David Ruderman's treatment of the same period, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key (2000), has more to say about translation studies. Ruderman argues that methodological disagreements about translating the Hebrew Bible into English must be mapped onto contemporaneous political and theological debates between religious communities, including a British Jewish community that became both increasingly anglophone and outspoken throughout the period.

In Ruderman's account, seemingly narrow arguments about translating biblical Hebrew—especially its vowel marking systems—are always also the terrain of an intricate argument-by-proxy over the evolving criteria of political inclusion within a schizophrenic polity that in 1753-4 granted and then immediately rescinded citizenship rights for British Jews, rights that were only fully granted through piecemeal legislation of the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. I will return to the details of these debates shortly, but for now I would like to dwell on the wider implications of Ruderman's interrogation of cultural politics and otherness. The political restrictions that defined life for British Jews in the eighteenth-century resonate with the experiences of other actively disenfranchised groups, including Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, and the panoply of colonial subjects, whether in the British Isles or abroad. Endelman and Ruderman's histories of Jewish attempts to navigate language, identity, and assimilationist pressure can be compared with other investigations vis-à-vis other marginalized populations, like Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (1992), for instance, which contains a trenchant analysis of the geographical, educational, and linguistic trajectories by which Scots and other non-English subjects questioned, subverted, and sometimes even reinforced English metropolitan hegemony within the ever diversifying British Empire.

While Endelman and Ruderman's texts are informed by the methods of cultural and political history, Sheila Spector's work on the Jewish community of Romantic-era Britain is more directly related to literary Romanticism. Spector's monographs foreground the role of Jewish cultural practices in the formation of the poets Blake and Byron. The contexts she outlines facilitate a host of new ways to read these figures, including Blake's Kabbalistic subtext

and Byron's Yiddish- and Hebrew-language afterlives.

Moreover, the best essays in Spector's three edited volumes interrogate Romantic representations of Jews and Jewish culture, thereby shedding refreshing light on familiar texts like Scott's Old Mortality (1816), Edgeworth's Harrington (1817), and Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838).

In short, Spector and the authors collected in her edited volumes are the central figures for any research into the "interaction" and "blending" that occurred between "British and Jewish cultures" during the Romantic period (Spector, British Romanticism and the Jews 1, 2, 9, et passim). Their purposeful yoking of British Romanticism and British Jews brings to the fore previously overlooked Jewish writers and translators—like David Levi (1742-1801), Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), and Hyman Hurwitz (1770-1844)—in the same way recent studies from other fields have recuperated writers previously omitted from discussion. The argument that Romantic writing's diversity far exceeds the formerly hermetic Romantic canon will be familiar to anyone who has had contact with the valuable archives of women's writing, Scottish writing, Irish writing, counterflows to colonialism, slave narratives, and other work by writers of color, all of which the field owes to research of the past several decades.

Obscure and yet prolific London-born Jewish scholar David Levi, for example, can only be understood as someone who straddled overlapping cultural milieux. He was an accomplished anglophone writer who sparred in journals with Thomas Paine over Paine's excoriations of prophecy, as well as with Joseph Priestley over Priestley's "amicable" invitation for Jews to "study" (and thereby acknowledge) the evidence of Christianity.

As a true multilingual, Levi's commitment to Jewish political rights and religious heritage resulted in a comprehensive intervention into his era's translation practices. The three successive volumes of Lingua Sacra in 1785, 1789, and 1803 took the form of a comprehensive Hebrew-to-English lexicon and commentary, in which Levi approached biblical Hebrew and the rabbinical tradition as a steward, one whose knowledge of Jewish tradition allowed him to advance British Jewish interests by rectifying biblical mistranslations on which both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic discourses were based. Lingua Sacra's title page displays this will to correct Christian mistakes and typological interpellations: ‘[E]nriched with Notes; in which are shewn the Grammatical Errors and Inaccuracies of the most distinguished Grammarians, and other Writers in the Hebrew Language [. . .]. The more difficult Words and Passages in the Sacred Writings will be explained, according to their true Meaning, and the lively Oracles of GOD rescued from the Errors of real or disguised Friends, and the Attacks of open and professed Enemies, whether Deists or Atheists. 

