Shaye JD Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. English, Hebrew, and Aramaic volumes are stacked on all available makeshift surfaces. Most of the text is leather and the pages are translucent like onion skin. The speckled pattern on the wool sweater Cohen wears is very similar to the stack he almost camouflages on his desk.
Cohen, Nathan Ritaur Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, always envisioned translating the Mishnah into a single volume. Recently, he and his two collaborators completed his arduous decade-long journey to achieve just that. Its culmination was the publication of The Oxford Annotated Mishnah, published in his three volumes by Oxford University Press.
This ancient Jewish law is traditionally believed to have been given to Moses on Mount Sinai with the ten written commandments. Known as the “Oral Torah,” the Mishnah was memorized and passed down through recitation from generation to generation. This is the basis for discussion and interpretation meant to be deciphered by the community.
It was eventually edited and written down around 200 AD, but exactly when and who finally edited the text is a matter of debate. But Cohen knows that “at some point in history, the Mishnah will be written down as a book.”
Today, this foundation of rabbinic literature is learned in book form, divided into six sections (Sedalim) containing 63 tracts (Masquette). Cohen, who has perused the Mishnah since her early yeshiva education, refers to it affectionately as “unshakeable” in her discussions of Jewish law. The text details how to live every important aspect of life, from how to make and break vows to giving charity and negotiating marriage contracts. Although it is prescriptive, the conversations that continue to take place in Jewish study halls and synagogues around the world still leave considerable room for interpretation and debate.
Cohen has years of Jewish day-school education, and unless you have a solid grasp of Hebrew, reading the Mishnah is like cutting yourself in the middle of a complicated conversation with a stranger. He said it can cause a lot of confusion.
He set out, somewhat naively at first, to change it himself. “I thought to myself, I sat down and started doing it. After months of working on one booklet, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be long enough to complete the project.” He switched tacks.
The result is what Cohen calls a “group project.” With a total of 1,256 pages in three volumes, the process has taken him over a decade, and he has shared the translation and interpretation skills of his 50 scholars with diverse backgrounds in academic and religious institutions around the world. I made good use of it. Sadly, Goldenberg didn’t live to see this publication. The project was too extensive to print in his one volume, which Cohen envisioned.
“Ultimately, what we were trying to achieve was making the Mishnah accessible to those who otherwise would not have had access to it,” Cohen said. With a price tag of $645, he can’t say this will be economically accessible to everyone, but he expects a more affordable edition to come out soon.
A previous translation of note paved the way for this translation. Cohen nods to his 1930s edition by Herbert Danby, an Anglican priest who worked for the British colonial government in Jerusalem. “He got a big gold star and honor for teaching us Mishnah,” Cohen admits. “As far as I know, he is the first to translate the entire Mishnah into English.”
Neither you of Danby nor you will appear here. Oxford’s Annotated Mishnah is divided into lines that look like verses, with short sections enough to study during your lunch break and keep in your mind for the afternoon. I’m here. He tries to break sentences into short phrases. I run headers over the text to help the reader notice a slight shift in focus. ” Occasional footnotes define ambiguous words or variants of the manuscript.
Cohen says the effort could easily have spanned a lifetime if the contributing scholars had been determined to reach consensus on every concept. Their compromise on a more realistic timeline started with how they approached annotation.
He explained to the contributor: What he didn’t want was a prescriptive commentary telling readers how to understand the Mishnah.
“This is not beach reading,” Cohen said with a smile. “The goal is for an intelligent and serious reader to understand the text and move on.” I would like to open
Each contributor did not have to translate Hebrew words in the same way to achieve that result. In fact, it is this disagreement and the conversation that ensues that really makes the experience of engaging with the Mishnah what it is today.
