S y m p o s i u m : Xe no p h i l ia , Pa r t 5

LOVING JUDAISM
THROUGH CHRISTIANITY
The Cases of Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik and Oswald Rufeisen

Shaul Magid

It is vain to think of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity before

Christians themselves are converted to Judaism.
— Stanislaus Hoga

There is no common religious ground which Judaism and Christianity

can share, after the Jewish legacy appropriated by Christianity has been
distorted beyond recognition of its Jewish origins.
 — Trude Weiss-­Rosmarin

Daniel Boyarin opens his book The Jewish Gospel with the following statement:

If there is one thing that Christians know about their religion, it is that
it is not Judaism. If there is one thing that Jews know about their reli-
gion, it is that it is not Christianity.1

Boyarin begins with this popular misunderstanding and spends the remainder of
his book showing why mutually excluding distinctions between the two religions

1. Boyarin, Jewish Gospel, 1.

Common Knowledge 26:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-7899599
© 2020 by Duke University Press

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are historically untenable (at least in late antiquity, which is his focus). So plain a

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statement of the misunderstanding is useful for him because it is deeply embed-
ded in modern Christian perceptions of Judaism and Jewish perceptions of Chris-

Xenophilia: Par t 5
tianity, and of each one’s own self-­fashioning. Boyarin’s formula is a fitting point
of departure for the present study as well, since my hope is to shed light on the
complex relationship between Judaism and Christianity, between Jew and Chris-
tian, and between two particular Jewish lives of the twentieth century. While
the historical record shows an exceedingly complex reality, the investment in

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categorical theological distinctions on both sides, for different reasons, remains

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large, even (or perhaps I should say, precisely) in our increasingly postsuperses-
sionist world. The claim of irreconcilability from the Christian side goes back a
long way and indeed is the basis of supersessionism. On the Jewish side, the claim
is more difficult to sort out because “Christian” did not likely exist, for Jews, as a
category distinct from that of “goy” (which covers all non-­Jews) until some point
during the Middle Ages.2
Boyarin’s opening statement thus encapsulates a modern viewpoint of which
he is volubly skeptical. Among those who themselves profess that modern view-
point uncritically, we find at least two forms of statement that, while similar in
tenor and consequences, make claims that should be differentiated. One form is
that of Leo Strauss, the Jewish political philosopher, who argued that “there is no
reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity; Judaism is the anti-­Christian
principle, pure and simple.”3 A second basic form is that of Justice Moshe Silberg
of the Israel Supreme Court, who wrote in a landmark decision that “Jew and
Christian are two titles that cannot be combined in a single subject.”4 The state-
ment just quoted is drawn from Silberg’s denial, in 1958, of a request by “Brother
Daniel” — a Jew from Poland (also known as Oswald Rufeisen) who became a
Carmelite monk during the war — to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen
under the Law of Return. That law, still in force today, states that any authenti-
cated Jew, living anywhere, is entitled to immediate Israeli citizenship. Strauss’s
claim has to do with two religions and their irreconcilability. Silberg’s, on the
other hand, deals not with Judaism and Christianity, but with Jew and Christian.
The question that Silberg addresses is whether a Jew can be also a Christian, or a
Christian also a Jew. Strauss makes a metaphysical claim about the irreconcilabil-
ity of two theological systems. Perhaps ironically, Silberg’s denial that one could
be both a Christian and a Jew — his determination that Christian baptism erases
one’s status as a Jew — is actually a Christian assumption going back to the third

2.  On the genealogy of the term goy (gentile) in antiquity 3.  See Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, 94.
and in late antique Judaism, see Rosen-­Zvi and Ofir, Goy,
4.  Cited in Weiss-­Rosmarin, “Case of Brother Daniel.”
and Hayes, “Complicated Goy.” Specifically on the ques-
tion of the category “Christian” in late antique Judaism,
see Reed, Jewish-­Christianity and the History of Judaism,
394 – 401.
 century. For much of Jewish history, and according to most Jewish authorities, a
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Jewish convert to Christianity, or to any other religion, is an apostate, meshumad,

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

which is a label applicable only to one who is a Jew.

To clarify the meaning and applications of the Hebrew term meshumad,
it may be useful to examine the lives of two Jews, the Catholic convert Oswald
Rufenstein (1922 – 98), already mentioned, and Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik (c. 1805 – 81),
an ultratraditionalist rabbi who, in his Hebrew commentary on the Gospels of
Mark, Matthew, and Luke, argued for the simultaneous truth (and even identity)
of Judaism and Christianity. Rufeisen and Soloveitchik, each of whom retained a
deep love for Judaism and identified himself as a Jew throughout his life, stand on
opposite sides of the conversion spectrum, representing different alternatives to
the modern assumption that Judaism and Christianity are diametrically opposed.
Soloveitchik held that, because Judaism and Christianity are symmetrical, non-
conflicting, and categorically indistinct, there was no reason for a Jew drawn
toward Christianity to convert, whereas Rufeisen, having decided that the two
religions, though not opposed, are distinct, converted upon finding something in
Christianity, not found in Judaism, that answered his need to explain the Holo-
caust and to understand his own experience of it. Still, both men, seeing Chris-
tianity mainly through the lens of the New Testament — which took form before
there was any such concept as “Christianity,” or even “religion” — denied, like the
early followers of Jesus, that Jew and Jesus-­believer were mutually exclusive terms.
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik has largely been forgotten, though his commentary
on the Gospels had appeared in French, German, and Polish translations by the
end of the nineteenth century, and the original 1869 Hebrew edition, published
in Paris, was reprinted by a Protestant seminary in Jerusalem as recently as 1985.5
Rufeisen became well known when he was denied entry to Israel by the Ministry
of the Interior and “The Case of Brother Daniel” became a test case in Israel of
“Who is a Jew?”6 Few at the time knew the intricacies of Rufeisen’s life, what
brought him to his conversion, or how he understood its affecting his status as
a Jew. His argument was based on the distinction he made between the Jewish
religion and the Jewish people: as a secular Zionist and an ethnic Jew, he identi-
fied with the latter but not the former. Still, when eventually he joined the Stella
Maris Carmelite Monastery in Haifa, he became part of a Hebrew-­speaking
Catholic community that sought to revive an earlier form of Christianity whose
roots, he insisted, were in ancient Judaism.7 It was in these ways that he under-

5.  On Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, see Magid, The Bible, the
Talmud, and the New Testament.
6.  See, for example, Shaki, Who Is a Jew in the State of
Israel? A history of the case and its legal ramifications can
be found in Stanislawski, “A Jewish Monk?”
7.  There are many other similar cases, for example that
of Franz Rosenzweig, who remained a Jew but held a deep
appreciation for Christianity and viewed it as part of the
larger “Jewish” mission to the world. On Rosenzweig, see
Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions, esp. 51 – 126.
8. Tec’s In the Lion’s Den contains extensive interviews
with Rufeisen about his conversion.
stood himself to be Christian and Jewish simultaneously.8

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Whatever the differences, however, between their relationships to Chris-
tianity, Rufeisen and Soloveichik equally rejected Christian supersessionism,

Xenophilia: Par t 5
which held that the Judaism of Jesus’s time was on the brink of irrelevance and
was finally invalidated with the coming of Christ. In the 1970s, supersessionism
would itself be superseded by a figuration or model of Christian-­Jewish relations
known as the “parting of the ways.” “In stark contrast to the old supersessionist
views,” as Annette Yoshiko Reed describes the new model,

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the metaphor of “parted ways” allows for both Judaism and Chris­t ianity
to be approached as authentic religions in their own right, with equally
strong links to the biblical and Second Temple heritage that they share.
As such, this model proves palatable to Jews and Christians alike; the
former can affirm Jewish origins of Christianity even as they deny
Christian influence on the development of classical rabbinic Judaism,
while the latter can claim profound continuity with pre-­Christian Jew-
ish history even as they affirm the originality of the (Gentile) Christian
message.9

This new approach met the needs of an emerging rapprochement of Jewish and
Christian scholars working on the ancient origins of Christianity and on the
emergence, at roughly the same time, of rabbinic Judaism. The problem with the
model is that it suggests a stark divergence of the two quite early in their respec-
tive histories.
A “parting of the ways,” as Reed observes, must assume the existence of
stable entities called “Judaism” and “Christianity” long before distinctness and
stability can be shown to have existed:

Only a small handful of our ancient and late antique Christian sources 
— and none of our ancient and late antique Jewish sources — frame
Jewish/Christian difference in terms akin to “parting/parted” ways.
The appeal of the “Parting” model does make sense, however, from
a present-­day [perspective] in which “religions” are conceptualized as
essentially separate entities with separate histories that might be likened
to discrete and unlinear diachronic paths through time.10

To ask when, where, and how Judaism and Christianity parted ways in antiquity
is, for Reed, a wrongheaded question, since “they” did not then exist:

Even when and where they did [part], new paths often emerged to medi-
ate new types of interchange between Jews and Christians, and new
realms of common ground could be established, thereby posing new

9.  Becker and Reed, The Ways that Never Parted, 16. 10. Reed, Jewish-­Christianity and the History of Judaism,
393.
 threats to those who promoted an idealized view of these identities and
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communities as hermetically sealed off from one another.11

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Seen in this light, the assessment of Leo Strauss is no more than a dogmatic
assertion with weak historical (and also, arguably, weak theological) foundations,
although the claim he makes plays a crucial role in how Jews perceive their proxi-
mate other in an era when Christians largely prefer ecumenism to supersession-
ism. As for Justice Silberg’s claim, all that it does, in my view, is invert an ancient
Christian assertion about Jews that hardly ever functioned in the Jewish world
until it was used to justify the refusal to grant Brother Daniel citizenship in Israel
under the Law of Return.
Soloveitchik and Rufeisen present very different challenges to the “parting
of the ways” narrative. Soloveitchik’s is perhaps the more straightforward: early
rabbinic Judaism and the Gospels share the same roots. The Gospels are for him
Jewish texts not only in their own temporal context but in ours as well, and the
Gospels are misinterpreted, by Christians and Jews alike, when read without that
understanding. Rufeisen’s challenge is to remind us that Jews who have aban-
doned the religion entirely — who have become “secular” or “assimilated” — are
considered still to be Jews even by most Orthodox rabbinic authorities. He then
asks why, if religion and ethnic identity are separable, can a Jew not join another
religion and remain a Jew, especially when that religion has so much commonal-
ity (though also, admittedly, carries so much historical baggage) as Christianity
does. The difficulty for Jews and Christians of dealing with Soloveitchik and
Rufeisen is less that they cannot be made to fit the “parting of the ways” narra-
tive than their interventions invite us to theorize anew the categories of “Jew,”
“Christian,” “Judaism,” and “Christianity.” Both men make it harder to deny that
the categories have never been quite stable (and surely were unstable in antiquity).
We must bear in mind, when considering their views, that Soloveitchik lived at
the time of an active attempt by Christian societies to convert the Jews of Eastern
Europe, and that Rufeisen lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, disguised
as a Polish national and working as a translator for the Nazis. Each in his own
way understood the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as especially
intricate, and certainly more complicated than either Silberg or Strauss would
allow. This symposium on xenophilia, where the emphasis has been on difficulty
and complication, seems a good context in which to retell these stories.

