André Chouraqui, or Bible Translation in the Light of Biography

Translators are not born. They become translators. They come to it by strange, roundabout paths, where personal history and history at large mingle with circumstance and an immoderate love of words, of dialogue, and of communication between people and between peoples. But what strange conjunction of circumstances leads someone to translate the foundational texts of the three great monotheistic religions, to put his name to the Chouraqui Bible and to a contemporary French version of the Qur’an? It is possible to attempt an explanation after the fact, once the greater part of the work is done. A substantial autobiography, L’amour fort comme la mort (Love as Strong as Death, Robert Laffont, 1990, 516 pp.), completes a first retrospective look at a turbulent course of life, offered in the preface to the reissue of his translation of Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart (Desclée de Brouwer, 1950a/1972). The writer had already published a first assessment of his journey in 1979, in Ce que je crois (What I Believe, Grasset).

Biography, of course, does not explain everything. If it did, many people who live across several cultures, languages and religions and undergo the same upheavals of history would “necessarily” arrive at achievements like those of André Chouraqui. A biographical approach cannot provide scientific “proof,” but it can reveal the main currents of a life, its ruptures and changes of direction, and the background against which this extraordinary man made his choices and pursued his work. One of his friends called him “the man who walked through the walls between religions.”

André Chouraqui’s translations can be fully understood and assessed only when we recognize that he was at once a poet and a scholar, with a lawyer’s precision and a mystic’s spirituality. He studied at a rabbinical school and trained in linguistics. He was a historian, a man of action who worked on the ground, a world traveller in the cause of interfaith dialogue, and an unofficial ambassador for Jewish culture and its renewal in Israel. Amid his ceaseless activities, meetings, lectures and journeys, the writer always felt the need to stop and withdraw, to face the solitude of the blank page in the discipline of retreats. Those retreats proved fruitful, allowing successive layers of his work as a translator to take shape.

The places that gave birth to the Chouraqui Bible matter as much as the turbulent times in which it matured. There was his Algerian childhood, his first journeys into the Sahara and his stay in the oasis of Ouargla in 1940. There was his forced retreat to the rugged mountains and Resistance country of Haute-Loire and Ardèche, a stronghold of Protestantism, where he translated Bahya between Resistance operations from 1942 to 1945. In 1954 he stayed in a cell at the Dominican hermitage of Sainte-Baume, dedicated to Mary Magdalene and overlooking Provence, to work on one of his first biblical translations, the Psalms. Later, in Israel, he withdrew to the guesthouse of the Cistercian abbey at Latrun to prepare the edition of L’Univers biblique (The Biblical World).

Above all, after settling in his house in Abu Tor, Jerusalem, in 1964, he kept to a disciplined routine of writing in black ink in his study. Its broad picture window opened onto an immense sky and an unobstructed view of the walls of the Old City. Jerusalem was both mystical and prosaic, a city at the meeting point of East and West, a city of the three monotheistic religions. From his desk the translator could see the church bell towers, the minarets, and the golden dome of the “Mosque of Omar,” overlooking the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple below.

The Formative Years

A. A multilingual childhood

An early familiarity with the three great religions of the Book and the tension of a threefold identity, Jewish, Algerian and French, nourished André Chouraqui’s life and work. He was born on 11 August 1917, three kilometres from the Mediterranean, in the small western Algerian town of Aïn-Témouchent, near Oran. From the cradle he absorbed the rhythms of the civilizations around him, each carrying its culture through its language: Hebrew and Jewish, French and Christian, Arabic and Muslim. Contrary to what I suggest at the beginning of this article, “Translators are not born. They become translators,” André Chouraqui regarded his vocation as something he had plainly been born with:

“You are born a translator just as you are born a poet. I never decided to become one. I had been one since my earliest childhood, among people who spoke to me or brought me up in the four or five languages they used. That is how my brain acquired a ‘chip,’ to use the language of computer specialists, that served me throughout my life.” (L’amour fort comme la mort, p. 459)

