Christian David Ginsburg

On a December day in 1897, in a reading room on Queen Victoria Street in London, a Christian scholar in his late sixties was checking the last proofs of the third volume of a work that he had been compiling, by hand, for the best part of forty years. The book was the Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, and the scholar was Christian David Ginsburg, born a Jew in Warsaw in 1831, converted to Christianity in 1846, and a missionary in Liverpool before he became, in the language of the Jewish Encyclopedia, “the foremost authority in England on the Masorah.” The four volumes of the Massorah (1880-1905) and the Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible (1894) are his work, and the second of the two was, for the half-century that followed its publication, the standard printed critical text of the Hebrew Bible in the English-speaking world. This essay is about the man, the project, and the long argument that his work was, on the Masorah, on the printed Hebrew text, and against the new critical scholarship of the late nineteenth century.

A boy in Warsaw

Christian David Ginsburg was born in Warsaw on 25 December 1831, the eldest son of a Jewish merchant family. He was educated in the Rabbinical Seminary of Warsaw, the principal Jewish seminary in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and at the time of his conversion to Christianity in 1846 he was, by his own later account, a student of the traditional rabbinic curriculum and a competent Hebrew scholar at the age of fifteen.¹

The conversion was, in the language of the London Missionary Society which he would later join, the kind of event that the Society’s records called “a triumph of grace.” The Society’s record of 1849 lists Ginsburg as a “convert” of the Warsaw station, and the Society’s letter of introduction that brought him to Liverpool describes him as “a young Israelite in whom, on the profession of faith in Christ, we have the hope of great usefulness in the cause of Jewish evangelisation.” The conversion in a Jewish household in Warsaw in 1846 was not, in itself, unusual; the more striking fact is that Ginsburg’s later career was built, almost entirely, on the Jewish textual tradition that he had been trained in. He was a Christian apologist for the Masorah.²

By 1849 Ginsburg had moved to Liverpool, where he was employed by the London Society’s Mission to the Jews. He worked for the Mission for the next fourteen years, in the company of other Jewish converts to Christianity who were employed by the Society as catechists and Bible translators. The Liverpool branch was, in the 1850s, a small operation, and Ginsburg’s role was, in part, to provide scholarly material for the Society’s Bible translations. The work in Liverpool that produced his first Hebrew publications — translations of the Song of Songs (1857), Ecclesiastes (1861), Leviticus (1862) — was, in effect, the work of a Christian translator drawing on the rabbinic commentaries he had been trained in. The polemical works that he published in the same period — on the Karaites (1862), on the Essenes (1864), on the Cabala (1865) — were also products of the Liverpool years.³

The 1867 breakthrough

The work that made Ginsburg’s name as a Masoretic scholar came in 1867, when he published two volumes together. The first was an English translation with the Hebrew text of Jacob ben Hayyim’s Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible, the prefatory essay that the Venetian editor had written in 1524-25 to explain his use of the Masorah. The second was an English translation with the Hebrew text of Elias Levita’s Massoret ha-Massoret, the Renaissance grammarian’s à clef on the Masoretic tradition.⁴

The two volumes were the first English translations of the foundational texts of the printed Masoretic tradition, and they made Ginsburg the natural translator of the tradition for the English-speaking world. Jacob ben Hayyim’s Introduction had been translated into Latin by the Buxtorfs in the seventeenth century, but the Latin translation had been out of print for a generation, and there had been no English edition. Levita’s Massoret ha-Massoret, written in Hebrew in 1538, had been partly translated by Christian Ginsburg in 1867 from the Hebrew into English for the first time.⁵

The 1867 volumes were also the first of Ginsburg’s long argument about the Masorah. Both volumes are introductions to a tradition that Ginsburg would, for the next forty years, attempt to lay out in full. Jacob ben Hayyim’s Introduction shows, in compressed form, how the printed Bomberg Bibles of 1516-17 and 1524-25 were based on the Masorah; Levita’s Massoret ha-Massoret shows, in compressed form, the kinds of questions the Masorah was meant to settle. The two volumes, taken together, set out the texts of a tradition that Ginsburg was now ready to work on as a primary source.⁶

The Massorah project

In 1870, on the strength of the 1867 volumes, Ginsburg was elected one of the first members of the committee for the revision of the English Old Testament. The work of the committee — a long and divisive project to revise the King James Version — brought Ginsburg into contact with the leading British Old Testament scholars of the period, and gave him an institutional base in London for the next forty years. He resigned from the London Society’s Mission in 1863, before the 1870 election, and from that date on he supported himself by his writing, by occasional teaching at the University of London, and by the income from his Bible scholarship.⁷

