Una Bibbia tedesca. La traduzione di Martin Buber e Franz Rosenzweig

The Verdeutschung der Schrift is the peak of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The translation of the Bible from Hebrew into German was jointly done by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and, after the latter’s early death in 1929, brought to conclusion by Buber forty years later in 1961, in Palestine. Starting from an analysis of the translators’ contribution to a redefinition of German Judaism in the post-assimilationist period, this work moves on to underline the convergence of their paths in the translation of the Scripture. A translation which is the pivotal point of the “Jüdische Renaissance”, the idea of a Judaism reconfigured on new criteria, from the recreation of an aesthetic dimension to the rediscovery of ethnicity. This work underlines the similarity, if not the total coincidence, of this ideas with the conceptual framework of the völkische Bewegung, and reconstructs the heated debate aroused by the first reviewers of the translation, some of the most important figures of German-Jewish intellectual life (Siegfried Kracauer, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin). These readers consider the text to be the coherent outcome of a neoromantic and völkisch ideology. After having pointed out the terms of this controversy, the analyis moves towards the text itself and shows, through precise examples from the books of Genesis and Exodus, a prevailing völkisch tone. The Verdeutschung is seen as the natural result of the thought and action of both Buber and Rosenzweig, the former being the mediator of Chassidic mysticism in Europe and the theoretician of a rediscovered and reshaped Judaism in the Prague speeches, whereas the latter stands out as the organizator of a wide and articulated cultural and educational project. A project which, centred on the “Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus” in Frankfurt, aims at recovering German Jews to the consciousness of their identity.