An Unusual and Beautiful Hebrew Poem by a 19th-Century Catholic Priest

The Hebrew author Haim Be’er is not well-known outside of Israel, where he enjoys a reputation both as a novelist and as a literary historian who takes an antiquarian’s delight in unearthing obscure aspects of Hebrew writers and books. In a recent article in the literary pages of the newspaper Haaretz, he tells of an unusual find: a Hebrew poem by a 19th-century Catholic priest, university professor, and Bible translator named Joseph Franz von Allioli.

Allioli (1793–1873) was himself far from unknown in his day. A native of the German town of Sulzbach, he was a scholar of Semitic and classical languages most renowned for his six-volume Ṻbersetzung der heiligen Schriften Alten und Neuen Testaments aus der Vulgata, published between 1830 and 1835. This translation of the Old and New Testaments, based on Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, was the first German Bible to receive the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, in whose eyes Martin Luther’s enormously influential 16th-century translation was the unacceptable work of a Protestant heretic. Allioli’s Bible was read widely in his lifetime and was, until supplanted by more modern rivals, the standard Scripture of German Catholicism.

Although Allioli studied and taught Hebrew, and used his knowledge of it to write about the Bible, he did not translate from it. Neither was he known to have written in it, nor was there any reason to think he might have, since non-Jewish scholars of Hebrew rarely knew it well enough to use it with any fluency, much less had occasion or motivation for doing so. I can’t think of a single serious Hebrew composition, whether in Allioli’s day or in the centuries preceding it, composed by a Christian.