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.
Our guest today, I'm very, very thrilled to introduce to you. She's a colleague and a friend, Danielle Drury.
I'll give you a little bit of her biography. Danielle teaches modern Hebrew literature here at Oxford.
She holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University and has taught
at the City University of New York and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Her research focuses on the ties between the literary translation and nationalism,
bringing together contemporary theories of cultural transfer and the study of modern Hebrew literature.
Her writing has appeared in several academic and popular publications, including Proof Text,
A Journal of Jewish Literary History, DePauw, a literary journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
And today she's going to talk to you about a subject which was very close to my mind,
my heart and my my research also about Joseph Klausner and Yosef Klausner and translation Zionism and Christianity.
So, Danielle, thank you. Thank you, Peter. OK, can you hear me?
You can. Great. So thank you very much for inviting me to participate in the seminar.
It is Election Day in the United States, as you all know.
So hopefully this talk is a distraction from the anxiety, even though I might say a few words about America and Israel later.
I mean, from the perspective of early Zionist thought, I'm very grateful for being here.
I should say that my training is in literary studies, but my current project about translation and Zionism revolves around question questions of
history and historiography no less than it does around the analysis of literary texts.
So it's nice to have a chance to take part in this ongoing discussion of early Zionist thought and Zionist history.
And what I'll present to you today is not about a literary text,
but rather about a Hebrew biography of Jesus Christ, written by the scholar editor and Zionist thinker Yosef Claus.
Now Klausner was born in a small town in today's Lithuania.
It was the Russian Empire at the time was 1874, and he became an important figure in the Hebrew literary world,
first in Odessa in the early 1900s, then in Jerusalem from the 1920s.
He got there in 1919 until his death in 1958.
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.
Our collaboration between Claus Now and the Anglican priest Herbert Danby,
who was church librarian and a journalist in Jerusalem in the 1920s before becoming the Regis professor of Hebrew.
Here I am in London, but OK here at the University of Oxford in 1936.
Before I get there, however, I'm going to dedicate a considerable amount of time,
maybe half of this presentation to the link between Zionism and translation.
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,
amongst other things, that the study of Zionism could benefit from the study of translation,
for looking at translation from looking at it added not only as a linguistic act,
but also as a metaphor that Zionist thinkers use as something that represents more than just that linguistic or cultural transfer.
So I will start with a lengthy general introduction about the centrality of translation in early Zionist thought,
and then I'll move on to Klausner closeness work on Christ in translation.
I should also say before I share my screen with you and start my presentation that you'll both lecture in this
seminar two weeks ago has prepared us to grapple with some of the questions that I am also interested in,
particularly the question of how the Zionist movement nationalised the Hebrew language.
And paradoxically, the translation was a way to achieve that goal of nationalising Hebrew.
So now I'm going to share my screen and hopefully it works. Does it work?
OK, so here we have some covers of translated literary texts in Hebrew, of course, in the early 90s and hundreds,
what you can see here on the left is David Garnishments translation of Lord Byron's work.
Caine, so kind based on the story from Genesis and next to it is freshman's.
19:10 Translation of Friedrich Nietzsche thus spoke.
Zarathustra Friedman was a Hebrew poet, writer, editor, but also a very important and prolific translator.
And next to Fishman's work as a translator,
you can see Heinrich Mondiali translations of Shiller's William Tell and Cervantes Don Quixote, which is not really a translation.
It was an adaptation of an abridged Russian version that Bialik created consulting the German text as well German translation as well.
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.
And we also have Brian, as you said, claim out.
Another famous Hebrew writer from the turn of the 20th century whose translation of
Dostoyevsky crime and punishment that came out in the early 1920s after Brown's death.
But he actually was working on it in 1910 1911.
So this is to show you that the Hebrew translation enterprise was growing in the first few decades of the 20th century,
and these covers are also beautiful. It was a very popular activity to translate amongst some writers.
And the period in general in modern Hebrew literary historiography is referred to as the revival of modern Hebrew literature the Renaissance Hospital.
And most writers of the revival, who also defined themselves as revivalists, sometimes were in eastern and Central Europe at the time.
Some of them later migrated to Palestine and to other places as well.
They set out to reinvent Hebrew is the language of literary modernism.
Of course, it did not function as any but his mother tongue at the time,
and it was not the vernacular of a national group that also defined itself as a unified, homogenous national group.
As yet pointed out in his talk, Hebrew only became a spoken language later in history.
But for years it had been a language that many Jews, mostly men all over the world, could read and write.
And so it was an effective medium of communication and also of literary circulation, which is my addition to what you already told us.
Those who believed that Hebrew had to be revived or rather nationalised aspired
to show all those Hebrew readers that Hebrew was like other living languages,
and translation was an effective way to achieve that goal.
And this is sort of the thought experiment that I think people were experiencing at the time.
Maybe unconsciously, if any reader picked up a book that was originally written in a spoken language, let's say German,
but was rendered anew in Hebrew, that Hebrew reader could think of Hebrew as equivalent to German or really any other spoken language.
And even if this would have been an almost unconscious understanding it, you know, it would have been very effective.
And in a more conscious level, Hebrew readers would simply have another opportunity to consume a book,
a book in Hebrew and not just any book, but one that other groups had already appreciated.
