Moshe David Cassuto

Umberto Cassuto, also known as Moshe David Cassuto (1883–1951), was a rabbi and Biblical scholar born in Florence, Italy.

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.

For two hundred years prior to Cassuto's works, the origin of the five books of Moses (the Torah) had been one of the most-argued subjects in biblical scholarship. The 19th century in particular had been a time of great progress, but also of great controversy, with many theories being put forward. The one which eventually emerged to dominate the field was a particularly comprehensive version of the Documentary Hypothesis put forward by Julius Wellhausen in 1878: indeed, so great was its dominance that by the first half of the 20th century the Wellhausen hypothesis had become synonymous with the Documentary Hypothesis, and the issue of Pentateuchal origins was regarded as settled.

Cassuto's The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (Hebrew, Torat HaTeudot, 1941; English translation, 1961) was one of the first mainstream works to offer a detailed critique of Wellhausen, rejecting both the central idea of the documentary model - that the Pentateuch had its origins in originally separate documents which had been combined by an editor into the final text - and Wellhausen's dating, which saw the four sources being composed between 950 and 550 BC with the final redaction around 450 BC. In place of this, Cassuto proposed the Pentateuch was written down as a single, entirely coherent and unified text in the 10th century BC and not thereafter altered in any meaningful way. However, the question of when the Pentateuch was finally written does not affect any element of Cassuto's radical critique of the dominant theories about its actual make-up, which was his chief concern, and so he treats the historical question only at the end and as a secondary issue in The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch. It should be added that Cassuto insisted throughout this work that it was merely a summary, in eight lectures, of his much more detailed and thorough examination of the Documentary Hypothesis in his La Questione della Genesi (1934). He refers all serious students to the latter work in almost every chapter. Some idea of that more thorough consideration, however, is available in English in his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) from Adam to Noah (1961) and (Part II) from Noah to Abraham (1964), and also his Commentary on the Book of Exodus (1967).

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