Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress

College Commons

Understanding bible translations as a key to Jewish history. Leonard J. Greenspoon holds the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University, where he is also Professor of Theology and of Classical & Near Eastern Studies. Greenspoon is the editor of the 32-volume (and counting) Studies in Jewish Civilization series. He has also written five other books, in addition to his most recent one on Jewish Bible translations. Additionally, he has served on translation committees for five versions. In 2018, Greenspoon was the recipient of a Festschrift: Found in Translation: Essays on Jewish Bible Translation in Honor of Leonard J. Greenspoon. At the 2019 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, he was the featured scholar honored in a section titled “Wisdom of the Ages.” For 2020, Greenspoon was named researcher of the year at Creighton. Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, "Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. Greenspoon profiles many Jewish translators—among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon—framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked. He differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, he shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible.