Judische deutsche Bibelubersetzungen vom ausgehenden 18.

• Author: Levenson, Alan T.

Judische deutsche Bibelubersetzungen vom ausgehenden 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.

By HANS JOACHIM BECHTHOLDT. Stuttgart: W. KOHLHAMMER, 2005. Pp. 682. [euro]60.

Nothing is more helpful to a reviewer than knowing the genre of the work under consideration. After wrestling with Bechtholdt's massive work, I am still not certain whether I am holding an encyclopedia of German-Jewish Bible translations from Mendelssohn to Buber-Rusenzweig, or a monograph on the ideology of rendering the modern Jewish Bible in what was the birthplace of modern Jewish studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and the site of the most numerous and varied translations of the Scriptures. On the basis of this Habilitationsschrift prepared for the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz, none of the author's colleagues will doubt his scholarly competence in Bible, Hebrew, or nineteenth-century German-Jewish history.

Although Bechtholdt insists that his is not a comprehensive list, anyone who covers Jakob Auer-bach, Simon Bernfeld, Martin Buber, Salomon Dubno, Julius Furst, Lazarus Goldschmidt, Salomon Herxheimer, Moses Mendelssohn, Ludwig Philippson, Gotthold Salomon, Harry Torczyner (Tur-Sinai), and Leopold Zunz can fairly claim to have discussed every significant work of German Jewish Bible translation. Bechtholdt profitably expends enormous energy describing the publication histories, physical layouts (size, language, absence/presence of notes and commentaries), translational choices of key words (including theophorics), prices, target audiences, and indebtedness to earlier translators. The handsomely laid-out, one-page synopses of these findings, provided for every one of the dozen translators listed above, is a gold mine of comparative information. One could easily imagine photocopying these Kurzbeschreibungen and the accompanying illustrations for a rich classroom session, even for non-German speakers.

This work also includes a judicious sampling of contemporary reactions. It is not a full-blown Rezeptionsgeschichte, nor does it claim to be, but the author succeeds in giving the reader the range of responses to these translations. I have found no errors in the numerous Hebrew texts or the one quote from Yiddish (p. 81). The excurses on Christian Meyer's reception of the Mendelssohn Bible (more below) and on the state of the de-christianized Luther Bible of 1840 are very interesting and present material very few scholars will have encountered. For anyone...