, such as Byron Sherwin, suggest that Jesus represented the Joseph messiah (as opposed to the Davidic one), an idea whose roots lie in the rabbinic tradition. The Joseph messiah will appear before the Davidic one, and will die and prepare the ground for the final redemption.114
Soloveitchik takes a different tack in his assessment of Jesus’ messianic vocation. Rather than denying Jesus as messiah, something difficult to do, given the plethora of references to his messianic vocation, or making a distinction between a “false” or “failed” messiah, or the Joseph or Davidic messiah, Soloveitchik claims that the central vocation of the Messiah is to teach people the fundamental lesson of Judaism; the unity of the Creator. Thus in almost every reference to the Messiah in Mark and Matthew, Soloveitchik comments on Jesus’ success in spreading the true Gospel, the unity of God. From Soloveitchik’s perspective, this is accomplished by Jesus in a particularly successful way, to his Jewish compatriots and later to the Gentiles through Paul. This notion of divine unity is the centerpiece of Maimonides’ depiction of Judaic monotheism.
In at least one place, Soloveitchik openly denies that Jesus is the Messiah and claims that most people have misread Matthew 24:5, which states: For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the mashiaḥ,” and they will mislead many. Soloveitchik states:
Many will come in my name—there are those who say that Yeshua cautioned them not to be mistaken if a man comes in his name and says that he is the Messiah, that he may not mislead them. However, the meaning of this verse is difficult, for how is it possible that a man would come in the name of Yeshua and make himself out to be the Messiah? Who would believe that Yeshua sent him? And what does he mean by saying, “many will come in my name”? This is the meaning: Yeshua told them that many would come in his name claiming that he was the Messiah, and by this they will mislead many. Therefore, what he is really saying is, “I am giving you distinct signs of when the Messiah comes.”
Rather than being the Messiah, for Soloveitchik Jesus is the one who spreads the necessary condition of belief in divine unity as the prelude to the Messiah (a kind of spiritual, as opposed to political or militaristic, Joseph messiah). The extent of his success makes him a messianic figure but not the final one who comes to redeem Israel.
Elsewhere in his commentary, he is less definitive in terms of Jesus’ messianic vocation. In his comment to Matthew 10:7, And as you go, call out, saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is on the brink of arrival,” Soloveitchik comments: “The main principle that he commanded to his disciples, first of all, to allow the faith in the unity of the Creator to be instilled in their hearts.” Commenting on the “son of man,” a common trope drawn from Daniel 7:13–14 and other places to refer to a messianic figure, Soloveitchik comments on Matthew 10:23: “Before the son of man comes—which is to say, I promise you that even if they persecute you from city to city, you will not complete your travels to all of the cities of Israel until the son of man comes, that is, until one of the men who is persecuting you realizes your righteousness in that you came to instill in the heart of every single man the knowledge of the unity of the Creator.” But even here, Soloveitchik seems to distinguish between Jesus’ messianic vocation (to instill in the heart of every single man the knowledge of the unity of the Creator), which he accomplishes with tremendous success, and his status as the Messiah. On Matthew 14:14, Soloveitchik comments: “Good news of the kingdom—a distinct sign of when the Messiah will come, when all the nations will know the good news of the kingdom, which is the
