The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  The Bible remained hidden for two centuries, either to protect it from the Inquisition or because one of the Inquisitors, conscious of its value, kept it somewhere safe. The Bible didn’t resurface until 1622, when it turned up in the library of Madrid’s Liria Palace, home of the Grand Duke of Alba. It remains there today; it is now known as the Alba Bible. A facsimile edition went on sale in 1992.17

  The Alba Bible survived. Most other Spanish translations didn’t. In Toledo in 1551 the Spanish Inquisition published their first Expurgatory Index, a list of banned and prohibited books. A second, fuller list followed in 1559. The lists included all translated Bibles, including individual sections or other works that contained scriptural extracts.

  But the banning of translated Bibles was only the beginning. Spain had already developed a penchant for book burning; a frenzy which began at the end of the fifteenth century with the immolation of Hebrew and Arabic works. Next came books on medicine, a class of work which was generally considered superstitious. Eventually, the Inquisition even burned Bibles, a matter which they seem to have considered utterly insignificant. Perhaps it was. Given the medieval fondness for torturing people and putting them to death by burning, possibly the most horrific and distressing ordeal ever devised, the immolation of books, even Bibles, seems quite mild. In 1559 a Jesuit reported that they had burned ‘mountains of books’ in their college. Two years later, when an officer of the Inquisition asked what he should do with the numerous Bibles he had confiscated, the answer came back, ‘Burn them’.18

  People were burned too. Many of them. Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, former confessor to Queen Isabella, archbishop of Toledo and Grand Inquisitor, is reputed to have presided over the burning of 2,500 conversos during his period in office. Ximenes, who had spent six years in prison as a young man, in protest at not being awarded a benefice promised to him by the Pope, was, on two occasions, appointed regent of Castile. He expelled 400 monks who had broken their celibacy vows from Andalusia, imposed forced conversions on the Muslims of Granada, led Spanish military activity in North Africa and conquered the Algerian port of Oran. He also found time to put his domineering personality to good use. In 1500 he founded a university at Alcalá de Henares, a city known as Complutum in Latin, where he sponsored a polyglot translation of the Bible. The six-volume work, known as the Complutensian Bible, contained parallel Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic columns. Ironically, while translated Bibles were being burned across Spain, Ximenes, agent par excellence of the Inquisition, took it upon himself to initiate one of the most ambitious Bible translation projects of the age.

  While Spain was burning people and translated Bibles, its freshly expelled Jews were trying to put down roots elsewhere. As were many conversos, who felt unable any longer to tolerate the Inquisition’s continual scrutiny of their lives for hints of relapse or heresy. The Jews, with co-religionists across Europe and the Mediterranean lands, found it easier to relocate than the conversos, who carried their stigma with them; neither accepted by Christians who considered them to be Jews, nor by Jews who regarded them as Christians. A few brave or influential souls did try to ease their plight. One such woman was the aristocratic Doña Gracia Nasi.

  Doña Gracia had been born as Beatrice de Luna, a descendant of Portuguese conversos. The widow of a wealthy gem dealer and well integrated into aristocratic Christian society, Beatrice de Luna devoted her life and fabulous wealth to combating the activities of the Inquisition and helping conversos to flee the Iberian peninsula. She didn’t have an easy time of it. A rift with her sister led her to being unjustly denounced in both Venice and France. In Venice, her sister alleged that she was a secret Jewess who planned to escape to Turkey with all her wealth. In France, a co-conspirator told a similar story to the government. Her wealth was confiscated in both lands and she was cast into jail. It was a stupendous fall from her earlier exalted status. Had it not been for her nephew’s deft use of the family’s extensive diplomatic connections, her time in jail may have marked the end of her.

  On her release, Beatrice de Luna saw no further reason to continue to conceal her Jewish origins. She began to use her Jewish name of Doña Gracia and moved to Ferrara in Italy, where she once again threw herself in to helping conversos flee the Inquisition. When, in 1556, 36 conversos were burned to death in the Italian seafaring town of Ancona, she used her considerable economic and political muscle to agitate, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for a boycott of the city’s port.19

  It’s the Ladino language which connects Doña Gracia’s story to that of the translated Bible. Ladino is considered today to be a Jewish language, but it didn’t begin life as such; it was one of the dialects spoken in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, when the Jews were expelled. It was written, like all Spanish languages, in the Latin alphabet.

