Was the Documentary Hypothesis Tainted by Wellhausen’s Antisemitism?

Julius Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels [Israelite History] (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878), reprinted in a second edition with the 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). See discussion in, Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the Jewish responses to Wellhausen see Stefan Schreiner, “Protestant Bible Study and the Jewish Response in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10:2 (2003): 140-171 and Yaacov Shavit and Mordecai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Book, trans. Chaya Naor (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2007), 85–155.

Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997 edition), 243. “Protestant” is the anglicized counterpart to the German evangelisch, which usually, as in this case, meant Lutheran. Wellhausen’s father was a Lutheran pastor too, quite typical for the guild (Zunft) of German Bible scholars.

How things have changed! In mainstream seminaries of multiple religious denominations, the DH approach Wellhausen had assumed spiritually debilitating is deemed essential if not the final word.

When Wellhausen taught at Marburg, he was prohibited from teaching Old Testament. He was moved to Islamics, but according to Lou Silberman’s recollected conversation with Jacob Z. Lauterbach, Wellhausen considered this a demotion. See Lou Silberman, “Wellhausen and Judaism,” Semiea 25 (1982): 79 [n.1]. See also Rudolf Smend, “Julius Wellhausen,” in Encyclopedia Judaica 2^nd ed. (2007) 21:6–7 and here.

Wellhausen called the core Priestly source “Q” (Quelle, meaning “source”) to distinguish it from the redacted version, which he called RQ. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 8 [n.2].

This quote comes from an appendix to the book, which is not from the German edition, but is a reprint of Wellhausen’s 1881 article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9^th edition) titled “Israel,” with the addition of a new section (§11) titled “Judaism and Christianity,” pp. 499–513. (When this essay was eventually reprinted as a standalone book titled, Sketch of the History of Israel and Judah [London: Adam and Charles Black, 1891], this section was printed not as §11 but as an appendix.) The original German version of this section serves as the ending to his essay, “Abriss der Geschichte Israels und Juda's,” published in volume one of his Skizzen und Vorarbeiten [Sketches and Preparatory Works].

Julius Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer: eine Untersuchung zur inneren jüdischen Geschichte [The Pharisees and the Sadducees: An Inquiry into Internal Jewish History] (Greifswald: L. Bamberg, 1874), 19. See the discussion in Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 210-221; idem, “The German Theological Tradition,” In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, ed. Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007) 353–373 [p. 365].

Wellhausen’s thinking here reflects the theological thrust of Liberal Protestantism in that era to separate Old and New Testament. This neo-Marcionism, a modern-day revival of the 2^nd century C.E. Christian heretic, ruled the day, and had inimical implications for evaluating Judaism.

A survey of Bismarck biographies may be found in Karina Urbach, “Between Saviour and Villain: 100 Years of Bismarck Biographies,” The Historical Journal 41 (December 1998). Since then, the best Bismarck biography is Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck. A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The National Liberals opposed Bismarck’s unconstitutional appropriations in the 1860s, but were won over by Bismarck’s foreign policy successes, enabled by the Prussian military. After successful wars against Denmark, Austria, and France and the establishment of the Empire, the National Liberals made peace with Bismarck, and vice versa until the late 1870s. Needless to say, this picture of the German political situation in the 1860–1870s is merely a sketch.

“Culture wars” over the Bible have been going on from Second Temple times until today. The heated discussions over the Museum of the Bible over the last few years offer a parade example. But the phrase “culture war” comes directly from this era.

The scholarship on the Kulturkampf is immense. The seminal works of Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Jonathan Sperber, and Christopher Clark offer a good starting point.

Silberman, „Wellhausen and Judaism,“ 78, identifies Conservative Protestant Bible scholars as Wellhausen’s principal target.

Fritz Stern’s seminal Gold and Iron deals with this shift brilliantly. Bismarck remained thoroughly utilitarian and amoral in his dealings. As antisemitism grew in these decades Bismarck did little to discourage it. As anxiety about Socialism grew, Bismarck did much to encourage this hostility.

Michael Meyer, “Great Debate on Antisemitism: Jewish Reaction to New Hostility in Germany, 1879-1881,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 11:1 (1966): 137-170.

On the Protestant monopoly of the academy in Wellhausen’s day and the ensuing deprecation or ignorance of other perspectives, see, inter alia, Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker (Leiden, 1988); Ulrich Küsche, Die unterlegene Religion, (Berlin, 1991); Hans-Joachim Bechtholdt, Die jüdische Bibelkritik im 19 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1995); Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie (Tübingen, 1999). The non-representation of Jews and Catholics in the 19^th century academy offers a parade example of the importance of diversity as an antidote to group think.

