Moses Mendelssohn’s Biur and the German Pentateuch

Between 1780 and 1783 a new edition of the Pentateuch was published at Berlin under the title Sefer netivot ha-shalom, “the book of the paths of peace”. It contained the Hebrew text, a translation into standard High German printed in Hebrew characters, and a commentary in Hebrew known as the Biur, “the explanation”. The translation was the work of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher who had become the best-known Jew in German-speaking Europe, and the commentary was written by Mendelssohn and a small group of collaborators. The edition is usually regarded as one of the founding works of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and it has been both praised and blamed for having led the Jews of Germany from Yiddish to German and from the traditional world of the study house into the culture of modern Europe. This article describes the circumstances in which the work was conceived, its collaborators and their division of labour, the character of its translation and commentary, the controversy that it provoked and its reception in the century that followed.¹²

Background

Mendelssohn's Early Life

Moses Mendelssohn was born at Dessau in 1729, the son of Mendel Heymann, a Torah scribe and teacher. He received a traditional education, and as a boy he studied with David Fränkel, the rabbi of Dessau, who was known for his commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud. When Fränkel was appointed chief rabbi of Berlin in 1743, the fourteen-year-old Moses followed him there. In Berlin he continued his Talmudic studies, but he also learned German, Latin, French and English, and studied mathematics and philosophy, partly with the help of other young Jews who had acquired a secular education. Among his early teachers was Israel Zamosz, a Polish Jewish scholar who introduced him to the medieval Jewish philosophers and to mathematics.³⁴⁵

Mendelssohn earned his living as a tutor and later as a bookkeeper and eventually partner in the silk factory of Isaak Bernhard. At the same time he became a writer of philosophy and criticism in German. His friendship with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which began in 1754, brought him into the literary life of Berlin, and his Phaedon of 1767, a dialogue on the immortality of the soul, made him famous throughout Europe. He was admired as an example of what a Jew could achieve in German culture, and he was also exposed to the pressure that this position brought with it. In 1769 the Swiss theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater publicly challenged him either to refute the arguments for Christianity or to convert. Mendelssohn’s reply affirmed his loyalty to Judaism while declining to enter into religious controversy, and the episode left a lasting mark on him.⁶⁷⁸

The Bible among German Jews

The Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century spoke Western Yiddish, and the vernacular versions of the Bible available to them were in Yiddish. The most widely read was the Tsene-rene, the homiletic adaptation of the Pentateuch, haftarot and Scrolls composed in the late sixteenth century, and there were also the Yiddish Bibles printed at Amsterdam in 1678 and 1679 and a number of glossaries and school translations. In the schools, the Pentateuch was taught by the traditional method of word-for-word translation into Yiddish, and pupils were introduced at an early stage to the commentary of Rashi and, before long, to the Talmud.⁹¹⁰¹¹

To Mendelssohn and those who shared his outlook, this system had serious defects. They regarded Western Yiddish as a corrupt form of German, unfit for literary or religious use, and they believed that it isolated Jews from the culture of the society around them. They criticised the schools for neglecting Hebrew grammar and the plain meaning of scripture in favour of an early and premature immersion in the Talmud. And they were concerned that young Jews who acquired a secular education, as they increasingly did, would read the Bible in the Christian translations, above all in Luther’s, and would absorb the Christian interpretations that accompanied them.¹²¹³¹⁴

Origins of the Project

A Translation for His Sons

Mendelssohn later explained how the work had begun. In a letter to his friend August Hennings, a Danish official, written in 1779, he described how he had translated the Pentateuch into German for his own children, dictating a few verses at a time in the course of their lessons. Solomon Dubno, a scholar from Volhynia who was then living in Berlin and serving as tutor to Mendelssohn’s son Joseph, saw the translation and urged that it be published, with a commentary that would explain the reasons for the translator’s choices. Mendelssohn agreed, on the condition that Dubno undertake the commentary.¹⁵¹⁶

The account in the letter to Hennings has been accepted in its outlines by most historians, but it does not tell the whole story. Mendelssohn had long been interested in the Bible. He had written commentaries on Ecclesiastes and on Maimonides’ treatise on logic, he had worked on the translation of the Psalms for many years, and he had thought deeply about the problems of translation and of the relation between Hebrew and the European languages. The project of a German Pentateuch, in other words, grew out of a lifetime of concern with scripture and its interpretation, and it was not merely a domestic undertaking that happened to reach the press.¹⁷¹⁸

