The rabbi who studied Jesus

Chiesa Espress Online ^ | February 20, 2010 | Anna Foa

[annalex]

The rabbi who studied Jesus

by Anna Foa

The book "Il Nazareno" by Eugenio Zolli appeared in 1938, published by the Istituto delle Edizioni Accademiche in Udine. Israel Zolli, who would later become Eugenio, was at the time chief rabbi in Trieste, and had not yet become – as he would a year later – chief rabbi of Rome in the place of Rabbi David Prato, who was driven out in 1938 because he was a Zionist. A few months after the publication of this book, Mussolini's racist laws made Zolli – born in Brody, in Galicia, but raised in Italy – a stateless person, and hurled him into the harsh years of persecution. Seven years later, in February 1945, causing great scandal in the Italian Jewish world and a great stir in the non-Jewish community as well, Israel Zolli converted to Catholicism, taking Pope Pacelli's name with baptism, and thus becoming Eugenio Zolli.

A volume about Jesus Christ written by a prominent rabbi, then, destined a short time later, in spite of this book and the vague whiff of heresy that surrounded him for many years, to become the leading rabbi of the Roman Jewish community.

Is the book a prefiguring of the author's later journey, an anticipation of his subsequent baptism? Or does it reflect a journey of exegetical studies, with attention to the figure of Jesus Christ, undertaken by much European Jewish exegetical thought beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century?

The latter is the perspective in which it is placed, in his extensive and valuable postscript, by the book's editor, Alberto Latorre, in analyzing Jewish and Christian studies on Christ in those crucial decades of the early twentieth century, and situating Zolli's work in this context.

The rabbi from Trieste writes about Jesus and about relations between early Christianity and the rabbinical culture of the time with accents and ideas not dissimilar from those of his teachers at the rabbinical college of Florence, Chayes and Margulies, and raising far less serious controversies than Joseph Klausner's book on "Jesus the Nazarene," which at its publication in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1921 was attacked by both Orthodox Jews and Christians, as recalled, in an interesting selection from one of his novels quoted by Latorre in the postscript, by the writer Amos Oz, Klausner's great-nephew,.

This area of study was very popular with Jewish scholars all over Europe, and in particular with those from Germany, heirs of the Science of Judaism and linked with the reformed currents, which strongly emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus and highlighted the correspondences between rabbinical Judaism and early Christianity. But it was also a favorite of Christian scholars, especially Protestant ones, in nineteenth-century Germany, in the setting of the school of Tubingen and of the later schools of liberal theology, and was assimilated, at the beginning of the new century, by modernist Catholic scholars.

This context, connected to the historical-critical method of biblical exegesis, is of great interest to both sides.

If this was the cultural atmosphere in which Zolli's massive study was born, it must also be said that this was an atmosphere in which there were extremely few contributions from the Italian Jewish world. Some exceptions are the rabbinical college of Livorno, where Elia Benamozegh taught in the second half of the nineteenth century, the rabbinical college of Florence, with its nucleus of teachers from Galicia, and Trieste, a city that was culturally and until 1918 even politically Hapsburg, open to all the cultural currents of Mitteleuropa, not least, with Weiss, that of psychoanalysis. Florence and Trieste had extremely close ties with Zolli, who had completed his studies in Florence and was a rabbi in Trieste for twenty years.

But Italian Jewish culture was far from these broader cultural currents connected to the experience of German studies, and to the secular imprint made on these by the reformed Jewish movement.

Italian Jewish culture did not share this attention to the historical figure of Christianity, to the Jewish categories of its preaching, and to its Jewish roots in general. Its contours were more traditional and provincial, and at that historical moment linked Italian Judaism with Catholic exegetical studies, which were also fairly distant, except for a few figures more closely connected to modernism, sharing the historical-critical exegetical approach widespread in the rest of Europe.

In his volume, which collected writings previously published in the journal of Raffaele Pettazzoni, "Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni," and of the modernist Ernesto Buonaiuti, "Ricerche religiose," Zolli proceeded by using, in addition to the historical-critical method, the comparative analysis of religions.

In his conclusions, he departed significantly from both established Jewish exegesis and the dogmas of the Catholic Church. He strongly emphasized the resemblance between Jesus' preaching and Judaism, postulated an original drafting of the Gospels in Hebrew and Aramaic, denied that the term "nazarene" was derived from Nazareth – an argument used by those who supported the non-historicity of Jesus – and claimed that the Eucharist had come from an evolution of the Jewish Passover "seder."

