In this fascinating intellectual history of the political situations in which translations arise, Naomi Seidman shows how translation reveals aspects of Jewish–Christian relations that have been occluded or otherwise forgotten. For Seidman, translation becomes a site for theorizing doubleness and difference, equivalence and transmutation with regard to Judeo-Christianity. Moving nimbly between the first Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible to translations by Aquila, Jerome, Luther, Mendelssohn, Buber, and Rosenzweig before ending with a discussion of contemporary translations of the Holocaust and Yiddish modernism in the work of Wiesel and Singer, respectively, Seidman carefully unpacks the theological subtexts and ideological contexts in which translations were produced. The triple-entendre contained in the title of her book betrays the significance and stakes of her project: First, “faithful renderings” are supposedly ones that are characterized by fidelity, accuracy, and loyalty. But, as Seidman shows, these characteristics are marked by sexual undertones that reflect certain ideologies, such as the transparency of meaning or the purity of the original. Second, “faithful renderings” refer to translations between faiths, particularly between Judaism and Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, and its various incarnations in national languages. And finally, “faithful renderings” conjure up the leap of faith of the translator, the contingencies involved in any “border-crossing” or encounter in which two differences—linguistic, cultural, national, religious—meet each other.

Beginning with a theoretical introduction that is framed by her own family history of displacement, encounter, and linguistic exchange, Seidman rejects all “essentialist” understandings of translation that seek, on the one hand, to universalize translation or, on the other, to reduce translation to a transparent practice of conveying inhering meanings. Instead, she looks for sites of erasure, occlusion, and difference, which, in her words, express “how the translators saw themselves vis-à-vis various ‘others’” (30). What emerges is a kind of mapping of sites of encounter between Jew and Christian, Judaism and Christianity, that evidences complex religious histories and political ideologies. Seidman makes no attempt to write a “comprehensive” history of translation or Jewish–Christian relations; rather, she is interested in specific themes and topoi that open up the field of translation studies in new ways.

The first two chapters focus on Hebrew Bible translations in late antiquity. Showing how theological rhetoric becomes imbricated in sexual rhetoric, Seidman argues that the Septuagint, “the first great translation project in the West” (38), is a preeminent site for studying the religious and sexual dimensions of “faithful” translations. Reading a single passage from Matthew that cites the Septuagint version of Isaiah, she shows how the translation of ha'almah (young woman) as parthenos (virgin) threw “religious authority, textual reliability, and the paternal line into anxious question” (39) by destabilizing the legitimacy of Jesus and the virginity of Mary. In the second chapter, Seidman turns to the case of Aquila, who is often considered “the worst” translator of all time for his literalist renderings of the Hebrew Bible into an unreadable Greek (76). But rather than resuscitating the stale debates between word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation, Seidman argues that a theological subtext haunts this debate, namely, one in which the translator's body is transfigured through the processes of translation. For Aquila, translating Hebrew into Greek also meant transforming his body from uncircumcised to circumcised, and it is here—on the body—that Seidman locates the mirroring of the “Hebraized Greek text he produced” (93). She casts Aquila as a “liminal figure” (109) and even “a rebel hero” (114) who moved between multiple communities, languages, and systems of power to produce a decidedly defiant text.

The next two chapters turn to German translations of the Hebrew Bible, beginning with Luther's “sense-for-sense” translation before discussing practices of translation by Mendelssohn, Buber, Rosenzweig, and, finally, Benjamin. But rather than debating the merits of Luther's rendering of the Bible into idiomatic German, Seidman examines the theological assumptions built into Luther's ambition: He wanted, she argues, to neutralize the experience of the foreign by rendering Judaism and the Jewish exegetical tradition absent from the German Bible. While Jews, Luther believed, could not be converted, Hebrew texts could be “converted” into German texts, something that resulted in the dangerous and precarious “figure of the untranslatable Jew” (133). In the fourth chapter, Seidman moves to Mendelssohn's ambition of rendering the Hebrew Bible into proper, elevated German that signified Bildung and refinement (169) in order to open up the question of what is occluded in the myth of German–Jewish symbiosis. Turning to the debates over the heritage of Buber and Rosenzweig's Bible translation, Seidman sees German–Jewish translation as both a polemic and a record of “the self-presentation of a divided individual or group” (159). This, she concludes, is the “double bind” of German–Jewish translation, a paradox of national belonging and estrangement, cultural hybridity and linguistic doubling.

The final two chapters turn to post-Holocaust translations, primarily focusing on the transformations of Elie Wiesel's seminal memoir, Night, and the work and reception of Isaac Bashevis Singer in America. Seidman foregrounds and proceeds to deconstruct a claim made by Levinas that the Holocaust “can only be told in the language of the victim” and cannot, in essence, be translated through “interchangeable” signs (199). She argues that what we understand today as “the Holocaust” emerged through a long “process of semantic consolidation” (200) in which Holocaust narratives were produced, translated, and received in a wide variety of cultural contexts. The Holocaust has, in fact, been written and rewritten, translated and retranslated for different audiences, and it is precisely through these strategic translations that the Holocaust has acquired the shape and recognition that it has today. But what Seidman is particularly interested in unpacking are the “censorial moments that have shaped Holocaust narrative,” the obfuscations and covert translations that have also contributed to its translational and transnational character.

Here, her case study is arguably the most famous Holocaust memoir ever published, Wiesel's Night. Far from being an “unmediated autobiographical account” of what happened—the fantasy of channeling the thing itself, the experience of Auschwitz in all its singularity—Seidman argues that Wiesel strategically positioned, rewrote, and edited the Yiddish, French, and English versions of his memoir to convey different things to different audiences. Whereas the Yiddish version ends with the rhetoric of revenge—his ambition “to rape German girls” (221)—the French and English versions end with the depiction of the survivor as martyr. In a deconstructive vein, her point is not that Wiesel's original is “more accurate” than its translational transformations, but rather that the text itself is “unstable” (234), evidencing more than one origin and a multiplicity of self-presentations.

The final chapter, on translation and assimilation, examines several of the short stories by Singer and the roots of his success in America. Using Cynthia Ozick's famous novella “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” as her jumping-off point, Seidman argues that Singer's oeuvre, particularly after 1943, can be considered to be all “about translation” (254). For Singer, there is no pure, originary space for an authentic Yiddish language; rather, there are only spaces of contamination and play between the Yiddish and English versions of his works, ones that place Jewish–Christian differences after the Holocaust into strong relief.

In sum, Seidman has written a thought-provoking, persuasive, and rich account of the importance of examining the theological and political practices of translation in Jewish–Christian relations. Translation becomes, in effect, the very model for understanding this relationship and its fraught, entangled history.