  The refugees took the dialect into exile with them as their spoken tongue. It evolved organically, as languages do, influenced in part by the speech the Jews heard around them in their new locations. Back in Spain it evolved along a separate trajectory, eventually merging into Castilian Spanish. The result was that the Jewish exiles, who no longer knew Spain, continued to speak a dialect of Spanish long forgotten in their former homeland. Now identified as a Jewish language, Ladino continued to evolve until it reached a point at which it was barely recognizable as a Spanish dialect. And it was written not in the Latin alphabet but in Hebrew script.

  In 1553, Doña Gracia undertook her final journey, to Constantinople, where she lived out the remainder of her life. The same year an edition of the Bible in Ladino was printed in Ferrara. Doña Gracia underwrote the costs of its printing. It was dedicated to Ercole I, Duke of Este, ruler of a fiefdom which had long been hospitable to the Jews. A second edition of the Ladino Bible appeared shortly thereafter, this time consecrated to Doña Gracia. The publishers declared that they were offering it to ‘one so noble and magnanimous, that it would adorn her nobility’.20

  These pioneering, printed Ladino translations still made use of the Latin rather than Hebrew script. They represented one of very few medieval translations undertaken by Jews, for the use of Jews. A far cry from those translations written in the other Jewish vernacular; the Yiddish versions that were composed around the same time in Northern Europe. They too were made for Jews, but not by Jews. They were made by Christian missionaries.

  The Yiddish New Testament

  Johann Reuchlin, the German scholar who inspired Luther to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew, knew something of Yiddish. The vernacular of Northern Europe’s Jews was relatively easy for him; it is a mixture of his native German tongue and Hebrew, the language to which he devoted his scholarship. He had in his library two Hebrew Bibles containing Yiddish translations of the hardest words, and he had come across Yiddish footnotes in other works that he consulted.21

  Reuchlin’s Hebrew grammar and lexicon had made it possible for Christian scholars to study Hebrew without recourse to Jewish teachers and, provided they spoke German, to understand a great deal of Yiddish. Because of Reuchlin, Christians could converse with Jews in their own language. This gave evangelical Christians an opportunity to take the translated Bible back to an arena it hadn’t entered since the days of Mesrop Mashtots and Little Wolf. Once again the Bible was to be translated for missionary purposes.

  The first Yiddish translation of the New Testament was printed in 1540 in Cracow. It came about through a collaboration between two Jewish converts to Christianity: Johann Harzuge who translated the Bible and Samuel Helicz who, with his brothers, Asher and Elyakim, had opened Cracow’s first Jewish printing press in 1534. They only kept it open for one year, then closed it for three. When it reopened, the brothers had new names; they were Paul, Andreas and Johannes, and they were no longer Jews. They had converted to Catholicism.

  In the dedication to his Yiddish New Testament, Paul Helicz wrote that he hoped his work would give Jews the opportunity to learn the truth about Christianity and eventually lead them to convers
ion. In reality he knew that, far from reading it, they were not likely to even pick it up. After converting to Christianity the brothers had carried on printing Hebrew books. The Jews, who considered the brothers renegades, had taken their business elsewhere. The brothers had appealed to the courts for financial support, claiming that their status as converts had prejudiced their market against them. The king issued a decree obliging the Jews to buy up all the brothers’ unsold Hebrew stock; 3,850 books valued at 1,600 florins. The royal decree simply made the Helicz brothers even more unpopular. There was no way now that the Jews were likely to buy Paul’s Yiddish New Testament, and he knew it.

