Scholar of Rabbinic literature, one of the theologian-historians who created CONSERVATIVE JUDAISM. He grew up in Lithuania and left for the U.S.A. in 1899. Ginzberg advocated religious practice for Conservative Judaism based on the inherited ideals of traditional Judaism while allowing diverse belief, including the ignoring of the creeds and theological canons of traditional Judaism. Ginzberg thus stressed that Judaism comprises a way of life rather than a theology.
Ginzberg’s theory of the role of history in the formation of religion is expressed in the statement: “Fact, says a great thinker, is the ground of all that is divine in religion and religion can only be presented in history—in truth it must become a continuous and living history.” This extreme statement of the positive-historical school will not have surprised the reformers of Ginzberg’s day. It provides a guide to the character of Conservative Judaism in the context of the changes of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The appeal to fact in place of faith, the stress on practice to the subordination of belief—these form responses to the difficult situation of sensitive intellectuals brought up, like Ginzberg, in one world but living in another.
Ginzberg’s scholarly work covered the classical documents of the oral Torah, with special interest in subjects not commonly emphasized in the centers of learning he had left. But while the subject changed, the mode of learning remained constant. Ginzberg’s work emphasized massive erudition, collecting and arranging texts, together with episodic and ad hoc solutions to difficult problems of exegesis. But the work remained primarily textual and exegetical, and, when Ginzberg ventured into historical questions, the received mode of talmudic discourse—deductive reasoning, ad hoc arguments—predominated.
The claim to critical scholarship forms, for Conservative Judaism, the counterpart to Orthodoxy’s appeal to the Torah as God’s will. Much is made in the theologies of Conservative Judaism of historical fact, precedent, discovering the correct guidelines for historical change. But the essential mode of argument accords with the received patterns of thought of the Yeshiva-world from which Ginzberg took his leave. Talmudists such as Ginzberg, who acquired a university training, including an interest in history, and who also continued to study Talmudic materials, never fully overcame the intellectual habits ingrained from their beginnings in Yeshivot. Ginzberg is best known for his masterly work Legends of the Jews (1909), translated into English by Henrietta Szold (see SZOLD, HENRIETTA).
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