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Community and Controversy: Jews, Anglicans, and Biblical Criticism in Mid-Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2021

Edward Breuer*
Affiliation:
Hebrew UniversityJerusalem, Israel
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Abstract

Mid-nineteenth-century Victorian England was roiled by public controversies regarding the legitimacy of biblical criticism, largely fueled by Anglicans and the Church of England establishment. Jews were well aware of these public controversies and even spoke out in a forthright manner. At this very juncture there was also a rather remarkable Jewish scholar, Marcus Kalisch, who began to advance critical notions in his commentary to the Pentateuch, ultimately coming to conclusions not altogether different from the leading critical scholars in Germany. This article explores the way in which Anglo-Jews first avoided, and then finally confronted, Kalisch's work, and what that said about communal sensitivities and self-consciousness.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2021

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References

1. On the reception of Darwin in Britain see Ellegard, Alvar, Darwin and the General Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Moore, James R., The Post-Darwinian Controversies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Jewish responses to On the Origin of Species in the decades following its 1859 publication were sporadic and limited to a smattering of letters and editorials in two weeklies, the Jewish Chronicle (henceforth JC) and the Jewish World. One such editorial seemed to exemplify the attitude: it belittled Darwin's findings by claiming a lack of conclusive scientific support, but it also implied that evolutionary notions could be harmonized with Scripture. See JC, December 15, 1871, 8–9; and Cantor, Geoffrey, “Anglo-Jewish Responses to Evolution,” in Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, ed. Cantor, G. and Swetlitz, M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2340CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See Endelman, Todd, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 120–21, 264–65Google Scholar; and the historiographical review in Daniel Langton, “Wandering Jews in England's Green and Pleasant Land: Wissenschaft des Judentums in an Anglo-Jewish Context,” in Wissenschaft des Judentums in Europe: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Christian Wiese and Mirjam Thulin, Studia Judaica 76 (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming), nn. 1–3. The pronounced focus on political and socioeconomic issues is evident in some of the best books that deal in part or in whole with Victorian Jewry. See, e.g., Alderman, Geoffrey, Modern British Jewry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)Google Scholar; Finestein, Israel, Jewish Society in Victorian England (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993)Google Scholar; and Feldman, David, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

4. For another recent study, see Pearce, Sarah, “Josephus and the Jewish Chronicle: 1841–1855,” in Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture, ed. Schatz, Andrea (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 106–43Google Scholar.

5. See Rogerson, John, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984)Google Scholar.

6. Davidson, Samuel, Lectures on Biblical Criticism (Edinburgh, Thomas Clark, 1839), 2, 8Google Scholar. See Holmes, Andrew, “The Common Sense Bible: Irish Presbyterians, Samuel Davidson, and Biblical Criticism, c. 1800–1865,” in Dissent and the Bible in Britain c. 1650–1950, ed. Mandelbrote, Scott and Ledger-Lomas, Michael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 176204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Davidson, Lectures, 382. Although scholars occasionally point to English figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Arnold as having engaged in the historical-critical approach to the Bible, those writers were focused on theological interpretation and on the New Testament. See Altholz, Josef, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over Essays and Reviews, 1860–1864 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 38Google Scholar.

8. Davidson, Lectures, 381; see also iii, 238, 274.

9. See Rogerson, Old Testament, 79–89; and Katz, David S., God's Last Word: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 225–27Google Scholar.

10. London, 1844. Only the Genesis volume was published. The translations and commentary were the work of Morris Raphall, David A. De Sola, and I. L. Lindenthal.

11. The translations included the Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and the English Authorized Version, and the German Jewish translations by Moses Mendelssohn, Ludwig Philipsson, and Leopold Zunz. Among the modern German Christian Bible scholars cited in this tome were E. F. K. Rosenmüller, W. Gesenius, F. Tuch, and P. Von Bohlen, and among Englishmen, Alexander Geddes and John Kitto.