’ "Deists" and "Atheists" get top billing as "Enemies" to the Jews here and throughout the work, but the more profound intervention occurs with regard to "real or disguised Friends," by which Levi means devout Christian Hebraists using Hebrew translation as a way to confirm their own religious sensibilities.

When David Levi was writing in the 1780s and 1790s, he was responding directly to Hebrew translation practices as they had been elaborated over the course of the eighteenth century, during which time all British religious communities contributed to the translation boom surrounding the Authorized Version's English form. Jonathan Sheehan's Enlightenment Bible (2005) has documented these preoccupations with renovating biblical material, attributing them to a prevailing sense that parts of the Bible suddenly appeared distant, barbaric, and antiquated rather than omnitemporal or universally applicable. Historian Neil Hitchin has analyzed the retranslation frenzy by focusing on attempts to create a governmentally sponsored Bible retranslation committee like the one that had produced the King James Version in 1611. Though Hitchin omits Jewish voices entirely, he elucidates details of the eighteenth century's (Christian) "cultural politics of religion" (68), which included dissenters seeking a greater stake in national religious life and certain pillars of the Anglican establishment seeking measured changes to official translations that would protect the Church's stability and authority.

The essential point is that working out these "cultural politics of religion" occasioned a rise in differing methods of reading, translating, and "knowing" the Hebrew language (some far more accurate than others). It was the most radical Christian ways of "knowing" the language that Levi would ultimately seek to discredit and debunk.

Here it is important to note that within British Christian communities Hebrew had traditionally occupied an odd position in the Hebrew-Greek-Latin scriptural triumvirate. Amongst Anglicans, it was less taught and less well known than the others, likely because Greek and Latin both had non-religious histories that were embedded in the educational system's admiration of the classical world. Commentators noticed the pall of low Hebrew literacy amongst the Anglican clergy. The publishing industry responded with a sudden boom in Hebrew pedagogical materials, many of which criticized clergymen for their poor knowledge of Hebrew grammar. These pedagogical texts promised that enhanced teaching methods would benefit Church leaders while building a pediment on which to erect a national spiritual revival, or as Hitchin has it, "a nationally comprehensive, protestant Church of England" (70). An analogous situation held true in the British Jewish community, as Endelman and Ruderman both point out.

Jewish leaders wanted to improve Jewish Hebrew literacy in Hebrew, as this would surely help steady the growing community during times of increasing assimilationist pressures and dwindling Hebrew literacy.

One way to trace the entwined political and theological interests that sought updates to anglophone scriptures is through the slew of Hebrew grammars that hit the markets between roughly 1740 and 1830, many of which were designed for novice and autodidact readers. While Christians produced the majority of them, British Jews also published anglophone grammars.

Put in a way that highlights the cultural specificity of these texts, grammars promising to teach the Hebrew language to Christians and written by Christians circulated alongside grammars written by Jews with the stated aim of teaching the holy language solely to wayward British Jews. A third and hybrid typology is also visible: anglophone grammars and lexicons like Levi's that promised to reveal the true character of Hebrew to both Jews and misled Christians. It is important to reiterate that Standard English was the new framing language for these new grammars. Whereas early-eighteenth-century Hebrew grammars circulated mostly within Anglican universities, Jewish community schools, and dissenting academies, thereby presupposing knowledge of Latin or Rabbinic (Mishnaic) Hebrew, the anglophone materials of the second half of the century facilitated access to a larger readership. In this way, Hebrew literacy spread to women, dissenters, and figures like Joseph Priestley, a man kept out of a traditional Anglican university by his convictions and the Test Acts. For their part, British Jews like Levi increasingly chose English over German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rabbinic Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish heritage languages. Suffice it to say, the accessibility of anglophone-Hebrew learning materials bred new and sometimes schismatic translation theories and practices.

