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.

And yet on a visit to Sulzbach, after being shown around an abandoned Jewish synagogue and cemetery by a local guide, Haim Be’er was in for a surprise when, in a small municipal museum, he was handed a printed manuscript of a Hebrew poem by Allioli written in 1821. The surprise was probably not so much the poem’s existence; hearing of it, one suspects (though he does not actually say so), may have been what brought Be’er to Sulzbach in the first place. Rather, it was its remarkable proficiency and contents, which reveal its author to have been not only a lover of Hebrew familiar with its contemporary literature and not just with the Bible and rabbinic writings (as was traditionally the case with Christian scholars of the language), but an aspiring Hebrew poet in his own right.

Entitled “In Praise of the Hebrew Language,” Allioli’s poem, as published by Be’er in Haaretz, has eleven stanzas, each with six unrhymed lines of roughly equal length; my translation of the first three and last three of them seeks to be as literal as possible while preserving the high level of the language. Stanza 1 begins by invoking Hebrew’s sacred status as the language of Creation and of Revelation at Sinai, whose God, flanked by cherubim, was believed to be present in the Ark of the Tabernacle and the Temple’s Holy of Holies.

Thou, child of heaven, mistress of all tongues,
Exalted art thou from primeval time
By He who dwelt betwixt the cherubim.
From on high He descended on His holy mount
With pen of fire to engrave thee on twin tablets,
His flame emblazoning thee upon them.

Stanza 2 salutes Hebrew as the language of the Five Books of Moses:

Moses, God’s chosen, great lawgiver and intercessor,
Mightily labored to enhance thy splendor
And make it like unto the spreading dawn.
Installed in thy glory, thee he crowned sovereign
And gave thee the golden scepter of Jeshurun
To reign and to rule with in honor sublime.

In Stanza 3, Allioli turns to the figure of King David, whose Psalms raised Hebrew verse to its apogee.

Then shone a star in Bethlehem, the son of Jesse,
Sweet singer of Israel, prince of all poets.
Thou and his lyre were his comfort in hardship,
And once he sat stalwart on his firm throne,
Thee he uplifted with the fair strains of his Psalms,
And with his minstrels thy beauty perfected.

Stanzas 4 and 5 continue to trace Hebrew’s course through the books of the Prophets, after which Stanzas 6 through 8 lament its decline in post-biblical times when “thy sister Aramaic clasped thy sons to her bosom,” replacing Hebrew as the Jews’ spoken language. It is understandable that Allioli makes no mention of such great post-biblical Hebrew prose works like the Mishnah and the midrash, since his topic is poetry, not prose. Odder, however, is his failure to acknowledge any of the great post-biblical Hebrew poets. It is hard to believe that he did not at least know of the more renowned of such figures, such as Judah Halevi or Solomon ibn Gabirol; nor can one argue that his was a case of the Christian supersessionism that refuses to credit Judaism with any post-biblical achievements, since this is precisely what he does in Stanzas 9 through 11. Perhaps he simply did not want to make an already long poem longer or overly complicate it.

The poem’s final stanzas, which celebrate Hebrew’s revival in Allioli’s own times, specifically refer, as Haim Be’er points out, to three Hebrew authors of the early Haskalah period: Naftali Herz Weisel or Wessely (1725–1805), Isaac Halevi Satanov (1732-1804), and Shlomo or Solomon Pappenheim (1740-1814). Wessely, who hailed from Hamburg in northern Germany and whose father’s name was Yissachar, wrote a prose defense of poetry and a good deal of poetry himself; his “Songs of Majesty” (Shirey Tif’eret) is a verse retelling of the story of Moses and Pharoah, while among his Hebrew translations was one of the apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon.” Satanov was a prolific author, a volume of whose poems was called “Fables of Asaf” (In the book of Psalms, Asaf is one of David’s musical accompaniers.) Pappenheim’s Y’ri’ot Shlomo, “Solomon’s Tent Sheets,” was a Hebrew thesaurus. These stanzas read:

Now cometh an age when from thy lowly state
Thou art restored! Wise souls of Israel,
Thy true worth knowing, have raised thee from the depths.
Like sailors retrieving the storm-shattered pieces
Of a sunk ship, they thy scattered parts salvaged
And rejoined, lighting with radiance Western lands.

Now Ben-Yissachar’s lute is heard in the north.
His songs, majestic, sing of redemption
From a monarch’s cruel hands and grant the gift
Of Solomonic wisdom to his people,
While Yitzhak Halevi vies with Asaf’s fables
And Shlomo cunningly pitches his golden tent.

Look down from thy place of heavenly glory
Upon thy young servant! Grant him thy grace and thy grace notes,
And shine thy light on those who love thee. Lead them
In sacred tune to thy glorious shrine,
And there reveal its secret of stored treasure!
Descend, descend from thy high place, that we may joy in thy bounty!

Allioli’s allusion to “Western lands” would seem to be a double one: to Western Europe (in which he included Germany), where the Haskalah had its start, and to the west as lying opposite the “spreading dawn” of Hebrew’s sunrise years. How well he actually knew Haskalah literature is difficult to say. Although the references to Wessely, Satanov, and Pappenheim do not necessarily indicate more than a passing familiarity with it, the Hebrew of his poem is so rich and skillful, and so obviously influenced by the rhetoric and tropes of the Hebrew verse of his age, that one must assume that he read no small amount of it.

If Allioli wrote additional poems in Hebrew, as the last stanza of “In Praise of the Hebrew Language” implies that he hoped to do, they have been lost. A pity, because he had considerable talent, and “In Praise of the Hebrew Language” compares favorably with other Hebrew poems of the age, which was not an outstanding one for Hebrew verse. History does not lack Bible translators. As a Christian, let alone a Catholic priest, in the hall of fame of Hebrew poets, Joseph Franz von Allioli would have been one of a kind.