Translating Untranslatability

This study grows out of the longstanding question of Jewish-Christian translation, historically shaped both by biblical translation and by debates over the possibility, or impossibility, of religious conversion. It departs from what has been constructed as an absolute hermeneutical difference between the literalist particularism associated with Rabbinic tradition and the universalism inherent in Christian exegesis, focusing instead on Yiddish as a site of linguistic and cultural inter/exteriority within Ashkenazi Jewish life and in relation to Christian society. Within the German-speaking world, the affinity between German and Yiddish was alternately exploited for Christian missionary purposes and condemned as evidence of Judaism’s supposedly “corrupting” influence. Yiddish also occupied a distinctive position within Jewish culture as the language associated with women and with those who, like women, were excluded from Hebrew learning. These dimensions of Yiddish provide a lens through which this project reconsiders early twentieth-century Jewish-German debates on translation and the reinterpretation of tradition, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. Their German translation of the Hebrew Bible serves as a paradigmatic example of what W. Gunther Plaut described as “linguistic theology as a political phenomenon.” The study especially foregrounds neglected female perspectives on translation. Beginning with Bertha Pappenheim, whose role in the Jewish feminist movement and involvement with psychoanalysis have overshadowed her translations of Yiddish “women’s literature”, the dissertation moves outside strictly philosophical genres and considers prayers (tkhines), novels, and poems authored by Jewish female intellectuals, such as Dvora Baron and Margarete Susman, as sources for thinking translation and untranslatability otherwise.