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Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik (~1805–1881) was an Orthodox Jew from the distinguished Soloveitchik family: the grandson of Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin (founder of the famous Volozhin yeshiva in Lithuania) and the brother of the great-great-grandfather of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik (one of the founders of Modern Orthodoxy).1 Elijah Zvi received a traditional education in Volozhin and remained an Orthodox Jew all his life; but he also cultivated friendships with Christians and carefully studied the New Testament.
In the 1860s, Soloveitchik published a peculiar commentary on the Gospels called Qol Qore. Interpreting Jesus in light of classical rabbinic sources, he attempted to show that “the New Testament is in no manner contrary to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) or the Talmud.”2 The commen-taries on Luke and John, if they ever existed, are lost. The commentary on Mark is extant only in a French translation. The commentary on Matthew alone has been preserved in Soloveitchik’s original Hebrew.
Thanks to the labors of translator Jordan Gayle Levy and editor Shaul Magid, Soloveitchik’s long-neglected commentaries on Matthew and Mark are now available in an excellent new English version.3 In colla-boration with Magid, the Journal of Textual Reasoning is pleased to present this exciting collection of articles engaging with Soloveitchik’s commentaries.
