Yehezkel Kaufmann

Yehezkel Kaufmann was born in 1889 in Podolia

Kaufmann was born in 1889 in Dunaivtsi, in Podolia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Mordekhai Nakhum Kaufmann, was a cloth merchant, and the family was traditional. He studied in a cheder and a beit midrash and learned Hebrew from a private tutor.

He studied at the yeshiva of Chaim Tchernowitz in Odessa and at the academy of Jewish studies in Saint Petersburg. He then studied philosophy and Semitic linguistics at the University of Bern, finishing in 1918 with a doctorate on the principle of sufficient reason. After that he worked in Berlin on the Encyclopaedia Judaica project.

In 1929 he immigrated to the Land of Israel and taught at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. His book Exile and Estrangement appeared in 1930 and argued that religion alone had preserved the Jewish people. In 1949 he moved to Jerusalem and became professor of Bible at the Hebrew University, where he headed the Bible department until 1957.

His major work, The History of Israelite Religion, opposed the documentary hypothesis of Julius Wellhausen. He held that monotheism began with Moses and came from Israel alone. He won the Bialik Prize twice and the Israel Prize in 1958, joined the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1959, and died in Jerusalem in 1963.