The Bible and Us: Biblical Scholarship in the JQR, Then and Now

When Israel Abrahams and Claude Montefiore brought out the first volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1888-1889, a particularly high proportion of the articles and reviews included therein were devoted to biblical subjects; though perspicacious readers probably noticed (some with relief) that, as at some religious universities today, the Bible's first five books were discreetly downplayed.¹ The journal's earliest contributors on these subjects were all, like the editors themselves, British males, and their religious affiliations were either Jewish or Anglican. They included Montefiore himself (a nephew of the late great Moses), T. K. Cheyne, Michael Friedlaender, S. R. Driver, Isidore Harris, and A. H. Sayce. Friedlaender, who was born and educated in Germany, was principal of Jews' College in London, where Abrahams, a son of the previous principal, was then teaching, and where both he and Harris (who later wrote a history of the college) had studied. Professors Cheyne, Driver, and Sayce were all graduates (like Montefiore) of Oxford and senior members of its faculty. Two rather different English institutions of higher learning, each with its own "old boys" network, were thus melded, albeit not entirely seamlessly, in the early biblical scholarship of the JQR.

Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841-1915), who contributed an article, "The Origin of the Book of Zechariah," to the journal's inaugural issue (October 1888), had studied at Gö ttingen after graduating from Oxford and was later ordained as an Anglican priest. He was a fellow at Balliol College between 1868 and 1882, which included the years during which Claude Montefiore was an undergraduate there, and since 1885 had served as Oxford's Oriel Professor of Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures-an appointment whose ecclesiastical appendage was the canonry at Rochester.² Canon Cheyne's colleague Archibald Henry Sayce (1845- 1933), who had been Deputy Professor of Philology at Oxford since 1876 but later served as the university's first Professor of Assyriology, wrote "The Book of Hosea in the Light of Assyrian Research" for the journal's second issue, which appeared in January 1889. Earlier in that decade Sayce had competed for the coveted Regius Professorship of Hebrew with another Oxford colleague, Samuel Rolles Driver (1846-1914), who was chosen over him partially because the pious previous incumbent, E. P. Pusey, believed Driver to be less receptive than the former (who later contributed the article "Polytheism in Primitive Israel" to JQR) to the corrosive influences of German scholarship. In late 1881, shortly before the death of Pusey, Driver became a deacon of the Anglican Church, and shortly after Pusey's passing he was ordained as priest, thus allowing him to be admitted soon afterward as Canon of Christ Church and to assume the Regius Professorship of Hebrew.³ In April of 1889 Canon Driver contributed the article "The Origin and Structure of the Book of Judges" to JQR's third issue. The young editors of the new journal had thus succeeded in acquiring articles from three of England's most distinguished biblical scholars (two of whom were Anglican divines) for each of its first three issues!

From among their coreligionists the editors had published an article by Michael Friedlaender, "The Design and Contents of Ecclesiastes"; an essay by Montefiore himself. "Mystic Passages in the Psalms"; and a two-part study by Isidore Harris, "The Rise and Development of the Massorah." Friedlander's article, together with its companion piece "The Age and Authorship of Ecclesiastes," which appeared in the journal's fourth issue, was largely a response to George Granville Bradley's recently published Lectures on Ecclesiastes (1885), which had been originally delivered at Westminster Abbey, of which Bradley had been Dean since 1881. Although Dean Bradley had also studied and taught at Oxford, where he had been Master of University College until assuming his ecclesiastical appointment, the fledgling editors of the JQR evidently found his biblical scholarship to be inferior to that of Professors Cheyne, Driver, and Sayce-worthy of being criticized, but not published, in the pages of their already...