Solomon Dubno and the Prospectus

Solomon Dubno was born in 1738 and educated in eastern Europe, where he studied with Solomon of Chelm, an authority on Hebrew grammar and the accents. He spent several years at Amsterdam and settled in Berlin in 1772. He was a poet and a grammarian with a deep knowledge of the Masorah, and he was the natural person to provide the textual and grammatical apparatus that the edition was to include.¹⁹

In 1778 a prospectus announcing the edition was published at Amsterdam under the title Alim li-terufah, “leaves for healing”. It contained a description of the project, a sample of the translation and the commentary, and an invitation to subscribe. The work was to include the Hebrew text, carefully corrected according to the Masorah, the German translation in Hebrew characters, the commentary, and notes on the text and its Masoretic tradition. The prospectus was widely circulated, and subscriptions were collected from Jewish communities throughout Germany and beyond, as well as from a number of Christian readers.²⁰²¹

The Edition

Contents and Arrangement

The edition, printed at Berlin by George Friedrich Starcke, appeared in five parts between 1780 and 1783. Genesis was published in 1780 and Exodus in 1781, and the remaining books followed by 1783. Each page contained the Hebrew text, with vowels and accents, and the German translation in Hebrew letters, printed in parallel. Below these was the Biur, and the edition also contained the Aramaic Targum of Onkelos and the commentary of Rashi, so that the reader had before him not only the new translation and commentary but the traditional companions of the Pentateuch as well.²²²³

The edition also contained a body of notes on the text called Tikkun soferim, which recorded variant readings and Masoretic information and justified the form of the text that had been printed. These notes were prepared by Dubno, in part with the assistance of Shalom of Meseritz. They continued the tradition of Masoretic scholarship represented by Elias Levita in the sixteenth century and by Yedidyah Norzi in the seventeenth, and they reflect the editors’ determination that the Hebrew text of the edition should be as accurate as possible.²⁴²⁵²⁶

The Collaborators

The commentary was divided among several authors. Dubno was responsible for most of the commentary on Genesis, although Mendelssohn wrote the commentary on its first chapter himself. Mendelssohn wrote the commentary on Exodus. The commentary on Leviticus was written by Naphtali Herz Wessely, the Hebrew poet and grammarian, whose work on the subject was the most extensive of any of the collaborators. The commentary on Numbers was written by Aaron Jaroslaw, and that on Deuteronomy largely by Herz Homberg, a young scholar from Bohemia who had become Mendelssohn’s pupil. Mendelssohn himself was responsible for the translation of all five books and for the general editing of the work.²⁷²⁸

The division of labour was not entirely planned. Dubno withdrew from the project after a dispute with Mendelssohn, the causes of which have been much discussed. The dispute seems to have concerned both the financial arrangements of the edition and Dubno’s growing unease at the hostility that the project had aroused among some rabbinical authorities. Dubno left Berlin and eventually went to Vilna, where he attempted, with the support of local scholars, to produce a Bible commentary of his own, intended for the Jews of eastern Europe, to be published with the Targum of Onkelos rather than with a German translation. The project was never completed.²⁹³⁰

Mendelssohn's Introduction

The edition opened with an introduction by Mendelssohn, generally known as Or li-netivah, “a light for the path”. In it he discussed the history of the biblical text and its transmission, the authority of the Masorah, the vowels and accents, and the history of translation of the Bible, from the Septuagint and the Targumim to the translations of the Middle Ages and his own time. He argued that the Masoretic text, with its vowels and accents, preserved the authentic reading of scripture, and he defended its antiquity against the views of Christian critics who regarded the vowel points as a late addition. He also explained the principles on which his own translation was based.³¹³²

The introduction is one of the most important statements of Mendelssohn’s views on scripture. It shows his close knowledge of the Jewish exegetical tradition and of the Christian scholarship of his day, and it reveals a conception of the Bible in which the oral tradition, represented by the Masorah and the accents, is inseparable from the written text. For Mendelssohn, the meaning of scripture could not be recovered from the consonantal text alone, as some Christian scholars supposed, but only from the text as it had been read and transmitted within the Jewish community.³³³⁴

