The Question of Authorship

Gevulot 'areẓ was originally attributed to Ben Elijah by Shmuel Yosef Fünn in his 1860 Kiryah ne'emanah.Footnote ⁸ Subsequent studies have relied on this attribution as the sole proof that Ben Elijah was the author of the text.Footnote ⁹ Given this author's maskilic agenda and his distinct desire to demonstrate the compatibility between the Haskalah and tradition, such reliance on Fünn is highly problematic. And indeed, in a study dedicated to the life and teachings of the Vilna Gaon, Dov Eliaḥ cast serious doubts on Fünn's claims:

Like Fünn, Eliaḥ had his own stake in this debate. Throughout his study he attempted to show that the mitnagdim, and especially Ben Elijah's father, the Vilna Gaon, were adamantly opposed to the Haskalah.Footnote ¹¹ Still there is merit to the claim that the question of Gevulot 'areẓ's authorship cannot be resolved by relying solely on Fünn's attribution.

How then are we to determine the identity of the work's author? One approach would be to determine which “secular” works Ben Elijah may have had access to, but this is difficult to ascertain. In his commentary on Psalms, he mentioned having read “books on nature,” but did not cite any contemporary studies by name.Footnote ¹² In his major bibliographical work, Rav pe'alim, he demonstrated a thorough knowledge of rabbinic literature, but made no note of “secular,” let alone non-Jewish, works (except for the occasional reference to Aristotle). Given the norms and nature of the Hebrew literature of the period, this is not surprising. Even conservative maskilim such as Samson Bloch or Yehudah Horowitz were reluctant to proclaim their use of non-Jewish or “secular” works. Thus, in his Shevilei ‘olam Bloch used a great deal of anthropological and geographical information taken from the scientific literature of the Enlightenment, but referred in his footnotes to such sources as Ḥazal or Maimonides. Horowitz, on his part, was inspired in his ‘Amudei beit Yehuda by the philosophical literature of the Enlightenment, but attributed his sources of influence to R. Judah Halevi and Maimonides.Footnote ¹³

The question of authorship cannot, then, be resolved through a reconstruction of Ben Elijah's library based on his bibliographical work. Contrary to Eliaḥ's claims, however, a comparison between Gevulot 'areẓ and other works by Ben Elijah shows an overlap in vocabulary, linguistic features, and style. Thus, for instance, Ben Elijah used the somewhat infrequent expression “and we/he were/was bereft of” (ונחסר/ו ממנו) both in Gevulot 'areẓ and in his Se‘arat Eliyahu.Footnote ¹⁴ An additional example of overlapping vocabulary may be found in Ben Elijah's preface to his commentary on Midrash 'aggadat Bereshit, which ends with the biblical phrase: “Have we not all one father” (הלא אב אחד לכולנו). The same phrase is found in the preface to Gevulot 'areẓ.Footnote ¹⁵ Due, however, to the intertextual nature of rabbinic literature, such recurring uses of Hebrew phrases are highly dubious as evidence with regard to the question of authorship.

More convincing as evidence are the conceptual overlaps between Ben Elijah's writings and Gevulot 'areẓ. Perhaps the most telling example is in Ben Elijah's commentary on Targum Onkelos, which was published posthumously in 1896. In this commentary Ben Elijah explained that Onkelos's “Kardu,” or Mount Ararat, was in “the land of Turkmenia”:

An almost identical description of Ararat appears in Gevulot 'areẓ. The author gives a short overview of the differing opinions regarding the location of Ararat, including that of “…the great Rabbi Abraham in his book Minḥah belulah…,”; and concludes that

The location of Ararat continued to occupy Ben Elijah in other writings as well. In an unpublished geography that remains in incomplete manuscript form, Ben Elijah claims once again that “Turkmenia is Armenia or Ararat and is 100 leagues long, 60 leagues wide.” (טורקאמאנייען — היא ארמינאה או אררט ארכה 100 פ', רחבה 60.)Footnote ¹⁸ The similarities between the three descriptions of Ararat are striking, and cannot be coincidental. They point to the fact that Ben Elijah was either the author of Gevulot 'areẓ or a zealous reader of the book.

The aforementioned unpublished geography gives further support to the notion that Ben Elijah was indeed the author of Gevulot 'areẓ. Not only does this work, which discussed the geographies and histories of such places as Spain, Portugal, and America, bear witness to Ben Elijah's passion for geography, but it also offers further similarities to Gevulot 'areẓ. Thus, for instance, elsewhere in the manuscript Ben Elijah discussed the flora and fauna of the island of Madagascar and explained: “We find there many salamanders” (גם נמצא שמה סאלאמנדר"י הרבה).Footnote ¹⁹ Interestingly, the salamander is the only animal mentioned by its particular name in the text—other animals are discussed under wider family terms such as “fish,” “birds,” and so forth. The special attention given by Ben Elijah to the salamander may derive from the long-standing rabbinic debate regarding this animal.Footnote ²⁰ And indeed the salamander received similar special attention in Gevulot 'areẓ, with the author claiming that Madagascar is the only country where the salamander may be found today in great numbers (רק בתוכה נמצא כעת הסאלמנדרא לרוב).Footnote ²¹

Other conceptual and literary overlaps between the two works are also readily apparent. In both texts, the author turned to the authority of the ancients while discussing contemporary geography. Furthermore, in both there is an attempt to establish the etymology of the names of various countries and cities, a discussion of their width and length in leagues (פרסאות), and of their histories, including their various kings and rulers.Footnote ²² Indeed it could very well be that Ben Elijah's geographical manuscript was meant to serve as a kind of supplementary volume to Gevulot 'areẓ, with the former focusing on geography, history, and etymology, and the latter on anthropology and natural history. It could also be that the work remained in manuscript form due to the poor reception of Gevulot 'areẓ, which, to the best of our knowledge today, was printed in a single edition only. The few pages of the manuscript that have survived offer only a general idea as to the nature and purpose of the work in its entirety.