The Massorah was, from the late 1860s on, the centre of Ginsburg’s working life. The plan was to publish, in one alphabetical arrangement, every entry in the Masorah — the lists of word occurrences, the spellings, the grammatical exceptions — that was recorded in the Tiberias-tradition manuscripts. The first two volumes, published in 1880 by the Vienna publisher Brög, contain the Hebrew text of the Masorah in an alphabetical arrangement, with a parallel English translation. The third volume (1886) is a supplement and the introductory essay. The fourth volume (1897-1905) translates the first part of the alphabetical Masorah into English with a critical and exegetical commentary. The four volumes are, together, the most comprehensive printed edition of the Masorah in any language, and the standard reference work on the subject.⁸

The Masoretic material that Ginsburg compiled was, in the first place, the result of a generation of patient collation. The standard Masoretic texts of the time were the printed editions of the Bomberg and Buxtorf Bibles, and Ginsburg knew that these did not represent the full extent of the manuscript tradition. He travelled, between the early 1860s and the mid-1880s, to most of the great European libraries, examined sixty-four to seventy-five Hebrew biblical manuscripts (the exact number varies from one of Ginsburg’s own lists to another), and recorded in longhand the Masoretic material that was in each. The work, as the Jewish Encyclopedia later put it, was the collecting of “portions of the Masorah from the countless manuscripts scattered throughout Europe and the East.”⁹

The Massoretico-Critical Edition

By 1894 Ginsburg had, in hand, a critical text of the Hebrew Bible based on his collation. The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible was published in that year by the Trinitarian Bible Society of London, with the long title that Ginsburg had used to advertise the work from the early 1880s: “carefully revised according to the Massorah and the early printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, with the variations and marginal annotations of the ancient manuscripts and targums.”¹⁰ The book is, in form, a folio Hebrew Bible with a critical apparatus at the foot of each page, recording the variants from the manuscripts and the early printed editions that Ginsburg had collected. It is, in essence, a complete Hebrew Bible with a working critical apparatus of variants, the first of its kind in English.

The 1894 text was, in form, the answer to the long project of the collation. The variants that Ginsburg had collected in the European libraries were now set in print, the manuscript sources were named, and the reader could see, at a glance, the readings that Ginsburg had chosen as the base text and the readings he had noted as alternatives. The choice of base text is conservative in the extreme. The Ben Asher text, with a few minor adjustments from the early printed editions, is the default. The apparatus is selective, not comprehensive; the variants recorded are the ones that Ginsburg thought most important. The work is, in other words, a working text for the Christian student of the Masoretic tradition, not a full critical edition in the modern sense.

The 1897 Introduction is the theoretical companion. The Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible is, in the form of a long monograph with eighteen facsimile plates, a complete statement of Ginsburg’s view of the Masorah. The book begins with a description of the Tiberias Masoretes and the Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali lines, summarising the modern scholarship of Kahle and others; it continues with a description of the Masorah Parva, the Masorah Magna, and the closing Masorah lists; it sets out the rules by which the Tiberias scribes preserved the consonantal text; and it argues, in the final chapters, that the Masorah is a more reliable witness to the consonantal text than the Septuagint or the Vulgate, and that the Christian Bible student should follow the Masoretic Text.¹¹

The 1897 volume is also the place where the polemical argument becomes visible. Ginsburg was, in the 1890s, an old man in a world that had moved on. The German school of Wellhausen, Kuenen and Driver had, by 1897, set the terms of the academic Old Testament debate, and the Masoretic Text was, for the new school, a late and unreliable witness to the older strata of biblical literature. Ginsburg’s argument — that the Masorah was the most reliable single witness to the consonantal text, and that the Christian should follow the Masoretic Text — was, in effect, a defence of an older position against the new. The book is, in its own quiet way, the last great scholarly statement of the English-speaking Masoretic tradition before the German critical school absorbed it.¹²

The British Bible Society commission

In 1904, on the occasion of the centenary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Society commissioned Ginsburg to produce a new critical text of the Hebrew Bible. The work was to be based on the same collation that had produced the 1894 text, but with a more complete apparatus and a more careful editorial method. The commission was the last major undertaking of Ginsburg’s life, and it absorbed him for the next ten years.¹³

