Bnei Brak or Silk Cushions?

Post date: Mar 13, 2018 2:01:34 PM

In 2002, Yona Sabar (יונה צבר) wrote a Hebrew article for the Hebrew Language and Cognate journal Leshonenu. The article was about a comparative study of two translations of the Passover Haggadah into Jewish Neo-Aramaic. In this article, Sabar mentions that in the translation of these Haggadot, the place where the 5 Rabbis in the Passover-Night-Learning anecdote meet, is on “silk cushions” instead of the more mainstream translation of the place called Bnei Brak.The well-respected translator of the Kasher Haggadah, Aaron Greenbaum, translates the passages as follows:

It is told of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon, that they were one reclining around their Passover table at Bnei Brak….

Bnei Brak is a place already mentioned in Joshua 19:45 and in an Akkadian text about conquests of King Sancherib in 701 BCE and should therefore not be problematic to translate. However, the above-mentioned article informs us that Kurdish Jews would traditionally translate the Haggadah orally into Jewish Neo-Aramaic and would translate “reclining at Bnei Brak” as “reclining on silk cushions”! The reason for this is that the 15th-century Portuguese Jewish statesman, philosopher, and Bible commentator Don Yitzchak Abarbanel in his Haggadah commentary (Zevach Pesach) explains that there is no other possibility of understanding the expression “Bnei Brak” than “silk cushions”. His assumption is that the expression stands for “objects that are shining” and that this must surely mean they were sitting on silk cushions. Abarbanel is definitely a minority opinion because most commentators do understand it to be the place name but it was interesting to see how Abarbanel’s opinion had made its way into translations. Therefore, I decided to see if I could find silk cushions in any of the English translations of the Haggadah which I am researching.

English Translations

The short answer is no. No English translator has ever translated Bnei Brak as “silk cushions”. But I did find quite a few interesting translations. Let’s state upfront that the most influential English Bible translation, the King James Bible, already in 1611 translated the name (in Joshua 19:45) as “Bneberak” [one word] preceding all English Haggadah translations and making it clear this is a place name. However, the Hebrew name “Bnei Brak” consists of two words of which the first, “Bnei”, can be translated as “children of”, while the second, “Brak”, could be understood as the name of a person, Berak, which was confusing for early translators.

Descendants of Haman?

In 1770, the first to translate the Haggadah into English (London), Alexander, therefore translated that the rabbis “were entertained amongst the children of Berak” and added the footnote that Berak is “a place inhabited by proselytes, Jews descended from Haman” (More about this is THIS POST).

The second English Haggadah translation came almost 25 years later by the renowned Anglo-Jewish scholar, David Levi. Levi was an autodidact and considered the most authoritative spokesman for Judaism in the 18th century English speaking world. Whereas Alexander’s translations often show a lack of knowledge (whose translations are frequently wrong), David Levi had a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish sources so it is surprising to see how his translation of Bnei Brak is identical to Alexander’s including the strange footnote.

Bnei Brak in Hebrew

A far less-known but extremely influential translator/ editor is Isaac Levi, the third translator of the Haggadah into English. Isaac took David Levi’s translations and “edited” them (making gross mistakes along the way). In this instance, he reversed the English “children of Berak” to the name Bnei Brak but instead of translating it, he left the name in Hebrew. He didn’t touch the footnote:

Isaac’s non-translation and strange solution was reprinted for decades although his name (Isaac’s) quickly disappeared from the title pages, replaced mistakenly with David Levi’s name. As such, this translation crossed the Atlantic in 1837 to become the First English Haggadah translation printed in the USA. But, with a twist… The first of the two Hebrew printed words got lost along the way and only “Brak” stayed. Now the rabbis met in “Brak” [written in Hebrew] but without any footnote to explain what this was.

Isaac’s translation was printed and copied and reprinted countless times all over the USA by many different publishers, always with the same Hebrew “Brak” and without the explanatory footnote, for at least half a century, and used by many communities except for the Reform ones (stating in 1842) who would not include this passage at all. In the meantime, in Britain, Isaac’s original translation with Hebrew “Bnei Brak” AND footnote was also copied by different publishers over and over again.

Finally Bnei Brak in English

Only in 1897 did Rabbi (Rev.) Aaron Asher Green publish his “Revised Haggadah” in London in which we find the place name “B’nei B’rak” as the meeting place of the rabbis for the first time.

