The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations Isaac Edward Salkinson’s Ithiel the Cushite of Venice and Ram and Jael A Bilingual Edition and Commentary Lily Kahn First published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London GowerStreet London WC1E 6BT Available to download free:www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Lily Kahn, 2017 Images courtesy of Lily Kahn, 2017 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Lily Kahn, The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations . London, UCL Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911307976 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 99- 0 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 98- 3 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 97- 6 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1- 911576- 00- 6 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1- 911576- 01- 3 (mobi) DOI:https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781911307976 This book is dedicated with love to Panda. vii Acknowledgements I wish to express my very deepest gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for generously funding the fellowship that led to the production of this volume. I am extremely grateful to the staff at UCL Press, in particular Lara Speicher, Chris Penfold, and Jaimee Biggins, for their support of the volume from its incep- tion through the writing, submission, and production process. My warmest thanks go to Ada Rapoport-Albert for her continual encourage- ment, as well as for generously giving of her time to review the entire volume and make countless positive contributions to it. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reader for providing a number of extremely helpful comments. Special thanks are due to Sacha Stern for his support of the project, and to Shai Heijmans, Tsila Ratner, Aaron Rubin, Andrea Schatz, and Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi for their invaluable discus- sion sessions and help with individual portions of the research. Finally, I am eternally grateful to James Holz for his ceaseless support and numerous insightful suggestions. ix Contents Introduction 1 1 The historical and literary background to the first Hebrew Shakespeare translations 1 2 Isaac Edward (Eliezer) Salkinson’s life and works 3 3 Salkinson’s Shakespeare translations 9 3.1 Publication and reception 9 3.2 Translation style 13 3.2.1 Domestication 14 3.2.1.1 Names 16 3.2.1.2 Christian references 16 3.2.1.3 Classical mythology 17 3.2.1.4 Other non- Jewish cultural elements 18 3.2.1.5 Shibbu ṣ 18 3.2.1.6 Foreign-language material 19 3.2.2 Poetry 20 3.2.3 Hebrew language 21 3.3 Salkinson’s source text edition 22 4 This edition of Ithiel the Cushite of Venice and Ram and Jael 23 4.1 The Hebrew text 23 4.2 The English back-translation 23 4.3 The commentary 25 Ithiel the Cushite of Venice 27 Preface 27 Letter from the translator to the publisher 73 The names of the speakers 76 x Contents First Part 78 Second Part 129 Third Part 175 Fourth Part 225 Fifth Part 267 Ram and Jael 301 Letter to the translator 301 Message from the translator 307 The names of the speakers 312 First Part 314 Second Part 374 Third Part 417 Fourth Part 476 Fifth Part 502 References 535 1 Introduction 1 The historical and literary background to the first Hebrew Shakespeare translations The first Hebrew Shakespeare translations are a product of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, a hugely influential social and intellectual movement that emerged in Berlin in the 1770s around the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and his circle. The Haskalah evolved under the influence of the gen- eral European Enlightenment but with a specific focus on Jewish issues. Maskilim, adherents of the Haskalah, sought to promote greater integration of Jews into their European host societies with a view towards eventual emancipation. To this end they advocated educational reform, including engagement with science, math- ematics, European languages, and other subjects that had been absent from the traditional Ashkenazic (Northern, Central, and Eastern European Jewish) educa- tional system, which was dedicated solely to study of the canonical Jewish texts with a focus on the Babylonian Talmud. A central element of the Maskilic project was the creation of a modern literary culture in Hebrew including genres that had not previously existed among Ashkenazic Jewry. Early Maskilic literary production consisted primarily of critical essays, poetry, and some drama (Pelli 1979). At the time Hebrew was not a spoken language, having died out in the early centuries ce and remaining more or less solely a literary medium until its revernacularization in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Palestine (Sáenz-Badillos 1993). The Maskilim selected Hebrew as the chief vehicle of their literary project due to its central and venerable status in Jewish society as the language of its main reli- gious, legal, and philosophical writings (Pelli 1979: 73–108; Shavit 1993; Schatz 2009; Eldar 2016). They typically expressed a preference for Biblical Hebrew over postbiblical varieties of the language, regarding the biblical