מה בקשר 54: תקשורת בין־דתית

“Interreligious communication” is a concept and domain that is still searching for a place in the academic and the real world. The difficulties are more evident than those of its elder sibling, “intercultural communication.” Most of the discipline remains stuck in the field of interfaith “understanding” or “outreach.” After all, how can entities engage in positive communication when each owns the absolute truth? In an era of “the clash of civilizations,” in which religious encroachment and its corollary, radicalization, have taken over where ideologies once ruled, the task is even harder. And when religion becomes a salient component of personal, cultural, and national identity, Hans Küng’s dialectic, “No peace among the nations without dialogue between the religions,”1 remains merely a recommendation more than ever. The basis of dialogue is very narrow and the oral or written translator stands at its center. Translators, Schäffner states,2 are “experts for interlingual and intercultural communication, and assume full responsibility for their work.” Taking the measure of this onerous responsibility, Mohammed Alghbban of King Saud University in Riyadh claims that a “short-circuit” has come about between Jewish and Israeli researchers and the Jewish public and their Muslim peers, as well as Islam at large. The reason, he finds, is simply flawed or tendentious translation, or lack of translation into Hebrew, of the Prophet Muhammad’s letters to the Jewish tribes and the wording of the alliances that he concluded. Alghbban has undertaken the task of translating this correspondence into Hebrew in order, he says, to improve “Muhammad’s public relations in the eyes of the Israeli public.” Selim Tezcan of Ankara University, wishes, in turn, to enhance Ottoman Turkey’s PR. In his contribution to Kesher, he analyzes four articles that David Ben-Gurion and Izhak Ben-Zvi published in the journal Ha-Ahdut during the period 1910–14 concerning the situation of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The two leaders’ pro-Ottoman stance, Tezcan infers, can be traced to their favorable impression of the condition of the Jews in the empire and not only to the practical assumption (which proved false) that Palestine would remain under Ottoman rule. Menachem Keren-Kratz relates the story of HaPeles, the Orthodox Jewish journal in early twentieth-century Lithuania, which resisted the winds of modernity and the Jews’ cultural outreach to their surroundings. Gideon Kouts investigates the