Everything about David Zvi Hoffman totally explained
David Zvi Hoffmann (
November 24,
1843 –
1921) (
Hebrew:
דוד צבי הופמן), was an
Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and
Torah Scholar. Born in
Verbó in 1843, he attended various
Yeshivas in his native town before he entered the college at
Pressburg, from which he graduated in 1865. He then studied
philosophy, history, and Oriental languages at
Vienna and
Berlin, taking his doctor's degree in 1871 from
Tuebingen University. His rabbinical training was at the hands of
Maharam Schick and
Azriel Hildesheimer.
Shortly after obtaining his degree, he became employed as a teacher in
Samson Raphael Hirsch's
Realschule school in
Frankfurt am Main, and in 1873 moved to Berlin to join the faculty of the
Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin where he eventually became
rector in 1899 after the death of Azriel Hildesheimer.
A selective Wissenschaft practitioner
David Hoffmann occupies a very interesting position in the
Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of the 19th century, as shown by, and is in some ways the prototype of the contemporary
Orthodox Jewish scholar, facing the ubiquitous tension between faithfulness to tradition and the demands of critical inquiry. Though born in
Hungary, he adapted the
German-Jewish approach of openness towards general culture, world and society. He employed the critical scientific method to the
Talmud and wrote about the history of the development of the form of the
Oral law (as opposed to the development of the
Law itself, the latter being an enterprise antithetical to traditional Jewish beliefs; see below). Despite his worldly inclinations, he was an original member of the more traditionally oriented
Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah (council of great Torah sages), and was also known to be a person of great moral conduct and piety.
Hoffman was the leading authority on traditional Jewish Law (halacha) in
Germany in his lifetime, an expert specifically in the area of
Midrash halakha (legalistic
Biblical exegesis), and was also well known for his efforts to disprove the
Documentary Hypothesis as expressed by the
Graf-Wellhausen theory, his arguments being presented in a famous work entitled
Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (1903/1916).
A. Altmann, however, sees Hoffmann's writings on these matters (though evidencing great expertise) as pure apologetics, the cause of which may be seen as laid out in his introduction to
Leviticus, where Hoffmann makes the following remarks:
I willingly agree that, in consequence of the foundation of my belief, I'm unable to arrive at the conclusion that the Pentateuch was written by anyone other than Moses...
We believe that the whole Bible is true, holy, and of divine origin. That every word of the Torah was inscribed by divine command is expressed in the principle Torah min Ha Shamayim... We must not presume to set ourselves up as critics of the author of a biblical text or doubt the truth of his statements or question the correctness of his teaching...
The Jewish commentator must (therefore) constantly be on guard against interpreting the passage in such a way as to appear to be in conflict with traditional Halachah. Just as the Torah as a divine revelation must not contradict itself, in the same way it must not contradict the Oral Law which is of divine origin. |
Yet, despite the piety of the above sentiments, and his repeated proclamations regarding the divinity of the Oral Law, Hoffmann was still very much the
Wissenschaft scholar. He cites in his work scholars such as
Z. Frankel,
A. Geiger,
S.J. Rapoport, and
H. Graetz, he studies the influences of
Ancient Near Eastern culture on the evolution of the Talmud, and he identifies problems in the transmitted text. For example, Hoffmann in
The First Mishna sees the present Mishna
Avot as having been redacted from three different sources, a Mishna of
Rabbi Akiva, a Mishna of
Rabbi Meir, and a Mishna of
Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, the originals of which can't be completely reconstructed due to their thoroughgoing fusion and subsequent manipulation.
The extent to which Hoffmann resided in the
Wissenschaft movement can also be seen from the criticism he received from such opponents of the movement as Samson Raphael Hirsch. Hildesheimer notes regarding Hirsch's opinion of his Rabbinical Seminary (where Hoffmann worked after leaving Hirsch's institution) that "a question certainly exists as to whether Rabbi Hirsch considers the seminary to be an Orthodox institution." Hirsch's opposition extended to Hoffmann's own work, judging Hoffmann's book
Mar Samuel to contain heresies .
Hoffmann's resolution of this tension between faithfulness to tradition and textual criticism is found by in the following passage from the introduction to
The First Mishna:
Thus, in the study of the [[Tanakh |
Writings
Some of Hoffman's works include
Die Erste Mishna,
The First Mishna, a historical and linguistic analysis of the
Mishnah and
Melamed Le-ho'il, a
responsa on contemporary issues based on historical evidence of tradition. He also published a commentary on the
Pentateuch that included a translation of the text into
German. Later this commentary was translated into Hebrew, though today it's out of print. Most of his writings were in German and remain so to this day.
The First Mishna was translated into English, and a selection of his comments on the
Passover Haggada have been published in Hebrew as well. He published a translation of two of the orders of the Mishna into German.
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