The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch: Eight Lectures

From 1914 to 1925 Cassuto was chief rabbi of Florence and then in 1925 became professor of Hebrew language and literature in the University of Florence and then took the chair of Hebrew at the University of Rome. Here he began to catalogue the Hebrew manuscripts in the Vatican but the 1938 anti-Semitic laws forced him out of his positions and he continued his academic career at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He edited a Bible with Hebrew commentary that has remained an Israel school classic.

His interests focused on Bible exegesis in which he contested the documentary theory of Wellhausen on the origin of the Pentateuch, postulating its redaction to a school around the 10th century BCE. Cassuto also made important contributions to Ugaritic studies.
 

Prof. Israel Abrahams--English translator of Cassuto's works was an outstanding Hebrew scholar in his own right. Born March 30, 1903 in Vilna, Lithuania, he came to Cape Town, South Africa in 1937 and for more than thirty years--since August of that year until mid-1968--held the position of Chief Rabbi of that city. Upon retirement, he made aliyah and passed away in Jerusalem in October 1973.