1 00:00:06,060 --> 00:00:16,950 So good afternoon. I'm Peter Bergman, and I want to welcome you to the second of our seminars in reconsidering early Jewish nationalist ideologies. 2 00:00:16,950 --> 00:00:23,760 Our guest today, I'm very, very thrilled to introduce to you. She's a colleague and a friend, Danielle Drury. 3 00:00:23,760 --> 00:00:28,860 I'll give you a little bit of her biography. Danielle teaches modern Hebrew literature here at Oxford. 4 00:00:28,860 --> 00:00:33,270 She holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University and has taught 5 00:00:33,270 --> 00:00:38,040 at the City University of New York and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 6 00:00:38,040 --> 00:00:43,230 Her research focuses on the ties between the literary translation and nationalism, 7 00:00:43,230 --> 00:00:50,400 bringing together contemporary theories of cultural transfer and the study of modern Hebrew literature. 8 00:00:50,400 --> 00:00:54,900 Her writing has appeared in several academic and popular publications, including Proof Text, 9 00:00:54,900 --> 00:01:01,110 A Journal of Jewish Literary History, DePauw, a literary journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 10 00:01:01,110 --> 00:01:04,410 And today she's going to talk to you about a subject which was very close to my mind, 11 00:01:04,410 --> 00:01:11,910 my heart and my my research also about Joseph Klausner and Yosef Klausner and translation Zionism and Christianity. 12 00:01:11,910 --> 00:01:17,160 So, Danielle, thank you. Thank you, Peter. OK, can you hear me? 13 00:01:17,160 --> 00:01:23,430 You can. Great. So thank you very much for inviting me to participate in the seminar. 14 00:01:23,430 --> 00:01:27,060 It is Election Day in the United States, as you all know. 15 00:01:27,060 --> 00:01:34,890 So hopefully this talk is a distraction from the anxiety, even though I might say a few words about America and Israel later. 16 00:01:34,890 --> 00:01:40,950 I mean, from the perspective of early Zionist thought, I'm very grateful for being here. 17 00:01:40,950 --> 00:01:51,390 I should say that my training is in literary studies, but my current project about translation and Zionism revolves around question questions of 18 00:01:51,390 --> 00:01:58,260 history and historiography no less than it does around the analysis of literary texts. 19 00:01:58,260 --> 00:02:06,570 So it's nice to have a chance to take part in this ongoing discussion of early Zionist thought and Zionist history. 20 00:02:06,570 --> 00:02:11,280 And what I'll present to you today is not about a literary text, 21 00:02:11,280 --> 00:02:20,010 but rather about a Hebrew biography of Jesus Christ, written by the scholar editor and Zionist thinker Yosef Claus. 22 00:02:20,010 --> 00:02:25,860 Now Klausner was born in a small town in today's Lithuania. 23 00:02:25,860 --> 00:02:33,750 It was the Russian Empire at the time was 1874, and he became an important figure in the Hebrew literary world, 24 00:02:33,750 --> 00:02:39,870 first in Odessa in the early 1900s, then in Jerusalem from the 1920s. 25 00:02:39,870 --> 00:02:45,000 He got there in 1919 until his death in 1958. 26 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:54,870 But it's not only the biography that he wrote of Jesus Christ that I'll be talking about, but also the story behind its English translation. 27 00:02:54,870 --> 00:03:00,390 Our collaboration between Claus Now and the Anglican priest Herbert Danby, 28 00:03:00,390 --> 00:03:09,990 who was church librarian and a journalist in Jerusalem in the 1920s before becoming the Regis professor of Hebrew. 29 00:03:09,990 --> 00:03:17,190 Here I am in London, but OK here at the University of Oxford in 1936. 30 00:03:17,190 --> 00:03:23,100 Before I get there, however, I'm going to dedicate a considerable amount of time, 31 00:03:23,100 --> 00:03:28,830 maybe half of this presentation to the link between Zionism and translation. 32 00:03:28,830 --> 00:03:39,510 Because my work, I'm close now and it is a work in progress. It's part of a larger project about translation and Zionism that aims to show, 33 00:03:39,510 --> 00:03:44,760 amongst other things, that the study of Zionism could benefit from the study of translation, 34 00:03:44,760 --> 00:03:51,180 for looking at translation from looking at it added not only as a linguistic act, 35 00:03:51,180 --> 00:04:03,480 but also as a metaphor that Zionist thinkers use as something that represents more than just that linguistic or cultural transfer. 36 00:04:03,480 --> 00:04:10,140 So I will start with a lengthy general introduction about the centrality of translation in early Zionist thought, 37 00:04:10,140 --> 00:04:16,560 and then I'll move on to Klausner closeness work on Christ in translation. 38 00:04:16,560 --> 00:04:24,390 I should also say before I share my screen with you and start my presentation that you'll both lecture in this 39 00:04:24,390 --> 00:04:32,190 seminar two weeks ago has prepared us to grapple with some of the questions that I am also interested in, 40 00:04:32,190 --> 00:04:40,770 particularly the question of how the Zionist movement nationalised the Hebrew language. 41 00:04:40,770 --> 00:04:47,940 And paradoxically, the translation was a way to achieve that goal of nationalising Hebrew. 42 00:04:47,940 --> 00:04:56,840 So now I'm going to share my screen and hopefully it works. Does it work? 43 00:04:56,840 --> 00:05:08,750 OK, so here we have some covers of translated literary texts in Hebrew, of course, in the early 90s and hundreds, 44 00:05:08,750 --> 00:05:15,680 what you can see here on the left is David Garnishments translation of Lord Byron's work. 45 00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:22,670 Caine, so kind based on the story from Genesis and next to it is freshman's. 46 00:05:22,670 --> 00:05:26,300 19:10 Translation of Friedrich Nietzsche thus spoke. 47 00:05:26,300 --> 00:05:33,860 Zarathustra Friedman was a Hebrew poet, writer, editor, but also a very important and prolific translator. 48 00:05:33,860 --> 00:05:37,430 And next to Fishman's work as a translator, 49 00:05:37,430 --> 00:05:49,940 you can see Heinrich Mondiali translations of Shiller's William Tell and Cervantes Don Quixote, which is not really a translation. 50 00:05:49,940 --> 00:05:59,750 It was an adaptation of an abridged Russian version that Bialik created consulting the German text as well German translation as well. 51 00:05:59,750 --> 00:06:12,860 This is from 1912 and Wilhelm Tales from 1923, but we should assume that whatever they published in those years, they had started working on earlier. 52 00:06:12,860 --> 00:06:17,120 And we also have Brian, as you said, claim out. 53 00:06:17,120 --> 00:06:22,790 Another famous Hebrew writer from the turn of the 20th century whose translation of 54 00:06:22,790 --> 00:06:30,350 Dostoyevsky crime and punishment that came out in the early 1920s after Brown's death. 55 00:06:30,350 --> 00:06:36,350 But he actually was working on it in 1910 1911. 56 00:06:36,350 --> 00:06:45,680 So this is to show you that the Hebrew translation enterprise was growing in the first few decades of the 20th century, 57 00:06:45,680 --> 00:06:54,020 and these covers are also beautiful. It was a very popular activity to translate amongst some writers. 58 00:06:54,020 --> 00:07:05,240 And the period in general in modern Hebrew literary historiography is referred to as the revival of modern Hebrew literature the Renaissance Hospital. 59 00:07:05,240 --> 00:07:16,250 And most writers of the revival, who also defined themselves as revivalists, sometimes were in eastern and Central Europe at the time. 60 00:07:16,250 --> 00:07:21,440 Some of them later migrated to Palestine and to other places as well. 61 00:07:21,440 --> 00:07:26,510 They set out to reinvent Hebrew is the language of literary modernism. 62 00:07:26,510 --> 00:07:30,290 Of course, it did not function as any but his mother tongue at the time, 63 00:07:30,290 --> 00:07:40,250 and it was not the vernacular of a national group that also defined itself as a unified, homogenous national group. 64 00:07:40,250 --> 00:07:47,060 As yet pointed out in his talk, Hebrew only became a spoken language later in history. 65 00:07:47,060 --> 00:07:53,960 But for years it had been a language that many Jews, mostly men all over the world, could read and write. 66 00:07:53,960 --> 00:08:03,680 And so it was an effective medium of communication and also of literary circulation, which is my addition to what you already told us. 67 00:08:03,680 --> 00:08:10,220 Those who believed that Hebrew had to be revived or rather nationalised aspired 68 00:08:10,220 --> 00:08:15,710 to show all those Hebrew readers that Hebrew was like other living languages, 69 00:08:15,710 --> 00:08:19,820 and translation was an effective way to achieve that goal. 70 00:08:19,820 --> 00:08:27,410 And this is sort of the thought experiment that I think people were experiencing at the time. 71 00:08:27,410 --> 00:08:36,020 Maybe unconsciously, if any reader picked up a book that was originally written in a spoken language, let's say German, 72 00:08:36,020 --> 00:08:44,810 but was rendered anew in Hebrew, that Hebrew reader could think of Hebrew as equivalent to German or really any other spoken language. 73 00:08:44,810 --> 00:08:52,880 And even if this would have been an almost unconscious understanding it, you know, it would have been very effective. 74 00:08:52,880 --> 00:08:59,930 And in a more conscious level, Hebrew readers would simply have another opportunity to consume a book, 75 00:08:59,930 --> 00:09:05,930 a book in Hebrew and not just any book, but one that other groups had already appreciated. 76 00:09:05,930 --> 00:09:16,310 So translation really helped create the illusion that some Zionist thinkers had hoped to turn into a reality that Jews, a scattered minority, 77 00:09:16,310 --> 00:09:21,650 were just like other nations or at least some other nations and one were in 78 00:09:21,650 --> 00:09:29,500 possession of a literary canon of a living literature and a living language. 79 00:09:29,500 --> 00:09:32,710 We can think about it as a fantasy of equivalence. 80 00:09:32,710 --> 00:09:41,950 Translation helped foster this fantasy of equivalence between Jews and others because the languages seemed equivalent in translation, 81 00:09:41,950 --> 00:09:48,220 even though, of course, any translation scholar would tell you that there is no such thing as perfect equivalence. 82 00:09:48,220 --> 00:09:57,320 But it did become a popular activity in the Hebrew literary field. And the Hebrew literary field in general was a major arena for shaping the 83 00:09:57,320 --> 00:10:03,090 Zionist movement in the first few decades of the 20th century to such a degree. 