11.  Becker and Reed, The Ways that Never Parted, 23.
Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik

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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

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Isaac of Volozhin (1749 – 1821), the 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 his lifetime and has remained
such to the present day. He was educated in the Volozhin yeshiva, the most presti-
gious institution of higher Jewish learning during the nineteenth century.12 Later

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in life, he lived a mostly itinerant existence, traveling between Lithuania, Russia,

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Germany, Poland, France, and finally England. His most popular work, Qol Qore,
a commentary on the Synoptic Gospels of Mark and Matthew (his commentary
on Luke has not survived), was written over the course of about a decade and, it has
been claimed, was the first modern Jewish commentary on the New Testament
written by neither a convert to Christianity nor a polemicist against it.13 Qol Qore
is distinctive also as a commentary, written in Hebrew, by a rabbinic insider
who believed that he could prove, by means of classical rabbinic sources, that
Judaism and Christianity do not stand in a relationship of mutual contradiction.
Very little is known of Soloveitchik’s life, largely because he never held
an official rabbinic or teaching post, and none of his children became world-­
renowned rabbinic scholars.14 We also must consider that Elijah Zvi’s professional
choices would not have found much favor in his illustrious family. Most of what
we know about him is through his publication activities, not only as a commen-
tator but also as an editor and publisher. He was active in publishing editions of
classical texts, including his own work in numerous translations. Much of his
publishing activity, at least early on, appears to have been occasioned by financial
and medical needs. We know that he left Slutzk in 1844 or 1845 to seek medical
help for various ailments and that the phrase sagi nahor, a Hebrew euphemism
for “blind person,” was applied to him. It was sometime in the 1830s or 1840s
that Elijah Zvi began to exhibit an interest in Christianity and to write his com-
mentary on the Gospels. Unlike other Jews of his time with similar concerns, he
appears never to have thought of converting, and as far as we know he remained
an ultratraditional Jew throughout his life. We have no indications of what might
have precipitated his interest in the Gospels.15

12.  See Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth
Century, 190 – 233; and Cohen, Vilna.
13.  See Vorster, “Jewish Views on Jesus,” 89, 90. Cf. Hag-
ner, Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 28n19. Moses Montefiore
wrote a two-­volume commentary, The Synoptic Gospels,
first published in 1909 and then in a second edition in
1927. For his commentary, Montefiore sought the help of
Israel Abrahams, reader in Talmudic and rabbinic litera-
ture at Cambridge, whose own work on Christianity was
published in two volumes as Studies in Pharisaism and the
Gospels (1902, 1929).
14.  Some of Elijah Zvi’s progeny, however, were academ-
ics and physicians of note. His great-­great-­great grandson
Peter Salovey is the current president of Yale University.
15.  Two examples among many from Soloveitchik’s gen-
eration who converted and published on Christianity
 It is striking how different Soloveitchik’s work on Christianity is from that
94

of other Jews of his time.16 A characteristic and well-­k nown example is Hen-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

rich Graetz, the third volume of whose History of the Jews offered an assessment
of Christianity that was strongly polemical and became standard in subsequent
generations, even or especially among liberal rabbis.17 Another well-­k nown case
is that of Abraham Geiger, a Reform rabbi.18 Many of these mostly liberal rabbis
or maskilim (freethinkers) were very critical of Christianity and focused largely
on the historical Jesus in order to argue that Judaism was the religion of Jesus
while Christianity was the religion about him — implying that Christianity and
the teachings of Jesus need to be understood as distinct. These positive appraisals
of Jesus were at the same time a veiled (and sometimes not-­so-­veiled) critique of
Christianity: their “Jewish Jesus” was part of their case for the emancipation and
inclusion of Jews in European (which is to say, Christian) society. Soloveitchik’s
approach was quite different. He argued for the complementarity of Jesus’s
teachings and those of Moses, and he used rabbinic literature, especially the work
of Maimonides, to make his case.
Early in his career as a translator, Soloveitchik focused primarily on Mai-
monides. In 1846, he published a German translation of his own edition of selec-
tions from Maimonides’s Book of Knowledge. In his introduction Soloveitchik
writes: “I decided to print these holy words, to publish this book as an aid to
all. I am now here [in Königsberg] to seek help for my illness. . . . I have already
published the first volume [in Hebrew]. And now I publish the second edition in
German translation for those who do not know the original Hebrew.” Does he
mean here that the German translation is meant for Christians? We do not know.
It is in a separate commentary, on Maimonides’s “Laws of Idolatry,” that we begin
to see the intellectual trajectory that will culminate in Soloveitchik’s work on
Mark and Matthew. Commenting on the history of idolatry that Maimonides
gives in chapter one of his “Laws of Idolatry,” Soloveitchik writes: “Our teacher
[Maimonides] brings proof from Jeremiah that[,] even when Jeremiah was rebuk-
ing Israel for abandoning God and going after other gods of wood and stone, he

were Alfred Edersheim (1825 – 89), author of The Life and 16.  See Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi; Berlin, Defending
Times of Jesus the Messiah (1888), and Moshe Margoliouth the Faith; and Stern, “Catholic Israel,” 483 – 511.
(d. 1881), who wrote numerous anti-­Talmud missionary
17. Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis
tracts. There are also Nehemia Solomon, who likely pro-
auf die Gegenwart. Graetz was especially critical of the
duced the first Yiddish translation of the New Testament;
“Jewish-­Christianity” of works like Pseudo-­Clementine’s
Stanislaus Hoga, the convert who translated Alexander
Homilies which, like the work of Soloveitchik (who likely
McCaul’s missionary tract The Old Paths; and Augustus
did not know this text), argued for the complementarity
Neander (1798 – 1850), born David Mendel, who became
of Judaism and Christianity. See Reed, Jewish Christianity
perhaps the most prominent church historian of his gen-
and the History of Judaism, chap. 11, 320 – 24.
eration. Soloveitchik may have been aware of Luigi Chi-
arini, who published a scathing attack on the Talmud, 18.  See Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus.
Theorie du Judaisme, in 1830. Chiarini was a member of
a Christian committee established in Warsaw in 1825 to
encourage Polish Jews to assimilate.
said that all nations know that God alone is one; they only err by elevating those

95
whom God himself has elevated.” This is a fairly close and conventional reading
of Maimonides’s text. Less conventionally, however, Soloveitchik repeats it many

Xenophilia: Par t 5
times, in his commentary on the Gospels, in order to correct Jews who think that
Christianity maintains that Jesus is God. He designates the Trinity — the concept
of one God in three Persons — a “great mystery,” thus accepting the doctrine as
monotheistic. If even ancient idolaters, as Jeremiah said, knew that God was one,
then certainly those in antiquity who had been exposed to Israelite monothe-

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ism must have known so. Therefore, Soloveitchik concludes, Christianity is not

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rightly classified as a form of idolatry.
Dov Hyman makes the very plausible suggestion that Soloveitchik’s New
Testament commentary was written in Hebrew between 1863 and 1868 (at which
time he also published his commentary on Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles”
in English).19 Soloveitchik begins his commentary by saying that “it may, perhaps,
appear presumptuous of us to undertake writing a commentary on a book like the
New Testament, and to choose a path that has been trodden by so many. . . . But
our object is not to comment but be impelled by the circumstances of the times. . . .
We desire to institute an inquiry into the cause of an existing misunderstanding.”
The statement indicates that this work on the “Thirteen Principles” is a part of
what will be published later as his commentary on the Gospels. In the “Thir-
teen Principles” commentary, Soloveitchik, writing from a Christian perspec-
tive (or perhaps it is the voice of the translator we are hearing), explains that the
“misunderstanding” between Jews and Christians has three components: “that
our Jewish brethren have no faith and that the summit of the Christian belief
centers on the eradication of the Law of Moses” (italics in the original); “that we
Christians are their opponents and merely seek their subversion”; and “that the
generality of Jews, as well as Christians, being unacquainted with that which
constitutes the Judaism of the present day, look upon the chasm that separates
Judaism from Christianity to be of such great magnitude as to render all efforts
of reconciliation in vain.”20 The second edition includes a letter, addressed to “My
Christian Brethren” in Soloveitchik’s own voice, that begins: “I much regret to
find that there exists amongst you a deeply rooted aversion to the sayings of the
Talmud.”21
Soloveitchik was a harmonizer and, in that sense, a throwback to pre-

19. Hyman, A Treatise on Elijah Zvi Halevi Soloveitchik,
134. The book on Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles,”
published in English, also bore the title Qol Qore (with A
Voice Crying, The Law, the Talmud, and the Gospel as sub-
title). This earlier Qol Qore appeared in London, with its
authorship attributed to “Several Learned Men,” in 1868.
This text was discovered by Jacob Dienstag and given to
Dov Hyman. There is no reference to this work on Mai-
monides until, in the preface to the 1985 republication by
Protestants of Qol Qore in Jerusalem, it is mentioned that
the work had been translated into French, German, Pol-
ish, and English. No other publication record mentions an
English translation.
20. Soloveitchik, Qol Qore, 3.
21. Soloweyczyk, Qol Qore.
 modern renderings of the New Testament. His Lithuanian Talmudic training
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resulted in his reading the New Testament in the way that the Tosafists (medieval
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glossators) read the Babylonian Talmud, noticing contradictions in the text or in

its commentaries (usually those of Rashi) and using still other texts to resolve the
discrepancies.22 Soloveitchik often notes an apparent contradiction in a text or in
its reception — in the way, that is, the text has been viewed as either anti-­Jewish
or running counter to rabbinic ideology — and then he looks for precedents in
Talmudic literature that he can read into the Gospels in order to resolve a mis-
understanding.23 His readings of Gospel texts make no reference to Christian
exegeses and thus demonstrate how the New Testament can be understood apart
from its later anti-­Jewish interpretations.

Soloveitchik’s Maimonidean Jesus

Among the more vexing dimensions of the Synoptic Gospels is Jesus’s claim to
be the Jewish messiah. A dominant theme in Jewish criticism of the Gospels has
been that Jesus does not meet the criteria. Maimonides’s “Laws of Kings and
their Wars,” where he delineates the criteria for recognizing the messiah, is often
cited, and the result has been a widespread belief among Jews that Jesus belongs
to the line of false messiahs that commenced before his day and has continued
into modern times.24 Rather than classify Jesus as a false or failed messiah — or as
the mashiach ben Yosef rather than the mashiach ben David — Soloveitchik maintains
that the essential vocation of the messiah is to teach the fundamental lesson of
Judaism, which Maimonides held to be the oneness of God.25 Thus, in regard to
almost every reference to the messiah in Mark and Matthew, Soloveitchik com-
ments on Jesus’s success in expounding the oneness of God to his Jewish com-
patriots and then, through the ministry of St. Paul, spreading that good news to
the gentiles.