Moreover, in the text there seemed to appear between the lines a recognition of the messianic character of Christ. This certainly would have been enough to provoke opposite reactions from Jews and Catholics. Nonetheless, these reactions didn't come. According to the editor of the book, Latorre, the Catholic world had no intention of drawing attention to a volume "so difficult to decipher and contextualize," at a moment when the modernist crisis had just recently reappeared, and the antisemitic climate was making it dangerous to discuss such sensitive topics.

So the Church preferred to remain silent about the volume, or almost silent (with the exception of the substantially positive reviews on the part of the Jesuits of "La Civiltà Cattolica"), declining even to use in an apologetical vein a text in which a famous rabbi seemed to be making a veiled reference to the messianic nature of Christ.

As for the lack of objections from the Jewish side, the historical context in which the book appeared, that of the racial laws of 1938, was not conducive to raising such delicate questions, especially in the crucial months between 1938 and 1939, in which some in the Church, like Fr. Agostino Gemelli, seemed to be hoping for a blending of racist doctrines and the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, the volume was greatly appreciated by the academic world in Italy and beyond. In November of 1938, Ernesto Buonaiuti wrote an enthusiastic review in "Ricerche Religiose."

Beyond the strictly exegetical questions, the volume presents many strictly historical issues for the consideration of today's reader, and prompts many questions about the life of Israel/Eugenio Zolli and about the nature of his conversion.

His conversion was certainly the result of a meditated decision, the result of a long and difficult journey, but it was also a conversion that required him to adjust his accents and emphases, yet didn't seem to change substantially the nature of his fundamental approach: a rigorously critical analysis of the biblical texts, which lifted him above any orthodoxy, and led him to accentuate the historical connections between rabbinical Judaism and Christianity, and to grasp in the figure of the Jewish Jesus the key to this complex moment of passage and transformation.

"Il Nazareno" belongs to the Jewish phase of Zolli's scholarly work, but the changes introduced by conversion into his later critical work are fairly few, and perhaps motivated only by reasons of obedience and prudence.

So it was between Jewish Wissenschaft and Christian modernism that the inseparably religious and scientific journey of Zolli's work unfolded.

A liminal figure whom the Jews, understandably hurt by his defection, did not understand, and whom the Church in the postwar period, at a time still light years away from Jewish-Christian openness, preferred to leave to the side.

"Il Nazareno" is the highest fruit of this being on the boundary, between the different orthodoxies.

_____________


The book:

Eugenio Zolli, "Il Nazareno. Studi di esegesi neotestamentaria alla luce dell'aramaico e del pensiero rabbinico", edited by Alberto Latorre, San Paolo, Milan, 2009, pp. 618, euro 42.00.

__________


The newspaper of the Holy See, in which Anna Foa's review of the book by Zolli was published on February 20:

> L'Osservatore Romano

__________


On these topics, on www.chiesa:

> Focus on JUDAISM

__________


English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.

[jjotto]

Traditional Jews who look at the details do not believe any such thing.

Peter Schafer is a Christian, by the way, who is held in high regard by the Judaism haters in the nihilistic secular Jewish world.

[Cvengr]

Good read

[Erskine Childers]

Traditional Jews who look at the details do not believe any such thing.

Perhaps you mean Jews like Maimonides?

I paste below an excerpt from his Epistle to Yemen wherein he restates succinctly some of the basic ideas concerning Jesus and Mary contained in the Talmud which, as you know, he influenced greatly. So, c'mon. Maimonides himself believed that these stories related to the Christian Jesus.

The first one to have adopted this plan was Jesus the Nazarene, may his bones be ground to dust. He was a Jew because his mother was a Jewess although his father was a Gentile. For in accordance with the principles of our law, a child born of a Jewess and a Gentile, or of a Jewess and a slave, is legitimate. (Yebamot 45a). Jesus is only figuratively termed an illegitimate child. He impelled people to believe that he was a prophet sent by God to clarify perplexities in the Torah, and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer. He interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment, to the abolition of all its commandments and to the violation of its prohibitions. The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him.

I believe that Christians and Jews have so much in common that we don't need to sugarcoat the nasty things we've said about each other ages ago. Let's start by getting honest about what these texts are and what they always meant

[Salvation]

The Sacred Page

The Chief Rabbi Who Became A Catholic and His Book on Jesus

L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, has just run a review praising a new edition of a book that is often overlooked. The book is Il Nazareno, and it was written more than seventy years ago by Israel Zoller, the former chief rabbi of Rome, who shocked the world by becoming Catholic in 1945. Significantly, the book was written before the rabbi's controversial conversion.

