The Hertz Chumash: A Polemical Defense of Judaism

Citations are from the one volume edition. For a full treatment of Hertz's commentary, see my A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch (New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998).

Towards the end of the century and in the early twenty-first century, it was replaced by the Reform movement's The Torah: A Modern Commentary (1981), the Orthodox Art Scroll Chumash (1993), and the Conservative movement’s Etz Hayim (2001).

Until recently, only the chief rabbi took the title “rabbi.”

Frampton received his rabbinic training at Aria College, Portsmouth, and held a lectureship in Hebrew for several years at Liverpool University. He and his congregation were anti-Zionist, although as a synagogue they supported colonization and acquisition of land and farming settlements in Palestine. With the Balfour Declaration Frampton's congregation reluctantly relinquished its fight against political Zionism, while Frampton personally embraced the Declaration.

Gerald Friedlander, The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1911; Hellenism and Christianity (London: Vallentine and Sons, 1912). Maimonides' rational approach to biblical texts and Friedlander's less than flattering perception of the roots of Christian theology were echoed strongly in the Chumash, though in considerably altered form.

See Abraham Cohen see, The Teachings of Maimonides (London: G. Routledge, 1927).

Cohen quoted the American clergyman and social activist, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887):

A preacher is a teacher; but he is more… He looks beyond mere knowledge to the character which that knowledge is to form. It is not enough that men shall know. They must be…Preaching is the art of moving men from a lower to a higher life.

Abraham Cohen, Jewish Homiletics (London: M.L. Cailingold, 1937), 18, 38–39.

See Joshua Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature (London: Macmillan, 1912); idem, “Maimonides,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics 8, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1915), 340–344.

For example, the source for the commentary’s explanation for the hardening of Pharaoh's heart (Chumash, 220) was found in Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah, 6:8; the notion that it was important for religion to enlist a person's natural fears and hopes of reward as a means of encouraging him to be ethical (Chumash, 319, 542, 865, 925) was located in the Guide for the Perplexed, 3.28, as well the introduction to Helek: Sanhedrin, chapter 10. For a translation of Helek, see Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972).

My research of the Hertz archive makes it very clear from the manuscripts given to him by his four contributors that he reworked and recast the submissions; specifically his hand-written insertions which transformed the Commentary into an anti-Christian polemic, defending the ostensibly superior moral system of Judaism.

This originally appeared as Julius Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels [Israelite History] (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878). It was soon reprinted in a second edition with a new title, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1883). This version was translated as Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, introduction by W. Robertson Smith (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885).

Chumash, p. vii.

Editor’s note: For more on Greenberg, see Alex Sinclair, “Moshe Greenberg: A Spiritual Critical Bible Scholar,” TheTorah (2023).

While Hertz polemicized against higher criticism, he never discusses lower criticism. Even so, Hertz does sometimes quote positively scholars, such as Rudolf Kittel, who use lower criticism.

John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1910), 447- 448. For contemporary discussions of the documentary solution here, see Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 1–12, 34–44; Ben Sandler, “Encountering the Documentary Hypothesis in the Joseph Story,” TheTorah (2014).

Chumash, 144. For other attempts to read the story as a whole, see Marty Lockshin, “Joseph Accuses His Brothers of Selling Him – But Did They?” TheTorah (2020); Edward Greenstein, “Finding Meaning in Incoherence: The Joseph Story Beyond Source Criticism,” TheTorah (2020).

Chumash, 814; David Hoffmann, Das Buch Deuteronomium (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1913), 246-250.

Notably Kalisch adopted source criticism. See discussion of this scholar in, Edward Breuer, “Community and Controversy: Jews, Anglicans, and Biblical Criticism in Mid-Victorian England,” AJS Review 45.2 (2021): 252–281; idem, “Marcus Kalisch: The Life and Eclipse of an Extraordinary Victorian,” Jewish Historical Studies 52.1 (2021), 145–166.

The Pentateuch and Haftorahs: Exodus, 127; Marcus Kalisch, A Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament: Exodus, with a new translation by Marcus Kalisch (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman's and Roberts, 1858), 196. The Chronicle’s passage is generally understood as the first attempt to deal with the discrepancy between the two Torah verses. For discussion of this contradiction and how it has been understood, see Robert A. Harris, “Korban Chagigah from the Torah to the Seder Plate,” TheTorah (2015).

Hertz’s desire not to explain his rendering may be due to the problem with Kalisch’s argument, which runs aground in 1 Sam 2:13, 15, which doesn’t use the term “water” but clearly means boiling. For how ArtScroll’s Stone Chumash deals with this contradiction, see Isaac S.D. Sassoon, “The Stone Chumash: Reviewing Its Torah,” TheTorah (2022).

