A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman Mara H. Benjamin Abigail Gillman. A History of German Jewish Bible Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 320 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000722 German Jewish Bible translation, like many other aspects of German Jewish cultural and intellectual production, has long taken up an outsized place in Jewish historiography. All the more striking, then, that Abigail Gillman charts an unusual path in this well-worn terrain. Indeed, her volume defamiliarizes that terrain with an argument that expands and fills in critical gaps in the scholarly consensus. Her work offers a comprehensive understanding of a set of literary and cultural projects that occupied the intellectual energy of so many German Jews. Gillman's volume considers the history of German Jewish Bible translation in four parts. Each of the main chapters juxtaposes several (roughly) contemporaneous Bible translations. The chapters trace what Gillman calls the major "waves" in Jewish Bible translation, starting in the late seventeenth century and ending in the early twentieth. The usual suspects are here, of course: Gillman cannot but include Moses Mendelssohn's Bi'ur (1783) and Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (1925–27). As she tells us in the preface, she initially undertook her study to test Gunther Plaut's famous framing of [End Page 477] these two Bible translations as the symbolic "bookends" of German Jewish Bible translation—an image that was then applied to the course of modern German Jewry as a whole. In the end, Gillman does not completely jettison the metaphor. Instead, by examining the middle of the bookshelf—where sit the translation projects of Leopold Zunz and Joseph Johlson, of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ludwig Philippson—she brings new complexity to how we read those bookends. Furthermore, Gillman analyzes the literary interlocutors of the famous Bi'ur and the Buber-Rosenzweig translation: two Yiddish translations of the Bible (1678–79) and Bertha Pappenheim's Zeenah u-reenah (1930). Gillman's argument centers on the claim that each wave gains its coherence through the common aesthetic, literary, educational, or cultural orientation characterizing the translations produced in a certain period—even if the resulting works read quite differently. In most cases, the translators she considers rejected or criticized the approach taken by the others in a given wave. But Gillman aims to demonstrate that the historical situation that gave rise to each wave lends a deeper unity to the projects, and that in spite of "conspicuous differences" between the projects, each group shares a "fundamental agenda" (17). The ample and well-chosen images from the Bible translations under consideration, as in the juxtaposition of Philippson's and Hirsch's representations of the menorah in the tabernacle (191–93), offer crucial evidence for and enliven the argument throughout the book. The first chapter, focusing on Jewish Enlightenment Bibles, challenges the long-held preeminence of the first Jewish translation of the Bible into German, Mendelssohn's Bi'ur, by reminding us that it was one in a series of Jewish Enlightenment Bibles. The two late-seventeenth-century Yiddish translations discussed in this chapter, both published in Amsterdam, shaped Mendelssohn's translations, and not always in the ways scholars have accepted. Gillman argues that the Yiddish translations, a century earlier, were in fact less "traditional" than Mendelssohn's: they swept commentary off the printed page, for instance, where Mendelssohn gives ample space to commentary (namely his own). Yet the Yiddish translations under consideration shared the goals that came to be widely associated with the Haskalah. Mendelssohn, even as he moved decisively away from Yiddish, "reclaimed the pedagogical-religious mandate of the Old Yiddish translation tradition" (85). The chapter traces the development of Mendelssohn's translational approach, highlights the importance of German Christian Pietist Bible translations that flourished in the seventeenth century, and meticulously compares each work's translational choices. (This chapter, unlike the others, unfortunately does not include the Hebrew verses alongside the different translations.) The second chapter, "The Emergence of a Bible Industry," considers the proliferation of German translations that appeared in the period 1831–41. These translations, Gillman argues, styled themselves as alternatives to (and...