12. The authors did not generally confront biblical criticism directly, but simply labeled it as the work of “modern biblical critics” or “rationalist expounders” and then offered traditional readings based on medieval and modern Jewish exegesis. One exception was the explicit rejection of the claim that Jacob's blessings in Genesis 49 were late historical retrojections. See Sacred Scriptures, 324, 348–51, which cited at length from Philipsson's Die Israelitische Bibel (Leipzig, 1839), 261–63. For another example of the Anglo-Jewish conservatism regarding German critical scholarship, see Aguilar, Grace, The Jewish Faith (London, 1846), 9193Google Scholar.

13. One example was Greg, William, The Creed of Christendom (London, 1851), 3537Google Scholar. Greg, a Unitarian, cited De Wette to assert that the biblical books ascribed to Moses were undoubtedly written much later; see Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3:21–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The subject of Nonconformists (or: Dissenters) of the Victorian era and their views of biblical criticism is complex and defies easy generalization, not least because it entails a dozen different church denominations (and these are only the dominant ones) with vastly different theologies. The only study, partial and now over a half-century old, is that of Glover, William, Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Independent Press, 1954)Google Scholar. Watts devoted only about fifteen pages to the subject, and Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c. 1650–1950 (ed. Mandelbrote and Ledger-Lomas) has a single chapter that focuses only on Irish Presbyterians. The attitude of Catholics also requires separate treatment.

14. The Text of the Old Testament Considered (London: Longman, 1856). This was a revision of volume 2 of T. H. Horne, Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, originally published in 1818 and reprinted often. Horne was aware of Eichhorn's pioneering work but defended the unity of the Bible. Davidson's new thinking might have had its genesis in visits to Germany in 1844 and 1854, where he met with Hermann Hupfeld and other Bible scholars; see Davidson, Anne, ed., The Autobiography and Diary of Samuel Davidson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1899), 21–24, 30–33, 78, 84, 92, 185–88Google Scholar. His reconsideration of critical scholarship can already be detected in A Treatise on Biblical Criticism (Edinburgh, 1852), viii, 3, where he refrained from his earlier disparagement of German scholars.

15. Text of the Old Testament, 593. Davidson even appreciated some of the newest directions in critical scholarship, citing the recent suggestion of Hupfeld that “the Jehovist did something more important than simply furnish a kind of appendix to the Elohistic document” (632). For a historical overview of the supplementary hypothesis, see Thomson, R. J., Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism since Graf (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 2730CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. The Text of the Old Testament Considered … 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1859), 632.

17. Ibid., (first and second edition), 633: “We do not believe that the authority or credibility of the Pentateuch is lessened by repudiating the Mosaic authorship of the first four books, with some important exceptions.… The authority of the Pentateuch is not in the least impaired, as far as we can see, by the view now taken by its authorship.”

18. Davidson, Autobiography, 150–51.

19. He received his doctorate from the university in Halle in 1847 for work on an Arabic text of Maimonides.

20. Kalisch taught the children of Lionel and Anthony de Rothschild, but was particularly close with Lionel's wife Charlotte. He was also more than a Hebrew and German tutor: he led Passover seders, advised the Rothschild women on their Jewish publications, and prepared Leopold for his examinations at Cambridge. Biographical information regarding Kalisch's early years, including his relationship with the Rothschilds, is drawn from family letters preserved at The Rothschild Archive, London (henceforth RAL); Battersea Papers at the British Library; and Pillitz, Beno, “Kalisch M. Hat Levele,” Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat Évkönyv 28 (1909): 241–46Google Scholar. For a full biography, see Breuer, Edward, “Marcus Kalisch: The Life and Eclipse of an Extraordinary Victorian,” Jewish Historical Studies 52 (2021): 145–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. JC, January 28, 1853, 1. The announcement specifically noted the support of the Rothschilds.

22. Hebrew Observer, February 18, 1853, 52; and a longer version in JC, February 18, 1853, 153–55.

23. In the letters of 1853 (see previous note), Kalisch indicated that he did not want to overlap with the Genesis volume of The Sacred Scriptures in Hebrew and English. In his preface to Exodus, he explained that this book “forms the centre of Divine revelation, and … [would] convey a correct idea of the spirit and tendency of our Commentary.” See A Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament with a New Translation: Exodus (London: Longman, 1855), preface, vi.