stratum as the purest 2 The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations form (Shavit 1993: 117–18) – although not all early Maskilim supported a strictly purist biblical style (Schatz 2009 ). They rejected Yiddish, the Central and Eastern European vernacular, and sought to replace it with German as the Jews’ spoken language (Shavit 1993: 114–15; Eldar 2016: 29). Over the course of the following decades, the Haskalah spread into Galicia and then further east into czarist Russia, where it gave rise to a much more extensive body of Hebrew literature including novels, short stories, novellas, and plays (Patterson 1988) in addition to a thriving press and other forms of non-fiction. Maskilic fiction included both original com- positions and translations of European literature, mainly German or, in the later decades of the Haskalah, Russian (Toury 2012: 133, 162–72). The popularity of translations during the Haskalah was a product of the desire to expand the Hebrew literary canon (Toury 2012: 165), as in other cultures with newly emerging literary models (Even- Zohar 1990 : 47). Considering Shakespeare’s status as one of the most highly regarded authors in the European canon, it is unsurprising that the early Maskilim became inter- ested in his work as part of their drive to develop a new Hebrew literature based on European models. Shakespeare’s particular eminence in Germany is especially relevant in this context both because of the great admiration for his work expressed by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe – whom the Maskilic authors held in extremely high esteem – and because most Maskilim accessed and translated European litera- ture through German intermediaries, with few of them trained in other European languages (Almagor 1975: 721–6; Toury 2012: 162–72). The early decades of the Haskalah saw the first attempt to translate Shakespeare into Hebrew, a rendition of fi fteen lines of a speech by King Henry IV from Henry IV Part Two (via German) that appeared in a book on biblical poetics (Levisohn 1816 ). The translated excerpt was intended to serve as an example of the concept of the apostrophe (Toury 2012 : 171). Following this initial effort, there was a gap of twenty-five years before any further Shakespeare extracts appeared in Hebrew. Between the 1840s and 1870s, a small number of Maskilic writers produced half a dozen fragmentary transla- tions, mostly monologues and all via German versions. These fragments include three excerpts from Hamlet ; the first, by Fabius Mieses, was composed in 1842 but remained unpublished until 1891; the second, by Naphtali Poper Krassensohn, appeared in the Maskilic periodical Kokheve Yi ṣ ḥ aq in 1856; and the third, by the prominent Hebrew literary figure Peretz Smolenskin, consists of four short extracts embedded in his novel The Joy of the Godless , which was published in the liter- ary journal HaSha ḥ ar in 1872. There were also two excerpts from Macbeth ; the first appeared in an article by Joshua Steinberg published in 1868 in the Maskilic periodical HaKarmel ; the second was translated by an S. Medliger and published in the periodical Ha ʽ et in 1871. Finally, an extract based on Herder’s version of a song from Cymbeline was translated by Simon Bacher and published in Kokheve 3 Introduction Yi ṣ ḥ aq in 1862. 1 As Toury (2012: 171–2) observes, these fragments did very little to familiarize Maskilic readers with Shakespeare’s work or to establish a position for him within the nascent Hebrew literary library: with the exception of Peretz Smolenskin, the translators were all minor or unknown literary figures, the transla- tions were typically published in relatively peripheral journals, and some of them (such as those of Smolenskin) were further obscured by appearing embedded within novels or articles. This early period of marginal Hebrew Shakespeare translation ended with the publication of Isaac Edward Salkinson’s Hebrew version of Othello, Ithiel the Cushite of Venice (Vienna, 1874). Salkinson’s Ithiel marked the beginning of a new era in the story of Shakespeare in Hebrew because it was the first rendition of a complete play to appear in the language and the first to gain widespread critical attention in Maskilic literary circles. In addition, it was the first Hebrew Shakespeare version to be translated directly from the English original, constituting a departure from the earlier practice of indirect translation via German. Salkinson’s translations were thus the first to bring the English and Hebrew texts into a direct dialogue with each other, in contrast to the previous versions, which were shaped by the inter- pretive filter of the German intermediary. This is significant not only in the imme- diate context of early Hebrew Shakespeare translation, but in that of translated nineteenth-century Hebrew literature in more general terms, as throughout this period English literature in Hebrew was typically mediated via German, and the distinction between direct and indirect translation was relatively unknown (Toury 2012 : 165– 73). Salkinson’s pivotal role in the history of Hebrew Shakespeare translation is rooted in his singular biographical circumstances, which will be dis- cussed in Section 2 . 