Abstract
Jewish Bible Translations, by the renowned Jewish scholar Leonard Greenspoon, is a classic study of the translation of the Bible. The first of its kind, it is an informative and instructive model for Bible translation studies. It describes the Bible’s translations by a people who were nationless over three millennia. Living in a plethora of different settings, experiencing an infinite variety of conditions, they have rendered their sacred document in many languages, upholding their belief in one God, and maintaining their religious practices up to the present time.
Leonard Greenspoon, author of Jewish Bible Translations, holds the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University, a Jesuit institution in Omaha, Nebraska. He also is professor of theology and of classical and Near Eastern studies at Creighton. 1 The book begins with a two-page personal statement about the loneliness of the researcher and the rewarding warmth of sharing one’s findings through conversation and writing. The author expresses deep gratitude to those who performed superb editorial preparation and publication of the volume, also very personal appreciation for his family, immediate and extended.
The author introduces his study by decrying the limited presence of Jewish authorship in the field, as well as the numerous misconceptions and lapses in the published materials. He hopes to redress the situation at least partially through the publication of his own book-length study of Jewish Bible translations and translators. Characterizing himself as “a university professor for more than forty years (and still counting)” (xxi), he undoubtedly envisages classroom settings for his readership. He also appeals to clergy, rabbis, lay study leaders, and general readers, “who may or may not be versed in Hebrew or other languages beyond English” (xix). The seven chapters of the book cover Jewish translations somewhat chronologically, by language individually, or in language groups.
The separate chapters are essentially self-contained, to be read collectively or individually. Each chapter concludes with final or further thoughts. Readers’ helps include twenty-nine pages of endnotes, a comprehensive subject index, and an index of Bible passages and other ancient texts. An online study guide is available at https://jps.org/books/jewish-bible-translations/ (click on “Excerpts & Resources,” then on “Study Guide . . .).
Given the occurrence of “Bible” in the title, “Bible” is obviously a key term in the study. However, no definition is given by the author, and it does not occur as a simple lexical entry in the subject index. The etymology of the word takes us back to the classical Greek biblos, “book,” from papyrus bark. “Scripture,” derived from Latin scriptura, “a writing,” may also refer to the Bible. In English usage, “Bible” normally means the holy book of Christianity.
Our author uses the words “Hebrew Bible” to designate “the contents of the biblical canon the Rabbis formally accepted around the second century” (224), comprising the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. And he specifies, “Thus, a Jewish translation of Scripture renders only the Hebrew Bible in whole or in part” (224).
Greenspoon’s Jewish Bible Translations is like an exquisite carpet, woven from a set of rich interlocking strands. While his style is easy to follow, the text is multilayered. The most visible strands are the translations, against which an array of questions is asked, among them, what is translation, and what are translations? 2
He draws on the American linguist and translation specialist Eugene Nida for assistance in breaking down the dichotomy of “literal” and “free” in his description of translations. Nida expressed “literal” in terms of “formal equivalence,” while “free” was stated as “functional equivalence.” “Formal equivalence” tries to retain as much of the grammatical form of the original text as possible in translation. “Functional equivalence” attempts to express the meaning in free or idiomatic form in order that the translated text may bring about the same results for the receptors as it did for the original audience (xiii).
A Jewish document
Greenspoon’s study may be read as his own Jewish purview of the Jewish Bible for the Jewish community throughout its history. He makes two profound claims: “Bible-translating began among Jews” (ix), and “Jewish Bibles point to the original rather than attempt to replace it,” unlike for Christians, he says, for whom “the Bible is a Bible in translation” (x–xi, author’s italics).
The Septuagint is a Jewish document, produced by a team of Jewish scholars from Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jews, in Alexandria, the Egyptian metropolis founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. It was translated among the Jewish diaspora living in Egypt in the third to second centuries BCE by translators whose names are not known. The Hebrew source texts used by the translation team are also unknown, a subject of continuing scholarly debate.
The translators were translating from Hebrew, the language of the texts, a Semitic language, into Greek, an Indo-European language, the trade language, the language of wider communication (LWC), in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. The styles of translation practiced by translators of the various books range from strict literalism to freedom of literary expression. Our author reminds us that inconsistency in style in translation is not unknown in modern Bible translation, referring his readers to the English New Revised Standard Version of 1989.
The early Christian church adopted the Septuagint as the Old Testament for its Bible, quoting from it in New Testament books. Known as the Greek Bible, its influence on modern-day versions is shown by the footnote signaling “Greek” (Gk.). Orthodox churches continue to give precedence to the Greek text over the Masoretic text. While Greenspoon does not accept that the Jews abandoned the Septuagint, he acknowledges that its influence lessened over time. He concludes, “Christians transmitted, largely intact, the greatest legacy of Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint” (28).
Judaism retained the Hebrew Torah as its sacred Bible text. As Aramaic increasingly replaced spoken Hebrew and as biblical Hebrew was understood by fewer and fewer people, the practice arose of having interpreters explain the reading of the Hebrew text to the audience in Aramaic. Over time, interpretations of the sacred text were written down and codified in a form known as Targums.