24. Ibid., iv.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., introduction, x.

27. Ibid.; italics appear in the original.

28. Ibid. See, e.g., comments to Exod 6:26, 11:1, 12:1 (introductory essay, p. 187), 13:2, 21:1 (p. 386), 24:1, 25:1 (introduction, pp. 483, 499), 28:30.

29. This “English Edition,” as the title page has it, was also a considerable tome of over 450 pages. The two editions were published simultaneously.

30. Ibid., “English Edition,” v.

31. Athenaeum, July 28, 1855, 873; Literary Gazette, August 11, 1855, 504–5.

32. Journal of Sacred Literature, October, 1855, 215; and see the praise in the decidedly less conservative publication, The Leader, September 29, 1855, 943.

33. Dukes had studied at the Pressburg yeshiva of R. Moses Sofer and later immersed himself in contemporary Christian and Jewish scholarship. His work focused on the Masorah, medieval Hebrew grammar, and biblical exegesis, including a collaboration with Heinrich Ewald. Of his friendship with Kalisch, see Kaufmann, David, “Autobiographische Blätter von Leopold Dukes,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 56 (1892): 150Google Scholar.

34. JC, July 20, 1855, 242.

35. See A Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament with a New Translation: Genesis (London: Longman, 1858), 1–2, 38–52. Kalisch rejected the assertion that Scripture and science inhabited separate realms that yielded no points of contact, and he dismissed attempts to reconcile the Bible and the sciences on literary or substantive grounds. The Bible, rather, reflected the limited knowledge of the natural world prevalent in antiquity, and had to be interpreted as such; the value of Scripture, in his view, rested on its spiritual and moral aims.

36. Ibid., preface, iii.

37. Ibid., 84–85.

38. Ibid., 161.

39. Ibid., 183.

40. Ibid., 184.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 184–85.

43. See Römer, Thomas, “‘Higher Criticism’: The Historical and Literary Approach—With Special Reference to the Pentateuch,” in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Sæbø, Magne, vol. 3/1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 410–14Google Scholar. Römer makes the point that at midcentury, the various models to explain the composition of the Pentateuch were quite fluid and given to constant reformulation.

44. Genesis, 721–26. Kalisch also read some biblical sections, like Jacob's final blessings for his sons, as historical retrojections, wherein later events were projected back into the mouths of the patriarchs to appear as prophetic utterances.

45. Ibid., 618.. Compare this to Davidson, Text of the Old Testament, 632.

46. Kalisch did not refer to Davidson's work of 1856 in this volume, and it is possible that he began to work on Genesis before seeing Davidson's book. Their connection at this stage is unclear.

47. The most positive mention, although not a review, came in a radical and political paper, The Leader and Saturday Analyst, May 29, 1858, 523. In a brief and passing mention of the book, it wrote that the Genesis volume was important for every “truth-seeker who is not afraid of the new lights putting out the old.”

48. Athenaeum, July 24, 1858, 108–9.

49. The Nonconformist, February 9, 1859, 116.

50. Westminster Review, October 1858, 555.

51. North British Review, November 1858, 565.

52. Geiger's book was published in Breslau, 1857.

53. See Richard Weis, “‘Lower Criticism’: Studies in the Masoretic Text and the Ancient Versions of the Old Testament as Means of Textual Criticism,” in Sæbø, Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, 351–58; and Edward Breuer and Chanan Gafni, “Jewish Biblical Scholarship between Tradition and Innovation,” in ibid., 273–74.

54. See Dukes, Masa Ḥoqrim (London, 1857); and Dukes, “Periodicals in the Hebrew Language,” HameʾassefThe Hebrew Review and Magazine for Jewish Literature, n.s. (1860): 588 (henceforth, Hebrew Review), in which he criticized Joshua Heschel Shor's articles in He-Halutz for their unsubstantiated textual emendations.

55. See JC, March 5, 1858, 95; although this review was unsigned, Benisch was cited as author in a reprint in Journal of Sacred Literature and Biblical Record 7 (1858): 235–37.

