Pauline Ruth "Nina" Salaman () (15 July 1877 – 22 February 1925) was a British Jewish poet, translator, and social activist. Besides her original poetry, she is best known for her English translations of medieval Hebrew verse—especially of the poems of Judah Halevi—which she began publishing at the age of 16.
An advocate for women's education and suffrage, Salaman was a prominent member of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, the Federation of Women Zionists, and the Union of Jewish Women. She was the first woman to deliver a sermon in a British Orthodox synagogue and to be elected president of the Jewish Historical Society of England, though her declining health prevented her from taking office.
Early life
Pauline Ruth Davis was born on 15 July 1877 at Friarfield House, Derby, the second of two children of Louisa () and . Her father's family were Jewish precision instrument makers, who had immigrated to England from Bavaria in the early nineteenth century. A civil engineer by trade, Arthur Davis mastered the Hebrew language, becoming an accomplished Hebraist noted for his study of cantillation marks in the Tanakh. The family moved to Kilburn, London when Nina was six weeks old, later settling in Bayswater. Davis gave his daughters an intensive scholarly education in Hebrew and Jewish studies, and took them regularly to the synagogue.
The Davises moved in learned Jewish circles, and friends of Nina's parents included the families of Nathan Adler, Simeon Singer, Claude Montefiore, Solomon Schechter, Herbert Bentwich, and Elkan Adler. Arthur Davis was one of the "Kilburn Wanderers"—a group of Anglo-Jewish intellectuals that formed around Solomon Schechter in the 1880s—members of which took an interest in Nina's work and helped her find publishers for her writings.
Career
Early career
Nina's first published translation, of Abraham ibn Ezra's The Song of Chess, appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on 22 June 1894. Later that year, she contributed an essay and a poem on "The Ideal Minister of the Talmud" to the Jewish Quarterly Review, then under the editorship of Claude Montefiore and Israel Abrahams, and continued thereafter publishing translations of medieval Hebrew poetry in the Jewish press. Israel Zangwill, an acquaintance of her father, provided her with an introduction to Mayer Sulzberger of the Jewish Publication Society of America, which published her Songs of Exile by Hebrew Poets in 1901. The collection, which attracted widespread attention, included translations of poems by Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, Eleazar ben Killir, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Joseph ben Samuel Bonfils, and Meir of Rothenburg, as well as passages from the Talmud and Midrash Rabba.
From about 1900, her father worked with Herbert M. Adler, nephew of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, on a multivolume edition of the Machzor with a new and modern translation. Nina and her sister, Elsie, both contributed to the work, devoting themselves to translating the metrical sections of the original into poetry, while their father rendered the prose. The festival prayer book was published as Service of the Synagogue in 1904–9, and became commonplace in synagogues across the English-speaking world.
Marriage and family
Nina met physician Redcliffe Salaman at the New West End Synagogue in July 1901, during Shabbat services. Redcliffe was one of the twelve children of Myer Salaman, a wealthy London ostrich feather merchant. His family had emigrated to England from Holland or the Rhineland in the eighteenth century. They were formally engaged ten days later and married on 23 October 1901, after which Redcliffe temporarily relocated to Berlin to complete advanced training in pathology. He was appointed director of the Pathological Institute at the London Hospital in 1902, but ceased to practice medicine the following year after developing pulmonary tuberculosis. The Salamans spent the winter of 1903–1904 in Montana-sur-Sierre and Montreux, Switzerland, where Redcliffe slowly regained some weight. Upon their return to England, they moved to a thirty-room Elizabethan country house, Homestall, in Barley, Hertfordshire, a small village near Cambridge.