The linguistic conditions in Aïn-Témouchent were indeed ideal for anyone who loved languages. In the street and with his grandparents, André spoke Arabic. At school and with his parents, brothers and sisters, he spoke French. He conversed in Spanish with Anita, the young maid in the household. In the synagogue, Hebrew and Aramaic prevailed in worship and study. For many people born in a multilingual setting, the result is generally disastrous: no language is truly their mother tongue, and speech, and even more so writing, becomes a kind of pidgin or creole, an unconscious mixture of words and turns of phrase borrowed now from one language, now from another. For those who are gifted or simply curious, multilingualism is a source of extraordinary wealth:

“One of my favourite pastimes was looking for correspondences between words of the same family in the languages spoken around me, Hebrew and Arabic, French and Spanish. […] In this way, a treasury of words began to accumulate in my memory, which was good and well organized…” (ibid., p. 454)

The tool, then, was at hand and grew more finely honed with time. By itself it cannot explain the vocation, still less the spiritual journey that gave rise to the translations of three sacred books.

B. Discovering the Bible

In the beginning was the Hebrew Bible and the sound of its words, heard in the synagogue and at Talmud Torah from the age of three and repeated from memory before their meaning was understood. But the contest with the secular French culture imparted at secondary school was unequal. André Chouraqui’s bar mitzvah, celebrated in the main synagogue of Aïn-Témouchent in the summer of 1929, marked his last formal link with Jewish tradition. He continued to fast on Yom Kippur and to refrain from eating bread at Passover. In every other respect he became a thoroughly French schoolboy. He retained some ties with the East through the Arabic language and grammar classes offered at the lycée in Oran. But Western literature became his passion, and during the summer holidays he read everything he could get his hands on, novelists and poets alike, with a particular fondness for the Romantics. As for God, he was relegated to the prop cupboard.

His first encounter as an adult with the Bible of his ancestors came by a roundabout route, and a Christian one. In the summer of 1934, between the two parts of his baccalaureate examinations, André Chouraqui went to metropolitan France for ankle surgery that partially relieved a disability caused by an attack of polio at the age of seven. The clinic that took him in, in Courbevoie, was run by a Protestant charitable organization. Two young nurses, who planned to serve God in missions in Africa or Oceania, introduced him to the Bible in Louis Segond’s Protestant translation. They engaged him in long discussions, and later in correspondence, about God and spiritual realities.

In November 1935 he began his studies at the Faculty of Law on rue Soufflot in Paris. At the same time, the future translator of the Gospels resumed his dialogue with the older of the two nurses, Yvonne, the niece of a Protestant pastor from the Cévennes. For nearly three years she spoke to him about her faith and opened up the depths of spiritual life to him, still hoping to convert him to Protestantism. Meanwhile, André took to accompanying one of his law professors to Sunday Mass to listen to the organist at Notre-Dame. After the concert, he often stayed to pray in the silence of the nave. His atheism was deeply shaken as he discovered a civilization he had known, at best, through books:

“The cathedrals, the churches, sacred music, Christian art, convents and monasteries […] What a shock for the little barbarian I was, just out of my colonial deserts.” (p. 126)

Meeting Pastor Louis Dallière in July 1936 marked a turning point. For the first time a Christian, instead of trying to convert him, spoke to him of the messianic vocation of the people of Israel and condemned in categorical terms both Christian antisemitism and the Nazi propaganda that had been turning Jews into outcasts since 1933. Directed back to his roots, definitively convinced after an “illumination” in the Hautes-Alpes in February 1937 that “God exists,” and aware of how far the Bible he read and meditated on in French was from the Hebrew original, André decided to study his heritage.

“I was Jewish, and I did not clearly know what that might mean. That Hitler wanted to persecute me, and might even kill me for that reason, was an obvious fact beyond my power to change. What I could do, at least, was find out why this thing that threatened my very existence was happening.” (p. 157)

In Paris, André Zaoui, a former schoolmate from the lycée in Oran, put him in touch with the Rabbinical School of France and gave him his first Hebrew lessons. André Chouraqui never intended to become a rabbi, but from then on he pursued legal and Jewish studies in parallel, first in Paris and later in hiding. Between 1937 and 1939 he earned his law degree and then an advanced diploma in law. He continued studying Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries with Georges Vajda, and Talmud and Aramaic with Abraham Back, at the Rabbinical School, the Sorbonne and the School for Advanced Studies.