The linguistic, conceptual, and literary similarities between Gevulot 'areẓ and Ben Elijah's other works undermine Eliaḥ's claims that the language and content of Gevulot 'areẓ are inferior to Ben Elijah's other works. Taken together with Fünn's testimony, they leave little room for doubt that Ben Elijah was indeed the author of Gevulot 'areẓ. It is possible that Ben Elijah was apprehensive about publishing the book under his own name, and thus chose to publish it anonymously in Berlin, instead of in his native Vilna.Footnote ²³ Whatever his motives, it appears safe to assume that it was in fact Ben Elijah who produced this unique Hebrew translation of Buffon.Footnote ²⁴

Buffon's Status among Hebrew Writers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

One of the first questions arising from Ben Elijah's translation of Buffon is why he chose to conceal the identity of the book's original author. Other Hebrew writers of the period took pride in their use of Buffon, sometimes unjustifiably so. Both the Polish kabbalist Pinḥas Horowitz and the Hannover-born maskil Baruch Linda, for instance, claimed to have used Buffon in the writing of their own books. If Linda seems to have done so only in passing, Horowitz—not at all.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, Buffon appears to have enjoyed a somewhat privileged status among Jewish writers of the period, and he continued to maintain this position well after being discarded, to some extent, by non-Jewish thinkers toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. His continued popularity is evident from Sholem Abramovitsh's praise of the naturalist in the preface to his 1862 translation of Harald Othmar Lenz's Gemeinnützige Naturgeschichte:

This passage refers to Buffon's methodological trademark—the explanation of various natural and anthropological phenomena by turning to environmental factors such as climate, or cultural and nutritional practices. In contrast to the other great naturalist of his time, the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linneaus), who attempted to categorize the natural world into rigid scientific taxonomies, Buffon's perception of nature was of a world in constant motion, a world that could not be organized into synchronic taxonomies but rather had to be described diachronically. Thus, each natural phenomenon, including human beings, was described against a specific historical and geographical context.

This kind of circumstantial and fluid understanding of the ways in which differences between human beings were formed and perpetuated was extremely popular among Jewish authors of the period, and especially among the maskilim. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most maskilic writers on issues such as natural history, geography, and anthropology tended to associate the physical and “mental” characteristics of different ethnic groups with their various cultural and nutritional practices as well as with the different climates in which they lived. Skin color, for instance, was often explained by referring to environmental factors, the most important of which was climate. Other explanations tended to focus on cultural practices such as tattoos, hygienic practices, or the application of various potions to the skin. The Galician maskil Joseph Perl, writing during the second decade of the nineteenth century, embraced these explanations:

Similar attempts to explain human variety by means of climate or custom appear in the writings of such thinkers as Tuvia Hacohen, Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, or Samson Bloch.Footnote ²⁸

Not surprisingly, parallel environmental explanations of human difference also played a role in the writings of both Jewish and Christian apologists for the Jews. In 1789, the Polish-French intellectual Zalkind Hourwitz stressed that “it is well known to all physicians that the physical constitution of the Jews is absolutely the same as all other nations that inhabit the same climate.” (Il est connu de tous les médecins que la constitution physique des Juifs est absolument la même que celle autre nations qui habitant le même climat.)Footnote ²⁹ A second Jewish apologist, the Portuguese-Dutch Isaac De Pinto, also harnessed the eighteenth century's fluid notions of difference to account for the physical and mental “traits” of the Jews. In a letter written sometime around 1746 to the French philosopher Charles Marie de La Condamine, De Pinto stated,

De Pinto returned to these statements in a later, better-known correspondence with Voltaire, this time claiming that “[t]he Jew is a chameleon who everywhere takes on the colors of the various climates in which he lives, of the various people with whom he associates, and of the various forms of government under which he lives.” (Le Juif est un Caméléon, qui prend partout les couleurs des différentes climats qu'il habite, des différentes peuples qu'il fréquent, et des différentes formes de gouvernement sous lesquelles il vit.)Footnote ³¹

Ironically, despite the environmentalist paradigm's great appeal for members of the Jewish Enlightenment, it appears that the only real attempt to translate a significant portion of Buffon's monumental study into Hebrew—indeed the most complete Hebrew translation to date—was made not by a maskil, but by a talmudic author who seems to have been as far removed from the Enlightenment as can be. And perhaps this is the reason behind Ben Elijah's motivation for disguising his use of Buffon; unlike maskilim such as Linda, Schnaber Levison, and later writers like Abramovitsh, Ben Elijah, a renowned talmudist and son of the Vilna Gaon, could hardly be expected to announce his use of a notorious French deist such as Buffon. And yet, Ben Elijah's choice to present the translation as an original work in Hebrew is not uncharacteristic of contemporaneous Hebrew literature. Other Hebrew translators also exhibited a striking tendency to present their translations as original work—not only for translations of esoteric authors or children's writers but even for Hebrew translations of such renowned authors as Anton Friedrich Büsching and Friedrich von Schiller.Footnote ³²

