Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

David Zvi Hoffman

For the American documentary filmmaker, see David Hoffman

David Zvi Hoffmann (November 24, 1843 – 1921) (Hebrew: דוד צבי הופמן), was an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Torah Scholar. Born in Verbó in 1843, he attended various Yeshivas in his native town before he entered the college at Pressburg, from which he graduated in 1865. He then studied philosophy, history, and Oriental languages at Vienna and Berlin, taking his doctor's degree in 1871 from Tuebingen University. His rabbinical training was at the hands of Maharam Schick and Azriel Hildesheimer.

Shortly after obtaining his degree, he became employed as a teacher in Samson Raphael Hirsch's Realschule school in Frankfurt am Main, and in 1873 moved to Berlin to join the faculty of the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin where he eventually became rector in 1899 after the death of Azriel Hildesheimer.

A selective Wissenschaft practitioner

David Hoffmann occupies a very interesting position in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of the 19th century, as shown by , and is in some ways the prototype of the contemporary Orthodox Jewish scholar, facing the ubiquitous tension between faithfulness to tradition and the demands of critical inquiry. Though born in Hungary, he adapted the German-Jewish approach of openness towards general culture, world and society. He employed the critical scientific method to the Talmud and wrote about the history of the development of the form of the Oral law (as opposed to the development of the Law itself, the latter being an enterprise antithetical to traditional Jewish beliefs; see below). Despite his worldly inclinations, he was an original member of the more traditionally oriented Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah (council of great Torah sages), and was also known to be a person of great moral conduct and piety.

Hoffman was the leading authority on traditional Jewish Law (halacha) in Germany in his lifetime, an expert specifically in the area of Midrash halakha (legalistic Biblical exegesis), and was also well known for his efforts to disprove the Documentary Hypothesis as expressed by the Graf-Wellhausen theory, his arguments being presented in a famous work entitled Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (1903/1916). A. Altmann, however, sees Hoffmann's writings on these matters (though evidencing great expertise) as pure apologetics, the cause of which may be seen as laid out in his introduction to Leviticus , where Hoffmann makes the following remarks:

Yet, despite the piety of the above sentiments, and his repeated proclamations regarding the divinity of the Oral Law, Hoffmann was still very much the Wissenschaft scholar. He cites in his work scholars such as Z. Frankel, A. Geiger, S.J. Rapoport, and H. Graetz, he studies the influences of Ancient Near Eastern culture on the evolution of the Talmud, and he identifies problems in the transmitted text. For example, Hoffmann in The First Mishna sees the present Mishna Avot as having been redacted from three different sources, a Mishna of Rabbi Akiva, a Mishna of Rabbi Meir, and a Mishna of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, the originals of which cannot be completely reconstructed due to their thoroughgoing fusion and subsequent manipulation.

The extent to which Hoffmann resided in the Wissenschaft movement can also be seen from the criticism he received from such opponents of the movement as Samson Raphael Hirsch. Hildesheimer notes regarding Hirsch's opinion of his Rabbinical Seminary (where Hoffmann worked after leaving Hirsch's institution) that "a question certainly exists as to whether Rabbi Hirsch considers the seminary to be an Orthodox institution." Hirsch's opposition extended to Hoffmann's own work, judging Hoffmann's book Mar Samuel to contain heresies .

Hoffmann's resolution of this tension between faithfulness to tradition and textual criticism is found by in the following passage from the introduction to The First Mishna:

Writings

Some of Hoffman's works include Die Erste Mishna, The First Mishna, a historical and linguistic analysis of the Mishnah and Melamed Le-ho'il, a responsa on contemporary issues based on historical evidence of tradition. He also published a commentary on the Pentateuch that included a translation of the text into German. Later this commentary was translated into Hebrew, though today it is out of print. Most of his writings were in German and remain so to this day. The First Mishna was translated into English, and a selection of his comments on the Passover Haggada have been published in Hebrew as well. He published a translation of two of the orders of the Mishna into German.