
Fania Oz-Salzberger in the NYT [h/t: JC]:
For decades, since 1962, Israeli students of philosophy and political science had read Hobbes in Hebrew translation. It was a good edition, albeit incomplete: the Hebrew University Magnes Press was not a rich publishing house, and neither were its customers. Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was full of avid readers, underpaid translators and hard-pressed publishers, who created a magnificent bookshelf of classics and modern masterpieces, nonfiction and children’s books, all in Hebrew translations and in cheap, mostly paperback editions.
[...]The Hebrew title and the biblical references that remained in the abridged translation certainly delighted modern Hebrew readers, accustomed to Israel’s peripheral status on that era’s global map, but I do no think that any of them took seriously the political edge of Hobbes’ Hebraism. That was too remote, too Christian, and too early-modern-English to appeal to the plethora of socialists and nationalists, universalists and humanists crowding Jerusalem’s tiny cafes and halls of learning back then.
What those Zionist intellectuals wanted from Hobbes was not a reinforcement of their own Hebrew roots, but a strong philosophical anchoring in Western political tradition. The young Israeli polity, after all, wanted to be part and parcel of the liberal democratic covenant, the small Leviathan of well-governed states.
Many professors and teachers in those days had a heavy German accent: they had been educated in the Weimar Republic, and some had witnessed first hand, and survived by the skin of their teeth, the great downfall of German erudition and cultural finesse. Hobbes mattered to them, but never in a simplistic way: the great Englishman sported a multitude of meanings to his Israeli readers at that time.
More here.


















