Yehezkel Kaufmann

Yehezkel Kaufmann (Hebrew: יחזקאל קויפמן; also: Yeḥezqêl Qâufman; Yeḥezḳel Ḳoyfman; Jehezqël Kaufmann) (1889 – 9 October 1963) was an Israeli philosopher and Biblical scholar associated with the Hebrew University.

Kaufmann was born in Ukraine. His Talmudic knowledge was acquired at the yeshiva of Rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav Tzair) in Odessa and in Petrograd, and his philosophical and Biblical training were at the University of Berne. He completed his doctorate on "the principle of sufficient reason" in 1918, and had it published in 1920 in Berlin. He began teaching in Palestine in 1928 and became Professor of Bible at Hebrew University in 1949.

Kaufmann was the author of dozens of publications, almost exclusively in Hebrew. In 1920, he published Against the claims of the phenomenological approach of Husserl, but this was to be his last publication on abstract philosophy.

His first major work was Exile and Estrangement: A Socio-Historical Study on the Issue of the Fate of the Nation of Israel from Ancient Times until the Present (1930), in which he suggests that what preserved Israel's uniqueness through the ages was solely its religion. Among the basic themes of this work is that it is the tension between "universalism" and "nationalism" that comprises the foundational problem of Judaism. This tension reaches back to the earliest eras of Judaism in which a universalistic conception of God was juxtaposed with the local socio-political issues of a small tribal people, even after that people had been exiled from its homeland. YHVH is the ruler of the entire universe, but he reveals Himself and His commandments only to Israel. It is this same tension which Kaufmann traces to the more modern phenomenon of exile and ghettoization. Among Kaufmann's contentious positions were his belief that Zionism could not provide the ultimate solution to the Jewish problem.

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