84 00:10:03,090 --> 00:10:09,590 The debates around literature and literature in translation were often as heated as 85 00:10:09,590 --> 00:10:16,970 debates around the so-called Jewish question and the Zionist answer or answers to it. 86 00:10:16,970 --> 00:10:25,670 In fact, the more readers expressed in, the more readers expressed interest in Hebrew literature and the Zionist movement. 87 00:10:25,670 --> 00:10:33,860 And this wasn't always a linear process. The more questions began to be asked about the right balance between original and 88 00:10:33,860 --> 00:10:39,650 translated Hebrew works in the Hebrew publishing world and the Hebrew literary field. 89 00:10:39,650 --> 00:10:47,240 So although many famous Hebrew writers who were also Zionist figures also translated, 90 00:10:47,240 --> 00:10:53,600 they sometimes became sceptical of translation, and that's something that I also wanted to show you. 91 00:10:53,600 --> 00:10:57,380 So here we have a picture of in Bialik. 92 00:10:57,380 --> 00:11:02,000 Very famous poet. I think it's fair to call him a Zionist figure as well. 93 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:09,500 And in 1935, he publishes an essay entitled Language Pangs Election, 94 00:11:09,500 --> 00:11:17,090 in which he discusses the poverty of the Hebrew language, as well as organic defects. 95 00:11:17,090 --> 00:11:26,360 And so he determines in this essay that Hebrew, which is a dead language or at least half dead, is not strong enough to endure translation. 96 00:11:26,360 --> 00:11:34,700 He criticises Hebrew writers growing use of translation mainly of single words, but also of complete works. 97 00:11:34,700 --> 00:11:40,340 And then he insists that translation would only weaken the Hebrew language in its literature, 98 00:11:40,340 --> 00:11:49,190 and it would reveal how limited its vocabulary is compared to the vocabularies of living languages. 99 00:11:49,190 --> 00:11:57,130 So he believed that if people writers focussed more on the original creation, they could strengthen Hebrew literature from within. 100 00:11:57,130 --> 00:12:01,450 And he had this wish that later, of course, was fulfilled, 101 00:12:01,450 --> 00:12:13,300 that comprehensive Hebrew dictionary would be produced maybe jointly a few Hebrew writers and lexicographers taking part in that project. 102 00:12:13,300 --> 00:12:20,680 Now the very idea that a language lacks strength deserves some scrutiny, 103 00:12:20,680 --> 00:12:33,000 especially as it is reminiscent of the Zionist claim that I think many of you would know that the Jews were independent, weak group everywhere. 104 00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:39,600 And this is the thing that Zionist image of a helpless diasporic nation made its way to 105 00:12:39,600 --> 00:12:45,780 discussions of translation and the Hebrew language itself in the early 20th century, 106 00:12:45,780 --> 00:12:50,670 in the form of these complaints about the degeneration of the language of the 107 00:12:50,670 --> 00:12:55,950 literature and translation was sometimes seen as part of that generation. 108 00:12:55,950 --> 00:13:06,180 And even though Bialik later translated Chillout and Cervantes and also experimented with translation before publishing this essay Language Pangs, 109 00:13:06,180 --> 00:13:13,620 he still resisted translation with it when it seemed to him to be taking over original literary production. 110 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:15,390 And he was not the only one. 111 00:13:15,390 --> 00:13:30,150 So here we see, but I know you're suffering, but I know who in 1999 publishes a review of a few Hebrew works, both original and translated. 112 00:13:30,150 --> 00:13:38,070 It was titled From the World of Our Literature and alongside the other publications he reviewed. 113 00:13:38,070 --> 00:13:42,210 But then I reviewed Henrik Ibsen's Norwegian Play a Doll's House. 114 00:13:42,210 --> 00:13:45,750 In its first Hebrew translation, Fleischman was the translator, 115 00:13:45,750 --> 00:13:53,700 and he really disliked the play and therefore criticised the very fact of its translation and publication. 116 00:13:53,700 --> 00:13:57,720 And so he stated, And you have it as a quotation on your slide. 117 00:13:57,720 --> 00:14:04,290 People might say, even if this translation does not do us any good, it would not do us any harm. 118 00:14:04,290 --> 00:14:08,520 No, I said it will do us harm our literary energy. 119 00:14:08,520 --> 00:14:14,310 Do I even need to mention it? It is sparser than sparse, and we should not waste it. 120 00:14:14,310 --> 00:14:24,810 So Glennon is known as a writer for this hyperbolic style, but I think he really means that when he says we have limited literary energy and again, 121 00:14:24,810 --> 00:14:35,170 this this was just our application or another way of saying that Jews, the Hebrew culture were weak. 122 00:14:35,170 --> 00:14:43,290 We had limited energy and had to focus their energy in a very deliberate way on the right kind of goals. 123 00:14:43,290 --> 00:14:50,160 And Brownout, who was a translator he'd started translating even before publishing this review essay. 124 00:14:50,160 --> 00:14:55,830 But it did not stop him from criticising specific translation choices. 125 00:14:55,830 --> 00:15:07,140 This debate became so heated that at a conference for the Hebrew language and its culture in Vienna in 1913, the chief rabbi of Moscow, 126 00:15:07,140 --> 00:15:16,710 Yaakov Maza, attempted to put an end to the dispute about translation, and he called for an inclusive approach to Hebrew publishing. 127 00:15:16,710 --> 00:15:25,500 He was basically asking Why should writing in Hebrew and translating into Hebrew be perceived as mutually exclusive activities? 128 00:15:25,500 --> 00:15:33,060 He was not a writer himself, so or he was a writer, as rabbis tend to be, but he wasn't producing any literary works. 129 00:15:33,060 --> 00:15:38,790 So maybe to him it seemed easy to do both translating and and writing. 130 00:15:38,790 --> 00:15:46,260 But he also used an analogy from the world of commerce, which strikes me as interesting. 131 00:15:46,260 --> 00:15:51,150 He said humankind is characterised by its drive to exchange goods. 132 00:15:51,150 --> 00:16:02,340 So why should anyone object to spiritual exchange more than they do to the exchange of material objects or farming methods, for example? 133 00:16:02,340 --> 00:16:13,520 So this was Mazen. Things got even more complicated when it came to translations from the Hebrew. 134 00:16:13,520 --> 00:16:17,570 So this is where I am now. We have here Jabotinsky, 135 00:16:17,570 --> 00:16:32,060 and he is next to the translation of around 40 of Nachman Bialik poems into Russian that he produced in the more or less from 1984 to 1910. 136 00:16:32,060 --> 00:16:41,960 And then the book itself. The anthology came out in 1911, and next to him you can see a picture of the continent. 137 00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:49,190 I already mentioned when Djiboutian Ski published this anthology of biotics poems in Russian translation. 138 00:16:49,190 --> 00:16:57,620 Fleischman promptly attacked him for granting Russians whom he defined as a nation that persecuted Jews, 139 00:16:57,620 --> 00:17:05,210 by definition, access into the best poems of the modern Hebrew literary canon for her freshman. 140 00:17:05,210 --> 00:17:15,890 From his point of view, Russians just didn't deserve that and Russian speaking Jews or Jews who could not read Hebrew but could only read Russian. 141 00:17:15,890 --> 00:17:26,960 They also did not deserve access to biotics. Poetry specifically, freshman insisted that the Alex Lemmens were untranslatable, 142 00:17:26,960 --> 00:17:35,870 so he called some of Bialik poems laments for reasons that I think would be obvious for people who had the chance to read Bialik. 143 00:17:35,870 --> 00:17:41,480 And he defined Bialik as a Jewish prophet and because he was a Jewish prophet, 144 00:17:41,480 --> 00:17:50,630 translating his work was like translating the Bible, which inflation's view was always bound to fail or at least miss the mark. 145 00:17:50,630 --> 00:17:59,420 And I think this is a familiar claim about the Bible. Bible scholars in this virtual room may have heard it in other contexts, 146 00:17:59,420 --> 00:18:06,410 and it is interesting that Fleischman had his theory about translating Bible inspired works into Hebrew. 147 00:18:06,410 --> 00:18:12,500 You may recall that he's the one who translated Lord Byron Cane into Hebrew, 148 00:18:12,500 --> 00:18:19,730 and he thought that that translation was not really a translation, but a restoration of the work he used. 149 00:18:19,730 --> 00:18:25,910 The Hebrew phrase has Shabbat Australia-China or Olive QnA. 150 00:18:25,910 --> 00:18:37,190 So he really did. Did think that something was regained rather than lost in his translation of that work by Beethoven? 151 00:18:37,190 --> 00:18:44,120 And he he would say similar things about other works that were clearly inspired by the biblical texts. 152 00:18:44,120 --> 00:18:48,710 And of course, there are many works that fall under that category. 153 00:18:48,710 --> 00:18:59,330 But he did resist translations from the Hebrew, especially when the biblical texts seemed to be part of the story. 154 00:18:59,330 --> 00:19:09,770 So all of these examples point to a duel, even contradictory perception of translation, both from and into Hebrew amongst Hebrew writers. 155 00:19:09,770 --> 00:19:17,030 Against that backdrop of the rise of Zionism, so really the first decades of the 20th century, 156 00:19:17,030 --> 00:19:22,910 the writers themselves, they all differed in their views of both literature and politics. 157 00:19:22,910 --> 00:19:30,380 All of these writers that I presented to you right now, but also others that could have been part of this presentation. 158 00:19:30,380 --> 00:19:36,810 Bialik, for example, subscribed to Zionism all in all made. 159 00:19:36,810 --> 00:19:41,510 Nobody took the step of migrating to Palestine. 160 00:19:41,510 --> 00:19:48,170 At some point. Even some of his biographers would tell you that he had other preferences, but he wasn't Tel Aviv at some point. 161 00:19:48,170 --> 00:19:58,760 Brennan often voiced his ambivalence about Zionism. He's very well known for that, and Fleischman actually rejected most Zionist principles, 162 00:19:58,760 --> 00:20:07,010 and freshman scholars cannot agree whether he was a Zionist or not, especially because he, he says it is. 163 00:20:07,010 --> 00:20:18,110 It is clear that he contributed on some level to the advent of some Zionist ideas, but he really had a very different vision of Jewish life in Europe. 