The Jewish philosopher and scholar Ezekiel Kaufmann (1889-1963) founded a new school of biblical criticism.

Ezekiel Kaufmann was born in Dunayvtsy, Podolia. Following the advice of his teacher, the Hebrew poet Jacob Fichman, in 1906 he left for Odessa to study at the Great Yeshiva headed by the famed Rabbi Hayyim Tschernowitz. From there he traveled to St. Petersburg to take up Oriental studies. In 1913 he went to Switzerland and, concentrating in philosophy and Semitic philology, received his doctorate from the University of Berne. Following World War I, he moved to Germany. He worked on the German-Hebrew Jewish encyclopedia Eshkol. In Berlin he edited a periodical of Hebrew culture and education, Atidenu, assisted in the writing of Tschernowitz's Abridgement of the Talmud, and worked on the Lexicon of Biblical and Talmudic Language.

In 1929 Kaufmann emigrated to Palestine, where he was a teacher at the Reali School in Haifa until...