Incidentally, Zoller was baptized with the name "Eugenio". Eugenio, of course, was the name of Pope Pius XII. Zoller took the name to express his admiration for the pope.

The book by Zoller is reviewed by Anna Foa, a Jewish scholar, who is professor of history at the University of Rome "La Sapienza." The review is largely positive.

For more, go here.

It's nice to see this book getting republished. I always enjoy reading the works of Jewish scholars about Jesus. In fact, one of the clear shifts in emphasis in recent historical Jesus scholarship has been the attempt to understand Jesus within the historical context of Second Temple Judaism.[1]

In light of this it is sort of ironic that the works of many important Jewish scholars of the past are often overlooked. Among them all I must highlight the scholarship of Zionist scholar Joseph Klausner, whose work offers some insightful observations[2]. Other important Jewish scholars include Hans-Joachim Schoeps,[3] and David Flusser.[4] While such works were exceptional in their day,[5] Craig Evans is right in assessing the present state of scholarship: “The fruitful progress of the rediscovery of the Judaic character and setting of Jesus is now everywhere seen.”[6] Of course, the major difference between older scholarship and more recent research is that older scholars were a bit less critical in their use of the later rabbinic traditions in reconstructing the Judaism of the first century.

Of course, Israel Zoller's work stands out as unique among these works: none of the other Jewish scholars mentioned here ended up converting to Catholicism.

NOTES
[1] Colin Brown, “Historical Jesus, Quest of,” 337: “If there is a common theme [of "Third Quest" Jesus scholarship], it lies in the belief that Jesus was not the Jesus of liberal Protestantism or of the New Quest, but a historical figure whose life and actions were rooted in first-century Judaism with its particular religious, social, economic and political conditions.” This emphasis in recent scholarship has been noted by numerous other scholars (see, e.g., Tom Holmén, “The Jewishness of Jesus in the ‘Third Quest,’” in Jesus, Mark and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and its Earliest Records (eds. M. Labahn and A. Schmidt; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 149–50. Indeed, this is part of a larger trend in New Testament scholarship, which emphasizes greater continuity between early Christianity and Judaism. Thus, for example, in Pauline studies the Jewish backdrop of Paul’s letters is increasingly coming into focus. See, to name only a few, E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977); Mark Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul's Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996); Chris VanLandingham, Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul (Peabody: Hendricksen, 2006).
[2] Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teaching (trans. H. Danby; New York: Macmillan Co., 1925; repr., New York: Bloch, 1989), trans. of Yeshu ha-Notzri (Jerusalem: Stybel, 1922). Particularly useful is Klausner’s survey of the history of Jewish scholarship. For our purposes here it is worth mentioning that Klausner highlights the work of a number of Jewish scholars largely ignored by contemporary writers. For example, Klausner discusses the way Albert Schweitzer’s seminal survey of the history of Jesus research pays hardly any notice to the work of Joseph Salvador, Jésus Christ et sa doctrine: histoire de la naissance de l’église, de son organisation et de ses progrès pendant le premier siecle (2 vols.; 2d. ed.; Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1864–65). As Klausner observes, that this work was overlooked cannot simply be chalked up to the fact that the work was originally written in French since Salvador’s work had been translated into German by the time of Schweitzer’s writing. Strikingly, not only is Salvador’s work badly mischaracterized and mentioned only in passing, but Schweitzer even misspells his name (“Salvator”)! See Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 161. See also Craig A. Evans, “Assessing Progress in the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus,” JSHJ (2006): 36 n. 3.
[3] See Hans Joachim Schoeps, Das Leben Jesu: Versuch einer historischen Darstellung (Frankfurt: Eremiten, 1954). Schoeps own work on Jesus followed his own comprehensive study of ancient Judaism. See Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Jüdisch-christliches Religionsgespräch in 19. Jahrhunderten; Geschichte einer theologischen Auseinandersetzung (Berlin: Vortrupp, 1937).
[4] David Flusser, Jesus in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Rowohlts monographien; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968). With the current climate of scholarship warming towards such approaches, Eerdmans recently republished two of Flusser’s works into English. See David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period: Qumran and Apocalypticsm (vol. 1; trans. A. Yadin with D. Bivin; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); trans. of Yahadut Bayit Sheni: Qumran ve Apocalyptica (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press and Yad Ishax Ben-Zvi Press, 2002); and The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’ Genius (trans. R. S. Notley, with J. H. Charlesworth; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); trans. of Jesus in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968). For a fuller survey of Jewish scholarship see Donald A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An Analysis and Critique of Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984). Another scholar who was clearly ahead of his time in calling for an approach that rooted Jesus in first-century Judaism was Joachim Jeremias (e.g., Neutestamentliche Theologie: I. Die Verkündigung Jesu [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971] and other works cited above).
[5] For a fuller treatment of the neglect and retrieval of the Jewishness of Jesus in the history of research see Keck, Who is Jesus, 22–47.
[6] Evans, “Assessing Progress in the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus,” 39. Scot McKnight (“Jesus of Nazareth,” in The Face of New Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent Research [eds. S. McKnight and G. R. Osborne; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 170], citing words spoken by John Dominic Crossan in public settings, describes how “modern scholarship is in a contest to see who can find the most Jewish Jesus.”