The Translation

Language and Script

The translation was in standard High German, the literary language of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, but it was printed in Hebrew characters. The choice of script has been explained in several ways. It made the translation accessible to Jewish readers who knew German but had not learned to read the Latin alphabet, as was the case with many in the eighteenth century. It placed the translation on the same page as the Hebrew, in a form that could be printed by Hebrew printers and sold through Jewish channels. And it gave the translation a Jewish appearance, so that it could be presented as a Jewish work for Jewish readers rather than as a concession to Christian culture.³⁵³⁶

The effect, however, was to teach High German to readers who did not know it. A reader who followed the translation alongside the Hebrew learned not only the meaning of scripture but the vocabulary and grammar of the German language, and the translation could be used, and was used, as a textbook of German. Contemporaries recognised this purpose, and Mendelssohn himself remarked in a letter that the translation was a first step towards culture for his nation. Whether the teaching of German was the principal purpose of the work or a secondary effect of it has been debated, but there is no doubt that it played this role in practice.³⁷³⁸

Principles of Translation

Mendelssohn’s translation sought to render the meaning of the Hebrew accurately and in good German, without following the Hebrew word order as the traditional Yiddish school translations did. He paid close attention to the accents, which he regarded as a guide to the syntax and meaning of the verse, and he frequently followed the interpretation of the medieval Jewish commentators, especially Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, David Kimhi and Nahmanides, where the Christian translations followed other interpretations. Where the Hebrew was ambiguous, he chose the reading that the tradition supported, and the commentary explained his choice.³⁹⁴⁰

The translation also had a literary aim. Mendelssohn was a stylist of German prose, and he sought to produce a version that would convey something of the beauty of the Hebrew. In the poetic passages, such as the Song of the Sea in Exodus and the blessing of Jacob in Genesis, he paid particular attention to rhythm and diction. Abigail Gillman has described the translation as an attempt to create a German that was at once faithful to the Hebrew and acceptable to the cultivated reader, a German that would be recognisably Jewish in its fidelity to tradition and recognisably modern in its style.⁴¹

Relation to Luther

Mendelssohn knew Luther’s translation well, and his own version was in part a response to it. Luther’s Bible had shaped the German language for two and a half centuries, and its influence was felt in Mendelssohn’s vocabulary and phrasing. But Luther had translated the Old Testament as a Christian book, finding in it prophecies of Christ and reading it in the light of the New Testament. Mendelssohn’s translation was intended to give Jewish readers a German Bible that was free of Christian interpretation. In passages that Christian tradition read christologically, he followed the Jewish interpretation, and his commentary sometimes explained the reasons for the difference.⁴²⁴³

The Psalms and the Song of Songs

Mendelssohn’s work on scripture did not end with the Pentateuch. In 1783, the year in which the edition was completed, he published a German translation of the Psalms, on which he had worked for more than a decade. Unlike the Pentateuch, it was printed in German characters and addressed to a general readership, Christian as well as Jewish, and it was praised by several German critics for its poetic qualities. A translation of the Song of Songs, with a Hebrew commentary, was published shortly afterwards by the press of the Jewish Free School in Berlin. These works show that Mendelssohn’s interest in the Bible extended beyond the needs of Jewish education to the place of the Hebrew scriptures in the literary culture of Europe, a subject that had been discussed by Robert Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder and that Mendelssohn himself had taken up in his early critical writings.⁴⁴⁴⁵

Taken together with the Pentateuch, these translations show a consistent approach. In each case Mendelssohn sought to render the Hebrew in a German that was faithful to its meaning, attentive to its form and acceptable to the educated reader, and in each case he relied on the Jewish exegetical tradition for the interpretation of difficult passages. The differences between them, especially the choice of script, reflect differences of audience rather than of method.⁴⁶

The Commentary

Plain Meaning

The Biur was devoted primarily to the peshat, the plain or contextual meaning of the text. It drew extensively on the medieval Jewish commentators, whose work had fallen out of favour in the Ashkenazi schools of the eighteenth century, where the homiletical and Talmudic approach dominated. The authors of the Biur cited Rashi, ibn Ezra, Kimhi, Nahmanides, Rashbam and others, compared their views, and chose among them. They also discussed questions of grammar, vocabulary and style, and they explained the structure of the narrative and the poetry.⁴⁷⁴⁸