164 00:20:18,110 --> 00:20:25,640 It was not the Zionist answer that he found the most the best answer to the Jewish question, so to speak of. 165 00:20:25,640 --> 00:20:35,450 But they they all shared this ambivalence about translation, which is what is interesting to me. 166 00:20:35,450 --> 00:20:42,140 Here's a sketch of Fleischman and Bialik in Berlin, and maybe they are debating translation and Zionism. 167 00:20:42,140 --> 00:20:48,780 Who knows? This is by the Russian Jewish painter Leonid Pasternak. 168 00:20:48,780 --> 00:20:58,140 Despite the differences between these Hebrew writers, most of them were attracted to the act and products of translation and sceptical about it, 169 00:20:58,140 --> 00:21:04,680 as I already said, sceptical about the short term and long term ramifications of translation. 170 00:21:04,680 --> 00:21:14,790 I think this reflected a broader ambivalence typical of them vis-a-vis European cultures at large or the extent to 171 00:21:14,790 --> 00:21:23,730 which Zionism represented a move away from Europe or an adoption of European political and philosophical trends. 172 00:21:23,730 --> 00:21:27,180 Above all, maybe the idea of modern nationalism. 173 00:21:27,180 --> 00:21:33,630 Maybe I'll stop sharing my screen briefly to just make that point, and then I'll move on to class now. 174 00:21:33,630 --> 00:21:45,270 I hope it works. So I just stopped sharing my screen because Zionism was a European nationalist movement that vowed to end both Jewish 175 00:21:45,270 --> 00:21:56,310 assimilation and persecution in Europe and think it could not afford to betray too intimate a connexion with European cultures, 176 00:21:56,310 --> 00:21:58,680 nations, religions. 177 00:21:58,680 --> 00:22:08,070 But it was still the non-Jewish world from which Zionist thinkers were consciously taking inspiration not just the non-Jewish world, 178 00:22:08,070 --> 00:22:20,250 but definitely also. And this is not a new observation. My goal is to show you that the act and products of translation capture this core tension, 179 00:22:20,250 --> 00:22:31,480 applying this ambivalent relationship with Europe and I, my use of this term Europe is really follows. 180 00:22:31,480 --> 00:22:44,010 The zipper writers use of the term Europe and will pay European is an adjective that they frequently used to refer to the world sometimes. 181 00:22:44,010 --> 00:22:50,100 Translation from an into Hebrew was a locus where the aspiration of Jewish self-reliance 182 00:22:50,100 --> 00:22:57,120 collided with the recognition that Hebrew culture depended on other cultures to sustain itself. 183 00:22:57,120 --> 00:23:01,590 So this is the oscillation between translating, wanting to translate, 184 00:23:01,590 --> 00:23:10,680 enjoying translated literature and not just not just poetics, but but all kinds of texts. 185 00:23:10,680 --> 00:23:16,970 But then there's also the concern that. 186 00:23:16,970 --> 00:23:20,870 Jews are becoming too European, which is, of course, 187 00:23:20,870 --> 00:23:30,710 part of that critique that some Zionist thinkers aimed at enlightenment thinkers, they propagated assimilation on some level. 188 00:23:30,710 --> 00:23:38,020 So assimilation is another concern and it is associated with translation. 189 00:23:38,020 --> 00:23:42,430 Another way to put it that Zionists wish to disconnect from the European other, 190 00:23:42,430 --> 00:23:47,200 whether culturally or geographically, was also a wish to be like the European. 191 00:23:47,200 --> 00:23:55,600 Other was always had two sides of the same coin and translation again sort of captures that aptly. 192 00:23:55,600 --> 00:23:57,370 And now to get to Klausner, 193 00:23:57,370 --> 00:24:07,300 I'll just say that a similar tension frames there the Zionist relationship with Christianity as the dominant religion of Europe, 194 00:24:07,300 --> 00:24:14,320 because on the one hand, Zionism was a rejection of any horizon of Jewish Christian coexistence in Europe. 195 00:24:14,320 --> 00:24:16,600 I am putting it bluntly, I know. 196 00:24:16,600 --> 00:24:28,450 But on the other hand, most Zionist thinkers adopted at least some general Christian views of Jews as a group that had fallen outside history. 197 00:24:28,450 --> 00:24:32,380 And here I'm repeating maybe crudely, 198 00:24:32,380 --> 00:24:41,350 but nevertheless the historian I'm known as quote skins argument about Zionism and how it advanced the idea that Jews had 199 00:24:41,350 --> 00:24:49,510 existed outside history from the time of the second temple's destruction to the Tuscola or the Jewish Enlightenment movement, 200 00:24:49,510 --> 00:24:53,320 and then Zionism and still quote skin has shown. 201 00:24:53,320 --> 00:24:59,260 And he's not the only one how Zionist thinkers often reworked the premise taken from 202 00:24:59,260 --> 00:25:06,070 Christian thought that Jews had fallen behind once they rejected Jesus's teachings. 203 00:25:06,070 --> 00:25:11,350 Of course, the Christian solution for that fall, so to speak, would have been conversion, 204 00:25:11,350 --> 00:25:17,830 while Zionist thought searched for ways to restore Jews involvement in global history as Jews. 205 00:25:17,830 --> 00:25:27,790 And I'm telling you this because Yosef Claus now was the kind of Zionist thinker who viewed the Zionist idea of return to the Land of Israel, 206 00:25:27,790 --> 00:25:35,650 Palestine of his day as the only way to initiate a return to history at large. 207 00:25:35,650 --> 00:25:42,760 And he was also very devoted to the study of early Christianity, which turns them into a really interesting case in point. 208 00:25:42,760 --> 00:25:47,170 Or I should say, it turns his work into a really interesting case in point. 209 00:25:47,170 --> 00:25:51,010 And now I'll share my screen again, and hopefully it works. 210 00:25:51,010 --> 00:25:59,020 And you can see Claus now. Not yet. Let me see. 211 00:25:59,020 --> 00:26:02,970 I'm I sharing my screen. OK. 212 00:26:02,970 --> 00:26:11,880 And you can see Cross now, great cross, there was not a poet or fiction writer like the other figures I've presented to you, 213 00:26:11,880 --> 00:26:17,850 but he was an influential essayist and editor as well as a historian of modern Hebrew literature. 214 00:26:17,850 --> 00:26:27,870 In 1953, he succeeded a card from a guru, maybe of spiritual Zionism in editing the prestigious journal Haseloff. 215 00:26:27,870 --> 00:26:31,830 And you have your picture of Hasselhoff on the slide. 216 00:26:31,830 --> 00:26:38,500 And so he became a really important figure in the Hebrew intellectual sphere of the time, and he was quite young, 217 00:26:38,500 --> 00:26:47,640 had to arm as the founding editor of a Shylock, had prioritised essays on Jewish history and European political philosophy. 218 00:26:47,640 --> 00:26:57,840 Close now, on the other hand, found room in it for more or less everything poetry, essays on European nationalism, archaeological papers. 219 00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:06,990 And he himself contributed to the journal articles about Jewish history and the historical calling of Israel. 220 00:27:06,990 --> 00:27:15,780 And some of those essays that were published in Nazi law were then compiled in this. 221 00:27:15,780 --> 00:27:20,520 Anthology by Claws now you can see it here had due to the energy you taught us, 222 00:27:20,520 --> 00:27:26,430 the Hebrew title or Judaism and humanism that you can see that it came out in more so in 223 00:27:26,430 --> 00:27:34,680 nineteen oh five what what you also have on your slide is closed now home in Jerusalem, 224 00:27:34,680 --> 00:27:43,350 and this is after the 1929 riots in Jerusalem, and he placed a sign of above his door. 225 00:27:43,350 --> 00:27:48,720 Maybe you can see it. It's probably hard because the picture is small and old, 226 00:27:48,720 --> 00:27:57,450 and the sign says Yaha do not have an offshoot just like the title of the anthology Judaism in Humanism. 227 00:27:57,450 --> 00:28:06,210 So these were allegedly the principles of Zionism. As Close now also explains in most articles in the anthology. 228 00:28:06,210 --> 00:28:15,630 You may also be able to see that it says first part if you can read Hebrew in the the cover of Judaism and humanism. 229 00:28:15,630 --> 00:28:21,690 Klausner was really writing essays all the time and then publishing them in anthologies. 230 00:28:21,690 --> 00:28:28,410 But to my, my reading of them is that many of them say more or less the same thing. 231 00:28:28,410 --> 00:28:31,620 So what is it that they say? 232 00:28:31,620 --> 00:28:42,450 In one way or another, Krasno always argues in these essays that the people of Israel had once been a great source of spiritual teaching in the world. 233 00:28:42,450 --> 00:28:46,200 Then they lost that role with the destruction of the Second Temple. 234 00:28:46,200 --> 00:28:54,330 Their exile from Jerusalem and in the centuries that followed, they led a ghettoised life of cultural marginality. 235 00:28:54,330 --> 00:28:59,560 So his emphasis is often on that cultural marginality. 236 00:28:59,560 --> 00:29:08,950 And then the Jewish Enlightenment movement came the last column it wished to put an end to that ghettoised existence. 237 00:29:08,950 --> 00:29:14,020 But it did espouse education and acculturation at its own peril. 238 00:29:14,020 --> 00:29:20,200 It brought about dangerous patterns of assimilation that only Zionism as a movement 239 00:29:20,200 --> 00:29:27,510 of Jewish return to the place where the Jewish people's ancestors once thrived. 240 00:29:27,510 --> 00:29:37,650 Only Zionism could mend. And this is this is another aspect of Crosshouse essays that becomes a motif. 241 00:29:37,650 --> 00:29:51,690 The fact that Jewish that the ancestors of Jews really once thrived, they were thriving in that period of Second Temple Judaism, 242 00:29:51,690 --> 00:30:00,560 as long as skin, whose work I already mentioned has demonstrated such ideas were shared by many Zionist thinkers. 243 00:30:00,560 --> 00:30:08,220 Yet closeness, ongoing preoccupation with early Christianity and with Jesus figure specifically is 244 00:30:08,220 --> 00:30:14,640 an interesting case study of that Zionist internalisation of Christian thought, 245 00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:21,720 as it is reflected through the lens of translation, which is what I'll try to show you. 246 00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:29,910 Yes, closed and often implied, like other Zionist thinkers, that Jews had fallen out of history after the Second Temple was destroyed. 