56. JC, June 11, 1858, 206.

57. Dukes's silence was especially conspicuous when he extolled the value of Kalisch's mini-essay “Paradise and the Fall,” precisely where Kalisch discussed the separate authorship of Genesis 1 and 2. See Commentary…. Genesis, 83–103, especially 84–85.

58. Hebrew Review, 653–55, 670–71, 697–702, 714–18.

59. The silence was also conspicuous in that Dukes mentioned the accolades that Kalisch's work had received “in many learned quarters”—presumably the British reviews—while passing over their express reservations; ibid., 654.

60. Hebrew Review, 718; see also, from a less sophisticated writer, JC, June 21, 1861, 8. Contrast this silence with a German Jewish review that noted Kalisch's new view of biblical criticism and hoped for a future clarification of his position; see Hebraeische Bibliographie 2, no. 7 (1859): 14.

61. Williams, Rowland, “Bunsen's Biblical Researches,” in Essays and Reviews (London: Longman, 1860), 5960Google Scholar. The subject of Williams's essay was the work of Christian Carl von Bunsen (1791–1860), a Prussian diplomat who had earlier served in England. The unsophisticated nature of mid-Victorian biblical scholarship is reflected in the fact that Bunsen was not a Bible scholar of significance or originality. See Altholz, Anatomy of a Controversy, 16–19.

62. Williams, “Bunsen,” 67.

63. See Josef Altholz, “The Warfare of Conscience with Theology,” in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef Altholz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 58–77.

64. Ibid., 73. Some 15,000 copies of Essays and Reviews were published in the first four months of 1861 alone; see Shea, Victor and Whitla, William, Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 1419Google Scholar, and 919–39 for a bibliography of responses.

65. The Jewish reaction to Essays and Reviews was limited to the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Items appeared from March 1861 down to the Privy Council judgment of 1864.

66. See e.g., JC, March 15, 1861, 2; July 12, 1961, 4; September 13, 1861, 4; July 4, 1862, 4.

67. The one exception seemed to underscore this reticence; the Jewish Chronicle ran a review of Bunsen's last work that focused on methodological failings; but this review was written by an unnamed Christian scholar from somewhere on the continent; see JC, March 1, 1861, 2, and March 8, 1861, 2.

68. Colenso's work filled seven volumes and was published over an extended period: the first four volumes appeared between October 1862 and the end of 1863, and the remaining volumes in 1865, 1871, and 1879.

69. Pentateuch and Joshua Critically Examined, 1:xx.

70. See the helpful overview of Ausloos, Hans, “John William Colenso (1814–1883) and the Deuteronomist,” Revue biblique 113 (2006): 372–97Google Scholar. Abraham Kuenen, an important contemporary Dutch scholar, credited Colenso with undermining the idea of an older Grundschrift, a seminal step in the emergence of the new documentary hypothesis; see Kuenen, An Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch (London, 1886), xvi.

71. Pentateuch and Joshua Critically Examined, 1:xxxiv.

72. The example generally cited is the reaction of F. D. Maurice; see Maurice, Frederick, ed., The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice (London: Macmillan, 1884), 421ffGoogle Scholar. See Larsen, Timothy, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 5977Google Scholar.

73. M'Caul, Joseph B., Bishop Colenso's Criticism Criticised (London, 1862), viGoogle Scholar.

74. Colenso boasted that almost 8,000 copies sold in the first three weeks alone; see Cox, George W., The Life of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal (London, 1888), 1:236Google Scholar.

75. There were at least one hundred treatises written against Colenso between 1862 and 1865 in the British Isles alone, and this does not include reviews that appeared in every quarterly, monthly, and weekly periodical.

76. On the formal moves against Colenso, which took place in both Capetown and England, see Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church (London: SCM, 1970), 2:92–95Google Scholar; and Hinchliff, Peter, John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal (London: Nelson, 1964), 115–42Google Scholar.