22.  The Tosafists were a circle of medieval French com-
mentators on the Babylonian Talmud, some descended
from Rashi, who intiated a method of analysis called pil-
pul or casuistry — solving textual dilemmas, many of their
own making, by evoking other rabbinic passages that
they would then connect to the problematic text at hand.
In the Lithuanian centers of Talmud study, this method
was widely adopted. For a definitive study in English, see
Kanarfogel, Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of
Medieval Ashkenaz.
23.  See Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism.
24.  See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Kings”
(chaps. 11, 12).
25.  Judaism is polymessianic: according to the biblical
book of Zechariah, Gabriel’s Revelation of the first century
BCE or CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Babylonian Talmud
Sukkah 52a – b, Jerusalem Talmud Sukkah 5:2, numerous
classical midrashim, the Zohar, the medieval Apocalypse of
Zerubbabel, Signs of the Messiah, and Secrets of R. Shimon b.
Yohai, as well as texts of Rashi, Saadia Gaon, and other
rabbinic authorities, two or more messianic figures are
to be anticipated, including both a triumphant messiah,
descended from King David, who will reign at the time
of the resurrection of the dead, and a suffering precursor,
descended from Joseph via Ephraim.
 In at least one place, Soloveitchik clearly denies that Jesus (Yeshuah) is the

97
messiah and argues that most readers have misconstrued Matthew 24:5 (“For
many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and they will mislead

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many”). Commenting on this verse, Soloveitchik writes:

Many will come in my name — t here are those who say that Yeshua cau-
tioned them not to be mistaken if a man comes in his name and says
that he is the Messiah, that he may not mislead them. However, the
meaning of this verse is difficult, for how is it possible that a man would

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come in the name of Yeshua and make himself out to be the Messiah?

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Who would believe that Yeshua sent him? And what does he mean by
saying, “many will come in my name”? This is the meaning: Yeshua told
them that many would come in his name claiming that he [Yeshua] was
the Messiah, and by this they will mislead many. Therefore, what he is
really saying is, “I am giving you distinct signs [concerning] when the
Messiah comes.”

Rather than himself being the messiah, Jesus spreads the belief in divine unity
that is the prerequisite to the messiah’s coming. The extent of Jesus’s success in
doing so makes him a messianic figure (a spiritual mashiach ben Joseph, perhaps)
but not the final messiah who will come to redeem Israel.
In other places in his commentary, Soloveitchik is less definite about Jesus’s
messianic status. In his comment on Matthew 10:7, And as you go, call out, saying,
“The Kingdom of Heaven is on the brink of arrival,” Soloveitchik writes: “The main
principle that he commanded to his disciples first of all [was] to allow the faith
in the unity of the Creator to be instilled in their hearts.” Commenting on the
phrase “son of man,” a common trope used in Daniel 7:13 – 14 and other sacred
texts to refer to a messianic figure, Soloveitchik writes of Matthew 10:23: “Before
the son of man comes — which is to say, I promise you that even if they persecute
you from city to city, you will not complete your travels to all of the cities of Israel
until the son of man comes, that is, until one of the men who is persecuting you
realizes your righteousness in that you came to instill in the heart of every single man
the knowledge of the unity of the Creator.” But even here Soloveitchik seems to distin-
guish between Jesus’s messianic vocation (“to instill in the heart of every single man
the knowledge of the unity of the Creator”) — which he accomplishes with tremendous
success — and his status as messiah. On Matthew 14:14, Soloveitchik comments:
“Good news of the kingdom — a distinct sign of when the Messiah will come, when
all the nations will know the good news of the kingdom, which is the unity of the
Creator. Both Jews and Christians together believe in one God alone and that the
Messiah will surely come, just as Yeshua promised; and when the good news of
the kingdom — being the unity of God — is proclaimed to all the nations, then
the end will come.”
 Soloveitchik understands the doctrine of divine unity as uniting Judaism
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and Christianity, and Jesus’s teaching as epitomizing this idea. Where, in Mark
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11:10, we read, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of David our father,” Soloveitchik
adds that the “goal” of the messianic kingdom “is the triumph of divine unity,”
thus lifting the kingdom from any specific historical setting. And where, in Mark
14:9, we find, “Amen, I say to you that wherever this good news is proclaimed
throughout the world, what she has done will also be told as a memorial to her,”
Soloveitchik comments: “As a memorial to her — meaning: Everywhere that my
name is mentioned with honor, for having proclaimed and spread the gospel — the
good news — of the unity of God in the world, the name of this woman will also
be cited for praise.” The good news never concerns Jesus as messiah but, rather,
the unity of the Creator about whom he preaches. In Matthew 4:23, Soloveitchik
renders “the good news of the kingdom” as “the unity of the Creator.”
Passages, moreover, that have been read as Jesus’s call for his adherents to
abandon their families and follow him are understood by Soloveitchik as teach-
ing belief in divine unity as the ultimate sacrifice. In Matthew 10:35, for example,
where we read, “For I have come to separate a man from his father and a daughter
from her mother and a bride from her mother-­in-­law,” Soloveitchik understands
the text to say: “‘I have come to separate’ — my goal is to teach you that every man
must give up his life for the sake of the unity of the Creator. And this faith will cause
separation between a son and his father, if the father does not believe in the unity
of the Creator, for he will think his son a foreigner and an enemy.” Similarly, on
Matthew 16:24, “Yeshua said to his disciples, ‘A man who desires to follow me will
disown himself, pick up his cross, and follow me,’” Soloveitchik comments: “To
follow me — he who wants to follow my teaching. The main principle of my teach-
ing is that man should be prepared to give up his life for the sake of the faith in
the unity of the Creator.” It is in this way that Soloveitchik situates Jesus’s main
message as in accord with rabbinic teaching (refracted through a Maimonidean
lens). If the final redemption depends on disseminating belief in the unity of God,
and if Jesus spread the word better than the rabbinic sages, then his messianic role
is both substantiated and re-­Judaized.
On the question of Jesus’s resurrection, Soloveitchik mirrors Maimonides
in conflating resurrection with the immortality of the soul. Maimonides does so
in his “Epistle on Resurrection” in a way intended to deflect the criticism that,
even as he lists resurrection as one of his “Thirteen Principles of Faith,” he does
not consistently argue for belief in resurrection.26 In any case, since the resurrec-
tion of Jesus is such a contentious dimension of the New Testament for Jews (even

26.  For a lengthy discussion of this idea in Maimonides, 246 – 80. More generally, see Levenson, Resurrection and the
see the “Epistle on Resurrection” in Epistles of Maimonides, Restoration of Israel.
as bodily resurrection is embedded in the eschatology of both prophetic and rab-

99
binic Judaism), Soloveitchik largely deflects the issue. He understands the claim
of Jesus’s resurrection as a call to belief in the immortality of the soul, an idea

Xenophilia: Par t 5
that, while normative for Jews, is also not unproblematic, especially if presented
as a substitute for resurrection.27 For example, on Matthew 16:21 (“From that
time on, Yeshua began telling his disciples that he needed go to Yerushalayim
and endure great suffering from the hands of the elders, the leading priests, and
scholars, and that he would be killed, but would surely arise on the third day”),

•
Soloveitchik comments: “On the third day after my death. Then you will under-

Magid
stand that the faith in the immortality of the soul that I instilled in your hearts is the
truth.”
Earlier in that same chapter, commenting on Matthew 16:12, Soloveitchik
maintains that the Sadducees did not believe in “the immortality of the soul,” the
standard contention being that it was the resurrection in which the Sadducees did
not believe. The matter of resurrection is taken up in a lengthy comment that
Soloveitchik makes on Matthew 22:23. It is worth quoting the comment in full:

There is no resurrection of the dead — I have already written that the foun-
dation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead is compiled of two
principles: the first is that the dead will rise in the time that the Creator,
blessed be his name, wills it; the second is the belief in the immortality
of the soul, that is, that the spirit of man does not die when it is sepa-
rated from the body but that it will remain immortal and forever enjoy
the pleasantness of YHVH in accordance to the good deeds that it per-
formed in this world. Both our Jewish and Christian brothers firmly
believe in these two principles, for they are united in the foundations
of the religion on which the Torah of Moshe rests. Only the Saddu-
cees turned away from the path of the Torah and the commandments
and refused to believe in these two principles. Therefore, they asked
Yeshua, “How will it be for the dead that rise if one woman had seven
husbands. . . ?”

And in a comment on Mark 12:27, Soloveitchik repeats, “for it is an important

and indisputable fact: in the dual belief of the immortality of the soul and the
resurrection of the dead, our Israelite brothers are in perfect accord with our
Christian brothers.”
But Soloveitchik is most explicit and unambiguous when he writes, com-
menting on Mark 8:33, that

27.  This issue was the subject of debate between Sam- lifetime. Luzzato’s critique of Maimonides’s rejection of
uel David Luzzatto (1800 – 65) and Nahman Krochmal bodily resurrection is defended by Krochmal in a sharp
(1785 – 1840), both of whom lived during Soloveitchik’s letter. See Krochmal, More Nevukhei Ha-­Zeman, 427 – 32.
 there was absolutely nothing impossible about them seeing Yeshua after
10 0

his death. . . . According to the Talmud a sage distinctly revived his

deceased colleague and conversed with him. Only Yeshua’s disciples
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

were mistaken about his thinking: he did not mean that he would actu-
ally resurrect physically but that he would reappear in order to convince
them, by this act, of the principle of the immortality of the soul. . . .
Petros as well, in my opinion, . . . believed that Yeshua spoke of a literal
flesh and bone resurrection, and knowing the thing to be impossible
in the temporal order, accused him of proclaiming inconceivabilities.

In his comment on Matthew 28:17 (“They saw him and bowed down to him, but
there were some of them whose hearts were divided”), Soloveitchik cites a passage
from the Babylonian Talmud (Moed Katan 28a) about Rabbi Nahman appearing
after his death to Raba — and, on that basis, Soloveitchik claims that Jesus appear-
ing to his disciples three days after his death does not necessarily mean that he
resurrected himself bodily.28 Rather, Jesus appeared to them in order to confirm
his teaching about the immortality of the soul. This attempt to substitute a medi-
eval idea of the immortality of the soul — Maimonides’s conception — for Jesus’s
claim to bodily resurrection illustrates the radicalism of Soloveitchik’s effort to
subvert the notion that Judaism and Christianity are categorically distinct and
irreconcilable.
Soloveitchik was well aware of how his interest in Christianity would be
received in both the Jewish community and the Christian. As he wrote in 1879,
in the introduction to the first Hebrew edition of the commentary:

I know that I will not escape from the criticism from both sides. My
Hebrew brethren will say, “What happened to R. Eliyahu! Yesterday he
was one of us and today he is filled with a new spirit?! And my Chris-
tian brethren will say, “This one who is a Jew comes to reveal to us
the secrets of the Gospel?! How can we accept that he speaks correctly
and [that] a true spirit dwells within him?” These two extremes are
really saying one thing. That is, it cannot be that he believes in his heart
what he speaks with his mouth. As regards this criticism, my soul weeps
uncontrollably. Only God knows, and God is my witness, that in this
respect I am free of sin.29

Soloveitchik’s commentary on the Gospels was no mere scholarly exercise.

It was fueled by his deep belief in the benefits, one might even say the redemptive
potential, of the case that he felt driven to make.