Gevulot 'Areẓ as a Paradigmatic Early Modern Hebrew TranslationFootnote ³³

The tendency to present translations as original work was of course not a uniquely Jewish translational norm. The eighteenth century has been dubbed by one scholar as “an age of plagiarism,” dominated by literary pirates, armchair travelers, and other writers who exhibited an extremely “liberal attitude to the borrowing of other writers’ works.”Footnote ³⁴ Still, there seems to have been something distinctive about the dominance that this particular translational norm held in the Hebrew literary world of the time. This may be gleaned by comparing the actions of Jewish translators writing either within or without the Hebrew literary system. In 1756, for instance, Moses Mendelssohn prepared the first German translation of Rousseau's second Discourse. He attributed the discourse to one “Johann Jacob Rousseau,” and made no note of his own role in the text's translation. The translator's “transparency” was also evident in the nature of the translation itself; though critical of Rousseau's views on the nature of man and society, Mendelssohn offered his readers a translation aimed at adequacy, striving to keep the original's style and ideas intact. He saved his critique of Rousseau's ideas for an open letter to his close friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rather than expressing them in his translation through diversions from the source text.Footnote ³⁵ Around the same time that Mendelssohn's German translation of Rousseau was published, a second translation by Mendelssohn also appeared. The translation, a Hebrew version of Edward Young's The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, was published in the early maskilic journal Kohelet musar. However this time, Mendelssohn chose to omit not only the name of the translator, but also that of Young, author of the original piece.Footnote ³⁶ This difference between Mendelssohn's choice in case of the Hebrew translation and that of the German translation is not merely accidental. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the choice to omit the translator's name was popular among German translators and served as a means of declaring the translator's adherence to the new translational norms of the period, which strove for adequacy and transparency.Footnote ³⁷ By comparison, the choice to omit the name of the author of the original text, or to present the text as the translator's own work, is indicative of a quite different translational norm—one that strives not for adequacy, but for acceptability and that emphasizes the pivotal role of the cultural mediator.Footnote ³⁸

The difference between the Hebrew and non-Hebrew translational norms of the late eighteenth century becomes even more evident when texts translated into Hebrew and into modern European languages can be compared. A case in point is Georg Christian Raff's Naturgeschichte für Kinder, translated into Hebrew by Baruch Linda in 1788 and into English by an anonymous translator in 1796. In the Hebrew text, nothing suggests that the work was a translation; Linda was presented as its original author. In the English version, while the translator's name was omitted from the text, the name of the author was prominent in the book's title: A System of Natural History, adapted for the Instruction of Youth. In the Form of a Dialogue. Originally written in German, by Prof. Raff of Goettingen. Footnote ³⁹ And though the English translator of Raff's work occasionally strayed from his source text, in general, he attempted to remain faithful to the original's style and content. In contrast, Linda, Raff's Hebrew translator, had no reservations about altering the style and content of Raff's book completely. As has been shown by Tal Kogman in her study of Linda's translation, Linda discarded the dialogic form completely and diverged from the text freely, often conveying messages that stood in direct opposition to the ones put forth by Raff.Footnote ⁴⁰

A further example is offered by Abraham Van Oven's 1778 translation of Robert Dodsley's immensely popular The Oeconomy of Human Life. Dodsley's book, a pseudotranslation of a fictitious Indian text, was originally published anonymously in 1750. The omission of the pseudotranslator's name appears to have supplied the book with an air of authenticity. But in Van-Oven's Hebrew translation, the translator's name was proudly displayed on the book's cover, while Dodsley, by this time known as the book's original author, was not mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew text.Footnote ⁴¹ It appears then that Ben Elijah's choice to omit Buffon's name is consistent with the translational norms of the Hebrew literary system of the time, which tended to stress the importance of the translator, while deemphasizing that of the original author.

A second distinctive characteristic of the turn-of-the-century corpus of Hebrew translations, also discernable in Ben Elijah's text, is the use of biblical Hebrew and intertextuality. Yehudah Friedlander and Ḥayim Shoham have argued that the maskilim tended to “incorporate into their text linguistic allusions…which created an interesting associative texture, thus allowing for the reception of the text in the desired way.”Footnote ⁴² There are ample examples of this translational norm in the writings of the Haskalah. In David Zamość's Hebrew translation of Joachim Heinrich Campe's Sittenbüchlein für Kinder, the translator changed the name of the English sailor Thomas Inkle into the biblical “Bera,” the name of the evil king of Sodom mentioned in Genesis 14:2. In Jewish imagination, “Bera” conjures images of evil and corruption, both in its literal meaning (ברע means “in evil”) and in its historical context. Thus, in a literary maneuver that allowed for the smooth reception of the text among its Jewish readers, the immoral English trader was transformed into an infamous biblical villain.Footnote ⁴³

Similar translational tactics may also be found in Gevulot 'areẓ. For instance, Ben Elijah used fragments of verses from the book of Job to describe the “Savage peoples” of the earth, thus creating a dismal image of their uncivilized state and emphasizing the omnipotence of God, who created such beings: “Stand and behold the marvels of the Lord, who created men who are excluded from humankind, and are many upon the earth…. They eateth grass as an ox and play with the beasts of the field. During the rains, they lay under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed and fens.” (עמוד והתבונן נפלאות אל, בראותינו אנשים היוצאים מגדר בני אדם, הן רבים על פני הארץ…. חציר כבקר יאכלו ישחקו עם חיות השדה. Footnote ⁴⁴.(בעת הגשמים תחת צאלים ישכבו בסתר קנה וביצה…

