Baron: O, you wrong me! How could you entertain such a suspicion? Without being learned in physiognomies, I must tell you I have never met with a more frank, generous, and pleasing countenance than yours.
Traveller: To tell you the truth, I do not approve of generalizations concerning a whole people.... I should think that among all nations good and wicked are to be found.
These quotations will suffice to convey an idea of the aim of the dramatist and of the manner in which it is carried out. There is a certain amount of comic relief to the gravity of the main plot. The foot-pad and garroter, Martin Krumm, cuts an amusing figure as an assailant of the honesty of the Jews. “A Christian would have given me a kick in the ribs and not a snuff-box,” says Christopher, the traveller’s servant. Christopher is a funny rogue. When his master cannot find him, and naturally complains, the servant replies: “I can only be in one place at one time. Is it my fault that you did not go to that place? You say you have to search for me? Surely you’ll always find me where I am.”
There were a few attempts prior to Lessing to present the Jew in a favorable light on the stage, as Sir Sidney Lee has shown. But between Shylock and Nathan there stretches a lurid desert, broken only by the oasis of Die Juden. To some it may occur that the battle of tolerance fought by Lessing did not end in a permanent victory. Lessing himself would not have been disquieted at that result. As he expressed it, the search for truth rather than the possession of truth is the highest human good. A leading Viennese paper said some few years ago that if Nathan the Wise had been written now, it would have been hissed off the German stage. It is not unlikely. Fortunately, Lessing wrote before 1880! Nathan does not remain unacted. I saw Possart play the title-role in Munich in the nineties. His splendid elocution carried off Nathan’s long speeches with wonderful absence of monotony.
A thing of truth is a boon forever, because it makes further progress in truth-seeking certain. Because there has been one Lessing, there must be others. And if Nathan the Wise be thus a lasting inspiration, let us not forget that the poet was trying his hand, and maturing his powers, by writing the play which has served as the subject of this sketch.
ISAAC PINTO’S PRAYER-BOOK
It was in America that the first English translation of the Synagogue Prayer-Book appeared (1761 and 1766). Often has attention been drawn to the curiosity that this latter volume was published not in London but in New York. The 1761 edition has only recently been discovered by Dr. Pool; with the 1766 work we have long been familiar. According to the Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica (p. 174), “the Mahamad would not allow a translation to be printed in England.” If such a refusal was made, we must at least amend the last words, and read in English for in England. For it was in London, in 1740, that Isaac Nieto’s Spanish rendering of the prayers for New Year and Day of Atonement saw the light of publication.
Indeed, in Isaac Pinto’s preface the point is made quite clear. “In Europe,” he says, “the Spanish and Portuguese Jews have a translation in Spanish, which, as they generally understand, may be sufficient; but that not being the case in the British Dominions in America, has induced me to attempt a translation, not without hope that it may tend to the improvement of many of my brethren in their devotion.” Admittedly, then, Pinto designed his work for American use; at all events, the objection of the Mahamad must have been to the language used by Pinto. We know how resolutely Bevis Marks clung to Spanish, and how reluctantly it abandoned some of the quaint uses made of it in announcements and otherwise.
“Some crudities there are in this translation, but few mistakes, and the style has a genuine devotional ring,” says Mr. Singer. Pinto could not easily go wrong, seeing that he made use of Haham Nieto’s “elegant Spanish translation.” Dr. Gaster remarks that Pinto’s rendering “rests entirely,” as the author declares, on Nieto’s. Pinto’s exact words are: “In justice to the Learned and Reverend H. H. R. Ishac Nieto, I must acknowledge the very great advantage I derived” from Nieto’s work. Mr. G. A. Kohut shares Mr. Singer’s high opinion of Pinto’s style. “The translation,” he asserts, “seems to be totally free from foreign expressions, and is characterized throughout by a dignity and simplicity of diction which is on the whole admirable.” With this favorable judgment all readers of Pinto will unhesitatingly concur. A remarkable feature which Pinto shares with Nieto is this: the translation appears without the Hebrew text. Commenting on the absence of Hebrew, Mr. Singer observes: “This fact would seem to show that there must have been an appreciable number of persons, who, for purposes of private worship at least, and perhaps also while in attendance at synagogue, depended upon English alone in their devotions.” On the other hand, it is possible that, as Hebrew printing must have been costly in London and New York in the eighteenth century, the absence of the Hebrew may be merely due to the desire to avoid expenses. The translations may have been meant for use with copies of the Hebrew text printed in Amsterdam and elsewhere on the continent of Europe.
Pinto’s book was small quarto in shape; it contained 191 pages. There are some peculiarities on the title-page, of which a facsimile may be seen in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, page 55: “Prayers for Shabbath, Rosh-Hashanah, and Kippur, or the Sabbath, the Beginning of the Year, and the Day of Atonements; with the Amidah and Musaph of the Moadim, or solemn seasons. According to the Order of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Translated by Isaac Pinto. And for him printed by John Holt, in New York, A. M. 5526” (= 1766). It will be noted that Pinto indicates the ayin by the use of italics in the words Amidah and Moadim. Also, though he employs the ordinary Sephardic term for the Day of Atonement (Kippur without the prefix of Yom), he does not translate the singular, but the plural, for he renders it the “Day of Atonements,” which is not exactly a blunder (though the Hebrew Kippurim is, of course, really an abstract plural with a singular sense).