Green’s translation of the Haggadah is revolutionary in many ways as can be seen from my post on the “First Bowdlerized Haggadah”.

Eight years later, the first women to translate the Haggadah, Lillie Cowen, would do the same in the USA so that we now had a proper translation on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, the blind spelling mistake prone Luncs would reprint Isaac’s translation in Jerusalem in 1901 and Dr. A. Th. Philips would still do so in the USA in 1912.

One of my favourite translators is William Rosenau (1906). Rosenau, who would eventually become a radical reformer of rituals, in this Haggadah still adheres to the original Hebrew text “for the reason that the charm of the Hagadah is intimately linked to its old form.” But he did, apparently, not think this held true for the English translation which he radically changed using explanatory and therefore lengthy translations. Rosenau gives us some more information about the meeting place. His translation reads:

“ The merit attaching to the narration of our deliverance, tradition emphasizes by the preservation of the following interesting incident: It is told of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah, Rabbi Akibah, and Rabbi Tarfon, teachers of the second century of the Common Era, that they once banqueted at the little town, Bene Berak,”

Influence of Zionism on English Translations

The modern-day city of Bnei Brak was founded as an agricultural village in 1924. By then, the connotations of descendants of Haman had long been forgotten as we can see from the footnote in the Seder Ritual for Passover-Eve (with a new translation and annotations by J.D. Eisenstein from 1928). Eisenstein wrote: "Bnei Brak - A town in Palestine, now a Jewish colony." Whereas the 1906 translator William Rosenau (see above) was a fervent anti-Zionist, Eisenstein had by 1928 already visited the Holy Land twice and had visited the town of Bnei Brak in 1926 so his footnote attests to his first-hand knowledge of the place. One year later a Haggadah produced in Budapest, Hungary and translated by Joseph Loewy and Joseph Guens also adds in a footnote that Bnei Brak is "a town in Palestine".

Cecil Roth adds in 1934 in his footnote that Bene Berak is "south-east of Jaffa" and when Louis Finkelstein writes his introduction to the Haggadah translated by Maurice Samuel in 1942, he writes at length about the rabbis who “were gathered in the village of Bene Berak, a short distance from Jerusalem, to celebrate the Passover.” Bnei Brak has finally become a real geographical place in the minds of the English translators. So much so that eventually, in 1943 in DeSola’s translation, Palestine has been promoted from a footnote to being part of the main translation text:

“It happened once in Palestine , more than eighteen hundred years ago, that Rabbi Eliezer , Rabbi Joshua , Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon reclining around their Passover table in Bne Brak.”

Vocalization of Bnei Brak

All translators seemed to have agreed by the 20th century that the meeting place was the town of Bnei Brak. It, therefore, came as a surprise to me to find in a Haggadah translated “into Prose and Verse by Maurice Myers” (1920) the name written as B’nei B’rok, following the Ashkenazi pronunciation. Looking back at the vocalization symbols in the Hebrew text, I noticed that the word Bnei Brak was indeed written with a “kamatz” which is pronounced by Ashkenazi Jews as [o] instead of [a], hence B’rok instead of “B’rak”.

Most Haggadot during that period used the kamatz vocalization although the original place name (in Joshua 19:45) is vocalized with a patach which is always pronounced as [a]. I had never noticed this but The Scholar’s Haggadah (Heinrich Guggenheim, 1995) shows that indeed the Ashkenazi and Yemenite tradition is to use the kamatz when vocalizing the word Bnei Brak in the Haggadah while Nussach Sfard uses a patach. Almost all modern Haggadot (and the modern-day city of Bnei Brak), no matter which tradition, use a patach. I have been told that Yemenite Jews when reading from the Haggadah say Benei Berok while when reading from Joshuah say Benei Berak. Interestingly enough, the first settlers of the modern-day Bnei Brak were Ashkenazi Hassidim but the town’s name is vocalized (as its Biblical source) Bnei Brak and not (as the Ashkenazi Haggadot) Bnei Brok.

Back to Silk Cushions?

The silk cushions, suggested by Abarbanel as adopted by the Kurdish Jews in their Neo-Aramaic translations never made it into the English translations. I was very disappointed to find out that the Abarbanel Haggadah, published by Artscroll in 1990 did not include this translation or even a mention of it. Quite a blunder I would say.