The Anti-Wellhausen

Moving on to Rabbi Joseph Hertz: it may be exactly because he was London-based, that he was permitted to deliver the apologetic he'd delivered. Where CS Lewis' Abolition denies Islamic teachings from his "Tao"; Hertz before him allowed nothing good in Christendom (pace Claude Montefiore). Based!

The good rabbi was even more based against homosexuality, deemed an error of the Greeks. Chevy Chase lookalike Dr. Rabbi Harvey Meirovich finds this stance so unfortunate that Meirovich digs around for English contemporaries to contrast him with.

Judaism has on occasion raised up some obscurantists. Hertz, by contrast, allowed input from contemporary philology. Among his arguments for Torah antiquity is Torah pulling from Egyptian terms, and of course the names which Freud(!) had found among the b'nai Levi.

Meirovich sees Hertz as a Maimonideian. For my part I see the legacy of David Ganz, an early rabbinical-trained opponent of Copernicus. I recall Ganz' quote We, the holy congregation of Israel, will not put our trust in history books produced by authors who are not from the children of Israel in Mitchell First's Jewish History in Conflict; I recall Ganz's support of the book "Daniel". But... ten years since reading that, I don't think Ganz was in life nearly as bigoted as this quote suggested.

Hertz intended to contradict Julius Wellhausen inasmuch as Wellhausen argued that Torah was a later assemblage. Wellhausen might counter that his schema was about... assemblage, which bakes-in that the assemblers worked from a library of text, some of which text might be early indeed.

Hertz is on firmer ground that Wellhausen had blithely accepted Christian propaganda - Protestant in particular - that priesthood is a degradation of prophecy; and indeed that Wellhausen had added to the propaganda. I'd hope that since Israel Knohl's work on the Holiness Code and its round of redaction, Christians might allow that the Temple's model of priesthood is not necessarily inimical to eunomía. Nor can we splash the blood of the Tabernacle upon the Rabbinate.

In his fundamentalism, Hertz might be more Protestant than he lets on. Much weight is placed on the Torah / Chumash as being a simple record of how it really was, plausible because ineptus. This reflects Tertullian, and foreshadows Joshua MacDowell. Hertz also follows the Chronicler in resolving the Exodus 12:8–9 / Deuteronomy 16:7 contradiction on whether the paschal lamb be roasted (צלי) or boiled (בשל). Boil it in fire!

Hertz saw Jews as a Divinely chosen people, granted a propensity to the ethical life at the cellular level. This was in tension with Hertz' view that Jews be an example to other nations in their ethical living. A Christian would agree that Jews' job is exactly that, which is why Emperor Theodosius offered them a citizenship which citizenship, if second-class, was at least superior to the deal which his imperium was offering to pagans. You know - them Greek homos? Hertz' racial angle also seems, er, based.

Chos-en-ness seems further in tension with Hertz' assertion that Christians have nothing to teach Jews in return. Christian ethics and exegesis, Lewis would suggest, illuminate the Tao by which learnéd Jews like Hertz (and Prager) take their ethics. Christians had already taught Jews; in recent times (if too recent for my liking), not to trade slaves.