German Jewish Bible translation, like many other aspects of German Jewish cultural and intellectual production, has long taken up an outsized place in Jewish historiography. All the more striking, then, that Abigail Gillman charts an unusual path in this well-worn terrain. Indeed, her volume defamiliarizes that terrain with an argument that expands and fills in critical gaps in the scholarly consensus. Her work offers a comprehensive understanding of a set of literary and cultural projects that occupied the intellectual energy of so many German Jews.

Gillman's volume considers the history of German Jewish Bible translation in four parts. Each of the main chapters juxtaposes several (roughly) contemporaneous Bible translations. The chapters trace what Gillman calls the major “waves” in Jewish Bible translation, starting in the late seventeenth century and ending in the early twentieth. The usual suspects are here, of course: Gillman cannot but include Moses Mendelssohn's Bi'ur (1783) and Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (1925–27). As she tells us in the preface, she initially undertook her study to test Gunther Plaut's famous framing of these two Bible translations as the symbolic “bookends” of German Jewish Bible translation—an image that was then applied to the course of modern German Jewry as a whole. In the end, Gillman does not completely jettison the metaphor. Instead, by examining the middle of the bookshelf—where sit the translation projects of Leopold Zunz and Joseph Johlson, of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ludwig Philippson—she brings new complexity to how we read those bookends. Furthermore, Gillman analyzes the literary interlocutors of the famous Bi'ur and the Buber-Rosenzweig translation: two Yiddish translations of the Bible (1678–79) and Bertha Pappenheim's Zeenah u-reenah (1930).

Gillman's argument centers on the claim that each wave gains its coherence through the common aesthetic, literary, educational, or cultural orientation characterizing the translations produced in a certain period—even if the resulting works read quite differently. In most cases, the translators she considers rejected or criticized the approach taken by the others in a given wave. But Gillman aims to demonstrate that the historical situation that gave rise to each wave lends a deeper unity to the projects, and that in spite of “conspicuous differences” between the projects, each group shares a “fundamental agenda” (17). The ample and well-chosen images from the Bible translations under consideration, as in the juxtaposition of Philippson's and Hirsch's representations of the menorah in the tabernacle (191–93), offer crucial evidence for and enliven the argument throughout the book.

The first chapter, focusing on Jewish Enlightenment Bibles, challenges the long-held preeminence of the first Jewish translation of the Bible into German, Mendelssohn's Bi'ur, by reminding us that it was one in a series of Jewish Enlightenment Bibles. The two late-seventeenth-century Yiddish translations discussed in this chapter, both published in Amsterdam, shaped Mendelssohn's translations, and not always in the ways scholars have accepted. Gillman argues that the Yiddish translations, a century earlier, were in fact less “traditional” than Mendelssohn's: they swept commentary off the printed page, for instance, where Mendelssohn gives ample space to commentary (namely his own). Yet the Yiddish translations under consideration shared the goals that came to be widely associated with the Haskalah. Mendelssohn, even as he moved decisively away from Yiddish, “reclaimed the pedagogical-religious mandate of the Old Yiddish translation tradition” (85). The chapter traces the development of Mendelssohn's translational approach, highlights the importance of German Christian Pietist Bible translations that flourished in the seventeenth century, and meticulously compares each work's translational choices. (This chapter, unlike the others, unfortunately does not include the Hebrew verses alongside the different translations.)

The second chapter, “The Emergence of a Bible Industry,” considers the proliferation of German translations that appeared in the period 1831–41. These translations, Gillman argues, styled themselves as alternatives to (and rejection of) Mendelssohn's Bi'ur, even as the latter was widely reprinted. The wissenschaftlich translators who produced these works favored a less idiomatic, more “Hebraic” style. In addition to the careful translational comparisons through which Gillman shows how the multiple agendas of the Haskalah took literary shape, she mounts a case that the “literal” (worttreu), hyper-Hebraic, archaic translational aesthetic was not the invention of Buber and Rosenzweig, to whom it is typically attributed. Instead, Gillman demonstrates, Zunz and Joseph Johlson were the “unacknowledged initiators” of a style meant to sound old and foreign—even as the social and educational mission of these nineteenth-century translators bore little resemblance to the agenda developed a century later. In chapter 3, “The Bible as Gesamtkunstwerk,” Gillman's attention to the design features, and not only the linguistic choices, of the Bible translations is richly rewarded. Ludwig Philippson and Samson Raphael Hirsch, well-known maskilim and religious reformers, were communal leaders united by their devotion to their rabbinic roles (even as their specific goals and their stylistic choices for their Bible translations pointed in opposite directions).

At long last, Bertha Pappenheim claims her rightful place in the critical account of German Jewish Bible translation. Among the most important contributions of the fourth chapter, “Reimagining the German Jewish Bible,” is Gillman's analysis of Pappenheim's translation projects (which included, among other things, the first German translation of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women as well as the Tsene-Rene) in the context of her work as a social activist, and her comparison of Pappenheim's approach to Buber and Rosenzweig's famous German Jewish Bible translation of that era. All three translators shared a common aim, namely, the hope that readers would hear the voice of God once again. But, as Gillman makes clear, Pappenheim made no bones about her serious criticisms of the Buber-Rosenzweig enterprise and communicated her disapproval to Buber in their correspondence. For her, the team's high-modernist translational choices blocked rather than channeled the voice of God, in particular for female readers. Rather than a direct experience of Gott, Buber-Rosenzweig's groundbreaking use of pronouns (e.g., IHM), Pappenheim feared, would cause women to encounter a God who was unambiguously and unavoidably male.

The afterword, on the perpetual challenge of rendering the Tetragrammaton, is a fitting close to a book that offers a new take on a question not just for scholars of German Judaism, but also for translators in general. Gillman's wide-ranging but careful study will serve readers seeking a thorough, careful treatment of an aesthetically, culturally, socially, and politically rich story.