Paradise Circumcised: How Milton Became Secular RAPHAEL MAGARIK University of Illinois Chicago In the spring of 1872, Isaac Edward Salkinson, a Jewish convert to Chris- tianity and missionary in Vienna, wrote about his translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost into Hebrew, “I have not come ... as a circumciser to circumcise the foreskin of the flesh of the book, so that it would convert to Judaism.” Rather, “as a faithful transcriber,” he promises the reader “Paradise Lost as it came forth from the author’s womb.” 1 Salkinson was either disingenuous or self-deluded. Through allusions to rabbinic texts, he subtly alters the poem’s theology, reflects metapoetically on his own mediation as a translator, and plays on Paradise Lost’s ironically anachro- nistic relationship to the Hebrew Bible. 2 By imaginatively combining Par- adise Lost and Jewishness, Salkinson secularizes Milton’s masterwork, refashioning it into a work of secular, world literature. One might suspect that, as a missionary, Salkinson had in mind another, simpler cultural transformation, which would target not a Renaissance I would like to thank Keith Budner, Benjamin Balthaser, Sarah Wolf, and Yosefa Raz for their comments on this essay; I would also like to thank the University of Chicago Jewish Studies working group for their feedback, as well as the journal’s anonymous readers. Modern Philology, volume 121, number 4, May 2024. © 2024 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/729777 1. Isaac Edward Salkinson to Alexander Halevi Langebank, in “Critical letters” [in He- brew], in Beit Otzar ha-Sifruth, Magazin fur hebraische Literatur und Wissenschaft, vol. 1, ed. Eisig Graber ( Jaroslau, 1887), 32. I discovered these letters through Hanna Scolnicov, “The He- brew Who Turned Christian: The First Translator of Shakespeare into the Holy Tongue,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 183 n. 9. 2. Starting in the 1920s, scholars would claim to detect cabbalistic or midrashic influences on Milton’s poetry, inaugurating a long-running argument about Milton’s putative Jewish sources. Blissfully unaware of this debate, Salkinson simply invents such allusions, making Milton’s Jewishness imaginatively fifty years before it could be observed philologically. See Raphael Magarik, “Milton’s Phylacteries: Textual Idolatry and the Beginnings of Critical Exegesis,” Milton Studies 57 (2016): 31–61, esp. 32–34, and “Milton after Auschwitz,” Milton Studies 65, no. 2 (2023):181–207, esp. 181–84. For the early philological speculation, see Denis Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925); Harris Fletcher, Milton’s Semitic Studies (University of Chicago Press, 1926), and Milton’s Rabbinic Readings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930). 402