Byron and the Jews (review)

Sheila Spector's project began, she explains, when having "compiled a bibliography of Hebrew and Yiddish translations of British Romantic literature," she "to [her] surprise found that Byron was the most frequently cited writer. Given the unexpected results, [she] then determined to discover why approximately two dozen Jews, ranging from mid-nineteenth-century Europeans to modern Israelis and Americans, would all be attracted to a gentile poet considered even by his close friends to be 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know'" (p. 1). While Byron collaborated on or wrote in their entirety several texts on biblical and/or historical themes that would have readily attracted the notice of Jewish intellectuals and literati—most notably, Hebrew Melodies (1815), Cain (1821), and Heaven and Earth (1821)—translators did not limit themselves to these three texts, but also translated Canto 1 of Childe Harold (1812), The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), Mazeppa (1816), Darkness (1816), and Manfred (1817). Spector correctly characterizes all of these texts as "works that could be used in the construction of [the translator's] particular version of the new Jewish identity, consisting primarily of intellectual elitism, moral integrity and, except for the Zionists, a diasporean existence" (p. 6).

Although her focus is on the translations, which she discusses "as allegorical representations of the cultural struggles experienced by Ashkenazi Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (pp. 8-9), Spector spends some time thinking through other factors that might have overdetermined why Byron or someone like him would have the appeal that is evidenced by the number of translations of his works that were done. Byron as an individual was viewed as a friend of the Jews and also as someone who supported religious tolerance, arguing in the House of Lords, for example, in favor of Catholic emancipation. More generally, Byron's sense of his Scottish heritage and his preoccupation with his own and other cultural and national identities put into play a large network of associations and similarities for his Jewish translators, who were also dealing with matters of cultural and national identity.

To the extent that his Hebrew and Yiddish translators were aware of the problematic cultural milieu in which Byron wrote and the issues of identity of which he wrote, one can begin to see how what Spector characterizes as "translation . . . as an act of transplantation" was mobilized in order to attempt to fill "a lack in the importing culture" (p. 3). An additional concern was the modernization of the Jewish identity, initiated by the attempt on the part of European Jewry, at first led by Moses Mendelssohn, to attain Enlightenment, or Haskalah (pp. 9-19).

Spector's discussion of Byron's work with Isaac Nathan to produce Hebrew Melodies is fascinating, showcasing her keen ear as a liturgical scholar, finding antecedents in the Kaddish, the Yigdal, and "Ma'oz Ẓur," among others. The resonant characteristic of these translations is their inherent tension, arising out of Byron's "complex attitude toward Christianity" and Nathan's "complex relationship with Judaism." In the first set of twelve songs, nine of which have identifiable liturgical sources, this tension manifests in four oppositional themes: "faith versus reason; religious Zionism versus secular nationalism; messianic passivity versus social activism; and, finally, on the personal level, Jewish religion versus English identity" (p. 37). These are tensions that have persisted over time and inform discussions of Jewish identity and the imperative to act, or its lack, to this day.

Byron's value to Jewish culture was that of a writer whose work, translated into Hebrew or Yiddish, might be read with profit by those Jews seeking to resituate themselves in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. The first to undertake to translate Byron were the Maskilim of eastern Europe. Byron, for these young intellectuals, became a litmus test for whether secular literature had a place in the Jewish community, as well as a test case on the question of whether Hebrew could be reclaimed as "a functioning modern language" and replace Yiddish as "the everyday language of the...