Arnold Ehrlich

Who was Arnold Ehrlich?

Arnold Bogumil Ehrlich 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 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.