Hebrew Translation Research Articles

Beyond the Scope of Philosophy and Kabbalah

The turn of the thirteenth century is a formative period for the historiography of medieval Jewish thought. These years saw the dissemination of the Hebrew translations of the Maimonidean corpus, alongside the simultaneous appearance of the first Kabbalistic treatises, in the same geographical regions. This concurrent appearance led scholars to examine Jewish theological discourse mainly via two juxtaposed categories: “Philosophy” and “Kabbalah”. In this paper, I will return to that formative moment in order to demonstrate that exploring Jewish history of ideas beyond the scope of these categories could be very advantageous in improving our understanding of both categories and the Jewish theological inner-dynamics in this period as a whole. I will draw attention to a contemporary theological attitude, which is neither Kabbalistic nor philosophical, which I will define as a medieval form of Jewish binitarianism. My argument in this paper will be composed of two parts—first, outlining the nature of this medieval Jewish theological trend, and second, showing how a precise definition of this belief within its context alters crucial notions and understandings in the common scholarly historiography of medieval Jewish thought.

The Quest for the “Charity Dish”: Interpretation in the Hebrew Arthurian Translation Melekh Artus (1279, Northern Italy)

Abstract This article analyzes Melekh Artus (King Arthur), a unique Hebrew translation of sections from the old French prose Merlin and mort Artu in the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Written in a single fragment from 1279 in northern Italy, this translation proves close Jewish engagement with old French texts. Through satirical biblical references and subtle critique of his material, the author reframes the Arthurian narrative to promote universal morals. Rather than Judaize the Arthurian canon and its Christian characters, he validates them as viable models for his Jewish audience.

What Is Heard in the Mountains: Paul Celan’s Gespräch im Gebirg in the Light of its Hebrew Translation

This article focusses on Paul Celan’s Gespräch im Gebirg [Conversation in the Mountains] in the light of its Hebrew translation. Written in 1959, this short prose text is regarded as Celan’s response to Theodor W. Adorno’s statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” As various scholars have pointed out, the question of sound is central to this response: How to bear witness to that which can no longer be heard? This question becomes even more crucial when dealing with issues of translation. In his epilogue to the Hebrew collection, Shimon Sandbank, the Hebrew translator, explains the difficulty of translating Celan’s hermetic work into Hebrew in general, and this prose text in particular. For example, in order to transfer the Yiddish syntax that Celan uses in the German, which cannot be translated into Hebrew, Sandbank introduced Yiddish words that do not appear in the original text. With regard to these dilemmas, I would ask: What does one hear when listening to Celan in Hebrew, and what happens to the language of the Other, the other language, in the transformation from German into Hebrew? This article suggests that the decisions taken by the Hebrew translator invite the reader to reconsider the relationships between the ethical and the poetical characteristics of Celan’s work.

From Migdol to Syene: Documents Pertaining to Jews in Egypt in the Persian Period by Bezalel Porten

