Full Description
Jews from all ages have translated the Bible for their particular times and needs, but what does the act of translation mean? Aaron W. Hughes believes translation has profound implications for Jewish identity. The Invention of Jewish Identity presents the first sustained analysis of Bible translation and its impact on Jewish philosophy from the medieval period to the 20th century. Hughes examines some of the most important Jewish thinkers—Saadya Gaon, Moses ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Judah Messer Leon, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig—and their work on biblical narrative, to understand how linguistic and conceptual idioms change and develop into ideas about the self. The philosophical issues behind Bible translation, according to Hughes, are inseparable from more universal sets of questions that affect Jewish life and learning.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introductory and Interpretive Contexts
2. The Forgetting of History and the Memory of Translation
3. The Translation of Silence and the Silence of Translation: The Fabric of Metaphor
4. The Apologetics of Translation
5. Translation and Its Discontents
6. Translation and Issues of Identity and Temporality
Conclusions: Between Spaces
Notes
Bibliography
Index
