A picture of Moses Mendelssohn displayed in the Jewish Museum, Berlin, based on an oil portrait (1771) by Anton Graff in the collection of the University of Leipzig. Wikimedia
Moses Mendelssohn’s Be’ur: Translating the Torah in the Age of Enlightenment
Moses Mendelssohn’s Be’ur (1780-83) was the first Jewish translation of the Torah into standard German. Motivated by religious and cultural needs, Mendelssohn took advantage of the translation revolution already underway in eighteenth-century Germany—and also included many striking innovations.
Published: January 24, 2017
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973) 69.
Letter to Henning, 29 June 1779, cited in Altmann, 344.
This section was included at the insistence of Mendelssohn’s collaborator Solomon Dubno.
On Mendelssohn and language, see Steven Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 179–213, and Andrea Schatz,Sprache in der Zerstreuung: Die Säkularisierung des Hebräischen im 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009.
Mendelssohn purchased this controversial translation. See Paul Spalding, “Toward a Modern Torah: Moses Mendelssohn’s Use of a Banned Bible,” Modern Judaism 19, no. 1 (February 1999): 67–82.
Editor’s note: For examples of Leitwort method interpretation, see Everett Fox, “Committing to the Covenant ‘Today’,” TheTorah (2014), and Shani Tzoref, “Israel’s Development as a Nation: Form, Storm, Norm, Perform,” TheTorah (2015) and “Preparing for Sinai: God and Israel Test Each Other,” TheTorah (2016).
Editor’s note: For more on the complication of translating this phrase and how this has been done by Jewish commentators throughout the ages, see James Diamond, “YHWH: The God that Is vs. the God that Becomes,” TheTorah (2017).
For a comparison with other German Jewish translations of Exodus 12:2, see my essay “From Myth to Memory: A Study of German Jewish Translations of Exodus 12-13:16,” in Exodus in the Jewish Experience, ed. Pamela Barmash and W. David Nelson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015),191-212.
Jewish calculation divides the hour into 1,080 parts. 793 parts is just over 44 minutes. So the month is 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes.
Commentary on Exodus 12:2, “Diser Monat sey euch der Anfang der Monate. Er soll euch der erste seyn, zu allen Monaten des Jahres.” Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubilaeumsausgabe, Vol 16:2, ed. Werner Weinberg (Stuttgart, Ger.: Friedrich Frommann, 1993) 92.
Dubno goes on to quote Ramban, who explains that silent laughter is always a form of mockery whereas laughter out loud is a form of joy, and that this explains why Sarah is rebuked here and not Abraham in chapter 17. Dubno supports this interpretation, but also notes its insufficiency, namely, chapter 17 never says Abraham laughed out loud. This leads him to a lengthy defense of how we know Abraham’s laughter was innocent and Sarah’s a form of mockery.
Mendelssohn 60.
Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Marion Aptroot, “Bible Translation as Cultural Reform: The Amsterdam Yiddish Bibles” (PhD diss. Oxford University, 1989) 329. See also Erica Timm, “Blitz and Witzenhausen,” in Studies in Jewish Culture in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelssohn and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1993), 39-66.
On the history of translation practices in Ashkenaz, see Nechama Leibowitz, “Die Übersetzungstechnik der jüdisch-deutschen Bibelübersetzungen des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts dargestellt an den Psalmen,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 55 (Niemeyer, 1931). A passage in Tractate Kiddushin, for example, attempts to explain what is meant if someone refers to himself, in the course of making an oath, as a reader and translator (b.Kiddushin 49a).
ר’ יהודה אומר: המתרגם פסוק כצורתו – הרי זה בדאי, והמוסיף עליו – הרי זה מחרף ומגדף! אלא מאי תרגום? תרגום דידן.
R. Judah said: “If one translates a verse literally, he is a liar; if he adds thereto he is a blasphemer and a libeler. Then what is meant by translation? Our [authorized] translation.”
An example is the Bible translation of Moses Landau (1833-37): a composite of Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch, Psalms, and Five Scrolls, with later translations of the other books. See Crawford Howell Toy and Richard Gottheil, “Bible Translations,” The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906).
Zev Eleff and Menachem Butler, “Moses Mendelssohn and the Orthodox Mind,” The Lehrhaus (2017).