One of the most influential of these theories involved the wholesale cultural decontextualization of the language and is best broached through the work of theologian John Hutchinson (1674-1737). Hutchinson's belief in timeless rabbinic deceit drove his attempts to purge Hebrew of its Jewish traces. In one publication, Hutchinson identifies five sorts of treacherous men: ‘1. Men who pretend to be directed by the Scriptures, but never learn to read and understand them. 2. Men who allow the Scriptures to be read, and construed, as the apostate Jews have pointed and explained them. 3. Men who pretend the Church of Rome has a power to construe and supersede the written Rules in Scripture. 4. Men who pretend to have a supernatural Director within each of them, which they are to follow, without regard to the Scripture. 5. Men who neither regard Scripture, Church, nor, &c. any farther than it serves their turns; but will each form Schemes, and determine everything by his own Reason, and demonstrate from his own Data, by Mathematics and Experiments (Covenant 2-3).’ Referencing theological contempt of Jews, Catholics, Deists, and atheists here, another passage renounces Jewish writing altogether: "We have nothing to do with the Translations or Paraphrases of the Apostate Jews" (Treatise 5), a claim that underlies Hutchinson's severing of biblical Hebrew from the Jewish commentaries, glossaries, and translations on which Christian translators had always relied.

His protégé Julius Bate regularly borrows such rhetoric, as here: "It is our own fault to let the Jews mislead us; we are forbid in the strongest manner to have any dealings with them" (292). Contrasting with the goal of partial formal equivalence that had subtended the production of the KJV, Hutchinsonian thinking characterizes the writings of Alexander Catcott, Benjamin Holloway, George Horne, William Jones of Nayland, and later John Parkhurst, all influential writers who contributed to the most polemical and anti-Semitic Hebrew translation practices during the period.

For these Hutchinsonians, the central translation problem involved the nature of the Hebrew writing system, which can be described as an abjad of consonantal characters surrounded by diacritic dots and dashes that mark vowel quality, accentuation, and cantillation. Hebrew vowel markers (niqqud, pl. niqqudot) were frequently referred to as "points" during the period, and Hutchinsonians renounced them by calling them Jewish impositions that debased a once divine script. The claim that "points" occluded true Christian meanings was but one prong of a much larger rejection of all the cultural history contained in the Masorah, or traditional Jewish textual commentary. Historian David Katz describes the Hutchinsonian method as follows: "Grammar and the history of linguistic development are angrily thrust aside, as Hutchinson and his followers argued that this [the appearance of irregularity], like all features of the Old Testament, had been planned by God himself" (Skeptics 240). Eliminating "points" from the Hebrew writing system produces considerable lexical and interpretive difficulties, especially for beginners.

Stripping texts of one of their most crucial signification technologies allowed for exceptional and even egregious interpretive license, one of the reasons why unpointed texts received a sympathetic audience in politically charged eighteenth-century religious discussions. Hitchin writes, "Dissenters often described literal translations as 'slavish and literal' [. . .]. Liberty and freedom in translation were prized by translators in the republican or neo-Roman tradition" (72). While Hutchinsonianism was not necessarily dissent, its will to get out from under a perceived Jewish yoke takes on and reflects the rhetoric of emerging ideas about individual sovereignty.

Hutchinsonian translator and grammarian John Parkhurst saw himself as a defender of the Anglican faith who, like Hutchinson himself, was charged with fighting a holy war via grammar, for while the "superstitions of Popery" threatened one flank, "the wicked reveries of the enthusiastic, self-illuminated Sects" menaced another.