28.  B. T. Moed Katan 28a: “Raba sat before Rabbi Nah- of a glass of milk” [referring to the separation of the soul
man. He saw him going to sleep [dying]. . . .” Raba said from the body].
to him: “Appear to me, master, in a dream.” He appeared
29. Soloveitchik, Qol Qore (Hebrew edition, 1879), 15, and
to him. Raba asked him: “Did you, master, suffer pains?”
Hyman, A Treatise on Elijah Zvi Halevi Soloveitchik, 132.
Rabbi Nahman said to him: “[As little] as taking hair out
The Social Context of Soloveitchik’s Work

101
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were both fertile and precarious
for the Jews of Eastern Europe, whether they stayed or, while remaining attached

Xenophilia: Par t 5
to the ways of their ancestors, immigrated to the West. The Haskalah — the
Jewish Enlightenment that had blossomed, a few generations earlier, in the Berlin
circle around Moses Mendelssohn — had by now made its way deep into Poland,
the Russian Pale of Settlement, and the Austro-­Hungarian empire, where most
Jews then lived.30 Tsar Alexander II’s reforms, which included emancipation of
the serfs in 1861, enabled Jews to integrate more completely into Russian society,

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Magid
but more important for our purposes are changes that took place earlier, during
the reign of Alexander I (1801 – 25).31 As Israel Bartal has shown, the spirituality
and traditionalist inclinations of Alexander I were viewed positively by many
leading rabbinic figures of the period. His spirituality also resulted, however, in
a concerted effort to convert the Jews of Russia to Christianity, which Alexander
believed was to be the spiritual legacy of the Russian empire.32 As Bartal writes,
“he believed with a full heart that he could enable the Jews to see the true tradi-
tion of the Tanakh and remove the barrier placed before them by the Talmud that
prevented their belief in Jesus. And they would truly become Hebrew Christians.
At this time the Russian tsar opened the gates of the empire to Christians from
the West to initiate an international campaign to rectify the citizenship status of
the Jews of Europe.”33
In 1817, Alexander I established the Society of Israelite Christians, whose
purpose was to support converts and serve as a resource for Jews interested in
converting to Christianity. The London-­based Society for Promoting Christi-
anity, a Protestant missionary organization that was to be active in the Russian
empire and Poland for much of the nineteenth century, was established in 1809.34
Often using Jewish converts, such as Nehemia Solomon (born 1790) and Stan-
islaus Hoga (1791 – 1860), as translators and emissaries, the Society approached
Jewish communities to offer them instruction about Christianity and conversion.
Yiddish translations of the New Testament began to appear — the first, appar-
ently, that of Solomon in 1821. Just when the Jews in Russia and Poland expe-
rienced a loosening of restrictions, and when their emancipation in the Europe

30.  Four-­fifths of the world’s Jews lived in Eastern Europe
at this time. On the Haskalah more generally, see Feiner,
Jewish Enlightenment. Litvak’s Haskalah challenges many
of Feiner’s claims: she argues that, as opposed to the
Enlightenment rationalist framework in which it usually is
understood, the Haskalah, especially but not exclusively in
Eastern Europe, was much closer to the Romantic move-
ment and far less antagonistic to tradition than is normally
thought.
31.  See Lincoln, Alexander’s Great Reforms.
32.  See, for example, Klier, “State Politics and the Con-
version of the Jews in Imperial Russia.” As it happened,
Shneur Zalman of Liady’s son Moshe converted to Rus-
sian Orthodox Christianity. See Assaf, Untold Tales of the
Hasidim, 29 – 95. For two important studies of conversion
to Christianity in an earlier period, see Carlebach, Divided
Souls and Endleman, Leaving the Fold.
33.  Bartal, “British Missionaries in the Environs of
Chabad,” 17 (my translation).
34.  See Gidney, History of the London Society.
 of the Napoleonic era was slowly exposing Jews to the wider world, programs
102

aiming to convert them — ostensibly as an act of inclusion (at least in the case of

Alexander I) — became a serious issue.35 On the other hand, as Todd Endelman
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

writes, “for most Jewish converts” at that time in Eastern Europe, “baptism was
a desacralized rite of passage and often no more than a bureaucratic formality.
It was formulaic, not transformative.”36 David Ruderman has challenged Endel-
man’s thesis by examining a group of “converts of conviction,”37 but they appear
to be exceptional cases and some of them even retained a connection to their
Jewishness.
The topic of Jewish conversion to Christianity is notable in Soloveitchik’s
project by its absence. His project is to show that Christianity and Judaism have a
common cause. As I read it, Soloveitchik’s New Testament commentary is a text
for Jews seriously considering Christian claims, however they have been exposed
to them, but also for Christians who have been taught to believe that Judaism is
an inferior religion and thus that emancipated Jews should become Christians.
This second aim may explain in part why Soloveitchik published his commen-
tary in French, German, and Polish before publishing the Hebrew original. His
work essentially argues that the attempt to convert Jews to the “true religion” is
ill conceived, not because Christianity is false but because both Christianity and
Judaism are true religions. The rabbinic materials that he brings to bear in his
commentary serve each community differently. For the Jew, they enable concep-
tion of the New Testament as a part of Torah. For the Christian, they enable a
fuller understanding of Christianity. I think that Soloveitchik hoped to convince
the Christian reader that, without viewing them through the rabbinic lens, the
Gospels cannot be properly understood. For its truth to be discernible, then,
Christianity requires of its believers and interpreters a knowledge not only of
biblical but also of rabbinic Judaism.
If a Jew responded by saying that, “if both are true religions, I will convert
to improve my lot in this world,” I am uncertain how Soloveitchik would have
countered, beyond saying that one born a Jew should remain a Jew. The question
of conversion, while never directly engaged by Soloveitchik, may loom implicitly
as the backdrop of his work. The London Society for the Promotion of Chris­
tianity among the Jews grew in popularity during Soloveitchik’s time, becoming
especially effectual through the efforts of the Irish missionary Alexander McCaul
(1799 – 1863), who was the principal of the Society’s Hebrew College.38 McCaul
was also a professor of Hebrew and rabbinic literature at King’s College, London,

35.  The stewardship of Nicholas II, who ruled from
1894 – 1917, limited the work of the London Society and
did not support the project of converting the Jews.
36. Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 362.
37.  See Ruderman, Converts of Conviction.
38.  On McCaul, see Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary
Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews” and
Stern, “Catholic Judaism.”
and declined appointment in 1841 as the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem because

103
he felt that a Jewish convert to Christianity should hold the position. Among
McCaul’s most popular, and for our purposes most important, works is a weekly

Xenophilia: Par t 5
pamphlet that he published in 1836 – 37, titled The Old Paths: Or, the Talmud Tested
by Scripture: Being a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism,
with the Religion of Moses. McCaul lived among Jews in Poland for years, spent con-
siderable time in Palestine, and was fluent in the languages requisite for the study
of rabbinic literature. Though a missionary intent upon the conversion of Jews,
he was also quite the philo-­Semite.39 He strongly defended the Jews in the 1840

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Magid
Damascus Blood Libel, for example, by circulating a document among Jewish
converts to Christianity, certifying that Jews never make ritual use of Christian
blood (there were fifty-­seven signatories).40 He also criticized Napoleon’s brother
Jerome’s handling of the Jews in France.41
The Old Paths cites copiously from rabbinic literature to argue that the Jew-
ish sages erred in their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and hence that modern
Judaism, their creation, is mistaken. In a later text he compares rabbinic Judaism
to Roman Catholicism: “If asked to give you a concise yet adequate idea of this
system [of rabbinic law,] I should say it is Jewish Popery; just as Popery may be
defined by Gentile Rabbinism. Its distinguishing feature is that it asserts the
transmission of an oral or traditional law of equal authority with the written law
of God, at the same time, like Popery, it resolves tradition into the present opin-
ions of the existing Church.”42 McCaul’s message as missionary was that Jews
should return to the authentic Mosaic religion, which is best represented in the
modern world by Protestant Christianity.43 How unlike McCaul was to other
missionaries is suggested by contrasting his association of Mosaic and Protes-
tant religion with his contemporary August Rohling’s indictment, in his popu-
lar book The Talmud Jew (1871), of Judaism as a primitive religion in adamant
opposition to Christianity. McCaul’s The Old Paths was likewise popular: when
it first appeared in 1837, it sold ten thousand copies in its first year and was reis-
sued in a second edition in 1846.44 While it seems unlikely that Soloveitchik read
The Old Paths in the original English, it is probable that he knew of the Hebrew
translation, Netivot Shalom, made by Stanislaus Hoga. Even before coming to
England, Soloveitchik may well have known McCaul’s work. In a letter to David
Luria of 1872, reflecting back on the late 1830s, Isaac Baer Levenson writes that
“McCaul’s work was read widely. Circulating in Vilna and St. Petersburg.” Netivot

39.  McCaul served as a missionary for the London Soci- 41. McCaul, Old Paths, 24 – 32, and Stern, “Catholic Juda-
ety in Warsaw from 1821 – 30. ism,” 491.

40.  See Ayerst, “The Rev. Dr. McCaul and the Jewish
Mission,” as cited in Ruderman, “Many Faces of Alexan-
der McCaul,” 51, 52. Cf. Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 246.
42. McCaul, Sketches of Judaism and Jews, 2.
43.  See McCaul, Old Paths, 652.
44.  See Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 54, 55.
 Shalom was covered in the Hebrew press and was the subject of numerous critical
10 4

responses by well-­k nown Jewish writers.45

McCaul’s translator Stanislaus Hoga — born Yehezkel ben Aryeh Leib in
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Kuzmir, Poland, in 1791 — was the son of a disciple of the “Seer of Lublin,” a cele-
brated Hasidic master, and thus was raised in an ultratraditional world of extreme
piety and Talmud study.46 Hoga’s prodigious talents in adolescence attracted the
attention of Prince Adam Czartoryski, who took him to Palawy to study modern
languages. Within a few years, Hoga converted to Christianity and was referred
to in his home region as Khaskel Hameshumad (Ezekiel the apostate).47 Even-
tually involving himself with the London Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews, he moved to England and led a life that, by turns, was bizarre,
colorful, tragic, and mysterious. In his final work Zir Ne’eman, Hoga declared
war on his mentor McCaul, repudiating The Old Paths, which he had translated,
and returning, according to Shnayer Leiman and Lask Abrahams, among others,
to the Orthodox Jewish fold.48 As Leiman writes, Hoga “was a genuine baal tes-
huva who lived his last year as a recluse, disowned by Jews and Christians alike.”
David Ruderman, on the other hand, is unconvinced that Hoga ever turned his
back on Christianity and suggests instead that Hoga’s was a “mingled identity.”49
In his book The Controversy of Zion, Hoga remarks that “it is vain to think of the
conversion of the Jews to Christianity before Christians themselves are converted
to Judaism,”50 and it is in his discernment of this paradox that Hoga’s viewpoint
comes closest to that of Soloveitchik. Hoga did not need to disclaim his conver-
sion to Christianity in order to return to Judaism, just as Soloveitchik did not
need to convert to Christianity when acknowledging the truth of its claims. For
Soloveitchik, conversion was unnecessary; for Hoga, it was irrelevant.

