The Antisemitic Origin of Michelangelo's Horned Moses
Abstract
Rather than reflecting, as many have claimed, a benign "mis-translation" of Exodus 34 by St. Jerome, the horns on Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses are emblematic of a millennium-long tradition of antisemitism that stretched from antiquity to the days of the Italian Renaissance. Both through literary invective and iconography, Jews were portrayed as horned devils ministering to Satan. The recent cleaning of the paintings of the Sistine Chapel has revealed how Michelangelo adorned a portrait of Aaron's father-in-law with a circular yellow badge of shame, an antisemitic symbol common in Renaissance Italy that became the precursor of the yellow Magen David imposed on Jews by the Nazis five centuries later. By endowing Moses with horns, Michelangelo not only mocked the giver of the Ten Commandments but also satirized his nemesis Pope Julius II, whom the facial features of the portrait resemble.
... Patients have mostly a history of seizures with fever or an injury to the brain in their early life. The majority of temporal lobe seizures originates in the mesial temporal structures, primarily in the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala [2]. ...
... He must also have been aware of the fact that "some Jews did believe that Moses was literally horned" (Gilad, 2018). On the other hand, some researchers have argued that this translation has underlying Anti-Semitic intentions (Bertman, 2009). I am confident that students of translation will only benefit from a discussion of this dilemma and the reasons why Jerome turned to the literal translation; otherwise, we end up taking a word out of context and presenting Jerome as a laughing stock, which he does not deserve, while missing an excellent learning and teaching opportunity. ...
This paper revisits the issue of the importance of context and critical thinking in translation and translation training by examining the linguistic controversy over the translation of the word mokusatsu in the statement of Japan’s Prime Minister Suzuki in response to the Potsdam Declaration. There is a widespread belief that the bombing of Hiroshima in August of 1945 was caused by a translation mistake. The author sides with the opposing view, i.e. that such an approach takes one word of the statement out of context in order to shift the focus of the problem from politics to linguistics. The message of the statement is unambiguous when analyzed in its entirety. As a result, it is obvious there was no translation mistake and the bomb was dropped for reasons other than translation quality. Sadly enough, the myth lives on as a textbook example of ‘the worst translation mistake in history” whereas it should be taught as an example of probably ‘the worst translation myth in history’.
This article addresses the issue of translation quality and translation errors. The aim of the study is to show that when translating certain types of text, one should be cautious about speaking of “elementary translation errors” because they may be interpretations or dogmatic requirements. Discussed is the widespread view that the horns of Moses in Exodus 34:29-30 and 34:35 in the Vulgate are the result of an “elementary” translation error by St. Jerome who “confused” the Hebrew words keren “horn” and its derivative karan “shining, emitting light.” The author supports the view that this is not a translation error, but a conscious translation decision by Jerome, who was aware of the two possible interpretations of the Hebrew text, but deliberately departed from the Hebrew tradition and the Septuagint translation, choosing the literal translation based on certain theological considerations and personal views.
It is the purpose of this study to reflect on the manner in which a fragment of the Christian history of salvation, in other words, the transition from the Old to the New Covenant, is embodied in Teófilo’s spiritual process. This process starts with the cause that leads him to sign a pact with the Devil up until his redemption initiated by the imperfect figure of Moses’s shining face and finishes by his full participation in the New Law through the Eucharist and Marian worship. Specifically, this will be achieved through an analysis of his establishment of a new pact with God, which represents ultimately the redemptive victory over the pact with the Devil. The Devil’s agency, in turn, is reinforced in the text by using the widespread medieval motif of the relationship between the Jews and Satan, and emphasized by the practice of Solomonic magic, a type of necromancy allegedly of Jewish origin, but also by adding several other elements such as those coming from the popular lore.
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