77. JC, November 7, 1862, 4. In the next issue of November 14 (p. 5), Benish informed his readers of the upcoming Williams trial, to which he facetiously added: “We may perhaps, by and by, hear of a still more exciting trial—that of a bishop of the Anglican church Bishop Colenso … [who] is certainly a still greater heretic than Dr. Williams.”

78. JC, November 28, 1862, 4.

79. Shortly after the last installment had appeared, Benisch published the series as Bishop Colenso's Objections to the Historical Character of the Pentateuch … Critically Examined; it appeared in March 1863.

80. Benisch explained that Colenso would not accede to “the authority of any rabbi.… The bishop needs to be met on his own ground, and with his own weapons.” JC, December 12, 1862, 6. And in another instance: “Unless the errors of the Bishop can be proved from the clear word of the Bible, controversy with him can lead to no satisfactory result.” JC, January 2, 1863, 6. Benisch's approach was lauded by Christians as a useful contribution to the anti-Colenso campaign; this Christian appreciation was cited in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle in order to play up the importance of this Jewish weekly in the eyes of the public.

81. There was one single mention of Colenso's later volumes in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, a letter to the editor published February 27, 1863.

82. Adler's criticism of Colenso's weak Hebrew skills, and the similar statement of Benisch, were cited and even reproduced in Anglican anti-Colenso publications; see The Record, December 12, 1862; and M'Caul, Bishop Colenso's Criticism Criticised, 53–54, 63–64; and see Larson, Contested Christianity, 66.

83. Athenaeum, December 6, 1862, 736. Adler had recently returned from his rabbinic studies in Prague with Solomon Yehudah Rappaport, a proponent of traditionalist Wissenschaft, with an awareness of contemporary biblical scholarship. Adler also had contact with Jews connected with the university. See A. Schischa, “Hermann Adler, Yeshivah Bahur, Prague, 1860–1862,” in Remember the Days, ed. John Shaftesley (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1966), 249. On the pseudonymous rebuttal to Adler's letter in the next issue of Athenaeum, likely written by Kalisch, see Breuer, “Marcus Kalisch,” 158.

84. This was a review of the book version of Benisch's series, Bishop Colenso's Objections to the Historical Character of the Pentateuch … Critically Examined.

85. JC, July 10, 1863, 6.

86. A decade later, with reference to a lecture by Marks on the Talmud, an editorial in the Jewish World lumped Marks with Colenso and Kalisch as sharing “intemperate expressions” against revered texts. Anna Goldsmid rebutted this statement by stressing that while Colenso and Kalisch “impugn the divine character and authority of the Bible,” Marks had written against Colenso and condemned Kalisch's commentaries. See Jewish World, February 28, 1873, 4, and March 7, 2. The absence of a dogmatic divide on this issue between the Orthodox establishment and Marks fits well with the bibliocentrism of Victorian Jews in general and Marks's “neo-Karaism” in particular. See Endelman, Jews of Britain, 113. These sources invite a more nuanced portrayal of the religious controversy between Victorian Orthodoxy and Reform.

87. A Jewish Reply to Dr. Colenso's Criticism on the Pentateuch (London: Trübner, 1865). This book was published anonymously, but Adler's obituary ascribed authorship to him and quoted from the preface to demonstrate his attitude towards biblical criticism; see JC, July 21, 1911, 21. The archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS ARC 3.1/5) have a hand-written list of Adler's publications which includes him as “Joint Author” of this book; it is not known who his collaborator might have been.

88. Book reviews in the Spectator, as in most Victorian weeklies and periodicals, were unsigned. The evidence for Kalisch's authorship is threefold: First, a letter preserved in The Rothschild Archive indicates that the editor of the Spectator invited Kalisch to be a regular contributor in the late summer of 1862, only three months before the review appeared; see RAL 000/84 letter of Charlotte de Rothschild, August 19, 1862. Second, the review is markedly different from the other early responses to Colenso's work: it was completely devoid of Christian or Anglican concerns, raising neither issues of church authority nor interpretative freedom with the church. There was not a single reference to Christian teachings, even in the manner of liberal theologians. Finally, the content of the review, as described in what follows, fits well with views that Kalisch would articulate in his own name.

