Chapter 1 From Metaphors to Mechanisms

Jewish Translation: Between the Medieval and the Early Modern

Translation has long occupied a central role in Jewish history.¹² The diasporic nature of Jewish existence from antiquity and into the modern period—the continuous migrations and expulsions of Jews throughout time and space—often resulted in profound linguistic changes. These changes in the languages and literacy of Jews made translation a necessity for Jewish religious continuity and cultural survival.¹³ In Europe and elsewhere, translation served as a primary means of communication not only with the lost Hebrew past but also with the Jewish—and non-Jewish—present. Jews used (and continue to use) translation to enter into dialogue with Jewish communities both far and near.¹⁴ In addition, beyond the borders of Jewish society, Jews served as cultural mediators, offering translations between such languages as Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek.

The best-known and most extensively studied project of Jewish translation is the Hebrew translation movement of the Middle Ages. Already in the eleventh century, Jews in Muslim Spain began to produce translations of scientific and philosophical texts from Arabic into Hebrew. In the mid-twelfth century, Andalusian Jews fleeing the Almohad persecutions settled in southern France. Desiring to disseminate Graeco-Arabic culture among their coreligionists in Christian Europe, these Arabophone Jews took up the task of Arabic-to-Hebrew translation with added urgency. The works of these translators resulted in the creation of a centralized and prolific translation movement that would come to inspire translators (and scholars of translation) for centuries to come.¹⁵

Among those inspired by the medieval translation movement were early modern Jews. Both in Italy and in Ashkenaz, Jewish translators often cited the medieval precedent in their prefaces, and some (particularly in the Italian-speaking realm) seem to have viewed their translations as a continuation of the earlier tradition. At the same time, Jewish translational activity underwent profound changes in the early modern period. The era saw shifts in the centers where Jewish translational activity took place as well as in the languages from and into which translations were produced. Already in the fourteenth century the gravitational center of Hebrew translation gradually migrated from southern France to the Italian peninsula. Accompanying this transition was the decline of the medieval phenomenon of translations from Arabic into Hebrew, as Latin came to the fore as a source language for Hebrew translation, with Italian sources also achieving prominence in the sixteenth century.¹⁶

In the second half of the sixteenth century, Jewish translation underwent another important shift, as translational activity began to blossom in central Europe, resulting in the increased prevalence of translations from German into Hebrew and the explosion of Yiddish translations. As we shall presently see, the translation of works from non-Jewish languages was a new phenomenon in Ashkenaz, raising new questions and opening up entirely new possibilities. Jewish translation reached its apex in central Europe in the late eighteenth century, after which, as central European Jews began to embrace German as both a spoken and literary language, translational activity began to migrate once again, this time eastward to Poland-Lithuania, and—in the form of Ladino translations—to the Ottoman Empire.

The changes in the languages and geographies of Jewish translation dovetailed with the rapid technological and cultural innovations that characterized the early modern period. These developments, and especially the rise of printing technologies and vernacular literatures, were to dramatically transform the nature of translation in Europe and beyond. As we shall presently see, during the early modern period, Jewish translation became increasing decentralized and versatile, drawing on multiple genres and languages and targeting new readerships well beyond the narrow elite of learned Hebrew readers, to whose literary appetites medieval translations had catered.

While there remained significant continuities, then, between the Hebrew translation project of the Middle Ages and Jewish translation in the early modern period, the latter phenomenon cannot be viewed as a mere extension of earlier trends. The overarching motivations, norms, and meanings of Jewish translation in early modern Europe differed vastly from those of its medieval precedent. These commonalities of early modern translations will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. In this chapter, I focus on the disparate but interrelated activities of the two major communities of Jewish translators in early modern Europe, termed here “Italian” and “Ashkenazic.”

Mapping Early Modern Jewish Translation and the Conundrum of Communities

Before proceeding, it is necessary to comment on the complexities of arriving at any kind of neat division of early modern Jews into disparate communities. As Peter Burke observes, there is a latent danger in using the term “community” in general, in that the term “seems to imply a homogeneity, a boundary and a consensus that are simply not to be found when one engages in research at ground level.”¹⁷ Jewish communities in particular, are notoriously difficult to define, entailing, at one and the same time, territorial dimensions and considerations of lineage, ritual, custom, language, and more. The phenomenon of Jewish migration in the late medieval and early modern periods further complicates matters. The mass movement of European Jews during these periods—often the consequence of forced expulsions, but also of voluntary migration—resulted in the establishment of heterogenous Jewish communities throughout and beyond Europe.¹⁸

The Jewish world is often broadly divided into the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities. With their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century, a large number of Iberian Jews settled in the Ottoman Empire, on the Italian peninsula, and in North Africa. In later decades, more Jews began to trickle out of the Iberian Peninsula, as ex-conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal) began to settle in western and central Europe and in Italy, as well as across the Atlantic. These diverse migration patterns effectively created three separate but interrelated Sephardic (lit. Spanish) diasporas: the large eastern, the smaller western, and the North African. These three diasporas shared religious rituals, customs, canons, commercial networks, and, to varying degrees, languages.¹⁹

A mass wave of migration also impacted and complicated Ashkenazic (lit. German) identity in the early modern period. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, large numbers of Jews were expelled from their homes throughout the Holy Roman Empire and began to settle in eastern Europe and northern Italy. Here too, three major diasporas emerged, often referred to in scholarship as Ashkenaz I (Ashkenazi Jews in central Europe), Ashkenaz II (eastern European Jews), and Ashkenaz III (Ashkenazi Jews in Italy).²⁰ Regional variations between these three Ashkenazic diasporas existed, but they were united by several overarching features, such as shared liturgy, rituals, and traditions and an indebtedness to German. As Joseph Davis notes: “the pressure of Sefardic Judaism, the common market for Yiddish books, and a shared rabbinic elite all helped make Ashkenazic Jews into a unified and distinctive group.”²¹

While the borders between Ashkenaz I and II remained fluid, solidifying only towards the late eighteenth century, over the early modern period the Italian Ashkenazic community grew increasingly distant from its German heritage. Ashkenazi Jews in Italy gradually became immersed in Italian culture, language, and literature. This process coincided with the rise of the Italian ghetto system in the mid-sixteenth century, which brought Jews of Italian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazic heritage into close proximity with one another.²² This unique reality resulted in the creation of a shared translational culture, which may be characterized as Jewish-Italian.

This is not to imply that early modern Italian Jewry constituted one, monolithic community. Throughout the early modern period, ritual differences, variations in tradition, and power struggles among the three disparate Jewish communities—the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, and the Italkim (lit. Italians)—persisted to varying degrees in different Italian cities.²³ In Venice, for instance, the three communities remained more or less separate throughout the period, although the meanings and significance of this separation are debatable.²⁴ In nearby Padua, on the other hand, as David Sclar notes, “Jews of Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Italian origin … functioned as an amalgamated community.”²⁵ Kenneth Stow writes that further to the south, in Rome, “the Jews … amalgamated and crossed so-called ethnic lines not only in their synagogues, but also in their private lives.”²⁶ Still, even where ritual and communal structures prohibited the formation of a homogenous community, the intellectual and cultural networks of many Jews in Italy—whether Italkim, Sephardim, or Ashkenazim—became increasingly “Italianized,” resulting in the emergence of a shared linguistic community.²⁷

Thus, Italian Ashkenazic Jews, who had previously drawn primarily on German texts, translating them into Yiddish—gradually began consuming and producing literature in Italian. The story of Sephardic Jews in Italy followed a somewhat similar, albeit not identical trajectory. Like their Italian Ashkenazic compatriots, these Jews, who had previously been immersed in Arabic and Iberian culture, became increasingly literate in Italian, French, and Latin beginning in the sixteenth century. Admittedly, some Sephardic Jewish communities in Italy continued to produce official documents in Iberian languages, and individual authors continued to produce works in these languages (including Ladino) well into the eighteenth century.²⁸ At the same time, however, in contrast to their Dutch peers, who continued to use Portuguese in their day-to-day interactions and who “consciously perpetuat[ed] Iberian social and intellectual traditions,”²⁹ Sephardic Jews throughout the Italian states seem to have engaged in literary and everyday dialogue with their Ashkenazi and Italian coreligionists, as well as with their non-Jewish neighbors—primarily in Italian.³⁰