So translation really helped create the illusion that some Zionist thinkers had hoped to turn into a reality that Jews, a scattered minority,
were just like other nations or at least some other nations and one were in
possession of a literary canon of a living literature and a living language.
We can think about it as a fantasy of equivalence.
Translation helped foster this fantasy of equivalence between Jews and others because the languages seemed equivalent in translation,
even though, of course, any translation scholar would tell you that there is no such thing as perfect equivalence.
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
Zionist movement in the first few decades of the 20th century to such a degree.
The debates around literature and literature in translation were often as heated as
debates around the so-called Jewish question and the Zionist answer or answers to it.
In fact, the more readers expressed in, the more readers expressed interest in Hebrew literature and the Zionist movement.
And this wasn't always a linear process. The more questions began to be asked about the right balance between original and
translated Hebrew works in the Hebrew publishing world and the Hebrew literary field.
So although many famous Hebrew writers who were also Zionist figures also translated,
they sometimes became sceptical of translation, and that's something that I also wanted to show you.
So here we have a picture of in Bialik.
Very famous poet. I think it's fair to call him a Zionist figure as well.
And in 1935, he publishes an essay entitled Language Pangs Election,
in which he discusses the poverty of the Hebrew language, as well as organic defects.
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.
He criticises Hebrew writers growing use of translation mainly of single words, but also of complete works.
And then he insists that translation would only weaken the Hebrew language in its literature,
and it would reveal how limited its vocabulary is compared to the vocabularies of living languages.
So he believed that if people writers focussed more on the original creation, they could strengthen Hebrew literature from within.
And he had this wish that later, of course, was fulfilled,
that comprehensive Hebrew dictionary would be produced maybe jointly a few Hebrew writers and lexicographers taking part in that project.
Now the very idea that a language lacks strength deserves some scrutiny,
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.
And this is the thing that Zionist image of a helpless diasporic nation made its way to
discussions of translation and the Hebrew language itself in the early 20th century,
in the form of these complaints about the degeneration of the language of the
literature and translation was sometimes seen as part of that generation.
And even though Bialik later translated Chillout and Cervantes and also experimented with translation before publishing this essay Language Pangs,
he still resisted translation with it when it seemed to him to be taking over original literary production.
And he was not the only one.
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.
It was titled From the World of Our Literature and alongside the other publications he reviewed.
But then I reviewed Henrik Ibsen's Norwegian Play a Doll's House.
In its first Hebrew translation, Fleischman was the translator,
and he really disliked the play and therefore criticised the very fact of its translation and publication.
And so he stated, And you have it as a quotation on your slide.
People might say, even if this translation does not do us any good, it would not do us any harm.
No, I said it will do us harm our literary energy.
Do I even need to mention it? It is sparser than sparse, and we should not waste it.
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,
this this was just our application or another way of saying that Jews, the Hebrew culture were weak.
We had limited energy and had to focus their energy in a very deliberate way on the right kind of goals.
And Brownout, who was a translator he'd started translating even before publishing this review essay.
But it did not stop him from criticising specific translation choices.
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,
Yaakov Maza, attempted to put an end to the dispute about translation, and he called for an inclusive approach to Hebrew publishing.
He was basically asking Why should writing in Hebrew and translating into Hebrew be perceived as mutually exclusive activities?
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.
So maybe to him it seemed easy to do both translating and and writing.
But he also used an analogy from the world of commerce, which strikes me as interesting.
He said humankind is characterised by its drive to exchange goods.
So why should anyone object to spiritual exchange more than they do to the exchange of material objects or farming methods, for example?
So this was Mazen. Things got even more complicated when it came to translations from the Hebrew.
So this is where I am now. We have here Jabotinsky,
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.
And then the book itself. The anthology came out in 1911, and next to him you can see a picture of the continent.
I already mentioned when Djiboutian Ski published this anthology of biotics poems in Russian translation.
Fleischman promptly attacked him for granting Russians whom he defined as a nation that persecuted Jews,
by definition, access into the best poems of the modern Hebrew literary canon for her freshman.
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.
They also did not deserve access to biotics. Poetry specifically, freshman insisted that the Alex Lemmens were untranslatable,
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.
And he defined Bialik as a Jewish prophet and because he was a Jewish prophet,
translating his work was like translating the Bible, which inflation's view was always bound to fail or at least miss the mark.
And I think this is a familiar claim about the Bible. Bible scholars in this virtual room may have heard it in other contexts,
and it is interesting that Fleischman had his theory about translating Bible inspired works into Hebrew.
You may recall that he's the one who translated Lord Byron Cane into Hebrew,
and he thought that that translation was not really a translation, but a restoration of the work he used.
The Hebrew phrase has Shabbat Australia-China or Olive QnA.
So he really did. Did think that something was regained rather than lost in his translation of that work by Beethoven?
And he he would say similar things about other works that were clearly inspired by the biblical texts.
And of course, there are many works that fall under that category.
But he did resist translations from the Hebrew, especially when the biblical texts seemed to be part of the story.
So all of these examples point to a duel, even contradictory perception of translation, both from and into Hebrew amongst Hebrew writers.
Against that backdrop of the rise of Zionism, so really the first decades of the 20th century,
the writers themselves, they all differed in their views of both literature and politics.
All of these writers that I presented to you right now, but also others that could have been part of this presentation.
Bialik, for example, subscribed to Zionism all in all made.
Nobody took the step of migrating to Palestine.
