Arnold Ehrlich

Arnold Bogumil Ehrlich (15 January 1848 in Włodawa, Poland – November 1919 in New Rochelle, New York) was a scholar of bible and rabbinics whose work spanned the latter part of the 19th and the early 20th century. A formidable scholar, he is said to have possessed perfect recall, with an outstanding knowledge of Bible and Talmud, and to have spoken 39 languages. He is best known for his book Mikra Kiphshuto (The Bible according to its Literal Meaning) in three Hebrew volumes published from 1899–1901, in which he sought to bring the results of modern textual criticism of the Bible to a wider Hebrew audience, emphasising the Torah to be a document made by humans complete with scribal and copying errors, not a perfect work dictated to Moses at Sinai; and as a formative intellectual influence on the young Mordecai Kaplan. Ehrlich earned a living as a private tutor, and teaching at the Hebrew Preparatory School of the Temple Emanu-El Theological School of New York. However, he was never considered for a professorial post at Hebrew Union College, apparently because in his early twenties he had helped the German Lutheran theologian Franz Delitzsch revise his Hebrew translation of the New Testament, a work used to proselytize Jewish converts to Christianity.

Born Jewish in Włodawa, Poland, Ehrlich was married at fourteen and had one son named Mark. At an early age he studied German in his native Polish village, and had read the Bible in the Moses Mendelssohn translation. At seventeen, Ehrlich came to the conclusion that he could no longer abide the stringencies of his environment and he sought association with the wider fields of knowledge he hoped to find in Germany. His wife did not agree with the move or his liberal views, and she and their son did not go with him to Germany. He then went on his own and he entered school there to learn arithmetic, geography, and other elementary school subjects alongside boys of ten. Such subjects were simple for a lad who started learning the German language at the age of five years.

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