The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  Central to the demand for emancipation was the need to encourage village Jews, who were detached and alienated from German society, to recognize the opportunities ahead of them. The push towards tolerance would only be worthwhile if Germany’s Jews were willing to seek a fuller role in mainstream German life. An essential ingredient in this was for them to learn the German language in preference to the Yiddish they commonly spoke. Adopting German as their common language would smooth the path to emancipation and provide the Jews with access to German and European literature. This in turn would open their minds to new ideas.

  Mendelssohn decided that the best way for the Jews to learn German was to present them with a text with which they were familiar, but written in the national language. The obvious choice was the Bible. A German translation of the Bible would not only encourage Yiddish-speaking Jews to better understand the language of their host culture, it would also serve to launch a cultural renaissance, a programme of education that would reignite an attachment to the ideas and humanity of the Bible.

  A year after the Lavater affair, in 1770, Mendelssohn began to translate the book of Psalms from Hebrew into German. It wasn’t published until 1783, by which time he had completed a translation for his children of the whole of the Pentateuch.

  Up to this point all German Bibles had been translated by Christians, with annotations or even commentaries that displayed a Christian understanding of the text. Mendelssohn wanted his translation to reflect the Jewish way of understanding the Bible, and to draw out the full meaning and style of the Hebrew text. He decided that including a commentary, based on traditional Jewish sources, alongside the translation was the most effective way to achieve this. He gathered together a group of scholars, mainly friends, to collaborate with him. The commentary was printed on the lower half of the page, with the original Hebrew text and German translation in parallel columns at the top. The whole work became known, by the Hebrew title of the commentary, as the Bi’ur.

  Excommunication

  In the Bi’ur’s first edition the German translation was written in Hebrew characters, the alphabet with which his intended Jewish readership was familiar. But the work proved far more popular than Mendelssohn imagined it would be. It displayed a literary elegance and clarity of language which contrasted favourably with the now archaic Luther translation. Christian scholars and churchmen also wanted to read it; of the 800 subscribers to the first edition, many were not Jews.4 A translation written in Hebrew lettering was clearly not appropriate. A second printing of Genesis in German characters quickly followed.

  But this was the translated Bible and, predictably, despite its obvious popularity Mendelssohn’s translation was not without its detractors. Some of the more traditional rabbis voiced objections. Their fear was different from the now obsolete concerns of the medieval Church; that making the Bible available to lay perusal might lead to unorthodox ideas. Jewish education had always been founded on Bible study; there could hardly be any objection to whichever language it was read in. Instead, Mendelssohn’s detractors voiced more prosaic reasons. Encouraging students to use the Bible as a means of learning German, they argued, would reduce the time they had available for serious religious education. That at least was the fear they spoke out loud. Less publicly articulated was a deep-rooted opposition to the whole emancipation project; they feared that it would lead to assimilation and ultimately to loss of Jewish identity. The fact that four of Mendelssohn’s six children converted to Christianity and that only one of his nine grandchildren remained a Jew is perhaps a vindication of their point of view.

  Whether Mendelssohn’s German pentateuch really hastened the conversion of many German Jews to Christianity is a matter for debate. But one thing is certain. As future generations of emancipated German Jews successively fell further and further out of touch with the Hebrew language, they turned to Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur to help them understand Scripture. Mendelssohn’s translated Bible started out as a way of teaching Yiddish-speaking Jews German. It ended up as the one enduring link German-speaking Jews had with their Hebrew faith.

  The opponents of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation didn’t try to kill him, those days had gone, but rumours did start to circulate of a plan for his excommunication. The most concerted opposition came from the rabbi of Altona. Altona is now a district of Hamburg in Germany, but in those days it was ruled by the Danish monarchy. Mendelssohn, however, had powerful allies in Denmark. He was able to outflank the rabbi by arranging for a subscription to the translation to be taken out on behalf of the Danish king, Christian VII. Christian, who was plagued by mental illness, was only the monarch in name; Denmark was ruled by his stepmother. But this didn’t matter. Obtaining royal approval was all Mendelssohn needed to neutralize the threat from Altona’s rabbi. The rumoured excommunication never took place and Mendelssohn’s translation achieved its aim. It was adopted as the textbook in Berlin’s first Jewish free school and provided a conduit for Germany’s Jews into mainstream society. It had been the first Jewish translation since the days of Saadia Gaon to be made for ideological purposes. Arguably, it was the last.

  10

  The Early American Bible

  The Bay Psalm Book

  The first settlers on American soil brought with them the Bibles they had used in their now forsaken homelands. For the English settlers this meant either the Geneva Bible, beloved of the Puritans, or the King James version. A copy of the King James Bible, printed in 1620 and carried by John Alden, the ship’s carpenter on the Mayflower, still survives at Plymouth’s Pilgrim Hall Museum in Massachusetts.

  But although existing European versions dominated in America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the continent’s story of the translated Bible really begins in Massachusetts Bay in 1640 with the book of Psalms. And although it is only one volume and not the whole Bible, nor is it particularly controversial, the Bay Psalm Book, as it is known, is worth a mention.