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.
Brennan often voiced his ambivalence about Zionism. He's very well known for that, and Fleischman actually rejected most Zionist principles,
and freshman scholars cannot agree whether he was a Zionist or not, especially because he, he says it is.
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.
It was not the Zionist answer that he found the most the best answer to the Jewish question, so to speak of.
But they they all shared this ambivalence about translation, which is what is interesting to me.
Here's a sketch of Fleischman and Bialik in Berlin, and maybe they are debating translation and Zionism.
Who knows? This is by the Russian Jewish painter Leonid Pasternak.
Despite the differences between these Hebrew writers, most of them were attracted to the act and products of translation and sceptical about it,
as I already said, sceptical about the short term and long term ramifications of translation.
I think this reflected a broader ambivalence typical of them vis-a-vis European cultures at large or the extent to
which Zionism represented a move away from Europe or an adoption of European political and philosophical trends.
Above all, maybe the idea of modern nationalism.
Maybe I'll stop sharing my screen briefly to just make that point, and then I'll move on to class now.
I hope it works. So I just stopped sharing my screen because Zionism was a European nationalist movement that vowed to end both Jewish
assimilation and persecution in Europe and think it could not afford to betray too intimate a connexion with European cultures,
nations, religions.
But it was still the non-Jewish world from which Zionist thinkers were consciously taking inspiration not just the non-Jewish world,
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,
applying this ambivalent relationship with Europe and I, my use of this term Europe is really follows.
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.
Translation from an into Hebrew was a locus where the aspiration of Jewish self-reliance
collided with the recognition that Hebrew culture depended on other cultures to sustain itself.
So this is the oscillation between translating, wanting to translate,
enjoying translated literature and not just not just poetics, but but all kinds of texts.
But then there's also the concern that.
Jews are becoming too European, which is, of course,
part of that critique that some Zionist thinkers aimed at enlightenment thinkers, they propagated assimilation on some level.
So assimilation is another concern and it is associated with translation.
Another way to put it that Zionists wish to disconnect from the European other,
whether culturally or geographically, was also a wish to be like the European.
Other was always had two sides of the same coin and translation again sort of captures that aptly.
And now to get to Klausner,
I'll just say that a similar tension frames there the Zionist relationship with Christianity as the dominant religion of Europe,
because on the one hand, Zionism was a rejection of any horizon of Jewish Christian coexistence in Europe.
I am putting it bluntly, I know.
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.
And here I'm repeating maybe crudely,
but nevertheless the historian I'm known as quote skins argument about Zionism and how it advanced the idea that Jews had
existed outside history from the time of the second temple's destruction to the Tuscola or the Jewish Enlightenment movement,
and then Zionism and still quote skin has shown.
And he's not the only one how Zionist thinkers often reworked the premise taken from
Christian thought that Jews had fallen behind once they rejected Jesus's teachings.
Of course, the Christian solution for that fall, so to speak, would have been conversion,
while Zionist thought searched for ways to restore Jews involvement in global history as Jews.
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,
Palestine of his day as the only way to initiate a return to history at large.
And he was also very devoted to the study of early Christianity, which turns them into a really interesting case in point.
Or I should say, it turns his work into a really interesting case in point.
And now I'll share my screen again, and hopefully it works.
And you can see Claus now. Not yet. Let me see.
I'm I sharing my screen. OK.
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,
but he was an influential essayist and editor as well as a historian of modern Hebrew literature.
In 1953, he succeeded a card from a guru, maybe of spiritual Zionism in editing the prestigious journal Haseloff.
And you have your picture of Hasselhoff on the slide.
And so he became a really important figure in the Hebrew intellectual sphere of the time, and he was quite young,
had to arm as the founding editor of a Shylock, had prioritised essays on Jewish history and European political philosophy.
Close now, on the other hand, found room in it for more or less everything poetry, essays on European nationalism, archaeological papers.
And he himself contributed to the journal articles about Jewish history and the historical calling of Israel.
And some of those essays that were published in Nazi law were then compiled in this.
Anthology by Claws now you can see it here had due to the energy you taught us,
the Hebrew title or Judaism and humanism that you can see that it came out in more so in
nineteen oh five what what you also have on your slide is closed now home in Jerusalem,
and this is after the 1929 riots in Jerusalem, and he placed a sign of above his door.
Maybe you can see it. It's probably hard because the picture is small and old,
and the sign says Yaha do not have an offshoot just like the title of the anthology Judaism in Humanism.
So these were allegedly the principles of Zionism. As Close now also explains in most articles in the anthology.
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.
Klausner was really writing essays all the time and then publishing them in anthologies.
But to my, my reading of them is that many of them say more or less the same thing.
So what is it that they say?
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.
Then they lost that role with the destruction of the Second Temple.
Their exile from Jerusalem and in the centuries that followed, they led a ghettoised life of cultural marginality.
So his emphasis is often on that cultural marginality.
And then the Jewish Enlightenment movement came the last column it wished to put an end to that ghettoised existence.
But it did espouse education and acculturation at its own peril.
It brought about dangerous patterns of assimilation that only Zionism as a movement
of Jewish return to the place where the Jewish people's ancestors once thrived.
Only Zionism could mend. And this is this is another aspect of Crosshouse essays that becomes a motif.
