Traductions Bibliques

The first great translation of the Hebrew Bible is also the one bearing the heaviest consequences for Western civilization. In the 3rd century before our era, in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, the flourishing Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria undertook to translate the Torah into Greek: this is the Septuagint (LXX). This Greek version of the Bible was realized in Alexandria, the principal center of Hellenistic Judaism. The context is that of a Judaism deeply embedded in the Greek world, where Hebrew retreated before the koinè as the language of daily life.

Tradition, however, tells a different story than a simple communal need. The Letter of Aristeas, a pseudepigraphic text, depicts King Ptolemy II Philadelphus eager to enrich the Library of Alexandria and summoning from Jerusalem seventy-two sages—six from each tribe—to translate the Law. It is from this number rounded to seventy that the name "Septuagint" comes. Modern scholarship reads this account as a foundation legend designed to confer royal prestige and priestly authority on an enterprise actually born from the internal needs of the Egyptian diaspora. Recent work on the history of the Septuagint clearly distinguishes the translators and readers of this Greek Bible, from the 3rd century before our era to the 4th century of our era. The Greek corpus then extends well beyond the Torah, progressively encompassing the Prophets and the Writings.

The historical irony is cruel: this Jewish Bible would become the Bible of the nascent Church, cited in the New Testament and adopted by Christians. In reaction, Rabbinic Judaism would gradually turn away from it, and new Greek versions more literal—those of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion—would appear in the first centuries of our era to restore to the Hebrew text its precision, often against the christological readings of the LXX.

As Aramaic established itself as the vernacular language of Jews in Judea and then Babylonia, the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue required an oral translation intercalated verse by verse. From this liturgical practice emerged the Targum. Aramaic translations of the Tanakh, designated by the name targoum, accompanied the reading of the Hebrew text. A particular official, the meturgeman, pronounced the Aramaic version aloud, without reading from a scroll, so that it would never be confused with the sacred text itself.

Two Targumim established themselves as references. The Targum Onkelos, on the Torah, is distinguished by its sobriety and literal fidelity, tempered by cautious theological adjustments — notably the attenuation of divine anthropomorphisms. The Targum Jonathan covers the Prophets. Alongside these official versions flourished more paraphrastic and homiletic Palestinian Targumim, such as the Targum known as Pseudo-Jonathan, which insert narratives, glosses and aggadic developments into the fabric of the text.

The importance of the Targum in Jewish piety is such that a Talmudic rule, the Shnayim mikra ve-echad targum, prescribes to the faithful to review each week the weekly pericope "twice the text and once the Targum." This obligation to read each week the parasha twice in the original and once in its Aramaic translation is a long-established usage. The translation ceases here to be a mere auxiliary to become a component of sacred study itself.

When, after the Islamic conquests, Arabic became the language of culture and commerce for the majority of Jews — from the Maghreb to Babylonia — the Bible needed a new bridge. This was the work of Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayyoumi, known as Saadia Gaon, in the 10th century. Head of the academy of Soura in Babylonia, thinker, grammarian and polemicist, he translated a large part of the Bible into Arabic, in Hebrew characters: this is the Tafsir.

This version is not a word-for-word translation but a reasoned transposition, often accompanied by commentary, intended for a cultivated readership confronted with the intellectual currents of his time — the rationalism of kalâm, the challenges of Karaism which rejected rabbinic tradition. By giving Arabic-speaking Jews clear and theologically controlled access to their Scriptures, Saadia made Judeo-Arabic a major language of medieval Jewish thought. The Tafsir remained for centuries the reference translation of the communities of the East and Yemen, where it was still recited alongside the Aramaic Targum.

At the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, the monk Jerome undertook in Bethlehem a Latin translation of the Bible that would dominate the Christian West for more than a millennium: the Vulgate. Its singularity, among the concert of ancient versions, was to have wanted to return to hebraica veritas — the "Hebrew truth" — rather than to content itself with the Greek of the Septuagint. For this, Jerome learned Hebrew and worked in contact with Jewish masters, whose help he records in his prefaces.

This undertaking, though Christian, belongs to the history of Jewish biblical translations by an indirect but real link: it testifies to the persistence of a living Hebrew knowledge transmitted by Jewish scholars, and it inaugurates a textual dialogue — often conflictual — around the meaning of verses, notably those that Christians read as prophecies. The divergences between the Masoretic text preserved by the Jews and the Greek and Latin versions would nourish, throughout the Middle Ages, exegetical controversies in which translation became a stake in religious dispute.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the philosopher Moïse Mendelssohn, a central figure of the Haskalah, the "Jewish Enlightenment" of Berlin, undertook a German translation of the Torah printed in Hebrew characters, accompanied by a Hebrew commentary, the Biour. The project, published in the 1780s under the title Netivot ha-Shalom, was doubly revolutionary: to offer German-speaking Jews an elegant literary German for their Scriptures, while weaning them away from Yiddish deemed corrupt and opening them to the ambient culture.