89. “To those who hold with us that the influence of God's spirit on the man is necessarily filtered through the imperfect medium of the human spirit … there will be little to excite alarm.” Spectator, November 8, 1862, 1250.

90. Ibid., 1251.

91. The citation was from Colenso, Pentateuch and Joshua Critically Examined, 1:153.

92. Spectator, November 8, 1862, 1251.

93. Compare, for example, A Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament with a New Translation: Leviticus Part I (London: Longman, 1867), 38–49.

94. Kalisch's sensitivity was not unfounded. Colenso dismissed the Commentary on Exodus just as he dismissed conservative German scholars who opposed the newer critical advances; see, e.g., Pentateuch and Joshua Critically Examined, 1:117–18.

95. The letter was dated December 20, 1862, and published in the Athenaeum, February 28, 1863, 297; see below.

96. Ibid. Kalisch's return letter was dated December 27, 1862.

97. RAL 000/84, letter of January 27, 1863, to Leopold de Rothschild. The convocation in question was that of the Church of England, which was then considering charges against Colenso. In the original letter, it is difficult to determine if the word “pre[s]ent” might have been “pre[v]ent,” and so the precise meaning is unclear. Either reading affirms Kalisch's willingness to help Colenso. My thanks to the archivist, Mr. Justin Cavernelis-Frost, for his examination of the original letter.

98. Hupfeld went out of his way to hail Colenso's critical method as more disciplined than German biblical criticism, which in his view relied on too many conjectures and hypotheses. Ewald, aware of those who saw Colenso as seriously undermining the faith of Christians, praised the bishop for holding firmly to the “essential and eternal substance of Christianity,” adding that the conflict now unleashed would lead to “the attainment of a grand new triumph of Christianity.”

99. Athenaeum, February 28, 1863, 297. Given the aggressiveness of his detractors, Colenso could not have imagined that these letters would convince anyone other than his supporters. This point was made in The Guardian on March 4, 1863, 219: “The [letters] prove absolutely nothing; and the fact that he is welcomed…. by German Professors of Hebrew and Biblical exegesis is … to deepen the distrust with which he is regarded by the English clergy. To say that such-and-such a theory is German is almost as much as to say that it is sceptical.”

100. Benisch wrote about Ewald that it was “a curiosity that a professor who disbelieves the historical character of the Pentateuch should yet talk of the eternal substance of Christianity,” something akin, he added, to averring that Jesus despised Moses and pronounced him to be an impostor. JC, March 6, 1863, 2. The reason for the omission of Hupfeld's letter is less certain, but Benisch's objections to Colenso (and earlier, Geiger) show that he avoided broad pronouncements about the value of biblical criticism, and perhaps for this reason, it was easier for him to omit the letter entirely. This may explain, but only in part, his silence regarding Kalisch.

101. Leviticus, 1:v–vi.

102. Ibid., xxviii.

103. Ibid., 146–48.

104. Ibid., 38, 43.

105. Ibid., 85–86, 92, 308–23, 396.

106. Ibid., 38–39.

107. These notions had been raised earlier in the century by De Wette, George, and Vatke, but were taken up in a far more assiduous manner in the 1860s by Abraham Kuenen and Karl Heinrich Graf.

108. Kalisch did not relate to the critical refinements regarding the Elohist texts which led scholars to treat parts of that document as independent of, and subsequent to, the Jehovist texts, which in turn precipitated the shift from the supplemental to the documentary model of the composition of the Pentateuch. He also refrained from using some of the new technical nomenclature regarding the Grundschrift or the Hexateuch.

109. See the Westminster Review, October 1867, 538–41; and the London Quarterly Review, January, 1868, 513–15.

110. Pall Mall, Athenaeum, and the London Quarterly Review made note of Kalisch's evolution from his early conservatism to his advanced criticism.

111. JC, September 13, 1867, 6.

112. Guedalla hailed from a wealthy Moroccan family and married into the Sebag-Montefiore clan. Readers of all nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish weeklies knew him as an inveterate letter writer, regularly criticizing Jewish institutions for all manner of perceived failures. This notice appeared in JC, December 20, 1867, 1.