  The very fact that the book exists at all shows just how intense the rivalry between religious sects can be, particularly when, to an outside observer, there seems to be very little difference between them. When two similar factions compete for authenticity, they each need to find a unique way of expressing their identity. For the settlers in Massachusetts Bay, their unique identity was expressed through their own translation of the book of Psalms.

  One of the great, popular innovations of the Reformation had been the public singing of hymns and psalms. Congregational singing allowed people to feel involved; they became participants in their religious services, rather than merely an audience. The singing of psalms in church was popular and many families also sang together at home.

  The first Puritans to arrive in America were already singing from an English book of Psalms, translated by Henry Ainsworth, an English pastor in Amsterdam. But the founders of the Bay Colony still clung to an older translation, one which Ainsworth had found so clumsy in its style and language that it impelled him to produce his version. The Bay Colony settlers did not like their older translation, but nor would they adopt Ainsworth’s version, because that was the one used by the Pilgrims in the nearby Plymouth colony. And although there was little to distinguish the Bay Puritans from the Plymouth Pilgrims, in terms of their beliefs and the way they practised their religion, the Pilgrims were Separatists, having broken away from the Church of England, and the Bay settlers were Non-Separatists. Therefore the Bay Settlers would not use the translation of the book of Psalms the Pilgrims used. Instead they wrote their own.

  The Bay Psalm Book is no more stylistically elegant than the Ainsworth version, possibly even less so, and it underwent a number of revisions over the ensuing years.1 But, doctrinal differences and local rivalries aside, the real significance of the Bay Psalter is that it was the first book ever to be written and printed in America. It is also very rare, and therefore extremely valuable. Of the 1,700 copies which made up the first edition, only eleven are known to have survived. A copy which went on sale
at Sotheby’s in 2013 sold for $13m, making the Bay Psalter the most expensive printed book in the world today, a distinction it attained solely because two similar Puritan denominations could not bring themselves to use the same psalm book.

  The Early American Bible

  The King James Bible reigned supreme in America for the best part of three hundred years. Its success was not for lack of competition; the nineteenth century saw a flurry of American translations, some of them highly idiosyncratic. Still, nothing could dislodge the King James version. David Daniell compares the situation in the United States with that in England where, despite the King James’s dominance, there was always healthy competition from the Geneva, the Douay and others. But in the United States, despite nearly every other area of culture demonstrating an energetic and inimitable American stamp, as far as religion was concerned the King James Bible, with all its English, monarchist associations, remained unchallenged.2

  Other languages were not similarly inhibited. As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even before the English arrived, Spanish Christian missionaries were translating parts of the Bible into Native American languages. In 1663 John Eliot, a Puritan minister who had been involved with the translation of the Bay Psalm Book, produced the first full Native American translation of the Bible, in the Natick dialect of the Algonquian language.

  Eliot, who believed that the Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,3 reportedly learned Algonquian with the aid of an ‘unpaid servant’.4 By all accounts Algonquian was a difficult language to inscribe; the Naticks had no written alphabet and like Little Wolf, Mesrop and Cyril before him, Eliot had to create one. But unlike his predecessors he did not go to the trouble of devising a new script, he simply transcribed the Native American phonemes into the Western alphabet, which he then taught to his prospective converts.

  By 1655 Eliot had translated the book of Psalms and with the aid of his Algonquian helper was working his way through Genesis and Matthew. He’d received funding from the New England Company, a society established by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament in 1649 for the express purpose of proselyting the Algonquin Americans. One condition of the Company’s funding was that Eliot should seek help with the translation from those who knew the Algonquians and their language better than he. He doesn’t seem to have done this and, once the translation was underway, doubts were raised about whether his work was actually intelligible to the Algonquians. Eliot responded forthrightly, asserting that he had read some of his translation to a group of Native Americans who ‘manifested that they did understand what I read, perfectly, in respect of the language’.5 But, although rarely voiced during the three years it took to typeset and print the Bible, the doubts persisted. Printing was finally complete in May 1663. One thousand copies came off the press and a second edition was prepared. But when a third edition was suggested, Cotton Mather, a Commissioner of the Company and Eliot’s biographer, advised against it. In his submission he referred to reports he had heard from the Algonquians: ‘There are many words of Mr. Eliot’s forming which they never understood. This they say is a grief to them. Such a knowledge in their Bibles as our English ordinarily have in ours, they seldom any of them have; and there seems to be as much difficulty to bring them into a competent knowledge of the scriptures, as it would be to get a sensible acquaintance with the English tongue.’6 Eliot’s landmark translation of the Bible into the Algonquian language was not deemed a great success.

  Like the Bay Psalm Book, the Algonquian Bible occupies a significant role in the history of American printing. The Bay Psalter was the first ever American printed book and the Algonquian the first printed Bible. And, like the Bay Psalm Book, the Algonquian Bible has become a collector’s item, a first edition selling in 2013 for $400,000.