2 Isaac Edward (Eliezer) Salkinson’s life and works Biographical information on Salkinson, in particular his early years, is relatively scant. He is believed to have been born in 1820 as Isaac Eliezer Salkinson in a small village near Shklov, a town in present-day Belarus that was then part of the Russian Empire. His father is thought to have been a poor scholar who was unsuccessful in securing a rabbinical post but served for a time as a judge in a rabbinical court in Shklov (Zitron 1925: 37–8); while some sources (e.g., Lapide 1984: 92) identify him as the Hebrew poet Solomon Salkind (1806–68), there does not seem to be any clear basis for this. Salkinson’s father was married twice. He had three chil- dren with his first wife, of whom Salkinson was the youngest. He and his first wife 1 See Almagor ( 1975 : 769– 71) and Toury ( 2012 : 171) for bibliographic details of these early fragmentary Hebrew Shakespeare translations, and Almagor (1975: 737–9) for a short discussion of them. 4 The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations were divorced sometime during Salkinson’s childhood; he subsequently remar- ried and had another two children (Zitron 1925: 38). According to the only book- length biography of Salkinson (Cohen 1942: 12), his family life was unhappy and he was cruelly treated by his stepmother. The same account states that Salkinson’s mother died when he was seven and his father may have died around ten years later; by contrast, according to the short biographical sketch appearing in Dunlop (1894: 373), his father died seven years before his mother. Salkinson received a traditional Jewish education, which included study of the classical sources (the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and especially the Talmud), and gained a reputation as an ilui , an outstanding scholar (Zitron 1925: 38). Like other Eastern European Jews of the period, his native vernacular was Yiddish. When Salkinson was sixteen or seventeen he is believed to have left home and settled in Mogilev, a larger city in present-day Belarus, where he continued his studies of the traditional Jewish sources until he was forced into hiding at the house of an innkeeper in a nearby village in order to avoid being conscripted into the czar- ist army (Zitron 1925: 39–41). While in the village, the innkeeper introduced him Figure 1 Isaac Edward (Eliezer) Salkinson (1820– 83) 5 Introduction to a man who exposed him to the Maskilic principle of secular education in addi- tion to Torah study and encouraged him to study medieval Hebrew literature as well as the Talmud (Zitron 1925: 42–3). The innkeeper wanted Salkinson to marry his granddaughter, and when Salkinson refused his host attempted to prevent him from leaving the village. Salkinson’s Maskilic friend helped him to obtain a travel permit and escape the village (Zitron 1925: 43–9). He travelled to Minsk and from there to Vilna, where he was introduced to Chayim Zalman Eliashevitz, a Maskil who took him in and introduced him to key Maskilic ideologies and texts. Under Eliashevitz’s guidance he studied Hebrew grammar, Moses Mendelssohn’s influ- ential Judeo- German Bible translation, and the German and Russian languages. While Salkinson did not take to the study of Russian and abandoned it after a short time (Zitron 1925: 49), he immersed himself in the study of German language and literature with the intention of travelling to Germany to pursue further educa- tion (Cohen 1942: 18). While in Vilna he fell in love with Eliashevitz’s daughter, but she did not return his affections, preferring a rabbinical student who used to frequent Eliashevitz’s house (Zitron 1925 : 50). According to Zitron, the rabbini- cal student would write Hebrew poetry for her, which impressed both her and her father. Apparently jealousy of his competitor spurred Salkinson to make his first attempt at literary translation into Hebrew, a rendition of the first act of Schiller’s drama Kabale und Liebe called ואהבה נכלים ‘Deceit and Love’ (Zitron 1925: 50), which does not seem to have survived. While Eliashevitz and his Maskilic associ- ates were impressed with the translation, it did not have the desired effect of win- ning over Eliashevitz’s daughter, and the rejection caused Salkinson to leave Vilna (Zitron 1925:50). Lacking a foreign travel permit, he crossed the Prussian border illegally and made his way to Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), from whence he planned to continue on to Berlin (Zitron 1925: 52– 3). The subsequent turn of events is somewhat unclear. According to Zitron ( 1925 : 53), while working at the Königsberg port in order to make money for his trip to Berlin he met a converted Jewish ship’s captain who offered him free passage to London and persuaded him that it would be easier for him to continue his studies there. By contrast, Dunlop ( 1894 : 373) states that he decided to go the United States in order to train under a ‘celebrated rabbi’ and stopped off in London on the way. Regardless of the circumstances of his journey, it is clear that Salkinson arrived in London in the late 1840s. According to Zitron (1925: 53–4), the ship’s captain arranged for him to be taken to the London Missionary Society, an organization that was engaged in, among its many international missionary projects, convert- ing London Jews to Christianity. At some point following this initial encounter Salkinson converted to Christianity, allegedly under the influence of an elderly con- verted Jewish couple who took him in, showed him hospitality, and encouraged him in his educational ambitions (Zitron 1925: 60–5; Cohen 1942: 21–3). Salkinson is one of a number of Eastern European Jewish translators and scholars to convert to 6 The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations Christianity under missionary auspices in this period. 