The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation

Preface

preface This monograph provides the first sustained analysis of Bible translation in Jewish philosophy. It conceives of translation as the originary practice of Jewish philosophy, functioning as the means both to domesticate philosophy and philosophize domesticity. Although all Jewish philosophy ultimately emerges from a series of encounters with the biblical narrative, surprisingly little work has been done on the translative act that makes these encounters possible in the first place. To analyze this translative activity in Jewish philosophy, I examine some of the most important names that emerge from the longue dur ée of Jewish philosophical writing: Saadya Gaon (882–942), Moses ibn Ezra (ca. 1060–ca. 1139), Maimonides (1138–1204), Judah Messer Leon (ca. 1425–ca. 1495), Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), Martin Buber (1878– 1965), and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). All these individuals wrote philosophical treatises devoted specifically to justifying the translation of the biblical narrative into new linguistic or conceptual idioms. Rather than localize this study to a thick description of one particular era or individual thinker, my monograph considers these treatises as a whole: comparing them, contrasting them, and putting them in counterpoint so as to illumine something of the nature of translation and its cognate activities in Jewish philosophy. The Invention of Jewish Identity is a historico-­ philosophical study. I maintain that philosophical questions and answers are inseparable from the historical and cultural milieux in which they arise and in which they are reflected upon. At the same time, however, I use the empirical-­ historical narrative as a way to articulate my own philosophical and literary reflections on translation. Although my base narrative seeks to explicate philosophical treatises justifying translations of the Bible in specific contexts, such contexts become the points of departure for larger and more universal sets of issues. In this regard, I intend for my own analysis to become another voice that emerges from and is in conversation with earlier voices. x preface This study also works on the assumption that the translation of the Bible is qualitatively different from the translation of other works in Jewish philosophy.1 The biblical text, after all, is the perceived ground of Jewish existence, that from which all other principles (e.g., halakhah, memory, ritual, holy days) are ultimately seen to derive; as revelation, it becomes the rupture of the divine speech into the world, the call to which humans must reach out.2 As temporal caesura, the Bible ostensibly reveals a different reality that is beyond time and whose language, Hebrew, represents reality’s touchstone. The history of Jewish philosophy—as indeed of the history of Judaism as a whole—is a series of engagements with the biblical narrative. And because these engagements take place in time, Bible translations reveal to us something of the struggles over assimilation, integration , and separation that constantly confronted Jews as minorities. The translative act thus becomes one of the primary causal factors or agents that facilitates and powers the struggle for identity. One of the great paradoxes is that as an attempt to translate the perceived eternality of the Bible’s chiaroscuro into other idioms, translation paradoxically succeeds in temporalizing language and thus the biblical texture. Translation’s greatest struggle is with temporal situatedness or thrownness, forcing us to confront the human condition where it is most fragile. One of the major themes of this study is that despite all attempts to rescue or resuscitate Hebrew through translation,3 this act often succeeded in making Hebrew into a palimpsest that could be glimpsed only through the veil of another language. In its sacrality, Hebrew paradoxically ceased to be a real language; it became little more than a specter that translation keeps forever out of reach.4 In all these formations, Judaism is actively produced in a way that is contingent upon the category of the non-­ Jewish. This is not in some Hegelian sense in which “the Jew” derives its meaning by opposition to “the non-­ Jew”; rather, the very techniques, methods, and languages responsible for imagining diverse Jewish identities are ultimately non-­ Jewish. Rather than uphold reified borders between “Jewish” and “non-­ Jewish”— borders that are often constructed and projected retroactively—I here prefer to examine their fluidity. In so doing, I contend that the project to­ extend knowledge of “Judaism” (via, for example, Bible translation) succeeds in othering Judaism to itself, so that ultimately the very goal of maintaining Jewishdistinctivenessendsupcollapsinguponitself.Indeed,through all these permutations the category of “Judaism” remains beautifully and necessarily unstable. It is upon...