“My legal studies had been invaluable in instilling in me a devotion to clarity in expressing ideas. The Semitic languages my teachers taught me at the Sorbonne, at the École pratique des hautes études and, even more, at the Rabbinical School of France opened my mind to the cultures of the East.” (L’amour fort comme la mort, p. 454)

C. The war years

The young North African student spent every summer in Algeria and returned to France each autumn, even after war broke out. He followed the Rabbinical School when it relocated first to Vichy and then to Clermont-Ferrand. His rediscovery of the East, through experience as well as books, encouraged his “return to Judaism.” His Judaism was closer to that of the ancient Hebrews and medieval mystics than to the Talmudic tradition, a form of religious life in which ritual observance was reduced to a minimum. His return did not sever his ties with the other monotheistic civilizations. His love for two young Catholic women in succession, first Magdeleine, whom he met early in 1938, and then her cousin Colette, to whom Magdeleine introduced him late in 1939, led him deeper into the demanding spiritual world of Christian faith, doctrine and dogma.

Early in 1940 he spent several months in the Sahara, in the oasis of Ouargla, where his brother Charles was stationed on military service. He agreed to teach French to the qadi, the Muslim judge, in exchange for lessons in the Qur’an and Arabic. These lessons would serve him five years later when he took an advanced diploma in Muslim law and local customary practices at the faculty in Algiers. In another oasis, Ghardaïa, he saw Kharijites, a Muslim sect, the White Fathers, and a Jewish community of three thousand living side by side despite tensions. The Jewish community gave him a sense of what everyday life might have been like for the Jews of the biblical East in the time of the Mishnah.

He returned to France in May 1940 and a month later had to flee Paris, taking Colette with him on his bicycle. He experienced the German bombing of Orléans and returned to Algeria, where he registered with the Oran bar and began his legal training under a head of the bar. In December he married Colette, who had meanwhile converted to Judaism. Following anti-Jewish legislation and the repeal of the Crémieux Decree, and before Vichy’s promulgation on 20 October 1941 of the “Statute of the Jews,” which excluded Jews from most professions, André took the initiative and resigned in June 1941. His parents were financially ruined.

At this time, with the help of Rabbi Isaac Rouche, deputy to the chief rabbi of Oran, David Askenazi, father of Léon, known as Manitou, André undertook to translate Duties of the Heart. The treatise was written in Arabic by Bahya ibn Paquda, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of eleventh-century Spain. The work abounds in biblical verses and gave Chouraqui his first encounter with the difficulties of biblical translation. He delivered his first public lecture, “How Should We Read the Bible?”, to a small group of Jewish intellectuals in Oran who had been thrown out of work by the Vichy laws. He was twenty-four. The central questions and most of the themes of his future biblical translations were already present in that lecture in germinal form.

On 20 June 1942 a new discriminatory law struck the Jews of France. In July came the roundup and deportation of Jews and Alsatians from the University of Strasbourg, which had relocated to Clermont-Ferrand, and on 8 July Jews were expelled from the city. The Rabbinical School was dismantled and its ranks decimated. André and Colette took refuge in Chaumargeais, four kilometres from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. There he made contact with emerging Resistance networks and became the representative of the OSE, the organization for the rescue of Jewish children, in Haute-Loire and Ardèche. For more than two years he travelled from village to village, hiding children and obtaining false papers for refugees threatened with deportation. He witnessed Protestant pastors and villages putting solidarity into practice at a time when Jews were being hunted across France.

His protectors in Le Chambon found a teaching post and welcoming lodgings for his teacher Georges Vajda, who settled a few kilometres from the Chouraquis. Every day the two men devoted several hours to their shared passion, the Bible and Bahya ibn Paquda. Vajda, one of the foremost medievalists of the day and a distinguished scholar of Hebrew and Arabic, was preparing a book on the medieval Jewish theologian who celebrated the love of God. It would appear in 1956. Chouraqui finished the translation he had begun in Oran. Bahya’s Duties of the Heart was published in 1950 with a preface by Vajda.