Edward Breuer has shown that the Biur was not a work of modern biblical criticism. Its authors did not question the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or the integrity of the Masoretic text, and they were deeply suspicious of the critical scholarship that was developing among German Protestant scholars of their time. Their purpose was rather to recover the medieval Jewish tradition of plain-sense interpretation and to show that the Jewish reading of scripture was rational, coherent and philologically sound. In this sense the Biur was a work of retrieval as much as of innovation.⁴⁹

Tradition and Enlightenment

At the same time, the Biur was a product of the Enlightenment. Its emphasis on grammar and plain meaning, its interest in the aesthetic qualities of scripture, and its concern with the rational foundations of the commandments reflected the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century. David Sorkin has described Mendelssohn as a representative of the religious Enlightenment, a movement found among Protestants, Catholics and Jews alike, which sought to reconcile revealed religion with reason rather than to replace it. The Biur may be understood as an expression of this outlook in the field of Jewish biblical interpretation.⁵⁰

Wessely’s commentary on Leviticus illustrates the method. Wessely was a learned Hebraist who had published a work on Hebrew synonyms, and in his commentary he examined the precise meaning of the terms used in the laws of sacrifice and purity, compared their uses elsewhere in the Bible, and sought to show that each word had been chosen with care. His commentary was long and detailed, and it was regarded by contemporaries as one of the most learned parts of the work. In the same years, however, Wessely’s pamphlet Divrei shalom ve-emet of 1782, which called for reform of Jewish education, provoked a fierce reaction from rabbinical authorities, and the controversy over the pamphlet affected the reception of the Biur as well.⁵¹⁵²

Controversy

Rabbinical Opposition

The project aroused opposition even before its publication. Several rabbis feared that the German translation would lead young Jews to neglect the study of the Hebrew text and the Talmud, that it would encourage the use of German in place of Yiddish and Hebrew, and that it would open the way to the secular culture with which Mendelssohn was associated. Reports circulated that the leading rabbis of the period, among them Raphael Kohen of Altona and Hamburg and Ezekiel Landau of Prague, had condemned the translation, and that in some places it had been placed under a ban. The extent of the opposition has been debated by historians, and some of the reports may have been exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the work was viewed with suspicion in important rabbinical circles.⁵³⁵⁴

Mendelssohn responded with restraint. He did not engage in public controversy with his critics, and he sought to secure the support of rabbinical authorities and of patrons who could protect the project. The list of subscribers printed in the edition included members of the Jewish communities of Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Holland and England, as well as several Christian notables. The breadth of the subscription was itself a reply to the critics, since it showed that the work had found acceptance far beyond the circle of the Berlin enlighteners.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The Question of Yiddish

The most lasting criticism of the Biur concerned its effect on Yiddish. Mendelssohn’s hostility to Yiddish was explicit. He regarded it as a language that contributed to the immorality of the common people, and he hoped that his translation would help German Jews to replace it with pure German. In this he was largely successful, though the decline of Western Yiddish in the following century had many causes. For later Yiddish writers and historians, Mendelssohn’s role in the decline of Yiddish in Germany was a matter of regret, and his translation became a symbol of the abandonment of Jewish vernacular culture in favour of assimilation.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Reception

Readers and Editions

Steven Lowenstein, in a study of the subscribers and the later editions, showed that the readership of Mendelssohn’s translation changed considerably over time. The original subscribers were drawn largely from the economic and intellectual elite of German Jewry, but the work was soon reprinted many times, in Germany, Austria and eastern Europe. In the early nineteenth century it was widely used in the modern Jewish schools of Germany, and it reached readers in Poland, Lithuania and Galicia who used it to learn German and to gain access to European culture. The edition printed at Basel in 1822 even bore, on some copies, the title Tsene-rene, in an attempt to attract the readers of the traditional Yiddish work.⁵⁹⁶⁰

In eastern Europe the Biur became a textbook of the Haskalah. Young men in the study houses of Lithuania and Galicia read it in secret, and it served many of them as an introduction to the German language and, through it, to the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment. The memoirs of eastern European maskilim frequently describe the discovery of Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch as a turning point in their lives. Its association with the Enlightenment made it suspect to traditional authorities there, and in some communities it was banned.⁶¹⁶²