Reviewed by: From Migdol to Syene: Documents Pertaining to Jews in Egypt in the Persian Period by Bezalel Porten Zev Garber bezalel porten, From Migdol to Syene: Documents Pertaining to Jews in Egypt in the Persian Period [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2020). Pp. xxvi + 178. Paper ₪98/$29. This informative book is an abridged version Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt [Hebrew] (4 vols.; Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem–Department of the History of the Jewish People, 1986–99). P.’s book is a collection of important documents written in Aramaic on papyri and dating from the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e. pertaining to the Jewish community on the island of Elephantine ( , Yev) near Aswan on the Nile, on the border between Upper Egypt and Nubia (Kush/Sudan). The Elephantine papyri are caches of legal documents and letters documenting a Jewish community that included mercenaries whose twofold task was to protect the Egyptian border with Nubia (Kush) and also to ensure the safe passage of products coming from and going to Nubia. Adjacent to the Jewish settlement at Elephantine was the Aramean garrison at Syene (Aswan), on the eastern bank of the Nile. While less evidence is available for this Aramean garrison, extensive records document life within the Jewish garrison at Elephantine. In Elephantine, the Jews built a temple for YHW (“Yahweh”), which resembled Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. During the fifth century b.c.e., contemporary with the Persian rule of Egypt, the temple was destroyed by Egyptian adherents of the Nubian god Khnum, represented as a ram-headed man, whose land included Elephantine. No doubt the Egyptians were offended by festival ram offerings in the Jewish temple, which justified their role in its destruction, following which the Jewish settlement dispersed and dissolved. The fate and faith of Jews in Egypt in the period of Persian conquest coupled with Judean exile, destruction, and return to Zion are a basic motif in this collection. The name of the book is extracted from the first of five oracles in Ezekiel (29:1–16; 29:17–30:19; 30:20–26; 31:1–18; and 32:1–32) concerning Egypt: “Assuredly, I (God) am going to deal with you and your channels, and I will reduce the land of Egypt to utter ruin and desolation from Migdol [northeast border of Egypt, to the east of Tahpanhes, commanding the road to the land of Israel] to Syene [Aswan], all the way to the border of Nubia” (Ezek 29:10 NJPS/1985 JPS). Living in Judea and ingathering to Zion, rejection of Egypt and wandering in exile following the Babylonian conquest and destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple (587 b.c.e.) constituted the strong advice of Jeremiah in the name of God, but the people did not listen (Jeremiah 42–44). Condemnation (e.g., idolatry, cult of the queen of heaven, [End Page 323] Jer 44:1–11), defeat, and destruction remain the fate of choosing Egypt over Judea. And ingathering by the will of God is the prophetic remedy (see Isa 11:11–16; 49:8–13; Zech 10:10; etc.). P.’s book, part of Encyclopaedia Miqra’it (Biblical Encyclopaedia Library 17) contains a short bibliographic list, eight illustrations of documents but no chronological list or maps. Editor Shmuel Aḥituv contributes an informative introduction on the beginning of the Judean diaspora in Egypt. The Hebrew translation and drawing of the documents are by Ada Yardeni (d. 2018). Three archives have emerged from Elephantine: two family archives with eleven and thirteen legal documents, respectively, and one communal archive consisting of ten letters and one list. Chapter 1, “The Jedaniah Archive (Communal)” is named after the leader of the Jewish community at the end of the fifth century b.c.e., Jedaniah son of Gemariah, probably a cousin of the two sons of the woman Mibtahiah whose private archive is covered in chap. 2 of the book. Ten documents of the communal archive have been brought together because they were addressed to Jedaniah, were written by/for him, or concern events in which he was involved. Included is a fragmentary letter from an unknown...

Niccolò Tartaglia's 1543 Edition of Euclid's <em>Elements</em> and the Sources of an Early Modern Hebrew Version of the <em>Elements</em>

Seven Hebrew translations of the Elements or of versions of it were produced before the modern era. There is currently no concrete evidence that any of these had a Latin version as its primary source. In a 1997 paper Tony Lévy reported that a partial Hebrew version of the Elements includes an explicit reference to Campanus’ Latin recension. Pointing out several other similarities to Campanus’ version, I examine the hypothesis that the Hebrew version was based on a particular source which itself was based on Campanus’ version: Niccolò Tartaglia’s Italian edition (Venice 1543). I found that Tartaglia’s edition shares many of the differences that exist between the Hebrew version and Campanus’ recension, and also that many annotations which Tartaglia added to definitions and propositions are found in the Hebrew translation. This similarity suggests the possibility that the Hebrew version is a translation based directly on Tartaglia’s Italian translation and indirectly on Campanus’ Latin version. My findings lead to the conclusion that the Hebrew version is either a translation of a version of Campanus’ recension other than Tartaglia’s translation, or that it is not a translation at all, but rather a free elaboration based on more than one source.

