WELCOME TO THE MESSIANIC ARCHIVE PAGE OF JORGE QUIÑÓNEZ

This web page is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the Hebrew and English writings of important Jewish-believers in Yeshua from the 19th-century such as: Isaac Lichtenstein, Hayim Yedidyah Pollak (Christian Theophilus Lucky), Joseph Rabinowitz, Paul Phillip Levertoff, Joseph Immanuel Landsman, Joachim Biesenthal, Isaac Salkinson, and Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein, to name a few.

[Files on this site require the use of Adobe Reader.]

Update 12-15-2010:

I just posted a 1908 edition of Levertoff's Hebrew translation St. Augustine's Confessions (וידויי אוגוסטינוס הקדוש) on archive.org. My thanks to Shalom Goldman for providing me with a copy and to FFOZ for scanning it.

As of several months ago, I am once again employed. I hope to post further updates in the coming months. Until then, I post for those interested some brief notes I wrote earlier this year for a follow-up or revision to my old paper on Levetoff I'm working on my spare time:

In my research, I always assumed that Paul Phillip was Levertoff’s conversion name. I always wondered about his Jewish name before his baptism. Somewhere in his personal correspondence housed at Stanford University, I found a reference to “Feivel” that an Israeli colleague pointed out while doing research for my first paper on Levertoff many years ago (Jorge Quiñónez, “Paul Phillip Levertoff: Pioneering Hebrew Christian Scholar and Leader,” Mishkan 37 (2002), 21-34). I included that in my paper and thought nothing more on the matter until recently.

While digging around in Copac, a library catalog webpage that includes all UK libraries, I found a reference to a Russian book by Levertoff with a different form of his name, “Pavel Grigor’evich Levertov” or Павел Григорьевич Левертов in Cyrillic. A little more research uncovered that "Feivel" is a Yiddish form of the Slavic name "Pavel," itself the Slavic word for "Paul." A little known fact according to one commentator was that Russian Jews wittily referred to Czar Paul as "Kaiser Feivel” at the very end of the 18th century.

Update 06-25-2010:

I just recently posted J. Biesenthal's Hebrew commentaries on the following NT books: Acts, Hebrews, and Romans and his revision of Frommann's Luke commentary from 1735 on archive.org. This is the last of the major 19th century Hebrew commentaries by Jewish believers in Jesus. You will find hundreds of pages of commentary (mainly in Rashi script). My thanks to Keren Ahvah Meshihit of Jerusalem for their hard work in scanning them earlier this year at my request.

Also of note, was Gershon Nerel's recent paper on J. I. Landsman and his Hebrew creed (Ikarei Emunatenu Hakedosha). According to the English abstract, the paper "presents a comparative analysis between two creedal (dogmatic) texts: by Joseph Immanuel Landsman (1869-1931), a Jewish believer in Yeshua (Jesus), and by Maimonides." Nerel's paper was presented at a Jewish Studies conference in early 2010 in Jerusalem.

Another interesting development is a yet to be published paper by NYU Professor, Elliot Wolfson, on Frommann's Hebrew commentary on Luke and the Christian Kabbalah. The article is still unpublished, but I saw a link to the presentation that Wolfson gave on it (February 2, 2010) at the University of California Santa.

There's more to write about, but that will have to wait until another time since I'm in the process of moving due to a change of employment. So take care until next time.

Update 11-20-2009:

The journal Mishkan just published an issue (issue 60) dedicated to Christian Theophilus Lucky, a Hebrew writer and Messianic Hassidic Jew. The articles are well written. Prior to this, we knew so little about him. The Mishkan has some groundbreaking articles that help us better understand Lucky as a real person rather than a phenomenon. As an example of how far-thinking he was, besides his Hebrew language Edut leYisrael, he was instrumental in helping publish a periodical called The Messianic Jew in 1910.

Anyone interested in Franz Delitzsch, who translated the NT into Hebrew, will want to read some articles I collected by and about him and a 44 page booklet from archive.org he wrote in English about his Hebrew NT translation.