The Vatican officially rejected critical Bible scholarship until the papal decrees in 1943, and arguably, did not embrace it until Dei Verbum in 1963 (1965?). Jewry, of course, had no similar authority and no university faculty, but also remained ambivalent about source critical methods. So did conservative Protestants, whose scholarship was deemed behind the times, such as the prolific biblical exegete Franz Delitzsch. The Elder Delitzsch, father of Friedrich, although a missionary and thoroughly convinced of Christianity’s superiority to Judaism, possessed a deep admiration for rabbinic creativity. (His mixed legacy included a ‘modern’ Hebrew translation of the New Testament, supposedly with an assist by the provocative emendation adept, and reputed apostate, Arnold Bogumil Ehrlich.) Delitzsch’s student, Hermann Strack, continued this tradition of combining ardent Christianity and admiration of rabbinic Judaism. They were devout Christians and committed to Jesus’s Jewishness. They were also in the minority.

See Shavit’s comprehensive discussion of the Bible-Babel controversy in The Hebrew Bible Reborn, 195-352.

Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Older but still critical works: Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Antisemitism (NY: Columbia University Press / Philadelphia: JPS, 1972); Sanford Ragins, German Responses to German Antisemitism: A Study in the History of Ideas, Alumni Series of HUC Press (Cincinnati: HUC Press, 1980).

A comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point.

Schechter did not reject the Documentary Hypothesis altogether. He rejected its anti-Judaic embellishments and the utility of the method in preparing rabbis. David Fine, “Solomon Schechter and the Ambivalence of Jewish Wissenschaft,”Judaism (Winter 1997): 4-24. The international and interdenominational Jewish responses to Wellhausen at the time included a schizoid separation of Torah and Nach, applying source critical methods to the latter only, and side-stepping the sort of chronological questions Wellhausen and company thought they had answered for the Bible at large. (Heinrich Graetz provides a precise example of this procedure.)

Cited in Fine, “Solomon Schechter and the Ambivalence of Jewish Wissenschaft,”

See Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2016). Zunz, an independent scholar, was more audacious in his Bibelkritisches. idem, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102.3 (2012): 431–454.

Wise rightly ranks as the founder of Reform Judaism in America: He remained quite traditional in his view of the Torah.

Nobody expressed the quality of what gave the Bible enduring relevance and sanctity better than the agnostic cultural Zionist Ahad Haam, who rejected Torah min ha-shamayim, but also rejected the uncritical importation of European methods into the educational system of academic high schools in Palestine. See Yaacov Shavit and Mordecai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn. From Holy Scriptures to the Book of Books (Berlin and New York, 2007); Alan Levenson, “In Search of Ahad Ha’am’s Bible,” Journal of Israeli History 32.2 (2013): 241–256.

On Kohler, see Schreiner, “Protestant Bible Study and the Jewish Response,” 156. One learned Orthodox respondent, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann, dedicated an entire book to pointing out problems with applying Wellhausen’s hypothesis to Torah texts. The key issue for Hoffmann may have been theological, but he understood the sociological implications. See David Ellenson and Richard Jacobs, “Scholarship and Faith: David Hoffmann and his Relationship to Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 8:1 (1988): 27-40.

On Kaufmann’s relationship to Wellhausen see Nahum Sarna, “From Wellhausen to Kaufmann,” Midstream 7:3 (1961): 64–74; Thomas Krapf, Yehezkel Kaufmann: ein Lebens- und Erkenntnisweg zur Theologie der hebräischen Bibel (Berlin: Institut für Kirche und Judentum, 1990); Aly Elrefaei, Wellhausen and Kaufmann: Ancient Israel and Its Religious History in the Works of Julius Wellhausen and Yehezkel Kaufmann, BZAW 490 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).

See Moshe Greenberg’s brilliant condensation of Yehezkel Kaufmann’s position in “The Sources,” The Religion of Israel (Chicago, 1960), 153-211.

David S. Sperling, Students of the Covenant. A History of Jewish Bible Scholarship in North America (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), offers a very reliable overview.

[30] One might view this story, in part, as a case of Jewish resistance to European Orientalizing.

Important exceptions were George Foot Moore and Herbert Danby. See Konrad Schmid, “The Interpretation of Second Temple Judaism as „Spätjudentum“ in Christian Biblical Scholarship,” in: Armin Lange (Ed.), An End to Antisemitism! Confronting Antisemitism from the Perspectives of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (Berlin/Boston 2020), 139–152.

Nobody expressed the quality of what gave the Bible enduring relevance and sanctity better than the agnostic cultural Zionist Ahad Haam, who rejected Torah min ha-shamayim, but also rejected the uncritical importation of European methods into the educational system of academic high schools in Palestine. See Yaacov Shavit and Mordecai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn. From Holy Scriptures to the Book of Books (Berlin and New York, 2007). See Martin Shuster, “Ten Theses on Jewish Studies,” AJS Perspectives (Fall 2020), 15-16.