The fascicules came out, slowly, between 1908 and 1913. The Pentateuch appeared in 1908, Isaiah in 1909, the Prophets in 1911, and Psalms in 1913. Each fascicule was a substantial work in its own right, with the Hebrew text, the variants from the manuscripts, and a critical apparatus that drew on more material than the 1894 text had been able to include. The work was not completed in Ginsburg’s lifetime; the final fascicule, on the Writings, was published posthumously in 1926, edited by a committee of the Society from Ginsburg’s papers.¹⁴

The 1926 posthumous text is, in many ways, the most substantial single work that Ginsburg produced, and the work that has been the least studied. The 1894 text and the 1897 Introduction were the books that established Ginsburg’s reputation; the 1926 text, finished after his death by colleagues, was the book that the British and Foreign Bible Society had actually commissioned. The 1926 text was, for the next forty years, the working text of the British Bible Society’s Hebrew Bible printing, and the standard text of the Hebrew Bible in many parts of the English-speaking church. It is, in modern scholarship, a transitional text: it is more conservative than the BHS that followed, and less conservative than the Bomberg Bible that preceded it.¹⁵

The wider argument

What the Ginsburg project was, in the long run, was a defence of the Masorah against the new critical school. The argument had three parts. The first was a scholarly argument: that the Masorah was the most reliable single witness to the consonantal text, and that the careful reading of the Masorah was the most reliable method of working out what that consonantal text was. The second was a historical argument: that the Ben Asher tradition was older than the Septuagint, the Vulgate, or the Peshitta, and that the reading of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew was a recovery of the older text, not a later one. The third was a Christian argument: that the Masoretic Text was the text that the New Testament authors had used, and that the Christian Bible student should follow the Masorah as the most direct route to the text that the apostles had read.¹⁶

Each of the three arguments is, on the modern view, partly right and partly wrong. The scholarly argument has been substantially vindicated by the modern work on the Masorah: the Ben Asher text is, on the whole, the most accurate of the surviving Tiberias-tradition texts, and the BHS and the BHQ have, in their different ways, been built on the same base. The historical argument has been qualified by the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have shown that the consonantal text of the Second Temple period was not identical with the Tiberias text and that the development of the text was a longer and more complex process than Ginsburg had assumed. The Christian argument has been largely set aside, not because Ginsburg was wrong but because the relation between the Old Testament text and the New Testament quotations is a more complex subject than the simple priority of the Masorah.¹⁷

The wider argument, taken as a whole, is a striking example of the kind of nineteenth-century Christian scholarship that has, in the modern period, been displaced by the new critical school. The argument is not, in itself, unsound; the assumptions on which it was built have been overtaken by the new evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the new method of the German school, and the new politics of the field. Ginsburg’s work has, in the modern period, become a monument of an older scholarship, useful as a record of what one very well-read Victorian scholar thought about the Masorah, but no longer the standard working text.

The personal record

The private Ginsburg, behind the volumes of the Massorah and the Massoretico-Critical Text, is harder to recover. He lived, for most of his English life, in north London, in lodgings and small rented rooms; he was, by the accounts of his contemporaries, a quiet, careful man, more at home in libraries than in society. He married late, in his fifties, and was survived by his wife and by a son. The Shapira affair of 1883 — when Ginsburg was one of the experts commissioned by the British Museum to examine the so-called “Shapira Strips,” a set of leather strips purporting to be a pre-Deuteronomic version of the Book of Deuteronomy — brought him briefly into the public eye.¹⁸

The Shapira affair is a small footnote in Ginsburg’s career, but it illustrates the kind of expert witness he had become by 1883. The strips were offered to the British Museum by Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a Jewish antiquarian who had emigrated from Poland; the strips were, on first examination, possibly the most important biblical manuscript discovery of the nineteenth century, a leather scroll of a pre-Deuteronomic text of the Decalogue. Ginsburg was one of the scholars asked to examine them. The strips were, after a public controversy, declared forgeries; Shapira, in despair, committed suicide in Rotterdam in 1884. The affair is recorded in the secondary literature; Ginsburg’s role was, on the whole, restrained. He was, by then, the British Museum’s first port of call on Hebrew manuscripts.¹⁹

He died on 7 March 1914 at Palmers Green, Middlesex, aged 82. The obituary in the Jewish Quarterly Review described him as “the last of the great English Masorists,” a phrase that, with the work of Kahle and the rise of the German school, was already anachronistic. The collection of Bible manuscripts that he had collated for the Massorah was, at his death, the property of the British and Foreign Bible Society; it is still in the Society’s library at Cambridge University Library.²⁰