One of the most interesting books from my collection is a cantillated Hebrew translation of the NT by the London Jews Society from 1866, which I obtained from the late Leonard Prager (of Blessed Memory). It was cantillated by Ezekiel Margoliouth. I asked First Fruits of Zion to scan it, which they kindly did. You can download it here or from their Remnant Repository. I highly recommend you try their Remnant Repository because they have a lot of materials I don't mention or have on this site especially by Levertoff. My thanks to David Rudolph for encouraging me to get this volume digitized. Dr. Rudolph used this cantillated NT for his two daughters' bat-mitzvah's.

By chance on a google search, I found this journal article from 2007 about Herbert Danby, an Anglican cleric who lived in Jerusalem during the British Mandate Palestine (before the State of Israel) and translated the Mishnah to English. Danby's translation is still widely used today. I contacted the article's author, Shalom Goldman, who kindly gave me permission to post it here. Danby reminds me a lot of Levertoff, who helped translate the Zohar into English. Next month (12/2009), Dr. Goldman's new book is published. Its title is Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land. The Danby article is impressed me sufficiently that I ordered a review copy.

From Google Books: 

1) A rare English translation of commentary by J. Biesenthal on Matthew 2:23. Click here.

Update 10-1-2009:

I noticed that Google Books posted of new additions in Hebrew by Levertoff and Landsman, both contemporaries, and Salkinson:

1) Joseph Immanuel Landsman's harmony of the gospels based on Delitzsch's Hebrew NT translation: Toldot Yeshua haMashiah / The Life of Christ: A Continuous Narrative in the Words of the Four Gospels According to the Hebrew Translation of Prof. Delitzsch; with References and a Systematic Index (London: Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel, 1907).

2) Paul Philip Levertoff's Polus ha-Shaliach, o, Sha'ul ish Tarsus: hayav, po'olav u-nesi'otav / St. Paul: His Life, Works, and Travels (London, 1907).

3) Shakespeare's Othello translated into Hebrew by Isaac Edward Salkinson with a forward by Perez Smolenskin. Itiel haKushi meVenetsya (1874).

4) Salkinson's NT Hebrew translation from 1891. There are several versions of it and of Delitzsch's translation as well.

Also of note, I have cleaned up the Edut LeYisrael file from 11/24/2005 (see below). Nearly half of the pages were upside down and compressed the file by 10 MB. Note if you can't open any PDF file on this site, make sure you are using Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded at  www.acrobat.com.

Update 9-1-2009:

Many things have happened since my last update. First, the Israeli publisher, Keren Ahvah Meshihit with which I have had a near decade long relationship (we share a mutual respect and appreciation for the works represented on this site) is now in the process of preparing for publication an anthology of Isaac Lichtenstein's writings in English including a newly translated work of his from German. Hopefully it will be published in 2010.

Next, First Fruits of Zion, to my surprise and exhilaration, is embarking on republishing and translating from Hebrew many of the works on this site. For example, they intend to publish an English translation of Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein’s NT commentary. The project is called Vine of David. They just recently reprinted in a new edition Paul Levertoff’s Love and the Messianic Age along with a study guide.

On another topic, Google Books continues to make substantial progress. I have given up keeping track of every new update of interest. Anyone is welcome to try. I don’t want to be in competition with Google Books, so in the future I will be choosing what I scan and post on this site. I am happy to list, however, below some of the more interesting digitized works of note that are of concern to this site’s focus from Google Books: 

•Heinrich Christian Immanuel Frommann’s Hebrew translation and commentary of Luke (1735). Click here.

•The first volume of Strack & Billerbeck’s massive German commentary on the NT based on the Talmud & Midrash (Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch). [the link is actually from archive.org; Google Books has it too.]

•Lots of years of the following Jewish missions periodicals (Scattered Nation, Saat auf Hoffnung, Peculiar People, Missions-tidning för Israel, Nathanael [Zeitschrift], Missionary Intelligence, etc.) [These you’ll have to search by cut and pasting the name into Google Books.]