  A year after he published his Yiddish New Testament, Paul Helicz sold up and left town. It has been suggested that the real reason he’d published the New Testament in Yiddish was to ingratiate himself with his patron, Piotr Gamrat, bishop of Cracow. It assuredly was never likely to be a commercial success.22

  In 1592, Elias Schadeus, former professor of Hebrew at Strasbourg University and a preacher at the city’s cathedral, published a Yiddish edition of five New Testament books. Unlike Helicz, Schadeus was a dedicated missionary. He believed that by publishing in Yiddish he was offering a service which Jewish readers would find useful. He didn’t get it quite right; Yiddish is an informal language, containing many words that can be expressed either in German or Hebrew. Its chief distinguishing characteristic, on paper, is that it is written in Hebrew characters rather than in Latin script. Whenever he had an opportunity to choose between a German or Hebrew equivalent for a word, Schadeus chose the German. His translation ended up little different from Luther’s German Bible, but written in Hebrew characters.

  In a preface to one of his other books, Schadeus records his reluctance to translate the entire New Testament into Yiddish. He doesn’t explain why, but Paulus Fagius, a contemporary who had translated many Hebrew books into Latin, is more forthcoming. In his German introduction to the Yiddish Bible published in 1544, he tells his Christian readers that, ideally, he would have preferred the Jews to read the Bible in a different language, rather than ‘having to drink the Jewish drivel with which they besmirched the worthy, holy book’.23

  Schadeus and Fagius both lived and worked in Strasbourg. The ferocity of Fagius’s language reveals that relations between Jews and Christians in the city were not genial. Officially, the Jews shouldn’t even have been there. They were expelled from Strasbourg in 1390 and not formally let back in until 1791. When Martin Bucer, a Hebraist who arrived in Strasbourg in 1523, was asked by the local count whether a Christian authority should tolerate Jews living among them, he recommended that the Jews be expelled. If that were not possible, harsh measures should be introduced to punish them for their inability to see the truth, and a policy of instruction in Christianity should be applied. Their synagogues were to be burned and they were to be obliged to attend Christian sermons. The only way they could avoid all this would be to convert. The attitude of Hebraists like Bucer explains the context in which the Yiddish Bible was published.

  Earlier Christian Hebraists, people like Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, had studied the language with Jewish teachers. But by the middle of the sixteenth century, through the courtesy of Reuchlin and others, the Hebraists had enough tools at their disposal to no longer need instruction from Jews. It wasn’t just that Jewish grammarians and linguists no longer had anything to offer them. Hebrew, they insisted, was no longer a Jewish language. It had been replaced, so they said, by Yiddish. Sebastian Münster, a cartographer and professor of Hebrew in Basel, explained that, just as the Jews had adopted Aramaic as their vernacular when exiled to Babylon, so too in his time they had adopted Yiddish. Were they to return to their homeland, he claimed, they would institute Yiddish as their national language, because they had all but forgotten Hebrew.24 As far as sixteenth-century Hebraists were concerned, Hebrew was an ancient, classical language, like Latin and Greek; an academic discipline to bring them closer to the origins of Christianity. Yiddish however was, for them, a tool for converting the Jews.

  The battle to get the Jews to forsake their faith for Christianity was an ongoing, eschatological activity; an enterprise for missionaries, scholars and polemicists. It didn’t make much difference to the lives of ordinary people whether or not the Jews converted. Out there in the harsh world, far removed from the concerns of professors and theologians, more menacing struggles were taking place. Europe’s old elites were being challenged as never before. The Hussite revolt in the Czech lands had only been the curtain raiser. Between 1524 and 1648 thousands would die in uprisings and revolutions across Northern and Central Europe. And although the various revolts and insurrections are collectively classed as Europe’s Religious Wars, their immediate causes had far more to do with poverty and social injustice than with the competing theological claims of Rome and Reformers.

  Even so, religion was never far from the battle; the popular revolt against privilege could scarcely avoid threatening the power and wealth of the Church. To some minds, the changes they were witnessing were wholly numinous, animated by divine forces far beyond their comprehension. Such people believed the world was approaching the end of days. It was, they were certain, to be an extraordinary time. It demanded extraordinary deeds. Nowhere was more extraordinary than the German city of Münster during the years 1534 and 1535. The translated Bible, quite unwittingly, sat at the heart of events.