247 00:30:29,910 --> 00:30:39,150 But he also underscored and made sure to remind the world or his readership that the Judaism of early Christians. 248 00:30:39,150 --> 00:30:48,090 So his essays often described Jews first and foremost as the originators of monotheism and Christianity. 249 00:30:48,090 --> 00:30:52,500 And in that sense, his work is not so much. 250 00:30:52,500 --> 00:31:00,900 An example of that link between Christian and Zionist thought that classical skin is known to have explored. 251 00:31:00,900 --> 00:31:06,990 It is more of an attempt to work through that link to to transform its meaning. 252 00:31:06,990 --> 00:31:16,950 It is as if Klausner knew that that that link was paradoxical and attempted to explain it to his readership, 253 00:31:16,950 --> 00:31:26,250 and translation was crucial for that attempt. And this is something that knows biography of Jesus can illustrate. 254 00:31:26,250 --> 00:31:36,120 So here we have the biography. We're finally with the biography that I promise to be talking about on the left is the Hebrew version Yeshua. 255 00:31:36,120 --> 00:31:40,750 And then on the right is Dan Bee's translation. 256 00:31:40,750 --> 00:31:46,380 Dan Bee's Translation Jesus of Nazareth, his life times and teaching. 257 00:31:46,380 --> 00:31:51,210 The Hebrew book was published in 1922 in Jerusalem, 258 00:31:51,210 --> 00:31:55,620 two and a half years after it closed Nell's migration to Palestine and four years 259 00:31:55,620 --> 00:32:02,910 before he became a lecturer at the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 260 00:32:02,910 --> 00:32:12,820 Parts of the book had been adapted from Klausner as German doctoral dissertation and had already been published in journals in several languages. 261 00:32:12,820 --> 00:32:16,150 And I want to look at the book through that lens of translation, 262 00:32:16,150 --> 00:32:23,500 I think it's useful beyond the fact that parts of the book were actually translated from the German. 263 00:32:23,500 --> 00:32:26,380 I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into that. 264 00:32:26,380 --> 00:32:35,200 The book's main claim is that Jesus is teachings in the New Testament were based on rabbinical exegesis. 265 00:32:35,200 --> 00:32:41,440 So they were a translation or adaptation of rabbinic ideas. 266 00:32:41,440 --> 00:32:52,210 Later, editions of the book also discussed the languages that Jesus knew and spoke again in order to highlight Jesus's Judaism. 267 00:32:52,210 --> 00:33:00,670 So Carlos now determines in later editions that Jesus must have known some Hebrew in addition to his Aramaic. 268 00:33:00,670 --> 00:33:10,420 And finally, the book was translated into several languages not long after its publication, which was precisely what Klausner wanted. 269 00:33:10,420 --> 00:33:17,140 In fact, some of his critics in the Hebrew literary world mocked him for deliberately writing 270 00:33:17,140 --> 00:33:23,440 a book that was suitable for multiple audiences that is suitable for translation, 271 00:33:23,440 --> 00:33:31,660 and the book does explicitly explicitly seek to educate both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus's Judaism. 272 00:33:31,660 --> 00:33:37,090 That drawing of parallels between passages from the New Testament and end passages from 273 00:33:37,090 --> 00:33:45,490 the Talmud is an illustration of what Carlos now was trying to do for multiple audiences. 274 00:33:45,490 --> 00:33:56,140 The book's English translation, which was an important translation from close Noah's perspective, came out in 1925, 275 00:33:56,140 --> 00:34:08,810 and it was the result of a collaborative process between Klaus now and his English translator, the Anglican priest Herbert Denbigh, who was Danby. 276 00:34:08,810 --> 00:34:19,760 He was a Bible scholar and missionary. He became church librarian and consultant to the Bishop in St George's Cathedral in Jerusalem in 1919. 277 00:34:19,760 --> 00:34:25,120 He stayed in Jerusalem until the early 1930s. 278 00:34:25,120 --> 00:34:31,090 He was very supportive of the Zionist cause in general and Jewish migration to Palestine in particular. 279 00:34:31,090 --> 00:34:31,450 Of course, 280 00:34:31,450 --> 00:34:43,990 the way those things were like at the time in the 1920s and his Hebrew knowledge enabled him to strike friendships with figures just like clothes, 281 00:34:43,990 --> 00:34:49,810 now these newly arrived intellectuals with a similar set of interests. 282 00:34:49,810 --> 00:34:58,000 And then there was also a contributing reporter for The Times of London, editor of the Palestine Oriental Society periodical. 283 00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:05,650 So presumably he was. He was very much attuned to demographic changes in Jerusalem. 284 00:35:05,650 --> 00:35:10,060 And he did become a friend of Crosshouse. 285 00:35:10,060 --> 00:35:20,800 His decision to translate Jesus of Nazareth now biography of Jesus struck his superiors in the Anglican Church as suspicious. 286 00:35:20,800 --> 00:35:28,390 So letters from the archives of St George's Cathedral, which the historian Shalom Goldman has uncovered, 287 00:35:28,390 --> 00:35:36,160 reveal that Dan B had to explain his decision to translate closeouts book to church leaders. 288 00:35:36,160 --> 00:35:43,330 In one letter, for example, Dan B confesses that for a while he couldn't quite decide whether his decision 289 00:35:43,330 --> 00:35:48,730 to contact close now to translate his book was a good thing or a bad thing. 290 00:35:48,730 --> 00:36:00,830 This is a quote, but he quickly resolved that a translation of closeness work could have a positive effect on missionary efforts in Palestine. 291 00:36:00,830 --> 00:36:08,540 It's close, Neil's book seemed to attest to Jewish curiosity about Christianity, it could give missionaries, 292 00:36:08,540 --> 00:36:22,050 and now I'm going to quote again a long wanted jumping off place and an insight into the strength or weakness of the present, educated Jewish opinion. 293 00:36:22,050 --> 00:36:27,000 Whether Danby shared these sentiments with close now or his plan, 294 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:32,760 that missionary efforts would somehow benefit from the translation, that remains unknown. 295 00:36:32,760 --> 00:36:37,230 But there is no evidence of Klausner feeling deceived. 296 00:36:37,230 --> 00:36:42,870 On the contrary, Klausner took great pride in the book's translation, 297 00:36:42,870 --> 00:36:53,440 and this is something that he reports to his readers in the preface to the fourth edition of Jesus of Nazareth from 1933. 298 00:36:53,440 --> 00:36:57,060 He really brags in this preface about the book's success. 299 00:36:57,060 --> 00:37:05,820 He tells the story of the different translations that had come out and specifically celebrates the English translation, 300 00:37:05,820 --> 00:37:10,050 which sold twice as much as the first Hebrew edition. 301 00:37:10,050 --> 00:37:16,170 And so then, he adds, And I have a quotation, I hope you can see it on your screens now. 302 00:37:16,170 --> 00:37:22,200 Much sorrow and grief has the book, which the reader now holds given its author, 303 00:37:22,200 --> 00:37:27,360 but I have derived spiritual satisfaction from the fact that the non-Jewish world 304 00:37:27,360 --> 00:37:33,450 had heard for the first time the voice of a Jew devoted to his religion and nation. 305 00:37:33,450 --> 00:37:38,520 Speaking about the strictly Jewish phenomenon called Jesus of Nazareth. 306 00:37:38,520 --> 00:37:45,210 So this is close now in the first four of the fourth edition of Jesus of Nazareth, 307 00:37:45,210 --> 00:37:54,570 and he really repeats here the main claim of the book as a whole that Jesus was a strictly Jewish phenomenon. 308 00:37:54,570 --> 00:38:02,160 Now, the grief to which to which he refers was the outcome of negative Hebrew reviews of the book. 309 00:38:02,160 --> 00:38:07,020 There were positive ones as well, but I'm going to mention the negative reviews. 310 00:38:07,020 --> 00:38:12,570 They either chastised clothes now for his very choice to write about Christianity 311 00:38:12,570 --> 00:38:18,570 or dismissed the book as full of contradictions and unoriginal claims. 312 00:38:18,570 --> 00:38:24,330 So for now, I'm going to quote This is my translation of me. 313 00:38:24,330 --> 00:38:29,910 Yosef Bertie Chayefsky's review of the book is famous for writer. 314 00:38:29,910 --> 00:38:35,340 He he said of the book that it never delivers on its promise to dwell on the difference between 315 00:38:35,340 --> 00:38:42,270 Judaism and Christianity because it recycles previous arguments about their inseparably. 316 00:38:42,270 --> 00:38:49,380 So closing presents Judaism and Christianity in the book or in some places in the book as a continuum. 317 00:38:49,380 --> 00:38:53,850 And that is something that Enlightenment writers had already done before him. 318 00:38:53,850 --> 00:39:01,380 And this led to believe Chayefsky to argue that there was nothing new about this book. 319 00:39:01,380 --> 00:39:13,020 And then a reviewer named a five day note went in a very different direction and accused close now of having struck a deal with missionaries. 320 00:39:13,020 --> 00:39:20,430 He knew about the relationship between Klausner and Denby, and Klausner writes about this review in his autobiography, 321 00:39:20,430 --> 00:39:27,120 and he insists that he never received any money from missionaries to write or translate the book on Jesus. 322 00:39:27,120 --> 00:39:33,780 But there's something new about De Nerd's this reviewer's. 323 00:39:33,780 --> 00:39:40,560 Statement that that that the missionaries could benefit, maybe on some level from closing the book, 324 00:39:40,560 --> 00:39:45,480 that, of course, should ring true to us now because then b it was thinking of the same thing. 325 00:39:45,480 --> 00:39:53,670 And he was part of that story, as far as I can tell from my reading of historians reports. 326 00:39:53,670 --> 00:40:04,290 So work that historians have done, the translated book did not really significantly change rates of Jewish conversion to Christianity in the 1920s. 327 00:40:04,290 --> 00:40:08,040 It was still just a book, an academic book at that. 328 00:40:08,040 --> 00:40:12,570 So yes, those don't really make a change in the world. 329 00:40:12,570 --> 00:40:25,920 But the book's English translation did did make some some waves, maybe stir some, some people at the church. 