Another important characteristic of the turn of the century Hebrew translations was the translators' tendency to translate works from the German. Even works by English or French authors were most often translated into Hebrew not from their original languages, but by using mediating texts in German. An interesting example is offered by Mendelssohn's translation of Young's Night Thoughts, translated, as Gideon Toury has demonstrated, not from the original English version but rather from a German translation of the ballad.Footnote ⁴⁵ Another example of the use of a German mediating text for the translation of an English work may be found in Mordecai Aaron Günzberg's 1823 Masa‘ Columbus 'o galut ha-'areẓ ha-ḥadashah. As is well known, the greater part of Günzberg's book is a translation of Joachim Heinrich Campe's Die Entdeckung von Amerika. But, toward the end of his book Günzberg added an appendix of sorts, in which he discussed American politics, the issue of slavery, and even the possibility of a Jewish settlement in the “new” continent. This appendix was in fact based on William Robertson's 1777 The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America, but Günzberg's use of German words throughout the text points to a German mediating text, most probably the anonymously published Historisch-geographische Beschreibung von Amerika für Jünglinge.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such use of German children's books as mediating texts is also a dominant characteristic of many Hebrew translations of the period and is perhaps reflective of the translators' paternalistic approach toward their readers.Footnote ⁴⁷

Similarly, Ben Elijah's translation of Buffon was based not on Buffon's original French text but rather on an adaptation of the book for children, published anonymously in 1778 under the title Génie de M. de Buffon (Spirit of Mr. Buffon), and prepared by the Italian pedagogue Giovanni Ferry di San Constante.Footnote ⁴⁸ Even though rumors suggested that Ben Elijah was fluent in French, his direct source text appears not to have been Ferry's French adaptation, but rather a German translation of the book that appeared—once again, anonymously—in 1783 under the title Büffons Geist, oder Kern seiner Naturgeschichte (Buffon's Spirit, or an Abridgement of His Natural History).Footnote ⁴⁹ Admittedly, the German translational norms of the period make it difficult to determine with certainty that Ben Elijah translated the book from the German and not from the original French edition; but this hypothesis is supported by his use of German words in Hebrew transcription throughout the text, in the absence of adequate Hebrew alternatives. In such cases, the text's close proximity to the German version is most evident. Thus, for instance, Ben Elijah explains that the peoples of the North are characterized by black or “געלב ברוין” (gelb broyn) eyes (“ein gelbes, braunes oder ins Schwarze fallendes Aug” in the German version of the book; “jaune, brun, et tirant sur le noir” in Ferry's French), or that the Cape of Good Hope is “דעס גוטן האפינינג פארגבירגעש” (“des gutn hofining fargebirges”; “Vorgebürges der guten Hoffnung” in the German translation; “Cap de Bonne Espérance” in Ferry's original).Footnote ⁵⁰

Ben Elijah's Treatment of His Source Text

Whether or not Ben Elijah translated Ferry directly or through the mediation of his anonymous German translator, there is no room for doubt in maintaining that he did not translate directly from Buffon's original work but rather from Ferry's adaptation of it. A short comparison among the three texts—Buffon's original, Ferry's adaptation, and Ben Elijah's translation—demonstrates the close proximity between the latter two, while at the same time allowing an initial impression of the differences in the methods, motivations, and self-perceptions of the three authors.

Among the various anthropological phenomena discussed by Buffon, one that has attracted special attention over the years is known as the “Hottentot apron” or “Sinus pudoris”—a large genital flap or elongated labia often attributed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists to “Hottentot” (Khoi-San) women; this idea enticed the imagination of countless Europeans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁵¹ The most famous “Hottentot apron” belonged to the Khoi-San woman Sarah Baartman, also known as the “Hottentot Venus.” While Baartmann's genitalia were merely a source of eager speculation during her lifetime (only her protruding buttocks were exhibited in early nineteenth-century freak shows), following her death in 1815, her genitals were preserved by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, and until recently they were exhibited at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.Footnote ⁵² Buffon's description of the “Hottentot apron” is straightforward and unapologetic. He explained that the “Hottentot” women exhibited a large and wide outgrowth, stemming from just above the pubic bone (“au-dessus de l'os pubis”). This “monstrous deformity” (monstrueuse difformité), explained Buffon, may be viewed by anyone able to garner either the courage or the curiosity to ask the women for a look or a touch.Footnote ⁵³ Buffon's reportage is of course hardly objective. In the same vein as other contemporary anthropological texts, it is ripe with aesthetic and moral judgments about the peoples, places, and practices it describes. And yet it is evident that Buffon viewed himself as a “serious” man of science and had no reservations about discussing the genitalia of his “subject matter.” The same cannot be said about Ferry, let alone Ben Elijah. In Ferry's version, as well as in its German translation, the Sinus pudoris is relocated to a more “neutral” area of the female body, just below the women's navel (“au dessous du nombril”; “unter dem Nabel” ).Footnote ⁵⁴ Ferry's mistranslation of Buffon is perhaps understandable, given that the adaptation was intended for children; however, in Ben Elijah's reportage, which was most probably not written primarily for children but rather for Jewish readers of all ages, Buffon's “monstrous outgrowth” is domesticated even further and is presented as emerging not from the more “problematic” parts below the navel but straight out of the navel itself: “The [Hottentot] females are smaller than the males, and they have a stiff and wide skin which emerges from the navel and reaches the thighs, and is like an apron to them.” (הנקבות קטנות מאוד מן הזכרי', ויש להם עור קשה ורחבת [!] יוצאות מן הטבור ומגיע עד הירכי', והוא להם כמו סינר).Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, the infamous “Hottentot apron” ceases to be part of the female genitalia and becomes an umbilical cord, a physical attribute that symbolizes not the wild and voracious sexuality of the African woman but rather the primordial innocence of the universal child.