Eager to Belong : A Palestinian Jew in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam*

Abstract In the middle of the eighteenth-century, Mordechai Tama, a Jew from Hebron, left his hometown carrying a manuscript containing his grandfather’s commentary on Midrash Mekhilta, with the aim of printing it in Amsterdam. That plan was unsuccessful, but once in Amsterdam, Tama did become a member of scholarly circles of the Portuguese-Jewish community. He absorbed that community’s blend of Rabbinic learning and Spanish literary tastes and, in turn, was valued for his knowledge of Arabic. This article examines the encounter in Amsterdam between Western Sephardi and Levantine Jewish learned cultures by a close reading of the paratexts of the two books Tama produced in Amsterdam, published there in 1765: Pe’er ha-Dor (a Hebrew translation of the Responsa of Maimonides from a Judaeo-Arabic manuscript that had belonged to Jacob Sasportas) and Maskiyot Kessef, a medieval glossary of homonyms by Solomon b. Meshullam Dapiera.

Martin Luther’s Use of Blended Hebrew and German Idioms in His Translation of the Hebrew Bible

AbstractThis article investigates an uncharted facet of Martin Luther’s Hebrew translation method. It is one of the more fascinating aspects of his translation, which demonstrates both the complexity of how he translated Hebrew and the lasting impact of the Hebrew on his German, neither of which has been fully appreciated by scholars. This article demonstrates how he sometimes blended Hebrew and German idioms in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the Minor Prophets. It further shows how he used this translation method to convey various linguistic features of the Hebrew language to his German audience. Finally, it shows how this has a number of important implications for Luther studies, Hebrew and German linguistics, and medieval and early modern history.

An Interpolation from Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine in the Ruthenian Translation of The Secret of Secrets

The Ruthenian translation of the medieval treatise Secretum Secretorum (“The Secret of Secrets”) was made in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century from a Hebrew version that dates back to late 13th‒early 14th centuries, when it was translated from the Arabic original, which probably originated in its final form during the 10th century. The Ruthenian translation contains certain interpolations that had been already present in the Hebrew version before it was translated into Ruthenian. They had been extracted from several Arabic and Hebrew sources, such as the treatise Al-Mansuri by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī (865‒925) and the treatises On Poisons, On Coitus, and On Asthma by Maimonides (1135/1138‒1204).The author argues that the same Ruthenian translation also contains a minor (one-page long) interpolation that through Hebrew mediation goes back to The Canon of Medicine written in Arabic by Avicenna (980‒1037). It is still to be established which of the seven known Medieval Hebrew translations and/or the around 30 commentaries on it (all unpublished) was used as the immediate source for the Kievan translation. Nevertheless, the newly identified Arabic origin of this particular interpolation to the Ruthenian version of the treatise The Secret of Secrets sheds some light on the prehistory of this particular text’s portion and compliments the list of sources used by the Hebrew-to-Ruthenian translators in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century.

A Hebrew Translation of the Letter Alef in the Biblical Dictionary Kitab Jami` al-Alfaz of the Karaite Scholar from the 10th Century David Ben Abraham Al-Fasi, edited by S.L. Skoss

