Yehuda Leib Krinsky - Criticism of Krinsky By Others

Criticism of Krinsky By Others

The work Meḥōqeqē Yehudā has not been received well. The traditional world seems to have ignored it altogether, whereas the critical world has given it a number of bad reviews. Already in 1907, the year when Krinsky published the first volume, David Hertzog published a harsh review of it in ZDMG. Much later, in 1990, Arye (Leo) Prijs called Krinsky's work misleadingly incomplete; in the preface to his own book on Ibn `Ezra's commentary on the first three chapters of Genesis, Prijs cites a number of quotes from Hertzog's negative review.

It must be remembered that despite the flaws for which Krinsky's work has been criticized, Meḥōqeqē Yehudā remains to this day the only modern complete supercommentary on Ibn `Ezra's Pentateuch commentary. All the other attempts by moderns to produce a supercommentary on Ibn `Ezra's Pentateuch commentary have either been woefully minimal (such as Asher Weiser's annotations to the Mosad Ha-Rav Kook edition of Ibn `Ezra's commentary), or covered only a few chapters of Ibn `Ezra's commentary (such as the works by Prijs and Linetsky, each of which covers only the first few chapters of Genesis.)