This was not the only instance in which Ben Elijah strayed from his source text. In some cases, the deviations were incidental, stemming, for instance, from a misreading of the source text, from the nature of Ben Elijah's abridged translation, or from the difficulties inherent in translating from a modern language such as German or French into the almost defunct Hebrew of the early nineteenth century. Other times, the deviations were deliberate and were the direct result of Ben Elijah's dissatisfaction with statements made by Buffon and of his conscious decision to alter the text and its meanings. As is most often the case with translations, telling these two models of mistranslation apart is, of course, risky business. The difficulty is multiplied given the limited vocabulary at Ben Elijah's disposal, which made it virtually impossible for him to remain faithful to his source text. Similarly to other Hebrew translators of his time, Ben Elijah had no choice but to create his own scientific vocabulary as he went along. The end result was a text filled with ambiguous anthropological, biological, and taxonomical Hebrew terms.

A striking example is afforded by Ben Elijah's translation of Ferry's discussion of the Sami (“Les Lappons”). Following Buffon's original source text, Ferry and his German translator presented the Sami as a “race” (“une race”; “eine Race”) of people of small stature and bizarre figure, “who appear to have degenerated from the human species” (qui paroissent avoir dégénéré de l'espèce humaine; die von den übrigen ganz ausgeartet zu seyn scheinen) (my emphasis).Footnote ⁵⁶ This description was translated by Ben Elijah as follows:

The differences between the descriptions are easily discernible: while Ferry and his German translator treated the Sami as a “race,” Ben Elijah presented them as a “species,” and whereas Buffon and his translators explained that these people had “degenerated” into their present constitution, Ben Elijah described them as beings that had deviated from mankind. The difference in terms may appear, prima facie, to indicate a difference in the ideological backgrounds of the authors. At first glance it seems that Ben Elijah wished to convey a polygenistic message, according to which the Sami were in fact a separate species of human beings, or pseudomen—a notion quite incompatible with Buffon's monogenistic beliefs. Indeed, Buffon was one of the most vocal advocates of monogenism during the eighteenth century, claiming that the unity of the human species was clearly proven by the fact that humans of all the various sizes, complexions, and climates were capable of producing fertile offspring.Footnote ⁵⁸ And yet, as the century progressed, Buffon's climatic and environmentalist theories of difference, so popular after the first publication of the Histoire Naturelle in 1749, began to lose sway among naturalists. Turn-of-the-century naturalists such as Christoph Meiners, Julian Joseph Virey, and Immanuel Kant began searching for newer, more “objective” ways to account for the differences among men. It was under these circumstances that the modern deterministic understanding of “race” as a biological attribute of men began to assume scientific and cultural significance, and it was not long before polygenism, or the belief in multiple species of human beings that had served during the early modern period mainly as an anticlerical provocation, began to attain a certain scientific prestige.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the Jewish literary realm, biological determinism, and, especially, polygenism were vehemently rejected by both maskilim and rabbinic authors alike. Addressing the rising polygenistic trend in 1792, Schnaber Levison, for instance, explained that “[m]any gullible persons have of late claimed that the sun shone on the earth and in her warmth produced […] many species of very strange men…. And really this is a great gullibility, with which we cannot be bothered.” (הרבה מפתיים האחרונים […] אמרו שהשמש זרחה על הארץ, ומחמימותה הוציאה הארץ […] הרבה ….מינים מבני אדם משונים מאד…. ובאמת היא פתיות גדולה אין להשיב עליו).Footnote ⁶⁰ It was not until the 1862 publication of Moses Hess's Rom und Jerusalem that modern polygenism made its first explicit appearance in Jewish thought, and even then the theory was most often rejected by Jewish thinkers, who continued to embrace and propagate a circumstantial understanding of human difference.Footnote ⁶¹ The reasons for this almost unanimous Jewish rejection of polygenism are manifold, but at least two considerations stand out as being especially consequential: the political implications of polygenism and its theological aspects. As explained above, Buffon's monogenistic view of mankind, and his circumstantial understanding of human difference, served the interests of Jewish apologists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jewish and Christian authors alike often held an equally dismal view of the present state of their Jewish contemporaries, and the environmental paradigm permitted a certain “optimism” as to the prospects for Jewish “regeneration.” For many authors during the period, abandoning this paradigm was tantamount to giving up one of the most fundamental tools in the struggle for the emancipation of the Jews.Footnote ⁶² Theology was a further problem. In its fundamental premise that mankind was composed not of one but many species, polygenism was incompatible with the biblical account of the origins of man, according to which God created only a single pair of human beings. This is not to say that all polygenists were atheists. Though polygenism was often linked with anticlericalism and materialism, some polygenists, such as the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames, attempted to reconcile their belief in the multiple origins of man with their Christian faith. Kames postulated that though there was originally only one human species, after the fall of the Tower of Babel humankind was divided into various species, each uniquely fitted for a different climate.Footnote ⁶³

