Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (review)

In the six meticulously researched chapters of Naomi Seidman’s Faithful Renderings, published by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Afterlives of the Bible Series, Seidman argues that the history of translations of Hebrew and Yiddish texts—from the Septuagint to Isaac Bashevis Singer—offers insight into questions of Jewish-Christian identity and difference. She reads translations with an eye to the contexts in which they were produced and circulated, rejecting the notion that Jewish translation is an essential phenomenon.

Each chapter of Faithful Renderings probes specific challenges posed throughout history for translators of Jewish material for non-Jewish audiences. The first four chapters, which detail the effects of Christian genealogical anxieties on the translation of Jewish texts, ground Seidman’s thesis that translation discourse mirrors Jewish-Christian tensions and polemics. The first chapter investigates the misinterpretations that permitted the patristic appropriation of Jewish sources for Christian purposes. But Seidman also invokes Jewish counter-accounts of the origins of the Septuagint to demonstrate that mistranslation can function as a tool of cultural and religious survival. Her argument is further developed in the second chapter, where she examines the fascinating figure of Aquila of Sinope, the second-century Jewish convert whose word-for-word rending of the Bible earned him the reputation as one of history’s worst translators. Aquila’s literalist, source-oriented approach contrasted with Christian preference for sense-for-sense translations, leading, Seidman maintains, to the association of literalism with Judaism and its consequent marginalization as a translational approach.

The third chapter examines Martin Luther’s reader-oriented approach to the Bible. Seidman argues that Luther’s naturalization of the Hebrew Bible as a German text made it a foundational text for modern translation practices and their ethnocentric approach. The fourth chapter investigates Jewish translations of the Bible into German through a comparison of Moses Mendelssohn’s Bible to the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible. Seidman is critical of Mendelssohn’s attempts to create a Jewish Enlightenment, but she also emphatically rejects the notion that the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible represents a true Jewish-German dialogue, arguing instead that it is the careful self-presentation of a minority group. Her argument here is indebted to postcolonial theory and postcolonial translation studies, in particular Homi Bhaba’s work on hybridity and colonial mimicry. These tools are quite effective, although she might have justified her use of them with reference to Jewish experience in the European diaspora.

In the fifth and perhaps most controversial chapter, Seidman revisits earlier work in Holocaust Studies to buttress her claim that the contemporary understanding of the Holocaust as an internationally recognizable event is a late creation that acquired its distinctive shape long after the event itself. She demonstrates how translation played an essential role in the shaping of some of the most widely read Holocaust narratives, including Anne Frank’s diaries, which were rejected by publishers both in the United States and abroad until the late 1950s.

Seidman details the challenges and perils of writing for a gentile audience,drawing particular attention to self-censorship. Her knowledge of Yiddish permits an intricate account of the translation history of Elie Wiesel’s Night.

A tense meeting in the 1950s between the devoutly Catholic French writer François Mauriac and the young journalist Wiesel led the latter to translate the Yiddish text Un di velt hot geshvign into French as La Nuit, the book later translated into English as Night. Following his meeting with Mauriac, Wiesel crafted a significantly shorter version of the Yiddish original, one that was less an indictment of people than of the Jewish God and was therefore more palatable to non-Jewish readers: “There are two survivors, then, a Yiddish and a French—or perhaps we should say one survivor who speaks to a Jewish audience and one whose first reader is a French Catholic” (p. 223). Seidman situates Wiesel’s rewritings within the long...