How Well Does My Computer Translate Hebrew?

The Mosaic reader David Black has a question concerning a computer translation of a Hebrew article.

The article, “On the Specter of Conversion” (Al Ḥezyon ha-Sh’mad), was published in 1910 by the well-known author Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner in the Palestinian Labor Zionist weekly Hapo’el Hatsa’ir. In this piece, whose appearance caused a public furor that eventually came to be known as “the Brenner Affair,” Brenner stated that the Jewish fear of losing large numbers of converts to Christianity, though obsessively discussed in the Jewish press, was unfounded. The fact that religious faith was weakening among the downtrodden Jewish masses of Eastern Europe was not a threat to Jewish identity, Brenner argued, because Jewish identity did not depend on a belief in Judaism. One could be a fully identified and even nationalistic Jew without thinking Judaism superior to other religions, or while admiring Jesus and the New Testament.

Interested in Brenner’s article but knowing no Hebrew, Mr. Black had his computer translate it into English and was puzzled by parts of the outcome. What, for instance, did Brenner have in mind when he wrote, “The thousands of Jews, perhaps even the tens of thousands, who have already assimilated incurably, who have already become able to convert to Christianity—even green has not spit on them?” Was “green” in this sentence, Mr. Black wondered, an allusion to “the political Left, or to a political party, or to some person living at the time?”