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Three Introductions to Psalms on Poetry, Translation, and Music by Joel Bril (Berlin 1791). A Bilingual Edition, translated with Commentary and an Introduction
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This annotated bilingual edition presents to readers for the first time a key Hebrew book of Jewish Enlightenment. Printed in Berlin in 1791, Joel Bril’s Hebrew introductions to Psalms constitute the earliest interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s language philosophy, translation theory, and aesthetics. In these introductions, Mendelssohn emerges as a critic of Maimonides who located eternal felicity not in union with the Active Intellect but in the aesthetic experience of the divine through sacred poetry. Bril’s theoretical insights, the broad range of his myriad textual sources, and his linguistic innovations make the Book of the Songs of Israel a touchstone of modern Hebrew literary theory and Jewish thought.
Three Introductions to Psalms on Poetry, Translation, and Music by Joel Bril (Berlin 1791). A Bilingual Edition, translated with Commentary and an Introduction
Author:
This annotated bilingual edition presents to readers for the first time a key Hebrew book of Jewish Enlightenment. Printed in Berlin in 1791, Joel Bril’s Hebrew introductions to Psalms constitute the earliest interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s language philosophy, translation theory, and aesthetics. In these introductions, Mendelssohn emerges as a critic of Maimonides who located eternal felicity not in union with the Active Intellect but in the aesthetic experience of the divine through sacred poetry. Bril’s theoretical insights, the broad range of his myriad textual sources, and his linguistic innovations make the Book of the Songs of Israel a touchstone of modern Hebrew literary theory and Jewish thought.
Author:
Abstract
The article explores the philosophical exegesis in Obadiah Sforno’s sixteenth-century Psalms commentary and its reception in Berlin of the late eighteenth century, where it was reprinted in the Haskalah’s biggest bestseller—an edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s Psalms translation with Hebrew commentary. While the inclusion of entire commentaries by earlier exegetes was unique among all Haskalah Bible editions, I argue that the choice to include Sforno’s commentary alongside Mendelssohn’s translation of Psalms, itself an expression of Mendelssohn’s political-theological defense of Judaism, was intended to buttress shared philosophical doctrines and concepts located by the two scholars in Psalms, notwithstanding temporal and cultural divergences: imitatio Dei, the salvation of the individual soul, and Israel’s eternity.