The Hutchinsonian sense that Christianity had superseded Judaism to the point of nullifying Jewish techniques for preserving Hebrew literacy colors Parkhurst's An Hebrew and English Lexicon. First printed in 1762 and subsequently republished in 1778, 1799, 1807, 1811, and 1823, the work rehearses the line that Hebrew was easier to acquire (and distort) "when unembarrassed with Points" (xii). Here Parkhurst brazenly promises the reader that study of Hebrew "unadulterated with the Rabbinical Points, in a few months, [would] enable him to read in the original with ease and delight, most parts of those Holy Scriptures, all of which, St. Paul assures us, were given by inspiration of God, and are able to make us wise unto salvation, through Faith, which is in Jesus Christ" (10-1). After this polemic, the text lists and defines Hebrew words according to an exceptionally idiosyncratic understanding of the language. This work perpetuates the Hutchinsonian opinion that Hebrew writing was divine, but its itinerant vowel systems were illegitimate, an assumption that was then transmitted to eager autodidact translators like Elizabeth Smith, a fascinating writer whom I have written about in a different context.

To understand the unique challenges and opportunities in Hurwitz's career, a brief note on the history of Jewish Hebrew teachers in Britain is in order. Though technically expelled from England from the late-thirteenth century until the 1650s, grammatical, religious, and kabbalistic works circulated into Britain from Jewish centers in Iberia, Amsterdam, and Eastern Europe, while a small network of crypto-Jews lived on discreetly in London, Cambridge, Oxford, and other port cities.

Christian students were known to hire recently converted or Jewish Hebrew tutors to facilitate their studies. In Philo-Semitism, David Katz cites biographical sketches of John Immanuel Tremellius, Jacob Wolfgang, and Jacob Barnet to document this very point. After the Jewish resettlement in 1655, eighteenth-century historian D'Blossiers Tovey hearkened back to the eleventh-century reign of William Rufus to explain the role of Jewish tutors in education, a pedagogic necessity that would have been familiar to students at Oxford in his own day: "In one of the parishes [of Oxford] they also had a School, or Synagogue; wherein certain Rabbies instructed, not only their own People, but, several of the Christian Students of the University, in the Hebrew Learning and Language" (9). Though there had been Hebrew chairs at Oxford and Cambridge since 1540, it is clear that the Christian establishment continually relied upon Jewish scholarly help in translation and exegesis.

The details of Hurwitz's life are simple but unusual. Immigrating to Britain around 1800, he spent a brief stint as a Hebrew teacher at a Christian school before opening a school for Jewish youth known as Highgate Academy.

Through mutual acquaintances he became the friend and tutor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a relationship I will discuss through reference to a Coleridgian translation in the final section of this paper. In 1828, Hurwitz's personality, openness, and writings secured him an appointment as the first Jewish professor of Hebrew at University College London, an institution that did not require its professors to conform to the Test Acts. The Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica deems the Elements of the Hebrew Language (1828) to be his most important work, noting that it "went through many editions, and was for a long time the standard Hebrew grammar among English Jews" (Jacobs and Wolf 223). As in Levi, this text attacks those who would dissociate biblical Hebrew from its cultural context, but it does so in a way that still invites novice readers of any faith into the pleasures of the Hebrew language. This is attributable to Hurwitz's vocation as an educator for all levels and confessions, but it also derives from his uniquely cosmopolitan cast of mind.

Cultural ecumenism can be seen in Hurwitz's Essay on the Uninspired Literature of the Hebrews as well as the playful Rabbinic parables of Hebrew Tales (1826) that the essay introduces. As a translator and defender of Mishnaic literature, Hurwitz accentuates the antiquity of the Jewish lore while dressing it in an appealing and contemporary anglophone style. Judith Page has written about Hurwitz's engagement with the British literary tradition, and one example of his Mishnaic glosses will serve here to confirm Page's point. Like many, the section from the Hebrew Tales called “Milton's 'Dark from Excess of Light'” presupposes the reader's familiarity both with Book Three of Paradise Lost and with the Mishnaic book Kodoshim. With these subtexts, Hurwitz launches into cultural syncretism, describing how Rabbi Joshua asked Emperor Trajan to stare at the sun after Trajan had questioned God's omnipresence. When the sun's brightness blackens Trajan's vision, Rabbi Joshua asks, "Thou art unable to endure the light of one of his creatures and canst thou expect to behold the resplendent glory of the Creator?" (Tales 64). The image of God's "excessive brightness" in Milton's Christian epic is here given a Jewish precursor.

