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5 min readA Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish
One of the first four or five Yiddish books ever printed was a New Testament—a 1540 translation by Paul Halech, a converted Jew who had gone bankrupt, bought a press, and dedicated the volume to the Bishop of Krakow before eventually returning to Judaism. This little-known fact opens a much stranger and more revealing story: over the centuries, roughly 750,000 copies of the New Testament in Yiddish were distributed to Jews across Eastern Europe and New York, mostly under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Most of those copies, according to various sources, ended up used to wrap fish.
The Missionary Translation Machine
The Bible society movement began in 1804 after a young girl named Mary walked 30 miles to get a Bible. Originally aimed at poor Christians, it grew into what Naomi Seidman calls "the world's largest translation effort," now covering some portion of the Bible in roughly 5,000 languages. The mission to the Jews was a special branch—converting a Jew was considered worth extra points toward hastening the second coming of Jesus—and it produced a steady stream of translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:05) **Introduction & Guest Welcome** - Alex Weiser (YIVO) introduces the "Very Jewish Christmas" series and guest Naomi Seidman, a scholar of Jewish languages and translation.
- 2 (04:31) **The First Yiddish New Testament** - Seidman reveals that one of the first four or five Yiddish books ever printed was a Yiddish New Testament from 1540 by Paul Halech.
- 3 (08:12) **The Scale of Yiddish New Testament Distribution** - Roughly 750,000 Yiddish New Testaments were distributed to Jews in Eastern Europe and New York, mostly by the British and Foreign Bible Society.
- 4 (12:08) **Deception and the "Lost Original" Effect** - Translations of the New Testament into Jewish languages often contain an element of deception, making the text feel like a lost Hebrew original.
- 5 (17:39) **The Special Status of Jewish Converts** - Converting Jews was considered especially valuable for bringing about the second coming of Jesus, and Jewish converts were prized as expert translators.
- 6 (25:25) **The Problem of Jewish Resistance** - Seidman explains the deep visceral rejection of Christianity ingrained in Jewish upbringing, which missionaries must carefully navigate.
- 7 (30:41) **Chaim Einspruch: A Hebrew Christian Missionary** - Seidman introduces Einspruch, a Yiddish writer and poet from a Hasidic family who never formally converted, believing Jesus fulfilled his Jewish identity.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman.
This lecture originally took place on December 21, 2023.
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