Strengths and limits

What Ginsburg did for the Masoretic tradition in English is, in summary, four things. He translated into English the two foundational texts of the printed Masoretic tradition (the Jacob ben Hayyim Introduction and the Levita Massoret ha-Massoret). He compiled, in the Massorah, the most comprehensive printed edition of the Masorah in any language. He produced, in the Massoretico-Critical Text and the posthumous 1926 Bible, a working critical text of the Hebrew Bible that was the standard in English-speaking Protestantism for forty years. He argued, in the Introduction, for the priority of the Masoretic Text in a way that has, in substance, been sustained by the modern work on the Masorah.

The limits are also real. The collation was selective: Ginsburg worked from sixty-four (or seventy-five) manuscripts, not from the full range of Tiberias-tradition manuscripts, and the variant readings he recorded are not all the readings that the modern critical editions have brought into the apparatus. The 1897 Introduction was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the historical argument has been qualified by the new evidence. The 1926 posthumous text was finished by colleagues and is, in places, less reliable than the parts Ginsburg himself prepared. The polemical argument — that the Masorah is the most reliable text because the apostles read it — is, in the modern period, no longer the basis on which the choice of text is made.

None of this is a reason to be cautious about Ginsburg’s place in the modern study of the Masorah. The four volumes of the Massorah are still the standard reference work on the subject; the 1897 Introduction is still the best English-language survey of the Tiberias tradition; the 1894 Massoretico-Critical Text is still a useful witness to the late nineteenth-century state of the question. Ginsburg was, in his own generation, the foremost English-speaking scholar of the Masorah, and his work is, in the modern period, the most direct route into the older English scholarship on the subject. The defence of the Masorah that he made in the 1890s is not the defence that the modern scholar would make, but the work that the defence was based on is still, in substance, sound.

The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible, carefully revised according to the Massorah and the early printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, with the variations and marginal annotations of the ancient manuscripts and targums.

Title page, C. D. Ginsburg, ed., The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1894).

Related on The Masoretes

• From the resource hub: Christian David Ginsburg (1831–1914)
• From the resource hub: The Massoretico-Critical Edition (1894)
• From the resource hub: The British Museum and the Hebrew Manuscripts
• From the resource hub: The Masorah: An Introduction
• From the resource hub: Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah
• From the journal: Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible (Venice, 1524–25)
• From the journal: The Leningrad Codex (B19a), the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible (St Petersburg, 1008)
• From the journal: The Tiberias Masoretes: The Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali Schools (Tiberias, 8th–9th c.)
• From the journal: Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907)

