Acknowledgments
It gives me great pleasure to thank friends, colleagues, and institutions who made the research and writing of this book possible. Throughout the work on this project, I was blessed with the friendship, inspiration, and advice of Nati Kupfer, an exceptional reader of German philosophy, extraordinary human being, and my inadvertent mentor. With his kaleidoscopic intellect, unwavering empathy, and buckets of humor, Nati has contributed to the shaping of this book in more ways than I can count. For that and much more, my friend, I cannot thank you enough.
I owe special thanks to a few people who have read parts of the manuscript at various stages and offered critical comments: Warren Zev Harvey, Thomas Meyer, Gilad Shenhav, Alessandro Guetta, Philip Getz, and my father, Avraham Sela, as well as to the two anonymous peer reviewers. I hold dear the numerous conversations about melitsah and Haskalah at the cafeteria of the (old) National Library in Jerusalem with Amir Banbaji and thank him for his insights and for reading parts of early versions of the manuscript. For their advice and stimulating discussions, I warmly thank David Rotman, Elchanan Reiner, Christoph Schulte, Elias Sacks, Eliezer Baumgarten, Edward Breuer, Claudia Rosenzweig, Irene Zwiep, David Sorkin, Shmuel Feiner, Grit Schorch, Rebekka Voss, Richard I. Cohen, Avraham Siluk, Uta Lohmann, and Kathrin Wittler. Fellows at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan with whom I spent the 2020–2021 year of “Translating Jewish Cultures” have inspired me to think anew about translation in ways that have left their mark on every chapter of the book. In particular, I wish to thank Naomi Seidman, Maya Barzilai, Joshua Miller, Adriana Jacobs, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Roni Mazal. At the final stages of writing, conversations with Paul Mendes-Flohr, z”l, on walks to and from the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem offered a unique dialogical space that enabled me to refine my ideas and yielded the title of the present book.
Several institutions and funding bodies have provided generous support for this project since its inception. I am grateful to The Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the Seminar for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies; the German Israeli Research Foundation (GIF); the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan; and the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. Thanks are due also to the librarians and staff of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
For their patience, assistance, and generosity in seeing through the publication of this book, I thank Giuseppe Veltri, series editor of Studies in Jewish History and Cultures, and Katelyn Chin and Katerina Sofianou at Brill. My thanks also go out to Richard Veit and Michael Helfield, who in the last phases of preparation provided useful feedback in addition to thorough and thoughtful copyediting.
Most especially, I thank my brother, Aner Sela, Gaia Pollini, Julie Hegenbarth, and Guy Hirschfeld for all their emotional support and encouragement. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Valeria De Lucca for a longtime friendship that traverses the distance between Rome and Jerusalem; for her wisdom, humor, and trust; and for standing by me in life and scholarship, always and everywhere.
Finally, no words can express my gratitude to my parents for their unconditional love and support, come what may. They continue to be my models of perseverance and dedication to creative, intellectually inquisitive living, always reminding me that there is no challenge too big as long as I listen to and trust my own inner voice.