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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226477695 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2018 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The First Wave: Jewish Enlightenment Bibles in Yiddish and German
Works Discussed
Jekuthiel ben Isaac Blitz. Torah Nevi'im u'Khtuvim: Bilshon Ashkenaz (Bible: in the Yiddish language). Amsterdam: Uri Phoebus Ben-Aharon Halevi, 1678.
Joseph ben Alexander Witzenhausen. Torah Nevi'im u'Khtuvim (Bible). Amsterdam: Joseph Athias, 1679.
Moses Mendelssohn. Sefer Netivot HaShalom ... im Targum Ashkenazi (The book of the paths of peace, including the Five Books of Moses with Scribal Corrections and German translation). Berlin: George Friedrich Starcke, 1783.
The Bible is an antique Volume —
— Emily Dickinson
Introduction: Translation Revolution
The main innovation of the first wave of modern Bible translation is precisely that which we take for granted when we pick up a translated book: a one-to-one rendering of a source text in stylistically and syntactically correct prose. The new translations aspired to be an improvement over the old in every respect, and improvement was also what they promised the reader. These translators aspired to "make the crooked straight" through clearly formatted pages and "clear, correct, and beautiful" language. Their priority was to convey the plain sense of Torah, unmediated pshat, in a way that also did justice to the form and structure of the target language. They insisted that their approach was consonant with the Jewish exegetical tradition; they concealed the extent to which they had been influenced by Christian translations and other trends that had little to do with Judaism. They had one further aspiration: to become the Bible's "warbling Teller," in Emily Dickinson's phrase, or in the words of Jehuda Halevi, "a harp to the songs" of Scripture: to enhance the Bible through translation. In short, translation in the Haskalah rose to the status of an art form. This was the groundwork, the genetic makeup, of the three Bible translations of the first wave: the two Yiddish Bibles published in Amsterdam, and Mendelssohn's Pentateuch, commonly known as the Be'ur.
The new approach to translation was motivated by developments internal and external to Jewish society, by religious needs and cultural desiderata. If one were to pinpoint the central cause, it would be dissatisfaction with extant translations which had become linguistically anachronistic. Aptroot summarizes the view of the Amsterdam translators and their publishers:
The taytsh vocabulary had become ossified. Many words which were part of the special taytsh vocabulary had become not only archaic, but incomprehensible. Moreover, the teachers in primary education, the melamdim, and the translators of the earlier printed translations of parts of the Old Testament did not always understand the Hebrew and thus made many mistakes. Blitz and Witzenhausen proposed to produce translations which would not suffer from these shortcomings. This critique re-emerged one hundred years hence in the promotional material for Mendelssohn's Be'ur.
Because even if the teacher understands the literal meaning of the verse, he cannot explain it to his pupil, because he lacks the eloquence to make the thoughts of his heart pleasing to the pupil's ear. ... Because whenever one explains something to another, both have to know a language thoroughly and use it to express the same things. But in these regions, our language is mixed in with the languages of other peoples, and what is more, there are words and idioms that the common people invented which are repulsive — mindless words.
Both generations of translators believed they were living in a neo-Babelian world, and both cited the oldest available rationale for a new and improved translation: education. But there was more to the revolution. They sought to advance Jewish civilization, to make Jewish Bibles look more like Christian Bibles, and to define the persona of the modern Jewish translator.
