Lazarus Goldschmidt: At 21, He Brought the Book of Enoch Back to Hebrew

Berlin, the end of the nineteenth century. A twenty-one-year-old sits in a rented room. On the table in front of him lies a book in a script that only a handful of people in Europe can read. He dips his pen in ink and begins to write in the Hebrew of the Bible: “And it came to pass in those days.”

The book will be published in 1892. The young man is Lazarus Goldschmidt, and the book he is translating was written by Jews in the Land of Israel more than two thousand years earlier, and has not been read in their language since antiquity. You could say he is returning lost property, rather late.

Who Lazarus Goldschmidt was

Eliezer Goldschmidt, known in Europe as Lazarus Goldschmidt, was born in 1871 in the town of Plungė in Lithuania. As a youth he studied at the Slobodka yeshiva, one of the important academies of the Lithuanian Torah world. In 1888, at seventeen, he came to Berlin and began studying oriental languages at the university.

The move from the house of study to the university was not rare in those days. What was rare was the field he chose. Instead of concentrating on Arabic or Aramaic, as might be expected of a former yeshiva student, Goldschmidt devoted himself to Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. His teacher was August Dillmann, the greatest Ethiopic scholar of the nineteenth century, and the man who had published the scholarly edition of the Book of Enoch forty years earlier.

So two things met in one room that had never met before: a deep knowledge of Hebrew in all its layers, and a knowledge of the only language in which the Book of Enoch had survived complete.

“From the language of the Cushites into the language of the Hebrews”

The translation was published in Berlin in the Hebrew year 5652, 1892. The title page states that the author “translated it from the language of the Cushites into the language of the Hebrews, and added an introduction, notes and explanations.” Goldschmidt was not content with a translation. He added an introduction on the history of the book and notes along the text, and opened the edition with a dedication and a poem, as was the custom in Hebrew books of his time.

It is important to understand what was new about it. Until then a Hebrew reader could know the Book of Enoch only secondhand, through translations into German or English. Goldschmidt skipped those stations and translated directly from the Ethiopic text. It was the first Hebrew translation of the book, and it was made by someone who was not yet twenty-two.

The Hebrew of the Bible

Goldschmidt’s most interesting decision concerns style. He could have translated into the language of the rabbis, or into the Enlightenment Hebrew of his day. He chose the language of the Bible, with its distinctive verb forms. Here is the descent of the angels in his translation, rendered into the English of the King James Bible as it appears in this site’s edition:

And it came to pass in those days, when the children of men had multiplied, that there were born unto them fair and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw them and lusted after them, and spake one to another, saying: Come, let us seek us wives from among the daughters of men, and beget us children.

1 Enoch 6:1–2, from Goldschmidt’s translation, in biblical English

The choice is not just a matter of taste. Goldschmidt understood that the Book of Enoch was written as a continuation of Genesis, and that its first readers heard in it the voice of the Bible. A translation into biblical language gives the book back the sound it once had. Whoever reads these verses feels for a moment as if reading a lost chapter of the Torah, and that is exactly the feeling the ancient authors wanted to create.

For comparison, here are the same verses in the modern English version based on his translation:

In those days, when humankind had grown numerous, beautiful and lovely daughters were born to them. The angels, the sons of heaven, saw them and desired them, and said to one another: Come, let us choose wives for ourselves from among the daughters of men, and father children.

1 Enoch 6:1–2, in modern English

A Hebrew book in a world that did not yet speak Hebrew

It is worth remembering the world into which the translation was published. In 1892 Hebrew was not yet a spoken language. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda sat in Jerusalem trying to persuade his neighbors to speak it with their children, and most readers of Hebrew knew it from the prayer book, the house of study and the Enlightenment press. Whoever translated an ancient book into Hebrew then could not expect a large audience. He was writing for a handful of readers, and for a future that was not certain to arrive.

The future arrived. Today his translation is read by people whose mother tongue is Hebrew, something Goldschmidt himself, in his room in Berlin, could only hope for. And through it, the book now reaches readers of English as well.

The man who translated the Talmud on his own

The Book of Enoch was only the beginning. In the years that followed, Goldschmidt published studies of Ethiopic literature and translations of ancient Hebrew works. Then, in 1897, he began a project that most people would not dare even to plan: a complete translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German.

The Babylonian Talmud is one of the longest and most difficult works ever written, thousands of pages of debate in Hebrew and Aramaic. Projects of this kind are usually carried out by teams. Goldschmidt did it alone. The last volume appeared in 1935, thirty-eight years after the first. It was the first complete translation of the Babylonian Talmud into a European language.

We tend to think of translators as quiet people, who stand to one side and let others speak. Goldschmidt’s life is a reminder that translation can also be an act of almost unimaginable stubbornness.

Berlin, London

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Goldschmidt left Germany and moved to England. He was sixty-two at the time, and a large part of his life’s work had been written in the language of the country that drove him out. He died in London in 1950.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that the man who devoted decades to opening the Talmud to German readers had to complete his work in exile from Germany.

Why his translation still matters

More than a hundred and thirty years have passed since the translation appeared in Berlin. In the meantime fragments of the book in Aramaic were found in the caves of Qumran, more translations and studies have been added, and Hebrew itself has changed a great deal. And yet Goldschmidt’s translation remains the starting point for every Hebrew reader.

There are three reasons for this. It was made directly from Ge’ez, by a pupil of the greatest expert on the Ethiopic text. It was written in precise and beautiful biblical Hebrew, which fits the book like a glove. And it was the first. The editions on this site rely on it: the Hebrew editions present his translation itself and a version in modern Hebrew, and the English editions carry it into biblical English and into modern English.

The Book of Enoch was written in Aramaic, survived in Ge’ez, became famous in English and was studied in German. For it to come back to Hebrew took one young man from Lithuania who learned Ethiopic in Berlin. The history of books, it turns out, often depends on people who are in an unexpected place, with unexpected knowledge, at an age when one does not yet know that the task is too big.