Drori, Danielle

Junior Fellow: October 2021–August 2022

Research Project: Translation Scepticism in Modern Hebrew Literature and Early Zionist Thought

This project examines claims about the untranslatability of Hebrew in Hebrew essays and fictional works from the late nineteenth century to the third decade of the twentieth century. Recording and analysing such claims, it sets out to locate them in two primary contexts: the growing number of published translations in the Hebrew literary field in Europe in the early twentieth century and the rise of nationalist and racialised notions of language that link geographical, ethnic, and philological origins. The project asks why a number of Hebrew writers and Zionist thinkers expressed scepticism towards the idea of vernacularising Hebrew in the early twentieth century by underscoring translational limitations and the asymmetry between Hebrew and other languages. Did these writers believe that Hebrew was innately untranslatable? On what Jewish sources, from the Bible to Jewish mysticism, did they rely? Was the expression of translation scepticism a political act, or did it manifest a spiritual position, or both? And what can early twentieth-century Hebrew translation scepticism teach us about the shared history of Jewish nationalism and the so-called revival of the Hebrew language?

Danielle Drori is a lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, London.