Chumash, 395, 630.

The use of archaeology and linguistic testimony was completely at odds from the earlier commentary of Samson Raphael Hirsch who held that Hebrew was the language in which God created the world, and was the original language of mankind: Isidor Grunfeld, “Introduction to the First English Edition of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Commentary on the Torah,” The Pentateuch: Genesis, translated into English by I. Levy (London: I. Levy, 1959), 14. As an advocate of Wissenschaft learning, Hertz accepted that Israelite society had not remained immune to the powerful cultural-linguistic influences of neighboring pagan civilizations. By casting light on the social and cultural life of the Patriarch's and of Moses, they offered indirect testimony to the Torah's historicity.

Chumash, 555.

Chumash, 848. Editor’s note: For more on this law, see Isaac S.D. Sassoon, “What Does Deuteronomy Say about Homosexuality?” TheTorah (2017).

Chumash, 12. Hertz fortified this interpretation with a reference to 1 Samuel 18:18: “Who am I, and who are my kinsfolk?” (ומי חיי). Notably, Hertz was not himself an expert in ancient Semitics or Egyptian, but gleaned this knowledge from the academic commentaries.

Chumash, 234, 844.

Chumash, 265.

Chumash, p. 555. This is the spelling Hertz used from Minoan, a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on Crete and other nearby islands.

Chumash, 941. Editor’s note: For more on this, see Eve Levavi Feinstein, “The Rape of the Unbetrothed Virgin in Torah and Assyrian Law,” TheTorah (2013).

Chumash, 862; emphasis mine. The notion of writing the Torah on twelve stones derives from linking this verse with the twelve stones taken out of the Jordan (Joshua 4:3).

Chumash, 142.

Chumash, 51-52, 151. For a contemporary discussion of this, see Albert D. Friedberg, “Who Were the Hebrews?” TheTorah (2017).

Chumash, 240, 250. For a contemporary discussion of anti-Egyptian symbolism in the plagues, see Gary Rendsburg, “Reading the Plagues in their Ancient Egyptian Context,” TheTorah (2015); idem, “YHWH’s War against the Egyptian Sun God Ra,” TheTorah (2016).

Prolegomena, 421–422.

William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: A. and C. Black, 1902), 256, 258, 439–440. Robertson Smith also wrote many articles on Bible in the 9^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise, translated by R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 8, 47, 165, 237, 247–250.

Robert Travers Herford, Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 332. See also, idem, What the World Owes to the Pharisees (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919). On Moore’s defense of Judaism, see George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 14.3 (1921), 197–254; idem, “The Rise of Normative Judaism: I. To the Reorganization at Jamnia,” Harvard Theological Review 17.4 (1924): 307–373; idem, “The Rise of Normative Judaism: II. To the Close of the Mishnah,” Harvard Theological Review 18.1 (1925): 1–38. Hertz’s working premise was that "the testimony of the nations" (a chapter title in his A Book of Jewish Thoughts (London: Oxford University Press, 1935) did as much to legitimize Jewish contributions to Western civilization as a score of Jews who defended Judaism against slander. This specific ploy was recommended by Herford: R.T. Herford, What the World Owes to the Pharisees (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919), 15.

Solomon Schechter, Seminary Address and Other Papers (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1915), 35-39. Hertz and Schechter had a personal relationship. Schechter accompanied Hertz down the aisle on the day of his marriage and wrote a highly complementary letter recommending Hertz for the post of chief rabbi.

Schechter and Hertz were hardly the only Jewish responses to Wellhausen. For a discussion of the Jewish responses overall, see Chapter 2, “Wellhausen and his School: The Jewish Response to Higher Criticism,” in Yaakov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books: A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles Over the Bible in Modern Judaism, trans. Chaya Naor (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 85–155.

Solomon Schechter, “Four Epistles to the Jews of England,” Studies in Judaism, 2d series, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1908), 197–199.

Solomon Schechter, "Higher Criticism - Higher Anti-Semitism," Seminary Addresses and Other Papers (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1915), 36-39.

It is difficult to appreciate this comment without knowing the background over the struggle to deal with evolution. For some context, see Daniel R. Langton, Reform Judaism and Darwin: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion, Studia Judaica 111 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Rachel S.A. Pear, “And It Was Good”?: American Modern Orthodox Engagement with Darwinism from 1925 to the Present (2012), Doctoral Dissertation (Bar Ilan University, 2012); Shai Cherry, “Three Twentieth-Century Jewish Responses to Evolutionary Theory,” Aleph 3 (2003): 247–290.

Hertz uses English as an example:

Thus, Anglo-Saxon, with its five cases and eight declensions of the noun is immeasurably more complicated than its direct lineal descendant, modern English.