Scholars of Mendelssohn's Pentateuch translation and commentary often focus on the relevance of these efforts to his philosophy and aesthetic thought, and to the Enlightenment, Christian Bible scholarship, rabbinic exegesis, and language politics. In lieu of the long-held myth that Mendelssohn "created" German Jewry, they situate Mendelssohn within intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends that preceded him. What has not changed is the fundamental identification of Mendelssohn with the Be'ur, and of the Be'ur with the Haskalah. But it seems to me that, with the exception of Werner Weinberg and David Sorkin, scholars have not paid adequate attention to Mendelssohn's art of translation, especially when juxtaposed with the relevant German and Judeo-German translations. Beginning in the 1750s, Mendelssohn was translating philosophical texts from French, English, Greek, and Hebrew into German. Comments reveal that he viewed translation as a laborious task; that he was exceedingly attuned to the literary style; and that he understood his task as capturing or "clothing" the original style in German garb. His translations of Hebrew poetry certainly shaped his technique. No less influential were his Yiddish and Christian predecessors: Blitz and Witzenhausen, Martin Luther, Johann David Michaelis, and Johann Lorenz Schmidt all illuminate Mendelssohn's poetics. What distinguishes these first-wave translations is their literary texture. It was a priority elaborated in prefaces and other paratextual elements, and in Mendelssohn's case, in his expansive commentary (the Be'ur proper): a rich composite of grammar, literary criticism, working notes, and translation history. Mendelssohn aspired to turn the Jewish Bible into a great book of the world. He approached the Bible as a work of literature and Hebrew as a literary language, favoring above all the poetic passages.
In each part of this study, I compare translations that shared a fundamental agenda, despite their conspicuous differences. In the first wave, two differences have been definitive: the languages of the translations, Yiddish versus German, and the usual periodization of the Haskalah. On the basis of language, the Yiddish Bibles belong in the previous wave. With regard to periodization, one cannot deny that the century between the 1670s and the 1780s was a watershed period for European Jewry, or that Mendelssohn's resources and milieu in Berlin were dramatically different from those in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Yet, as Mendelssohn's Hebrew typeface demonstrates, the Haskalah was a time of intense transition, linguistic and otherwise. In fact, for most of the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth, there was only one Hebrew phrase — targum ashkenazi — to designate both a Yiddish and a German translation. I place these Yiddish and German translations side by side to show that translation did more than promote German at the expense of Yiddish; it sought to educate Jewish readers about how language means, in the Bible and beyond. The Amsterdam Yiddish Bibles provided the blueprint for what was to come, as scholars of Old Yiddish have long known. They are the prehistory of the Jewish Bibles in German, but also a part of that history. A comparison of their prefaces, techniques, and sample verses reveals that it took three Bibles to launch a translation revolution
First Steps to Culture: Title Pages of Blitz and Witzenhausen Bibles
Everything about their physical appearance, and above all their ornamental title pages, lent the Bibles printed by Uri Phoebus (with the translation by Jekuthiel Blitz, 1678) and Joseph Athias (with the translation of Joseph Witzenhausen, 1679) an aura of beauty and prominence. Old Yiddish Bibles had often incorporated small wooden-graved illustrations in their pages, but no prior translation had included artwork of this kind. These title pages provided the visual entry point into a whole new kind of Bible, and they shall serve as our gateway to the story of the translation revolution.
In the German-speaking world, it had become customary to adorn theological works with ornamental title pages even before the Protestant Reformation. This tradition peaked with the Luther Bibles in the sixteenth century and continued well into the nineteenth. Such pages included a predictable array of biblical characters, typological motifs, and architectural imagery. Early Haskalah Bibles followed suit. Richard Cohen explains: "Jewish and Christian publishers were following local trends in publishing that had witnessed the economic value in publishing illustrated popular books since the late fifteenth century." Illustrated books were expensive, and were marketed to a financially successful segment within Jewish society that also had the good taste to appreciate the publishers' efforts. The increasing use of illumination techniques in books that were not required for Jewish learning — above all, in the Passover Haggadah — served as a "bridge between an emerging appreciation of objects of art, their collection, and a sense of self-elitism in Jewish society." Eventually, even the Hebrew Bible became reconfigured as an objet d'art, appealing to an emergent social status and to "elitism in book ownership." There was no precedent for printing a translated Bible in folio format and with such extravagant design. As Aptroot explains, the Bibles produced by Phoebus and Athias stood out "at first sight ... from all previous books in Yiddish."