330 00:40:25,920 --> 00:40:37,020 We have a petition from 14 Anglican priest, so 14 is the number who signed that petition that call to banish down from Jerusalem. 331 00:40:37,020 --> 00:40:39,690 Nothing happened with that as well. 332 00:40:39,690 --> 00:40:50,340 I do think that the English translation was an academic event of sorts because it was a Jewish work about early Christianity and Jesus. 333 00:40:50,340 --> 00:40:58,800 So really an academic affair, more than a watershed moment in the work of missionaries in Palestine, right? 334 00:40:58,800 --> 00:41:07,860 Here's an interviewer who not an interviewer, our reviewer who reviewed the English translation of the work. 335 00:41:07,860 --> 00:41:11,190 This is Vernon in the New Republic. 336 00:41:11,190 --> 00:41:20,640 February 1926 It is likely that the book will be most prised for the numerous Jewish parallels to the sayings of Jesus, 337 00:41:20,640 --> 00:41:31,110 which this splendidly equipped writer's writer gathers, and for the background of Jewish history and custom against which the figure of Jesus moves. 338 00:41:31,110 --> 00:41:37,320 There are many unfamiliar and illuminating, but alas, undated quotations from the Talmud. 339 00:41:37,320 --> 00:41:45,390 To those, however, who are familiar with the recent literature, there is little that is actually new concerning Jesus's time. 340 00:41:45,390 --> 00:41:56,340 The messianic unrest in Galilee in particular, is pictured as more acute than his customary originality of thought is denied to Jesus utterly. 341 00:41:56,340 --> 00:42:01,350 There is no word of his that is not paralleled in Jewish sources. 342 00:42:01,350 --> 00:42:05,370 I'm not going to get into the content of specific parts of closeness. 343 00:42:05,370 --> 00:42:13,890 Nell's book like that messianic unrest in Galilee, because this is a talk about the story behind the translation. 344 00:42:13,890 --> 00:42:17,520 I want to look at the use of the term originality here. 345 00:42:17,520 --> 00:42:27,360 What the reviewer voices is sort of a sense of unease in the face of Krasnov insistence that Jesus never expressed an original thought. 346 00:42:27,360 --> 00:42:27,990 And indeed, 347 00:42:27,990 --> 00:42:40,710 Krasno presents Jesus's Judaism in the biography as some sort of an original text from which the historical figure was constantly translating. 348 00:42:40,710 --> 00:42:47,280 And this was really a pattern in Clauson Zionist thought. 349 00:42:47,280 --> 00:42:50,940 I want to show you another review of sorts of the book. 350 00:42:50,940 --> 00:43:01,170 This is from an academic work on Jesus in Hebrew literature, and it's very recent, 351 00:43:01,170 --> 00:43:09,360 and it locates the book in the context of Kronos work as a Jewish scholar who of Christianity whose Zionist agenda could not be missed. 352 00:43:09,360 --> 00:43:17,100 So this is not a start, and this is a book from not too long ago, according to Claus now. 353 00:43:17,100 --> 00:43:25,380 Jesus was not simply a Jew, but a Jew who belonged to his own land and was aware of his mission to claim the land for his people. 354 00:43:25,380 --> 00:43:31,350 In fact, it was the landscape itself that inspired him to become a national leader who 355 00:43:31,350 --> 00:43:36,210 guided his people toward both spiritual and political redemption closeness. 356 00:43:36,210 --> 00:43:44,190 Jesus embodies the new Jew charisma, bravery, mastery of his own land, morality and idealism. 357 00:43:44,190 --> 00:43:50,220 At the same time, this new Jew is also a poet, a man of fables and metaphors. 358 00:43:50,220 --> 00:43:57,780 So Stahl is suggesting that crows now claim to Jesus not only for Judaism but also for Zionism. 359 00:43:57,780 --> 00:44:08,680 And I would add to her claims about closeness biography of Jesus that those remarks that Krasno makes in later editions of the book on Jesus, 360 00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:20,430 his knowledge of Hebrew by suggesting that Jesus knew at least some Hebrew clause, and that sort of completes his portrayal as this exemplary new Jew. 361 00:44:20,430 --> 00:44:30,360 What is striking about Dan these translation is that it doesn't meddle with this portrayal of Jesus as a Jewish or Zionist hero. 362 00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:33,140 Dad was what we might call a faithful. 363 00:44:33,140 --> 00:44:43,730 Translation, or is what we might call a faithful translation, although he does translate the the phrase the Land of Israel as Palestine, 364 00:44:43,730 --> 00:44:54,110 Denbigh generally adhered to the translation norms of the time, which really did not allow for radical changes when someone was was translating. 365 00:44:54,110 --> 00:44:57,410 I think these are still the norms today. 366 00:44:57,410 --> 00:45:07,850 He also had claws now by his side, occasionally when he was translating, so he could not presumably mistranslated the work or transform it completely. 367 00:45:07,850 --> 00:45:13,790 I think that all in all, that pear writer and translator got on well. 368 00:45:13,790 --> 00:45:19,970 And in many ways, it was Zionist thought that brought them together. 369 00:45:19,970 --> 00:45:26,030 Klausner clearly gained from Dambisa Translation, not only fame as a scholar, 370 00:45:26,030 --> 00:45:32,570 but also an opportunity to spread these Zionist ideas about style mentions in what is 371 00:45:32,570 --> 00:45:38,600 on the slide right now and to spread them in the English speaking speaking world. 372 00:45:38,600 --> 00:45:40,670 And this is again on some level paradoxical, 373 00:45:40,670 --> 00:45:47,960 because now is the kind of Zionist thinker who believed that only Hebrew could be a vehicle for Zionist thought, 374 00:45:47,960 --> 00:45:54,200 but he was nevertheless aware of the fact that he had limited potential to reach a mass readership. 375 00:45:54,200 --> 00:45:59,780 Crucially of non-Jews, but not only of non-Jews, but also Jews in the English speaking world. 376 00:45:59,780 --> 00:46:09,470 And the story of this English translation in America is a separate one, and we can talk about it briefly in the Q&A. 377 00:46:09,470 --> 00:46:13,370 Dan, we, of course, supported the Zionist message of Claus and his biography. 378 00:46:13,370 --> 00:46:24,020 On some level, it's just that he viewed Zionism as some kind of a future opportunity for the mass conversion of Jews into Christianity. 379 00:46:24,020 --> 00:46:33,560 Of course, members of their respective communities close saw Klaus now in downbeat collaboration as wrong, even dangerous. 380 00:46:33,560 --> 00:46:41,150 But as I showed you in the beginning of this presentation, it was really not unusual to deem translation a dangerous act. 381 00:46:41,150 --> 00:46:46,310 In the context of early 20th century Hebrew intellectual exchange, 382 00:46:46,310 --> 00:46:54,560 Klausner was the kind of writer who really embraced most acts of translation, particularly the translation of his own work. 383 00:46:54,560 --> 00:46:58,250 And he did find in Danby, a friend. And so I'm about to conclude, 384 00:46:58,250 --> 00:47:07,250 but I want to say a few words about what this story always makes me think about in relation to to some contemporary issues. 385 00:47:07,250 --> 00:47:18,350 It always makes me think about this contemporary unholy alliance between some Jews in Israel and some evangelicals in the United States and beyond. 386 00:47:18,350 --> 00:47:27,890 Because despite a deep theological differences, these groups can come together like translator and writer to advance their different versions. 387 00:47:27,890 --> 00:47:33,530 Translations of the Zionist idea and Klausner and Dan Denbeaux collaboration in 388 00:47:33,530 --> 00:47:40,230 the 1920s anticipated this kind of Jewish Christian alliance without coexistence. 389 00:47:40,230 --> 00:47:45,110 Of course, I don't think any of them really wanted a kind of Jewish firsthand coexistence. 390 00:47:45,110 --> 00:47:49,910 I do have one more slide. Do I have time for it, or should we, OK, move on to the Q&A? 391 00:47:49,910 --> 00:47:55,080 So just really to tell you one more anecdote about closed. 392 00:47:55,080 --> 00:48:01,280 Now I want to tell you about another essay from Judaism in Humanism. 393 00:48:01,280 --> 00:48:11,270 In fact, the essay entitled Judaism and Humanism in this anthology that was published first in Haseloff and in that essay, 394 00:48:11,270 --> 00:48:17,210 Klausner complains that no Hebrew writer ever produced a grand historical fictional 395 00:48:17,210 --> 00:48:22,280 exploration of married life of the kind Tolstoy produced in Anna Karenina. 396 00:48:22,280 --> 00:48:31,400 So here we have a colony now. Maybe even the translation that clause now read and close them does not mention in this article on a colony. 397 00:48:31,400 --> 00:48:41,350 Not explicitly, but the allusion is pretty obvious. He just complains about the absence of a Tolstoy in the Hebrew literary field. 398 00:48:41,350 --> 00:48:47,830 But there was no Hebrew told story seemed especially baffling to Claus now because Jewish 399 00:48:47,830 --> 00:48:56,470 tradition had so much to say about family marriage and sexual relations out of wedlock, 400 00:48:56,470 --> 00:49:06,010 et cetera. So just like the policeman who you may recall, conceived of Hebrew as a better medium to tell Bible inspired stories, 401 00:49:06,010 --> 00:49:09,670 Close now determines in that article Judaism and humanism. 402 00:49:09,670 --> 00:49:18,070 The Jewish sources are the best sources on which a writer could rely to examine married life in fiction. 403 00:49:18,070 --> 00:49:27,640 So he doesn't dub Hebrew literature not as strong or not as good as Russian literature when he compares Hebrew writers to Tolstoy. 404 00:49:27,640 --> 00:49:33,070 No, he implies that Hebrew literature is better. It's just dormant. 405 00:49:33,070 --> 00:49:40,510 He urges Hebrew writers to outperform Tolstoy by consulting Jewish sources and really did believe that 406 00:49:40,510 --> 00:49:46,990 Jewish sources had more to say maybe than Christian thought about these issues and why Christian thought. 407 00:49:46,990 --> 00:49:53,290 I mean, Tolstoy is really famous for incorporating Christian ideas into his modern fiction. 408 00:49:53,290 --> 00:50:00,460 And I read a lot about outperforming the Russian novelist as yet another attempt to argue that 409 00:50:00,460 --> 00:50:07,690 Judaism should be seen as that blueprint of Christianity sort of an original behind a translation. 410 00:50:07,690 --> 00:50:14,950 And this is why Hebrew writers had to prove that whatever Christian thought has explored Hebrew thought could explore better. 