Later German Jewish Translations

Mendelssohn’s translation was the first of a series of German Jewish translations of the Bible. In the nineteenth century, Leopold Zunz and his collaborators produced a complete translation of the Hebrew Bible, Ludwig Philippson published a translation with an extensive commentary, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of modern Orthodoxy in Frankfurt, published a translation and commentary on the Pentateuch that reflected his own theology. In the twentieth century, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig undertook a new translation that sought to convey the sound and rhythm of the Hebrew in German. Each of these works defined itself in relation to Mendelssohn’s, and Gillman has shown that the history of German Jewish Bible translation may be read as a continuing dialogue with his achievement.⁶³

Significance

Assessments

The Biur has been judged in very different ways. For the historians of the Haskalah in the nineteenth century, it marked the beginning of the modern era in Jewish history, the moment at which German Jews entered European culture. For traditionalist critics, it was the first step on the path that led to assimilation and religious reform. For Yiddishists, it was an act of cultural self-denial. Modern historians have generally taken a more nuanced view. Breuer, Sorkin and others have emphasised the traditional character of the commentary and its roots in medieval Jewish exegesis, while Gillman and Feiner have stressed the work’s innovative use of the German language and its role in creating a new Jewish public sphere.^64656667

A Place in the History of the Bible

For the history of the transmission of scripture, the Biur represents a moment of meeting between two traditions. It preserved the Masoretic text with scrupulous care and supported it with an apparatus that continued the work of the Masoretic scholars of earlier centuries. It drew on the medieval commentators to establish the plain meaning of the text. And it presented that text in a European language, in a form that was intended to make the Bible accessible to Jews who were entering the wider culture of their time. In this combination of fidelity to the tradition and openness to the modern world, it stands at the beginning of the modern Jewish engagement with the Bible.⁶⁸⁶⁹

Mendelssohn died at Berlin in January 1786, less than three years after the completion of the edition. He did not live to see the full consequences of his work, and he would not have approved of all of them. But the Pentateuch that he and his collaborators produced remained in print for more than a century, and its influence on the way Jews read and understood the Bible, in Germany and far beyond, was profound.⁷⁰⁷¹

Notes

1. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
2. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
3. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
4. “Moses Mendelssohn”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Dessau”. ↩
6. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
7. Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩
8. “Moses Mendelssohn”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
9. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
10. See also “The Tsene-Rene, the Yiddish Women’s Bible” on this site. ↩
11. See also “Yiddish” on this site. ↩
12. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
13. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
14. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
15. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
16. Zuzanna Krzemien, “Solomon Dubno, His Eastern European Scholarship, and the German Haskalah” (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), open access, doi 10.1515/9783110492484-003. ↩
17. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
18. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
19. Zuzanna Krzemien, “Solomon Dubno, His Eastern European Scholarship, and the German Haskalah” (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), open access, doi 10.1515/9783110492484-003. ↩
20. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
21. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols 15–18: Hebräische Schriften II (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), reproducing the Pentateuch edition with an introduction on its origins and reception. ↩
22. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols 15–18: Hebräische Schriften II (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), reproducing the Pentateuch edition with an introduction on its origins and reception. ↩
23. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
24. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols 15–18: Hebräische Schriften II (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), reproducing the Pentateuch edition with an introduction on its origins and reception. ↩
25. See also “Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538” on this site. ↩
26. See also “Norzi and the Minhat Shai Commentary on the Hebrew Text” on this site. ↩
27. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
28. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols 15–18: Hebräische Schriften II (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), reproducing the Pentateuch edition with an introduction on its origins and reception. ↩
29. Zuzanna Krzemien, “Solomon Dubno, His Eastern European Scholarship, and the German Haskalah” (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), open access, doi 10.1515/9783110492484-003. ↩
30. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
31. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
32. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
33. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
34. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
35. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
36. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation”, Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 179–213. ↩
37. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
38. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation”, Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 179–213. ↩
39. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
40. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
41. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
42. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
43. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
44. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
45. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
46. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
47. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
48. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
49. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
50. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
51. Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩
52. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). ↩
53. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
54. Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩
55. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
56. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols 15–18: Hebräische Schriften II (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), reproducing the Pentateuch edition with an introduction on its origins and reception. ↩
57. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
58. See also “Yiddish” on this site. ↩
59. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation”, Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 179–213. ↩
60. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
61. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). ↩
62. Grokipedia, “Haskalah”. ↩
63. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
64. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). ↩
65. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
66. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). ↩
67. Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩
68. Grokipedia, “Moses Mendelssohn”. ↩
69. See also “Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538” on this site. ↩
70. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). ↩
71. Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