Pre-eminent among gentiles: Milton’s major poetry in Hebrew translation

This chapter examines the various extant Hebrew translations of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Both poems were first translated into elaborate biblical and midrashic Hebrew in the nineteenth century by interested Jewish readers with widely differing religious, spiritual, and literary agendas. As this chapter argues, a close examination of these translations, and their implicit and explicit aims, reveals much about the vexed, fertile relationship between Jewish and Christian consciousness. Even more interestingly, this discussion ultimately sheds fresh and important light on the peculiar Hebraic integrity of Milton’s English verse. This chapter proposes that, when viewed in light of these translations, many previous questions raised with respect to Milton’s putative anti-Semitism and his ambivalent Hebraism may be rethought and readdressed from the outside in, as it were, with startling results.