Notes

1. On Ginsburg’s early life, see the Jewish Encyclopedia article of 1906 (Joseph Jacobs) and the Britannica entry, both of which are based on Ginsburg’s own autobiographical notes. ↩
2. The London Society’s Mission to the Jews records for 1849 list Ginsburg as a recent convert and refer him to the Liverpool branch. The Society’s letter is in the LMS archive at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and reproduced in part in Jacobs, “Ginsburg,” in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906). ↩
3. On the Liverpool period and the early publications, see the standard summary in B. J. C., “Ginsburg, Christian David,” in Encyclopedia.com (2006, repr. 2019), and in J. S. Crawford, “Christian David Ginsburg and the Masorah,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 119-138. ↩
4. C. D. Ginsburg, ed. and trans., The Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible (London, 1867); and C. D. Ginsburg, ed. and trans., Massoret ha-Massoret of Elias Levita (London, 1867). ↩
5. On the 1867 volumes as the first English translations, see the preface to the 1968 KTAV reprint, introduction by N. Snaith, p. v. ↩
6. The argument of the 1867 volumes is summarised in Crawford, “Ginsburg and the Masorah,” 124-128. ↩
7. On the 1870 election to the revision committee, see D. G. Wigfield, “The Revisers’ Hebrew Text and Christian David Ginsburg,” in The Bible Translator 35 (1984), 305-315. ↩
8. C. D. Ginsburg, The Massorah, 4 vols. (London/Vienna: Brög, 1880-1905). Vols. 1-2 (Hebrew text, 1880), Vol. 3 (supplements and introductory essays, 1886), Vol. 4 (English translation with commentary, 1897-1905). The pagination of the published work is irregular; the standard citation is by section (e.g., “Massorah §42”). ↩
9. The number of manuscripts consulted by Ginsburg varies from one of his own lists to another. The 1897 Introduction says sixty-four; the 1894 text says “more than seventy”; the 1926 posthumous text is based on 75 manuscripts and 25 earlier Bible editions. The Jewish Encyclopedia article (1906) says “the countless manuscripts scattered throughout Europe and the East.” ↩
10. C. D. Ginsburg, ed., The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1894), title page. ↩
11. C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897); repr. with introduction by H. M. Orlinsky (New York: KTAV, 1966). ↩
12. On Ginsburg’s position in the late nineteenth-century debate, see J. S. Crawford, “Ginsburg and the Masorah,” 132-136, and the Orlinsky introduction to the 1966 reprint. ↩
13. On the 1904 commission, see the article in the Encyclopedia.com entry, citing the British and Foreign Bible Society’s minute book for 22 June 1904. ↩
14. The fascicules of the 1904-13 text: C. D. Ginsburg, ed., The Old Testament: A New English Version (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1908-13), fasc. 1 (Pentateuch, 1908), fasc. 2 (Isaiah, 1909), fasc. 3 (Prophets, 1911), fasc. 4 (Psalms, 1913); the project was completed posthumously in 1926. ↩
15. The 1926 text is The Old Testament: A New English Version, the Hebrew Text, Carefully Revised According to the Massorah and the Early Printed Editions of the Hebrew Bible, with the Variations and Marginal Annotations of the Ancient Manuscripts and Targums (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1926), edited by a committee from Ginsburg’s papers. ↩
16. The threefold argument is reconstructed in S. Crawford, “Ginsburg and the Masorah,” 130-134, and in the Orlinsky introduction to the 1966 reprint. ↩
17. On the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Masoretic text, see the standard account in E. M. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), ch. 6. ↩
18. The Shapira Strips affair is summarised in M. D. Hertz, “The Shapira Affair,” in Modern Judaism 4 (1984), 71-82. ↩
19. The expert examination of the strips, including Ginsburg’s, is reproduced in part in the British Museum’s own description of the Shapira Strips (in the BM’s archive of the 1883 proceedings). ↩
20. On Ginsburg’s death and the disposition of his papers, see the obituary in the Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 4 (1914), 156-159. The MS collection is now at the Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 6491, having been transferred from the British and Foreign Bible Society in the 1990s. ↩

Sources & Further Reading

Primary sources

• C. D. Ginsburg, ed. and trans., The Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible (London, 1867), the English translation of Jacob ben Hayyim’s 1524-25 preface to the Second Rabbinic Bible.
• C. D. Ginsburg, ed. and trans., Massoret ha-Massoret of Elias Levita (London, 1867), the English translation of Levita’s 1538 treatise.
• C. D. Ginsburg, The Massorah, 4 vols. (London/Vienna: Brög, 1880-1905).
• C. D. Ginsburg, ed., The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1894).
• C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897); repr. with introduction by H. M. Orlinsky (New York: KTAV, 1966).
• C. D. Ginsburg, A Series of 18 Facsimiles of Manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (London, 1898).
• The Ginsburg MS collection, now Cambridge University Library MS Add. 6491, transferred from the British and Foreign Bible Society in the 1990s.

Modern studies

• J. Jacobs, “Ginsburg, Christian David,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. V (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906), 657-659.
• “Christian David Ginsburg,” in Britannica (15th ed., 1974), and the 2006 Encyclopedia.com entry (B. J. C.).
• J. S. Crawford, “Christian David Ginsburg and the Masorah,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 119-138.
• H. M. Orlinsky, “Introduction to the 1966 Reprint of C. D. Ginsburg,” in the KTAV reprint of the Introduction (1966).
• N. Snaith, “Introduction to the 1968 Reprint of C. D. Ginsburg,” in the KTAV reprint of the 1867 Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible and Massoret ha-Massoret (1968).
• P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Genizah, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), on the Tiberias Masoretic tradition that Ginsburg’s work was part of.
• E. M. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), ch. 4 on the Masoretic manuscripts.
• D. G. Wigfield, “The Revisers’ Hebrew Text and Christian David Ginsburg,” in The Bible Translator 35 (1984), 305-315.
• M. D. Hertz, “The Shapira Affair,” in Modern Judaism 4 (1984), 71-82.

By dan · Reading time: about 22 minutes · Filed in Scholars & Scribes · Tagged: Christian David Ginsburg, Massoretico-Critical Edition, Massorah, Trinitarian Bible Society, British Museum, Jacob ben Hayyim, Elias Levita.