Some scholars associate the creation of Targums with the words “translating it and giving the sense, so they understood the reading” in Nehemiah 8:7–8 (TANAKH). Should the word rendered “translation” be “translation,” or should it be “interpretation”? According to Greenspoon, the Nehemiah text is too early to refer to Targums per se, but he does place the tradition of reading orally alongside the liturgical reading of the sacred text. For Greenspoon, the Targums are not translations. They are explanations of the Hebrew Torah, not a substitute for it.
Bridges in the diaspora
Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was born in Saudi Arabia in approximately 580 CE. Within two centuries of his death, his followers had established an Islamic empire westward through North Africa and eastward through Mesopotamia. This included Babylon, home to a significant Jewish diaspora population. When Babylonia came under Arab control, language dominance shifted from Aramaic to Arabic, the language of the Qur’an.
Arabic is the language of the first Jewish Bible translation outside the Greek of the Septuagint. It is the work almost exclusively of Saadiah ben Joseph, a Jew born in lower Egypt in 882 CE. From Egypt, Saadiah moved to Palestine, then to Babylonia. Philosopher, theologian, linguist, rabbi by profession, and Bible translator by vocation, he was appointed gaon, “leader,” of the Jewish academy in the city of Sura. Saadiah Gaon, a serious student of Hebrew grammar and lexicon, is credited with compiling the first Hebrew dictionary, entitled, Agron, “glossary, wordlist.” A second edition included Arabic definitions of the Hebrew words.
Writing extensive commentaries on issues of biblical exegesis, Saadiah undertook translation of the Hebrew biblical text. He called his translation Tafsir, “commentary.” Giving examples of Saadiah’s functional equivalence translation, Greenspoon cites Saadiah’s interpretation of the text in Genesis 27:12–13, where Rebekah appears to want to direct Isaac’s possible forthcoming curse away from Jacob and upon herself. She makes this imprecation: “Your curse, my son, be upon me!” Saadiah seems troubled by the curse falling upon the mother and renders it as follows: “Warding off your sin is upon me!” Greenspoon has not found this passage to be troubling to biblical exegetes (64). However, UBS translation consultants William Reyburn and Euan Fry seem to side with Saadiah when they offer translators less harsh alternatives, namely, “I will accept that curse for myself,” “I will be cursed in your place,” or “If he calls down trouble on you, that trouble can come on me alone.” 3
As the time the Jews were living outside their former homeland lengthened through centuries, their migrations extended further west and north. They built social bridges in the communities where they settled, including the development of contact languages. In Germany, they adapted their own language in pidgin and creole fashion to local German dialects and created Yiddish, “broken German”—in linguistic classification, Judeo-German.
First translations into Yiddish occurred in the thirteenth century, with the complete Hebrew Bible being published in the seventeenth century. Greenspoon notes the Yiddish literary translations of two poets, Lithuania-born Solomon Bloomgarten (1872–1927) and Itzik Manger (1901–69), a poet and playwright born in what is now Ukraine.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) produced Yiddish Bibles. Bible Society goals were to mass-produce Bibles for general distribution and to enhance “the reputation of Yiddish as a legitimate language” (87). The second goal is particularly striking because Bible Society practice tended to ignore or reject “substandard” language forms. Only recently have such languages begun to be recognized as new languages, worthy of Bible translation.
Extending over 450 years, the German language, including Yiddish, has one of the richest traditions of Jewish Bible translation. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) began publishing translations of the Bible into German in the late eighteenth century. His translation work, together with the works of his followers, produced the first complete Jewish Bible in German in the 1830s. Greenspoon offers extensive commentary on Mendelssohn’s goals and the controversies that surrounded his efforts.
Two philosophers, Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), worked together to create a German translation that transported the readers back to “a time, place, and society far different than their own” (106). This approach to translation is known as foreignization of translation, as opposed to domestication, which is its opposite. 4
The Jewish diaspora spread throughout much of Europe, extending eastward into nations of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Greenspoon offers a selection of five languages of Jewish Bible translation: three Western languages, Spanish, French, and Italian, and two Eastern languages, Russian and Hungarian.
Spain was the first European nation where Jews translated into the vernacular language. As early as the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, the city of Toledo was a multicultural center of translation activity for classical, Jewish, and Christian works. In 1422 Don Luis de Guzman, a Roman Catholic military leader, commissioned a Jewish rabbi, Moses Arragel, to translate the Bible into Spanish, and he assigned a Franciscan priest, Arias de Enciena, to work with him. When the translation was completed in 1430, the Alba Bible, as it is known, was sent to Franciscan scholars in Toledo to verify and correct. Greenspoon observes that this was a “rare moment of relative religious tolerance in this era” (114). The Yiddish form of Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, called Ladino, was the language of the first translation of the complete Hebrew Bible, published in 1553.
French Jewish translations came much later. Samuel Cahen’s La Bible, Traduction Nouvelle, in eighteen volumes, was published in 1851. A second major translation in French was Zadoc Kahn’s La Bible du Rabbinat Français, published in 1899 in the difficult circumstances of a developing European spirit of anti-Semitism.
