Hiroshi Ichikawa

• An academic project of translating the Babylonian Talmud into Japanese was initiated by a president of private jewelry company in 1986 and sixteen volumes of it were published with the collaboration of more than ten Japanese scholars of the Bible and Judaism until 2016. In order to make an assessment for possible impacts of this translation on Japanese cultural revitalization, the author tried to perceive the collision and struggles the Talmud has faced in transmitting itself to later generations even to the present days as it has still claimed its universal validity. It will be helpful to envisage Jewish intellectuals of the subsequent generations wondering what it was to live according to the Torah and the Talmud and how they coped with difficulties in facing the collision of foreign cultural impacts especially in the modern era. As the Japanese people had been profoundly influenced by Buddhism before the modern era, the assumption of the similarity between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment through transmission of the ineffableAn academic project of translating the Babylonian Talmud into Japanese was initiated by a president of private jewelry company in 1986 and sixteen volumes of it were published with the collaboration of more than ten Japanese scholars of the Bible and Judaism until 2016. In order to make an assessment for possible impacts of this translation on Japanese cultural revitalization, the author tried to perceive the collision and struggles the Talmud has faced in transmitting itself to later generations even to the present days as it has still claimed its universal validity. It will be helpful to envisage Jewish intellectuals of the subsequent generations wondering what it was to live according to the Torah and the Talmud and how they coped with difficulties in facing the collision of foreign cultural impacts especially in the modern era. As the Japanese people had been profoundly influenced by Buddhism before the modern era, the assumption of the similarity between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment through transmission of the ineffable truth and the similar notion of Rabbinic Judaism will help prospect the possible influence of the Jewish scripture. This Buddhist notion had been most successfully developed in the tradition of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Furthermore this notion was fully and more influentially developed in the sphere of education of Japanese military ruling class and their cultural achievements before the modern era. So we suppose that Jewish endeavors in the Talmudic studies facing collisions and struggles against western impacts will give some insights in considering Japanese struggles against, and responses to, the forceful impacts of the modern West upon our traditional value system.…