Artom did not reach the perfection of Jellinek, but he never sank to the level of the botcher. What he aimed at he succeeded in attaining. If his rabbinic quotations at the beginning of a discourse were perfunctory, those which he made in the body of the discourse were invariably to the point; they always interpreted. He did not merge Midrash into his own personality as Jellinek did. But he employed it as a certain type of painter does the accessories to a picture, to add color, to relieve the severity of the main idea, to suggest outwardly that which he is not quite able to express inwardly. Hence he usually quoted obvious Midrashim, and used them in an obvious sense. He showed his wisdom in this. If a painter puts in a camel to help me to perceive that he is representing a desert, he must be very careful to make his camel recognizable. It will not do to give me a symbolical “Ship of the Desert,” it must be a camel, palpable and conventional. Within his limitations, he shows himself the better artist the less he tries to make his accessories bizarre or even original.
I trust that no one will suspect me of a desire to “damn with faint praise.” On the contrary, starting with the unquestionable fact that the living Artom was a great preacher, my intention was to indicate what we have to keep in mind if we would admire his printed addresses as they deserve. If we know what to expect from them we shall find it. Take the following paragraph:
“Our sages said that ‘a precious jewel hung around the neck of Abraham.’ It was not a talisman, an amulet, supposed by the superstitious to keep away the consequence of envy, of evil eye; the jewel was the knowledge of the Lord, of the one God, of the Omnipotent Being, that knowledge which Abraham disseminated among men; it was the spiritual jewel which ought to be treasured in the heart of every good man, of every true Israelite. We have inherited that Jewel, we have it still. Oh, let us wear it with pride, for it is the noblest decoration.”
There are a hundred such passages in Artom’s volume. They got home when the orator pronounced them, and they get home still when calmly read as literature. It is perhaps curious that a preacher who in his day was admired for his brilliance, should endure less for the sparkle than for the substance of what he said. That is, however, the common fate of orators. Happy they, if their utterances have worth after the personality behind them has passed away.
SALKINSON’S “OTHELLO”
One of the first writers to combat, on the continent of Europe, Voltaire’s depreciation of Shakespeare was Lessing. But his eulogy was dated 1759. A year earlier (1758) Moses Mendelssohn, in his essay on the Sublime, had anticipated Lessing’s judgment. But his influence did not lead the new-Hebrew school to translate Shakespeare. It was not till near the middle of the nineteenth century that we find Hebrew translations even of such famous soliloquies as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” In 1842 Fabius Mieses and in 1856 N. P. Krassensohn rendered the passage. Both, however, were dependent on Mendelssohn, translating his German rendering. Others, at the same period, turned a few passages, including one of Richard II’s monologues, from German versions into Hebrew.
“To-day we exact our revenge from the English! They took our Bible and made it their own. We, in return, have captured their Shakespeare. Is it not a sweet revenge?” With these words Smolenskin opened his introduction to Salkinson’s Hebrew translation of Othello.
It is not easy to explain how it happened that we had to wait till 1874 for the first Hebrew adaptation of a Shakespearean drama. In fact, with the exception of Salkinson’s Romeo and Juliet (1878), S. L. Gordon’s King Lear (1899), and Isaac Barb’s Macbeth (1883), I know of no Hebrew version of plays by the author of Hamlet, which latter drama so far as I have observed, has not even been printed in Yiddish. (Dr. Halper, however, informs me that Hamlet was translated into Hebrew by H. J. Bornstein, and that his version appeared in the pages of Ha-Zefirah somewhere about 1900). Julius Cæsar appeared in Yiddish in 1886. King Lear has also been printed in the same language, and the Merchant of Venice received the same honor, at the hand of Basil Dahl, in New York, in 1899. I use the words “printed in Yiddish” advisedly, because there are extant in manuscript acting versions of other plays used by Yiddish companies. Of course, select passages from Shakespeare have often been rendered into Hebrew, as, for instance, in that curious publication Young’s Israelitish Gleaner and Biblical Repository, Edinburgh, 1855 (pp. 24, 16). The lack of Hebrew translations may be explained by two considerations. The Merchant of Venice, despite its sympathetic treatment of some aspects of Shylock’s character, dealt so deadly a blow at the Jews, that there could be no enthusiasm with regard to the other works. But more operative was another fact. The available Hebraists for the most part were ignorant of English. The Macbeth mentioned above was translated not from the original, but from Schiller’s German.
There is a further consideration (for after all Schlegel’s fine German version was at hand for those who knew no English). Drama in Hebrew, whether original or translated, has always been spasmodic. Drama needs an audience. Until the Hebrew revival become wider spread, there can never be a sufficiently popular demand for the presentation of Hebrew plays to encourage or cultivate the composition of them. It will no doubt be otherwise in the new Palestine. Indeed we already read of plans, instituted by M. James Rothschild, to organize a Hebrew Drama in Judæa.
Isaac Edward (Eliezer) Salkinson, however, knew English well. He was also gifted with a fine command of Hebrew, which he wrote not only fluently, but in real poetic style. He was born in Wilna, being perhaps the son of Solomon Salkind, himself a writer of meritorious Hebrew verse (Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, p. 651). Unfortunately, a knowledge of Hebrew does not of itself suffice to keep a Jew within the pale of the Synagogue. “As a youth, Salkinson set out for America with the intention of entering a rabbinical seminary there; but while in London he was met by agents of the London Missionary Society, and was persuaded to forsake Judaism.” The Synagogue lost in him one of the most accomplished Hebraists of modern times.