Umberto Cassuto
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Umberto Cassuto, also known as Moshe David Cassuto, (1883 - 1951), was a rabbi and biblical scholar born in Florence, Italy.
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[edit] Early life and career
He studied there at the university and the Collegio Rabbinico. After getting a degree and Semicha, he taught in both institutions. From 1914 to 1925, he was chief rabbi of Florence. In 1925 he became professor of Hebrew and literature in the University of Florence and then took the chair of Hebrew language at the University of Rome La Sapienza. When the 1938 anti-Semitic laws forced him from this position, he moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Umberto's son Nathan was also a rabbi in Florence. He went into hiding during World War II, was betrayed and perished in the Nazi death camps. Nathan's wife and children were saved and emigrated to Israel. One child, the architect David Cassuto (born 1938), played a key role in rebuilding the Jewish quarter in the old city of Jerusalem. In the 1990s he was for some years deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
[edit] Cassuto and higher biblical criticism
The Documentary Hypothesis is the idea that the five books of Moses (the Torah) were edited together from a number of early sources long after the time of Moses. The most popular form of this theory in the 1800s was the form proposed by Julius Wellhausen, a Christian Bible scholar.
While conceding that the Torah was not necessarily the work of Moses, Cassuto rejected Wellhausen's views, and wrote a detailed critique of Wellhausen's claims in his work The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (Hebrew, Torat HaTeudot, 1941; English translation, 1961). Cassuto did accept in general the idea of applying higher criticism to the Torah. He postulated a redaction to a school around the 10th century BCE., who assembled a number of early sources to create the text of the Torah that we now know today, and developed his own theory of how the Torah was edited. [1]. This is not the same as the Documentary Hypothesis; for example, Cassuto explicitly rejected the idea that there are two different and even contradictory accounts of the Creation (a cornerstone of Wellhausen's thesis); on the contrary, he argued at length that the two accounts are from the same author. (See the discussion page of this article.) At the time he wrote his views on the subject, his theory on the Torah's origin was reviewed and dismissed by the overwhelming majority of non-Orthodox scholars at the time. However, there has more recently been an appreciation of his views. For example, Gordon Wenham in his 1987 commentary on Genesis says 'The valuable commentaries of Jacob (1934) and Cassuto (1944) dispense completely with the sources JEP and attempt to understand Genesis as a coherent unity.'
The underlying goal that drives Cassuto’s The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch is to undermine the successes of the Graf-Wellhausen approach to historical/source criticism of the Pentateuch by (a) invalidating each of the five “pillars” upon which the Documentary Hypothesis stands, and (b) offering his alternative interpretation of the single sources which lies behind the textus receptus. The author criticizes the adherents of the Documentary Hypothesis whom he did believe took into consideration all the cognate literatures and archaeological evidence; he also believed that Documentary Hypothesis adherents did not keep an eye on critical methods at work in other fields (e.g. Homeric studies). He furthermore presupposes that internal disagreements within the Documentary Hypothesis camp (such as whether P is the latest stratum or D) point toward the instability of the theory over all.
Cassuto begins his critical analysis of the five pillars with a lengthy discussion of the divine names, to which he devotes more time (two chapters) than any of the other features of the hypothesis. Here, the author lays out his hermeneutical approach by way of Wellhausen and company’s "failure" – that source criticism neglects to observe how the two divine names, יהוה and אלהים, and the various construct or nominal forms thereof, are consistently employed for a particular context and purpose to reflect specific aspects of the divine. According to Cassuto, there is no evidence that more than one hand is at work; he believed that a single hand could just as easily (or perhaps more easily) understood when to use one, and when to use the other. The Wellhausian assumption regarding the names is that they are identical in meaning; Cassuto disgrees with this view, comparing the nuances of the God of Israel (יהוה) and the God of the World (אלהים), as well as comparing the literature which derives from a solely Israelite context (prophets, legal literature, and non-sapiential poems) and that which has ties to external literatures (sapiential literature, portions of the narrative literature). Hereafter, each new argument Cassuto proposes finds its ground in this initial one.
[edit] Cassuto and the text of the Hebrew Bible
Cassuto saw the need to produce the most accurate possible text of the Tanakh. He realised that the texts generally published had mostly been edited by non-Jews, and Jews who had converted to Christianity. While Cassuto saw no reason to believe that major alterations had been made, it was important to compare these printed editions with older manuscripts as a check.
Thus Cassuto sought out the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of the Tanakh, dating back many centuries before the invention of printing. In particular in 1944, he managed to visit the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria and study the Aleppo Codex). He was one of the very few scholars to study this key manuscript before most of the Torah section disappeared.
His research showed that the printed Bibles generally have an accurate text. However, he corrected the spelling of many words, and made very many corrections to the vowel points and musical notes. He also revised the layout of the text, its division into paragraphs, the use of poetical lines when appropriate (see the books of Psalms, Proverbs and Job) and similar matters. Where he differs from other Bibles in any of these respects, it is likely that Cassuto has better authority. The Bible was published posthumously in 1953.
[edit] Cassuto as Bible commentator
However, his most enduring legacy may be his commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. He wrote a Hebrew commentary on the Bible that is very popular in Israel. He wrote a more detailed commentary on Exodus and at the time of his death had completed chapters 1-11 of a more detailed commentary on Genesis; both of these latter commentaries are available in English and, not surprisingly, reflect his views on the Documentary Hypothesis.
[edit] Works available in English or Italian
- CASSUTO, Umberto. Storia della letteratura ebraica postbiblica. Pp. xvi, 212. Firenze: Casa editrice Israel, 1938
- CASSUTO, Umberto. The documentary hypothesis and the composition of the Pentateuch: eight lectures by U. Cassuto. Translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams. Pp. xii, 117. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1961
- CASSUTO, Umberto. A commentary on the book of Genesis. Translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1961-1964
- CASSUTO, Umberto. A commentary on the book of Exodus. Translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams. Pp. xvi, 509. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1967
- CASSUTO, Umberto. Biblical and oriental studies. Translated from the Hebrew and Italian by Israel Abrahams. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1973-1975
- CASSUTO, Umberto. The documentary hypothesis and the composition of the Pentateuch: eight lectures by Umberto Cassuto, with an introduction by Joshua A. Berman. Translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams. Pp. xxix, 142. Jerusalem and New York: Shalem Press, 2006