Chumash, 557–558. The author of the quotation was Christian theologian George Rawlinson (1812-1902), professor of ancient history at Oxford. The reference was from Rawlinson's article, “Moses, the Author of the Levitical Code of Laws,” Lex Mosaica, ed. R. V. French, (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1894), 28–29.

Chumash, 322. Hertz was paraphrasing the Rabbi Joshua ben Levi’s dictum:

^{ירושלמי פאה ב:ד [≅חגיגה א:ח]} אפי' מה שתלמיד ותיק עתיד להורות לפני רבו כבר נאמר למשה בסיני.

^{j. Peah 2:4 [≅j. Hagigah 1:8]} Even that which a distinguished disciple was destined to teach in the presence of his master was already said to Moses on Sinai."

Hirsch, The Pentateuch: Genesis, xx.

Frankel’s conviction was that ancient laws for which there were no basis in the biblical text, described traditionally as halakhot le-Moshe mi- Sinai (Laws given to Moses at Sinai), referred to laws of such remote antiquity that the identity of their authors was forgotten, or to laws that were firmly established as if they had been given orally by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai. Hirsch condemned Frankel for implying that these laws were, in fact, of human origin: Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Collected Writings (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1988, from the German edition of 1910), volume 5, pp. 229-231.

Claude Montefiore, Old Testament and After (London: Macmillan, 1923), 291.

Claude Montefiore, Liberal Judaism and Hellenism (London: Macmillan, 1918), 185. Even though Hertz and Montefiore disagreed vociferously over their interpretations of Judaism, they befriended one another. As a token of personal esteem, the chief rabbi cabled congratulations (published in the Jewish Chronicle) on Montefiore's eightieth birthday, wishing him the blessing that he should live to 110 years (interestingly, not the customary 120).

As Hertz himself notes, striking similarities between the Mosaic and ANE law collections reflected resemblances common to the ancestors of both the Hebrews and their neighboring societies. An array of Christian scholars claimed Israelite beliefs and practices were hardly unique, but reflected religious affinities and dependence upon the civilizations by which they were surrounded. So, Samuel Rolles Driver: "…their code of civil and criminal law, their religious institutions, can no longer be viewed, as was once possible, as differing in kind from those of other nations, and determined in every feature by direct revelation from Heaven; all, it is now known, have substantial analogies among other peoples.": S.R. Driver, "Hebrew Authority," in Authority and Archaeology, Sacred and Profane, edited D.G. Hogarth (London: J. Murray, 1899), 6-7. While Driver fully appreciated the spiritual plateau reached in the Old Testament, he did not feel the same way about the rise of rabbinic Judaism:

Christianity…took the form of a reaction against the paralyzing influences of Rabbinism, a reaction resting primarily upon a return to the more spiritual religion of the prophets.

S.R. Driver, “The Permanent Moral and Devotional Value of the Old Testament for the Christian Church,” Sermons on Subjects Connected with the Old Testament (London: Methuen, 1892), xiv-xv.

While these arguments can be easily critiqued as apologetic generalizations, Hertz was writing as a preacher to an audience, highlighting a contrast of values that would resonate in the mind of the synagogue-Jew, who would leave the synagogue with a “clear” perception of why Jews are distinctly different from Gentiles in the way they frame the world. In fact, Hertz rejected out of hand a number of potential rabbinic contributors whom he felt were too academic in their submissions. Indeed, he stated that he wanted the commentary to be “in the spirit of Rashi and not Ibn Ezra.”

Harmony implied a social system propelled by orderliness, the “harmonious arrangement of society, by which every human peg is put into its appropriate hole… It stresses the inequalities of human nature.”

Chumash, 821. On Hertz's elaboration of Israel's moral genius, see his essays in the Additional Notes to Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy: Chumash, 401-406, 563-564, 920-924, 927-935.

He was joined by an array of Jewish thinkers (e.g., Maimonides, Nachmanides, Samuel David Luzzatto, Heinrich Graetz, Isaac Husik, Kaufmann Kohler) and Christian theologians (e.g., William Ralph Inge [1860-1954], Dean of Saint Paul's and Robert Travers Herford. Hertz acknowledged several illustrations of exemplary moral rulings of the Code of Hammurabi in a 1928 lecture, yet omitted any mention of them in his commentary. See, his “Ancient Semitic Codes and the Mosaic Legislation,” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 10 [November 1928], 210–213.

Chumash, 505.

Chumash, 208, 314. The rabbinic source is in b. Bava Metzia, 59b. In a rare illustration praising pagan morality, the Chumash, 498 echoed the Talmud's praise for the reverence shown a parent by his pagan son; the source is in b. Kiddushin 31a.

