Early life Ehrlich was born to a Jewish family in Volodovka, near
Brest-Litovsk, in what is now
Belarus. At an early age he studied German in his village, and read
Moses Mendelssohn's Bible translation. He was married at fourteen and had one son named Mark. At seventeen, Ehrlich came to the conclusion that he could no longer abide with his current stringent environment and sought association with the wider fields of knowledge he hoped to find in Germany. His wife did not agree with the move or his liberal views, and she and their son did not go with him to Germany. He then went on his own and he entered school there to learn arithmetic, geography, and other elementary school subjects alongside boys of ten. He then worked as a librarian in the Semitics department of the Berlin Royal Library. It was at this time in Germany that Ehrlich somehow came to the attention of Professor
Franz Delitzsch, who engaged him as his
amanuensis. They both worked in the missionary
Institutum Judaicum, and at Delitzsch's insistence Ehrlich revised the Hebrew translation of the New Testament (10th Edition), meant for
Christian missionary work among Jews - an action that he would come to regret. During this time he encountered the work of
Julius Wellhausen and the concept of
Biblical criticism, which led him to accept the
documentary hypothesis. (Later, though, he wrote against the perceived destructiveness of higher criticism.) His deep familiarity with the
Hebrew language led him to believe that the Bible could be understood only if one devoted oneself to its language and to an understanding of the Hebrew idiom through its cognates.
Teaching in America Ehrlich emigrated from
Hamburg, Germany in 1874 to
Manhattan, New York, where he worked as a teacher in the Emanu-El Theological School of New York, associated with the
Temple Emanu-El. His naturalization date is July 11, 1881, and he lists his occupation as "Teacher of Languages." His son, Mark, later followed him to Manhattan in 1885. Ehrlich wrote in English and spoke it fluently and flawlessly, though with a slight accent. He was said to have known 39 languages, which included all the
Semitic languages, all the languages of Western Europe except Finnish, all the
Slavic language dialects, as well as
Sanskrit,
Latin, and
Greek. He also took an interest in
philology, and explained the relationship that Israelite and Canaanite civilizations bear to that of the Greeks upon the basis of language similarities and idiomatic likeness. He was a lover of the Greek classics and had a great knowledge of classical civilizations, as well as a special love for
Arabic literature and poetry. Many of those who taught Arabic in the Semitics departments of universities came to Ehrlich for instruction. Among them was Professor
Richard J. H. Gottheil of
Columbia University, son of
Gustav Gottheil, who claimed that Ehrlich had admitted to changing becoming a Christian in Germany and later regretting for it. Ehrlich never admitted to this, and the event is only claimed to have taken place by witnesses speaking in the late 19th century. While in America Ehlich authored a biblical commentary called ''Mik'ra Kiph'shuto'' ("The Plain Meaning of the Bible"). It embodies his main point of view that the Bible itself is the best source for the knowledge of Hebrew as a language and for the ancient Hebraic ideas, despite the age of the scriptures and the findings of higher biblical criticism. He felt that somehow original meanings persisted and that the cross references or parallel passages often shed light upon obscure sentences as well as upon mistakes in the original biblical text. During his years in the United States, Ehrlich was sought after by various Jewish scholars and students. He had a strong influence on the young
Mordecai Kaplan, Ehrlich's exegetical work is an important contribution to modern biblical exegesis. Ehrlich's work was highly influential on the Jewish translation produced by the Jewish Publication Society in 1917 and its successor of 1962–82. == Works ==