  But not even the printing of a Bible in the Algonquian tongue was enough to stimulate the much more straightforward enterprise of composing an English-language translation in America. For decades the King James retained its monopoly among English speakers. It wasn’t until the aftermath of the Revolution, when it was high time to dispense with the memory of the English monarchy, and the Bible that bore a royal name, that American versions began to appear.

  The charge was led by Charles Thomson, a Revolutionary leader himself, who had arrived in America as a child from Ireland, together with the remnants of his family.

  Thomson’s childhood had not been happy. One of six children, he lost his mother when he was ten years old. Their father, certain that they would have a better future in America, packed the family onto a boat; within a few weeks he too had fallen sick and expired. The ship’s captain helped himself to the father’s money and, as soon as the vessel docked, dumped the kids in the New Castle port, where they were separated. Charles found himself taken in by a blacksmith but fled as soon as he discovered that his benefactor was making plans to have him indentured as an apprentice. Blacksmithing was not something Charles Thomson had ever planned to do. The boy had greater ambitions.

  Escaping from the blacksmith’s forge turned out to be the best thing he had ever done. As he trudged aimlessly towards wherever his next destination might be, he fell into conversation, if the story is to be believed, with a passing lady. As adults do, she asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. When he told her he wanted to be a scholar, she whisked him up, took him home and sent him to school.7 If this all sounds a bit like a fairy story, maybe it is. The only thing we really know is that Charles Thomson did get himself an education, and suffered a distinguished career.

  After a brief career as a teacher and merchant, Thomson became drawn into revolutionary politics. He led Philadelphia’s Liberty Party and served as secretary to the Continental Congress, the representative body of the thirteen colonies during the War of Independence. Hs role as Secretary made him the official charged with telling George Washington that he had been elected President of the United States. Given his distinguished service, Thomson hoped that he would be offered a post in Washington’s government. Deeply disappointed not to be offered anything, and disillusioned with politics, he went into retirement. It was then that his relevance to the history of the translated Bible began.

  Thomson was preparing to write a history of the American Revolution when he happened to walk past a store from which was extruding the hubbub of an auction. He heard the auctioneer proclaiming the sale of ‘an unknown, outlandish book’.8 Intrigued, Thomson walked in, bid for it, and watched the gavel fall. He found himself the owner of a section of the Greek Septuagint. Two years later he came across the remaining parts, in the same store. He snapped those up too.

  Thomson spent twenty years translating the Septuagint, finally publishing it in 1808 together with an English translation of the Greek New Testament. At Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion, Thomson printed his bible in octavo format (meaning each sheet of paper was folded into eight leaves, with an approximate size of six by nine inches). Jefferson assured him this was the size that most readers preferred. But the sale of his Bible proved unprofitable. Ebenezer Hazard, Thomson’s partner in the publishing enterprise, eventually bought up the unsold stock and stored it in his attic for years. When he died, the entire stock was sold for waste paper.9

  Thomson’s English Septuagint is a majestic and effusive piece of nineteenth-century literature. He had no qualms about sacrificing word-for-word equivalence on the twin altars of elegance and readability. His translation has attracted a certain amount of merriment, but this is largely because we no longer speak as they did in the nineteenth century, and because we are familiar with the Hebrew Bible, not the Septuagint. Thomson’s rendering of the Garden of Eden as the ‘garden of pleasure’10 risks bringing images into our twenty-first-century minds that would probably horrify him. But the Septuagint author knew that the underlying sense of the Hebrew name Eden is ‘pleasure’, so Thomson, although innocently graphic, is correct. And in Psalm 23 where just two Hebrew words are typically translated as ‘my cup runneth over’, Th
omson’s elaborate ‘and thine exhilarating cup is the very best’ is just a more fulsome way of rendering the Septuagint’s ‘your cup was supremely intoxicating’.11

  Charles Thomson’s Bible was not a commercial success but it did break new ground. It was the first English version of the Old Testament from the Septuagint ever made. It was also the first English translation of the Bible in America. Many more would follow.

  Noah Webster’s Expurgated Translation

  If any one individual is responsible for the distinctive vitality of American English, it is Noah Webster. Trained as a teacher, and with a keen interest in pedagogy, Webster was acutely aware that the American way of life was rapidly diverging from its origins in England. The challenges and rigours of living in an emergent society were so different from old England’s staid and comfortable ways, and America’s newly won political independence was propelling the nation towards cultural self-sufficiency. Even the very diction of the two English-speaking nations was bifurcating; the natural consequence of the evolution of language, a phenomenon we can easily spot if we compare audio recordings made half a century ago with the way we talk now.

  Yet for all these differences, America’s educational system was still dependent upon the Old World’s teaching methods and textbooks. The United States desperately needed its own pedagogical tools, resources that would enable schoolchildren to develop a greater awareness of their own identity and to engage more fully with the language and literature that was coming to define the new nation’s self-perception. Noah Webster spotted the challenge, and took it up.