subversion”; and (3) “That the generality of Jews, as well as Christians, being unacquainted with that which constitutes the Judaism of the present day (viz. the Rabbinic Tradition) look upon the chasm that separates Judaism from Christianity to be of such great magnitude as to render all efforts of reconciliation in vain.”38
Making this even more complicated, there appear to be two editions of the 1868 English translation of Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles.” The second one includes Soloveitchik’s name as the author on the frontispiece (but still translated by “Several Learned Men”) and includes a letter addressed to “My Christian Brethren” in Soloveitchik’s own voice that begins with “I much regret to find that there exists amongst you a deeply rooted aversion to the sayings of the Talmud.”39 This will become relevant when we examine the work of Alexander McCaul and his Old Paths below, which is a running critique of the Talmud published in London around the same time, which may have been a motivation for Soloveitchik’s project.40 One notices a few differences from the 1868 version reproduced by Hyman and what appears to be a second edition. First, the version in Hyman has the subtitle “The Law, the Talmud, and the Gospel”; and this second version has “The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament.” Second, the version reproduced by Hyman has a verse from Ezekiel 37:17 as an epigraph: And join them one to another and there shall become one in thine hand, while the other edition has a verse from Isaiah 57:17 that reads: Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him. There are many substantive differences in the body of the text as well. Most pronounced, and relevant to our concerns, is that what appears to be a second edition has a long chapter, “The Doctrine of the Trinity,” and a commentary on the first three chapters of Matthew, ending abruptly after verse 8 in chapter 3. A version of the chapter “The Doctrine of the Trinity” also appears in the first Hebrew edition published in Paris in 1870.41
The confusing nature of the two versions of the 1868 English Qol Qore will likely remain unresolved. For us, what matters is that by the early 1860s, Soloveitchik appears to have completed a draft of his Hebrew commentary and began a long process of securing its translation into numerous languages. Of note before we transition to the history of the text itself is a brief mention of Soloveitchik’s relationship with Xavier Branicki (1816–1879), a Polish nobleman whom Soloveitchik seems to have greatly admired.42 Soloveitchik notes in his Hebrew edition of Qol Qore that Branicki had seen the text, apparently the 1870 French edition, and was so impressed that he personally financed its translation into Polish. As we will see below, Branicki was involved with numerous editions of Qol Qore and a constant supporter of Soloveitchik’s work. Soloveitchik mentions Branicki numerous times, noting that Branicki had a nephew who was a priest and worked in the Vatican library and that Branicki had sent him a copy of Qol Qore to be cataloged there. Branicki is one of the few Christians whom Soloveitchik mentions, apparently proud that such a nobleman and learned Christian valued his work and certainly appreciative of the financial support that he provided. Branicki also wrote a letter of support for the 1877 German edition of Qol Qore. We don’t know anything about their relationship aside from Soloveitchik’s brief remarks; but even with that sketch, we can see that he was open to engaging Christians about his project and believed them to be supportive of what he was trying to do.
Qol Qore: The Text
As I mentioned above, accurately putting together the publishing history of Soloveitchik’s Qol Qore on the New Testament is complicated by various factors. First, he published an earlier work by that name, which is not a commentary to the New Testament (the text translated and annotated here) but an extended commentary on Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles of Faith”; one edition includes a commentary to the first few chapters of Matthew. This seems to have been a prefatory text to his work on the New Testament. Second, while Qol Qore was written in Hebrew sometime in the 1860s, the first edition is a French edition translated by Rabbi Lazare Wogue (1817–1897) that appears in Paris in 1870, followed by a German edition and a Polish edition, and only then followed by the original Hebrew version.43 Since the original Hebrew commentary to Mark is not extant, we used Wogue’s French translation for Mark.44
In 1877, a German edition of Qol Qore appeared, translated from the 1870 French by Moritz Greenfield and published in Leipzig. This edition also includes a German translation of Soloveitchik’s essay on Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles of Faith” that had appeared earlier in English translation in 1868 but does not appear in the 1870 French translation. In 1879, a Polish edition of Qol Qore appeared from the French translation and was financed by Branicki. It was published in Paris in the printing house of Adolf Reiff. This apparently was the edition that Branicki sent to his nephew Vladimir Chatzki, who worked in the Vatican library.
There is some mystery behind the first Hebrew publication of Qol Qore. The frontispiece of the Hebrew edition has it published in Paris, with no date. Hyman notes that it could not have appeared before 1879, when the Polish edition appeared, and not later than the end of 1880, when we know that Soloveitchik was already living in Frankfurt am Main. We assume that he was in Paris to oversee the publication of the Polish translation.45 The 1985 Jerusalem edition published by a Protestant mission is the text that we used in our translation although we compared it to the first Paris edition. Hyman notes that he found a Jewish apostate, Joseph Azmon, from Givatayim in Israel, who had copied the original Hebrew edition from the Alliance Israélite library in Paris (a copy now exists in the National Library in Jerusalem, where we obtained a copy) and brought that to Israel to use for the Jerusalem translation.46 To ensure as much accuracy as possible, we consulted the original Paris printing (circa 1879) and the 1970 French translation of Matthew from the original Hebrew when translating from the 1985 Hebrew reprint. We found only very small, insignificant changes (e.g., a few grammatical corrections) between the original Paris printing and the Jerusalem edition. We found the 1870 French and 1985 Hebrew basically identical except for a few instances when the French version skipped some redundancies.
One unresolved problem in Soloveitchik’s commentary is determining what New Testament translation, or translations, he used. This poses a particular problem for the translator of a commentary, who would preferably like to know what version of the text the commentator was reading when he wrote his commentary. It seems clear that Soloveitchik did not know enough Greek to use the original. He likely had some facility with German and perhaps French (any English would have come later), but, given his desire to offer a decidedly “Jewish” reading of the Gospel, texts like The King James Bible would not have sufficed as our base text. A few Hebrew translations existed in Soloveitchik’s time, and we determined that he likely used at least one of them, and perhaps more than one;47 but we did not know which ones. One possibility we considered was Nehemiah Solomon’s Yiddish translation of the Gospels that appeared in 1821. Solomon was a convert who worked for Alexander McCaul. We thought, however, it more likely that Soloveitchik used a Hebrew translation.
We chose to use the Hebrew translation of the New Testament by Franz Delitzsch (1813–1890), a noted Lutheran theologian and Hebraist who was a professor at Leipzig University. Hebraist Pinchas Lapide devotes a chapter to him in his Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish—Christian Dialogue.48 Ismar Schorsch called Delitzsch the “finest Christian Hebraist of the nineteenth century.”49 Soloveitchik’s attraction to Delitzsch’s translation would have been Delitzsch’s attention to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew grammar and syntax. In his 1870 Hebrew translation of Paul’s “Letter to the Romans,” Delitzsch notes that translating the New Testament into Hebrew “requires not only a basic understanding of the New Testament text but the language which conditioned the thought and expression of the sacred writers even though they were writing in Greek.”50 Delitzsch’s first choice was biblical Hebrew; but when he could not find a proper word in biblical Hebrew, he chose Mishnaic Hebrew. A salient characteristic of Delitzsch’s translation is also his choice to retain the Hebrew names of the New Testament people and places.51
Even