Mendelssohn's ambition was pedagogical and emancipatory: to make the language of the State an instrument of integration without rupture with fidelity to the text, since the translation remained anchored in the Hebrew commentary and exegetical tradition. The undertaking aroused the enthusiasm of reformers and the mistrust of traditionalist rabbis, who feared that German would become a gateway to assimilation. Yet the Biour nonetheless marked the entry of Jewish biblical translation into European modernity, where each version henceforth reflects an identity project as much as a religious service.

The emancipation of the Jews of France, consecrated by the Revolution, called in turn for a Bible in French. In the nineteenth century, notably under the impetus of Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn, a French translation of the Hebrew Bible was produced by French rabbis and scholars: the "Bible of the Rabbinate," published at the end of the century, offered French-speaking communities a text that was both faithful to Jewish tradition and accessible to the faithful who were now fully French in language and culture. It remains to this day the reference version in many French-speaking synagogues.

The twentieth century extended this effort through more personal and bold works. André Chouraqui, committed to literal and sonorous writing, attempted to restore in French the Hebrew roots, the plays of sound and the archaic texture of the text, even if it was to disconcert the reader. In contrast to the concern for classical elegance of the Rabbinate, his version illustrates a permanent tension in all biblical translation: between the readability that domesticates the text in the host language and the fidelity that preserves its original foreignness. It is this same tension that, from Alexandria to Paris, traverses two thousand three hundred years of history.

Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayyoumi, also known as Saadia Gaon (882–942) — סעדיה גאון. Born in Egypt, he became head of the Talmudic academy of Soura in Babylonia, and was a philosopher, grammarian, liturgist and polemicist. His Tafsir, an Arabic translation of the Bible in Hebrew characters, gave Arabic-speaking Jews reasoned and theologically controlled access to their Scriptures. A defender of Rabbinic Judaism against the Karaites, he made Judeo-Arabic a great language of thought. His work remained the reference for Eastern and Yemenite communities for centuries.

Aquila of Pontus (2nd century) — עקילס. A proselyte and, according to tradition, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, he produced in the 2nd century a Greek translation of the Bible of extreme literalism, seeking to restore even the Hebrew syntax. His version was adopted by Greek-speaking Jews eager to distinguish themselves from the Septuagint, which had become Christian. Only fragments remain, transmitted notably through Origen's Hexapla, but his undertaking testifies to the Rabbinic concern for a Greek faithful to the Hebrew text.

Jerome of Stridon (c. 347–420) — Hieronymus. A monk and Christian scholar settled in Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew from Jewish masters and translated the Bible into Latin on the basis of the hebraica veritas. His Vulgate dominated the Latin West for more than a millennium. Though not Jewish, he belongs to this history through his recourse to living Hebrew learning and through the exegetical controversies that his translation choices opened between Jews and Christians.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) — משה מנדלסון. A Haskala philosopher in Berlin, he conceived the Netivot ha-Shalom, a German translation of the Torah in Hebrew characters accompanied by the Biour commentary. His project aimed at the cultural emancipation of German-speaking Jews without breaking with fidelity to the text. Praised by reformers and contested by traditionalists, he brought Jewish biblical translation into European modernity and symbolizes the passage toward linguistic integration.

Zadoc Kahn (1839–1905) — צדוק כהן. Grand Rabbi of France, he championed in the 19th century the French translation of the Hebrew Bible by French rabbis and scholars, known as the "Bible of the Rabbinate". Faithful to the Jewish tradition and accessible to an emancipated public, this version remains the reference for many French-speaking synagogues. A figure of French republican Judaism, he also worked toward communal solidarity and the great causes of his time.

André Chouraqui (1917–2007) — אנדרה שוראקי. Born in Aïn Témouchent in Algeria, a lawyer, writer and public figure in Israel, he devoted a substantial part of his work to translating the Bible into French. His version seeks to restore the literality, roots and sonorities of Hebrew, at the cost of deliberate strangeness. His work, both admired and debated, illustrates the tension between fidelity to the source text and readability in the target language.

From Alexandria to Paris, the history of Jewish biblical translations traces a constant pattern: to translate is to respond to linguistic exile. Each great version — the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Targumim, the Arabic Tafsir, the German Biour, the French Rabbinic Bible — is born from the encounter of a diaspora with a new language, and each arbitrates in its own way between two irreconcilable loyalties: that to the Hebrew text and that to the reader. In doing so, translation does more than transmit: it interprets, it takes a stand, it exposes the sacred to the regard of nations and sometimes contests it against external appropriations, as shown by the Christian destiny of the Septuagint and the Vulgate. It is also a barometer of Jewish transformations — Hellenistic acculturation, medieval Arabization, modern emancipation. To understand biblical translations is thus to read, between the lines, the very history of the communities that produced them, and to measure how much the survival of a sacred text depends on each generation's capacity to retell it in its own language.