The fact that Jewish that the ancestors of Jews really once thrived, they were thriving in that period of Second Temple Judaism,
as long as skin, whose work I already mentioned has demonstrated such ideas were shared by many Zionist thinkers.
Yet closeness, ongoing preoccupation with early Christianity and with Jesus figure specifically is
an interesting case study of that Zionist internalisation of Christian thought,
as it is reflected through the lens of translation, which is what I'll try to show you.
Yes, closed and often implied, like other Zionist thinkers, that Jews had fallen out of history after the Second Temple was destroyed.
But he also underscored and made sure to remind the world or his readership that the Judaism of early Christians.
So his essays often described Jews first and foremost as the originators of monotheism and Christianity.
And in that sense, his work is not so much.
An example of that link between Christian and Zionist thought that classical skin is known to have explored.
It is more of an attempt to work through that link to to transform its meaning.
It is as if Klausner knew that that that link was paradoxical and attempted to explain it to his readership,
and translation was crucial for that attempt. And this is something that knows biography of Jesus can illustrate.
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.
And then on the right is Dan Bee's translation.
Dan Bee's Translation Jesus of Nazareth, his life times and teaching.
The Hebrew book was published in 1922 in Jerusalem,
two and a half years after it closed Nell's migration to Palestine and four years
before he became a lecturer at the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Parts of the book had been adapted from Klausner as German doctoral dissertation and had already been published in journals in several languages.
And I want to look at the book through that lens of translation,
I think it's useful beyond the fact that parts of the book were actually translated from the German.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into that.
The book's main claim is that Jesus is teachings in the New Testament were based on rabbinical exegesis.
So they were a translation or adaptation of rabbinic ideas.
Later, editions of the book also discussed the languages that Jesus knew and spoke again in order to highlight Jesus's Judaism.
So Carlos now determines in later editions that Jesus must have known some Hebrew in addition to his Aramaic.
And finally, the book was translated into several languages not long after its publication, which was precisely what Klausner wanted.
In fact, some of his critics in the Hebrew literary world mocked him for deliberately writing
a book that was suitable for multiple audiences that is suitable for translation,
and the book does explicitly explicitly seek to educate both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus's Judaism.
That drawing of parallels between passages from the New Testament and end passages from
the Talmud is an illustration of what Carlos now was trying to do for multiple audiences.
The book's English translation, which was an important translation from close Noah's perspective, came out in 1925,
and it was the result of a collaborative process between Klaus now and his English translator, the Anglican priest Herbert Denbigh, who was Danby.
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.
He stayed in Jerusalem until the early 1930s.
He was very supportive of the Zionist cause in general and Jewish migration to Palestine in particular.
Of course,
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,
now these newly arrived intellectuals with a similar set of interests.
And then there was also a contributing reporter for The Times of London, editor of the Palestine Oriental Society periodical.
So presumably he was. He was very much attuned to demographic changes in Jerusalem.
And he did become a friend of Crosshouse.
His decision to translate Jesus of Nazareth now biography of Jesus struck his superiors in the Anglican Church as suspicious.
So letters from the archives of St George's Cathedral, which the historian Shalom Goldman has uncovered,
reveal that Dan B had to explain his decision to translate closeouts book to church leaders.
In one letter, for example, Dan B confesses that for a while he couldn't quite decide whether his decision
to contact close now to translate his book was a good thing or a bad thing.
This is a quote, but he quickly resolved that a translation of closeness work could have a positive effect on missionary efforts in Palestine.
It's close, Neil's book seemed to attest to Jewish curiosity about Christianity, it could give missionaries,
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.
Whether Danby shared these sentiments with close now or his plan,
that missionary efforts would somehow benefit from the translation, that remains unknown.
But there is no evidence of Klausner feeling deceived.
On the contrary, Klausner took great pride in the book's translation,
and this is something that he reports to his readers in the preface to the fourth edition of Jesus of Nazareth from 1933.
He really brags in this preface about the book's success.
He tells the story of the different translations that had come out and specifically celebrates the English translation,
which sold twice as much as the first Hebrew edition.
And so then, he adds, And I have a quotation, I hope you can see it on your screens now.
Much sorrow and grief has the book, which the reader now holds given its author,
but I have derived spiritual satisfaction from the fact that the non-Jewish world
had heard for the first time the voice of a Jew devoted to his religion and nation.
Speaking about the strictly Jewish phenomenon called Jesus of Nazareth.
So this is close now in the first four of the fourth edition of Jesus of Nazareth,
and he really repeats here the main claim of the book as a whole that Jesus was a strictly Jewish phenomenon.
Now, the grief to which to which he refers was the outcome of negative Hebrew reviews of the book.
There were positive ones as well, but I'm going to mention the negative reviews.
They either chastised clothes now for his very choice to write about Christianity
or dismissed the book as full of contradictions and unoriginal claims.
So for now, I'm going to quote This is my translation of me.
Yosef Bertie Chayefsky's review of the book is famous for writer.
He he said of the book that it never delivers on its promise to dwell on the difference between
Judaism and Christianity because it recycles previous arguments about their inseparably.
So closing presents Judaism and Christianity in the book or in some places in the book as a continuum.
And that is something that Enlightenment writers had already done before him.
And this led to believe Chayefsky to argue that there was nothing new about this book.
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.
He knew about the relationship between Klausner and Denby, and Klausner writes about this review in his autobiography,
and he insists that he never received any money from missionaries to write or translate the book on Jesus.
