The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible
How Scholars in Germany, Israel, and America Transformed an Ancient Text
By (author) Alan T. Levenson
Publication date:
07 July 2011Length of book:
262 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442205161
Tracing its history from Moses Mendelssohn to today, Alan Levenson explores the factors that shaped what is the modern Jewish Bible and its centrality in Jewish life today. The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible explains how Jewish translators, commentators, and scholars made the Bible a keystone of Jewish life in Germany, Israel and America. Levenson argues that German Jews created a religious Bible, Israeli Jews a national Bible, and American Jews an ethnic one. In each site, scholars wrestled with the demands of the non-Jewish environment and their own indigenous traditions, trying to balance fidelity and independence from the commentaries of the rabbinic and medieval world.
Levenson (Univ. of Oklahoma) provides an important work of cultural history, biblical scholarship, and modern Jewish history in his analysis of how Jewish scholars and communities constructed the modern Jewish Bible. He begins his story with Spinoza, whose Jewish sensibilities foreshadowed the development of the Jewish Bible. The real story, however, begins with Mendelssohn in the late 18th century. The Bible became the touchstone for a Jewish German community, in which one could be both fully Jewish and German. In the 20th century, the Jewish Bible became central to the formation and life of the modern state of Israel. It formed the cultural basis for the new nation and the center of its continuing national intellectual and educational life. Finally, in the United States, a fully Jewish biblical scholarship emerged in the 1960s. Within the synagogue, the Jewish Chumash stands as a common source within various Jewish denominations. As a significant cultural achievement, the formation of the modern Jewish Bible is, Levenson argues, "on par with the Jewish Enlightenment, the scientific study of Judaism, the revival of Hebrew, or the Zionist ideology." This volume will be useful in libraries with collections in biblical and Jewish studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above; general readers.