411 00:50:14,950 --> 00:50:22,440 And this is where and and I look forward to your questions. 412 00:50:22,440 --> 00:50:27,000 And I don't think it makes sense to me. 413 00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:30,840 Let me just open the Q&A panel. Just a reminder to anyone. 414 00:50:30,840 --> 00:50:35,250 If you do have a question, please type it in now. I think I've got nothing at the moment. 415 00:50:35,250 --> 00:50:41,400 And since, as Yakov said, this is going. This is being recorded and we'll go out onto a podcast later. 416 00:50:41,400 --> 00:50:49,650 If you do not prefer your name to be mentioned when, when, when I ask your question, please just type that in the box as you type in. 417 00:50:49,650 --> 00:50:53,060 So in the meantime, while people are typing away, I hope. 418 00:50:53,060 --> 00:50:57,000 Daniel, I think I'd like to, if you don't mind, take the opportunity to ask the first question. 419 00:50:57,000 --> 00:50:59,910 While we're waiting. As you know, I mean, we've discussed this in the past. 420 00:50:59,910 --> 00:51:08,280 I mean, Joseph Klausner, for me, it's very important as a revisionist figure and to some degree, as a professor of Hebrew literature. 421 00:51:08,280 --> 00:51:12,510 But I suppose my question is this. 422 00:51:12,510 --> 00:51:17,190 You talked about you just mentioned at the very end, you know, you talked about this kind of unholy alliance between, 423 00:51:17,190 --> 00:51:23,880 let's say, the Christian or Christian Zionists and the ultranationalists, and it was something we still see today. 424 00:51:23,880 --> 00:51:29,860 But in the point of fact, it only goes so far because really certainly in the in the in Christian ideology, 425 00:51:29,860 --> 00:51:36,210 Christian theology that Christianity wins out. I mean, and that there's there's so there's there's an essential problem there that cannot 426 00:51:36,210 --> 00:51:39,630 you can't really get over at some point you have to it has to be confronted. 427 00:51:39,630 --> 00:51:44,730 So I suppose my first question is on what point at what and to what degree does he confront this? 428 00:51:44,730 --> 00:51:48,450 Because Klausner was it was a it was an a territorial maximalist. 429 00:51:48,450 --> 00:51:53,370 I mean, he was, you know, hardcore revisionist. And I guess that leads me to also my next question. 430 00:51:53,370 --> 00:51:58,680 In spite of everything we've just talked about, how do you reconcile the kind of, 431 00:51:58,680 --> 00:52:02,370 you know, the closeness, an ultranationalist and klausner someone who I mean, 432 00:52:02,370 --> 00:52:10,160 of all the things you'd want to do, you know, his his kind of best known work from himself is his is a book about Jesus. 433 00:52:10,160 --> 00:52:18,870 Oh, yeah. You know, yeah, I think there's there's a joke about, is it the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch? 434 00:52:18,870 --> 00:52:25,440 Because there used to be a custom of writing on on the tombstone, 435 00:52:25,440 --> 00:52:31,320 the the name of the most famous book of a writer, the title of that famous book section. 436 00:52:31,320 --> 00:52:41,970 Gosh, I think that's him used to joke that he'd have Jesus of Nazareth on his tombstone because he also has a book about Jesus. 437 00:52:41,970 --> 00:52:48,690 OK, so well, first of all, yes, I barely mentioned the fact that Claus now and I did mention Jabu Kinski, 438 00:52:48,690 --> 00:52:56,040 but I did not mention closeness, intimacy with Shepperton Ski, and I was really reading his autobiography. 439 00:52:56,040 --> 00:53:06,930 And the first thing he describes when he describes his arrival to Palestine and this is the main purpose is really to settle there. 440 00:53:06,930 --> 00:53:16,980 The first thing he sees is Djiboutian ski looking dazzling in his uniform so that I think I'm 441 00:53:16,980 --> 00:53:25,070 not a historian as I as I already said from from what I've read about closing as a revisionist. 442 00:53:25,070 --> 00:53:34,730 He never he never quite supported the revisionist movement beyond, you know, op eds, 443 00:53:34,730 --> 00:53:46,430 sometimes what we might call today op eds and really his into his intellectual but also a friendship is intellectual intimacy with Joe Burtynsky. 444 00:53:46,430 --> 00:53:57,230 And I think he did believe and in all of sharpshooting skills, ideas about, you know, what is it, the Iron Fist and everything but the Iron Wall? 445 00:53:57,230 --> 00:54:14,820 Sorry. But but when he writes about Zionism, he's on the defensive in many ways, which which I think again, that those discussions around trans. 446 00:54:14,820 --> 00:54:18,380 He captured that almost as a metaphor. 447 00:54:18,380 --> 00:54:28,080 He is always determined to prove that Judaism was there first and therefore whatever is your opinion about him personally, 448 00:54:28,080 --> 00:54:32,730 Jewish thought Djiboutian Ski was such a European figure. 449 00:54:32,730 --> 00:54:38,040 And again, I'm using the adjective European as they used to. Maybe it's not a very narrow use. 450 00:54:38,040 --> 00:54:47,010 I know maybe it's too broad, but but he also he always made sure to to underscore the fact that Judaism was 451 00:54:47,010 --> 00:54:54,480 there first and in fact was really at the basis of European culture in general, 452 00:54:54,480 --> 00:55:02,220 because European culture owes its genesis to Christianity and Christianity owes its genesis to Judaism, and that was it. 453 00:55:02,220 --> 00:55:09,780 And whenever he's accused of being too radical politically and his autobiography makes it very clear, he just goes on the defensive, 454 00:55:09,780 --> 00:55:19,380 and it's the same with Jesus of Nazareth, the book to answer your question about that, he was defending his position as a scholar. 455 00:55:19,380 --> 00:55:30,120 And there's another famous story about clothes now he he wanted to teach Second Temple Judaism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 456 00:55:30,120 --> 00:55:36,600 And he, I think, was sure that he would get a bad job because he had already published so much about that, 457 00:55:36,600 --> 00:55:41,520 and he completed his dissertation at the University of Heidelberg. 458 00:55:41,520 --> 00:55:46,800 And you're right about that time in Heidelberg as a time in which you really realised 459 00:55:46,800 --> 00:55:52,050 that he was such an excellent writer and thinker and he was writing in German, 460 00:55:52,050 --> 00:55:58,500 which was definitely not as his first language. And then he didn't get that job. 461 00:55:58,500 --> 00:56:01,770 He got the job of teaching modern Hebrew literature. 462 00:56:01,770 --> 00:56:10,680 And so students of modern Hebrew literature like myself usually start with reading some of Cosmo's work or really today 463 00:56:10,680 --> 00:56:20,730 just scholarship on Claus nose work or that already incorporates work into the historiography of modern literature. 464 00:56:20,730 --> 00:56:31,560 But he he was he always felt like he was undervalued as a scholar of the Second Temple in early Christianity. 465 00:56:31,560 --> 00:56:34,140 So I would say he he continued to take pride. 466 00:56:34,140 --> 00:56:41,670 As I said in my presentation in in in that work of his, I don't think it bothered him that he was known for that work again. 467 00:56:41,670 --> 00:56:50,460 I mean, to him, it was proof that a Jew could write about Jesus maybe better than others because a Jew had access 468 00:56:50,460 --> 00:56:57,510 to those Talmudic texts that he really viewed as the original behind it Jesus's translations. 469 00:56:57,510 --> 00:57:03,940 I hope that answers your question. So it just prompts a couple of questions for me. 470 00:57:03,940 --> 00:57:07,620 Yeah, yeah. I have a question. Can I jump in and ask a question? 471 00:57:07,620 --> 00:57:12,330 Sure. I mean, put myself on, Danielle. 472 00:57:12,330 --> 00:57:22,920 Thank you so much for this fascinating talk and so much to think about and to really be excited about wanting you to go on discussing. 473 00:57:22,920 --> 00:57:32,280 So I want to make maybe a general comment and then to ask the two questions somewhat related to this. 474 00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:39,630 It's very interesting to think of Klausner as a arms student or proteges and to a degree, right? 475 00:57:39,630 --> 00:57:52,170 Well, do inherit from him specifically because when you read a heydon's writings generally, but specifically his critique of Hertzel, 476 00:57:52,170 --> 00:58:02,700 the one thing that Saddam just cannot accept is how European heritage, the imagination of the new society, or Noland, is. 477 00:58:02,700 --> 00:58:09,450 He uses European as a derogatory term to say everything I look around in the book is European and then Klausen, 478 00:58:09,450 --> 00:58:18,510 it comes in this, you know, try to amend. It is appropriate. European is in a sense, but even more to the point. 479 00:58:18,510 --> 00:58:22,140 You should know everybody. I mean, most of our I think this, you know, 480 00:58:22,140 --> 00:58:29,940 but just to make it go to remind ourselves a goddamn gets into a severe fight is trying to censor yourself. 481 00:58:29,940 --> 00:58:36,720 Haim Brenner Because Brenner argues that reading this the the Christian Biblical reading 482 00:58:36,720 --> 00:58:42,630 the Christian literature is a Jewish exercise because it's reading Jewish literature, 483 00:58:42,630 --> 00:58:49,800 and the Haddam sees this as breaking the taboo of Hebrew, a Jewish nationalism. 484 00:58:49,800 --> 00:58:57,750 And then his protege, in a sense, goes on to write a book about Jesus that makes his name out of, you know, as a Jesus biographer. 485 00:58:57,750 --> 00:59:08,010 So that's a very interesting point that I would ask you to comment on this relationship with the Haddam and how he understood this. 486 00:59:08,010 --> 00:59:13,740 The second question is, in a sense, wider, and it's much more speculative. 487 00:59:13,740 --> 00:59:21,420 But I. I think there's always flowing and an undercurrent flowing under these discussions, 488 00:59:21,420 --> 00:59:24,780 which we rarely mentioned and you mentioned and I love, I mean, I appreciate it. 489 00:59:24,780 --> 00:59:31,440 I really love that you mentioned, but I ask you to expand on it. And this undercurrent is Russia, Russian ness, Russian identity. 490 00:59:31,440 --> 00:59:36,060 These are all Russian Jews, right? Except for no one. 491 00:59:36,060 --> 00:59:39,930 They have Central European education, and they go to Germany to study. 