The Jewish Jesus and Anti-­Semitism

Soloveitchik wrote his commentary on the Gospels at a time of pogroms and of
rising anti-­Semitism throughout Europe. The deteriorating conditions enabled
the rise of Zionism, which, according to Theodore Herzl, would alleviate anti-­
Semitism by removing large numbers of Jews from Europe.51 Soloveitchik thought
that anti-­Semitism was rooted in a misunderstanding of the New Testament by
Jews and Christians alike. In a lengthy comment on Matthew 2:1, he remarks

45.  See Stern, “Catholic Judaism.”
46.  On Hoga, see Lask Abrahams, “Stanilaus Hoga — 
Apostate and Penitent,” 121 – 49; and Ruderman, “Intel-
lectual and Spiritual Journey of Stanislaus Hoga” (unpub-
lished MS). I want to thank Professor Ruderman for mak-
ing this text available to me before its publication.
47.  See Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 139.
48.  See Leiman, “The Baal Teshuva and the Emden-­
Eibeschuetz Controversy.”
49.  See Ruderman, “Intellectual and Spiritual Journey of
Stanislaus Hoga,” 14 (in TS).
50.  As cited in Lask Abrahams, “Stanislaus Hoga,” 128.
51.  See Herzl, “A Solution to the Jewish Question.” Cf.
Complete Diaries, 9 – 10.
with special regret on the Jews’ refusal to take Jesus, the New Testament, and

10 5
Christianity seriously. The reference in the following passage concerns the fan-
tastical depiction of Jesus in the anonymous medieval work Toledot Yeshu:52

Xenophilia: Par t 5
We find that the mother of Ben Stada was Miriam, and her husband
was Pappos ben Yehudah, and her lover was Pandira. Her son was a
bastard and therefore they called his mother Stada, because she was
a harlot. From this section in the Gemara those who lack knowledge
from among both our Jewish and Christian brothers conclude that this
speaks about Yeshua who is called “Messiah.” Therefore, the Christians

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Magid
think badly of their Jewish brothers and speak against the Gemara with-
out limit.

The expression of such attitudes, Soloveitchik argues, is fodder for Christian

animus toward the Jews. As he writes in his preface to the 1868 London edition
of Qol Qore:

Since the fire of dispute has been kindled in the camp of our Hebrew
brethren, it has divided the worshippers of God into two sections, the
one Jews, and the other Christians. Does it not seem, upon contempla-
tion, amazing that, after a lapse of centuries, as empires have crumbled
into dust, monarchies have ceased to exist, dynasties have fallen into
decay . . . that this fire of contention has not ceased but still rages with
its primordial fury[?]53

Soloveitchik was not the first traditional Jew to claim that Christian anti-­
Semitism is rooted in a scripturally based theological animus. Most such argu-
ments made during Soloveitchik’s day, however, relied on the midrashic principle
that “Esau hates Jacob” to contend that Christian anti-­Semitism is ontological
and thus immutable in nature. (A good example of a popular tract making this
argument is She’ar Yisrael (The Remnant of Israel) by Naftali Zvi Berlin, head of
the Volozhin yeshiva from 1854 – 92.)54 Soloveitchik was one of the few traditional
rabbis in general, and certainly in Eastern Europe, who wrote positively at this
time about the possibility of diminishing anti-­Semitism and who contended that
the fault lay with Jews as well as Christians — Jews, because they refused to take
the New Testament seriously; and Christians, because they refused to acknowl-
edge the complementarity between Jewish teachings and those of the Gospel.
One major Central European rabbinic authority who, before Soloveitchik’s

52.  See Schafer, Toledot Yeshu.
53. Soloveitchik, Qol Qore, 1 – 2, and Hyman, A Treatise on
Elijah Zvi Halevi Soloveitchik, 54, 55.
54.  Naftali Zvi Berlin (the Netziv), She’ar Yisrael, first
published in his Rinat Yisrael and then again as an appen-
dix to his commentary on Song of Songs. On the Netziv,
see Perl, Pillar of Volozhin. The Netziv’s small tract on
anti-­Semitism was translated into English by Howard S.
Joseph and published as Why Antisemitism?: A Translation
of “The Remnant of Israel.”
 time, expressed positive views of Christianity was Ya’akov Emden (1697 – 1776),
10 6

and Soloveitchik cited Emden’s work, which he may well have regarded as a pre­
cedent for his own.55 The two share a belief in the morality (and freedom from
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

idolatry) of Christianity as well as a conviction that Jesus had no intention of

eradicating the law for Jews. Emden remarks that many Christians “would be
diligent in the analysis of the Gemara . . . and still today are found among them
many learned ones who love our Talmud and study it.”56 Unlike Soloveitchik,
however, Emden — who was familiar with the Gospels and often cited them — did
not write about them extensively and never quite claimed, as Soloveitchik did,
that there is no categorical distinction to be made between Judaism and the reli-
gion taught by Jesus.57 This claim of Soloveitchik’s is precedented not so much
among Jews as among certain Christians, going back as far as the third or fourth
century. In the Pseudo-­Clementine Homilies we find, for example, the assertion
that “Jesus is concealed from the Hebrews who have taken Moses as their teacher,
and Moses is hidden from those who have believed Jesus. . . . For there is a single
teaching by both, God accepts one who has believed either of these. . . .” (8.6 – 7).58
It is not known whether Soloveitchik read the Pseudo-­Clementine Homilies, or
even the works of Heinrich Graetz in which they are cited. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, the deist John Toland made a case comparable to that of the Homilies in his
book Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718).
Something like Soloveitchik’s approach can be found as well among Jewish apos-
tates who, although devoted Christians, maintained a connection to their Jewish
past. An eighteenth-­century German example is H. C. Immanuel Frommann,
who wrote a Hebrew commentary on the Gospel of Luke, a Hebrew translation
of and commentary on Acts (which has not survived), a Hebrew commentary
on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and numerous Christian hymns in Hebrew.59
Moments before his death, it is recounted, Frommann “turned his head toward
the wall, sang in Hebrew, which bystanders did not understand, most likely a
hymn in praise of his Redeemer. . . .”60

55.  Other Central European rabbis of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, not mentioned by Soloveitchik, who
exhibited a positive view of Christianity include, nota-
bly, Jonathan Eybeshutz (1690 – 1764) and Eliezer Fleck-
eles (1754 – 1826). Soloveitchik discusses Emden, among
other places, in the preface to the 1870 Paris edition of
the Hebrew Qol Qore. There has been much written on
Emden’s attitude toward Christianity: see, for example,
Falk, “Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Views on Christianity,”
107 – 11, and Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden, Sabbatean-
ism, and Frankism.
56. Emden, ‘Etz Avot, on Mishna Avot 5:22, 58b, as cited
in Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden,” 366n10.
57.  See Kohler, “Clementina, or Pseudo-­Clementine Lit-
erature,” in Jewish Encyclopedia 4.114 – 116. More generally,
see Ariel, “Christianity through Reform Eyes,” 181 – 91,
and Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism,
chap. 8.
58.  I want to thank Annette Yoshiko Reed for suggest-
ing the comparison of Soloveitchik’s views with those of
the Pseudo-­Clementine Homilies and to thank, as well, the
audience and other members of an American Academy of
Religion panel to whom I presented a paper in 2017 about
Soloveitchik’s commentary on Matthew.
59.  On Frommann, see The Life Story of H. C. Immanuel
Frommann, and Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Com-
mentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah,”
171 – 222. Cf. Deutsch, “A Jewish-­Christian Commentary
on Luke.”
60.  Life Story of H. C. Immanuel Frommann, 14.
 Frommann, as a convert to Christianity, stands closer to Oswald Rufeisen

107
than to Soloveitchik on the spectrum of Jewish Christophiles. But Rufeisen dif-
fers radically from Soloveitchik and Frommann alike — differs indeed from any

Xenophilia: Par t 5
of the Jewish Christophiles I have mentioned — in having suffered the effects of
a type of anti-­Semitism that none of them could have imagined. Soloveitchik
was concerned about anti-­Semitism and its growth in his time; as I have noted,
it is likely that his commentary on the Gospels was motivated by the desire to
weaken anti-­Semitism by destabilizing its specious bases in Scripture and theol-
ogy. Rufeisen, however, witnessed up close the most virulent outbreak of anti-­

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Magid
Semitism in history when, posing as a Pole of German origin, he survived the
Holocaust by working, in an SS uniform, for the Nazi police. After the Nazis
learned that he was assisting and even arming local Jews, he hid in a convent,
where in 1942 he was baptized a Roman Catholic. On joining a Carmelite mon-
astery in Cracow after the war, he took the name Daniel, at the suggestion of the
order’s Polish provincial, because, like the biblical Daniel, he had emerged alive
from a lion’s den.

Becoming Father Daniel

Born in 1922, the son of Eliasz and Fanny Rufeisen in the small town of Zadziele
on the southern tip of Poland, Oswald Rufeisen was in many ways a typical Polish
Jew of his time, unlike Soloveitchik who came from a rabbinic dynasty at the cen-
ter of Jewish learning.61 Oswald’s parents were not particularly religious but likely
kept a kosher home. Oswald’s Jewishness expressed itself in an early commitment
to Zionism. As an adolescent he belonged, together with his brother Arieh, to a
Zionist youth group, called Akiva, active in their part of Poland. Before the war,
the Rufeisen brothers both wanted to immigrate to Palestine, but it was decided
that Oswald would stay behind to tend to their parents. Thus, Arieh was already
in Palestine when Oswald, after the German invasion of Poland, was hiding in
various locales with members of their Zionist group.
I have said that the Rufeisens were typical, but one clear difference between
them and their Jewish neighbors was that the Rufeisens spoke German rather
than Yiddish at home. Oswald, who indeed never learned Yiddish, studied at a
Jewish school in Bielsko where the instruction was in German and, later, at a
state school where the language was Polish. His fluency in both languages and his
knowledge of Polish history, along with his relatively “Aryan” appearance, even-
tually enabled him to work for the Nazi police and then as a member of the Ger-

61.  The definitive study of Rufeisen is Tec, Lion’s Den.

Tec did extensive interviews with Rufeisen as well as with
many who knew him in Poland. Much of the biographical
material in my article is drawn from Tec’s excellent study.
 man police force in Russia. By the early 1940s, Rufeisen was working as a trans-
10 8

lator for Meister Reinhold Hein, the head of a Schutzpolizei-­Gendarmerie unit

in charge of an area including the small city of Mir in German-­occupied Russia.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Hein took a liking to Rufeisen and treated him like a son. He never suspected
him of being a Jew. The Nazis had planned to liquidate the Mir ghetto, site of a
famous yeshiva, in 1942.62 Rufeisen knew of the plan and sent word for the Jews to
flee. He even organized the theft and transport of Nazi weapons to the ghetto to
help with the Jews’ escape.63 On August 11, 1942, the Nazis discovered that over
three hundred Jews had escaped from the ghetto, and Hein called Rufeisen into
his office. Rufeisen worried that a Jew named Stanislawski, who worked in a stable
near the gendarmerie, might have turned him in. When Hein asked Rufeisen if
he had told the Jews of Mir about the German plan, he responded: “Yes, Herr
Meister, it is true.” When pressed why he had done so, Rufeisen replied: “Out
of pity. I felt sorry for them.” Even then, Hein apparently did not suspect that
Rufeisen was a Jew. After further admitting that he had provided weapons for the
Jews of Mir, Hein said: “I have come to the conclusion that as a Polish nationalist
you were taking revenge for what we have done to the Poles. . . . A Pole acting
against the Germans. An act of revenge. Am I right? I want to hear it from you.”
Hein was a decent man, according to Rufeisen, who often felt that Germans
were mistreating Poles. He also seemed not to hate Jews, as so many others on
the force did; Hein was following orders, and no more. But Rufeisen did not take
the way out that Hein had offered and replied: “I am not a Pole, I am a Jew.”64
Rufeisen begged Hein for a gun to kill himself before the Nazis could kill him.
“There is no need for that,” Hein said. “You succeeded twice, you may succeed
a third time.” Hein seemed intentionally to protract the case against Rufeisen so
that he would have a chance to escape, which he did. He took advantage of the
opportunity Hein had given him but knew that very soon a Nazi search party
would be on his trail.