But where did Ben Elijah stand on this issue? In terms of the political hazards of polygenism, Ben Elijah seems to have been far less concerned with the question of Jewish integration in Europe than were his maskilic contemporaries. In fact, in contrast to such Jewish apologists as Isaac De Pinto or Zalkind Hourwitz, who, as noted above, rejected the notion of innate Jewish physical or mental attributes and portrayed the differences between Jews and Christians as resulting from differences in mode of living, Ben Elijah embraced the idea of Jewish uniqueness, and even attempted to uphold it against his source text, Ferry's Büffon's Geist. In a short chapter discussing the Jews, Ferry explained:

Ferry omitted from Buffon's original description a short discussion of Ashkenazi Jews, who, according to Buffon, were as light skinned as other Germans. In this sense, Ferry demonstrated what his contemporaries would conceive to be a less “optimistic” view of Jews.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ben Elijah took this deviation from Buffon's original a step further and explained that the Jews in general (not only the Portuguese Jews) did not intermarry with other nations and were thus always of a darker complexion than their European compatriots. This message was reinforced in a footnote that accompanied the discussion, in which Ben Elijah once again clarified that “all who observe them recognize that they are descended from the same blessed seed, and say: who is like your people, one nation in the world and one language” (וכל רואיהם יכירו כי המה זרע בירך א' ויאמרו מי כעמך גוי אחד בארץ ולשון אחד).Footnote ⁶⁶ For Ben Elijah then, Jewish physical uniqueness indicated the genealogical “purity” of the Jewish people, and was therefore something in which a Jew is to take pride, not attempt to rationalize. Unlike such Jewish apologists as Zalkind Hourwitz and Isaac De Pinto, who attempted to explain away Jewish uniqueness by turning to climate and customs, Ben Elijah chose to celebrate it. In this respect, whereas political considerations often inspired the maskilic treatment of scientific theories, for Ben Elijah, it was religion that defined which theories would be accepted, and which would be rejected.

And indeed, it was also religion in which Ben Elijah's undeniable monogenism was grounded. Not only did Ben Elijah embrace Buffon's monogenism throughout his translation, often attributing ethnic variations to climate and mode of living, but he also harnessed Jewish theology to support it. Consider, for instance, Ben Elijah's treatment of the following paragraph by Ferry/Buffon:

This paragraph, which constitutes the article's key paragraph, is treated by Ben Elijah with greater liberty than other parts of the text. The Hebrew translation appears as follows:

It is evident then, that the taxonomic ambiguities in Ben Elijah's translation of Ferry were not the result of any deliberate decision to stray from the source text, but rather stemmed from the unique nature of the Hebrew language of the time and the absence of an accepted scientific lexicon in Hebrew.Footnote ⁶⁹ These problems would continue to afflict Jewish writers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as is evident, for instance, from Joseph Klausner 1900 anthropological treatise, in which he attempts to tackle the absence of a biological and anthropological nomenclature in Hebrew and expresses a hope that “if all [Hebrew] science books were to add lexicons, the great shortage of words that is felt in our language would slowly be relieved by specialists, each of whom would know the matter at hand and the words by which the thing might be expressed in full.”(אם יהיו בסוף כל הספרים המדעיים אוצרות מלים מלאכותיות כאלה, אז יתמלא חוסר-המלים הגדול הנרגש בשפתנו, לאט לאט וע"י אנשים שכל אחד מהם יודע את הענין אשר לפניו ואת המלים שעל ידיהן אפשר לבטא את הענין הזה במלואו).Footnote ⁷⁰

Ben Elijah's (mis)translation of Ferry's explanation of human difference also underscores that Ben Elijah did not settle for incidental deviations from his source text, and did not hesitate to make deliberate changes wherever he saw fit. The vast majority of these changes were concerned with theological issues. Ben Elijah's reference to Ḥazal in his discussion of human variety is indicative of his attempt to legitimize the scientific information put forth in his text by turning to the authority of the ancients. On a separate occasion, Ben Elijah also claimed that Abraham Ibn Ezra had already reported the vegetarian practices of the Indian people and that the Gemara mentions many of the islands found in America.Footnote ⁷¹

Another instance occurs in the second chapter of the book, titled Memshelet ha-'adam ‘al ba'alei ha-ḥayim, which is a translation of chapter 21 of Ferry's adaptation of Buffon, titled “Von der Herrschaft des Menschen über die Tier.” For the most part, Ben Elijah remained faithful to the original text and translated it almost literally, but at the very end of the discussion he inserted a reference to the biblical King Solomon.Footnote ⁷² Once again, in this practice Ben Elijah was merely complying with the literary norms of his fellow Hebrew translators during the period, who often used a spoonful of the Jewish canon to help their modern scientific or philosophical ideas go down. Perhaps most famous in this respect was Pinḥas Horowitz, who wrote what is now considered to be the first Hebrew encyclopedia, under the pretext of supplying readers with a text to accompany Ḥayim Vital's She‘arei kedushah.Footnote ⁷³

The notion that the ancient Jewish sages had been somehow aware of the existence of a fourth continent was also shared by many of Ben Elijah's Jewish contemporaries. Pinḥas Horowitz, for example, speculated, following a long-standing Jewish tradition, that the biblical land of Ophir is in fact the South American Peru. This notion was even shared by some maskilim, such as the Polish-born Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, who stressed the assonance between the words “Ophir” and “Peru” as well as the fact that both kingdoms were characterized by an abundance of gold.Footnote ⁷⁴

