Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1911. Wrappers; 8vo. 72 pages. In German. Teil I. No more published? Includes bibliographical references. Chaim Heller was a rabbinical and biblical scholar, "one of the very few modern scholars who combined a vast and deep talmudic erudition of the traditional type with a thorough competence in the methods of textual research. He defended the traditional masoretic text against the Bible critics. " (EJ) Of this work, speaking about those who criticize the reliability of traditional texts, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo says, "perhaps the most devastating blow to these critical theories was delivered by Rabbi Chaim Heller (1878-1960) . Not only had he mastered the Oral Torah to the extent that he was one of the greatest talmudic scholars of his time, but he also knew every extant ancient Bible translation in its original target language, whether Aramaic, Greek, Latin, or Syriac. In his Untersuchungen ueber die Peschitta (1911) , he took issue with those who concluded that apparent divergences from the Torah in their possession were due to variae lectiones in the ancient texts. Not so, he asserted. Every translation is a commentary, and the variations result from the translator preferring one explanation in the Oral Torah to another. Thus, the differences were exegetical rather than textual. He further showed that all the apparent differences stemmed from the thirty-two exegetical rules of biblical interpretation enumerated by Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Shimon. In the above-mentioned study he gives examples showing how the translator employed each rule in his version. " (Cardozo, Between Silence and Speech) . SUBJECT(S) : Bible. O. T. Syriac -- Versions -- Peshitta. Bible. O. T. -- Criticism, Textual. Ex-library. Bookplate of Peter Wiernik on inside front cover. Wiernik was an American Yiddish journalist, "editor for New York's most important Yiddish daily, the Jewish Morning Journal. His editorials, possessed of intelligence, good taste and tolerance, advocated a fusion of modern Orthodoxy and Americanism, and evinced a coolness to political Zionism and hostility to socialism. " (Joseph Hirsch, EJ) Age-stained. Some corners chipped. Wrappers very chipped, but with no loss of text. Signatures loose. All pages present. Some pages still uncut. Text in good condition. (GR-6-29)
