It is impossible to do justice in a brief article to the intense love of Judaism shown in Miss Aguilar’s book. She pleads for the religion with persuasive eloquence; it must appeal to the heart and the reason; it must permeate the home; it must regulate life. She would have family prayers daily. To this topic she returns over and over again. “The youthful members of a little domestic congregation would look back with warm emotion, in after years, to that period when, with their brothers and sisters, they thronged around their parents to listen to the word of God, and made known their common wants together.” But the thought that dominates her whole book is the perfect truth and sufficiency of Judaism. It only needs to be known to be preferred to every possible alternative. No Jew can ever become lukewarm if he understands his religion. But he must understand its spirit. “We know that they who depart from the faith of their fathers are ever those reared in the severest obedience to mere forms.” Whereupon Leeser in his note comments: “This is certainly a sweeping clause though there is a great deal of truth in it.” He adds that the fault “does not lie in the forms, but in the absence of spiritual education.” That is clearly the reason why Miss Aguilar called her book “The Spirit of Judaism.” She was no foe to forms as such. She strongly defends the dietary laws, in the very chapter whence the last quotation was taken. Obedience is the term writ large on every page; but so is belief. When Judaism is believed in and obeyed, then will redemption be nigh, release from captivity at hand, and the advent of the Messiah approaching. But how movingly she says it in her own fiery words!
ISAAC LEESER’S BIBLE
The twenty years around the middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the preparation of several Jewish translations of the Bible. Moses Mendelssohn had shown the way in the previous century; he did not, however, produce a complete German Bible. This was done with success by a body of scholars led by Zunz (Berlin, 1838). Ludwig Philippson, in the very next year, began an enterprise the accomplishment of which occupied him till 1856. His edition was not only annotated; it was also adorned with illustrations. In 1875 the Philippson Bible came out anew with the Doré pictures.
ISAAC LEESER
(From a Painting by Solomon Nunez de Carvalho)
As for English versions by Jews, David Levi edited the Pentateuch in 1787. But, to pass over certain publications of separate books, no complete Bible appeared in England from a Jewish hand until the issue of Benisch’s version (1851-56). This was a melancholy affair. Real and original scholarship is shown in every page. He claimed for his rendering “fidelity, uniformity and independence.” But he had no sense for English style. He unnecessarily and grotesquely altered the familiar words of the Authorized Version. Hence, one is bound to speak of this monument of learning and earnestness as “melancholy”; it might so easily have been acceptable. His corrections of the Authorized were often necessary. Thus, in the Ten Commandments he rightly put “Thou shalt not murder” for the current “Thou shalt not kill.” The Revised Version made the same correction. So, too, he was right when, for historical reasons, he made a change in Leviticus 23. 15. In the Authorized Version this runs: “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath.” But by the Jewish tradition the Feast of Weeks is not counted from a Saturday but from the first day of Passover—on whatever day that happens to fall. Hence Benisch substituted: “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest.” Naturally, too, he corrected certain dogmatic prejudices of the Anglican Version.
Curiously enough, Isaac Leeser leaves “Thou shalt not kill” uncorrected. But he was vigilant with “the morrow after the Sabbath,” for which he substitutes “the morrow after the holy day.” On the other hand, he retained the word “Sabbath” (where the Hebrew has Shabbaton) applied to the first and eighth days of Tabernacle, e. g., Leviticus 23. 39. This, however, he altered in his later editions to a rest; Benisch has strict rest. The Revised Version has a similar correction: solemn rest.
It is not my purpose to compare Leeser’s Version with others. From the hour when his “Law of God” appeared in Philadelphia, in 1845, Leeser’s Pentateuch won the affectionate regard of American Jews. The Pentateuch was issued in octavo, in Hebrew and English; the whole of the Bible came out in quarto, in English alone, towards the end of 1853. From that time it has been often reprinted in varying forms, simply and in editions de luxe. But it is not the printers who made the book popular, though I must remark that, despite the small public support the enterprise secured, the 1845 Leeser Pentateuch is a beautiful specimen of the printer’s art. What made the book was the people’s growing love for Leeser. Can higher praise be given, can a finer fate be wished, than that a man’s book shall live in his brethren’s hearts because of him?
This is not the time to criticise Leeser’s work. Like Benisch, he had no feeling for English style. He could, in the twenty-third Psalm, alter the wonderful melody of “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” into “In pastures of tender grass he causeth me to lie down.” He could take the haunting rhythm of Job’s “There the wicked cease from troubling, there the weary are at rest,” and give us “and where the exhausted weary are at rest,” which is no nearer the literal Hebrew (“the wearied in strength”), and is incomparably farther from its beauty. Or again, the felicitous opening lines of the nineteenth Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,” become in Leeser “The heavens relate the glory of God; and the expanse telleth of the works of his hands.” It is this more than anything else that made it impossible for English Jews to use Leeser’s Bible. Revision of Leeser on scholarly grounds was also necessary, no doubt. Thus, in his rendering of Esther 6. 8, where Haman suggests the details of the pageant in behalf of the man whom the king delighteth (why did Leeser substitute desireth?) to honor, Leeser has: “Let them bring a royal apparel which the king hath worn, and a horse on which the king hath ridden, and let there be placed a royal crown on his head.” But, as Ibn Ezra had in part already pointed out (as Leeser notes), and as we know to be almost certainly the case, the crown was for the horse’s head. In the Revised Version the passage runs: “Let royal apparel be brought which the king useth to wear, and the horse that the king rideth upon, and on the head of which a royal crown is set.”
Naturally, in what precedes I have turned to familiar passages. My comments only touch the fringe of the problem of Bible revision. In one important particular, Leeser anticipated the Revised Version: he arranged the English in paragraphs and not in verses. Since Leeser’s day, however, not only have we learned more as to the precise meaning of words, but we have won a closer insight into the idiomatic use of the Hebrew tenses. The American revision, now issued under the auspices of the American Jewish Publication Society, has given us at once a scholarly translation, and one which remains true to the English excellences of the version made in the reign of King James.