Paul Kahle and the History of Hebrew Pointing

In 1903 a young German minister, already trained as a theologian and as an orientalist, left the libraries of Berlin, London, Oxford and Cambridge and took up a pastoral post in Cairo. Paul Ernst Kahle was to serve the German Protestant congregation there, and to direct its school, until 1908. He was not yet the author of the books by which later Masoretic scholarship would know him. He was a pastor in a city that was also a manuscript frontier, and the years he spent in Egypt, with repeated journeys into Palestine, gave him the material and the questions of a lifetime.¹ The hub note on Paul Kahle sets his career in brief. This essay follows him from that Cairo parish to the choice of the Leningrad Codex as the base of a printed Hebrew Bible, and to the wartime lectures in London from which The Cairo Geniza was made.

A Pastor in Cairo

Kahle was born on 21 January 1875 in Hohenstein, in East Prussia, into an evangelical family. Johann Fück, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, records that his father Ernst was a doctor of theology and a school administrator. From 1894 Kahle studied theology and Oriental studies at Marburg and then at Halle. He took his doctorate under Franz Praetorius with a dissertation on the Samaritan Targum of the Pentateuch, published in 1898 as Textkritische und lexikalische Bemerkungen zum samaritanischen Pentateuchtargum. He completed a theological licence in 1902 with a book that already announced the labour of his life: Der masoretische Text des Alten Testaments nach der Überlieferung der babylonischen Juden, issued at Leipzig by J. C. Hinrichs.² After a short spell as an assistant pastor in Brăila, in Romania, he went to Cairo.³ The order of those facts is easy to miss, and it matters. Kahle did not discover the Babylonian tradition because a Cairo pastorate happened to throw fragments in his way. He had already written a book on the Masoretic text according to the tradition of the Babylonian Jews before he took up the Egyptian post. Cairo, and the Genizah, gave that early research the breadth of evidence it still lacked.

The University of Turin’s account of the archive it purchased in 1966, the most detailed institutional sketch of his early movement, adds that before Egypt he had already worked on Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic and Syriac manuscripts in Berlin, London, Oxford and Cambridge. In Cairo he was both pastor and director of the Deutsche Evangelische Oberschule. The stay, the Turin notice says, was of high importance for his scientific training. He collected manuscripts, notes and photographs on a wide range of subjects, including the Egyptian shadow play, and he travelled repeatedly to Palestine, where he gathered material on Muslim holy places, on the dialect of the village of Bīr Zēt, and a number of Samaritan manuscripts.⁴ The Encyclopaedia Judaica later lists, among the fruits of that Palestinian work, a series of articles on Muslim holy places in the Palästinajahrbuch for 1910–1912, and, with Hans Schmidt, the two volumes of Volkserzählungen aus Palästina (1918–1930).⁵

The Samaritan thread, begun in the 1898 dissertation, was not dropped in Egypt. The Turin notice records that among the manuscripts he gathered on his Palestinian journeys were Samaritan copies, and the later archive still holds his work on the Samaritan Pentateuch, its Targum and its liturgy.⁶ Cairo also placed him within reach of the Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, which Solomon Schechter had opened to modern scholarship in the 1890s. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says that Kahle’s interest in the fragments was aroused by Schechter, and that the Genizah became his main body of evidence for the study of the Masorah.⁷ Fück writes that by thorough investigation of the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts, and especially of the fragments from the Genizah of the synagogue in Old Cairo, Kahle was able to clarify the development of the old Palestinian, the Babylonian and the Tiberian punctuation, and to characterise the recensions of the biblical text constituted by the Tiberian Masoretes.⁸ The pastorate was not a detour from that work. It was the post that put him in the city where the evidence still lay.

From Halle and Giessen to a Chair in Bonn

Kahle returned to Germany and qualified as a lecturer at Halle in 1909. In 1914 he was appointed to a chair at Giessen. In 1917, in Giessen, he married Marie Gisevius, the daughter of a professor of agriculture; they would have five sons. In 1923 he moved to Bonn as director of the university’s Oriental department, a post the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the directorship of the Oriental Institute. Fück notes that he greatly expanded the seminar there, adding Chinese and Japanese sections. From 1921 he also served on the board of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, edited its journal and monographs, and organised its congresses.⁹

The years at Halle, Giessen and Bonn were the period of his major Masoretic books, though the first of them was already in print before the Bonn appointment. Masoreten des Ostens, published at Leipzig in 1913 in the series Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament, with the subtitle Die ältesten punktierten Handschriften des Alten Testaments und der Targume, put the Babylonian, superlinear pointing on a new scientific footing. A later article of 1928, “Die hebräischen Bibelhandschriften aus Babylonien,” continued that dossier in the Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. The two parts of Masoreten des Westens, issued at Stuttgart by W. Kohlhammer in 1927 and 1930, organised the Palestinian and related western evidence. The 1930 volume, Masoreten des Westens II, carries a subtitle that already names its three subjects: the Palestinian Pentateuch Targum, the Palestinian punctuation, and the biblical text of Ben Naftali.¹⁰ Those are not casual labels. A book that set Palestinian pointing beside a Targum tradition and beside a named rival to Ben Asher was already doing the historical work that later chapters of Kahle’s career would press further, and sometimes too far. Geoffrey Khan, in his study of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition, still points to Kahle’s publications of 1902, 1913 and 1928 as the important earlier studies of manuscripts with Babylonian vocalisation, even as he now treats Israel Yeivin’s volumes of 1985 as the most authoritative scholarly source on that tradition. In the same introduction Khan lists Kahle’s 1930 volume among the most important scholarly studies of the Palestinian vocalisation.¹¹ The sequence is itself a measure of Kahle’s place. He did not have the last word on either non-Tiberian system. He is the scholar who made it impossible to treat Tiberian pointing as if it had no history and no rivals.

Those books are also, in a quieter way, books about families and recensions, not only about signs. Khan, discussing the ancestry of Aaron ben Asher, refers the reader to Kahle’s first Western volume, and to the later English Cairo Geniza, for the notice that Asher “the elder,” the great-great-grandfather of Aaron, probably lived in the second half of the eighth century.¹² A classification of pointing systems and a genealogy of the Tiberian authorities belonged, for Kahle, to the same historical labour.

Under his guidance, the Encyclopaedia Judaica records, many of his students turned to the Genizah, especially to the early history of piyyut. Several of them, including Menahem Zulay, settled in the Land of Israel and became prominent in Jewish scholarship.¹³ In 1924, while he held his German posts, Kahle wrote an opinion defending the Talmud against the libels of the antisemite T. Fritsch.¹⁴ That intervention belongs with the later events in Bonn, not as a piece of later legend, but as a public act already on the record of the 1920s. Eleven years later, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, he was honoured with a Festschrift, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Nahen und Fernen Ostens (1935), with a bibliography of his work.¹⁵ The volume is a snapshot of a still-established German career. Within four years that career would be broken, and the next collected volume of his shorter studies, Opera Minora, would be published in 1956 from the far side of exile, on his eightieth birthday.

The Night in November and the Road to Oxford

The Turin archive, which also holds papers of Marie Gisevius Kahle, gives the most precise account of what happened in November 1938. After the November pogrom known as Kristallnacht, Kahle’s wife and their eldest son aided a Jewish shopkeeper in Bonn. Kahle then faced, in the archive’s words, constant persecution and intimidation, and he lost his post at the university. In 1939, rejoining his wife and their five sons, he took refuge in England.¹⁶ Fück, writing for the Neue Deutsche Biographie, says that Kahle emigrated in 1939, after he had been suspended from office for helping a Jewish acquaintance, and that he took his family with him.¹⁷ The Encyclopaedia Judaica dates the family’s need to seek refuge in England, and specifically in Oxford, to 1938, and attributes it to his and his wife’s pro-Jewish activities after Kristallnacht.¹⁸ The year of departure is therefore given differently in sources that otherwise agree on the cause. What is not in doubt is that a German professor of Oriental studies, who had already defended the Talmud in print, lost his chair because his household had helped a Jewish neighbour, and that the rest of his scholarly life was lived from England.