2 Following his conversion, Salkinson completed a four-year course at the college of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews, subsequently becoming a missionary of the British Society in Scotland while training as a Presbyterian minister in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He received his ordination in Glasgow in 1859 (Dunlop 1894: 373). Around this time Salkinson began to engage in earnest with his interest in Hebrew translation. In an autobiographical sketch published in Dunlop (1894: 373), he recalls how upon first encountering the New Testament – in a Hebrew transla- tion – he felt the need for ‘a version in idiomatic Hebrew’. Having acquired Greek language skills as part of his seminary training, he translated the Epistle to the Romans into Hebrew (Salkinson 1855 – although Salkinson himself cites a pub- lication date of 1853). This was followed by a Hebrew translation of Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation: A Book for the Times (Walker 1841), an American mission- ary tract; the translation was commissioned by Salkinson’s fellow students at the United Presbyterian Seminary and was published in 1858. Dunlop (1894: 375–7) contains details of this book and Salkinson’s Hebrew translation of it. At some point he married a younger Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity and the couple had two children (Kamianski as cited in Zitron 1925: 71), but there is little additional information in this respect other than that his wife was ‘his invaluable helpmate in the Mission Field’ (Dunlop 1894: 382). At this time Salkinson returned to literary translation, following a sugges- tion by his converted Jewish colleague Christian David Ginsburg that he produce a Hebrew version of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Dunlop 1894: 374). He began his transla- tion in 1861 and completed it in 1870, when it was published with Ginsburg’s assis- tance under the title of האדם את ויגרש ‘So He Drove Out the Man’ 3 Reverend Joseph Rawson Lumby, Norrisian Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, commented (in Dunlop 1894: 377) that Salkinson’s Hebrew translation ‘sets forth Christian teach- ing almost as definitely as does the Apostles’ Creed’. This contrasts sharply with Salkinson’s later Shakespeare translations, in which he typically omits or Judaizes Christian elements, as discussed in Section 3.2.1. At some point after Salkinson completed his studies in Scotland, the British Society posted him to Pressburg (present-day Bratislava), where there was a large Jewish community, in order to pursue his missionary activities there among his for- mer coreligionists (Cohen 1942: 23). In 1876 he was transferred to Vienna, which 2 See Dunlop ( 1894 ) for a compilation of biographical sketches of Jewish converts to Christianity in Victorian Britain; see Ruderman ( 2015 ) for a discussion of the nineteenth- century missionary activity of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, focusing on the central figure of Alexander McCaul. See also Endelman (1987). 3 This title is a citation of the beginning of Gen. 3:24, in which God drives Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden after they eat from the tree of knowledge. See Dikman (in Salkinson 1874/2015: 234–5) for a brief discussion of Salkinson’s translation of Paradise Lost 7 Introduction at the time was a pivotal hub of Maskilic literary culture, serving as the home of various major Hebrew writers (mostly émigrés from czarist Russia) and journals including the influential HaSha ḥ ar , the chief forum for late nineteenth-century Hebrew literature (Holtzman 2010). In Vienna Salkinson met and became friends with Peretz Smolenskin, the Russian-born editor of HaSha ḥ ar and an extremely prominent author of Maskilic Hebrew prose fiction. During his time in Vienna Salkinson seems to have spent a great deal of time associating with members of the Maskilic Hebrew literary circles, befriending well-known authors such as Judah Leib Gordon and Abraham Baer Gottlober; indeed, Zitron (1925: 67), who met Salkinson during his years in Vienna, suggests that this activity was more impor- tant to him than his missionary work. Hebrew writers who were acquainted with him seem to have regarded him as honest and upstanding, with a true love for the Hebrew language, and to have respected him (while simultaneously holding him in suspicion) for his openness regarding his missionary activities (Cohen 1942: 38). Smolenskin had a longstanding desire to see Shakespeare’s plays in Hebrew, but lacked the English skills to conduct a translation from the original