of Judaism and Christianity on theological grounds that he hoped would diminish anti-Semitism. Therefore, he cites a rabbinic or Jewish medieval teaching only if he feels the verse needs such an interpretation to cohere with normative Judaism. Or, in some cases, he offers a rabbinic teaching as a way to clarify an ambiguity in the Gospel text itself. In this sense, he begins with an assumption in concert with many in the Tübingen School about Jesus’ Jewish context. There are, however, two important differences. First, Soloveitchik does not see Jesus as deviating from the basic Jewish teachings of his time; and second, Soloveitchik believed that the Talmud and midrash, and even Maimonides, faithfully transmit normative Jewish life and law that was operative in the time of Jesus. While we now know that such an assumption is no longer viable, Soloveitchik’s rabbinic training in Volozhin trained him to think in such terms and thus he used an ahistorical assumption to make his historical argument, not only about Jesus’ Jewishness (this was assumed) but his fidelity to Judaism.67
While both Soloveitchik and Strack-Billerbeck had an agenda in the sense that both wanted us to read the New Testament in a new way, Soloveitchik was more focused on using rabbinic texts selectively to solve a problem in the text of the Gospel, while Strack-Billerbeck may have been more interested in offering the reader a wide plethora of rabbinic sources to show their influence on Jesus and perhaps the way Jesus moves beyond them. In this sense, their agendas stand in opposition: Strack-Billerbeck expressed a certain form of allosemitism while Soloveitchik sought to bring the two testaments, and both religions, closer together. In this, he makes a significant contribution to the larger discussion of Judaism and Christianity, especially coming from a traditionally trained and observant rabbinic Jew.
Before moving to the question of conversion, a few comments are in order about George Foot Moore’s seminal 1922 essay “Christian Writers on Judaism.” Moore is important here because he may be one of the first Christian scholars to argue that thorough research into rabbinic Judaism is essential to understand not only the historical context but the theological message of the Gospels. He resisted the tendency of Christian scholars to focus on Apocryphal rather than rabbinic materials, claiming that the latter, even if redacted long after Jesus’ time, better represent the lives of Jews than many non-canonical texts that may have been more limited in scope and influence.68 As opposed to using Judaism to show the categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity, that is, a supersessionist approach, which extends from Eisenmenger through Adolf Harnack’s (1851–1930) What Is Christianity? (1901) and Wilhelm Bousset’s (1865–1920) The Religion of Judaism in the Time of the New Testament (1903), Moore took a less apologetic, or perhaps less supersessionist, stance regarding how these sources should be read and integrated into the study of the Gospels. Moore focuses on Bousset’s The Religion of Judaism perhaps because Bousset is the most explicit of later authors in using Jewish materials, “to prove that the character and teaching of Jesus can be explained, not as having roots in Judaism, but only as the antithesis to Judaism in every essential point.”69 Bousset claimed that the essence, and error, of Judaism is that it posited a God removed from the world against the more intimate notion of God as a “heavenly Father” in Jesus’ teaching. Moore responded: “The historian can only characterize the notion that the fatherhood of God is the cardinal doctrine of Christianity and its cardinal difference from Judaism as a misrepresentation of historical Christianity no less of Judaism.”70 It is true, as Moore notes, that Bousset was not a historian; yet this kind of presentation prevents a more nuanced view of the religion in Jesus’ time.
I briefly mention Moore’s attempt to expose the underlying supersessionism of Christian writing on Jews and Judaism because Soloveitchik implicitly argues similarly, without knowing the historical trajectory of Moore’s subjects. Soloveitchik’s assumption in his commentary is that rabbinic teaching—including Maimonides—can help clarify the sayings of Jesus that are often misunderstood (by both Jews and Christians) when viewed outside the rabbinic orbit. Unlike Moore, Soloveitchik is not a historian; and unlike Bousset and the others, both Christians and Jews, Soloveitchik does not view Judaism and Christianity as categorically distinct. Like Moore, he argues that it is the rabbinic corpus that can help us clarify what Jesus was teaching. According to Soloveitchik, such teaching reveals that Jesus says nothing that stands in opposition to rabbinic teaching, making Jesus’ “Christianity” nothing more than a form of Judaism. Unlike Reform Jewish thinkers, from Abraham Geiger to Kaufmann Kohler, Soloveitchik does not view Jesus as a “reformer” or even a rabbinic rebel but rather a normative teacher of the Mosaic message. It would thus be interesting to ponder what Moore would have thought about Soloveitchik’s commentary, which he apparently had not seen. It is a good example of precisely what Moore was suggesting, even though it, too, had a theological agenda: the undermining of supersessionism as well as the Jewish claim of Jewish superiority.
The Attempt to Convert the Jews in the Nineteenth Century: Situating Qol Qore as a Response to Conversion
Before turning to the Sitz im Leben of Soloveitchik’s commentary, a short methodological note is in order. Much of New Testament scholarship in the time of Soloveitchik was based on the historical-critical method, initiated largely by the Tübingen School. In the case of the synoptic Gospels, this meant focusing on the differences between the Gospels in an attempt to decide which version was the earliest and also distinguishing the setting of each Gospel in relation to the historical Jesus. One interesting thing about Soloveitchik’s resisting this method is that it has often been thought that the historical-critical method enabled modern Jewish thinkers to engage with the New Testament to make their case against it—or in favor of its proximity to rabbinic ideas.
Soloveitchik was a harmonizer and a throwback to premodern renderings of the New Testament. His Lithuanian Talmudic training resulted in his reading the New Testament the way a Tosafist would read the Talmudic text, noticing contradictions in the text or its commentaries (usually Rashi) and using other texts to resolve the discrepancy.71 Soloveitchik often notes an apparent contradiction in the text or its reception (that is, the way it has been viewed as anti-Jewish or against rabbinic ideology) and looks for a precedent in Talmudic literature to debunk that claim that he then reads into the text in the Gospel to solve a misunderstanding. The result is that he often offers readings of the text that, stripped of an entire history of Christian interpretation—not only historical interpretation but also Christian anti-Jewish interpretation—yield a Gospel that may have actually been closer to earlier Jewish-Christian texts in late antiquity. One example would be a comparison of Soloveitchik with the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (fourth century), which espouses a reading of the Gospel of Matthew and an understanding of Christianity that is strikingly similar to Soloveitchik’s views.72 Since I assume that Soloveitchik did not read Pseudo-Clementines, I do not engage in comparing the two; I simply point out that Soloveitchik’s attempt to erase the categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in his time takes us back to a much earlier time of what was later called “Jewish-Christianity,” likely with different considerations and different goals.73 And it is his rabbinic training in harmonization that enables him to do that.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were incredibly fertile as well as precarious for the Jews of Eastern Europe, both for those who remained there and for those who immigrated to the West yet remained attached to the ways of their Eastern European ancestors. The Haskalah that had blossomed in Berlin with the circle around Moses Mendelssohn a few generations earlier had now made its way deep into the recesses of the Pale of Settlement, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where most Jews lived.74 For example, Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861, as part of a larger project of reforms, enabled Jews to be more integrated into the empire.75 More important for our purposes was the reign of Alexander I during the Napoleonic period (1801–1825). As Israel Bartal suggests, Alexander I’s spiritual, even mystical, nature and traditional inclination were viewed positively by many leading rabbinic figures of the period—for example, Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of the Chabad dynasty.76 In his Beit Rebbe, Chabad historian Hayyim Heilman writes: “On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, [the rebbe] said to me: ‘If Bonaparte is victorious, Israel will become wealthy,