•Hugh J. Schonfield’s The History of Jewish Christianity (1936). This title is from Archive.org and it is unusual since one would assume that this classic book is still under copyright.

Now for my Updates/Downloads:

1) A collection of articles (mainly in English) by Joseph Immanuel Landsman, a contemporary of Paul Levertoff. click here to download.

2) Two of Christian Theophilus Lucky’s English articles. These are the only ones I’m aware of. He wrote almost entirely in Hebrew. Click here to download.

3) The first book that Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein wrote in German along with a collection of his articles from Saat auf Hoffnung. Click here to download.

4) A translated sermon in English by Joseph Rabinowitz. I found this one in Google Books. Click here to download.  

Lastly, please note: 1) an address update (see end of webpage) and 2) a fix to a broken (the Rabinowitz Anthology from the 11/24/2005 update).

Update 2-4-2009:

I wanted to note several things since my last update. First, to my surprise, someone is selling Isaac Lichtenstein's "An Appeal to the Jewish People" on lulu.com. It is available for free on this website. Next, I highly recommend people visit lcje.net and click on the link to the papers from the 2007 International Conference. There you will find very informative papers about Lucky and both Lichtensteins by Dr. Kai Kjaer-Hansen. Below are my new offerings:

1) Google Book Search and Archive.org have lots of books available to download that may be of interest to you. Click here to download a book list I compiled of available titles. Also available: under the "History Project" link at lcje.net, you will find a large library of digitized book relating to Jewish missions.

1) Selections from Berit Am by various authors (Rabinowitz, J. Z. Lichtenstein, et al.). Berit Am was the missionary journal of the Instititum Judaicum Delitzschianum that was published from 1893 to 1924 practically all in Yiddish. This collection I put together only includes the Hebrew language material (articles and poetry) that is very comparable to the type of stuff you would see in Lucky's Edut LeYisrael. My thanks to Juan Morales Cano for all the work he did to make the copies and to the library of the modern Instititum Judaicum Delitzschianum located in Muenster, Germany, for making the periodical itself available to Mr. Cano. It is 110 pages (note that some of the articles may be duplicated in this scan). Download here.

2) St. Paul in Jewish Thought / Three Lectures (London: Diocesan House, 1928). by Paul Levertoff. The three lectures are: 1) "St. Paul and His Jewish Contemporaries"; 2)  "Claude Montefiore's Criticism and Appreciation of St. Paul"; and 3) "A Jewish Dramatist's Presentation of St. Paul." Download here.

3) Or haOlam by Ben Zion Friedmann (1897). It is a short tract in Hebrew ("Light of the World") that was praised by A. Lukyn Williams. Download here.

Update 11-4-2006. Two items:

1) Rabbi David Kimchi's Commentary upon the Prophecies of Zechariah by Alexander McCaul. (London: James Duncan, 1836-1837). McCaul was not Jewish. He was Irish. However, like Franz Delitzsch who also wasn't Jewish, McCaul had a great interest in Jewish literature and Jewish evangelism. In this work, he translates Rabbi David Kimchi’s Zechariah commentary into English providing his own comments. Part of the discussion involves reviewing differences between medieval Jewish commentators and the New Testament in how they approach scripture that relates to the Messiah, e.g., that the angel mentioned in Zechariah is the Messiah or Malachi’s “Angel of the Covenant.” Download here.

2) The Book of Common Prayer... translated into Hebrew. (London, 1836). It was the prayer book that Michael Solomon Alexander used in Jerusalem in 1838 for his Hebrew services and McCaul in England with the London Jews Society in 1837. Decades later, it would serve as a model for Joseph Rabinowitz's prayer book, Tefila. Despite its shortcoming, the Hebrew translation of the Book of Common Prayer served as the first proto-Messianic siddur. Download here.

