David Hoffmann

David Zvi Hoffmann (November 24, 1843, Verbó, Austrian Empire – November 20, 1921, Berlin) (Hebrew: דוד צבי הופמן), was an Orthodox Rabbi and Torah Scholar. Born in Verbó in 1843, he attended various Yeshivas in his native town before he entered the college at Pressburg, from which he graduated in 1865. He then studied philosophy, history, and Oriental languages at Vienna and Berlin, taking his doctor's degree in 1871 from the University of Tübingen. His rabbinical training was at the hands of Moshe Schick and Azriel Hildesheimer.

Shortly after obtaining his degree, he became employed as a teacher in Samson Raphael Hirsch's Realschule school in Frankfurt am Main, and in 1873 moved to Berlin to join the faculty of the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin where he eventually became rector in 1899 after the death of Azriel Hildesheimer.

David Hoffmann is in some ways the prototype of the contemporary Orthodox Jewish scholar, facing the ubiquitous tension between faithfulness to tradition and the demands of critical inquiry. Though born in Hungary, he adapted the German-Jewish approach of openness towards general culture, world and society. He employed the critical scientific method to the Talmud and wrote about the history of the development of the form of the Oral law (as opposed to the development of the Law itself, the latter being an enterprise antithetical to traditional Jewish beliefs; see below). Despite his worldly inclinations, he was an original member of the more traditionally oriented Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah (council of great Torah sages), and was also known to be a person of great moral conduct and piety.

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