“A Third Reading”: The German, the Hebrew (the Arab)

In the Nachwort to his translations of Yehuda Halevi’s liturgical poems published in Berlin in 1927, Franz Rosenzweig writes about a certain element that makes the Hebrew poem so different, so foreign, and therefore so difficult to translate into German.¹ It is the prosodic element of Hebrew, what he calls “die stumme Silbe,” the silent syllable, which, he writes, was an original prosodic element developed by the Spanish Jewish writers in order to distinguish the Hebrew metrics from the prominent Arabic ones.² Rosenzweig refers here to the prosodic invention of the Hebrew poet Dunash Ben Labrath of the tenth century, introducing the quantitative metric system from Arabic into the world of Hebrew letters. Since Hebrew lacks a clear differentiation between long and short vocal movements that are common in Arabic, an equivalent prosodic order had to be developed in Hebrew—the order of yated and tenuah, based on combinations of regular and short syllables. What Rosenzweig defines here as “stumme Silbe” is the mobile shewa, a short and almost unheard vowel that was used for the construction of the yated. This “silent syllable” was a basis for the creation of a prosodic order, and was used for the creation of classical poems both in the profane and the sacred realms. It is thus a minor movement in language through which Hebrew poetry defined itself out of, against, and toward Arabic.³ Here was grounded, one should add, also one of the conditions under which Yehuda Halevi’s liturgical poem was written: in borrowing, adapting, and translating metrics, themes, and poetical figures from Arabic literature, Halevi created rich textures of poetic expression in Hebrew.⁴

However, in transforming this Hebrew prosodic order that is based on a minor difference from the Arabic, Rosenzweig argues, the translator brings “a new tone” into the German world of letters.⁵ The translation of the Hebrew liturgical poem thus also involves the creation of new metrical considerations in German. The modifications of the German classical rhythm caused by the translation of the Hebrew poem—which in itself, as we recall, is grounded in the Arabic tradition—are thus significant. It is not only a philological rapture that German experiences here, but also a metaphysical one: what is expressed in the modifications of the classical metrics, in the rhythmic raptures, in the caesura of the German poetical sentence, are the traces of the sacred itself. The translation from Hebrew causes the German language to become foreign, different from itself. The task of the translator, Rosenzweig writes, is “das Deutsche umzufremden,” making German into a foreign language.⁶ German thus experiences (through translation) a foreignness within itself—becoming other than itself. This moment of Absonderung—being rejected, being special, being unexpected, becoming irregular – is “holy.”⁷

Rosenzweig’s argument on the liturgical heritage of the Hebrew poem, endowing German (through translation) with a new tone and foreign voices, enriching its world with sacred names and expressions of messianic thought, is extraordinary. Yet the argument hints at the complexity of German Jewish thinking, at least since the age of the Enlightenment, in which the special role of Hebrew has often been reflected in philological and theological circles. What is remarkable, however, in Rosenzweig’s argument on the “weight” of this Hebrew “silent syllable” in creating a new theo-poetical texture in German, is that it reveals—actually by denying it—the critical role of Arabic in this Hebrew–German drama. For only through this minor difference between Hebrew and Arabic, the difference between עברי and ערבי, Ivri and Arvi, is a condition created for a radical change in the realm of German poetry.

The “minor difference” between Hebrew and Arabic was often considered as uncanny. It was Rosenzweig himself who noticed in writing (in German letters, of course) the danger involved in the Zionist enterprise of the revival of Hebrew as a secular language in Palestine.⁸ In his view, it is not only the forgetting of Jewish tradition and the “fanatic” way of renewal that threaten the future of Hebrew, but also its approximations with Arabic that constitutes a real danger. For...