Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine

In this volume, Naomi Seidman explores translation as a site for Jewish-Christian encounters. The translational relationship that connects and separates Judaism and Christianity is a particularly rich intersection, which should be viewed not from the perspective of linguistic transfers but rather as a map of a specific set of intellectual influences. The expression of how the translators saw themselves can contribute to understanding Jewish approaches to translation. Here, S’s main objective is to interpret the linguistic controversies of translation discourse (e.g. issues of translatability, the choice between word-for-word and sense-for-sense translation, the fidelity vs. treason dichotomy, and the translator’s invisibility) as religious and political questions.

Ch. 1 begins with the theological and translational problems of the Virgin Mary’s virginity—that is, questioning the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, the status of Jesus as a son of God, and the cultural meaning of virginity. This sexual-textual knot forms the center of the Jewish-Christian polemic over the perfection of the Septuagint in late antiquity: Christian orthodoxy insisted on the virgin birth and the emendation of the Septuagint (LXX) translation, whereas rabbinic Judaism denied both Mary’s virginity and the accuracy and canonicity of the Septuagint.

Ch. 2 is dedicated to the figure of Aquila whose word-for-word Greek Bible version, produced in the first half of the second century for use in the synagogue, replaced the Septuagint in the Jewish community after it had become the Bible of the Christian Church. Aquila attempted to reproduce as many features of the Hebrew text as possible and, thus, generated an unreadable text. In a more elaborate description, Christian theology has shaped the goal for sense-for-sense translational techniques for the greatest part of its history, literalism being stereotypically obscured as the Jewish position.

In Ch. 3, S argues that Martin Luther measured the distinctiveness of his own German-language translation of the Bible by its distance from the Hebrew style of the original and the Jewish exegetical tradition. Theological aims, grounded in a scientific apparatus (e.g. Christian Hebraica free of Jewish influence), provide a culturally neutral linguistic transparence. In Luther’s Bible, God speaks not only to the German folk but even as a German.

The study of German-Jewish culture through the lens of translation, as presented in Ch. 4, shows that the formulation of translation as a variety of cultural encounter served to conceal tensions and asymmetries in the German-Jewish translation project (exemplified by Jewish translations of the Bible into German from the eighteenth through the twentieth century as well as by Walter Benjamin’s model of an interlinear Bible translation).

The significance of translation in Holocaust discourse, affected by the polyglot nature of Jewish life and demanded by the international reception, is examined in Ch. 5. The Yiddish authors whose literary heritage depends upon translation may also be regarded as victims of the Holocaust. Ch. 6 explains a wide range of political and cultural circumstances that are obstacles in translating Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works into English.

In the epilogue, S raises some ethical questions, including the issue of whether mistranslation can tell another kind of truth.

The range of data makes this book an important contribution to the translational history of the world.