Italian Jewish translations may be traced back to the medieval period. However, Greenspoon presents only the work of Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), known as Shadal, a child prodigy who undertook linguistic and biblical studies from the age of eleven. His translation of the Torah, Ḥamishah ḥumshe Torah: ‘im ha hafṭarot ‘im tirgum italḳi (The five books of the Torah, with the Haftarot in Italian translation), was published and circulated from 1853 to 1875.
Hungarian and Russian translators were much influenced by Enlightenment thought and action. Hungarian Mor Bloch (1815–91) called on Hungarian Jews to embrace Magyar, the Hungarian language. He translated the Pentateuch and Joshua into Hungarian. He later converted to Protestantism, a move that somewhat compromised his impressive Jewish contribution. The complete Bible in Hungarian was published by the Jewish Hungarian Literary Society in 1898–1907.
For Russian Jewish translation, Greenspoon presents two individuals who were more engaged in activities of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia than in successful translation efforts. Leon Mandelstamm’s translation of the Pentateuch (1862) followed the Hebrew text literally. A second edition was published with accompanying Hebrew text but was not well received. Soon afterward, Judah Leib Gordon, with two collaborators, produced a new translation of the Pentateuch. Published in 1875, it exhibited a higher level of Russian literary form than Mandelstamm’s version and was well-received, especially by adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment.
The King James Version
Introducing Jewish Bible translations in English, Greenspoon turns the tables on his readers by drawing special attention to the English King James Version (KJV), published in 1611. The KJV translation project was commissioned by an Anglican king, the team of translators were all Protestants, and the KJV was the predominant English Bible translation, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when English was the most dominant LWC.
Professor Greenspoon conducted extensive research in identifying Jewish influences on the KJV. First, there was examination of the linguistic and translation milieu out of which the KJV was developed. Second, there was evaluation of the KJV team members’ Hebrew capacity, including their adeptness at retaining Jewish expression and imitating Hebrew style. Third, there was analysis of the Jewish reception and use of the KJV.
Jewish English-speakers accepted the KJV for their own Jewish use, as Greenspoon writes, “For many Jewish translations into English, the King James Version has remained the explicit point of reference” (198). This remained true until the Jewish Publication Society published its first version in 1917, followed by TANAKH, a new version in 1985, with a gender-sensitive adaptation in 2006.
Greenspoon describes the development of Jewish English-language Bible translations, providing a summary with his own comments and recommendations. Among the translators, he draws attention to Robert Alter, an American writer and literary critic, who produced the five-volume version entitled The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Alter’s goal, as quoted by Greenspoon, was to offer “an appropriate modern English equivalent to ancient Hebrew style,” similar to the King James Version (192).
Non-Jewish translations
The final chapter of Jewish Bible Translations addresses topics that might have been the most difficult for the author to treat. The first is the increased use of the Yiddish language by BFBS for translation of the New Testament, which was not a part of the Hebrew Bible. The stated intention of this practice was “providing Christian missionaries with another tool in their proselytizing arsenal” (202). Yiddish New Testaments were published from 1821. The first complete Old Testament in Yiddish was published by BFBS in 1898, and the final Old Testament version in Yiddish appeared in 1928. Greenspoon discusses this issue and concludes that it is difficult to judge the “success” of the publication of the Yiddish Bible translations (207).
The second problematic topic is translations with titles such as Jewish New Testament and Complete Jewish Bible, produced by people who are associated with so-called Messianic Judaism. From the Jewish perspective, both the publication titles and the association name are contradictory: the Hebrew Bible does not include the New Testament that is published in these versions of the Bible, and “Messianic Judaism” is “not recognized as a valid manifestation of Judaism” by the majority of Jews, or Christians, according to the author (207).
The third topic is Greenspoon’s only reference to Bible translation in the Orient. It is the story of Joseph Schereschewsky (1831–1906), who translated the Bible into Chinese, Schereschewsky was a Lithuanian-born Jew who emigrated to the United States, converted to Christianity, and engaged in Bible translation. He learned Mandarin Chinese well and was involved in translation of the Bible in two versions. Greenspoon clarifies the strong Jewish influence brought by Schereschewsky into the translation, which became the standard Protestant Bible in China, the Chinese Union Version, first published in 1919.
According to Greenspoon, exhibiting Jewish features does not establish a translation as an authentic Jewish Bible. Nevertheless, he is magnanimous in recognizing non-Jewish translations for having contributed to raising an awareness of Jewishness and of Jewish Bible translations in Christendom.
Conclusion
Jewish Bible Translations offers a comprehensive understanding of the Bible through translation. The author emphasizes the importance of both Hebrew language mastery and Jewish life experience for authentic translation of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, he encourages his audience to “more expansively imagine Jewish Bible translation as a wide-ranging river (or torrent?), fed by many sources and branching off in numerous tributaries” (218), to which this reviewer adds, Amen!
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography