Hyman Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales (1826): Redeeming the Talmudic Garden

Abstract

Tw o years before he became the first Jewish Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at University College, London, in 1828, Hyman Hurwitz published the first collection of Hebrew literature in English, an anthology entitled Hebrew Tales.1 The volume is composed of tales and aphorisms from rabbinic literature, including the Talmud and midrash. As Hurwitz’s preface and essay make clear, he intended the volume to counter negative and uninformed assumptions about this literature in much Christian writing, and to educate British Jews in their own rich traditions. More fundamentally, he wanted to show the compatibility of traditional Jewish wisdom and contemporary British culture. Inspired by his friend Coleridge, Hurwitz set out to redeem the Talmud and to cultivate a new tradition that would make Jews more at home in Britain and Britain more hospitable to Jews and Jewish culture.2 The historian David Ruderman, who sees the project of translation as a major part of the Haskalah or Enlightenment in England, believes that Hurwitz’s project, like that of Jewish biblical translators of the period, “constructed a radically new image of what they thought Judaism meant to their age. This image was so formidable and pervasive that, to the readers of their prodigious translations, the reality on which their new image was based was virtually displaced.”