Rufeisen’s Conversion
Rufeisen wandered for a few days after escaping and found refuge, but no safe
haven, with local peasants. He was widely known in the region as the Jew who

62.  The students and staff of the Mir yeshiva left for Vil-
nius in 1939 after the Soviet occupation. The town was
then repopulated by Jewish refugees from Poland, and
thus Rufeisen’s services were needed to translate from
Polish to German in the early 1940s.
63. Tec, Lion’s Den, 134 – 48. On the Mir ghetto escape,
see “Resistance Plans to Escape from the Mir Ghetto,” in
Holocaust Encyclopedia at www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article
.php?ModuleId=10007238 and “Mir During the Holo-
caust,” in Yad Vashem Archives at www.yadvashem.org/yv
/en/exhibitions/communities/mir/escape_from_ghetto.asp.
Rufeisen convinced the rebels that the planned ghetto
resistance would be futile and advised fleeing to hide in
other towns or to join the partisans in the nearby for-
est. See Reuveni and Reznik, “The Wondrous Story of
Oswald Rufeisen,” 320.
64. Tec, Lion’s Den, 156.
saved the Mir ghetto, and it was hard for him to travel without being noticed.

10 9
Throughout this time, Rufeisen showed no signs of religious fervor or even belief,
and certainly no religious practice. He remained a Zionist and hoped that, if he

Xenophilia: Par t 5
survived the war, he could join his brother in Palestine.
On August 16, 1942, Rufeisen knocked on the door of the convent, near Mir,
of the Order of the Sisters of the Resurrection. The mother superior, who opened
the door, recognized Rufeisen immediately and let him in. He was not initially
seeking refuge in the convent but asked the mother superior if she knew how to
contact the Baliki sisters, friends of Rufeisen’s from Mir who, he thought, could

•
Magid
help him find more permanent refuge. The mother superior gave him a place to
sleep in the hayloft of the convent’s barn until she decided what to do with him.
The nuns were divided about whether to let him stay. The mother superior in the
end vetoed all naysayers and offered him the convent’s protection. During this
time, he made use of the convent library and read voraciously in the New Testa-
ment and in Hebrew books that he found in the attic. His reflections on this time
are of special importance in our context. In an interview with Nechama Tec, he
recounted that he came across reports of the miracles at Lourdes and that doing
so ignited his interest in Christianity:65

. . . after I read about these miraculous cures, I asked for a New Testa-
ment and began to study it. . . . I felt very much like a Jew, I identified
with the plight of my people. I also feel like a Zionist. I longed for Pal-
estine, for my own country. . . . In this frame of mind I became exposed
to the New Testament, a book that described events that were taking
place in my fatherland, the land I was longing for. This itself must have
created a psychological bridge between me and the New Testament. . . .
Strange as it may seem, I had a Polish high school diploma but I never
read the New Testament. No one demanded it of me. About the church
I knew only negative things. I was prejudiced against the church.66

Rufeisen’s interest in the Gospels was driven by his “longing” for the land of
Israel. In the solitude of a convent, while the Nazis murdered his people, he
entered “an artificial world”:

In the convent, all alone, among strangers I created an artificial world

for myself. I pretended that the [the previous] 2000 years [of exile from
the Holy Land had] never happened. In this make-­believe world of
mine, I am confronted with Jesus of Nazareth. . . . You must realize that
not all history about Jesus is the history of the church. The history of
Jesus is a fragment of Jewish history. . . . Soon I began to learn more and
more about the position taken by Jesus. I found myself agreeing with
Jesus’s approach and view of Judaism. . . . In this process, I somehow

65. Tec, Lion’s Den, 166. 66. Tec, Lion’s Den, 166.

 disregarded all that happened later in the relationship between Jews
110

and the Christians.67

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Whether one can distinguish between the religion that Jesus taught and the
religion taught by the Christian church is, of course, a long-­debated question,
especially among Jews who have come to discover the historical Jesus.68 In the
so-­called Brenner Affair of the 1920s, Yosef Hayyim Brenner and Ahad Ha’Am
argued about whether Jesus should be reclaimed as a Jew by the Zionists.69 In
other words, Rufeisen in his isolation was thinking about Jesus and Christianity
in ways not so distinct as he presumed from what other Jews were thinking about
the same subjects around the same time.
But, living in a convent and hiding as a Jew from the Nazis, Rufeisen was
able to imagine more deeply than most the early “Jesus movement,” a Christian-
ity practiced by apocalyptic Jews before there was a church per se. Like some of
those Jewish-­Christians, Rufeisen had seen and been entangled in the suffering
of martyrs: on three occasions, he said in a 1984 interview, he had translated
execution orders from German into Polish and had had to witness the consequent
murder of fellow Jews.70 Jesus’s Passion resonated intensely with Rufeisen’s own
circumstances:

Suddenly, I don’t know how, I identify his suffering and resurrection

with the suffering of my people and the hope for their resurrection. I
begin to think that if a man who is just and pure dies, not for his sins but
because of his circumstances, there must be a God, because it is God
who brings him back to life. I think that if there is justice toward Christ
in the form of resurrection there will be some kind of justice toward
my people, too.71

Rufeisen was not alone in his understanding of the innocent death and resur-
rection of Jesus as a paradigm for his people in and after the Holocaust. Zionists
of his time often referred to the State of Israel as a tekumah or resurrection (also
translated “rebirth”). As Rufeisen said to Nechama Tec, “the Holocaust is the
Golgotha of the Jews, a road to redemption.”
This same trope was adopted by Jean-­Marie Lustiger, a Jew who con-
verted to Christianity at age fourteen and became cardinal-­archbishop of Paris.72
Lustiger, whose mother died in Auschwitz, insisted that his baptism did not affect

67. Tec, Lion’s Den, 167. 70.  See in Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 133.

68.  See, for example, Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the
Jewish Jesus and “Jesus as Theological Transvestite”; Hoff-
man, From Rebel to Rabbi; and Vermes, Jesus the Jew.
69.  See, for example, Govrin, Me’orah Brenner.
71.  As quoted in Tec, Lion’s Den, 167.
72.  See Katz, “Cardinal Lustiger in the History of Philo-­
Semitism.” Lustiger himself published two articles in
these pages: “From Despair to Hope” and “Rediscovering
Universal Reason.”
his status as a Jew, and Rufeisen reported that Lustiger told him that “Jews have

111
been crucified by us Christians for many centuries. We failed to see in them the
brother of Christ. Jews were condemned to follow the same path Jesus did. . . . We

Xenophilia: Par t 5
the Jews in the church have an obligation to make Christians aware of what they
have done to the Jews.”73 In another context, he remarked: “I was born Jewish and
so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel
is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is
the means for achieving it.” He wrote his own epitaph, which reads: “I was born
a Jew. I received the name of my paternal grandfather Aaron. Christian by faith

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Magid
and by baptism, I remained a Jew, as did the Apostles.”74 His funeral mass in 2007,
at Notre-­Dame Cathedral, began with the kaddish, recited by a minyan, includ-
ing his cousin Arno Lustiger, in the plaza outside the cathedral.75 The cardinal
himself had recited kaddish in 1995 on his visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
memorial in Jerusalem.76 As for Rufeisen, his brother Arieh recited kaddish for
him during his funeral at the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa. Lustiger’s main
concern was to witness and improve the church’s treatment of Jews, whereas
Rufeisen hoped that, through Zionism, a form of Christianity that had itself
been Jewish might be retrieved. When Rufeisen said that “the crucifixion [of the
Jews in the Holocaust] offers redemption,”77 his idea was not far from the Zionist
vision of R. Zvi Yehuda Kook, who held that the Holocaust had been an act of
“divine surgery” needed to resurrect the Jewish people and bring them back to
the Promised Land.78
Rufeisen experienced the collective death of Jews during the Holocaust in
a way that few Jews did — from the side of the Nazis — and so apparently he felt he
had a special calling. His choice to convert to Christianity may represent a choice
to extend his dual identity, as overtly a Polish Catholic and covertly a Zionist Jew,
into the post-­Holocaust world. Now, however, his non-­Jewish identity promised
not death but rebirth. And in his new (dis)guise he felt that his two identities were
symmetrical rather than contradictory:

I was cut off from my Judaism for a year. I was separated from all that
was Jewish. I felt that for a Jew in this church there must be a resur-
rected place, I was not wrong about that. I became convinced that per-
haps I have some special function to perform in this church, maybe to

73.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 169. 76.  See Haberman, “Jerusalem Journal.”

74.  See Christopher White, “Cardinal Lustiger: Ten Years 77.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 169.
after Death, Jewish Convert Still Looms over Church
78.  See Kook, Sihot on the Festivals #1, 264 – 86. Rufeisen
in France,” cruxnow.com/global-­c hurch/2017/08/04
does not speak of the “necessity” of the Holocaust, but he
/cardinal-­lustiger-­10-­years-­death-­jewish-­convert-­still-­looms
does see in the Holocaust the opportunity for a rebirth of
-­church-­france/.
the Jewish people in their ancestral land.
75.  See “Kaddish Read at Lustiger’s Funeral,” at www
.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-­3436032,00.html.
 improve, to fix the relation between the Jews and the Christians. . . . In
112

the end my move to Christianity was not an escape from Judaism but,
on the contrary, a way to finding answers to my problems as a Jew. . . .
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

At any rate the psychological battle lasted for two days. During that
time I cried a lot, asking God for guidance. . . . For me the acceptance
of Christianity was a Jewish step. It was the move of a Jew toward a
certain historical period of the Jewish people. Eventually I told myself
that, even though my people, because of tragic circumstances, did not
accept Jesus, this does not mean that I have to always be faithful to their
decisions.79

Nor did Rufeisen feel a need to “be faithful” to the church’s understanding of
itself. His personal view of the church resonates with that of many Jews who, on
their own, had discovered the historical Jesus:

Christ’s teachings are basically Jewish, not Roman, not Greek, not Pol-
ish. The New Testament is Jewish, written by Jews for Jews. . . . Just
because at this moment the inheritors, the administrators of the Testa-
ment, are not Jews does not mean that I have to remove myself from
it. On the contrary I should bring back into the New Testament the
Jewish elements, myself being one of those Jewish elements, and others
like me. There are many people like me, Christians who see themselves
as Jews.80

Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik had sought to bridge the gap between rabbinic
Judaism and the early “Jesus movement” through the careful citation of rabbinic
sources. Rufeisen, however, had not the Talmudic learning to engage seriously in
this scholarly project (and by joining a medieval monastic order, it may be argued,
he undermined the credibility of his hope to Judaize Christianity). But then, he
was not learned in Christian sources either. When he informed the mother supe-
rior of the convent where he was hiding that he wished (on his father’s birthday!)
to be baptized, she replied: “But you know nothing about Christianity.” To which
he responded: “I believe that Jesus was the messiah. Please baptize me.” Rufeisen
left the convent in December 1943, spending much of his time with partisans in
the forest, where he decided to become a monk. Life in the forest was apparently
pretty wild: Jews, Polish nationalists, and communist partisans fought the Nazis
but also fought among themselves, and Rufeisen, who claimed to be a Catholic
but also a Jew, was not initially trusted by anyone. Slowly he developed a reputa-
tion for being honest and sincere. Jacob Greenstein, a Jewish partisan with whom
Rufeisen developed a lifelong friendship, noted: “He was, of course, a Catholic . . .
with him, however, one thing was very different from others who had converted

79.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 167, 168. 80.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 168.
to Christianity. He emphasized that he was a Jew with a Christian religion . . .

