Paradise Circumcised: How Milton Became Secular.
Isaac Salkinson, whose 1871 Vayegaresh et Haʾadam is the first translation of John Milton's Paradise Lost into Hebrew, is a curious character: a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary in Pressburg and Vienna, who also made major contributions to Hebrew letters, translating not only Milton and...
| Published in: | Modern Philology Vol. 121; no. 4; pp. 402 - 425 |
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| Format: | Literary Criticism |
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University of Chicago Press
May2024
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=176716496&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 176716496 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00268232 MPH jtl: Modern Philology issn: 00268232 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2024 vid: 121 iid: 4 pid: 415 pub: University of Chicago Press artinfo: ui: 176716496 10.1086/729777 ppf: 402 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.7MB tig: atl: Paradise Circumcised: How Milton Became Secular. aug: au: Magarik, Raphael affil: University of Illinois Chicago su: Secularism Salkinson, Isaac Hebrew letters New Testament Christianity Milton, John, 1608-1674 17th century (Literary period) sug: subj: Secularism Salkinson, Isaac Hebrew letters New Testament Christianity Milton, John, 1608-1674 17th century (Literary period) ab: Isaac Salkinson, whose 1871 Vayegaresh et Haʾadam is the first translation of John Milton's Paradise Lost into Hebrew, is a curious character: a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary in Pressburg and Vienna, who also made major contributions to Hebrew letters, translating not only Milton and the New Testament, but also (for the first time) two plays of Shakespeare. I use Salkinson's translation to test the theoretical claim, advanced by Gil Anidjar and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin inter alia, that modern secularization recapitulates Christian supersession. Attending to the shibbutsim (allusive phrases) that distinguish his translation's maskilic style, I argue that Salkinson secularizes both Milton and the canon of classical Jewish texts, foregrounding their discontinuity and conflict. Debates over the secular often pay insufficient attention to literary questions of figuration, metaphor, and allusion. In Salkinson's case, reimagining Milton in dialogue with Jewish texts modernizes both traditional corpuses, freeing the great English poet from his constraints of time and place while imagining a sphere of Hebrew letters no longer defined by religious, dogmatic limits. Salkinson's secular derives not from either his rabbinic nor his Renaissance English sources but precisely from their collision—a point that can be appreciated only through close reading of his allusions. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Literary Criticism src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Modern Philology is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Modern Philology holder: University of Chicago Press dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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