“I undertook the translation of Duties of the Heart because at that time, in our Resistance hideouts, no other intellectual work was possible for me. The book contains many passages from the Bible. For my own use, then, I had to formulate the problems involved in translating biblical texts and devise a method for dealing with them. Without knowing it, I had embarked on the path that would lead me to translate the Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. My entire life was barely enough for that work.” (L’amour fort comme la mort, p. 459)

After Bahya ibn Paquda, he translated and annotated Solomon ibn Gabirol’s mystical poem The Crown of the Kingdom (Revue Thomiste, 1952, reissued by Fata Morgana in 1996). He then translated two biblical texts that had left a particularly deep mark on literary history and spiritual life, the Song of Songs (1951) and the Psalms (1955). These translations immediately won favour with the public. They were lucid, written in a supple, literary French. At this stage he was not yet seeking to overturn the conventions of traditional translation.

These formative years, scarred by war, allow us to follow the intellectual development and spiritual search of a man who combined the rigour and Cartesian discipline of a university scholar and French jurist, holding a state doctorate from the Paris Faculty of Law, with the flight of poetry and the exacting demands of true mystics. His first volume of poems, Cantique pour Nathanaël (Song for Nathanael), published in 1957, prefigures, in the aftermath of the slaughter of the Shoah, the individual’s ascent from darkness and the abyss into the light. It also prefigures the reconciliation of human beings with one another, “which can come about only through the reconciliation of humanity with the Being of being.” Its lyricism follows the personal journey of Nathanaël, otherwise known as André-Natân Chouraqui.

Wary of ideologies and shunning sectarianism, he engaged with spiritual traditions of every kind, without ever repudiating any part of his Jewish identity. It is hardly surprising that he later became one of the early advocates of Jewish–Christian friendship and Israeli–Arab dialogue, in addition to engaging with faiths from Asia and Africa. Above all, we discover a man for whom the Bible is a living book, a book that speaks to the present and to all people. It is also a book whose secrets Chouraqui strives to uncover by equipping himself with the necessary tools: linguistics, exegesis and the history of religions. His approach combines love with scholarly criticism.

D. On the road to Jerusalem

In November 1947, René Cassin, whom Chouraqui had met after the war, appointed him Deputy Secretary-General of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a post he held until 1952. When André, who felt unsuited to administrative duties, wanted to resign, Cassin created a post especially for him as the Alliance’s permanent delegate. It left him free to devote six months each year to his scholarly and literary work, wherever he chose to live.

Between 1950 and 1957, the AIU sent André Chouraqui to Israel on numerous occasions to lay the foundations for a network of schools and support committees. His first encounter with Jerusalem, in August 1950, left him dazzled. Gradually the wish to settle in Israel matured. He made the decision in 1956 and acted on it in 1958. His duties as the Alliance’s permanent representative could readily be carried out from the capital of the Jewish state to which he had devoted his doctoral thesis in 1948.

And there was Annette Lévy, a young Jewish woman of Alsatian origin whom he had met in Paris a few years earlier and who dreamed of living in Israel. They spent the summer of 1957 together on a kibbutz in Galilee. In 1958 they went to Jerusalem to marry. After spending several months learning to speak modern Hebrew at Ulpan Akiva near Netanya, they made Jerusalem their permanent home. The biblical translator spoke haltingly, rather hampered by his bookish knowledge of the Hebrew of the prophets. In 1961 he acquired Israeli citizenship without losing his French citizenship. In Jerusalem the couple eventually bought a plot of land on Ein Rogel Street, below the village of Abu Tor and facing the Jordanian border. In 1964 they moved into the house they had built there, where they were still living at the time of writing. Their five children, born between 1959 and 1968, helped make them firmly rooted Israelis.

