A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 383 Reviews A VINDICATION OF JUDAISM: THE POLEMICS OF THE HERTZ PENTATEUCH. By Harvey Warren Meirovich. pp. 304. New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998. Cloth. The intellectual challenge facing Judaism at the start of the now-closing century distressed Solomon Schechter, "the new century does not open under very favorable auspices for ludaism. Our Scriptures are the constant object of attack, our history is questioned, and its morality is declared to be an inferior sort." No prior generation could have assessed matters otherwise , given the millennial competition of Judaism and Christianity in the West, Judaism and Islam in the East. But what made acute a fonnerly chronic problem was, "that attitude of the younger generation, who if not directly hostile, are by dint of mere ignorance sadly indifferent to everything Jewish.... They are bound to end in that cold critical attitude toward Judaism terminating in drifting away from it altogether." When he became chief rabbi of the British Empire, reading the crisis as one of intellect and faith, Joseph Hertz detennined to meet the crisis by hitting head on the Protestant challenge to the Hebrew Scriptures and their historicity and morality. The liberal Protestant theologians maintained that the Scriptures are not (historically) true, and the religion they set forth is inferior. He also took as his task to answer Refonn and Liberal Judaism in its British fonnulation, arguing against its critique of ritual in the name of morality and its articulated policy of compromise and conciliation with (liberal) Christianity. The result was a commentary, the Hertz Pentateuch, with its polemics against liberal Protestant anti-Judaism and against Liberalludaic anti-Orthodox-Judaism. In this over-researched, under-reflected-upon, but enlightening dissertation , Harvey Meirovich, a Jewish Theological Seminary of America professor in Jerusalem, provides the defmitive account of a subject that, in retrospect, proves less interesting than it ought to have been. For the real problem of Hertz's Pentateuch is not addressed: why, in all, did it exercise so marginal an influence in synagogue life, despite its wide circulation, so that after three generations in the pews, one would do well to fmd a single position Hertz in particular argued that is broadly accepted as nonnative by the faithful, or as persuasive for that matter. Its early sales were trivial and, in the United States of America, scandalously sparse. Hertz thought a commentary would do, but it was the text that served in synagogue worship , along with the translation. Today the commentary and excurses are something of an intellectual joke, a museum of dead ideas and spent arguments . Contemporary Orthodoxy has produced its own media for the reception of the Torah, Refonn Judaism never gave way before Hertz's on- Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 384 Reviews slaught, and so far as Conservative synagogues went, the Hertz Pentateuch, like much else, was a mere fonnality, not a focus and source of a living faith like Rashi's counterpart. Hertz fought over issues few today (outside of Protestant fundamentalism) find acute and crafted a Pentateuch of ephemeral points and trivial observations. Meirovich places Hertz solidly into Conservative Judaism as the Jewish Theological Seminary defined matters in its fonnative age: a literate and enlightened Orthodox Judaism of intellect, integrated into the religious world of the time and place, for Jews who rejected self-segregation but affumed Judaism in its classical system. Hertz not only was the Jewish Theological Seminary of America's first graduate but maintained a lifelong relationship with the school and asked for a job there when he held a pulpit in Johannesburg. In shaping his commentary, moreover, Hertz occupied that very ground that the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Schechter's Conservative Judaism had taken for itself: [1] engagement with the scholarship of the age, and [2] apologetics in the face of attacks on the beliefs deemed normative. At what cost? Hertz bought into the Protestant framing of issues, so argued against much, but for very little. He obtusely engaged on the critics' own grounds, allowing the anti-Judaism of the liberal Protestants to define the tenns of debate. This was little short of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and yielded the...