Umberto Cassuto, also known as Moshe David Cassuto (16 September 1883 – 19 December 1951), was an Italian historian, a rabbi, and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic literature, in the University of Florence, then at the University of Rome La Sapienza. When the 1938 anti-Semitic Italian racial laws forced him from this position, he moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Early life and career Cassuto was born in Florence as the son of Gustavo and Ernesta Galletti in a traditionalist Jewish family. Cassuto studied there at the University of Florence (graduated in 1906), and the Collegio Rabbinico (ordained in 1908), where its principal Samuel Hirsch Margulies had a profound influence on him. After getting a degree and Semicha, he taught at both institutions. From 1922 to 1925, he was Chief Rabbi of Florence. In 1925 he became professor of Hebrew and literature at the University of Florence and then took the chair of Hebrew language at the University of Rome La Sapienza. When the 1938 anti-Semitic laws forced him from this position, he accepted an invitation to fill the chair of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine in 1939, where he taught until his death in 1951. Work Ugaritic translation and commentary Cassuto was one of the first scholars who understood the importance of the archaeological finds from Ugarit in Syria, and the similarities between the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible. His Ugaritic studies thus throw considerable light on the literary structure and vocabulary exegesis of the Bible. His treatise Ha-Elah Anat (1951, 1965; The Goddess Anath, 1970), a translation with introduction and commentary of Ugaritic texts, particularly the epic of Baal, is of special importance. Origins of the Pentateuch By the first half of the 20th century, Julius Wellhausen's version of the documentary hypothesis had become the dominant view on the origins of the Pentateuch in academia. Cassuto's The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (Hebrew, Torat HaTeudot, 1941; English translation, 1961) offered a critique of Wellhausen; Cassuto proposed the Pentateuch was redacted by a school around the 10th century BCE. However, the question of when the Pentateuch was finally written does not affect any element of Cassuto's radical critique of the dominant theories about its actual make-up, which was his chief concern, and so he treats the historical question only at the end and as a