Chumash, 537, 813, 842, 924. According to Aristotle,

[A] slave was deemed an 'animated tool,'…. If at any time it was thought that there were too many slaves, they were exterminated, as wild beasts would be…. So much for the 'glory that was Greece.' The 'grandeur that was Rome,' was even more detestable. The slave was denied all human rights, and sentenced to horrible mutilation and even crucifixion at the whim of his master…. Worlds asunder from these inhumanities and barbarities was the treatment accorded to the Hebrew slave.

The commentary acknowledged one instance of mutilation in the Torah (Deuteronomy 25:11-12), but was quick to point out that the severe penalty was commuted to a fine under rabbinic jurisdiction (Chumash, 856); the rabbinic source is ספרי דברים [Sifrei on Deuteronomy], ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969), 312 [§193].

Chumash, 538.

Chumash, 151, 842. On the Talmudic source, see b. Sanhedrin 46a and discussion in Marty Lockshin, “A Corpse Left Hanging Overnight Is a ‘Cursing of God’,” TheTorah (2020).

Chumash, 494.

Letter from Salaman to Hertz on 19 February, 1932. Located in, K. Robson, MS 175 Papers of Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz 1872-1946, 1853-1949 (Southhampton: University of Southhampton, 1993).

Chumash, 310-311.

Chumash, 536.

Chumash, 308, 721.

Hertz ignored Maimonides' ruling, to the contrary: M.T. Hilkhot Ishut, 21:10.

Chumash, 316. Hertz was quoting no less an admirer of the Christian spirit than Claude Montefiore, his religious adversary. However, in a 1932 address, Hertz highlighted the mutual acceptance by Jews and Anglo-Saxons of the biblical injunction: "thou shalt not take vengeance" (Leviticus 19:18). Though he subsequently recorded this lecture verbatim in the Chumash, 501-502, he conveniently omitted the following pertinent claim:

Now this Jewish attitude toward vengeance is also, we are happy to say, that of the English people. John Henry Newman [1801-1890] expressed the Englishman's view when, in giving his well-known definition of the gentleman, he said, "The gentleman is too indolent for vengeance"; and recently we have been told "Inability to hate is the English-man's strong suit in the game of life.": Joseph Hertz, Sermons, Addresses, and Studies (London: Soncino Press, 1938), I, 297.

Chumash, 403. Halevi's source is The Kuzari, translated by Hartwig Hirschfeld (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1905), I, 103 (p. 73), 109 (p. 75).

This theme was central to the work of Louis Finkelstein, his outreach to the Gentile world, especially Christian religious leaders following WWII and throughout his entire chancellorship at JTS.

Chumash, 47, 70.

In the Genesis commentary published in 1929, p. 392, Hertz notes that Joseph relocated the Egyptian population to “concentration camps” (Genesis 47:21); this wording being, as Hertz notes, the actions of British colonial imperialism in India. In the one volume edition (1938), the word “depot” was inserted (Chumash, 177).

Chumash, 180, 192.

Chumash, 747. This paragraph in the Deuteronomy commentary (pub. 1935) was, to my mind, written against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism. Hertz was fully aware of the threat posed by Hitler. He makes several references to Nazism only in the Deuteronomy commentary. While on the subject of Nazism, Hertz notes in Deuteronomy (Chumash 855):

In Nazi Germany...[the] prohibition [against shehitah] was enacted not so much out of sympathy with the beast, as out of a desire to inflict pain on human beings: ‘they that sacrifice men kiss calves’ (Hosea 13:2).

His point: Nazism was pagan to the core. For Hertz, what was important was to distinguish broadly, in black and white terms, between Jewish morality and, in this case, Nazism. In a 1938 address he called Nazism a “persecuting paganism.”

Chumash, 704, 747, 759.

Chumash, 812, 848–849.

Hertz’s strident denigration of the standards of Western morality and particularly of Christendom would have had considerably more bite and cogency had he been able to point concretely to the living reality of Hebraism’s spirit inside a Jewish state that had grappled with and appreciably overcome its susceptibility and vulnerability to the full range of temptations: economic, social, political, and religious. The world governments that Hertz so roundly condemned were engaged in the colossal enterprise of fashioning total social and political orders. That they failed, in Hertz’s estimate, to moderate the exercise of power by moral sensitivity may be granted, but at least there were sufficient data to render a judgment against them. The same cannot be said of Jewish Diaspora life, which, owing to its political powerlessness and statelessness, never brought complete political, economic, and social concerns to the center of its religious consciousness.

See, Alan Levenson, “Was the Documentary Hypothesis Tainted by Wellhausen’s Antisemitism,” TheTorah (2021); Ismar Schorsch, “Coming to Terms with Biblical Criticism,” Conservative Judaism 57.3 (2005): 3–22.