This article presents the Hebrew translation of the introduction and the letter alef of the first Judaeo-Arabic Biblical dictionary extant, the Kitāb Jāmiʿ al-Alfāẓ, composed by the Karaite scholar David Ben Abraham al-Fāsī (fl. second half of the 10th century), ably edited by the late S.L. Skoss. The dictionary is quite comprehensive. Even if one does not take the introduction into consideration, the first volume contains no less than 600 pages, the second more than 750. The introduction itself deals intensively with various aspects of the structure of the dictionary. The main part of the dictionary is divided into 22 sections, reflecting the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Every section opens with an introduction characterizing the letter in question. The following main part is theoretically subdivided into 22 subsections, exhibiting the combination of the letter of the section dealt with, with one letter of Hebrew alphabet. Since, however, not every combination is attested, there are in fact, as a rule, less than 22 subsections. Every subsection is introduced by a list of the verses to be dealt with, followed by a thorough lexical and grammatical analysis, which forms the main body of the dictionary. Yet, the correspondence between the examples in the list and the analysis is not always clear. And one wonders what the real function of the list can be. The dictionary is based, in accordance with the period in which it was written, on the bi-radical and mono-radical system. There is no doubt that it is only the tri-radical principle that enables a clear and all-comprising analysis of the Hebrew roots. On the other hand, the bi-radical and mono-radical system does not artificially separate related weak roots. It was because of this relationship that Hebrew grammarians adhered to the bi-radical and mono-radical principle, and it was only through the influence of Arabic, in which the tri-radical structure of the verb is prominent that the tri-radical principle was adopted in Hebrew grammar. Being one of the first Judaeo-Arabic dictionaries, it is not surprising that the structure of subdivisions, containing lexical and grammatical analysis of the material, is sometimes ambiguous, at times because of the conciseness of expression. In the wake of Biblical prose, in which main clauses opening with copulative waw are very frequent, our dictionary tends to introduce main clauses with copulative waw, whereas classical Arabic utilizes fa in this environment. On the other hand, al-Fāsī frequently applies asyndetic clauses, both coordinated and subordinated ones. Like Judaeo-Arabic literature in general, our dictionary too is written in Middle Arabic, in which post-Classical Arabic, Neo-Arabic and also pseudo-corrections alternate. Sometimes al-Fāsī's Arabic is influenced by Hebrew, as when, in the wake of Hebrew hāyā, Arabic kāna governs its predicate with the preposition la. Sometimes the translation of Biblical verses is so literal as to be unintelligible; accordingly, al-Fāsī considers himself obliged to add another translation in a more comprehensible Arabic. On the other hand, al-Fāsī's understanding of Biblical Hebrew is often influenced by Arabic. Thus, when analyzing 'eshekh, he interprets it, as well as the verb shkhkh, by comparing the Hebrew verb shākhan (exhibiting shkh as the first part of its root), yet he attributes to it peculiar meanings of the parallel Arabic sakan, viz, 'to calm down' as well as its late signification ‘to be hidden'.

The Preface to the Hebrew Translation of Purity and Danger

Purity and Danger, published in 1966, remains Dame Mary Douglas’s most famous book and “The Abominations of Leviticus” its most widely read chapter. In 2005, only two years before her death and in preparation for the Hebrew translation ofPurity and Danger, which appeared in 2010, Douglas wrote a preface for that publication. With the likely interests of the Hebrew reader in mind, the preface expresses Douglas’s final reflections on the history of her engagement with “The Abominations of Leviticus.” It includes a restatement of her conclusions in light of Valerio Valeri’s work, in which she found the preferred approach to the questions she had asked over the years. This article presents Douglas’s preface after setting it in the context of her contributions.

An examination of the factor structure and preliminary assessment of the psychometric properties of a Hebrew translation of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2)

The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely-used, 10-item measure of a core facet of positive body image. To extend its use internationally, we examined the factor structure and conducted a preliminary assessment of the psychometric properties of a novel Hebrew translation of the BAS-2. A sample of 613 Israeli adults (362 women, 251 men; age M = 29.52, SD = 9.47) completed the BAS-2 alongside demographic items and previously-validated measures of life satisfaction, self-esteem, self-compassion, and body investment. Exploratory factor analyses with a semi-random split-half subsample (n = 377) indicated that BAS-2 scores reduced to a single dimension with all 10 items. This factor structure was equivalent across women and men. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with a second split-half subsample (n = 235) showed the 1-dimensional factor structure had adequate fit following one modification and multi-group CFA showed that the model was invariant across sex. Men had significantly higher BAS-2 scores than women, but the effect size was small (d = 0.22). Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through positive associations with indices of life satisfaction, self-esteem, self-compassion, and body investment. The availability of a validated BAS-2 Hebrew translation should advance future research of body appreciation in Israel.