492 00:59:39,930 --> 00:59:48,120 But Russian ness of the time specifically has this complicated relationship with its own identity and with with Europeans. 493 00:59:48,120 --> 00:59:57,720 For Russians to be present, European is actually a cultural appropriation in a sense or, you know, self imagining that is extremely important. 494 00:59:57,720 --> 01:00:02,190 And Russian has also built itself, in that sense, vis a vis war against the Jew, 495 01:00:02,190 --> 01:00:10,980 which obviously so many of the Zionists accept as a framework for thinking, Well, how do you see this is playing out this? 496 01:00:10,980 --> 01:00:15,480 Yeah, I guess the Russian background for this, right? Yeah, no. 497 01:00:15,480 --> 01:00:22,890 These are very good questions that are going to help me improve this chapter that I'm working 498 01:00:22,890 --> 01:00:29,100 on at the moment because one of my thoughts working on this chapter had been for a while now. 499 01:00:29,100 --> 01:00:30,490 Should I really relate? 500 01:00:30,490 --> 01:00:39,510 Maybe also to that the Brennan affair that you mentioned, it's usually referred to as the Brennan affair, and now I know I should. 501 01:00:39,510 --> 01:00:43,890 So just a comment on closing as a call to arms protegee. 502 01:00:43,890 --> 01:00:53,790 I think there is some writing about it. Historians have grappled with with this question and I've I was thinking about it, 503 01:00:53,790 --> 01:01:04,680 reading a card and reading about a father who became kind of depressed in the final years of his life. 504 01:01:04,680 --> 01:01:10,470 I think when Adam gave away Schiller and this is based on, you know, 505 01:01:10,470 --> 01:01:18,420 historians work and works by academy himself, he was just really tired of editing that journal. 506 01:01:18,420 --> 01:01:24,030 And Klausner was really energetic. That's that's what I think really happened there. 507 01:01:24,030 --> 01:01:34,110 If I read some of Adam's work from after the time that he was that founding and really legendary editor of Haseloff, 508 01:01:34,110 --> 01:01:44,760 so Grossman had already sent a few articles, Adam could see that he was very confident, which is something that had maybe lacked, 509 01:01:44,760 --> 01:01:52,020 you know, this sense of long, long standing, ongoing self-confidence. 510 01:01:52,020 --> 01:01:57,600 And this is not a psychoanalytical, you know, observation. 511 01:01:57,600 --> 01:02:08,650 In fact, it has a lot to do with what you said, Yakov, about how and to arm because the other arm is worried in the early 20th century. 512 01:02:08,650 --> 01:02:21,780 You know, he writes his his essays like Imitation and Assimilation that has his manifesto about Zionism in the late 1890s and then in the early 1800s, 513 01:02:21,780 --> 01:02:28,410 as Zionism becomes more and more popular. He really is worried about it's going in the direction that it eventually went, 514 01:02:28,410 --> 01:02:33,390 maybe held steady and Zionism, the kind of Zionism that health are represented. 515 01:02:33,390 --> 01:02:44,490 And it was very European, as as you said. So maybe that's that's my only solution to that conundrum of what really happened 516 01:02:44,490 --> 01:02:51,480 there where he just sort of maybe he just lets go at some point because it's too much. 517 01:02:51,480 --> 01:02:55,530 It's going in a direction that he cannot identify with. 518 01:02:55,530 --> 01:02:58,770 And that direction is as very European. 519 01:02:58,770 --> 01:03:08,910 By the way, I really didn't think that Hebrew literature should have any kind of poetic works in it whatsoever, so let alone translations. 520 01:03:08,910 --> 01:03:19,680 And he becomes livid when a translation of the Vicar of Wakefield on an English historical novel comes out. 521 01:03:19,680 --> 01:03:22,830 And it's Goldsmith's novel, 522 01:03:22,830 --> 01:03:34,570 and I'm just doesn't understand why would any Hebrew reader be interested in some English family in the countryside that goes bankrupt? 523 01:03:34,570 --> 01:03:36,420 You know, that's that's the story. 524 01:03:36,420 --> 01:03:45,600 But he does recommend translating a different work by Goldsmith in that same essay, The Citizen of the World, which is which is very different. 525 01:03:45,600 --> 01:03:47,730 It's not a poetic work, per se. 526 01:03:47,730 --> 01:03:55,500 It's an epistolary novel and very, you know, it's like Monty skewers Persian letters in the in the tradition of the Enlightenment. 527 01:03:55,500 --> 01:04:04,740 And that brings me to Russia on some level, not I. These are the two languages I wish I knew on a personal level Arabic and Russian. 528 01:04:04,740 --> 01:04:09,930 And having grown up in Israel, these are really the languages that someone should have taught me. 529 01:04:09,930 --> 01:04:19,710 But I don't know them. There are. Scholars of moderate Hebrew literature who are also Russian readers, and I think their numbers are growing, 530 01:04:19,710 --> 01:04:24,750 and that makes a difference for the study of modern Hebrew literature because you 531 01:04:24,750 --> 01:04:29,490 are very right to point out that the Russian connexion is is extremely important. 532 01:04:29,490 --> 01:04:41,970 And as I said, when Bialik translates Don Quixote, it's based on a Russian and a German, two adaptations of 76 very famous Spanish Spanish novel. 533 01:04:41,970 --> 01:04:54,330 So I think what I what I could say is that Hebrew writers aligned themselves with the kind of Russian writers 534 01:04:54,330 --> 01:05:02,970 and thinkers who do identify Russia with Europe or wanted to go and wanted it to go in that direction. 535 01:05:02,970 --> 01:05:08,790 So from what I can see, they they they think of Russia for its part of Europe, for the most part. 536 01:05:08,790 --> 01:05:10,510 And then there is a whole Russian. 537 01:05:10,510 --> 01:05:17,860 You know, there are Russian politics that may contradict that, but I'm not sure I'm a good person to comment on that. 538 01:05:17,860 --> 01:05:25,950 But, but yes, I mean, there is some work being done on it. I just found a great article about Janice Hahn, who was one of Brennan's best friends, 539 01:05:25,950 --> 01:05:34,500 a Hebrew writer, and how his entire work really ode to Russian literature, its motifs and its style. 540 01:05:34,500 --> 01:05:39,660 So I hope that answers the question. Thank you, Daniel. 541 01:05:39,660 --> 01:05:47,740 So I guess following on from that, I've got a question from someone who asks, Is Zionism then a European translation of Judaism? 542 01:05:47,740 --> 01:05:53,190 It's the good question. Yeah, I like that. Can I use it in my manuscript? 543 01:05:53,190 --> 01:06:02,760 Because they're anonymous? So why not? Yes, this is the kind of metaphor that I I plan to to to work with. 544 01:06:02,760 --> 01:06:08,820 I mean, really, all these paradoxes, you know, Zionism was supposed to put an end to assimilation. 545 01:06:08,820 --> 01:06:17,910 Maybe it's, you know, the best way to assimilate was to imitate those European structures just elsewhere. 546 01:06:17,910 --> 01:06:27,480 So is Zionism actually assimilation? Scholars like Daniel Boyfriend have written about that, 547 01:06:27,480 --> 01:06:40,980 and then translation enters this discussion readily because translation is often debated in that context of assimilation. 548 01:06:40,980 --> 01:06:47,550 So if Zionism is a movement that is supposed to put an end to assimilation, should it translate? 549 01:06:47,550 --> 01:06:55,020 These are one of the this is one of the questions that that I I plan to deal with in this work in progress. 550 01:06:55,020 --> 01:07:06,460 So, yes, I mean, I like I like that reworking of the presentation by an anonymous participant who is giving you the permission to use. 551 01:07:06,460 --> 01:07:14,400 Yeah, that's right. Thank you. So I wonder if we do, if we have any other questions and if not, I have another question. 552 01:07:14,400 --> 01:07:17,430 We maybe if there's another question we used to wrap up the seminar, 553 01:07:17,430 --> 01:07:21,330 I'm going to go back to what you said before we're talking about this kind of the downplaying, 554 01:07:21,330 --> 01:07:30,690 let's say, of closeness, nationalist or ultranationalist. I would say personally, I don't totally agree about the fact that he downplayed it. 555 01:07:30,690 --> 01:07:34,140 I mean, he was a revisionist without and quite proudly so. 556 01:07:34,140 --> 01:07:39,330 I mean, he was the he he he led the Western Wall campaign, you know, in the wake of the 1929 Arab Wired's. 557 01:07:39,330 --> 01:07:42,120 I mean, it was Klausner who spearheaded the campaign and let it. 558 01:07:42,120 --> 01:07:48,180 But also, I'm thinking of an article and I really hope I'm not wrong because it's I'm going on kind of very dusty memories now. 559 01:07:48,180 --> 01:07:55,230 But back when I was doing my own doctoral thesis, I read an article by Klausner about Hanukkah, the hush money. 560 01:07:55,230 --> 01:08:02,040 And he really does. Like many other ultranationalist look to this as actually a proud moment in Jewish 561 01:08:02,040 --> 01:08:05,940 nationalist history because they tried to defend themselves and like the Masada thing, 562 01:08:05,940 --> 01:08:10,770 you know, they defended, you know, even though they got defeated, they they tried very, very hard to defend themselves. 563 01:08:10,770 --> 01:08:18,600 So I think I don't know if I I mean, he goes past Jesus for, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it on an ideological level. 564 01:08:18,600 --> 01:08:23,190 I think I think and I just want to to movement. 565 01:08:23,190 --> 01:08:31,260 No, it's not. I mean, so yes, I if I gave the impression that he was downplaying it, it's not what I meant. 566 01:08:31,260 --> 01:08:41,910 Exactly. I mean, I do think that, well, he doesn't like to be associated with, let's say, overt or explicit political debate, 567 01:08:41,910 --> 01:08:48,570 at least as he describes it in some of his autobiography Biographical Works and the preface to 568 01:08:48,570 --> 01:08:56,070 his other scholarly works because he wants to be seen where he wanted to be seen as a scholar. 569 01:08:56,070 --> 01:09:07,350 And which is why I mentioned that anecdote from from the days that he he was waiting to be appointed as a lecturer at the Hebrew 570 01:09:07,350 --> 01:09:14,250 University and ended up getting that that that job that he didn't want of teaching modern Hebrew literature and later he got to teach. 571 01:09:14,250 --> 01:09:17,370 What he wanted to teach for, I mean, for sure, 572 01:09:17,370 --> 01:09:26,610 and he is and he was definitely and I hope he made it clear in the presentation itself there was no other solution as far as now was, 573 01:09:26,610 --> 01:09:31,320 as Carlson was concerned to that Jewish question. 