Translation and Interpretation in Contemporary Jewish Philosophy

Abstract

By inquiring into the translatability of Judaism and philosophy, we reawaken an ancient problem that asks after philosophy’s relation with religion: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Translation is a rejuvenated means of wrestling with this irksome question, which seeks to understand how multiple approaches to meaning and being can exist concurrently or whether any interaction forfeits multiplicity for the primacy of one form over all others. The specifi c issue that linguistic versions of the problem address is whether or not the languages that Judaism and philosophy speak are separate and distinct and if those distinctions are established on deeper, non-linguistic ground. For this reason, translation not only raises the problem of articulacy and context in interlingual translations, it also alludes to an ontological or metaphysical separation that speaks of different, non-shared worlds. Whether or not a translation theory addresses, repairs or upholds the opposition between religion and philosophy is in question, and translation becomes a vehicle for discussing what Jerusalem has to offer Athens and what Athens has for Jerusalem. In this essay, I examine the translation problem as an attempt to repair or re-gloss the relation between Judaism and philosophy by way of Michael Fagenblat’s recovery of Emmanuel Levinas’ thought in his work, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (2010).