Update 12-1-2005. Messianic Jewish version of the "Thirteen Principles or Articles of Faith" in Hebrew by Maimonides. It includes a clean Hebrew transcription I did on my Hebrew word processor. Around 1913, Joseph Immanuel Landsman wrote a Hebrew Messianic Jewish version of the Maimonides "Thirteen Principles or Articles of Faith," that is now standard in the siddur (Jewish prayer-book). Its Hebrew title is Ikarei Emunatenu Hakedosha (Hebrew for "The Principles of Our Holy Faith"). The Landsman piece is a pastiche or parody (depending how you look at it; imitation is the best form of flattery as they say) of the Rambam's original. It is virtually unknown to modern Messianic Jews. The version in the PDF file includes a nearly century-old English translation by David Baron from The Scattered Nation (1914) and the Hebrew original of Landsman's "Thirteen Principles" with a Yiddish translation at the bottom of each page. At the end, it includes a transcription I made of the Hebrew part so you can print out a legible copy. Download here.

Update 11-24-2005. THANKSGIVING UPDATE (11-24-2005): It is massive: over a thousand pages of new material! Download works by some of the most significant figures in Messianic Jewish history of the 19th century: A) SHEVA HOHMOT: In 1883, Lichtenstein published Sheva Hohmot (“Seven Wisdoms”) with the German subtitle, “Geography of the Talmud.” He wrote it under the name of Jechiel Zebi Herschensohn (his original Jewish surname). This book was later reprinted in 1912 by a Jewish publisher. It is a collection of rabbinic sayings on geography (and science in general). Over a Download SHEVA HOHMOT.

B) OTHER WORKS - (includes- Limudei haNeviim, Derekh haKodesh, Toledot Yeshua, Yeshua veHillel): This includes several works in one file: 1) Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein’s (hereafter L) earliest known work, Limudei haNeviim (“The Teachings of the Prophets”), was published in 1868 or 1869. According to Franz Delitzsch, L worked on Limudei haNeviim for 12 years. Later, Harling said that Delitzsch had called the work “the most scholarly and curious work, which a Jewish-Christian had written.” Limudei haNeviim tried to combine the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah and the New Testament as it presents itself as a type of Bible commentary. One of L’s former pupils, Landsman, explains it: “L undertook to harmonize the New Testament with the doctrines of the Cabbala, and the fruit of his studies was... [Limudei haNeviim].” 2) Derekh haKodesh, is a briefer version of Limudei haNeviim cut off at pg. 158 (only includes the title page and introduction or forward. Thus, only the intro/forward is included. 3) Toledot Yeshua (“The Life of Yeshua”) that L published under the pseudonym “Even Tzehar.” The title, of course, a response to the rabbinic polemic commonly known as Toledot Yeshu. 4) L’s Hebrew translation of Franz Delitzsch’s Yeshua veHillel, a response by Delitzsch to Jewish writers’ comments comparing Jesus to Hillel (viz. Rabbi Abraham Geiger). Download OTHER WORKS.

C) L's REVISED MATTHEW COMMENTARY- Jechiel Zebi L’s revised commentary on Matthew [Beur lesifre berit haHadashah /Kerech [aleph]: Matai. Paul Levertoff & Heinrich Laible (eds.), Leipzig, 1913] in Hebrew which is a substantial revision of his original 1891 edition [Matthäus. Leipzig, 1891]. Lichtenstein died before it could be published. Download REVISED MATTHEW COMMENTARY.

D) Theophilus Lucky's EDUT LEYISRAEL- The true founder of modern Messianic Judaism. This 600 page (all in Hebrew) file of all of the extant issues of his Haskalah era periodical Edut LeYisrael published both in the USA and Eastern Europe. One of the first Hebrew periodicals published in America! Hundreds of articles in Hebrew on Torah, rabbinics, the holidays, book reviews, letters, etc. For example, pages 7-8 has Hebrew liturgy by Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein. Along with Lichtenstein's NT commentary, this has to rank as one most unique and interesting publications by 19th century Jewish Yeshua-believers. It still awaits modern scholars' analyses. Download EDUT LEYISRAEL.

