David Tsvi Hoffmann

The son of the av bet din (head of a Jewish legal court) of Verbó, Austro-Hungary (today Vrbové, Slovakia), David Tsvi (Zvi) Hoffmann attended several yeshivas around his ancestral town. Displaying prodigious scholarly ability, Hoffmann studied with several prominent rabbis of the region, most notably Moshe Schick and Azriel Hildesheimer. In 1873 he moved to Berlin and joined the faculty of the Rabbinical Seminary, where, in 1899, he would become rector. A leader of proto-Modern Orthodoxy, Hoffmann created scholarship that included secular subjects alongside traditional rabbinic fields, using the modern text-critical techniques associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement to reinforce traditional exegesis. In 1918, he became one of only a few Jewish scholars to be given the title of professor by the German state. Much of Hoffmann’s polemical energy was spent defending traditional Jewish views of the Torah’s divine authorship against the emerging “documentary hypothesis,” which sought to pinpoint various authorial voices in the text on the basis of linguistic, stylistic, and ideological differences.