Another important aspect of Ben Elijah's diversion from Buffon's original is the way in which he “Judaized” his source text. Such tactics of “domesticating” translated non-Jewish texts were common among Jewish writers of the Haskalah. Hebrew translators such as Lefin, David Zamość, and Yosef Vitlin tended to clothe their non-Jewish source texts in a Jewish garment by “Judaizing,” to a greater or lesser degree, names, places, ideas, and language.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ben Elijah, however, seems to have taken this practice a step further than his maskilic contemporaries, as he transformed Buffon's materialistic magnum opus into an exceedingly religious text.Footnote ⁷⁶ Where Buffon and Ferry avoided using religious explanations for natural phenomena, Ben Elijah simply inserted religion, theology, and acts of God. Admittedly, religious considerations and motivations often did play a part in the writings of the conservative Enlightenment, both Jewish and Christian, but in most cases theology was merely an appealing addition to the text and did not serve as a legitimate scientific explanation. Furthermore, when dealing with religiously problematic aspects of their source texts, turn-of-the-century maskilic translators tended to settle for the omission of specific sentences or whole paragraphs and did not normally attempt to turn an overall secular or deistic text into a religious or theistic one. Thus, for example, while translating Campe's narrative on the “discovery” of Palau, Menaḥem Mendel Lefin had to deal with the following statements appearing in his source text:

Lefin may have sympathized with the general sentiment of Campe's description of the noble Palauan people, born with an innate sense of God; however, the latter part of the paragraph, which bordered on deism, appears to have been too radical for the conservative Polish maskil, and he chose to omit it from his 1818 translation of the book.Footnote ⁷⁸

The distinctly religious aspect of Ben Elijah's translation is manifested not only in the translator's tendency to pour religious content into Buffon's secular discussions, but also in other additions he made to the source text that demonstrate a keen interest in theological issues, among them, Ben Elijah's recurring references to Ḥazal, his mention of King Solomon, or his positive portrayal of Jewish separatism. In some cases, Ben Elijah used the geographical discussion as a platform for speculating about the whereabouts of the lost Jewish tribes. In one place he claimed, for example, that many of them had been lost in the land of Georgia, and in another he stated that they had reached South America and are in some way responsible for the “higher level of sophistication” exhibited by South Americans.Footnote ⁷⁹ The notion that Native Americans were, at least in part, descendants of the lost tribes was popular in both Jewish and Christian literature of the seventeenth century and served as a means of compromising between the “discovery” of the “new” continent and its inhabitants and the biblical worldview.Footnote ⁸⁰

This theory continued, to some extent, into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries and served as a basis for the American Jewish diplomat Mordecai Manuel Noaḥ's program for the unification of Jews and Native Americans. However, the theory gradually lost its appeal among thinkers of the Jewish as well as the non-Jewish Enlightenments.Footnote ⁸¹ As Richard Popkin explained, during the eighteenth century “[t]he Jewish Indian theory fell victim to a scientific movement aimed at getting rid of the Scriptural framework of human history and substituting a secular one, of migrating people.”Footnote ⁸² And indeed the “lost tribes” theory played no role in the scientific discussions of major eighteenth-century naturalists such as Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant, and similarly appeared only rarely in the literature of the Haskalah.Footnote ⁸³

In conclusion, Ben Elijah's deviations from Ferry's original were most often inspired by theological considerations, linguistic difficulties, or the need to abbreviate. Unlike the maskilic translators of his time, Ben Elijah seems to have been less concerned with the scientific or political aspects of his source text and more attentive to its religious messages. But like the maskilim, Ben Elijah was not merely a passive recipient of his source text; he actively adapted and domesticated the text to better suit his own interests and the needs of his target audience. He mistranslated both deliberately and accidentally, added and omitted, gave new meanings to stories and words, and harnessed Buffon's scientific discourse to meet his own theological and ideological agenda. In the process of translation, then, a new text was created, one that was uniquely Jewish and indeed thoroughly traditionalistic in character, and yet one that also corresponded with the ideology and translational norms of the Jewish Haskalah and the scientific and naturalistic discourse of the “general” Enlightenment.

Buffon, Ben Elijah, and the Vilna Gaon: New Light on an Old Question?

The discovery of Ben Elijah's use of Buffon raises once again the much-discussed question of the attitude of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jewish rabbinic elites toward the Haskalah. What may be gleaned from Ben Elijah's translation of the magnum opus of an anticlerical, perhaps even atheistic thinker of the French Enlightenment? Previous studies have often shown that the new scientific thought of the Enlightenment enjoyed some prestige among the eighteenth-century Jewish religious elite and that notwithstanding the rising tensions during the late eighteenth century between the Haskalah and the rabbinic elite, some rabbis did not hesitate to use the works of such Jewish or non-Jewish philosophers of the Enlightenment who they perceived to be moderate. Thus, for instance, some maskilim, such as Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, Isaac Satanov, or even Naphtali Herẓ Wessely, were used by several nineteenth-century rabbis and talmudists.Footnote ⁸⁴ But whereas the occasional use of conservative maskilim such as Lefin by members of the rabbinic elite is perhaps understandable, Ben Elijah's translation of an entire text written by a French deist, or even atheist, whose writings were denounced by representatives of the church in France and even by the relatively tolerant Sorbonne, is an entirely different story.Footnote ⁸⁵

