The Task of the Jewish Translator: A Valedictory Address

There is nothing more exalted than the task of the Jewish translator. Little children are inducted into the secrets of Sinai by the rote repetition of Torah-and-taytsh: VAYOYMER, un er hot gezogt, ADOYSHEM, got, EL MOYSHE, tsu Moyshe, LEYMER, azoy tsu zogn. In the beginning was not the word, but the word as mediated by the professional translator.

There is nothing more tedious and thankless than the task of the Jewish translator. Since your average Jewish author was multilingual, possessing as many as three internal languages, the translator must be a polyglot, possessing at least one external language to boot. The author gets all the glory. The translator gets all the blame.¹

Prooftexts launched the field of Jewish literary history, a new cross-discipline, based on a bold theory of translation. The newness of it was already evident in the choice of name. Whoever invented the word "prooftext"—Judah Goldin, perhaps, or Shalom Spiegel—must have been a genius, because it captures both the denotative meaning of the Aramaic asmakhta and the connotative stodginess of a technical term; it is a word that only scholars would use. By turning "prooftext" into a plural, however difficult it is to pronounce, and by adopting it as the title of a new journal, we, the eight founding editors,² added two new levels of meaning. We wished: (1) to signify a late-twentieth-century concern with issues of textuality; and (2) to underscore that this modern critical agenda was perfectly compatible with a predilection for hermeneutics and midrash. If our journal succeeded, then not only would an obscure term of Judaic "translatese" have become mainstreamed, but we would also have signaled the marriage of the modern with the classical, the renegotiation of modernity in light of our ancient and medieval heritage. Of course, things did not work out quite the way we planned. People asked whether the journal had something to do with proofreading. Local journalists who picked up the story of our founding complained that they had never heard of such a word; this, despite the translation that we so helpfully provided on the inside cover: "PROOFTEXTS : The scriptural passages used by the Rabbis to legitimate a new interpretation."

The word "prooftext" had a further, hidden advantage in that it is English-specific; it does not readily translate into another European language. Were le prooftext ever to make it into French parlance, for example, it would sound as exotic as asmakhta does to the Hebrew ear. English was both our medium and our message; both our target audience and our teleology. English, for us, meant the road to emancipation. English was also our state of exile. And English may someday prove to be our national liberation.

Twenty-five years ago, when Jewish studies was still the province of a few elite schools, there was no English-language journal in which to publish a serious scholarly article on Jewish-in-Jewish literature. The field of Jewish literary history did not yet exist. At best, one could publish an occasional essay on Shylock, on Rebecca in Ivanhoe, on Fagin, on Leopold Bloom—that is, on the image of the Jew in this literature or that. The critical writing on I. B. Singer was all done by people who read no Yiddish. The scope of Hebrew literature was defined by Robert Alter's reading habits. Holocaust literature consisted of what Lawrence Langer found in Widener Library shelved under the rubric of World War II. In the popular mind, Jewish was inherently funny, as in a button from the sixties that read "Proust Is a Yenta."

So to enter the closed world of English as a scholar of Jewish literary texts was nothing less than an act of emancipation. And, to up the ante, we insisted on adopting the English literary essay—as opposed to the German scholarly monograph—as our model. Readability, we cried, üuber alles! We delighted in puns, epigraphs, and pithy formulations. We aimed at a style that was free of jargon. We wrote initially for one another; an essay of interest to all the...