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The Invention of Jewish Identity

Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation

Indiana University Press

INTRODUCTORY AND INTERPRETIVE CONTEXTS

The book of wandering could only be the wandering of the book.
So many books within a single one.
The desert is the keeper of the book.
Return to the book means return to the desert.

In the so-called Letter to Philocrates, Aristeas relates how the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus was so impressed by the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible that he asked Eleazar the High Priest to send him six elders from each tribe of Israel. For the next seven days, the king put a series of philosophical questions to the seventy-two individuals, after which they were secluded for seventy-two days to produce a Greek translation of the Bible. This translation so impressed the elders of Israel that they ordered that "it should remain in its present form and that no revision of any sort take place." In a second version of the myth — this time told by Philo of Alexandria — the seventy-two elders, gathered on the island of Pharos and sitting in seclusion, "became as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated by an invisible prompter."

In their different ways, the two versions of this story justify the project of translation: the transference of authority from one language to another; the need to find counterpoints between cultures; and — what occupies me in the present study — the desire to absorb, legitimate, or otherwise describe the need for such activity in the first place. The mythology engulfing the production of the Septuagint in many ways justified all subsequent translation of the Hebrew Bible with its insistence that the divine presence could encompass a derivative work, that the vernacular could invoke the same reverence for the original and sacred word, and that the new language could awaken the same piety in the believer as the old.

As Judaism moved into different cultural spaces, elite Jews sought out new modes of translation to update or clarify the meanings both within and those perceived to be at work behind the biblical narrative. The Bible functioned like a mirror held up to reflect larger cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic models. Owing to Judaism's bibliocentrism, biblical translation became one of the primary means whereby Jewish philosophers formulated their rational articulations and subsequently disseminated these articulations to others. The various modes of translation to be examined in the present study were not solely a Jewish affair, however; rather, they were inextricably linked and therefore always formulated based on the larger non-Jewish contexts in which Jews lived. translation thus provided a convenient way to absorb or counter the various intellectual trajectories of these larger cultural moments.

Translation activity opens up before us a series of vignettes wherein we can grasp something of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters. When Jews in general and Jewish philosophers in particular translated the biblical narrative — whether in whole or in part — they imagined a new Bible: one that would simultaneously break with the confining shackles of existing dogma by returning to an encounter with a pristine past and that would both embrace a newly constituted set of memories in addition to all the cultural sophistications of the present. this paradox between old and new, with each putting on the garments of the other in order to express itself, reverberates throughout this study, and it plays out in the often-contested pages of the biblical narrative as Jewish thinkers sought to read philosophy into the Bible (and the Bible into philosophy) by showing it was already therein. translation, as mentioned, simultaneously re-read, mis-read, and un-read the biblical narrative. In this it was certainly no different than other modalities of rabbinic interpretation. Where philosophical translation differed from the latter, however, was in the depth of its encounter with non-Jewish systems of philosophy, which subsequently provided both the map and the tools for charting and making sense of such encounters. translation becomes a philosophical interrogation that problematizes the relationship of the past to the present, of Jews to non-Jews, and of memory to reality.

As my argument unfolds, I show that Bible translation is not simply a matter of philology, but of philosophical and cultural aesthetics and thus the poetic realization of philosophical practice. None of the translators that I examine regarded their works as innovations, however, but as reconstitutions of an original text and as clarifying various instantiations of the divine presence. translators — using new tools and aesthetics at their disposal — increasingly imagined new Bibles that seamlessly fitted with their own conceptions of what Judaism was or should be. If the line between tradition and innovation, reading and mis-reading, has always been a fine one, the thinkers who are the subject of this study surely walked the razor's edge.

For reasons that will become clear, I have chosen to deal primarily with the translative activity of individuals across the longue durée of Jewish philosophical writing. The names are certainly familiar enough: Saadya Gaon, Moses ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Judah Messer Leon, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. However, I trust that their reasons for inclusion are not as obvious: all wrote — in one way or another and in various times and places — philosophical justifications for translating the biblical narrative into new linguistic or conceptual idioms. My interest is in precisely these philosophical justifications as opposed to their actual translations (although I shall certainly examine these as well). Rather than provide a series of chronological analyses, I instead read these texts together and, depending upon my question or set of questions, historicize or dehistoricize these texts as I deem appropriate. I trust that such a reading will illumine something of the nature of the translative act in Jewish philosophy. My concern is simultaneously historical, literary, and philosophical. In an attempt to bring some order to these potentially unwieldy categories, I unravel them in this chapter so as to raise what I consider to be some of the central issues surrounding each one. This interpretive ground will subsequently function as a point of reference for later chapters.

In order to expand my field of inquiry, I operate with a very broad notion of translation. For example, although Moses ibn Ezra and Maimonides did not literally translate the Bible into Arabic, the former's Maqalat alhadiqa and the lexicographical chapters from the latter's Guide both take a keen interest in metaphor. Metaphor thus becomes for these two thinkers the locus of translation, the ability to move beyond the Bible's literal meaning toward its closely guarded secrets. In so doing, Moses ibn Ezra and Maimonides are just as interested in translating the biblical narrative as other individuals regarded as engaging in more "normative" translative activity, and their conceptual translations are as heavily invested in establishing retroactively authoritative versions of their own modes of reading.

As mentioned in the preface, I conceive of the present study as a historico-philosophical essay rather than a study in either of these fields. Philosophical issues are inseparable from the historical and cultural contexts in which they arise and in which they are reflected upon. Yet at the same time such issues neither can nor should be simply reduced to such contexts. I subsequently use the empirical-historical narrative as a way to articulate a larger set of philosophical and literary reflections on translation that may or may not have been relevant to figures living in earlier periods. Although this study seeks to make an original contribution to our historical understanding of philosophically informed translations of the Bible, I subsequently use this historical understanding as a point of departure for larger and more universal sets of questions. In this I hope that my own study of translation will become another layer added to and in conversation with earlier voices from the Jewish philosophical canon.

