The Podcast of Jewish Ideas · Torah in Motion

62. The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible | Dr. Abigail Gillman

·1 hr·5 clips

Buber and Rosenzweig replaced God's name with 'He' in capital letters, a provocative move that rejected Mendelssohn's distant 'Eternal One'.

This episode explores the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation, a landmark German translation of the Hebrew Bible by philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Host JJ Kimri interviews Dr. Abigail Gillman, a professor of Hebrew and German literature who authored a history of German-Jewish Bible translation. Dr. Gillman explains that German Jews produced an unusually high number of Bible translations, with Moses Mendelssohn's 1780s translation initiating a "translation revolution" to culturally elevate Jews. She outlines a tradition where each generation reacted against the prior one, from Mendelssohn's followers to the monumental 19th-century works of Ludwig Philippson and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Buber and Rosenzweig entered this field in the 1920s, aiming not to bring the text to the reader but to transform the reader's relationship to the text. Their collaboration began when publisher Lambert Schneider asked Buber to revise Martin Luther's translation, but they soon started anew. Rosenzweig, who translated medieval Hebrew poetry, and Buber, known for translating Hasidic tales and Chinese philosophy, brought distinct approaches. The translation's principal features include a unique page layout formatted into "breathing units" resembling a modernist poem, with verse numbers removed to emphasize orality. They employed a *Leitwort* (leading word) method, consistently translating Hebrew roots to make repetitions audible in German. Names like "Chawa" (Eve) were Hebraicized in the German text and glossed for meaning, such as "Chawa, Leben" (Eve, life). They rendered the divine name not as "the Eternal" (Mendelssohn's choice) but with capitalized masculine pronouns ("Er," "Ihn"). Dr. Gillman notes Rosenzweig critiqued Mendelssohn's "the Eternal" as overly distant, arguing "Adonai" implies an intimate, personal God. The working papers, studied by scholars like Donna Rubenstein, reveal they consulted Midrash, Rashi, and prior translations extensively despite promoting a "foreignizing" result. Bertha Pappenheim, who produced her own Genesis translation, notably commented on the gendered pronouns in Buber-Rosenzweig's text. The translation was completed by Buber in the 1960s after Rosenzweig's 1929 death, with some controversial word choices softened in a later edition. A surprising insight is that Buber and Rosenzweig's target audience faced the opposite problem of Mendelssohn's era: German Jews knew German too well, making scripture feel stale. Their goal was to "jolt" readers, using techniques like translating "korban" (sacrifice) as "bringing near" to recover an experiential meaning. The tone is educational and conversational, delving into scholarly details of translation theory and German-Jewish intellectual history. Listeners interested in biblical translation, modern Jewish thought, or German-Jewish culture would find this episode compelling, while those seeking a broad philosophical overview might prefer a more general discussion.

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