But there's something new about De Nerd's this reviewer's.
Statement that that that the missionaries could benefit, maybe on some level from closing the book,
that, of course, should ring true to us now because then b it was thinking of the same thing.
And he was part of that story, as far as I can tell from my reading of historians reports.
So work that historians have done, the translated book did not really significantly change rates of Jewish conversion to Christianity in the 1920s.
It was still just a book, an academic book at that.
So yes, those don't really make a change in the world.
But the book's English translation did did make some some waves, maybe stir some, some people at the church.
We have a petition from 14 Anglican priest, so 14 is the number who signed that petition that call to banish down from Jerusalem.
Nothing happened with that as well.
I do think that the English translation was an academic event of sorts because it was a Jewish work about early Christianity and Jesus.
So really an academic affair, more than a watershed moment in the work of missionaries in Palestine, right?
Here's an interviewer who not an interviewer, our reviewer who reviewed the English translation of the work.
This is Vernon in the New Republic.
February 1926 It is likely that the book will be most prised for the numerous Jewish parallels to the sayings of Jesus,
which this splendidly equipped writer's writer gathers, and for the background of Jewish history and custom against which the figure of Jesus moves.
There are many unfamiliar and illuminating, but alas, undated quotations from the Talmud.
To those, however, who are familiar with the recent literature, there is little that is actually new concerning Jesus's time.
The messianic unrest in Galilee in particular, is pictured as more acute than his customary originality of thought is denied to Jesus utterly.
There is no word of his that is not paralleled in Jewish sources.
I'm not going to get into the content of specific parts of closeness.
Nell's book like that messianic unrest in Galilee, because this is a talk about the story behind the translation.
I want to look at the use of the term originality here.
What the reviewer voices is sort of a sense of unease in the face of Krasnov insistence that Jesus never expressed an original thought.
And indeed,
Krasno presents Jesus's Judaism in the biography as some sort of an original text from which the historical figure was constantly translating.
And this was really a pattern in Clauson Zionist thought.
I want to show you another review of sorts of the book.
This is from an academic work on Jesus in Hebrew literature, and it's very recent,
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.
So this is not a start, and this is a book from not too long ago, according to Claus now.
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.
In fact, it was the landscape itself that inspired him to become a national leader who
guided his people toward both spiritual and political redemption closeness.
Jesus embodies the new Jew charisma, bravery, mastery of his own land, morality and idealism.
At the same time, this new Jew is also a poet, a man of fables and metaphors.
So Stahl is suggesting that crows now claim to Jesus not only for Judaism but also for Zionism.
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,
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.
What is striking about Dan these translation is that it doesn't meddle with this portrayal of Jesus as a Jewish or Zionist hero.
Dad was what we might call a faithful.
Translation, or is what we might call a faithful translation, although he does translate the the phrase the Land of Israel as Palestine,
Denbigh generally adhered to the translation norms of the time, which really did not allow for radical changes when someone was was translating.
I think these are still the norms today.
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.
I think that all in all, that pear writer and translator got on well.
And in many ways, it was Zionist thought that brought them together.
Klausner clearly gained from Dambisa Translation, not only fame as a scholar,
but also an opportunity to spread these Zionist ideas about style mentions in what is
on the slide right now and to spread them in the English speaking speaking world.
And this is again on some level paradoxical,
because now is the kind of Zionist thinker who believed that only Hebrew could be a vehicle for Zionist thought,
but he was nevertheless aware of the fact that he had limited potential to reach a mass readership.
Crucially of non-Jews, but not only of non-Jews, but also Jews in the English speaking world.
And the story of this English translation in America is a separate one, and we can talk about it briefly in the Q&A.
Dan, we, of course, supported the Zionist message of Claus and his biography.
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.
Of course, members of their respective communities close saw Klaus now in downbeat collaboration as wrong, even dangerous.
But as I showed you in the beginning of this presentation, it was really not unusual to deem translation a dangerous act.
In the context of early 20th century Hebrew intellectual exchange,
Klausner was the kind of writer who really embraced most acts of translation, particularly the translation of his own work.
And he did find in Danby, a friend. And so I'm about to conclude,
but I want to say a few words about what this story always makes me think about in relation to to some contemporary issues.
It always makes me think about this contemporary unholy alliance between some Jews in Israel and some evangelicals in the United States and beyond.
Because despite a deep theological differences, these groups can come together like translator and writer to advance their different versions.
Translations of the Zionist idea and Klausner and Dan Denbeaux collaboration in
the 1920s anticipated this kind of Jewish Christian alliance without coexistence.
Of course, I don't think any of them really wanted a kind of Jewish firsthand coexistence.
I do have one more slide. Do I have time for it, or should we, OK, move on to the Q&A?
So just really to tell you one more anecdote about closed.
Now I want to tell you about another essay from Judaism in Humanism.
In fact, the essay entitled Judaism and Humanism in this anthology that was published first in Haseloff and in that essay,
Klausner complains that no Hebrew writer ever produced a grand historical fictional
exploration of married life of the kind Tolstoy produced in Anna Karenina.
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.
Not explicitly, but the allusion is pretty obvious. He just complains about the absence of a Tolstoy in the Hebrew literary field.