Translating the Bible

It was in Israel that the Bible, its language and its landscapes ceased to be things known from books and became a living, tangible reality:

“My reading of the Bible was renewed. I understood better texts I had translated and knew by heart, as if an opaque veil had fallen from my eyes. My eyes could focus better. My gaze grew sharper, my reading clearer.” (L’amour fort comme la mort, p. 460)

When Jacques Deschanel asked him in 1972 to translate the Bible for Desclée de Brouwer, he said yes. Twenty-one years earlier he had declined a similar proposal from Jacques Madaule:

“I felt able to accept. I realized that everything since my adolescence, or even my childhood, had been preparing me, consciously or unconsciously, for this work. The fruit I carried had ripened. It was time to pick it.” (p. 460)

“I had thus been preparing for this work all my life, and it was ready to be born. All that remained was for me to get to work and bring it into the world.” (p. 461)

In twenty-eight months, from 10 April 1972 to 14 August 1974, André Chouraqui wrote out by hand in black ink the first draft of his first complete translation of the three parts of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch, the Prophets and the Writings, and of the four Gospels, which he called Les Quatre Annonces (The Four Announcements). Working alone, in just over two years, he translated texts that had matured in the East over more than a millennium and had shaped the Judeo-Christian consciousness of the West. He brought out their underlying unity, in particular by rendering their shared Semitic vocabulary consistently.

“Translating the Hebrew Bible was, as I have said, no deliberate decision on my part. The undertaking had imposed itself on me, and when the time came my translation poured from my pen during the twenty-eight months in which I wrote the first draft, as if in a state of ecstasy.” (p. 463)

Once typed, in an age before personal computers, the manuscripts were sent to specialists who reviewed them, added notes and offered criticism. Chouraqui went back to work on the text, revised it, sent it to other specialists, and made further changes. The first version of his Hebrew Bible and New Testament then appeared in twenty-six volumes between 1974 and 1977. The text was published on its own, without commentary. Its division into volumes, chapters and verses followed Masoretic usage, and the titles returned to those used in the Hebrew tradition: one volume for Genesis, now called Entête (At the Head, Beréchit), another for Exodus, Les Noms (The Names, Chemoth), and so on.

At the same time, he published Vie quotidienne des hommes de la Bible (Daily Life of the People of the Bible, 1978), which reworked and expanded his 1971 book La vie quotidienne des Hébreux au temps de la Bible (Daily Life of the Hebrews in Biblical Times). See also Moïse (Moses, Éditions du Rocher, 1995), which won the Prix Méditerranée. He set out his credo in Ce que je crois (What I Believe, 1979), published in Grasset’s series of that name, briefly tracing four essential stages in the maturation of his major work:

“The passion for translating took hold of me as a child in our synagogue in Aïn-Témouchent, where I tried to grasp the meaning of the Hebrew Bible and our prayers by following them in bilingual editions. As an adolescent, translating meant getting to the heart of the ancestral heritage my parents were trying to pass on to me. Then came the time when I compared what I understood of the text with what the translations said. For my own benefit I restored the meanings of words and the harmonies of rhythms as they rang in my head, the head of a Hebrew thoroughly shaped by French culture. This is how my translations of Bahya’s Duties of the Heart, the Song of Songs and the Psalms came into being. My vocation as a translator would probably have stopped there if I had not come to settle in Jerusalem. My plan to translate the Bible could now become a reality. I had ground beneath my feet, the land of the prophets and apostles, and I could enter into dialogue with the Bible in the language in which it was written.” (Ce que je crois, pp. 248–249)

André Chouraqui’s vocation was thus the result of a slow development, a forty-year gestation that came to term after a “revolution” in his very being. The act of translating took on different functions as his search progressed. It was a spiritual search, but also a search for identity by a “colonized” man from nowhere, whose roots reached simultaneously into three continents, Africa, Europe and Asia, none of which was truly his homeland:

“The discomfort of belonging to three worlds as different as Muslim Algeria, Christian France and Israel heightened my need to search for my identity, and beyond myself, for the identity of the whole human being, the human being stripped bare, and the Being that grounds human existence.” (L’amour fort comme la mort, p. 456)

The encounter between a tool, multilingualism, and a spiritual search for identity born of circumstance and history led André Chouraqui to read and reread the foundational texts of the three great religions. He never ceased to engage with those faiths, and his growing familiarity with them eventually culminated in a translation that crowned his work. The translation itself was taken up afresh again and again, to follow the winding course of life and thought, which never cease to surprise and unsettle us…

But that is another story.

Francine Kaufmann