The Production of Alterity: Rosenzweig's Translations of Jehuda Halevi

This article seeks to address the function of alterity in Franz Rosenzweig's book of translations of the poems and hymns of the Jewish medieval philosopher and poet Jehuda Halevi. The article proposes that alongside the alterity that all good translations produce, Rosenzweig's translation of Halevi effected a special kind of temporal cyclical index. In his philosophical work in The Star of Redemption (1921), Rosenzweig identified the role of experiencing the cyclical repetition of the year in the Jewish anticipation of eternity in the present. The article argues that Halevi translations reproduced the very same structures of cyclical repetition, and thus promoted Jewish alterity and eternity.