Maimonides, On the Elucidation of Some Symptoms and the Response to Them (Formerly Known as On the Causes of Symptoms). A New Parallel Arabic-English Edition and Translation, with Critical Editions of the Medieval Hebrew Translation, by Gerrit Bos (ed.)

Maimonides, On the Elucidation of Some Symptoms and the Response to Them (Formerly Known as On the Causes of Symptoms). A New Parallel Arabic-English Edition and Translation, with Critical Editions of the Medieval Hebrew Translation, by Gerrit Bos (ed.)

Maimonides On the Elucidation of Some Symptoms and the Response to Them (Formerly Known as On the Causes of Symptoms). A New Parallel Arabic-English Edition and Translation, with Critical Editions of the Medieval Hebrew Translation. By Gerit Bos. pp. 179. Leiden, Brill, 2019.

<i>Maimonides</i> On the Elucidation of Some Symptoms and the Response to Them <i>(Formerly Known as</i> On the Causes of Symptoms). A New Parallel Arabic-English Edition and Translation, with Critical Editions of the Medieval Hebrew Translation. By Gerit Bos. pp. 179. Leiden, Brill, 2019.

Maimonides, on the Regimen of Health. A New Parallel Arabic-English Translation. By Gerrit Bos, with Critical Edition of Medieval Hebrew Translations by Gerrit Bos and Latin Translations by Michael McVaugh. (The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides, 12). pp. x, 540. Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2019.

Maimonides, on the Regimen of Health. A New Parallel Arabic-English Translation. By Gerrit Bos, with Critical Edition of Medieval Hebrew Translations by Gerrit Bos and Latin Translations by Michael McVaugh. (The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides, 12). pp. x, 540. Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2019. - Volume 30 Issue 2

Hebrew Translation as Innovation

Hebrew Translation as Innovation

Translation and Loss-Aversion1

This paper is about the inflation of loss talk in a certain discourse on translation and how translation is often presented as a disaster or even an emblem of what is always missing. My guiding questions will be: Why has the notion of loss become such a dominant concept when talking about translation? Where does this rhetoric of loss—in translators’ reflections, in translation reviews as well as in scholarly material of theoreticians—come from? What are some of the assumptions that underlie this loss discourse on translation products? Can we go beyond a descriptive perspective of the phenomenon and try to come up with a few explanations for this loss talk on translation? I shall furthermore explore the concept of loss-aversion from economics and decision theory (Kahneman, 2011), and argue that loss-aversion may help us to better understand how the notion of loss, and more generally the gain-loss equation, operate in the field of translation. Finally looking at translation discourse through the losing-glass, I will briefly discuss a few “unlosables” from the field of biblical Hebrew translation.

South African text; Zionist palimpsest: Israeli critics read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country

ABSTRACT The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debates internal to Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.

The Liturgy of Beta Israel: Music of the Ethiopian Jewish Prayer. 2019. Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel, no. 26, AMTI0118. Digital editing and mastering by Avi Nahmias and Gil Stein. Annotated by Simha Arom, Frank Alvarez-Pereyre, Shoshana Ben-Dor and Olivier Tourny. Produced by Edwin Seroussi. 192-page book with notes in

The Liturgy of Beta Israel: Music of the Ethiopian Jewish Prayer. 2019. Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel, no. 26, AMTI0118. Digital editing and mastering by Avi Nahmias and Gil Stein. Annotated by Simha Arom, Frank Alvarez-Pereyre, Shoshana Ben-Dor and Olivier Tourny. Produced by Edwin Seroussi. 192-page book with notes in

On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt by Aimée Israel-Pelletier (review)

