Modern Censorship of Rashbam
I actually gave two talks at the recent Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) conference. I mentioned the one about Leitworte, that is, מילה מנחה, in a prior post.
Another talk I gave was in the Inclusion and Ethics in DH session. The abstract reads something like this:
Discovering Censored Translations of Biblical Commentaries
The availability of English translations of classic Hebrew Biblical commentaries makes such texts more accessible to the average reader. However, a risk is that the translator censors the more surprising and controversial comments, for ideological reasons. Indeed, the translator of several commentaries (Rabbeinu Chananel, Rashbam, Radak & Seforno), accessible on Sefaria, proudly explains that he omits material or paraphrases as needed, for ideology, brevity, or clarity [1]. For instance, he omits Rashbam’s first comment on Genesis 1:31, which might suggest, contrary to Orthodox Jewish doctrine, that day precedes night for the onset of the Sabbath, and only translates/presents the second [2].By programmatically comparing the Hebrew text with the translation, as well as comparing competing English translations (Eliyahu Munk’s vs. Sefaria Community, for the Rashbam commentary), we uncover these “interesting” comments for further manual and programmatic consideration. These comparisons include (a) simple inclusion / exclusion of the entire comment, (b) length of comment, (c) phrase by phrase comparisons employing gensim word similarity. These highlighted texts are evaluated by human efforts to assess precision and recall. Ideally, the output can be used to highlight what sort of comment is deemed controversial, investigate the phenomenon from a sociological and theological perspective. Further, the output could be utilized to alert users of Sefaria's online library where a translation has been censored, or to correct the translation.
Download is available here:
Two sample slides from the slide deck:
Because of its somewhat controversial content, I am “censoring” mention of my coauthors.