But there was no Hebrew told story seemed especially baffling to Claus now because Jewish
tradition had so much to say about family marriage and sexual relations out of wedlock,
et cetera. So just like the policeman who you may recall, conceived of Hebrew as a better medium to tell Bible inspired stories,
Close now determines in that article Judaism and humanism.
The Jewish sources are the best sources on which a writer could rely to examine married life in fiction.
So he doesn't dub Hebrew literature not as strong or not as good as Russian literature when he compares Hebrew writers to Tolstoy.
No, he implies that Hebrew literature is better. It's just dormant.
He urges Hebrew writers to outperform Tolstoy by consulting Jewish sources and really did believe that
Jewish sources had more to say maybe than Christian thought about these issues and why Christian thought.
I mean, Tolstoy is really famous for incorporating Christian ideas into his modern fiction.
And I read a lot about outperforming the Russian novelist as yet another attempt to argue that
Judaism should be seen as that blueprint of Christianity sort of an original behind a translation.
And this is why Hebrew writers had to prove that whatever Christian thought has explored Hebrew thought could explore better.
And this is where and and I look forward to your questions.
And I don't think it makes sense to me.
Let me just open the Q&A panel. Just a reminder to anyone.
If you do have a question, please type it in now. I think I've got nothing at the moment.
And since, as Yakov said, this is going. This is being recorded and we'll go out onto a podcast later.
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.
So in the meantime, while people are typing away, I hope.
Daniel, I think I'd like to, if you don't mind, take the opportunity to ask the first question.
While we're waiting. As you know, I mean, we've discussed this in the past.
I mean, Joseph Klausner, for me, it's very important as a revisionist figure and to some degree, as a professor of Hebrew literature.
But I suppose my question is this.
You talked about you just mentioned at the very end, you know, you talked about this kind of unholy alliance between,
let's say, the Christian or Christian Zionists and the ultranationalists, and it was something we still see today.
But in the point of fact, it only goes so far because really certainly in the in the in Christian ideology,
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
you can't really get over at some point you have to it has to be confronted.
So I suppose my first question is on what point at what and to what degree does he confront this?
Because Klausner was it was a it was an a territorial maximalist.
I mean, he was, you know, hardcore revisionist. And I guess that leads me to also my next question.
In spite of everything we've just talked about, how do you reconcile the kind of,
you know, the closeness, an ultranationalist and klausner someone who I mean,
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.
Oh, yeah. You know, yeah, I think there's there's a joke about, is it the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch?
Because there used to be a custom of writing on on the tombstone,
the the name of the most famous book of a writer, the title of that famous book section.
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.
OK, so well, first of all, yes, I barely mentioned the fact that Claus now and I did mention Jabu Kinski,
but I did not mention closeness, intimacy with Shepperton Ski, and I was really reading his autobiography.
And the first thing he describes when he describes his arrival to Palestine and this is the main purpose is really to settle there.
The first thing he sees is Djiboutian ski looking dazzling in his uniform so that I think I'm
not a historian as I as I already said from from what I've read about closing as a revisionist.
He never he never quite supported the revisionist movement beyond, you know, op eds,
sometimes what we might call today op eds and really his into his intellectual but also a friendship is intellectual intimacy with Joe Burtynsky.
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?
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.
He captured that almost as a metaphor.
He is always determined to prove that Judaism was there first and therefore whatever is your opinion about him personally,
Jewish thought Djiboutian Ski was such a European figure.
And again, I'm using the adjective European as they used to. Maybe it's not a very narrow use.
I know maybe it's too broad, but but he also he always made sure to to underscore the fact that Judaism was
there first and in fact was really at the basis of European culture in general,
because European culture owes its genesis to Christianity and Christianity owes its genesis to Judaism, and that was it.
And whenever he's accused of being too radical politically and his autobiography makes it very clear, he just goes on the defensive,
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.
And there's another famous story about clothes now he he wanted to teach Second Temple Judaism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
And he, I think, was sure that he would get a bad job because he had already published so much about that,
and he completed his dissertation at the University of Heidelberg.
And you're right about that time in Heidelberg as a time in which you really realised
that he was such an excellent writer and thinker and he was writing in German,
which was definitely not as his first language. And then he didn't get that job.
He got the job of teaching modern Hebrew literature.
And so students of modern Hebrew literature like myself usually start with reading some of Cosmo's work or really today
just scholarship on Claus nose work or that already incorporates work into the historiography of modern literature.
But he he was he always felt like he was undervalued as a scholar of the Second Temple in early Christianity.
So I would say he he continued to take pride.
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.
I mean, to him, it was proof that a Jew could write about Jesus maybe better than others because a Jew had access
to those Talmudic texts that he really viewed as the original behind it Jesus's translations.
I hope that answers your question. So it just prompts a couple of questions for me.
Yeah, yeah. I have a question. Can I jump in and ask a question?
Sure. I mean, put myself on, Danielle.
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.
So I want to make maybe a general comment and then to ask the two questions somewhat related to this.
It's very interesting to think of Klausner as a arms student or proteges and to a degree, right?
Well, do inherit from him specifically because when you read a heydon's writings generally, but specifically his critique of Hertzel,
the one thing that Saddam just cannot accept is how European heritage, the imagination of the new society, or Noland, is.
He uses European as a derogatory term to say everything I look around in the book is European and then Klausen,
it comes in this, you know, try to amend. It is appropriate. European is in a sense, but even more to the point.
