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Spinoza in the Mirror of the Ethics' Hebrew JJTP 15,2_f3_38-63IIII 9/20/07 10:55 AM Page 39 IN THE EYE OF THE TRANSLATOR: SPINOZA IN THE MIRROR OF THE ETHICS’ HEBREW TRANSLATORS Gideon Katz I Spinoza’s main work, the Ethics, has been translated into Hebrew three times, a rarity for philosophical works.1 It was first translated by the Galician intellectual Solomon Rubin (1823–1910), next by philosopher Jacob Klatzkin (1882–1948), and most recently by Yirmiyahu Yovel (b. 1935), a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.2 The translations appeared in the nineteenth, 1 The Hebrew reader has not been “pampered” with translations of philosoph- ical works. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed has been translated into Hebrew four times, and Plato’s Symposium has been translated three times, but many philosophical works have not been translated at all. Others have been translated only once, not always in full, and the translations are now often outdated. Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, for example, have not been translated in full, nor have Hegel’s major works. Hobbes’s Leviathan and Hume’s Essays are only partially available to Hebrew readers. This same state of affairs also exists in Jewish philosophy. For example, the only Hebrew version of Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem is an antiquated translation. 2 Solomon Rubin was born in 1823 in Dolina, Galicia (today southeast Poland- northwest Ukraine). He was a prolific writer, much of whose work dealt with Jewish folklore and customs. His special interest was in Jews who were persecuted because of their ideas. He translated the play Uriel Acosta by Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow into Hebrew. His interest in persecuted Jews was the reason for his ongoing preoccu- pation with Spinoza. Rubin wrote several works and articles on Spinoza, and he translated Spinoza’s grammar of the Hebrew language, Compendium Grammaticae Linguae Hebraeae, into Hebrew (Diqduq sefat ever). Rubin’s life was marked by frequent relo- cations in Europe as well as by confrontations with the rabbinical establishment. He died in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven. Details of his wanderings and the rab- binical attacks against him appear in Joseph Klausner’s preface to S. Rubin, Solomon’s Anthology: Ten New and Old, Specific and Revised Articles [Hebrew] (Krakow, 1896); and M. Dorman, Spinoza’s Controversy in the Jewish Mirror [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990), 190, n. 106. A recent study of Rubin is A. Jacont, “Shlomo Rubin (1823–1910): A One-Man Library of Enlightenment” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2006). Jacob Klatzkin was born in 1882 in the Russian town of Bereza-Kartuskaya to a family of rabbis. In 1912 he received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Bern. After WW I he founded the Eshkol publishing company in Berlin, where he published the Enziklopedyah Yisre’elit in Hebrew, and, together with M. Zobel, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 JJTP 15.2 Also available online – www.brill.nl JJTP 15,2_f3_38-63IIII 9/20/07 10:55 AM Page 40 40 gideon katz twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, paralleling dynamic changes in the history of the Jewish people. Rubin’s translation was published in 1885 in the midst of the Eastern European enlightenment and the very naissance of Zionism. The second appeared in 1925, when the Zionist idea was coming into fruition, and the third translation was published in the State of Israel in 2003.3 In this article I discuss the views of the Hebrew translators of Spinoza’s Ethics. Over the years, many modern Jewish philosophers and intellectuals have investigated Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Hess, Hermann Cohen, Solomon Maimon, Leo Strauss,4 Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Nachman Krochmal, Abraham Krochmal, Samuel David Luzzatto, Meir Letteris, Aaron Zeitlin, and others.5 Several autobiographies by Enlightenment intellectuals describe Spinoza as an influential figure whose work was the impetus for the The Philosophical Lexicon (4 vols., 1928–1933), which discusses the terminology of medieval religious philosophers. In 1941 he was appointed lecturer in Hebrew phi- losophy at the College of Jewish Studies in Chicago. He died in 1948. For more biographical information, see Y. Schechter, Jacob Klatzkin: An Anthology of Essays [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1965), 7–8. Yermiyahu Yovel was born in 1935 in Haifa. He received his doctorate from the Hebrew University. Yovel has written books on Kant and metaphysics, Kant’s philosophy of history, and Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s views of Judaism. He is active in the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute and is deeply involved in Jewish secularism and pluralistic democracy. 3 B. Spinoza, An Investigation of God with the Science of Man [Hebrew], trans. S. Rubin (Vienna, 1885); B. Spinoza, Ethics [Hebrew], trans. Y. Klatzkin (Tel Aviv: Masadah, 1954); and B. Spinoza, Ethics [Hebrew], trans. Y. Yovel (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hmeuchad, 2003). 4 An interesting analysis of Spinoza’s significance for Zionism appears in an early article by L. Strauss, “The Testament of Spinoza,” in L. Strauss,The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. M. Zank (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 216–23. 5 There are more examples. The leading Jewish intellectuals in Europe—Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Henry Bergson, and Sigmund Freud—and even religious thinkers such as Rav Kook had a complex attitude toward Spinoza’s philosophy. The following studies deal with Spinoza’s influence on Jewish thinkers: D. Schwartz, “Fascination and Rejection: Religious Zionist Attitudes toward Spinoza,” Studies in Zionism 14 (1993): 147–68; W. Goetschel, “Heine’s Spinoza,” Idealistic Studies 33 (2003): 203–17; E. Navon, “Hermann Cohen’s Perceptions of Spinoza: a Reappraisal,” AJS Review 4 (1979): 111–24; E. Yakira, “Leo Strauss and Baruch Spinoza: Remarks in the Margins of Strauss’ Timely Reflections,” Studia Spinozistica 13 (1997): 161–82; Y. Melamed, “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 67–96; A. Kaplan, “Spinoza and Freud,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 5 (1977):299–326; P. Lachover, “Spinoza and the Enlightenment,” Old and New Borders: Literary Essays [Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1951), 103–29; and Z. Levy, Spinoza and the Judaic Concept [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1972)..
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