In England, according to the Turin notice, he worked on the catalogue of Islamic manuscripts at the Chester Beatty Library. In 1941 he was invited to give a series of lectures at the British Academy. Those lectures became the basis of The Cairo Geniza.¹⁹ Only after the Second World War was he able to take possession of his library again. He was appointed professor emeritus at Bonn, but, Fück records, he kept his residence in England, travelling often to Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and in 1955 to Pakistan, before moving to Düsseldorf in 1963.²⁰

The date of his death is another point on which the record splits, and it should be left in view. Fück’s article, and the index of the Deutsche Biographie, give 24 September 1964, in Düsseldorf. The University of Turin likewise gives 1964. The Encyclopaedia Judaica heading, and the title of Matthew Black’s memoir in the Proceedings of the British Academy, give 1875–1965.²¹ This essay follows the German biographical article for the day and the place, and notes the later year where it appears.

Masoretes of the East and of the West

The technical centre of Kahle’s work is a historical map of Hebrew pointing, drawn largely from Genizah evidence. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises his thesis as follows. The two centres of rabbinic learning, Babylon and Palestine, each created both a simple and a complete system of vocalisation. From those systems there ultimately emerged the official Tiberian vocalisation that is an integral part of the Ben Asher text and Masorah.²² The claim is easy to state and hard to have been the first to document. It means that the dots a modern reader meets in a Tiberian Bible are not the only medieval science of reading, and not a system without a prehistory. Khan, citing the 1902 book itself, records one small but telling feature of the evidence Kahle had already begun to describe. In some manuscripts with Palestinian and Babylonian vocalisation, the letter sin is distinguished from shin by a miniature samekh written over the one and a miniature shin over the other.²³ The detail is technical. It is also a reminder that the first book was already a book about signs as historical evidence, not only a rehearsal of the received Tiberian page. There were eastern signs, written above the line, and there were Palestinian signs, and each of those traditions, on Kahle’s account, had a simpler and a fuller form before the Tiberian system became official. Fück describes the same labour as a clarification of the development of the old Palestinian, the Babylonian and the Tiberian punctuation, and as a characterisation of the recensions constituted by the Tiberian Masoretes.²⁴

That claim matters because it treats the signs in a printed Hebrew Bible as the outcome of a history, not as a single system discovered whole. When a modern student opens a Tiberian page and sees the dots and dashes of the Ben Asher tradition, Kahle is one of the reasons those signs come with a past of rivals and predecessors. He linked the grammar of the Masorah to named manuscript classes, and to the geography of Cairo, Palestine and Babylonia. Later work has refined the description of each system, and Yeivin’s Babylonian volumes have become, in Khan’s judgment, the standard account of that tradition.²⁵ The refinement does not erase the earlier books. It is what a pioneering classification looks like once other manuscripts, and other readers, have been brought into the same argument.

Kahle’s own path into that argument, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica traces it, ran from the popular printed text of Jacob ben Hayyim’s Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524/25 toward the Aaron ben Asher texts of the eleventh century.²⁶ The decisive manuscript in that movement would not be a Genizah fragment but a complete codex.

How Leningrad Became the Printed Text

Kahle’s most visible legacy outside specialist Masorah is editorial. As the third edition of Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica took shape, he pressed the case for using the complete, dated codex Firkovich B 19 A, written in Fustat in 1008/1009 and long held in St Petersburg, as the diplomatic base of the printed text. Due to his research, the Encyclopaedia Judaica states, that manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, supplanted Jacob ben Hayyim’s text as the basis for Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica of 1937, and was later used for its successor, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.²⁷ Fück puts the same decision in almost the same terms: Kahle made the Ben Asher recension, on the basis of the Leningrad manuscript of 1009, the foundation of the Masoretic text that he had printed in the third edition of Kittel, thereby replacing a form that had been treated as authoritative since 1524 with a text centuries older.²⁸

The publisher’s own history of the Kittel editions confirms the change of base, and it is worth following that history in its own words, because it shows what the decision looked like from the printer’s side as well as from the scholar’s. The first Biblia Hebraica, published in 1906, had still used the received text of Jacob ben Hayyim. In 1921 the Württemberg Bible Society acquired the rights from Hinrichs. From 1925 a new edition was undertaken, and its base was changed. The Codex Leningradensis of 1008, which that history says was “discovered” by Paul Kahle and which is the oldest completely preserved manuscript of the Masoretic text, was to serve as the basis for the text. The critical apparatus was divided into two ranks, so that the reader could see how the information was weighted. Above all, the small Masorah of the Leningrad Codex was printed on the outer edge of the pages, although without further editing or explanation. The complete revision was published in 1937 as the third edition of Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica. The publisher presents that edition as establishing the international reputation of the Biblia Hebraica and as paving the way for BHS.²⁹ The word “discovered” in the publisher’s narrative should not be pressed too hard. The manuscript had been in St Petersburg, and in the catalogues, long before Kahle. What he discovered, in the sense that mattered for a printed Bible, was its fitness to replace the received printed text as the face of a critical edition.

