Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim
Klein (Rachack Review)
David B. Ruderman’s compact
biography of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett rescues an odd, compelling figure from the
footnotes of Anglo-Jewish history and serves up a life that is as instructive
as it is uncomfortable. If your interest is in Jewish tradition — its texts,
its institutions, and the social pressures that shape how Jews live with their
texts — this little book will give you everything you want: vivid episodes,
plenty of primary material, and a portrait of a man who was at once learned,
quarrelsome, charming to outsiders, and deeply estranged from much of his own
community.
Solomon Yom Tov Bennett was born
in 1767 in the region of Polotsk (Belarus/Poland) and spent his youth rooted in
the traditional educational world of eastern Europe. Ruderman makes clear that
Bennett’s early life was that of a serious student of Bible and Talmud: he had
a strong yeshivah formation and displayed real facility in classical Jewish
learning. But at a young age, he chose a very different path. In the 1790s, he
left the traditional world of Eastern Europe for training as a copper-engraver
(Copenhagen, then Berlin), and in November 1800 — at age thirty-three — he
arrived in London, where he would make his life for nearly forty years.
That beginning explains much of
the book’s fascination. Bennett is not a simple archetype. He spent his
formative years within the traditional (read: Orthodox) Jewish society of
Eastern Europe, yet he remade himself into a professional artisan and later an
author who comfortably moved in Christian circles in Western Europe. He taught
himself — or perhaps re-applied — the textual precision of his youth to the
exacting work of engraving, producing plates for both Jewish and gentile
clients. But age and failing eyesight in the 1820s forced him to cut back on
his work and he shifted his focus to studying; this shift — from making images
to making words — is when Bennett’s literary and polemical life becomes most
visible.
Ruderman does not sugarcoat
Bennett’s moral awkwardness. He left his first wife and children in Eastern
Europe — a fact that his contemporaries repeatedly used to shame him. Bennett
later remarried in London. In 1818, he married Elizabeth (known also by her Hebrew
name Pesha), who was seventeen at the time while Bennett was fifty-one — a fact
that the book records frankly and that only compounds the uneasy picture of his
personal life. Ruderman also provides the human detail that the reader craves:
Elizabeth outlived him and their household produced a number of children,
though family relations remained a fraught feature of Bennett’s biography.
Socially, Bennett was singularly
ill-fitted to the mechanisms of Anglo-Jewish communal life. Ruderman traces a
long, bitter quarrel with the chief rabbinic leadership — in particular with
Chief Rabbi Solomon Hirschell (1762–1842) — that ended in public rebukes and Bennet’s
effective ostracism from the circles that governed synagogue life. One
flashpoint, which Ruderman documents in detail, involved Bennett’s willingness
to officiate in a marriage that many communal leaders regarded as forbidden: a Jewish
man of priestly lineage (a Kohen) marrying a woman who had converted to Judaism
as a child. Bennett argued from his reading of classical sources that the union
could be legitimate (because the conversion occurred when the woman in question
was less than three years old). On the other hand, Chief Rabbi Hirschell and
the Mahamad (the lay leadership of the London Jewish community) responded with bans.
The dispute reveals everything essential about Bennett: learned enough to argue
complex halakhic points, yet politically tone-deaf and insufficiently
deferential to communal authority.
And yet Bennett was not a mere
provocateur. Ruderman’s close reading of his writings shows a man of genuine
intellect and genuine contradictions. Bennett wrote polemics against Christian
missionaries — a surprising move for someone who cultivated Christian patrons —
and he deployed a robust, even staunchly traditional, defense of Hebrew as a sacred,
original, and historically-singular language. He hated what he saw as the
overly “academic” reduction of Hebrew to a mere subject of secular philology;
he insisted on its sanctity and on the value of classical Jewish commentators
as guides to meaning. In that respect, Bennett is an oddball blend of maskil
and traditionalist: willing to engage modern intellectual currents and
Christian readers, while insisting that the Hebrew text retain theological
primacy and that old Jewish commentators remain the court of final appeal.
Ruderman’s archival work makes
this double life vivid. He reconstructs Bennett’s network of Christian patrons
— including unusual friendships and correspondences with evangelical and
genteel women in England who provided him not only with money but with
intellectual companionship. The letters and benefactions that Ruderman
describes and cites from explain why Bennett, who so often alienated his Jewish
brethren, nevertheless found acceptance among certain English elites.
Those documents also shed light
on Bennett’s ambition: he wanted to produce an English translation and
commentary on the Hebrew Bible that would correct what he saw as the linguistic,
legal, and theological distortions of the Authorized (King James) Version.
Ruderman shows that Bennett’s translation project was a major, clearly
theological undertaking: a large working manuscript survives, an unfinished
labor of several hundred (if not over a thousand) pages in which Bennett often
leans on Targumic readings and classical Jewish commentators such as Rashi and
Radak. His rendering of the Hebrew Bible in English was a decidedly Jewish work.
Ruderman is admirably careful
where the record is silent. He cannot tell us precisely when — or if — Bennett
ceased to be halakhically observant; the papers and the writings suggest that
Bennett always regarded himself as Jewish in identity and in literary
commitment even as he increasingly flouted communal norms. Ruderman’s refusal
to draw hard lines here is judicious; as a reviewer coming from a strongly
traditional viewpoint, however, I feel the urge to make a firmer ethical
judgment: Bennet was an oysvorf.
The book is short, readable, and
well supplied with primary quotations. Ruderman sprinkles the text with many of
Bennett’s own sentences and with reproductions of letters and pamphlets that
make Bennett speak for himself. The biography is a model of archival rescue: it
gathers passports, engraved plates, pamphlets, and letters and uses them to
tell a story that is both local (the petty politics of synagogue life) and
transnational (the movement from the Eastern Europe yeshiva to Copenhagen
atelier to Berlin printshop to London reading room and the libraries of the
gentry).
If you go to Ruderman’s book
expecting tidy answers about fidelity, apostasy, or heroic Jewish identity, you
will be disappointed. Bennett resists tidy categories: he is part
traditionalist, part assimilationist, both a defender of Hebrew’s sanctity and a
man who sought the validation of English Christians. Ruderman does not lionize
Bennett, nor does he condemn him without cause. He furnishes the documents and essentially
invites the reader to weigh them.
For those of us who approach Jewish tradition seriously and who are fascinated by strange careers in Jewish letters, Ruderman’s study is a brisk, sympathetic, and ultimately troubling portrait. Solomon Yom Tov Bennett emerges as both an exemplar of Jewish erudition and a cautionary tale about the social cost of seeking acceptance beyond the communal frameworks that sustain Jewish life. The book is short, accessible, and rich with primary material — an excellent read for a popular audience interested in how Jewish learning migrates, adapts, and sometimes strays when it meets the modern world.
