The Brisker method was named after its originator, Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk. He initiated this highly original and controversial method of study that changed the way many traditional Jews approached the Talmud.9
Volozhin was a fairly small and unremarkable town in what was then known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the name given to a bi-confederation of Poland and Lithuania ruled by one monarch who held the titles of king of Poland as well as the grand duke of Lithuania. In its most expansive iteration, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the commonwealth encompassed a wide swath of Eastern Europe, including present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and parts of northeastern Poland. By the time Soloveitchik lived there, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the commonwealth was under the protectorate of the Russian empire (1793–1914). It was only in 1918, after Soloveitchik’s death, that Poland and Lithuania were established as independent countries.10 In Jewish circles, the area where Soloveitchik was born and raised was known as Lithuania (or Lita). Jews there were called Litvaks, and it was the home of the anti-Hasidic movement knows as the Mithnagdim (Opposers of Hasidism).11
Soloveitchik’s Environs
Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the nineteenth century lived a life largely commensurate with other parts of Eastern Europe. They had a religious and cultural hero in Vilna known as Elijah ben Solomon, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797).12 Vilna was Lithuania’s Jewish center, known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.”13 Largely because of the Vilna Gaon, it became the center of traditional Jewish learning. But it was also a center of maskilic (Enlightenment) activity including reformers, Zionists, and secular Jewish literature, in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. Along with Odessa, Warsaw, and Lublin (the “Jerusalem of Poland”), Vilna served as one of the great centers of Jewish creativity in modern Europe, attracting young men in search of high-level Torah study, as well as a venue for freethinking. By the 1860s, there were eighty-six study houses in Vilna alone.14
In addition to the Vilna Gaon and the Volozhin yeshiva, when scholars think about Lithuanian Jewry in the nineteenth century, they think of the Vilna printing of the Talmud, known as the “Vilna Shas,” which became the gold standard of subsequent printings.15 The three (the Gaon, Volozhin, and the Vilna Shas) are interconnected. The influx of students from around Europe to the yeshiva in Volozhin contributed to the increased demand for Talmudic tractates that standardized the Vilna printing of the Talmud for future generations. This is where Elijah Zvi acquired his knowledge of classical Jewish literature. The deans of this yeshiva, including a number of Soloveitchiks, were often viewed as the luminaries of Talmud-centered Judaism of that period, with the Vilna Gaon as their figurehead. The yeshiva in Volozhin also produced some of the greatest Jewish figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in addition to members of the Soloveitchik dynasty.16
While an institute of traditional study, the yeshiva in Volozhin had a complicated relationship to educational reforms. Some of the great leaders of Jewish secularism studied for a time within its walls.17 Yiṣḥak, Hayyim of Volozhin’s son who took over the yeshiva after his father’s death in 1821, when Elijah Zvi was an adolescent, was conversant in numerous languages and may have been open to limited forms of secular studies. For example, he attended a conference on Jewish education in 1843 sponsored by the ministry of education of the Russian government and attended by Jews of various branches of Judaism, including the German maskil Max Lilienthal.18 It was unusual for a traditional rosh yeshiva (yeshiva dean) in Lithuania to mingle with such reformers. I mention the complex nature of the Volozhin yeshiva regarding broader education only to suggest that Elijah Zvi’s unorthodox decision to devote his life to proving the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity may be part of a larger trend that emerged from Volozhin that included others who passed through the yeshiva to pursue less than traditional paths. Given that Elijah Zvi was a consummate insider, a grandson of the founder of the institution, and part of the Soloveitchik dynasty, his career choices were unusual and, one might say, unique.19 He never adopted modernity, in thought or in practice the way many others did at the time; yet he departed from the traditional mind-set that would have made his work on Christianity impossible. Unfortunately, we have almost no record of his thought processes in these matters.
An Itinerant Life
The birthplace of Elijah Zvi is not known for certain, although in some of his books he adds to his name “from Slutzk, Russia.”20 There is much more known about Elijah Zvi’s elder brother, Isaac Zev, partly because Isaac Zev’s son Joseph Dov (Beit ha-Levi) became a major figure of Talmudic learning.21 The absence of Elijah Zvi in the documented histories of the period may also speak to the ways in which the family and their students found Elijah Zvi’s work problematic. There is some mystery about Elijah Zvi among those familiar with the Soloveitchik dynasty. When interviewing Jacob Dienstag, librarian at Yeshiva University in New York from 1940 to 1970, who was very knowledgeable about the Lithuanian sages of that period, Dov Hyman asked about Elijah Zvi. Hyman writes: “I once asked him about our Soloveitchik (Elijah Zvi). He deflected my question to something else and didn’t want to talk about him at all.”22 It seems safe to say that Elijah Zvi is the “forgotten Soloveitchik” in the world of Jewish scholarship, even as his works, as we will see, had some cachet among Protestant clergy who maintained interest in his project, even reprinting the Hebrew original of Qol Qore in Jerusalem in 1985.23
There is very little known of Soloveitchik’s life, largely because he never held an official rabbinical or teaching post and, in contrast to his brother, Isaac Zev, none of his children became world-renowned Talmud scholars.24 We also must consider that Elijah Zvi’s professional choices would not have found much favor in his illustrious rabbinic family. Most of what we know about him is through his publication activities, not only as a commentator but also as an editor and a publisher.25 Elijah Zvi was active in publishing editions of classical texts, including his own work, in numerous translations (as we will see in the next section, on the text Qol Qore). Much of his publishing activity, at least early on, appears to be generated by poverty and medical needs. We know, for example, that he left Slutzk in 1844 or 1845 to seek medical help for various ailments that plagued him. He often writes of fighting illnesses throughout his adult life and is referred to in one approbation of his work as sagi nahor, a Hebrew euphemism for blindness. We don’t know when he became blind, or how, but it seems that he was blind in his later years, while living in London.
In the 1830s or 1840s, Elijah Zvi seemed to fall in love with Christianity and began a lifelong project of composing a Hebrew commentary to the New Testament. Unlike other Jews in his time with similar interests, he did not convert, and we have no record as to what might have precipitated this interest.26 As far as we know, he remained an ultra-Orthodox Jew throughout his life. It is striking how different Soloveitchik’s work on Christianity is from that of other Jews of his time, who wrote about Jesus and Christianity.27 One classic example would be the historian Henrich Graetz, whose third volume of his History of the Jews offers a strongly polemical assessment of Christianity that became standard in subsequent generations, even among liberal rabbis. The other well-known case is the Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger.28 Many of these mostly liberal rabbis who were maskilim (freethinkers) were critical of Christianity and focused largely on the historical Jesus to argue that Judaism was the religion of Jesus while Christianity was the religion about him—implying that Christianity and the teachings of Jesus need to be viewed as distinct. For most of them, their positive appraisals of Jesus was also a veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) critique of Christianity while using their “Jewish Jesus” as part of their case for emancipation and the inclusion of Jews into European (Christian) society.29
Soloveitchik’s approach was different. He argued for the total symmetry between the teachings of Jesus and the teaching of Moses that he sought to prove through rabbinic literature and the works of Moses Maimonides. He was well aware of how his interest in Christianity would be received in the Jewish world.