  John of Leiden and the Münster Revolt

  In 1937 a German journalist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, wrote Bockelson: A Tale of Mass Insanity.25 Ostensibly a history of events in Münster, Reck-Malleczewen’s book was a thinly disguised attack on the Nazi regime. His refusal to be drafted into the army, his hatred of Hitler, ‘the stereotype of the head waiter’26 whose face ‘waggled with unhealthy cushions of fat . . . slaggy, gelatinous, sick’27 and his revulsion at the deeds of the Third Reich, would inevitably lead to his murder in the Dachau extermination camp. But his recounting of events in sixteenth-century Münster as a forewarning of the evils of Nazi Germany is both prescient and terrifying. The Münster revolutionaries and the Third Reich shared many characteristics; not the least of which, as John Gray points out, was the millenarian belief that through their eradication of the evils of the old they would usher in the dawn of a new age.28

  Luther’s translation of the Bible, and the centrality of Scripture to the Reformers’ theology, opened up new avenues of religious thought. But for religious conservatives the Reformation set in train a series of events which seemed to vindicate their age-old fears. Once people could read the Bible for themselves, they did indeed start to have their own ideas; exactly as the opponents of the vernacular Bible had predicted. One faction in particular – they were too diffuse in their beliefs to be classified as a sect – found neither the Catholic Church nor Luther’s reforms satisfactory. Known as Anabaptists, they held themselves aloof from wider society, living in tightly knit communities where worldly possessions were, at least in theory, shared. Each community had its own prophetic leader who was followed uncritically. But what they had in common was a distaste for theological speculation and complex religious ritual. Instead they followed the Bible, and only the Bible, which they read, or had read to them, in their own language. The fence which they erected around their communities was one of re-baptism; it is what the name Anabaptist means. To be a member of the community one had to be re-baptized, as an adult. Without undergoing re-baptism, one could not join.

  Anabaptists are a reputable Christian sect. But many religious movements are forced at some point in their history to respond to a deviant tendency, which, through extreme cynicism or misplaced fundamentalism, behaves tyrannically, or worse. In Münster, as Reck-Malleczewen’s analogy intimates, it was worse.

  In 1532 the German city of Münster became a Lutheran town. The transition from Catholicism was the result of popular pressure, the power of the town guilds and, most importantly, the influence and preaching of Bernt Rothmann, a young, charisma
tic orator who drew large crowds to hear his sermons. Lutheran preachers were installed in the town’s churches and the Lutheran translation of the Bible adopted. And that is where matters could have rested, had it not been for the arrival in Münster, just a year later, of followers of Melchior Hoffman, a mesmeric and inspirational Anabaptist visionary. His followers preached Hoffman’s message of imminent redemption. It struck a chord among the working people of Münster. Rothmann was also seduced. He abandoned his Lutheranism, declared himself an Anabaptist, placed himself at the head of the local movement and called upon the townspeople to follow the example of early Christianity by renouncing all personal possessions and holding all property in common.

  Had everyone within Münster’s walls bought into the communal model equally, and if the town had managed to erect a bulwark against the outside world, the experiment may have had some chance of success. But by all accounts the appeal of a relatively prosperous, egalitarian city where everything was shared attracted a large number of opportunists, chancers and ne’er-do-wells. Knowing what we do today about how outsiders and immigrants are blamed for society’s ills, we may take such reports with a pinch of salt. But what is beyond doubt is that within a very short time the more prosperous citizens and Town Council were trying, ineffectually, to expel Rothmann and his Anabaptist supporters. The stand-off between the Town Council and Rothmann’s followers was ongoing in Münster when, at the beginning of 1534, the radical Anabaptist movement underwent a change of leadership. That was when the trouble really started.

  Melchior Hoffman, the prophetic visionary who was responsible for the blossoming and growth of Anabaptism, had been arrested in Strasbourg. His opponents imprisoned him in a cage, inside a tower. He would never leave. For all his idealistic eschatology, Hoffman had been a man of peace. His successor, Jan Matthys, was not. Matthys was an unyielding revolutionary, a man who believed that the End of Time could only be brought about by putting unbelievers to the sword. In early 1534, just as Rothmann was facing expulsion from Münster, the first of Matthys’s apostles reached the city. They were greeted with fanatical excitement, the balance of power in the city swung in favour of the Anabaptists and Rothmann was saved.