Book Reviews

Medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture Encounters in Confluence and Dialogue Medieval Encounters 18 (2012) 290-297 brill.com/me

Book Reviews

Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Eds), Studies on Steinschneider. Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Studies in Jewish History and Culture, Volume 33 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). xxxii, 602 pp.

Medieval culture, as Thomas Burman put it so aptly, was a culture of translation. Among Jews and Christians the back-and-forth between Hebrew and Aramaic, in the first instance, and Hebrew, Greek and Latin, in the second created an expectation of a multilingual textual culture on which was imposed the rich cultural multilingualism of the assimilation of Greek, Persian, and Indian science and philosophy. The broad contours of the medieval translation movement (Greek into Arabic and Hebrew, specifically) was known by the mid-1900s, but only as a bibliographical construct—lists of books and manuscripts, whose contents were largely unknown. Although Leopold Zunz and Salomon Munk made important contributions, the emergence of translation studies as a scholarly discipline was owing to Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907). Steinschneider was a key participant in the movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums, a mod- ern “science” of Judaism that its German-Jewish promoters hoped would take its place among the recognized scholarly disciplines. The present volume of 25 essays on Steinschneider—the acts of a con- ference held in 2008—covers a huge landscape of material, with individual essays sometimes going over the same ground from a different perspec- tives. This is useful because it makes clear how rich and variegated Steinschneider’s scholarly production was. While it does not fulfill the desideratum of a biography it leads the way to one. Steinschneider identified (following Ismar Schorsch’s elegant aperçu that leads off this collection of essays) a “corpus of secular Jewish writings, created a conception of Jewish culture free of the trope of persecution and discovered the vital role played by Jewish translators of the thirteenth century in transferring Greek knowledge from east to west” (p. 4). A mem- ber of the founding generation of German Orientalists in the 1840s,

Steinschneider had been introduced to Arabic by Heinrich Fleischer at the University of Leipzig (where Steinschneider received his doctorate in 1851). It was under the aegis of Fleischer’s Jewish students, the most important being Ignaz Goldziher, that “Orientalism” came to include Arabic and Hebrew studies under one banner; here Steinschneider was an important proponent of setting comparative philology as the guiding model for “Oriental” studies. Steinschneider’s fame rests on two sets of works. First are bio-bibliogra- phies of medieval translations and translators, the most influential being Die Hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters (HU) (Berlin, 1893) and Die Arabischen Übersetzungen aus dem Grieschischen (Leipzig, 1889-1893), both enormous, two-volume works of encyclopedic reach. Steinschneider’s production was so immense that it defies any facile characterization. He was dismissed by later scholars as a mere bibliographer, but the works just cited were enormously influential both programmatically (by provid- ing a conceptual “map” of the medieval translation movements) and prac- tically ( Jewish libraries that wanted to build strong medieval collections used his works as a shopping list, e.g., Alexander Marx at the Jewish Theo- logical Seminary in New York). Interestingly, Arabischen übersetzungen was a discursive comment on al-Nadim’s Fihrist, itself a (medieval) bio-bibliographic work which likewise aimed to account for the results of the translation movement. Then inDie Europaischen Übersetzung aus dem Arabischen (1906), he explains how translators from the north of Spain and Provence became “natural mediators” between literature of Orient and medieval Europe. Jews, he observed, were “people of languages” (Volk der Sprachen) (101) and as a result, I might add, lived in an intellectual world dominated by “translation culture”. Hebrew science (that is scientific treatises written in Hebrew) emerged in the 12th century under the aegis of Abraham ibn Ezra (from Tudela) and Abraham bar Hiyya (originally from Huesca), in the Ebro Valley contemporaneous with, and identical in content to, the early movement of scientific translation from Arabic into Latin. All three of these classics can be downloaded from Google Books. The most perceptive articles in the book under review are those by Schorsch, already mentioned, and Charles H. Manekin, on the “The Genesis of Die Hebraeischen Übersetzungen” (489-529). Manekin notes that HU transcended its original purpose and become, instead, “a massive reference work for the history of ‘profane literature’ in mediaeval Hebrew” which however included in its scope not only medieval Jewish literary