You should know everybody. I mean, most of our I think this, you know,
but just to make it go to remind ourselves a goddamn gets into a severe fight is trying to censor yourself.
Haim Brenner Because Brenner argues that reading this the the Christian Biblical reading
the Christian literature is a Jewish exercise because it's reading Jewish literature,
and the Haddam sees this as breaking the taboo of Hebrew, a Jewish nationalism.
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.
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.
The second question is, in a sense, wider, and it's much more speculative.
But I. I think there's always flowing and an undercurrent flowing under these discussions,
which we rarely mentioned and you mentioned and I love, I mean, I appreciate it.
I really love that you mentioned, but I ask you to expand on it. And this undercurrent is Russia, Russian ness, Russian identity.
These are all Russian Jews, right? Except for no one.
They have Central European education, and they go to Germany to study.
But Russian ness of the time specifically has this complicated relationship with its own identity and with with Europeans.
For Russians to be present, European is actually a cultural appropriation in a sense or, you know, self imagining that is extremely important.
And Russian has also built itself, in that sense, vis a vis war against the Jew,
which obviously so many of the Zionists accept as a framework for thinking, Well, how do you see this is playing out this?
Yeah, I guess the Russian background for this, right? Yeah, no.
These are very good questions that are going to help me improve this chapter that I'm working
on at the moment because one of my thoughts working on this chapter had been for a while now.
Should I really relate?
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.
So just a comment on closing as a call to arms protegee.
I think there is some writing about it. Historians have grappled with with this question and I've I was thinking about it,
reading a card and reading about a father who became kind of depressed in the final years of his life.
I think when Adam gave away Schiller and this is based on, you know,
historians work and works by academy himself, he was just really tired of editing that journal.
And Klausner was really energetic. That's that's what I think really happened there.
If I read some of Adam's work from after the time that he was that founding and really legendary editor of Haseloff,
so Grossman had already sent a few articles, Adam could see that he was very confident, which is something that had maybe lacked,
you know, this sense of long, long standing, ongoing self-confidence.
And this is not a psychoanalytical, you know, observation.
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.
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,
as Zionism becomes more and more popular. He really is worried about it's going in the direction that it eventually went,
maybe held steady and Zionism, the kind of Zionism that health are represented.
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
there where he just sort of maybe he just lets go at some point because it's too much.
It's going in a direction that he cannot identify with.
And that direction is as very European.
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.
And he becomes livid when a translation of the Vicar of Wakefield on an English historical novel comes out.
And it's Goldsmith's novel,
and I'm just doesn't understand why would any Hebrew reader be interested in some English family in the countryside that goes bankrupt?
You know, that's that's the story.
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.
It's not a poetic work, per se.
It's an epistolary novel and very, you know, it's like Monty skewers Persian letters in the in the tradition of the Enlightenment.
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.
And having grown up in Israel, these are really the languages that someone should have taught me.
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,
and that makes a difference for the study of modern Hebrew literature because you
are very right to point out that the Russian connexion is is extremely important.
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.
So I think what I what I could say is that Hebrew writers aligned themselves with the kind of Russian writers
and thinkers who do identify Russia with Europe or wanted to go and wanted it to go in that direction.
So from what I can see, they they they think of Russia for its part of Europe, for the most part.
And then there is a whole Russian.
You know, there are Russian politics that may contradict that, but I'm not sure I'm a good person to comment on that.
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,
a Hebrew writer, and how his entire work really ode to Russian literature, its motifs and its style.
So I hope that answers the question. Thank you, Daniel.
So I guess following on from that, I've got a question from someone who asks, Is Zionism then a European translation of Judaism?
It's the good question. Yeah, I like that. Can I use it in my manuscript?
Because they're anonymous? So why not? Yes, this is the kind of metaphor that I I plan to to to work with.
I mean, really, all these paradoxes, you know, Zionism was supposed to put an end to assimilation.
Maybe it's, you know, the best way to assimilate was to imitate those European structures just elsewhere.
So is Zionism actually assimilation? Scholars like Daniel Boyfriend have written about that,
and then translation enters this discussion readily because translation is often debated in that context of assimilation.
So if Zionism is a movement that is supposed to put an end to assimilation, should it translate?
These are one of the this is one of the questions that that I I plan to deal with in this work in progress.
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.
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.
We maybe if there's another question we used to wrap up the seminar,
I'm going to go back to what you said before we're talking about this kind of the downplaying,
let's say, of closeness, nationalist or ultranationalist. I would say personally, I don't totally agree about the fact that he downplayed it.
I mean, he was a revisionist without and quite proudly so.
I mean, he was the he he he led the Western Wall campaign, you know, in the wake of the 1929 Arab Wired's.
I mean, it was Klausner who spearheaded the campaign and let it.
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.
But back when I was doing my own doctoral thesis, I read an article by Klausner about Hanukkah, the hush money.
And he really does. Like many other ultranationalist look to this as actually a proud moment in Jewish
nationalist history because they tried to defend themselves and like the Masada thing,
you know, they defended, you know, even though they got defeated, they they tried very, very hard to defend themselves.
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.
I think I think and I just want to to movement.
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.
Exactly. I mean, I do think that, well, he doesn't like to be associated with, let's say, overt or explicit political debate,
at least as he describes it in some of his autobiography Biographical Works and the preface to
his other scholarly works because he wants to be seen where he wanted to be seen as a scholar.