113
he openly said that if he survived the war he would go to Jerusalem. None of us
would have said it. He had guts.”81 In 1945 Rufeisen arrived in Cracow with a

Xenophilia: Par t 5
letter of introduction to Father Josef Prus, the Carmelite provincial in Poland.
Remarkably, it was Rufeisen’s Zionism that drove his choice of monastic order:
he knew there was a Carmelite monastery in Haifa and hoped to be transferred
there after taking his vows. Once Rufeisen settled into the Carmelite monastery
in Czerna, about fifteen miles from Cracow, and began life as a monk, he wrote
to his brother Arieh, who was living in a moshav near Haifa, to tell him that he

•
Magid
was alive and to recount his story.

Immigration to Israel as a Christian Jew

Rufeisen’s first request to the Carmelite Order for relocation to Israel was denied.
Then, in 1956, with an outbreak of anti-­Semitism in Poland and with large num-
bers of Jews immigrating to Israel, Rufeisen again requested, and this time was
granted, relocation to Haifa. Having been denied on his first application for a
Polish exit visa, he sought the assistance of a high-­ranking communist, Hersz
Smodar, whom he knew from his partisan days in the forest. Within a few weeks
he had a passport but, upon its receipt, had to renounce his Polish citizenship. If he
was denied entry by Israel, he would be stateless. He met with the Israeli ambas-
sador to Poland, Katriel Katz, and their brief conversation is worth recounting:

The ambassador asked, “How do you want to go to Israel — as a mis-

sionary? As a tourist?”
“I want to go as a Jew” came the answer.
“But you are a Catholic, a priest, a monk?!”
“Being a priest is my vocation,” Oswald said.82

Rufeisen’s application for immigration to Israel under the Law of Return

was denied, but Minister of the Interior H. M. Shapira, a member of the National
Religious Party, assured him that, if he applied for entry as a non-­Jew, he would
be admitted. Rufeisen wanted the state to recognize him as a Jew and appealed
the decision to the Israeli Supreme Court. As Michael Stanislawski summarizes
the case: Rufeisen asked for Israeli citizenship as an ethnic Jew, “totally in line
with the basic Zionist redefinition of Jewishness as a nationality like all other
nationalities, entirely independent of religious commitment.”83 In the end, the
court, with the exception of Justice Haim Cohen, declined to distinguish Jewish
national identity from the Jewish religion and, in ruling against Rufeisen, essen-

81.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 198. 83.  Stanislawski, “A Jewish Monk?,” 553.

82.  Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 220.

 tially rejected the halakhic definition of a Jew as anyone whose mother is Jewish.84
114

Cohen, who was willing to take the Zionist revolution to its natural conclusion,
wrote of Zionism in his dissent: “Never before has there been such a revolution-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

ary event in the history of the Jewish people. . . . The revolution is not merely of
a political character, it renders imperative a revision of the values which we have
imbibed in our long exile.”85 Prime Minister David Ben-­Gurion was so convinced
of the Rufeisen case’s importance that he wrote a letter of inquiry to a group of
fifty scholars of Judaica, asking them to express their views on the key question:
who is a Jew?86 Most of the scholars who responded to Ben-­Gurion rejected his
idea that the commitment to live in Israel is itself sufficient to merit acceptance
as a Jew. They argued instead that Jewish identity in Israel should comply with
traditional halakhic practice.87
As for the Supreme Court’s ruling, suffice it to say that, although the court
acknowledged that Rufeisen, the son of a Jewish mother, was halakhically a Jew,
he could not enter Israel under the Law of Return, because, as an apostate, he
had abandoned not only the Jewish religion but his identity as a Jew.88 The jus-
tices concluded that an ordinary Jew would not regard a Catholic monk as Jewish
even if he were born of a Jewish mother, and they were unwilling to entertain any
subjective criteria for Jewishness. In other words, Rufeisen’s self-­identification
as a Jew did not matter. Still, though he could not have “Jew” printed on any of

84.  Actually, Aharon Lichtenstein — in making a series of
distinctions regarding apostasy that, if applied in a state
court, could result in excluding someone in Rufeisen’s
position from the status of a Jew — showed that the judges
in the Rufeisen case did not necessarily adjudicate in con-
tradiction to halakha. See Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel,”
260 – 80. Stanislawski (in “A Jewish Monk?,” 555) discusses
an earlier and related case in Israel: “Aleph,” a boy born
of a Jewish father and a non-­Jewish mother in Vienna,
immigrated with his father to Israel but eventually asked
permission to leave the country so as to avoid conscrip-
tion into the Israeli army. He told the court that he did
not consider himself a Jew and, as the son of a non-­Jewish
mother, was in fact not halakhically Jewish. His request
was denied by the court, declaring that, when Aleph
immigrated, he did so to join the Jewish people and could
not “remove himself from his people by a verbal declara-
tion that he [did] not feel himself to be a Jew.” In contrast,
Rufeisen, who never abdicated his claim to be a Jew, not
even after converting to Christianity, was denied Jewish
rights in Israel by reason of his conversion.
85.  Cohen, in Oswald Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior,
HCJ [High Court of Justice] 62/72: 2441 – 4 42.
86.  Ben-­Gurion’s letter seems to indicate that what he
wanted of those scholars was for them to help him make a
sharp distinction between the Jews in Israel and those in
the Diaspora. With his attention focused on mixed mar-
riages of a Jewish and a non-­Jewish partner, he argues that
non-­Jews married to Jews, who immigrate with them to
Israel, should be fully absorbed not only into Israeli soci-
ety but also into the Jewish people. There was a personal
dimension to Ben-­Gurion’s argument. His son Amos, who
had fought with the British army during the war, mar-
ried a gentile Scot named Mary, and Ben-­Gurion urged
them to come live in Israel. Ben-­Gurion asked Joachim
Prinz, a Reform rabbi, if he would perform a “shotgun”
conversion — t hat is, one with little religious preparation
on the convert’s part — and Prinz complied. Ben-­Gurion
wrote Prinz that he did not care if Mary converted as long
as she lived in Israel but that his wife was adamant that her
daughter-­in-­law had to convert. Amos’s wife agreed to the
conversion on one condition — t hat she could retain the
name Mary, which she did for the rest of her life. Mary,
whom Ben-­Gurion loved as a daughter, came to Israel
with Amos and served in the Palmach. Years later, she was
granted an Orthodox Jewish conversion.
87.  On Mary’s conversion and Ben-­Gurion’s letter, see
Joachim Prinz, Joachim Prinz: Rebellious Rabbi, 237 – 40.
88.  An amendment to the Law of Return, made in light of
the Brother Daniel case, was rendered in “Law of Return
(Amendment no. 2), 5730 – 1070”: “For the purposes of this
law, ‘Jew’ means a person born of a Jewish mother or [who]
has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member
of another religion.”
his official documents, the justices acknowledged all that he had done for Jewish

115
communities and individual Jews during the Holocaust, and he was granted entry
to Israel as, essentially, a “righteous gentile” and was set on a course toward citi-

Xenophilia: Par t 5
zenship. The court’s decision that, as Leo Strauss put it, “Jew and Christian are a
contradiction in terms” hurt Rufeisen deeply but did not deter him, now settled in
Israel, from making the case for a Jewish Christianity.89 Stanislawski is correct, in
my view, that “in many ways it was the Catholic Church itself, or more precisely,
the history of the Church’s relations with the Jews, that was summoned to trial.”90
Brother Daniel’s wearing a Carmelite habit and a large cross around his neck were

•
Magid
unlikely to be regarded as irrelevant at a time when the other major Holocaust-­
related case in Israel was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which affected the Israeli
public in a very emotional and even traumatic way. As Justice Zvi Berenson wrote
for the majority in the Rufeisen case: “It will take a long time still, so it seems,
before convictions change and that grievance so deeply felt by the Jews for all the
wrong that Christianity had done to their people, whose history is soaked with
the blood of martyrs who died in order to sanctify the Holy Name, will disappear.
Until that day dawns it is not possible to recognize the petitioner as a Jew for the
purpose of the Law of Return.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, Rufeisen continued to argue that
Christianity was a part of Judaism, and he dedicated his life to realigning these
two religions that history had torn asunder. He traveled to schools around the
country to teach Israeli children about the origins of Christianity in Judaism and
about the deep ties of the two religions. He celebrated mass in Hebrew and joined
a group called the Society of Hebrew Christians in Israel, founded by a Jew-
ish physician from South Africa, Father Elias Friedman, who had converted to
Catholicism during World War II.91 Another circle of the kind to which Rufeisen
belonged was the St. James Group, named for the Apostle James the Just, called
the “brother of Jesus,” who led the Jewish-­early Christian church in Jerusalem.
Hillel Seidel once said that he thought Rufeisen, a lifelong friend, would even-
tually return to Judaism. When a journalist asked Brother Daniel if what Seidel
had said of him was true, Rufeisen replied: “But how can I return? I never left!”
Meanwhile, Rufeisen’s grave in Haifa continues to be visited by Jews whose lives
he saved during the Holocaust.
Probably the most incisive of the theologically and halakhically informed
studies of the Brother Daniel case is R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s “Brother Daniel
and the Jewish Fraternity” (1964), which is in essence a halakhic analysis of Jew-
ish identity and apostasy.92 If we applied the Talmudic principle that “an Israelite

89.  A very persuasive critique of the court decision can be 91.  See Goldman, “Apostasy and Citizenship,” 140.
found in Galanter, “A Dissent on Brother Daniel.”
92.  See Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel,” and Wolowelsky,
90.  Stanislawski, “A Jewish Monk?,” 565. “Two Aspects of Jewish Identity,” 17 – 27.
 who sins is still an Israelite” (B. T. Sanhedrin 44a), then we would have to rule
116

that Rufeisen remained a Jew after baptism (and indeed, such was the ruling of
the Israeli rabbinate). Lichtenstein, on the other hand, argued that certain acts of
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

apostasy terminate one’s Jewish identity altogether. Lichtenstein’s essay does not
engage in historical discussion of the relationship between the church and the
Jews but argues, on a purely theological basis, that a Jew who converts to Chris-
tianity fits the category of meshumad l’hol ha Torah kulah, one who has abandoned
the entire Torah. As Lichtenstein puts it: “He remains a Jew [but] without Jewish-
ness.”93 While Lichtenstein does not raise the question of whether Christianity is
a form of idolatry, he does state that conversion to Christianity is even more seri-
ous than the types of idolatrous practices that the Talmud describes some Jews
as having practiced. These latter, he reasons, were largely regional in nature and
did not imply universal claims to truth; nor did such practices require severing
one’s ancestral affiliations. Christianity, on the other hand is “sharply exclusive”
of Judaism in particular and “calls for a radical break with one’s past.”94
The foundation of Lichtenstein’s case is his contention that the origin of
Jewish identity is the act of collective conversion upon the revelation of God at
Mt. Sinai (Exodus 24.3 – 7; B. T. Shabbat 88a).95 Before this communal expres-
sion of acceptance, the people of Israel had shem yisrael (the name of Israel), but
only at Sinai did they acquire kedushat yisrael (the sanctity of Israel). Since Jews
in this way constitute both an ecclesia and a polis, their bond is not merely socio-
logical, psychological, or cultural; it is a bond rooted in the experience of divine
revelation. Without that shared experience, the Jewish people does not exist. By
rejecting Judaism, as Lichtenstein claims Rufeisen did by joining the church, he
by definition rejected knesset Yisrael, the congregation of the Jewish people. For
Lichtenstein, even an atheist would be a sinner, not an apostate, since atheism — 
although it makes a universal truth claim (that there is no God) — is not a his-
toric community that would by definition exclude him or her from knesset Yisrael,
unless the atheist specifically rejects the revelation at Mt. Sinai of the covenantal
God. It is Lichtenstein’s argument that to accept Christianity is to accept the
supersessionist doctrine that the Sinai covenant has been abrogated and a new
covenant established between the gentile world and Christ. It may be that, of the
fifty Judaic scholars whom Ben-­Gurion consulted in the Brother Daniel case,
most agreed, against the prime minister, with a version of Lichtenstein’s more
theologically based conclusion.
To my mind, the weakness of Lichtenstein’s argument is threefold. First,
he rejects (or, at any rate) ignores the existence of Jewish-­Christian communi-
ties as late as the fourth century (or perhaps even later). These faith communi-

93.  Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel,” 267. 95.  Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel,” 272.

