Mendelssohn’s Genesis: German written in Hebrew letters: (discussion, dictionary, bibliography and exercises)

For almost two centuries, German was also written and printed in Hebrew letters, giving Ashkenazic Jewish readers access to German-language religious, educational and secular texts while remaining within the familiar world of the Hebrew script. This distinctive literary tradition flourished from the age of the Haskalah until the destruction of European Jewish culture during the Holocaust. Mendelssohn’s Genesis: German Written in Hebrew Letters is a large-format scholarly workbook designed to recover the ability to read this neglected form of written German. At its centre is Moses Mendelssohn’s celebrated German translation of Genesis, first published in Berlin in 1780. The complete fifty-chapter text is presented in Hebrew letters, accompanied by a line-by-line Latin-script rendering. The arrangement allows readers to compare the two scripts directly while becoming accustomed to the right-to-left organisation of the Hebrew text. The workbook includes: • detailed bidirectional conversion rules for changing German between Latin and Hebrew scripts; • the complete German text of Mendelssohn’s Genesis in Hebrew letters with Latin-script assistance; • an alphabetical biscriptal dictionary of 4,303 word forms used in the translation, together with an appendix of names and other source-language forms; • an evidence-graded bibliographic survey of more than 160 editions and imprints of German-language books printed in Hebrew letters; • a practical list of 10,000 frequently used German words rendered in Mendelssohn-style Hebrew orthography. The language throughout remains German: this is not a translation into Hebrew or Yiddish, but a systematic presentation of German in the Hebrew script. Combining historical documentation, textual scholarship, dictionary reference and practical exercises, the volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in German studies, Jewish studies, Yiddish studies, Germanic studies, linguistics, translation, book history and European intellectual history. It may also serve independent readers seeking to acquire an important reading skill. This workbook restores access to a substantial body of Jewish and European cultural heritage that has remained largely inaccessible since the mid-twentieth century.