113. Vice-Chancellor Sir William Page Wood's Able Defence of Scripture against Rationalists Contrasted with Dr. Kalisch's High Criticism on the Old Testament, and Fallacious Cavilling against Its Contents by Specious Arguments … (London, 1868). The pamphlet offered a pastiche of lengthy quotes from Kalisch's tome contrasted with the traditional views of William Page Wood, a member of England's High Court and an Anglican layman, and author of The Continuity of Scripture as Declared by the Testimony of Our Lord … (London: John Murray, 1867).

114. The booklet appeared in February 1868; the Jewish Record printed a brief excerpt, but other than this none of the Jewish weeklies even bothered to discuss his call. Compare this response to the review in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 32 (1868): 306–7, which broadly surveyed Kalisch's claims while still disagreeing with his methods and conclusions.

115. The article, signed only as “Publicola,” alluded here to Ephesians 4:13.

116. Weekly Dispatch, September 19, 1869; JC, September 24, 1869, 10–11, and October 1, 1869, 8–9.

117. In a subsequent exchange with “Publicola,” the Jewish editorialist reiterated his view of Kalisch: “A Jew like Dr. Kalisch may question its [= Old Testament's] authenticity; but we Jews, as a rule, do not read Dr. Kalisch, and there is no Kalisch sect among us.” See JC, October 22, 1869, 8.

118. Leviticus, 2:266–79, 505, 512–17.

119. Ibid., 640.

120. This was true for the London Quarterly, April 1872, 194–214; Non-Conformist, March 27, 1872, 328; and Christian Observer, January 1875, 54–67.

121. See the British Quarterly Review, April 1872, 597–98; and Athenaeum, May 4, 1872, 551–52.

122. Westminster Review, April 1872, 494–97; The Academy, July 1, 1872, 247–49; and the Athenaeum. The reviews in Westminster Review and Athenaeum, possibly written by the same hand, even criticized Kalisch for neglecting the critical question of how the Elohist texts were related to the Levitical legislation.

123. JC, April 12, 1872, 19, carried a one-line response to a correspondent identified only as “A Firm Believer in the Torah” that “Dr. Kalisch's work is in the reviewer's hands.”

124. It is worth noting that this serialized review was the longest of its kind since Benisch's series on Colenso's Pentateuch a decade earlier.

125. JC, September 19, 1873, 414; and see also JC, September 27, 1872, 358.

126. Friedländler's authorship of these reviews was referred to, as if somewhat common knowledge, in JC, December 25, 1891, 14. His authorship is confirmed in a letter of the editor, Henry, to Friedlander on July 22, 1872, Friedlander Papers, box 21, folder 1, University College London Library, Special Collections.

127. JC, July 12, 1872, 213.

128. Ibid., 214, where the reviewer took a swipe at “modern criticism, which is not satisfied to read what is written before it, but presumes to find by its infallible ingenuity the original intention and plan of the author.”

129. These reviews, it should also be said, never questioned the nature of Kalisch's religious commitments or beliefs. The letter of Henry to Friedlander of July 22, 1872, was explicit about the need to “meet him [= Kalisch] on his own ground—that of literary, philological, argumentative, logical hermeneutics.” See Friedlander Papers.

130. JC, July 4, 1873, 232.

131. On Kalisch's last publications, see Breuer, “Marcus Kalisch,” 163–64.

132. Times, August 31, 1885, 7; JC, August 28, 1885, 5, 10; Athenaeum, September 5, 1885, 303.

133. How Kalisch was regarded by Anglican Bible scholars in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and more importantly, why his work was ignored by most German scholars, needs separate treatment.

134. The British openness to “German criticism” began to manifest itself slowly in the 1870s and only found its footing around 1890; Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 273–89. This was paralleled among Anglo-Jews in the work of Claude Montefiore; see his article, “Some Notes on the Effect of Biblical Criticism upon the Jewish Religion,” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 4 (1892): 293–306, as well as his Hibbert Lectures, On the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Hebrews (1892).