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The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan PDF

304 Pages·1990·8.57 MB·English
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PUBLISHED FOR JUDAICA RESEARCH AT YALE UNIVERSITY on the LOUIS M. RABINOWITZ FOUNDATION YALE JUDAICA SERIES EDITOR JULIAN OBERMANN Volume X THE FATHERS ACCORDING TO RABBI NATHAN ('ABOT Di-RABBl NAT AN) The Fathers ACCORDING TO RABBI NATHAN TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY JUDAH GOLDIN The Jewish Theological Seminary of America NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON . GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1955 Copyrlstt C 1955 by Yale Uru-sty. Copyr\&Iu C renewed 1983 by Judah GoldIn. All rJab1I .......-I. ThIs book may not be reprodua:d, In whole or In put, Indudini WuauatIona, In any fann (beyood that copylng pennined by Sectiona 1( f1 and 108 of the U.s. CopyrigIu law and except by reviewers for the public press), wiIhout wrinen pamIssIon from the publishers. Pmed in the UnlIed States 01 America by Vall-Ballou Preu, Binghamlon. N.Y. 1JInry of Congrea cata10g ani number: 5~1"5 1nIernatIcaal aandard book number: ~697-9 (pbk.) The paper In this book meeu \be suJdeIInes for permanence and dwabilky at the CoaunitIee on Produaion Guldelines for Book J..onaeYkY at \be Council on 1JInry J.esoura:s. 6 8 10 9 7 5 For Grace EDITOR'S NOTE I T is almost exactly ten years since Judaica Research at Yale University was founded for the purpose of promoting studies and publications in the various fields of Hebrew lore and lit­ erature. The decennial anniversary is fittingly marked by the ap­ pearance of the present book—Volume Ten of the Yale Judaica Series. In the Report on the First Year of Wor\, 1944-1945, sub­ mitted to President Charles Seymour and printed for private dis­ tribution, an attempt was made to outline the organization of the novel project and to define its scope and ramification. It seems ap­ propriate therefore to survey, against that outline, the course of the project in its first decade of work (1944-54). Those charged with putting the plan into effect were by no means unaware of the manifold difficulties and obstacles they were likely to encounter. They were mindful, in fact, not to permit their enthusiasm for the project to render them unduly sanguine about its realization. As the work continued to evolve, their en­ thusiasm did not diminish, but their consciousness of the crucial responsibility they had taken upon themselves increased with each book approaching completion, with each manuscript submitted, with each volume published. Seen in retrospect, the work so far done is not inconsiderable and its quality has been found to be not inadequate; but it was accomplished at a very high cost of human effort and scholarly labor. Ten years is not too long a period in which to advance the cause of a greatly specialized and, in many ways, neglected branch of scholarship. But even half of such a period is a dire price in the life of the productive scholars who have shared in the work of the series. Three of the contributors to the project, each an outstanding authority in his own field of endeavor, did not live to see their work published; two of them died even before their labors of many years had been finished. A moral obligation to publish post- viii THE FATHERS humously the three works concerned—and where necessary to complete them for publication—was felt to be self-evident. It has afforded us a measure of consolation that the work of Herbert Danby, the Boo\ of Cleanness, could be brought out within a year after his demise. At present, plans are under way to publish at least part of the Boo\ of Seasons, prepared by Solomon Gandz. And an effort will be made to find a scholar who will undertake to complete the work that was started and to a considerable extent advanced by Michael Higger—a translation of three extracanon- ical but immensely vital and important tractates of the Mishnah. From the beginning, the principle guiding the editorial policy of the series has been that of combining accuracy of philological analysis with complete independence from the style and idiom of the Semitic texts that were to be made available in translation. It has often been demonstrated—more often in negative than in posi­ tive terms—that philological accuracy is a sine qua non for safe­ guarding the stylistic independence of a translator of ancient and medieval works against the hazard of license, misinterpretation, or unnecessary exegesis. Even within the relatively limited scope of the two cycles en­ visioned in the report on the first year of work, the series was de­ signed to embrace a rather wide range of subjects, of cultural back­ ground, of literary species, of linguistic variability. The works al­ ready published have been translated, mostly for the first time, from Ethiopic, Arabic, Aramaic, and several kinds and periods of Hebrew. In literary subject matter they represent Apocrypha, Agada, liturgy, philosophy, polemics, and a wide sphere of sacred and civil law. As it often happened in the preparation of our vol­ umes, a given phrase or vocable, especially when used as a stand­ ing locution or technical term, might be found listed in the standard dictionaries as bearing a variety of connotations. To make the proper choice or to provide a connotation that was not listed but had to be deduced from the context in which it occurred, the translator often found it necessary to consider the literary, cul­ tural, and historical area out of which the work he translated had grown. EDITOR'S NOTE ix Most of our volumes are bound to assume the nature of text books or works of reference. Some of them have already found their way onto the shelves of university libraries and seminar rooms to stand side by side with the classic originals which they have made available in translation. Lacking in philological pre­ cision and accuracy, they would be condemned as untrustworthy witnesses to those classics. But failing to replace the idioms of the originals by the idiom of modern literary English, they would have failed to render the classic monuments accessible to non- Semitist scholars—historians, theologians, philosophers, jurists— and would be of even less service to the general reader, for both of whom they have been primarily intended. In the initial report the belief was expressed that it might be advantageous to find, for the works selected, translations already made by scholars on their own initiative. It may now be said that the advantage has been found to lie in the opposite direction. In fact, in cases where a manuscript submitted for publication con­ tained work which the translator had done at his own discretion, such work had virtually to be done over again in order to adjust it to the essentially popular nature of the series and, in particular, to the principle of its editorial policy. As a rule, however, our translations have been prepared by scholars for the specific purpose of submitting them for publica­ tion in the present series. This has made it possible for translator and editor to cooperate in the task on hand from beginning to end: from the time the work got under way until its completion, and from questions bearing on details of the translation and an­ notations to those concerning the nature of the introduction, the make-up of the index, and often even the exact wording of the title. This close progressive cooperation has given the published volumes inner cohesion, as well as outer uniformity, despite their great divergence in subject matter and cultural-literary species. By contrast, another belief expressed in the initial report has crystallized into firm conviction: that the enormous range of hitherto untranslated Jewish classics should be made available to the humanistic sciences and the general public. What has been

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