The emergence of two distinct linguistic communities in Italy and Ashkenaz throughout the early modern period is perhaps best exemplified by looking at the primary source languages of translation among Jews residing in these two locales. Of the 152 translations in the sample that were produced between 1500 and 1800 by Jews residing on the Italian peninsula (regardless of lineage), 39 percent (60 translations) were translations of Italian works (or of works in other languages, mediated by Italian), another 39 percent (60) were translations of Latin works, and only 9 percent (13) were translations from Iberian languages, 8 of which were produced during the sixteenth century. The translations from Italian included translations produced by Sephardic-Italian authors such as David Atias, Yosef Ha-Kohen, and Moshe Ibn Basa, and by Italian Ashkenazi authors such Elia Levita (Elye Bokher) and Pinḥas Ashkenazi (Felice Tedeschi).³¹ By comparison, of the 211 works that were translated by Jews who may be reasonably assumed to be Ashkenazi Jews residing in central and eastern Europe between 1500 and 1800, 62 percent (130) were translated from German, 10 percent (21) were translated from Dutch, and 8 percent (16) were translated from Latin.

In the context of translation, these linguistic communities are of utmost importance. As the data above begin to suggest, it is the linguistic affinities of a community that set the tone for the kind of translational activity in which its members will participate: the languages from and into which they translate; the sources on which they rely; the genres they prefer; the literary norms and fashions to which they adhere, and, most importantly perhaps, the functions that translation will serve. This understanding underlies my decision, in the present study, to prioritize linguistic communities over communities defined by lineage and ritual. The first sections of this chapter focus separately on translations produced by Italian Jews, by which I mean both Sephardim, Italkim, and Ashkenazim residing in the Italian peninsula, and Ashkenazic translations, that is, translations by Ashkenazi Jews residing primarily in central Europe and, to a lesser extent, eastern Europe.

A brief word on other communities of Jewish translation. While it is true that Italian and Ashkenazi Jews took the lead in creating the library of Jewish translations in early modern Europe, other communities also contributed to its construction. The JEWTACT database includes, for instance, a small number of Hebrew translations produced by western Sephardim, particularly Portuguese Jews residing in Amsterdam. This small corpus of translations is marginally represented in the following chapters, as well as in some of the statistical figures featured and discussed below. However, I have not dedicated a separate discussion to the development of the western Sephardic corpus of Jewish translations. The reason is that while some important Hebrew translations were produced by western Sephardim in the eighteenth century, particularly in Amsterdam, as a rule, this community produced significantly fewer translations into Hebrew script than did the communities of Ashkenaz and Italy. The total number of Hebrew translations that currently appear in the JEWTACT database and that can be unambiguously attributed to western Sephardim is eleven.³² This is unsurprising—for the vast majority of Sephardic Jews residing in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, and other places in western and central Europe, Portuguese and Spanish functioned as Jewish languages, much in the same way as Yiddish and Hebrew functioned among Italian and Ashkenazi Jews, and they remained the primary languages of both literary output and daily communication for most of the early modern period. Thus, with some important exceptions, it was Iberian languages into which former conversos transmitted both Jewish and non-Jewish knowledge.³³

The Position of Translated Literature Within the Italian and Ashkenazi Communities

Given the profound cultural and linguistic differences between Jews in Italy and Jews in central and eastern Europe, it is unsurprising that translation into Jewish languages served vastly different functions within these two communities. As noted above, Italian Jews, including the Sephardic exiles who settled in Italy, had long exhibited an interest in the translation of works from Latin and Arabic into Hebrew, particularly in the fields of science and philosophy. Mauro Zonta’s list of medieval Hebrew translations in these genres includes no fewer than 128 translations that were produced (or likely produced) on the Italian peninsula between 1100 and 1500.³⁴ Italian interest in Hebrew translation continued in the sixteenth century, with the translation of near-contemporary works by thinkers of the Jewish-Italian Renaissance such as Avraham Farissol, Avraham Yagel, Azariah De Rossi, and Leon Modena.³⁵