The choice was pragmatic as well as principled. The Aleppo Codex, closer for many later judges to a pure Ben Asher ideal, was not then available as the base of a hand edition in the way Leningrad was. Leningrad was complete, and it could be reached through photographs and library channels. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, writing after the Hebrew University Bible Project had chosen Aleppo, still calls Kahle’s text important as a parallel to that project’s Aleppo text.³⁰ Most modern readers of a scholarly Hebrew Bible still meet the Masoretic text through a Leningrad-shaped window that Kahle helped to install. The journal essay on the making of BHS tells how that window was reset, after the war, when Kittel’s matrices had been lost or destroyed and a new setting was unavoidable. BHS kept the same base manuscript. What it changed, among other things, was the treatment of the Masorah that Kittel and Kahle had printed from Leningrad without further editing. Gérard Weil completed the Masorah parva in the margins and moved the Masorah magna into a separate volume. The diplomatic text, however, remained the text Kahle had placed at the centre of the edition in 1937.³¹

The Cairo Geniza Lectures

In 1941, two years after the family’s arrival in England, Kahle gave the Schweich Lectures of the British Academy. The Academy’s list of the series records the 1941 lectures as The Cairo Geniza by Paul E. Kahle, published as a book in 1947.³² The volume was issued in London for the British Academy by Oxford University Press. It runs, in that first edition, to some xii and 240 pages. A remark printed with the book, and repeated in later catalogue records, places the chamber itself:

The Cairo geniza belongs to an ancient synagogue of Old Cairo, which was originally the Christian Church of St. Michael.

Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (London, 1947), as recorded in the edition’s preliminary matter³³

The lectures, given in wartime London by an exiled German professor, turned a career of Genizah-based research into an English book that could be read far beyond the Bonn seminar. The Encyclopaedia Judaica treats The Cairo Geniza (1947; enlarged second edition, 1959) as the place where Kahle’s vocalisation thesis, and much else, is to be found.³⁴ The Turin archive records a German edition of 1962 as well, and calls the work one of his most important publications, issued twice in English and once in German.³⁵ Later bibliographies, including Khan’s, give the 1959 edition as issued at Oxford by Blackwell, still under the heading of the Schweich Lectures.³⁶ Fück notes that Kahle devoted particular attention, in the second English edition, to the finds from Qumran and to the problems they posed.³⁷ He had already published a separate study of the Dead Sea manuscripts, Die hebräischen Handschriften aus der Höhle, in 1951.³⁸ The second edition of The Cairo Geniza is therefore not only an enlargement of the Schweich lectures. It is the book in which an ageing scholar, still working from England, tried to bring a new corpus of Hebrew evidence into an argument he had first framed from Genizah fragments and from the Leningrad Codex. Fück, who is otherwise careful not to flatten controversy, is willing to say that Kahle’s leading idea, that the Hebrew biblical text is the end result of a long development, found a striking confirmation in those Qumran texts, in which genuine, meaning-bearing variants occur.³⁹ The confirmation is of the idea of development, not of every particular thesis about the versions.

The book is not only a report on fragments. It is the English statement of a habit of mind. For Kahle, the Encyclopaedia Judaica writes, all textual transmission was a matter of emergence from earlier traditions.⁴⁰ That habit had already remade the printed Hebrew Bible. It also led him into arguments that many of his readers would not accept.

