The First Hebrew Translation of Plato's Symposium

The first Hebrew translation of Plato's Symposium was published in Jaffa in 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, in the series Yephet, edited by veteran Hebrew writer Alexander Zisskind Rabbinovich. The translator, Asher Ben-Israel, was a young secondary school teacher in Jaffa, who had no knowledge of Greek. My article shows, by means of a close comparison of passages from various parts of the dialogue in the original Greek, in two German translations published in 1910 and 1912, and in Ben-Israel's Hebrew translation, that Ben-Israel translated the Symposium from these two translations, picking and choosing his Hebrew phrases from each of them with no guiding principle except his own taste. I cite some contemporary evidence to show that in the Hebrew teachers' training college in Jerusalem, where the translator had studied some years earlier, German was the first foreign language, and German literature was extensively studied. In the second part of the article I present some basic information about the main dramatis personae: Ben-Israel himself and Alexander Zisskind Rabbinovich on the Hebrew side, and Rudolf Kassner and Kurt Hidebrandt on the German side.