Working on the British canon, Hurwitz's translation is almost the inverse of Christian typology as it locates Jewish subtexts for Christian stories. The goal is to formulate a cultural history in which Jewish thought and philosophy are recognized as constitutive of British identity and not opposed to it. Hurwitz's “Essay on Uninspired Literature” and the Hebrew Tales have been compared to Wordsworth and Coleridge's preface to Lyrical Ballads, but they can also be likened to phenomena like Ossianism, Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), or the diverse texts of overseas orientalism.

After all, Hurwitz makes Jewish cultural relics into sources for contemporary art and knowledge; he asks history to relate its lessons to the present, not in the service of narrow national or ethnic ends, but for all Britons.

The implications of Kennicott's orientalism for translation studies are critical: like Hutchinsonians, Kennicott annexed to himself the authority to rewrite the scriptures through contrived textual sciences as a way to bypass traditional Jewish learning. Of course, the other interesting aspect of Kennicott's project is the way it configures the Near East as a distinct repository of authentic cultural material upon which a British scholar could bring the money and linguistic skills necessary for gleaning specifically Christian truths. As Hitchin writes, "Improving access to near eastern lands was a boon to translators. Comparing Arabic and Syriac words with ancient Hebrew words was increasingly treated as an indispensable adjunct for biblical philology" (79). In this respect, Edward Said's link between biblical study and orientalism in the sense of the East as a career-making object of study is borne out most obviously.

The East produced by Kennicott's comparative philology is only one such discursive East, another comes through in the simultaneously primitivist and orientalist translation work of Bishop of London Robert Lowth (1710-1787).

Lowth is best known for advancing the thesis that three types of thematic parallelism structured biblical poems.

First was synonymous parallelism, wherein two parts of one verse echoed one another, as in the first line of Psalm 114: "When Israel went out of Egypt, / the house of Jacob from a people of strange language." The second type of parallelism fuses two antithetical half-verses, as in 1 Samuel 2:4-5: "The bows of the mighty are broken / and they that stumbled are girded with strength." The third variety of parallelism repeats a grammatical form over multiple verses like in Psalm 19:8-11: "The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul; / The testimony of Jehovah is sure, making wise the simple; / The percepts of Jehovah are right, rejoicing the heart; / The commandment of Jehovah is clear, enlightening the eyes." The unfolding of the four lines is parallel, but also additive; the sum of the four offers more than each line individually. Lowth's focus on reproducing these biblical Hebrew traits in eighteenth-century English goes so far as to alter—or augment—English's capacities. Lowth makes English speak in Hebrew's forms rather than the other way around. He uses space, parallelism, and repetition to produce a translation distant from English poetic traditions, especially the traditions of paraphrase and versification associated with Isaac Watts and others.

Lowth's translation of Isaiah takes this logic into another dimension, criticizing translators for rendering prophetic writings as prose when in fact Lowth saw them as poetry. His updating of Isaiah 53, one of the most celebrated typological moments in the Bible, exemplifies how translation can pursue Anglican prophecy through anglophone Hebrew poetry.

The KJV's Isaiah 53:2 serves up serial prose fragments with incidental rather than intentional parallelism.

By contrast, Lowth fashions a poem with line breaks conforming spatially to Hebrew grammatical units and employing synonymous parallelism:

For he groweth up in their sight like a tender sucker;

And like a root from a thirsty soil:

He hath no form, nor any beauty, that we should regard him;

Nor is his countenance such, that we should desire him (Isaiah 154).

A similarly subtle use of spatial arrangement and discursive purgation is visible in 53:7. Where the KJV reads, "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumme, so he openeth not his mouth," Lowth reformulates the lines,

It was exacted, and he was made answerable; and he opened not his mouth:

As a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

And as a sheep before her shearers,

Is dumb; so he opened not his mouth (Lowth, Isaiah 155).