Rather than proceed chronologically, my approach here is thematic, with each chapter examining a particular problem that I perceive as existent in Jewish philosophy writ large. This permits interesting and often unexpected results as I juxtapose, sometimes awkwardly and sometimes naturally, tenth- and twentieth-century texts. The sudden shifts in discourses, figures, and contexts in the pages that follow are not meant to confuse, but to show relevance and to make the so-called history of Jewish philosophy into an organic engagement with ideas relevant to us, into something akin to the philosophy of Jewish history. "To show that these texts are relevant today, to preserve their life," to quote Martin Kavka, we "must blast them out of their historical contexts." Or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."

Translation: Inside Out

Reality is mediated in and through language. Attempts by philosophers to break through language's perceived confines — perhaps encountered most vividly in Maimonides' desire to shatter language's inherent anthropomorphism so as to abide in silent contemplation — cannot escape language's omnipresence. Even Maimonides, as we shall see, ultimately needs the very fabric of words both to express claims and to attempt to turn such words back on themselves. Translation derives both its necessity and its potency from the paradox that even though God's presence cannot be confined, it is encountered in language (i.e., the biblical narrative) and through the act of reading. Translation becomes the mode that attempts to mediate this paradox by moving between languages, by pointing the way to an articulation of the unspoken that can only be spoken and by trying to get at the nonlanguage that exists in language. The paradox that I am trying to expose here is articulated forcefully in the writings of Edmond Jabes, who — as the mirror inverse of Maimonides, traveling in the opposite direction from Cairo to Europe — also mined the limits of language and the status of the Book:

God's truth is in silence.
To fall silent in turn, with the hope of dissolving into it.
But we become aware of it only through words.
And words, alas, drive us ever farther from our goal.

Words — agleam in the firmament — spread their traces, their residue, over the created order: revealing it, sustaining it, mimicking it, subverting it. Between texture and erasure translation seeks but never finds the silent splendor of the beyond, the unraveling of words to reveal the palimpsest of all language and the All-language. As such, no text can be completely original because intertextuality is inherent to language: the translation of the nonverbal word and world, every sign being the translation of another sign in a potentially infinite regress.

But translation also represents the desire for a solution to or from this regress and, as such, becomes a central focus of the human dimension. As a practice or habitus, in addition to being a philosophical or literary genre, translation is the illusive quest for the perfect language that brings us back to the paradox mentioned earlier; a paradox, to use the terms of Rosenzweig, whose ultimate goal — at least according to some of the authors who are the subject of this study — is the arrival at a full silence that makes language possible. It is an activity that presupposes that we are not perfect and that we are incomplete. The multiplicity of languages, to use the words of Derrida, "exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics." Because of this multiplicity, there is a need for translation: to build nexuses between cultures, between languages, between texts, between ideas, and between peoples.

Translation is a term, an activity, a mode — perhaps even a way of life — in need of clarification. Simultaneously a tool and an object of analysis, translation as I understand it is a complex tapestry of practical, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic processes. My goal throughout this study is to unravel these processes while at the same time appreciating their interconnectedness with an eye toward exploring something of the uncertain hopes, the fractured memories, and the tasks of communal reinvention that hover around the translative act. The search for nonlanguage within language: "Look at the road ... because it links past to future and, the other way around, future to past — as if there were still a past after the future — but look also at the hope tougher than life that one day there could reappear out of the black bottom of misery a corner, a bit of blue sky."

The Task of Translation

On its most fundamental level the task of biblical translation is ostensibly about understanding the past and thereby demonstrating revelatory continuities that have the potential to shatter the quotidian dimensions of the present. Translation, to use Schleiermacher's words, helps "to provide the reader with the same image and the same pleasure as reading the work in the original language." Although this turn of phrase may well orient us to the task at hand, it also risks blurring the poetics of translation, forcing us into the overly practical and the perhaps all too familiar. Schleiermacher cannot, after all, explain why we continually retranslate. Reality attests the necessity of poetics that Schleiermacher ultimately ignores. Therefore we have to add Walter Benjamin's words to the equation. For him, the task of translation becomes inseparable from more philosophic and aesthetic concerns: "an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other." To reduce biblical translation simply to the activity of making the Hebrew accessible in a new language, to aid those who no longer understand the nuances of the original, misses the creative and dynamic forces of the translative act. Translation is neither mimetic nor parasitic upon the original, but moves language toward God's messianic return in the present. Schleiermacher and Benjamin thus provide us with two opposite ends of the continuum of understanding translation, two necessary guides — the quotidian and the utopian — to chart our course.

Again, we could ask: How are we to understand translation? Within this context, Hugo Friedrich raised many of the issues that preoccupy me in this study. In a lecture from 1965 entitled "Zur Frage der Übersetzungskunst," he asks a series of penetrating questions that pierce to the heart of understanding both the nature and modality of translation:

Is translation something that concerns the cultural interaction of an entire nation with another? Is translation just the reaction of one writer to another? Does translation resurrect and revitalize a forgotten work, or does it just keep a work alive to satisfy tradition? Does translation distort the foreign in an old work under the pressure of specific contemporary aesthetic views? Do translators pay close attention to the difference inherent in languages or do they ignore them? Does the translation create levels of meaning that were not necessarily visible in the original text so that the translated text reaches a higher level of aesthetic existence? What is the relationship between translation and interpretation: when do the two meet and when does translation follow its own laws?

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Excerpted from The Invention of Jewish Identity by Aaron W. Hughes. Copyright © 2011 Aaron W. Hughes. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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