Book Translation : Religion of the Semites. (2005). Transaction Publisher, London, by of William ROBERTSON SMITH, from English to French

This work was proposed to me for translation from English into French by Professor MAROUF Nadir. It was first published in 1894 (with two recent reprints in 2002 and 2005) and has never been translated into the target language to this day, more than a century after its original publication.

The book consists of eleven (11) lectures delivered by the author (a professor of comparative religions and a “Semiticist”) at Aberdeen University (Scotland) from 1888 to 1891. These lectures gained such notoriety that they are frequently cited, either in footnotes or in translated passages in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Émile Durkheim, P.U.F., 1968, making it a key reference in the field.

These lectures, compiled into a single document, have become an essential reference in biblical studies, anthropology of religions, and classical literature, simply because they lay the foundations for a comparative understanding of what Smith calls “positive religions”: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all three revealed through Scripture and by Semitic peoples. The term “positive” refers to the fact that all three carry the teachings of major religious innovators relative to earlier paganism and are established as spokespersons of divine revelation.