Exporting political theology to the diaspora: translating Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook for Modern Orthodox consumption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent boost in English translations of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), the undisputed father of religious Zionism, may be considered a revealing juncture between Israeli and American Modern Orthodox Jewish communities. Upon establishing the features of theological translation in this homeland-diaspora framework, my paper offers a discussion of a dominant translation trend of Kook’s thought in the 1990s, an ideologically motivated “export” of texts which has been largely determined by the transnational movement of people. The translators were American rabbis who emigrated and settled in Israel and the main target audience for the translations was the growing number of young American Jews making the one-year study visit in Israeli yeshivas before returning to American college life. The translations, I argue, were framed as a political polemic on the part of right-wing religious Zionism, aimed at promoting a highly nationalist, topical political interpretation of Kook’s suggestive Hebrew works among English-speaking Modern Orthodox Jews, particularly those making the increasingly popular study visit in Israeli yeshivas – visits that have been associated with the persistent “slide to the Right” of Modern Orthodox Judaism in America in recent decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".