La Bible Chouraqui&#8239: genèse d’une traduction et de ses retraductions au regard des archives

André Chouraqui was born on the 11th of August 1917 into a Jewish family with roots in Algeria dating back to the 14th century. Benefiting from a multilingual culture and a French education from kindergarten to high school, he studied law in Paris, combining it with Hebrew studies at the Sorbonne and the Central Rabbinical School of France. An active member of the French Jewish Resistance during the war and a doctor of law, he served as a judge in Algeria before becoming René Cassin’s first deputy at the Alliance Israélite Universelle from 1947 to 1982. He wrote the first studies on the history of North African Jews (1950-1952). His love for the poetic texts of the Bible and his move to Jerusalem in 1958 redirected his career. At the request of the publisher Desclée de Brouwer, he became a translator of the Hebrew Bible, then of the New Testament (1974-1977), before translating the Koran (1990). For forty-two years he devoted himself to translating and retranslating the Bible, refining his method for a wide range of readers. This study reconstructs the genesis of these translations, using in particular the Chouraqui collection deposited at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.