94.  Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel,” 268.

ties comprised Jews who, after Christian baptism, continued to regard them-

117
selves, without any sense of self-­contradiction, as Jewish. The reality of such
communities and individuals is discounted out of hand, and no explanation is

Xenophilia: Par t 5
offered as to why. Perhaps Lichtenstein’s argument was meant to have purchase
solely within the context of normative halakhic discourse, but the subject under
consideration — Jewishness in relation to Zionism — exists outside of that context,
as well as inside it, and often stands, in fundamental ways, in conflict with basic
halakhic assumptions. Of course, Lichtenstein was a Religious Zionist, which was
not then a mainstream position among Israelis, and so Rufeisen’s Zionism does

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not and should not be expected to conform to Lichtenstein’s understanding of
the movement. Lichtenstein’s type of Zionism ignores or rejects even the widely
shared vision of Zionism as a revolutionary movement seeking to revise the his-
torical trajectory both of Jewishness and of Judaism. The Religious Zionist’s view
that the Israeli polis is a fulfillment, not an upending, of Jewish tradition stands
opposed to the assessment, by Zionists as mainstream as Ben-­Gurion and Justice
Haim Cohen, of the Jewish state’s role in Jewish history.
Finally, Lichtenstein wrote about the Brother Daniel case without having
detailed knowledge of Rufeisen’s life which, admittedly, did not come to light
until Nechama Tec’s book In The Lion’s Den appeared in 1990. Lichtenstein knew
of the general framework as it appeared in the court proceedings, which included
Rufeisen’s heroism, both before and after his conversion. It may have been for
Lichtenstein, as it was for the Israeli Supreme Court, that Rufeisen’s subjectivity —
 his comprehension of the Holocaust through the lens of Christ’s death; his Zion-
ism driven, therefore, by the possibility of the Jewish people’s resurrection; his
fidelity to the Jewish people by choosing to live in the reborn Jewish polis — had
no legitimate part to play in adjudicating his case. Whatever its context and etiol-
ogy, the act of joining the church excludes the convert from membership of the
Jewish people. Or, at the very least, baptism makes the convert what Lichtenstein
calls a Jew without Jewishness, one who may have shem yisrael but, by definition,
not kedushat yisrael. But why should even exclusion from kedushat yisrael make the
convert ineligible for citizenship, under the Law of Return, in a secular nation-­
state, built by and for a secularized Jewish people?
Building on Lichtenstein’s categories, Joel Wolowelsky addresses this ques-
tion in an essay titled “Two Aspects of Jewish Identity.”96 Wolowelsky suggests
that the distinction between shem yisrael and kedushat yisrael may mean that a Jew
who has become a Christian may be disqualified from participation in Jewish
religious ritual but may still be obliged to invest their shem yisrael with kedushat
yisrael.97 Indeed, other Jews may be obliged to encourage them to do so. The obvi-

96.  Wolowelsky, “Two Aspects of Jewish Identity,” 16 – 27.
97.  Wolowelsky, “Two Aspects of Jewish Identity,” 18.
The phrase “another religion” in the amendment to the
Law of Return (see note 88 above) refers, in practice,
to Christianity (and perhaps Islam). It is unlikely that a
Jew who becomes a Buddhist monk, for instance, would
 ous way to do so would be encouraging a full-­throttled return to Jewish religious
118

belief and practice. But what of someone, such as Rufeisen, who claims never to
have left Judaism and, moreover, seeks to exercise his kedushat yisrael through his
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Zionism? Outside of Lichtenstein’s closed orbit of rabbinic categories (of which

Zionism itself had arguably broken free), can we understand Rufeisen’s commit-
ment to the Jewish project of state-­building as an act of kedusha sufficient to merit
citizenship according to the Law of Return, even as it may not merit inclusion in
Jewish religious ritual? If Zionism serves as an aspect of kedusha, as it seems to do
for Lichtenstein as well as for Rufeisen (albeit for different reasons), why can it not
suffice for citizenship in a secular nation-­state? What stands between Rufeisen
and Lichtenstein is not only how they understand Zionism but also, and more
importantly, how they conceptualize the categories of “Judaism” and “Christian-
ity” and how those categories relate to the terms “Jew” and “Christian.” For Lich-
tenstein, the distinction made in both sets of terms is categorical and irreversible;
for Rufeisen, it is precisely because Judaism and Christianity are not the same
that the possibility exists to be both a Jew and a Christian — a Jew by birth with
fidelity to the Jewish people, and a Christian by belief with fidelity to the church.
Rufeisen argues that religion should not be the sole criterion for determining
Jewishness, because religion has never been the sole criterion of kedushat yisrael.

In Conclusion
The assumption and enumeration of categorical differences between Judaism
and Christianity has become the basis for much of modern Judaism.98 But it is
also the case that, in recent times, many Jews and Christians have become open
to questioning or even subverting the hierarchical distinctions between Judaism
and Christianity or, at least (for example, at the Second Vatican Council), to
arguing against the supersessionist concept that one religion is not quite valid
as long as the other continues to exist — an idea that for many centuries made
the conversion of the Jews seem necessary to the fulfillment of Christianity.99
Meanwhile, most Jewish authorities, down to the present day, have regarded
Christianity as a form of idolatry (or avoda zara, “strange worship”); thus the
prohibition of Jews entering churches, being present at Christian rituals, and so
forth. Christians such as Paul van Buren have proposed a dual-­covenant theol-
ogy to undo centuries of Christian supersessionism, and some Jewish scholars

be denied entry to Israel under the amended Law of
Return — a nd indeed, in the Middle Ages, Ovadia Mai-
monides, Moses Maimonides’s grandson, became a prac-
ticing Sufi, yet his work Treatise of the Pool was read by Jews
and not deemed forbidden by Jewish authorities.
98.  See Becker and Reed, The Ways that Never Parted,
1 – 33.
99.  On the question of Christian supersessionism, see my
“Christian Supersessionism, Zionism, and the Contempo-
rary Scene,” 104 – 41.
have responded in kind.100 Today, many Jews, no longer living under an oppres-

119
sive Christendom, have begun to rethink Jewish attitudes toward Christianity
that had developed over centuries of bad relations.101 But the foundation upon

Xenophilia: Par t 5
which this new thinking has been built is a sharp distinction between Jesus and
the church — so sharp that Jews can repossess the historical Jesus while reject-
ing the Christological one.102
Simply repossessing the historical Jesus for the history of the Jewish people
was insufficient for Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik and Oswald Rufeisen, the two outli-
ers on whom I have focused here. I expect that, even when better informed about

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these two than most Jews are currently, they would reject the arguments of both.
Even if no longer ignored, Soloveitchik’s views will likely be taken as resulting
from a misuse or highly selective use of rabbinic texts to interpret an explicitly
and vehemently anti-­rabbinic corpus. Moreover, as we know, the Talmud has
some very negative things to say about Christianity, and that negativity acceler-
ated in postrabbinic literature, beginning with the medieval Toldot Yeshu, which
is an alternative biography of Jesus and a parody of the Gospels.103 And where
tolerance has largely replaced coercion, the categorical distinction between Juda-
ism and Christianity is paradoxically more necessary. Some read Rabbi Joseph
B. Soloveitchik’s rejection of Jewish-­Christian theological ecumenism in that
light and argue that, in this age of tolerance, we must be especially vigilant, lest
Jews be swallowed up by the majority culture, to retain theological barriers.104
Many will say that Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik was naive to think that anti-­Semitism
was founded on readings of the New Testament and, thus, that an understand-
ing of those materials in explicitly Jewish terms would contribute to Christian-­
Jewish toleration. And indeed anti-­Semitism is a complex phenomenon whose
foundations are irreducible either to theology or to scriptural interpretation. As
for the threat of Jewish conversions, it is impossible to say whether Elijah Zvi
Soloveitchik’s work was read by Jews who were then convinced to convert or
not to convert, since we do not have records concerning the readership of the
Hebrew edition of his commentary, which is most likely the one that Jews read.
More interesting, though, in any case, is how many Christians were interested in

100.  Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-­Christian Reality. Radical Jew; and Gager, Who Made Early Christianity?. One
exception to this consensual approach is Franz Rosen­
101.  See Novak’s introduction to Christianity in Jewish
zweig, whose thoughts on the Jewish-­C hristian divide
Terms, 1 – 6.
have been the subject of continuous examination; see in
102.  We can see this approach among Jewish thinkers particular Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions.
from Abraham Geiger to Leo Baeck and Martin Buber,
103.  See Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud, which is central to
all of whom based their positive views of Christianity on
a robust debate among scholars over the extent to which
their distinction between Jesus and Paul. More recently,
rabbinic sages knew or cared about Christianity.
Paul’s Jewishness has been reassessed in ways that under-
mine the distinction. See, for example, the works of 104.  Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” 5 – 29.
E. P. Sanders; Taubes, Political Theology of Paul; Boyarin, A
 Soloveitchik’s project, even though his commentary undermines supersession-
120

ism, which was crucial to nineteenth-­century Christianity.

The case of Rufeisen addresses a different issue — the criteria for Jewish-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

ness. Rufeisen, from his conversion forward, was a devout Christian, but as far
as I know he never said whether he believed that Christianity was in any way
superior to Judaism. It appears that Christianity answered existential questions
to which he, personally, needed answers at a turning point in his life. The Israeli
Supreme Court rejected Rufeisen’s argument that one could be Jewish and Chris-
tian simultaneously, but Justice Cohn, in his dissent, argued that Rufeisen chal-
lenged Zionism to live up to its claim to revise Jewish identity independently of
religious criteria. As Marc Galanter wrote at the time:

Justice Cohn views the establishment of the state of Israel as a decisive

historical break that enables us to re-­evaluate our experience and to
recognize change. The Jews themselves have “become a nation like all
other nations. . . . This revolutionary event demands a change in values
and in attitude, a revision of our galut [Diaspora] thinking.”

Even more important, however, to Cohn’s dissent in the Brother Daniel case was
his perception — as early as 1962, which was before the Second Vatican Council,
then in session, had issued its decree, Nostra Aetate, on the relationship of Juda-
ism and Christianity — of a development that most Israelis and most Jews glob-
ally have not processed fully even now: “The Church itself is ‘no longer either in
theory or in practice, an enemy of the Jewish people.’ ”105

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