chapter thirteen

Deciphering the : The First English Edition of the Talmud Revisited. Michael Levi Rodkinson: His Translation of the Talmud, and the Ensuing Controversy 1

A man is obligated to divide his time between the written Torah, , and Talmud, the latter referring to understanding and discernment. This obligation exists at the beginning of his learning. When he is so grown in Torah and does not need to constantly learn the written Torah nor continu- ously learn the (Mishnah), he should still arrange time for these so that they should not be forgotten. This should not lessen the amount of his Talmud study, to which he must devote his total attention during his study time. Rema: . . . and there are those who say that a man may fulfill his obligation with the Babylonian Talmud, which includes all three. (Shulhan Arukh, Y. D. 246:4) The Talmud, the quintessential Jewish book, is a challenging work.2 A source of Bible interpretation, halakhah, ethical values, and ontology, often described as a sea, it is a comprehensive work that encompasses all aspects of human endeavor. Rabbinic Judaism is inconceivable without the Talmud. Jewish students traditionally followed an educational path beginning in early childhood that culminated in Talmud study, an activity that continued for the remainder of the adult male’s life. That path was never easy. The Talmud is a complex and demanding work, its complexity compounded by the fact that it is, to a large extent, written in Aramaic, the language of the Jews in the Babylonian exile, spo- ken in the Middle East for a millennium, and used in the redaction of the Talmud. Jews living outside of the Middle East—and even Jews in the Mid- dle East after Aramaic ceased to be a spoken language—found approach- ing the Talmud a daunting task. Talmud study was for many, excepting

1 I would like to thank Mr. Jack Neiman and Mr. Benny Ogarik for providing me with books and articles used in the preparation of this article. I would also like to express my appreciation to Ms. Noni Rudavsky, Coordinator of Special Collections and Public Services Librarian, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, for providing me with copies of the Prospec- tus and the edition of Rosh Hashana listing Rabbi J. Leonard Levy as the translator; and to the staff of the Jewish Division, New York Public Library, for their assistance. 2 All references to the Talmud in this paper are to the Babylonian Talmud. 218 chapter thirteen scholars steeped in Talmudic literature, a difficult undertaking, made all the more so by its language and structure. After the Enlightenment, when large numbers of Jews received less intensive Jewish educations, these impediments to Talmud study became more prevalent. Elucidation of the text was accomplished through commentaries, most notably that of R. Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi, 1040–1105). Within his com- mentary there are numerous instances in which Rashi explains a term in medieval French, his vernacular. In the modern period, another solution to the language problem presented itself for those who required more than the explanation of difficult terms, that is, the translation of the text of the Talmud into the vernacular. There have been several such translations of mishnayot and parts of or entire tractates beginning in the sixteenth century.3 It was not, however, until 1891 that a complete Talmudic tractate was translated into English. In that year, the Rev. A. W. Streane, Fellow and Divinity and Hebrew Lecturer, of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and formerly Tyrwhitt’s Hebrew Scholar, published an English edition of tractate . A scholarly work, the translation, in 124 pages, is accompanied by marginal references to biblical passages and, at the bottom of the page, notes. The volume concludes with a glossary, indexes of biblical quotations, persons and places, Hebrew words, and a general index. All that was available in English from the Talmud in the last decade of the nineteenth century were fragmentary portions of tractates, Mishnaic treatises, and Streane’s translation of Hagigah. At that time an effort was begun to translate a substantial portion of the Talmud into English. The subject of this paper is that pioneer effort to produce an English edition of the Talmud. This paper addresses the background of that translation,

3 The earliest translations were by Christian-Hebraists of portions of tractates or, more often, of mishnayot into Latin. Among the earliest of these translations are those of Paulus Ricius (d. 1541), Perek Helek of tractate (Augsburg, 1519); Constantin l’Empereur (1591–1648), (Leiden, 1630), and mishnayot from (1637); and R. Rhen- ferd (1629–1708), Specimen Disputationem Gemaricarum ex Codica Berakhoth (Franeker, 1696), and Wilhelm Surenhuis, who translated forty tractates of the Mishnah, published in Hebrew and Latin in six volumes with the commentaries of , Bertinora, and his own annotations (Amsterdam, 1698–1703). There are translations into other languages, such as German, beginning with Jacob Rabe’s (1710–98) Der Talmudische Traktat Berachoth mit Deutscher Uebersetzung (Halle, 1777), and French, beginning with tractate by Luigi Chiarini (1789–32) and by Moise Schwab (1839–1918), in 1831 and 1871, respectively. For a comprehensive overview of translations of the Talmud for Jews, see Adam Mintz, “Words, Meaning, and Spirit: the Talmud in Translation,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 5 (1994): 115–55, and idem., “The Talmud in Translation,” in Printing the Talmud: From Bomb- erg to Schottenstein (New York, 2005), 125–27.