himself. Upon meeting Salkinson, who was a fluent English speaker and had experience with liter- ary translation into Hebrew, he saw the rare opportunity for this dream to be fulfilled and commissioned him to translate an entire play, Othello. Salkinson’s acceptance of this commission is likely to have been rooted in his longstanding passion for literary translation, as well as in his evident desire to maintain a foothold in the Maskilic Hebrew cultural world despite his conversion. His Othello translation, entitled Ithiel the Cushite of Venice , was published in Vienna in 1874 with a lengthy preface by Smolenskin. This preface is itself a remarkable piece of early Hebrew Shakespeare criticism, which makes for fascinating reading in its own right. In it, Smolenskin analyses Shakespeare’s significance as a playwright and provides a psychological assessment of the characters appearing in the play, with a particular focus on Ithiel (Othello), Doeg (Iago), Phichol (Brabantio), and Asenath (Desdemona); in addi- tion, he evaluates the ways in which the play’s themes are particularly relevant and instructive for a Jewish audience, and argues for his vision of good literature as a vehicle for the depiction of human nature in all its moral complexity. The motivation behind Salkinson’s and Smolenskin’s selection of Othello as opposed to other Shakespearean works is unclear. Scolnicov (2001) proposes that the subject matter of Othello was particularly appealing to Salkinson because he identified with the protagonist’s liminal status as a foreigner and convert. This was followed by a translation of Romeo and Juliet , called Ram and Jael , published in 1878. 4 Again, there is no explicit reason given for the selection of this par- ticular play. Gilulah (2013: 50) suggests that the choice of Othello followed by 4 See Section 3.1 for further details of the publication and reception of these two translations. 8 The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations Romeo and Juliet hints at a particular interest in the themes of jealousy and love. (If so, perhaps this interest was inspired by Salkinson’s memories of his love for Eliashevitz’s daughter and his unsuccessful rivalry for her affections.) During this time, Salkinson also rendered Christoph August Tiedge’s early nineteenth- century German poetic work Urania into Hebrew at the request of the Reverend Jellinek in Vienna (Dunlop 1894: 374); the translation was published in 1877. Apparently he also translated Byron’s 1815 volume Hebrew Melodies into Hebrew, but this does not seem to have survived (Oz in Salkinson 1878/2016: 190). Despite his obvious affinity for Maskilic cultural activity, Salkinson’s autobio- graphical sketch and letters to John Dunlop – secretary of the British Society – pre- dictably paint a very different picture of his time in Vienna, focusing on his attempts to convert the local Jews to Christianity while downplaying his work as a liter- ary translator. Salkinson (in Dunlop 1894: 380–2) describes visits to the Temple Library in Vienna, where he attended lectures on Midrash and the Hebrew Bible in an attempt to raise the issue of the Messiah with the Jewish audience, his discus- sions with a Jewish doctor with whom he discussed the tenets of Christianity, and a friend from Breslau who converted under his influence. Nevertheless, regardless of such efforts Salkinson did admit that he felt translation to be his chief purpose in life, stating that ‘Hebrew translation seemes [sic] to be the only talent given to me, and it I have consecrated to the Lord’ (Dunlop 1894: 382). It is thus unsurprising that even within the context of his missionary work, Salkinson’s most memorable achievement was in the realm of translation. The British Society, like Smolenskin, recognized his singular talent in this area and in 1877 commissioned him to pro- duce a Hebrew version of the New Testament. In his autobiographical sketch (Dunlop 1894: 375) he notes: ‘I undertook the work with delight, the more so since many learned Jews repeatedly expressed to me their astonishment that I had not undertaken it long ago.’ Salkinson seems to have intended to continue juggling his Hebrew literary translation with his missionary activities. In the preface to Ram and Jael , Smolenskin puts forth his vision for a complete series of Hebrew Shakespeare plays translated by Salkinson. However, this dream was to go unrealized. According to the Hebrew writer David Isaiah Silberbusch (1936), following publication of Ram and Jael a fel- low converted Jew called Josephus, who had taken a dislike to Smolenskin and was offended at his comparison of Shakespeare’s work to the Holy Scriptures (made in the preface to Salkinson’s Ithiel ), took his anger out on Salkinson by reporting him to the British Society for neglecting his missionary work and New Testament commission while instead spending his time translating Shakespeare into Hebrew. The British Society dismissed Salkinson from his post for a year and banned him from returning until he had completed his New Testament translation. While Salkinson, unsurprisingly, does not reference this incident directly in his auto- biographical sketch, there is perhaps a veiled allusion to it when he says: ‘Under