Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Ginsburg, Christian David

by Arthur Ernest Cowley and Benedict William Ginsburg

GINSBURG, CHRISTIAN DAVID (1831–1914), Old Testament scholar, was born at Warsaw, of Jewish parentage, 25 December 1831. His parents had migrated to Warsaw not long before, having come, it is believed, from Spain. There is a tradition in the family that an ancestor was a minister of the Catholic sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella. His mother was of English descent. Young Ginsburg was educated in the Rabbinic school at Warsaw, and there laid the foundations of the profound knowledge of Hebrew literature which afterwards made his name well known. At the age of about sixteen he became a Christian, and, being thereby cut off from his family, came to England, where thenceforth he made his home. For some years after his arrival in this country, Ginsburg engaged in lecturing and preaching, although he was never ordained. He found time, also, to follow up his interest in biblical literature; and in 1855 he began his monumental labours upon the critical text of the Massorah—a work which was his chief occupation during the rest of his long life. In 1858 he became a naturalized British subject, and in the same year he married Margaret, daughter of William Crosfield, of Aigburth, Liverpool, a member of an old quaker family. He was then enabled to settle down in Liverpool and devote himself to literary work. His wife died in 1867, and in the following year he married Emilie, daughter of F. Leopold Hausburg, of Woolton, near Liverpool. By his two marriages he had one son and four daughters.

Ginsburg’s biblical researches were by this time becoming known. He had received an honorary LL.D. degree from Glasgow University in 1868. In 1870 it was natural that he should be invited to be one of the original members of the Old Testament revision company. He thereupon moved to a new home at Binfield, Berkshire, in order to be in closer touch with Westminster and with the British Museum. In 1872, at the invitation of the British Association, he made an expedition to Trans-Jordania, in company with Canon Henry Baker Tristram [q.v.]. Their object was to follow up, by further researches, the discovery (1868) of the Moabite stone; but their efforts were unsuccessful.

In 1880 appeared the first of the four folio volumes of Ginsburg’s edition of The Massorah. This will long remain the standard work on the subject. Although its preparation occupied the greater part of his life, he regarded it not as an end in itself, but as the only sound foundation for the text of the Hebrew Old Testament. His revision of the text, The Old Testament in Hebrew, was published in 1894 (second edition, 1911). In this edition the minutiae of the vowel-points and accents were more strictly corrected in accordance with Jewish tradition than they had ever been before, but the progress made in the elucidation of the text was very small. Criticism has undergone great changes since Ginsburg began his work. It is now recognized that the Massoretic recension is not the original form of the text, that it embodies corruptions, and that the evidence of the early versions and of comparative philology must be taken into account. Moreover, the scrupulous quality of Ginsburg’s scholarship suffered to some extent from the defects of the rabbinical method in which he had been trained. As a pure Hebraist, however, he was unsurpassed in his knowledge of the language at all its periods. This was shown in his Hebrew translation of the New Testament (with the Rev. Isaac E. Salkinson), and in his editions of Elias Levita and Jacob ben Hayyim. In 1883 he reported upon the alleged fragments of Deuteronomy offered for sale to the British Museum by M. W. Shapira, and pronounced them to be forgeries [The Times, 27 August 1883].

Ginsburg delighted in the society of scholars, and his hospitality was unbounded. Among his more intimate friends were William Aldis Wright [q.v], whose great collection of bibles was always at his disposal, and Thomas Chenery [q.v.], editor of The Times, who was a well-known Hebrew and Arabic scholar. Ginsburg’s interests and activities were, however, by no means exclusively academic. He was a keen liberal, a personal friend of Mr. Gladstone, and for many years closely associated with the National Liberal Club. He also sat regularly as a justice of the peace for Surrey and Middlesex. He made a great collection of pre-Reformation bibles, the bulk of which he bequeathed to the British and Foreign Bible Society. From his youth he had made a study of engravings, of which he possessed a large and valuable collection.

Ginsburg died at his house at Palmers Green, Middlesex, 7 March 1914. His portrait, painted in 1914 by A. Carruthers Gould, hangs in the National Liberal Club.

[The Times, 9 and 11 March 1914; private information; personal knowledge.]

A. E. C.

B. W. G.