Arnold Goldberg's Bible Translation

Abstract

The most eminent and much discussed example of translating texts as translating cultures is the Hebrew Bible. Its numerous translations from antiquity to our present time reflect many remarkable transformations of the original text (if there ever has been an original text) into a vast variety of quite different cultures and the ongoing process of adapting the cultural context of the Hebrew Bible to ever new historical circumstances. We are not dealing here, in this context, with a selection of the highlights of Bible translation throughout the centuries; rather, we are interested in Bible translations in relation to Martin Buber's attempt to translate the Hebrew Bible into his own cultural context, the German language and culture of the early 20th century. This task justifies a closer look at Arnold Goldberg's Bible translation because it turns out to be the most recent and most ambitious attempt to take up and continue the long line of German Bible translations from Mendelssohn to Zunz and Philipson and others that climaxed in the Buber-Rosenzweig translation. The very fact that someone started the project of a new German Bible translation, after the huge success of Buber-Rosenzweig, is remarkable enough and deserves our attention.