E) An ANTHOLOGY of WORKS by Joseph Rabinowitz- It includes the following works of Rabinowitz (R hereafter) with English translations: 1) Tefila (R’s congregational prayer book) along with an English translation edited by myself. Note that this includes a Messianic version of Lekha Dodi. 2) R’s Passover or Easter Service including a complete English translation. This is an interesting experiment. 3) A collection of articles from Peculiar People that include English translations of part of Tefila, an introduction on R by Delitzsch and R’s own autobiography, and R’s view on Zionism. 4) English translations by James Adler and others of some of R’s sermons and liturgical material from Tefila. 5) A tract of two sermons in Hebrew. 6) R’s Hebrew sermon anthology, Devarim Nekhumim. 7) R's dialogue between two Jews. Download R's ANTHOLOGY.  [updated Aug 8, 2006]

Update 4-25-2005. Work by Hungarian Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein or RIL (1824-1908), a famous JBJ from the late 19th century. Below is a link to download his An Appeal to the Jewish People. An abstract: This text is entreats Jewish readers to take an unprejudiced and impartial look at the claim that Yeshua is the Messiah and that believing in Jesus is not anti-Jewish. He asks people to reserve judgment on the matter until the finish reading his Appeal. What unfolds is a passionate yet predictable apology. RIL connects together biblical passages, one after the other, at times as part of the actual text (e.g., Ps 39:9-12 followed by Rm 10:13-15 on page 9). This is a common literary technique in rabbinical writings. As well, RIL tries to demonstrate to his audience that Christian doctrine is not so alien or different to that of Judaism. He says "I will not speak of the Christian doctrine of the Godhead Father, Son, and Spirit although our Chassidim, who claim to be successors of the heroes of the Talmud believe in a tenfold godhead, in ten emanations, who with En-Sof (the Eternal) form one absolute, inseparable unity, with ten sides and ten faces." (pg. 15) He also connects Yeshua with the malakh berit (Angel of the Covenant) from Malachi 3:1 (pg. 5) that noted medieval rabbinic commentators such as RaDaK (i.e., Rabbi David Kimchi) equate with the Messiah. Near the end, RIL tries to break Jewish stereotypes of Christian anti-judaism by gives saying that not all Christians are anti-semites (pg. 15). He finishes his Appeal by assuring his readers in the Jewish people accepting Yeshua as their Messiah they will not lose their people-hood and assimilate: G-d will finally be put into action all those prophetic promises he gave to Israel and that they will at the head and not the tail among the nations (p. 21)." [I expect that sometime in 2008, an anthology of RIL's writings (translated into English) that I edited will be published.] Download here.

Emanuel Yispe (probably a pseudonym) in 1892 had his collection of songs/poem entitled Shirei haYeshuah, Hebrew for "Songs of Salvation", published in Eastern Europe. I don't have any other information on this person or his work. The titles are Cyrillic and Hebrew. It is probably Russian, but could be some other Eastern European language such as Ukrainian. Yeshua the Messiah appears to be a central topic of the poetry. Any song-writers want to put music to this Hebrew verse? Download here.

Paul Phillip Levertoff (1878-1954), translator of the Zohar into English for Soncino Press and early Messianic Jewish pioneer, wrote a Hebrew liturgical service, called Meal of the Holy King, in the 1920s that he probably employed all the way towards the end of his life. It that can be downloaded here .

A Hebrew NT commentary by Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein (1830/31(?)-1912). Originally published between 1891 and 1904 in multiple parts, Jechiel Zebi Lichtenstein's Beur leSifre Berit HaHadashah (Commentary on the New Testament) is one of the more interesting Hebrew writings by JBY to have come out of the 19th century. Download Lichtenstein’s Commentary.

Contact Information:
Jorge Quiñónez   (jorgequinonez at yahoo.com)