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
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.
What he wanted to teach for, I mean, for sure,
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,
as Carlson was concerned to that Jewish question.
It was only migration and it was Jews, right? It was their historical right.
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.
So the two banks of the Jordan, and it's unambiguous.
I agree with you, Peter, and you're the historian here, and you probably know these things better.
And that's what I see when I read clause now to insert him into that literary story that I'm
trying to tell because he is a very important figure in the Hebrew literary world as well.
But there is a tension there. And again, it's the same tension as with no translation.
All of these writers are also Zionist figures, and literature and politics often have this uneasy relationship.
Clearly, literary work is always part of the political were world implicated in,
you know, influenced by it and maybe even has the power to change it slowly, gradually.
I don't know. But but the fact that Hebrew lit Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century is
also a political arena does not mean that everyone involved feels comfortable with it.
And so this is what I meant to highlight, and that's from the point of view of someone who studies mainly literature.
That clause now, when he's asked about politics, he son when he was asked about politics,
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.
But yes, I mean, he writes about Zionism and Jabotinsky and terms, and I'm sure they were reading one another.
And again, you know, better. So thank you for for that.
And in point of fact. Oh, Yaakov, one more. Go ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter, for allowing this. I want to ask the question and do remind you something.
So the question I have actually relates to a theme that comes up in almost all of our meetings in this,
uh, similar serious is the question of multilingualism.
These all are ideologues working in a multilingual situation where they are building a monolingual entity.
Maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't think so. Some of them were obviously committed to this.
But can you say something about the way they they negotiated this tension between nationalist?
Focus on one language as the everything.
Yeah, even to the degree that you you that they would look negatively on translations and then the reality in which they live,
in which it's more than bilingualism, for sure. For most of them, right?
I mean, it's Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian German.
And the second you promise to say something about the election, we are all sitting on something.
I said, No, not at all. I just like, you know, from the literary world, I will not say anything political.
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,
because now encounter always makes me think about Mike Pompeo visiting Israel.
Right? So this is just my association.
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,
I think and between the lines of the time that has passed and the different iterations of of that unholy alliance.
So that was an aside. But yes,
multilingualism is another major tension that that is similar to that tension that translation both represents and generates
in modern Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century and really in Zionist thought to early Zionists thought so.
It paradoxically, and this goes beyond the Jewish context, multilingualism often contributes to the advance of monolingual realities.
This is how translation works, actually.
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,
if we can talk of language about languages is something that we own that we possess.
Then you need those multilingual agents to translate everything into that language.
Otherwise, it's complete isolation, which is not something that we really know as humans, I think.
Or I mean. And I'm happy that this is the case.
We're not completely isolated culturally.
So this is a structural paradox when it comes to translation that you need multilingual agents to generate mono, monolingual realities.
And it's not unusual that national movements or nationalist movements have this robust enterprise of translation to support their nationalism.
So there are many other examples, and they're fascinating of these translation enterprises sometimes of reclaiming what
what you know what the coloniser had already translated into the coloniser language.
What I read India had this major translation enterprise at the time of decolonisation,
which is by definition, at least on some level, a time of nationalisation.
I mean, different stories, of course. So this is this is not unusual.
But another aspect of translation is that it doesn't quite let us forget that multilingualism exists.
So yes, it does advance monolingual ism, but it's that liminal space.
And you know, I mentioned, you know, bollocks, stop here.
And he was really, he said at the end of his talk that we live in a world that rewards multilingualism rather than multilingualism.
And I think it's true that we live in a world that is dominated by a monolingual paradigm,
meaning that the every person should have a single language that defines him or her.
That's that's supposed to be the norm. Of course, it's not the norm.
And even, you know, the photographs that we sign in yet use lecture from Jerusalem.
You can see that. But actually, there are always cracks in that monolingual reality.
There's other languages always creep in.
I think if there's anything that is conspicuously missing from these writers works, the Hebrew writers at the turn of the 20th century,
it's Arabic because if they if they address Arabic, it's always the language of the past.
Even when they're already in Palestine, it's the language that, you know, mediaeval Jewish poets, new used.
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.
While they do grapple with the fact that they know other languages and yeah, this is another tension,
the tension that you just mentioned in that world of translation and Zionism that aren't interested in.
Right, Danielle, it's a good place to end. I want to thank you for well, sure for your talk very, very much.
And next week we'll be able to or next time we'll be able to talk about the results of the American election.
I hope with a happy face. I just remind you that next week we go back to the Israel Studies seminar and Dr. Yuval
Shabani and Sean Peretz will be talking about Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel,
equality struggle. And then in two weeks from today, we return to the reconsidering resign and urge early Jewish Nationalist Ideology Seminar.
And Dr. Yuval, if we will talk about the return to adolescent disputes over Sephardic culture and identity between Arabic and Hebrew.
Danielle, it's been a to just to correct your back.
Yes, I'm back just to correct the network President U-value.
But you are talking about sacred places and the regulation of sacred places must have been a confusion of fact.
Yeah, you're right. That's my mistake. I can't read it. Reading was not a big part of my doctoral studies.
So OK. I'm really sorry about that. You're absolutely right. It's it's also reading everything in a very dim light.
Anyway, Danielle, I want to thank you. Thank you very much for your wonderful contribution.
And yes, thank you so much. Thank you, Yaakov.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you for inviting me.