The insertion of engraved title pages is highly unusual in Yiddish prints; I know of no other examples in the period. Copper engravings were costly and intaglio plates could not be printed with the same presses as were used for type and woodcuts, which have raised surfaces. Only very few leading printing houses had rolling presses for the printing of engravings but they were usually printed by specialist plate printers. This all added to the cost of the books. Such plates were therefore not often used (Gaskell 1985: 156–158). The presence of engraved title pages in the Amsterdam Yiddish Bibles serves to demonstrate that the books were printed with the idea that they were important works, not second class popular books.
The title page of Uri Phoebus and Jekuthiel Blitz's Torah Nevi'im u'Khetuvim of 1678 was designed by a Jewish convert from Protestantism, Abraham bar Jacob (fig. 1.1). Moses and Aaron flank the opening of the temple, whose centerpiece is the Holy of Holies with its altar and cherubim. The pairing of Moses and Aaron became iconic in Jewish print history. Perhaps Abraham bar Jacob was inspired by the title page of the 1648 Dutch translation of the Luther Bible, which featured Moses on the left, Jesus on the right, and a round framed portrait of Luther in the center below. As Falk Wiesemann phrases it, Moses and Aaron represent the two "pillars" of the edifice of biblical religion: the law (tablets and staff) and the sacrificial cult. At the same time, many of the motifs surrounding this sacred space come from Western secular art — fluted columns, ivy wreaths, thick theatrical curtains crowning the image, and the angel peering gargoy-lelike from the altar.
Abraham bar Jacob's title page illustration, with its pairing of Moses and Aaron, had a rich afterlife beyond the Blitz Bible. It became iconic after it was reused as the background to the title page of the famous Amsterdam Haggadah (1695). For that Haggadah, he also borrowed the copper engravings from Icones Biblicae (Basel, 1625), the author of which was the most famous German illustrator of the seventeenth century, Mathaeus Merian (1593–1650); for the first time, a copper engraving, already widely used in Christian books, was used in a Haggadah. Moses and Aaron also reappear (albeit on opposite sides) on the title page to the famous Sulzbach Haggadah (1755). On other such title pages, Moses and Aaron might be joined by David and Solomon (see the title page, also by Abraham bar Jacob, for the 1698 book Shnei luchot habrit [Two Tables of the Covenant], published by Joseph Athias's son Immanuel Athias). A Christian variation of the image shows a threesome, with David kneeling in the center.
The title page of the second (Athias/Witzenhausen) Bible depicts a more complex vertical tryptich featuring Moses and David, the exemplary biblical poet (fig. 1.2). Moses points his rod toward the scenario above, where a miniature Moses is receiving the tablets at Sinai. David plays his harp, also peering upward. The columns and curtains reappear, but this time, curtains are held up by two putti holding olive branches — perhaps an allusion to the prophecy of Zachariah. Most striking is the replacement of Bar Jacob's altar with the imposing seal of the Dutch Republic with the Latin motto, Concordia res parvae crescunt, squarely in the center. This seal had also appeared on the Athias's Biblia Hebraica (1661 and 1667), a Hebrew Bible for non-Jews edited by the Hebrew professor Johannes Leusden. But it first originated on the title page of the Dutch States Bible of 1637, with the corresponding Dutch phrase, Eendracht maeckt Macht. There was no mistaking the meaning of a lion holding seven arrows that appears on the Witzenhausen title page, but in light of the inclusion of David, the lion may have doubled as an emblem of the Israelite tribe of Judah. The crown motif in fact connects David, the lion, and the seal as a whole. Both upper and lower segments displayed scenes that had already appeared on other Athias books. In the lower panel, the biblical Joseph reunites with his father and brothers (Genesis 46) after a twenty-year sojourn in Egypt, with Egyptian couriers to the left encountering Joseph's father and brothers on the right. These embracing figures were copied from Merian's engraving Jacob's Reconciliation with Esau, and the horse-drawn wagon came from another Merian scene, Jesebel's Death (II Kings 9:1–37). The inclusion of this scenario is interpreted as a covert allusion to Athias's own father, who had died in the Inquisition in Cordoba in 1665. Might the reunion scene not also encode an allegory of the power of translation in a new age?
