The Longest TranslationThis article mentions the Soncino translation in passing, but not the Neusner translation.
Forty-five years after he began his revolutionary reworking of the Talmud, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz takes time to celebrate its completion — through learning.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer (The Jewish Week)
When Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz began his monumental project of translating the Talmud into contemporary Hebrew, piercing the dense layers of wisdom and commentary contained in the ancient text, Levi Eshkol of the now-defunct Mapai party was Israel’s prime minister, the young country’s population stood at a mere 2.5 million, and when a Beatles concert there was canceled, it was assumed the country’s leaders thought the Fab Four would corrupt its youth.
It was 1965. And for the next 45 years, working at first out of a cramped office in Jerusalem, Rabbi Steinsaltz, an Israeli scholar and author, would churn out tractate after tractate, translating by his own estimate “millions” of words from Aramaic into modern Hebrew and then English.
Along the way he did nothing less than free the Talmud from the province of a small number of scholars and make it available to a new generation of learners.
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Background here.