Reviewed by: On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt by Aimée Israel-Pelletier Deborah A. Starr Aimée Israel-Pelletier. On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 226 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000795 In recent years, there has been an encouraging increase in publications about the modern history and cultural production of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Aimée Israel-Pelletier's new book On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt provides a much-needed addition to this burgeoning field. Israel-Pelletier examines writings—poetry, prose, and essays—by five authors who were raised in the Francophone culture of the Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie and elites: Jacques [End Page 492] Hassoun, Jacqueline Kahanoff, Edmond Jabès, Paula Jacques, and André Aciman. The works Israel-Pelletier discusses were all composed following the writers' departures from Egypt and the dispersal of the Egyptian Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century. To date, little serious scholarly attention had been paid to the literature produced by Francophone Egyptian Jews as a unique corpus. Egyptian Jewish literature does not fit comfortably in the postcolonial paradigm of Francophone studies, dominated as it is by the Caribbean, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Further confounding classification, two of the writers—Kahanoff and Aciman—ultimately made careers writing in English. In the context of Jewish studies, paradoxically, while French served as the lingua franca of middle- and upper-class Egyptian Jews (and other foreign minorities, as well as the Egyptian elites), little scholarship has been published in English about the Francophone literary production of Egyptian Jews. Israel-Pelletier's book fills this gap. Do not be misled by the blurb on the back cover that tries to market the book as a work of "political and cultural history." While, as the blurb claims, the book indeed "confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust," it is an important work of literary criticism by an accomplished scholar of French and Francophone literature. On the Mediterranean and the Nile would have been stronger if it had fully embraced its scholarly contribution to the discipline of literary studies. In addition to the blurb on the back, the choice of title and the vaguely historical introduction together serve to obscure the disciplinary orientation of the book. This choice does the author, the reader, and the discipline of literary studies a disservice. The author's voice is strongest and her arguments most compelling when she engages in textual analysis. Chapter 1 establishes the writing of Jacques Hassoun as a critical framework for the analysis of the texts to follow. Hassoun, trained as a psychoanalyst, devotes himself both as a clinician and as a public intellectual to treating and writing about the traumas of forced migration. Israel-Pelletier weaves together two strands of Hassoun's writing: his fascination with the concept of "the stranger" and societies' "compulsion to exclude," and his efforts to articulate Egyptian Jewish history and heritage. I found Israel-Pelletier's synthesis and analysis of Hassoun's writings particularly compelling at this cultural moment when we are yet again witnessing the rise of populism and nativism in the West. Reading Israel-Pelletier's book makes me want to dive into Hassoun's The Stranger's Crossing (1995). The second chapter is devoted to Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's 1951 novel, Jacob's Ladder. Kahanoff was educated in French schools in Cairo, where she began her writing career in French. After leaving Egypt, Kahanoff first studied in the United States, then moved to Paris, before settling in Israel in the mid-1950s. Throughout her career, Kahanoff mostly wrote in English—although her most influential writings were published in Israel in Hebrew translation. I have long been partial to Kahanoff's work as an essayist. Israel-Pelletier's refreshing analysis of the novel gives me new appreciation for Kahanoff's artistry as a fiction writer. [End Page 493] In the strongest chapter of the book, Israel-Pelletier offers a lyrical analysis of Edmond Jabès's The Book of Questions. Unlike the other writers she discusses, Jabès is a central figure in...

Fear in Hebrew

This article examines Hebrew translations of World War II–era psychology handbooks as means of transmission for scientific knowledge and as a mechanism for the cross-cultural spread of behavioral modernity. While drawing a broad, vivid picture of transnational military mobilities postwar, the article centers on the story of one such handbook: John Dollard’s Fear in Battle, a 1943 self-help guide on combat behavior. Produced in the context of efforts to manage the morale of American troops, Fear in Battle then traveled overseas along with volunteers, mercenaries, and special advisors from the former Allied powers, and played a role in decolonization and nation-building in the Middle East. The article reconstructs each phase of the text’s geopolitical and institutional itinerary: the experimental work on aversive conditioning that led to its writing and the larger neobehaviorist agenda it formed a part of; its function within the United States Army and subsequent transit to Palestine; and its translation into two new versions that circulated among Jewish militia members during the 1948 Palestine War. Analyzing in detail changes in language, style and format, the article thus aims to unpack the process by which behavioral science had been vernacularized and its mode of explanation went global.