The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik
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who emigrated to Jerusalem, where he was known as the Londoner. His son was Zalman Yosef Soloveitchik (after whom my brother is named), who lived in Jerusalem, where he was an apothecary and community leader. His son was my grandfather, Yitzchak Leib (Louis) Soloveitchik, who emigrated from Jerusalem to New York, where he changed the family name to Salovey. And his son, my father, Ronald Salovey, was a retired professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who passed away in June 2018. And I am Ron and Elaine Salovey’s eldest child. Perhaps we should call this part of the family the “Jerusalem connection.”
Writing about one’s lineage (yichis, in Yiddish) can sometimes come across as bragging, and there is an old saying in Yiddish that translates, roughly, as “Yichis is like a potato; the best part is in the ground.” But in case you find all this mildly intriguing rather than absolutely confusing, the bottom line is that Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik is my great-great-great-grandfather, and he was the brother of the Rav’s great-great-grandfather.
I take you through the primary boughs of my family tree, I must admit, with some pride. And growing up, I heard many stories of the famous rabbunim in my family, as well as about life in the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem, immigration to the United States (and the changing of our name, with its odd spelling but including in it my grandfather’s desire to preserve “love”), as well as about various family connections from Hayyim Volozhin down to the Rav. But the one person I never heard about growing up was Elijah Zvi, whose writings are the subject of this fascinating book. Perhaps this was because he was an obscure figure, or perhaps it was because his direct decedents did not become rabbunim like his brother’s. But since learning about his book on the Gospels, I have always wondered if, in reality, the family knew about his writings, and chose to hide him from view.
I am sure that some in my family cringed when they read the title of Shaul Magid’s article about Elijah Zvi in Tablet, “The Soloveitchik Who Loved Jesus.” I did not, although I am not sure whether Elijah Zvi actually “loved Jesus” or had other motives for writing about Christian thought. I like to believe that he was a brave soul—blind and seeking treatment in London at the end of his life—who wanted to provide a basis for Christians and Jews to respect each other, and he did that from the perspective of an observant Jew aware at all times that he was the grandson of Hayyim Volozhin. I like to believe that he chose Matthew as a focus (perhaps his first focus) in part because Matthew’s Jewish origins are revealed through his writings. I like to believe that Elijah Zvi was, quite simply, ahead of his times (at least among nineteenth-century Soloveitchiks) and that he wanted to enable what we now call on campus a “difficult dialogue.”
Thank you, Jordan Levy, for the translations of my great-great-great-grandfather’s work, and thank you, Shaul, for authoring this thoughtful and respectful—and intriguing—study of an overlooked thinker from a notable rabbinical family. His interests differed so obviously from those of his forebears and nephews, but he models for my generation of the family the significance of independent thinking (even in the context of religious orthodoxy) and the importance of seeking to understand the “other.”
Peter Salovey
President of the University
Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology
Yale University
Introduction
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the Jewish Jesus, Christianity, and the Jews
The master from Gastinin said in the name of master from Kotzk: All authors write instructions to their books, and it is common for people to say that a book without an introduction is like a body without a soul. God also wrote an introduction [hakdama] to God’s book, and it is civility [derekh eretz], as it says: “Civility is the introduction [kadma] to the Torah.”1 —MENACHEM MENDEL OF KOTZK, Emet ve-Emunah, 69
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik: The World of Lithuanian Yeshivas and the Soloveitchik Dynasty
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik (also known as Elias Soloweyczyk) was likely born in Slutzk, Russia, in 1805. He died in London in 1881. He was the grandson of Hayyim ben Isaac of Volozhin (1749–1821), founder of the Volozhin yeshiva in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Elijah Zvi was an early member of the Soloveitchik family, which became a rabbinic dynasty during and after his lifetime. He was educated in the Volozhin yeshiva, the most prestigious Jewish institute of higher Jewish learning in the nineteenth century.2 Later, Elijah Zvi lived mostly an itinerant existence, traveling between Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Poland, France, and England. His work Qol Qore, which is translated here, is his Hebrew commentary to the New Testament written over the course of about a decade and published in several languages. Qol Qore’s distinction is that it is a New Testament commentary written in Hebrew by a rabbinic insider in the nineteenth century who believed that he could prove, through the use of the classical rabbinic sources, that Judaism and Christianity do not stand in contradiction to each other. Soloveitchik was the first modern Jew to write an actual commentary to the New Testament.3 Most other similar works at that time were written by Jewish converts to Christianity or by rabbinic figures who polemicized against Christianity.4 Soon after Soloveitchik, Claude Montefiore penned a two-volume commentary to the New Testament, The Synoptic Gospels, first published in 1909 and in a second edition in 1927.5
The first known Soloveitchik dates back to 1751: Isaac ben Joseph Soloveitchik, who moved from Brisk to Kovno, where he served as a rabbi. Isaac, his son Moshe, and grandson Joseph were considered important Jewish figures in Kovno and its environs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Isaac ben Joseph’s grandson Joseph Soloveitchik married Rilke, a daughter of Hayyim ben Isaac of Volozhin, and became his third son-in-law.6 Joseph died quite young, leaving Rilke with two small sons: the elder, Isaac Zev; and the younger, Elijah Zvi. Isaac Zev’s son was Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1820–1882), known as the Beit ha-Levi, after his gloss on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (“Code of Law”).7 He became the chief rabbi of Slutzk and then Brisk, both in Lithuania. Joseph Dov was probably the second most well-known Soloveitchik of that period, next to his own son Hayyim Soloveitchik (1853–1918), known as the Brisker Rav, who was a teacher and lecturer (maggid shiur) of the Volozhin yeshiva until the yeshiva was closed by the Russian government in 1892.8
The Soloveitchik dynasty is often viewed as identical to what has become known as the Brisker method of Talmud study, a highly abstract method of reasoning less interested in the legal implications of a Talmudic pericope (sugya) than its logical progression. 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,