Here Lowth locates synonymous parallelism in the second and third lines. Additionally, because poetry is meant to enhance prophecy, Lowth establishes a link between the passive niggas ('exacted') and the passive causative na'aneh ('made answerable'). His changes produce a strange sort of poem on the page, and while still replete with Christological symbolism, it acts on English-language aesthetic traditions in a way that prefigures other intentionally archaized writings of the period, such as Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) or “Christabel” (1797-1800).

In fact, this archaizing impulse in Coleridge is one of the ways British Hebraism can supplement our knowledge of the period. Coleridge obtained Lowth's De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum from the library in Bristol in 1796 (Halmi 352; Whalley 114-42). When he translated the opening of the "Song of Deborah" (Judges 5:1-10) in December 1799—before he had ever studied with Hurwitz—it is clear that from Lowth he had developed his own conception of how biblical Hebrew material operated (Halmi 352-4). For one, Coleridge quotes Lowth several times in Lectures on Revealed Religion (1795) (McKusick 412). Additionally, he rehearses Lowth's theory of biblical parallelism in an explanatory note: "The Song of Deborah, translated in the * parallelisms of the Original / (* that is, so that each Line or member of a sentence is counter-balanced by the following, either by difference or similitude, or by the repetition of the same thought in different words or with a different Image" (Poems 254). In his deployment of these forms, Coleridge shows that he is interested in “The Song of Deborah” as a historical relic unique to a specific time and place, but also that he is interested in the passage as a transcendental and even transhistorical overflow of powerful feelings, what James McKusick terms a "crisis of mental activity finding a volcanic outlet in language" (414).

In fact, his understanding of the Hebrew song as local in origin yet universally sublime in expression offers an interesting new origin for Romantic aesthetics as they are typically understood.

Coleridge judges the “Song of Deborah” to be "as simple a dithyrambic production as exists in any language" (Shakespearean Criticism 426). And indeed, “The Song of Deborah” is widely believed to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest piece of poetry in the Hebrew corpus even though the difficulties in dating it are many (Globe 495; Smith 81). Coleridge knew about the song's antiquity and in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit he even adduced it as evidence arguing against the scriptures being dictated by an "infallible Intelligence" (31). Rather than considering the Bible as "a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men" (32), Coleridge saw the Bible as a composition, animated but not dictated by a holy spirit, ‘All the several books bound up together in our precious family Bibles were composed in different and widely distant ages, under the greatest diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and information, and yet the composers, whether as uttering or as recording what was uttered and what was done, were all actuated by a pure and holy Spirit [. . .] one Spirit, working diversly.

’ To paraphrase, the Bible unfolds in time as a holy spirit activates people from vastly different eras.

As a Hebrew victory-ballad, “The Song of Deborah” stands out in the Bible as a ritualized performance. It caps and extends the prose narrative of Judges 4 with a triumphant prayer celebrating the community's fortification. In Verse III, Coleridge attends to Deborah's role as prophetess and warrior, intervening with a significant shift in verb tense, from the past "arose" to the present "arise" in the translation of shakkamti. Thematically, this shift stresses the lasting implications of Deborah's bravery for the community. McKusick attributes Coleridge's variation to a discovery of how to express shifting tense that occurs frequently in the Bible, "as Coleridge could have learned from any grammar book" (414). This reading points to the importance of the new Hebrew grammatical tradition.

For my part, I want to suggest that Coleridge is deliberately invoking an antithetical parallelism between "They ceased, till I arose, Deborah" and "Till that I [Deborah] arise, a mother in Israel." My reading emphasizes that these two events reference different moments in the historical narrative. Deborah's song first thinks back to the moment before she went into battle, just after she "arose," and then jumps forward to the moment after the war's victory when she "arise[s], a mother in Israel" or, equivalently, when she arises as the mother of Israel. Such a reading corresponds to the emphasis on Deborah's motherhood in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, at the same time as it equates Deborah-as-mother and Deborah-as-warmonger storming the Caananites' gates (Verse IV, line 2).