Theses that Met Resistance

Beside the pointing systems and the choice of Leningrad, Kahle advanced two large theses about the ancient versions, and both were met with resistance. On the Targums, the Encyclopaedia Judaica reports his view that the Targums of the Torah and the Prophets were originally free, random renderings, later edited in Babylon as Targums Onkelos and Jonathan and transferred to Palestine as official renderings around the year 1000. Fück records a related claim, that the language of the Targums, studied from the oldest manuscripts, stood close to the Aramaic spoken in Palestine in the time of Jesus.⁴¹

On the Septuagint his position was more provocative still. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises it thus. The Septuagint, which originally had only the Torah, with its authorised form advocated in the Letter of Aristeas, emerged as a full version only in and for the Christian Church, and was composed from a variety of Targum-like Greek renderings. The hypothesis was then stretched to include all known versions. Opposition to Kahle’s view, the entry says, was widespread, and it is possible that the attempt to make the hypothesis so universally applicable shows a fundamental weakness.⁴² Fück, who had no reason to flatter a contested thesis, says that Kahle assumed locally different versions behind the Septuagint, whose differences were only gradually evened out as the Church felt the need for an official edition of the Greek Old Testament, and that this thesis, standing in sharp contrast to the prevailing views, led to heated controversies.⁴³

A journal essay on Kahle would be weaker, not stronger, if it passed over those controversies. The same mind that classified the pointing systems and chose Leningrad was prepared to rewrite the history of the versions as a history of emergence. Some of that rewrite has remained a minority view. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says so plainly. A career is allowed to be uneven. The vocalisation books, the Leningrad decision and the later attention to Qumran do not stand or fall with the Septuagint hypothesis.

After the War

After 1945 Kahle was, Fück writes, rehabilitated in Germany, and he was appointed professor emeritus at Bonn, without giving up his English residence until the last year of his life.⁴⁴ The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he continued his work at Oxford University during the English years. A memorial volume, In memoriam Paul Kahle, edited by Matthew Black and Georg Fohrer, was published in 1968.⁴⁵ Black also wrote the memoir of him in the Proceedings of the British Academy. The books and papers of the career now form a fonds at the University of Turin, purchased in 1966, including correspondence with more than two thousand five hundred people, a library of some eleven thousand printed works, and some three hundred manuscripts. The same notice, written to introduce that archive, is careful not to reduce him to the Hebrew Bible alone. Beside the Masoretic books it records the cataloguing of Islamic manuscripts for the Chester Beatty Library, the studies of the Egyptian shadow play, the edition, with Muḥammad Muṣṭafā, of part of the Mamluk chronicle of Ibn Iyās, work on the Ottoman sailing manual of Piri Reis, and the Palestinian folklore collected with Schmidt.⁴⁶ Those labours lie outside the scope of this essay, but they explain why a fonds of this size exists, and why an Oriental department at Bonn had been, under his direction, more than a chair of the Hebrew Bible.

The measure of the life, for readers of this journal, is not the size of the archive. It is the fact that a pastor who walked the lanes of Old Cairo in the first decade of the century forced modern scholarship to treat Hebrew pointing as a history with more than one centre, and that he put a single complete medieval codex, written by Samuel ben Jacob in Fustat, under the eyes of almost every later student of a printed scholarly Hebrew Bible. Later editors have reset the type, completed the Masorah, and, in the Hebrew University Bible, chosen a different base. Later grammarians have rewritten the Babylonian system in more detail than Kahle could. The window he installed is still the one through which most readers first look.

Notes

1. “About,” Paul Kahle fonds, University of Turin, at paulkahle.unito.it. *
2. Johann W. Fück, “Kahle, Paul,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 11 (1977), 24–25, at deutsche-biographie.de; “Kahle, Paul Ernst,” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, at Encyclopedia.com; Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020). *
3. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”; University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
4. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
5. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
6. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
7. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
8. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
9. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”; University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
10. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”; Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1. *
11. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 13–14. *
12. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1. *
13. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
14. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
15. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
16. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
17. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
18. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
19. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
20. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”; University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
21. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”; University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
22. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
23. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 64, citing Kahle 1902, 11. *
24. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
25. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 13–14. *
26. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
27. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
28. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
29. Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (BHK), Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, at die-bibel.de. *
30. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
31. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, at die-bibel.de; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
32. “Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology,” The British Academy, at thebritishacademy.ac.uk. *
33. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, 1941 (London: published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1947), at archive.org. *
34. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
35. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
36. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1. *
37. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
38. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
39. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
40. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
41. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”; Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
42. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
43. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”. *
44. Fück, “Kahle, Paul”; University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *
45. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kahle, Paul Ernst”. *
46. University of Turin, “About,” Paul Kahle fonds. *