Byron and the Jews (review)

Sheila Spector’s book is a serious one on a serious and important subject about which she knows a great deal. It would be better entitled The Jews and Byron, however, since it is mainly concerned with what educated Jews made of Byron from the time when Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible into German five years before Byron’s birth initiated their large-scale assimilation into Gentile cultures (‘the Haskalah’). Spector distinguishes three main movements, which form the three most important chapters in her book. These are, firstly, the Maskilim, who embraced major elements of Gentile culture by translating some major texts into Hebrew, then the Yiddishists, more avowedly secular, who translated some major texts into Yiddish, and finally the Zionists, who regarded both these earlier efforts as failures and returned to an image of Jewish separation but concentrated in the idea of Sion’s restoration.

Byron’s poetry, and to some extent his personality, were used by all three groups to further their causes. Hebrew Melodies, in particular, was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. Spector gives the Hebrew versions in an appendix, but these are also freely translated throughout. Byron had the gift of identification with places and people to such an extent that they often modified their own sense of identity. Something like this on a small scale happened with Byron and certain Jews. Byron’s interiorising of some basic Jewish themes in the Melodies, such as covenanted relationship, desecrated holy places and exile, provided a model for Jewish readers attempting a related interiorising of European culture. In this way Byron helped them to articulate ‘an alternative Jewish identity’. Byron’s good relations with Isaac Nathan, which extended so far as a personal invitation to dine with him (an action that shocked many at the time), and his cordial relations with Isaac D’Israeli, a ‘maskil’ by inclination, gave personal force to this intellectual linkage.

Spector gives a good and comprehensive account of Byron’s relations with Nathan and D’Israeli, but her main interest is in what the translations reveal about evolving Jewish attitudes to Gentile cultures. This has a literary as well as an historical interest for, as she convincingly demonstrates, the Hebraic resonances of Nathan’s settings are often in tension with or even opposed to Byron’s intended meanings. She puts it like this in two helpful sentences:

First, [Nathan] disconnects what had been a union of sound and sense, leaving each to be analyzed as an independent component. At the same time, by merging the religious music with the secular lyrics, he ironizes both, simultaneously imposing a religious implication onto Byron’s lyrics, while, in effect, profaning the sacred, demonstrating that music could be spiritual, even without its specifically religious content.

Spector has an intelligent interest in the nature of translation, and in the allegorical extension or transference of references across different cultures, though she accepts without reservation that Nathan’s settings are always and intrinsically subversive.

Apart from Hebrew Melodies, it was Cain and, more surprisingly, The Prisoner of Chillon that were most frequently translated, though Heaven and Earth, Manfred and parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were too. The Prisoner of Chillon, for example, was translated into Yiddish by Moisei Khashtshevatski, a Polish Communist, in 1937, ‘at the height of anti-Semitic purges’. Some of the comments made by the translators of Cain are particularly striking. Thus Yaakov Zevi (unknown apart from his unpublished translation of the poem into Hebrew) argues that Byron’s play is in the tradition of Jewish exegesis, which extends the contexts in which the text may be understood. He ‘cites numerous rabbinic authorities’ to substantiate his point. Byron’s poem is used to consolidate both religious and anti-religious positions. Spector has tracked down a whole series of literary translations that, without her dedication, would be little known. We can only be grateful to her.

The assimilation of Gentile culture by many Jews tends to assist a certain...