574 01:09:31,320 --> 01:09:36,540 It was only migration and it was Jews, right? It was their historical right. 575 01:09:36,540 --> 01:09:47,620 It was their historical calling. He calls it 2.0 air, the calling that this is a nation of Jews in general to really take over the entire space. 576 01:09:47,620 --> 01:09:52,740 So the two banks of the Jordan, and it's unambiguous. 577 01:09:52,740 --> 01:09:57,720 I agree with you, Peter, and you're the historian here, and you probably know these things better. 578 01:09:57,720 --> 01:10:04,980 And that's what I see when I read clause now to insert him into that literary story that I'm 579 01:10:04,980 --> 01:10:10,200 trying to tell because he is a very important figure in the Hebrew literary world as well. 580 01:10:10,200 --> 01:10:15,000 But there is a tension there. And again, it's the same tension as with no translation. 581 01:10:15,000 --> 01:10:24,630 All of these writers are also Zionist figures, and literature and politics often have this uneasy relationship. 582 01:10:24,630 --> 01:10:31,200 Clearly, literary work is always part of the political were world implicated in, 583 01:10:31,200 --> 01:10:39,570 you know, influenced by it and maybe even has the power to change it slowly, gradually. 584 01:10:39,570 --> 01:10:47,040 I don't know. But but the fact that Hebrew lit Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century is 585 01:10:47,040 --> 01:10:53,190 also a political arena does not mean that everyone involved feels comfortable with it. 586 01:10:53,190 --> 01:10:58,500 And so this is what I meant to highlight, and that's from the point of view of someone who studies mainly literature. 587 01:10:58,500 --> 01:11:05,010 That clause now, when he's asked about politics, he son when he was asked about politics, 588 01:11:05,010 --> 01:11:14,160 especially in the context of literary and scholarly activity, he would sometimes, you know, at least, you know, don't play some parts of it. 589 01:11:14,160 --> 01:11:23,100 But yes, I mean, he writes about Zionism and Jabotinsky and terms, and I'm sure they were reading one another. 590 01:11:23,100 --> 01:11:27,390 And again, you know, better. So thank you for for that. 591 01:11:27,390 --> 01:11:33,090 And in point of fact. Oh, Yaakov, one more. Go ahead. Thank you. 592 01:11:33,090 --> 01:11:38,550 Thank you, Peter, for allowing this. I want to ask the question and do remind you something. 593 01:11:38,550 --> 01:11:44,340 So the question I have actually relates to a theme that comes up in almost all of our meetings in this, 594 01:11:44,340 --> 01:11:49,410 uh, similar serious is the question of multilingualism. 595 01:11:49,410 --> 01:11:57,210 These all are ideologues working in a multilingual situation where they are building a monolingual entity. 596 01:11:57,210 --> 01:12:02,700 Maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't think so. Some of them were obviously committed to this. 597 01:12:02,700 --> 01:12:10,610 But can you say something about the way they they negotiated this tension between nationalist? 598 01:12:10,610 --> 01:12:14,960 Focus on one language as the everything. 599 01:12:14,960 --> 01:12:22,370 Yeah, even to the degree that you you that they would look negatively on translations and then the reality in which they live, 600 01:12:22,370 --> 01:12:25,880 in which it's more than bilingualism, for sure. For most of them, right? 601 01:12:25,880 --> 01:12:29,810 I mean, it's Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian German. 602 01:12:29,810 --> 01:12:35,330 And the second you promise to say something about the election, we are all sitting on something. 603 01:12:35,330 --> 01:12:41,630 I said, No, not at all. I just like, you know, from the literary world, I will not say anything political. 604 01:12:41,630 --> 01:12:49,560 No, I said that I might say a few things about the Girl in America, which I did in that form of my comment on how this down, 605 01:12:49,560 --> 01:12:59,030 because now encounter always makes me think about Mike Pompeo visiting Israel. 606 01:12:59,030 --> 01:13:01,550 Right? So this is just my association. 607 01:13:01,550 --> 01:13:09,860 And I think, Peter, you also, you know, as another historian in the room, you you told me that I should be very aware of, 608 01:13:09,860 --> 01:13:19,170 I think and between the lines of the time that has passed and the different iterations of of that unholy alliance. 609 01:13:19,170 --> 01:13:21,650 So that was an aside. But yes, 610 01:13:21,650 --> 01:13:33,410 multilingualism is another major tension that that is similar to that tension that translation both represents and generates 611 01:13:33,410 --> 01:13:42,230 in modern Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century and really in Zionist thought to early Zionists thought so. 612 01:13:42,230 --> 01:13:54,860 It paradoxically, and this goes beyond the Jewish context, multilingualism often contributes to the advance of monolingual realities. 613 01:13:54,860 --> 01:13:57,500 This is how translation works, actually. 614 01:13:57,500 --> 01:14:09,230 So in order, let's say, for Cultural Group, a national group to be able to read whatever it wants to read in its own language, 615 01:14:09,230 --> 01:14:15,320 if we can talk of language about languages is something that we own that we possess. 616 01:14:15,320 --> 01:14:21,290 Then you need those multilingual agents to translate everything into that language. 617 01:14:21,290 --> 01:14:29,000 Otherwise, it's complete isolation, which is not something that we really know as humans, I think. 618 01:14:29,000 --> 01:14:32,840 Or I mean. And I'm happy that this is the case. 619 01:14:32,840 --> 01:14:37,220 We're not completely isolated culturally. 620 01:14:37,220 --> 01:14:47,450 So this is a structural paradox when it comes to translation that you need multilingual agents to generate mono, monolingual realities. 621 01:14:47,450 --> 01:15:02,720 And it's not unusual that national movements or nationalist movements have this robust enterprise of translation to support their nationalism. 622 01:15:02,720 --> 01:15:12,890 So there are many other examples, and they're fascinating of these translation enterprises sometimes of reclaiming what 623 01:15:12,890 --> 01:15:20,210 what you know what the coloniser had already translated into the coloniser language. 624 01:15:20,210 --> 01:15:27,050 What I read India had this major translation enterprise at the time of decolonisation, 625 01:15:27,050 --> 01:15:33,410 which is by definition, at least on some level, a time of nationalisation. 626 01:15:33,410 --> 01:15:39,470 I mean, different stories, of course. So this is this is not unusual. 627 01:15:39,470 --> 01:15:49,370 But another aspect of translation is that it doesn't quite let us forget that multilingualism exists. 628 01:15:49,370 --> 01:15:55,160 So yes, it does advance monolingual ism, but it's that liminal space. 629 01:15:55,160 --> 01:15:59,000 And you know, I mentioned, you know, bollocks, stop here. 630 01:15:59,000 --> 01:16:07,920 And he was really, he said at the end of his talk that we live in a world that rewards multilingualism rather than multilingualism. 631 01:16:07,920 --> 01:16:15,020 And I think it's true that we live in a world that is dominated by a monolingual paradigm, 632 01:16:15,020 --> 01:16:21,890 meaning that the every person should have a single language that defines him or her. 633 01:16:21,890 --> 01:16:25,730 That's that's supposed to be the norm. Of course, it's not the norm. 634 01:16:25,730 --> 01:16:32,510 And even, you know, the photographs that we sign in yet use lecture from Jerusalem. 635 01:16:32,510 --> 01:16:38,520 You can see that. But actually, there are always cracks in that monolingual reality. 636 01:16:38,520 --> 01:16:41,150 There's other languages always creep in. 637 01:16:41,150 --> 01:16:51,920 I think if there's anything that is conspicuously missing from these writers works, the Hebrew writers at the turn of the 20th century, 638 01:16:51,920 --> 01:16:57,770 it's Arabic because if they if they address Arabic, it's always the language of the past. 639 01:16:57,770 --> 01:17:04,580 Even when they're already in Palestine, it's the language that, you know, mediaeval Jewish poets, new used. 640 01:17:04,580 --> 01:17:15,860 And then it's maybe also worthy of translation. But I I'm sure others have found things, but there's so little about Arabic in their work. 641 01:17:15,860 --> 01:17:22,400 While they do grapple with the fact that they know other languages and yeah, this is another tension, 642 01:17:22,400 --> 01:17:29,100 the tension that you just mentioned in that world of translation and Zionism that aren't interested in. 643 01:17:29,100 --> 01:17:36,660 Right, Danielle, it's a good place to end. I want to thank you for well, sure for your talk very, very much. 644 01:17:36,660 --> 01:17:41,880 And next week we'll be able to or next time we'll be able to talk about the results of the American election. 645 01:17:41,880 --> 01:17:49,860 I hope with a happy face. I just remind you that next week we go back to the Israel Studies seminar and Dr. Yuval 646 01:17:49,860 --> 01:17:54,360 Shabani and Sean Peretz will be talking about Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel, 647 01:17:54,360 --> 01:18:04,170 equality struggle. And then in two weeks from today, we return to the reconsidering resign and urge early Jewish Nationalist Ideology Seminar. 648 01:18:04,170 --> 01:18:12,160 And Dr. Yuval, if we will talk about the return to adolescent disputes over Sephardic culture and identity between Arabic and Hebrew. 649 01:18:12,160 --> 01:18:16,500 Danielle, it's been a to just to correct your back. 650 01:18:16,500 --> 01:18:19,650 Yes, I'm back just to correct the network President U-value. 651 01:18:19,650 --> 01:18:27,150 But you are talking about sacred places and the regulation of sacred places must have been a confusion of fact. 652 01:18:27,150 --> 01:18:31,740 Yeah, you're right. That's my mistake. I can't read it. Reading was not a big part of my doctoral studies. 653 01:18:31,740 --> 01:18:37,410 So OK. I'm really sorry about that. You're absolutely right. It's it's also reading everything in a very dim light. 654 01:18:37,410 --> 01:18:41,410 Anyway, Danielle, I want to thank you. Thank you very much for your wonderful contribution. 655 01:18:41,410 --> 01:18:45,270 And yes, thank you so much. Thank you, Yaakov. 656 01:18:45,270 --> 01:18:56,133 Thank you, Peter. Thank you for inviting me.