Posted by Michael Barber at 9:30 PM

[Salvation]

Thank you for posting it. I posted the article from Michael Barber’s blog also.

[annalex]

Judaism was our spiritual origin

Yes, absolutely. Catholic Christianity is the perfection of Jewish temple worship. The Jews need to convert only insofar as they no longer practice the Judaism of their forefathers. But as the Second Temple was destroyed, it was also rebuilt by Christ. Gaze at the Altar and see Jerusalem in Heaven.

[Jaded]

mark

[onedoug]

Why did he teach prayer as a Jew then? “Our Father...”

[annalex]

By the way, you had questions? Here’s a good thread to discuss Catholics vis a vis the Jews.

[Poe White Trash]

By the way, you had questions? Here’s a good thread to discuss Catholics vis a vis the Jews.

I had several questions concerning your views on a certain writer's positions, not just his position on Judaism... but on ANOTHER thread.

If you wish to answer those questions, my understanding is that it would be best to do so on THAT thread.

[annalex]

I don’t know anything about Dr. Rao’s views on that and will not sidetrack the thread that has nothing to do with your questions.

[Poe White Trash]

...and will not sidetrack the thread that has nothing to do with your questions.

Good! I'm sure the moderators will appreciate that.

[Beamreach]

you need professional help....

[BlackVeil]

It is a ... ah ... satirical reply to post 5.

[SuziQ]

Yes, Jesus was Jewish. He was called 'Rabbi' by many of His followers, and he frequently taught in the Synagogues. He wouldn't have been able to do that, had he not been Jewish.

It is Jesus's followers who call themselves 'Christians'.

[1010RD]

Rabbi and teaching in synagogues are contextual to the time.

Do you believe Jesus is God, the Son of God or the Messiah?

That he died and was resurrected in payment of your sins?

Are these Jewish concepts?

[1010RD]

Do you accept that he is the Son of God, God and the Messiah? Do you believe he was resurrected and died for your sins? Are these religious acts Jewish?

[onedoug]

Hyam Maccoby, Revolution In Judaea: Jesus And The Jewish Resistance

Semikhah, or the ordination of rabbis was performed only by the Pharisees. It's obvious you don't like it. But Rabbi Jesus was a Jew: Prayed as a Jew, ate as a Jew, admonished that the Law be kept as a Jew, went to Temple as a Jew, was buried as a Jew. Read your Bible.

That he was resurrected, I'm agnostic. But the United States could not have been founded without the Christ saga. So, perhaps the Father made him the messiah after all.

[SuziQ]

Yes, Jesus is the Savior, the Son of God, and by His death and resurrection, He redeemed us, and made it possible for us to spend eternity with Him, if we live according to His Word. That doesn't mean he wasn't Jewish. The Old Testament is full of prophecy about a Redeemer. They were waiting for a Messiah. If there were no concept of redemption, why would they NEED a Messiah?

Most Jews rejected Jesus, because they had come to anticipate a Messiah who would liberate them from the yoke of oppression, be it the Babylonians, or the Romans, later. They'd gotten away from the notion of spiritual bondage, and the need for liberation from it.

[1010RD]

You’re confusing noise with the signal. What was the relationship of Jesus to the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes supportive?

Is Christianity a correction of Judaic lost knowledge?

Is the Gospel of Christ eternal and had from Adam or from the birth of Christ?