A Bible for "People Today"

106SHORT REVIEWS contributing to humanity in some way, while refusing to ignore or be complacent about the profound problems in each. These comments, however, are not so much a critique of Boyarin's work as testimony to its thought-provoking and engaging content. Daniel Boyarin's study of Paul is a worthwhile read for Jews and Christians alike. Insightful in its specific exegeses of Pauline passages and in its placement of Paul in the intellectual and theological context of first-century Judaism, this book not only sheds light on one of the most influential Jews of all time, but also raises to the fore some of the central concerns of our own. ADELE REINHARTZ Department of Religious Studies McMaster University NOTE 1.Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison ofPatterns ofReligion (Philadelphia, 1977), p. 552; Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia, 1983), p. 68. 2.Indeed, Boyarín (206) is in agreement with the first point, at least. A Bible for "People Today" Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Scripture and Translation, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 223 pp. In Jerusalem in 1961, Martin Buber completed his German translation of the Hebrew Bible—a project he had begun in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig in Weimar Germany almost forty years earlier. At a ceremony marking Buber's accomplishment, Gershom Scholem referred to the translation as the Gastgeschenk or "gift" of the Jews to the Germans.1 Scholem then invoked a more cynical metaphor: he called the translation a tombstone, because its intended audience had been decimated in the interim. However, the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible was never intended for Jewish Germans alone; it is still used in Germany today. Nor has the Holocaust rendered Buber and Rosenzweig's enterprise obsolete, as witnessed by the recent publication of volume 1 of the Schocken Bible, an English translation of the Pentateuch based upon the Buber-Rosenzweig method. However untimely the project may have seemed at the hour of its completion, its influence and readership seem only to have increased with time. But the reception of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible has been fraught from the start. This is only partially due to historical circumstance; many of the work's very first reviewers (Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Borchardt, Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Prooftexts107 Hallo), writing in the 1920s, disliked what they saw, and criticized the enterprise as they understood it.2 There are important intrinsic reasons that the BuberRosenzweig Bible has been a difficult text to appreciate. Part of the problem, as the translators themselves came to realize, arose from their own principled decision— highly iconoclastic, from a historical standpoint—to publish a Bible without a line of commentary; nor was the original Hebrew included. The explaining came only later, after the first volumes appeared, in the form of scholarly essays, lectures, and private and public letters written in the years following 1925 (Rosenzweig died in 1929). In 1936, Buber compiled these pieces in a volume called Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, literally, "Scripture and its Germanization." In stark contrast to the text of their Bible, which is surrounded by so much white space, these pieces provide a remarkable record of Buber and Rosenzweig's philosophy and praxis of translation, their understanding of Scripture, and the wider intent guiding the project. It is as if the powerful rhetoric and thoughtful reasoning in these companion pieces would accomplish what the bare translation by and large failed to do, namely, convey in the clearest terms the need for a new kind of German Bible: not Hirsch, not Philippson, not Luther. Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung has now been masterfully translated into English by Lawrence Rosenwald in collaboration with Everett Fox, both of whom have written about the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible in the past. Scripture and Translation retains the sequence and format of the German volume, while adding valuable glossing and bibliographic notes to literary and Judaic sources, as well as a careful index. Both Fox and Rosenwald add introductory essays that draw upon their particular expertise in order to contextualize the Buber-Rosenzweig method and their Bible from different angles. Fox provides historical background, and relates the project to the authors' philosophical and...