David Kaufmann

David Kaufmann (7 June 1852 – 6 July 1899) (Hebrew: דוד קויפמן) was a Jewish-Austrian scholar born at Kojetín, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). From 1861 to 1867, he attended the gymnasium at Kroměříž, Moravia, where he studied the Bible and Talmud with Jacob Brüll, rabbi of Kojetín, and with the latter's son Nehemiah.

Kaufmann was born to a father who managed a farm. He received a Jewish education as a young boy, then went to piarist school to complete his primary education. In 1867, he went to the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau, where he studied for ten years, while simultaneously taking courses at the University of Breslau. In the summer of 1874, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig; and on 29 January 1877, he was ordained rabbi. In the latter year, he declined the offer of a professorship at the Jewish Theological Seminary, preferring to accept instead the chairs of history, philosophy of religion, and homiletics at the newly founded Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, which he continued to hold till his death. He also taught Greek and German in the preparatory school of the same institution, carrying on this work in the Hungarian language, which he had rapidly mastered.

As librarian of the seminary, he acquired the large library of Lelio della Torre of Padua, which made the seminary one of the most valuable Hebrew libraries of Europe. As a teacher, Kaufmann was highly successful; and his relation to his students was that of a friendly adviser. He maintained a lively correspondence not only with the most eminent Jewish scholars, but also with the leaders in other branches of science. Kaufmann was a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Madrid and a member of the executive committee of the Budapest branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He died in Karlovy Vary, Bohemia, on 6 July 1899.

Kaufmann displayed a many-sided literary activity. The bibliography of his works, which M. Brann compiled for the Gedenkbuch zur Erinnerung an David Kaufmann (ed. M. Brann and F. Rosenthal, Breslau, 1900), includes 546 items, covering nearly every branch of Jewish science. His voluminous contributions to the periodical literature of the last two decades of the 19th century show him as a finished writer both of German and of Hebrew. His first and most important works, dealing with the philosophy of religion, include:

His most important historical monographs are:

Kaufmann was the first to take up the history of art in the synagogue, challenging the prevalent view that Judaism had always been aniconic. He marshalled a large and comprehensive corpus of data in order to prove it untenable. He was the first to use the term “Jewish art” in an article published in 1878, and is regarded as the founder of the scholarly discipline of Jewish art history. His disciple Dr. Samuel Krauss said in 1901:

As late as ten years ago it would have been absurd to speak about a Jewish art. It is Kaufmann's own merit to have uncovered this art. Not only did he have to prove that such an art existed, he also had to prove that it could exist, as he showed that the idea that the prohibition of images would obstruct the development of such an art was mistaken, and even established it as an irrefutable fact that the art in wide areas was not prohibited insofar as no worship was associated with it.

The following works of his in this field may be mentioned: