Isaac Salkinson, whose 1871 Vayegaresh et Haʾadam is the first translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost into Hebrew, is a curious character: a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary in Pressburg and Vienna, who also made major contributions to Hebrew letters, translating not only Milton and the New Testament, but also (for the first time) two plays of Shakespeare. I use Salkinson’s translation as a test case for the theoretical claim, advanced by Gil Anijdar, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin inter alia, that modern secularization recapitulates Christian supersession. Paying close attention to the shibbutsim (allusive phrases) that distinguish the maskilic style of his translation, I argue that Salkinson secularizes both Milton and the canon of classical Jewish texts, often foregrounding their discontinuity and conflict. Debates over the nature of the secular have often paid insufficient attention to indispensable literary questions of figuration, metaphor, and allusion. The essay also forms part of a broader project about how, from the second half of the nineteenth century on, re-imagining Milton as somehow “Jewish” became a crucial tool of modernizing the great English poet, freeing him from his constraints of time and place and ensuring him a status as an icon of secular world literature.