To summarize: the narrative of the triptych leads the eye from divinely revealed law, received with fear and trembling; to the nation — carefully balanced by Mosaic law and instruction on the left, Davidic culture/song and royalty on the right, and the Dutch Republic, the political guarantor, front and center; to a scene of reconciliation below. The embrace, an apt figure for the title page as a whole, conveys the same hopeful message as the title of Mendelssohn's translation one century later, The Book of the Paths of Peace.
The story of these two title pages, and the small but meaningful differences between them, gives pictorial evidence of a new tradition in formation. We will see the same types of minor differences in the actual translations of biblical verses contained inside these volumes, and also when we contrast Blitz's and Witzenhausen's choices with those of Mendelssohn and his Christian counterparts. Richard Cohen emphasizes that what is striking about illustrations in Jewish books of this period is precisely the "lack of innovation" and "redundancy in their iconography." Redundancy guaranteed marketability; it identified these select works as part of a trend. The Luther Bible and the Dutch States Bible had permanently changed people's expectations of what a vernacular Bible looked like and how it sounded. Would the trend also take off among traditional Ashkenazi Jews? These two Yiddish Bibles, with their fine paper, ornate title pages, and iconic-innovative imagery, exuded that ambition. Uri Phoebus, Joseph Athias, and their translators did more than adapt a Christian prototype for a Jewish readership. They aspired to provide the Jewish nation with what Moses Mendelssohn, one hundred years later, would call "the first step toward culture" — a religious and aesthetic project.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface List of AbbreviationsIntroduction. The German Jewish Bible in Context
1. The First Wave: Jewish Enlightenment Bibles in Yiddish and German
Introduction: Translation Revolution First Steps to Culture: Title Pages of Blitz and Witzenhausen Bibles (1678, 1679) The Story of the Blitz and Witzenhausen Bibles From Yiddish to German: A New Genealogy First Impressions: Mendelssohn’s Page Layout Mendelssohn’s First Steps: Translating Jehuda Halevi and Biblical Poetry Mendelssohn’s Christian Contexts Verse Comparisons: An Idiom in Formation Excursus on Mendelssohn’s Commentary: Explaining the Ways of Language Apologias: The Religious Mandate of the Modern Translator Manifestos: The Jewish Translator as Modern Author Conclusion: Reframing the Legacy
2. The Second Wave: Emergence of a Bible Industry
Introduction: That Red, Red Stuff Contexts of the Second Wave Moving Beyond Mendelssohn The New Hebraism: The Bibles of Joseph Johlson and Leopold Zunz Reception of the Johlson and Zunz Bibles Gotthold Salomon’s Volks- und Schulbibel Salomon Herxheimer’s Bible: A Be’ur for Jews and Christians Legacies of the Second Wave
3. The Third Wave: The Bible as Gesamtkunstwerk
Introduction: Redesigning the German Jewish Bible Contexts of the Third Wave Philippson and Hirsch: Biographies Philippson and Hirsch: Mission Statements Philippson: Unifying the Hebrew Bible Philippson: Picturing the National Story Commentary of Philippson and Hirsch Hirsch’s Phonetic System: Explaining the Bible from Within Hirsch versus the Orthodox Bible Society Philippson and Hirsch: Menorah Legacies of the Third Wave
4. The Fourth Wave: Reimagining the German Jewish Bible
Introduction: Reframing the History A Friendship in Letters: Buber and Pappenheim (1916-1936) Educators with Many Pedagogies: Buber, Pappenheim, Rosenzweig Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: First Steps to Translation Buber’s Creative Retellings Luther and Torzcyner: Stepping-Stones of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Pappenheim’s Yiddish Tanach Excursus: The Tsene-Rene, Then and Now Mission Statements: Bibles for People Today Methodological Consensus in the Fourth Wave Methodological Dissensus in the Fourth Wave The Limits of Reimagination Legacies of the Fourth Wave: A Female Moses and Jewish Luther
Epilogue: Ma shemo? The Name of God in the German Jewish Bible
Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index