Byron and the Jews (review)

In Byron and the Jews, Sheila Spector, who has edited three essay collections on Romanticism and the Jews, sets out to discuss why George Gordon Byron is the British Romantic author most frequently translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. She describes the translation of Byron’s poetry as one more instance of the Jewish tradition of allegoresis (“[t]he Hebrew root for ‘translate,’ targem, also means ‘to interpret’ ” [175]). Hebrew Melodies is the poem most frequently translated or allegorized, but the other poems repeatedly taken up have been Childe Harold (Canto I, 1812), The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), Darkness (1816), Manfred (1817), Mazeppa (1819), Cain (1821), and Heaven and Earth (1821). Don Juan does not form part of this Jewish canon. Spector offers a valuable twenty-page appendix of the translations discussed and transcribes thirty poems in Hebrew and Yiddish by fifteen translators, along with a full bibliography of primary and secondary sources, in a clearly and tastefully designed book.

The “Jewish” response was, as Spector carefully demonstrates, split between Hebrew and Yiddish speakers. Except in religious usage, “Hebrew, the historical language of the Jews, was functionally dead” (11). Yiddish, associated with illiteracy, was the social language for both groups, but there was uncertainty that it could be made adequate to scholarly purposes. Spector notes that “The early Jewish Byronists were all committed Hebraists” (55), part of the early secular movement to develop Hebrew as a modern working language. When Byron emerged onto the European scene, the Jewish Enlightenment had already produced figures such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) who saw the need to bring Jewish society into the modern world by educating their children in the vernacular within the state system. This was unlike the tradition of confining such education to the development of a rabbinical elite through the study of Hebrew texts. Yiddish communities, especially after the pogroms of the 1880s had marked the failure of assimilation, chose to remain autonomous within the Diaspora, and this tradition stressed the mystical interpretation of ancient texts (Hasidism) rather than the rationalism of the Haskalah.

All these questions were repeatedly confronted as European culture itself was transformed by revolution, socialism, and the post-WWII dispensation of power. The co-opting of Byron may thus be seen as part of a strategy to give Jews a national identity independent of any religious foundation, and Byron scholars used to reading Hebrew Melodies in the context of Burns, Scott, and Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, will find this a recognizable signpost. Seen in the light of Jewish culture, though, it becomes more than local colour or sentimental lyricism.

However, Jewish culture had its own effect on Byron himself. Initially, in response to the request of the composer Isaac Nathan for lyrics, Byron had sent him only a few, but subsequently the poet “was so entranced with the how the musical settings deepened and even transformed ‘She Walks in Beauty’ into ‘an Invocation of the Muse,’ that he extended the project” (45). Jewish thought also offered Byron a concept that reified his own situation—what became known as genius. In 1795, Isaac D’Israeli had published his Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, where the Jewish concept of genius was denoted by the term illuy—“the young prodigy who was groomed for a position of intellectual leadership in the community” (27). During the early Childe Harold years, Byron read and re-read D’Israeli’s Essay, and his annotations were passed on by John Murray to D’Israeli, who published a second edition in 1818; this too was read and annotated by Byron, after which D’Israeli expanded it into a third edition in 1822. In its first form the Essay complained of the lack of British interest in literary culture: “D’Israeli’s solution was to suggest, in effect, that the British become more like the Jews” (28). Later, he “refocused the opening chapters from a discussion of the place of the literati within a national context to their supernational literary character...