Resisting Modernity: Jewish Translations of Scripture and Rabbinic Literature in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Italy

The translation of traditional religious texts into modern languages is a defining feature of Jewish modernization.¹ As changes in patterns of Jewish learning took place under the influence of secular scholarship, Jews set out to render their religious literature into modern idioms. Beginning in Germany in the eighteenth century, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) translated portions of the Bible to encourage the replacement of the Judeo-German dialect by High German.² Prayer books were rendered into German as the modern custom of vernacular worship was introduced in synagogues.³ In the nineteenth century, translations of the Talmud were initiated in order to accurately represent its “morals and ethics” to Christian readers.⁴ Thus, not only did these translations serve intra-Jewish educational purposes, they also made the Jews’ particular understanding of their heritage available to those outside the community.

In most pre-Unitarian Italian states Catholic censorship afforded Jews little freedom to publish Italian translations of biblical books or rabbinic literature.⁵ The gradual relaxation of church censorship throughout the developing Kingdom of Italy made a complete translation of the Hebrew Bible possible.⁶ This project, initiated by Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) and completed by his students, was realized over the course of a decade as La Sacra Bibbia Volgarizzata da S. D. Luzzatto e Continuatori (The Holy Bible translated by S. D. Luzzatto and his successors; 4 vols., 1866–1875). The publication of a Jewish Bible in Italian was preceded by the printing of a work by Giuseppe Levi (1814–1874), a liberal intellectual and educator who had founded the periodical of Jewish culture and society L’Educatore Israelita in 1853. Levi’s Parabole, leggende e pensieri, raccolti dai libri talmudici (Parables, legends, and thoughts collected from the talmudic books; 1861; henceforth Parabole) made a large number of “gems and flowers” from the Talmud and Midrash available to Italian readers.⁷

Mario Toscano has explained modernization among Italian Jews as a process of Italianization—an absorption of Italian cultural models and values—and it is tempting to read these translations of Scripture and rabbinical texts as a literal Italianization of key documents of Jewish culture, a sign that Jews were fusing their status as Italian citizens with their religious and cultural identity.⁸ On closer examination, however, both translations are better interpreted as defensive measures. Although the translation of religious texts served the aims of modernization, the circumstances and the manner of translation of both the Luzzatto Bible and Parabole undermine the idea that these works were undertaken under the banner of modernity. In fact, they were conservative, even reactionary projects spurred by the activity of Christian missionaries.

At a moment when Italian Jews were reaping the benefits of citizenship, Italian Jewry was facing a crisis.⁹ In the newly unified nation, the Jewish community remained fragmented and its religious leadership failed to achieve cohesion on questions of religious reform that were debated at conferences in Ferrara (1863) and Florence (1867)—two exceptional moments when representatives of the Jewish communities throughout Italy assembled in one place—as well as in the Jewish press. In a rare demonstration of unity, conservatives and liberals, who decried the widespread use by Jews of Christian translations of the Bible distributed by foreign missionary societies, joined forces to support the publication of a Jewish translation under the auspices of the Rabbinical Seminary in Padua. But the project was not complemented outside the seminary by a spiritual revival or coordinated reform movement that might have revitalized Italian Judaism and, in fact, the completion of the translation coincided with the closing of the seminary in 1871.

Unlike the Luzzatto Bible, Giuseppe Levi’s anthology of rabbinic literature in translation was not a community undertaking; rather, the Piedmontese rabbi and journalist was motivated in part by his interactions with a local representative of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. This representative was a converted rabbi who had translated into Italian a critique of talmudic teachings, Alexander McCaul’s The Old Paths (1837), that served as a handbook for missionaries.¹⁰ Instead...