Textual criticism of the Bible in the writings of Jacob Reifmann: a re-evaluation

Abstract

Jacob Reifmann (Poland, 1818–1895), one of the most fascinating figures of the Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, was a prolific scholar and intellectual whose books and articles cover a variety of subjects in Jewish intellectual history. Most of the scholars – scholars of Reifmann’s work and scholars of Jewish biblical research during the Enlightenment – usually present him as someone who worked extensively on the biblical text and proposed hundreds of emendations to the traditional (Masoretic) text. As I will endeavour to show in this article, the place of the critical study of the biblical text within Reifmann’s scholarly oeuvre needs to be re-evaluated. The conclusion reached in the course of our discussion is that Reifmann in fact made only a few suggestions for emending the biblical text, while the hundreds of comments that scholars have understood as proposals for textual emendation should be understood in a different way.