Ben Elijah's choice to omit Buffon's name from the translation shows that he had no intention of legitimizing the naturalist himself. In fact, it is safe to assume that Ben Elijah was aware not only of Buffon's scientific prestige, but also of his problematic religious status, which was not only notorious during the period but is also self-evident throughout the source text itself, in which religion is rarely invoked to sanction scientific speculation. In fact, Ben Elijah could easily have chosen to translate some other natural-history book, one more conservative in nature, such as Linneaus's Systema Naturae, throughout which the author's adherence to the religious worldview is evident.Footnote ⁸⁶ And yet it appears that Ben Elijah strove to translate what he justifiably understood to be the arch text of eighteenth-century natural history. In this choice to translate an important scientific text in spite of its author's deistic and anticlerical leanings, Ben Elijah conforms to the tendency, found in many maskilic translations during his time, to translate the writings of deists or materialists such as Benjamin Franklin or even anti-Jewish thinkers such as Voltaire or Goethe.Footnote ⁸⁷ It implies an ideology that values the content, theme, and literary or scientific merit of the text over the name of its author, his attitude toward Jews, or his religious convictions.Footnote ⁸⁸ Indeed, Ben Elijah's choice to translate Buffon reinforces the arguments made by contemporary scholars such as David Assaf or Yehoshua Mondshein, who claim that the Lithuanian mitnagdim of the late eighteenth century embraced an ideology of “accepting the truth from whatever source it comes.” According to Assaf and Mondshein, a close affinity existed between the Lithuanian mitnagdim and the Haskalah, and the radical rejection of the Haskalah originated not from the mitnagdim but rather from hasidic circles.Footnote ⁸⁹

Finally, Ben Elijah's Gevulot 'areẓ may shed some light on a related scholarly controversy surrounding the Vilna Gaon's attitude toward the question of secular studies. Ever since the eighteenth century, two mutually exclusive images of the Gaon have existed in both the research community and the popular imagination. The first is the image of the Gaon as an ardent supporter of secular studies or, at times, even a harbinger of the Haskalah in his own right. This image made its initial appearance in a 1780 translation of Euclid by the maskilic rabbi Baruch Schick of Shklov. In the preface to the translation, Schick claimed that the Gaon had instructed him “to translate whatever possible of the secular subjects into our holy tongue in order to recover what they [the Gentiles] had devoured, so that they will spread through the land and knowledge should proliferate among our people of Israel.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The image of the Gaon as a supporter of the secular studies was further propagated by other conservative maskilim such as Samson Bloch or Shmuel Yosef Fünn, who attempted to legitimize the Haskalah project by turning to the authority of great Jewish sages such as the Gaon.Footnote ⁹¹ There is, however, an altogether different image of the Gaon as an extremely conservative member of the Jewish religious elite and a vehement opponent of secular studies. This image of the Gaon also originates in the eighteenth century, during which rumors circulated that the Gaon had ordered the public burning of copies of Wesseley's Divrei shalom ve-’emet in Vilna.Footnote ⁹²

These two opposing images of the Gaon were tailored to meet the needs of two opposing camps during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conservative Haskalah attempted to legitimize the pursuit of secular knowledge by identifying precedents for such pursuits in the thought and writings of such canonical thinkers as the Gaon, while their opponents, who viewed the Haskalah as an assimilatory and secularizing force within Judaism, attempted to purge the image of the Gaon of any affinity with the maskilic ideology.Footnote ⁹³ To some extent, the image of the Gaon continues to serve as an ideological battleground between liberal historians and ultraorthodox scholars today. In recent years, however, there has been a growing scholarly tendency to view the Gaon as less tolerant toward secular studies than maskilim such as Fünn would have us believe. Perhaps the most important work in this respect is Immanuel Etkes's 1980 study of the Gaon. Etkes casts serious doubts as to the Gaon's positive attitude toward secular studies, explaining that “the sole evidence cited by [researchers] for this assertion [that the Gaon instructed his disciples to translate secular books into Hebrew] is the testimony of Rabbi Barukh of Shklov…. Now, while we have no reason to doubt Rabbi Barukh's word, neither do we have any reason or justification to generalize and infer that the Ga'on enjoined his disciples to translate secular texts.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Other studies still maintain that the Gaon held a positive attitude toward secular studies, and it appears that the question of the Gaon's attitude toward both the Haskalah and secular studies remains open.Footnote ⁹⁵ Even Etkes agrees that the trend to combine secular and religious studies, prevalent among some of the great sage's disciples, is an “interesting cultural trend [that] deserves thorough research into its nature and salient features, as well as the extent and depth of its influence.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The discovery of the translation of Buffon by the Gaon's most ardent disciple, his son Abraham, is perhaps a step in this direction. The fact that Ben Elijah took it upon himself to translate the most canonical natural-history text of the Enlightenment and while doing so embraced many of the maskilic translational norms of the period constitutes further evidence that the Gaon did indeed urge his disciples to become acquainted with the new intellectual trends of their time and to propagate secular knowledge in a Judaized form, through Hebrew translations.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is not to say, of course, that the Gaon or his son were either harbingers or members of the Haskalah movement. While Ben Elijah embraced some maskilic translational norms, he rejected many other important ones. And whereas for the maskilim the scientific content and political message of the text were paramount, for Ben Elijah the chief concern was religious. However, the discovery of Ben Elijah's source text exposes some surprising intercultural contacts between the Lithuanian mitnagdim and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, suggesting an openness to secular knowledge that far exceeds anything seen among the Gaon's disciples to date. Further research is needed to determine the meanings and scope of this surprising cultural interchange. Perhaps the first step in this direction is the realization that no matter how far removed it may appear to be at first glance, Jewish thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must be reviewed against the backdrop of the non-Jewish cultural, scientific, and intellectual trends of its time. The abyss between Buffon and Ben Elijah, Enlightenment and orthodoxy, modernity and tradition—is not as wide as it seems.