Nina Salaman was a well-regarded Hebraist, known especially for her translations of medieval Hebrew poetry, at a time when Jewish scholarship in Europe was a male preserve. In addition to her translations, she published historical and critical essays, book reviews, and an anthology of Jewish readings for children, as well as poetry of her own.

Nina Ruth Davis Salaman was born on July 15, 1877, in Derby in England’s industrial heartland, to Arthur and Louisa (Jonas) Davis. Her father’s family were precision instrument makers (telescopes, opera glasses, miners’ lamps) and had lived in England since the early nineteenth century. When she was six weeks old, the family moved to London, settling first in Kilburn and then later in Bayswater. Although not an observant Jew by birth (there were few Jews and no synagogue in Derby), Arthur Davis embraced Orthodoxy and, having mastered the Hebrew language, devoted his leisure and then retirement to Jewish scholarship. In 1892, he published a study of the neginot (cantillation marks) in the Masoretic text of the Bible, and in the next decade, working with Herbert Adler (1876-1940), a lawyer and nephew of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler (1839-1911), prepared what became the standard British edition and translation of the mahzor (festival prayer book). 

Arthur Davis transmitted his enthusiasm for Hebrew to his daughter Nina and, most unusually, gave her and her older sister, Elsie (1876-1933), an intensive Hebrew education, personally teaching them every day. While still in her teens, Nina began publishing translations of medieval Hebrew poetry in the Anglo-Jewish press. She also contributed translations to her father’s edition of the mahzor. Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), the best known Jewish writer in the English-speaking world at the time and, like her father, a member of the Kilburn Wanderers (the circle that formed around Solomon Schechter [1847-1915] in the 1880s), encouraged her and provided her with an introduction to Judge Mayer Sulzberger (1843-1923), a leading figure in the Jewish Publication Society of America, which published her collection Songs of Exile by Hebrew Poets in 1901.

On October 23, 1901, Nina married Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874-1955), a physician who had fallen in love with her four months earlier when she saw her sitting in the women’s balcony of the New West End Synagogue in London. After living in Berlin for several months, while Redcliffe completed advanced training in pathology, they returned to London, where he assumed the directorship of the Pathological Institute at the London Hospital. However, tuberculosis forced him to leave medicine in 1904, and after three months of recuperation in Switzerland, he and Nina settled in the country, in the village of Barley in Hertfordshire, about fourteen miles from Cambridge. Family money (ostrich feathers and London real estate) having relieved her husband of the need to earn a living, they lived comfortably with their six children (one of whom died in childhood) and numerous servants in a thirty-room country house. Nina Salaman continued to pursue her interest in medieval Hebrew poetry, travelling frequently to Cambridge to use the library. At the same time she supervised her children’s education, oversaw nannies, tutors, and servants, and, as the local squire’s wife, entertained the vicar, hosted garden parties, and helped the village poor. Despite Barley’s distance from London, she maintained a Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws).kosher home (a matter of greater concern to her than to her husband) and Sabbath observance. She took personal responsibility for the Hebrew education of her children until they left for boarding school, especially that of her eldest son, Myer, whom she hoped would become a rabbi.

Barley’s proximity to Cambridge brought Salaman into close contact with Israel Abrahams (1858-1925), reader in rabbinics at the university since 1902, and, like Zangwill and her father, one of the Kilburn Wanderers. She met with him frequently in Cambridge—he regarded her as his superior in reading medieval Hebrew poetry—and occasionally left her boys in his care.  While she worked in the university library, he would give them Hebrew lessons and show them around the university’s museums. In 1916, the Jewish Publication Society of America invited her to translate poems of Judah Halevi (before 1075-1141) for its Schiff Library of Jewish Classics.  She worked on the Halevi volume at the same time that her friend Israel Zangwill was preparing a volume of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s (c. 1020-c. 1057) religious poems for the same series and they frequently compared notes and critiqued each other’s work. She submitted the manuscript in 1922 but the book did not appear until late 1924, a few months before her death.  It has remained in print continuously since then.

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Davis, Nina. trans., Songs of Exile by Hebrew Poets. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1901.

The Voices of the Rivers. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1910.

“The Hebrew Poets as Historians,” Menorah Journal 5:5 (October 1919) and 6:1 (February 1920).

Ed., Apples & Honey: A Gift-Book for Jewish Boys and Girls. London: Heinemann, 1921.

“Ephraim Luzzatto (1729–1792),” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 9 (1922): 85–102.

Songs of Many Days. London: Elkin Matthews Ltd, 1923.

Trans., Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi, ed. Heinrich Brody. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1924.

Rahel Morpurgo and Contemporary Hebrew Poets in Italy. Sixth Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture. London: G. Allen & Unwin Limited, 1924.