In later centuries, however, the valence of Jewish translation in Italy began to change. As discussed above, by the second half of the seventeenth century, Italian Jews had become, by-and-large, linguistically assimilated into their Italian environment. One would expect this linguistic change to have made translation into Jewish languages less appealing to Italian Jews—and translations of Italian works in particular entirely redundant. And indeed, the phenomenon of Italian-to-Yiddish translation, which had produced some of the classic works of Old Yiddish literature—such as Elye Bokher’s Bovo d’Antona (1541) or the anonymous Pariz un’ Viene (1594)—disappeared in the seventeenth century.³⁶ The last Yiddish book known to have been printed on the peninsula appeared in 1609, marking the end of a century of vibrant German Jewish culture in Italy and the emergence of a more localized Jewish-Italian identity.³⁷

And yet, Hebrew translation (and Hebrew literature more generally) on the peninsula followed an altogether different trajectory. Figure 1 combines Zonta’s list with the JEWTACT database in order to survey the number of Hebrew translations (both manuscript and print) produced by Italian Jews between 1200 and 1800.³⁸ The stacked columns in the front signify the number of translators, while the stacked area in the back reflects the number of translations produced.³⁹ As the chart shows, the number of active translators remained relatively steady throughout the entire period. Indeed, Hebrew translation had always been the effort of a small number of dedicated translators in Italy, a phenomenon that continued well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, when prominent Jewish authors like Samuel David Luzzatto (SHaDaL),⁴⁰ Ephraim Luzzatto,⁴¹ and Samuel Romanelli⁴² took it upon themselves to translate works from Italian, Latin, German, French, and English into Hebrew.

For these Italian Jews, translation into Hebrew constituted a continuation of a medieval tradition, thus occupying a peripheral position within the Italian Jewish literary (poly)system.⁴³ For the most part, Hebrew translation in Italy did not serve to invigorate Italian Jewish culture but rather to preserve the medieval tradition of Hebrew translation, as well as to disseminate Italian culture to Jewish readers outside the peninsula. The Hebrew translations produced by Italian Jews during this period, many of which remained in manuscript, were thus a marginal phenomenon, and their impact on the Italian Jewish literary system as a whole was limited at best.

For Ashkenazi Jews in central and, later, eastern Europe, on the other hand, translation into Hebrew and Yiddish bore profoundly different meanings. In contrast to the steady trend of linguistic assimilation that characterized Italian Jews (as well as western Sephardim in central Europe), the majority of Ashkenazi Jews in central and eastern Europe remained unable to read Latin script well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. Moreover, for these Ashkenazi Jews, unlike their Italian coreligionists, the translation of non-Jewish literature was essentially a new phenomenon. Of the 571 entries that appear on Zonta’s list of medieval Hebrew translations, only four were produced in Ashkenaz (two in Germany and two in northern France). The remainder were produced primarily in Italy, Spain, and southern France. To this we may add a handful of Yiddish translations of German epics that appeared in the late Middle Ages, and which are discussed in further detail below.

Throughout the early modern period, however, the tables of translation would gradually turn. Figure 2 depicts the rise of Hebrew and Yiddish translations produced by Ashkenazi Jews in early modern Europe. Ashkenazi interest in translation began to blossom in the sixteenth century, initially encompassing Ashkenazi Jews in both Italy and central Europe. As Yiddish translation disappeared in Italy in the seventeenth century, Yiddish and Hebrew translations began to appear with increasing frequency in German-speaking lands and in the Low Countries. These translations encompassed works of science and philosophy, belles lettres, history, religion, and more. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, this interest would migrate toward eastern Europe, where it would continue to thrive until the Second World War.⁴⁴

Figure 3 offers a comparison of translational trends in Italy and Ashkenaz between 1200 and 1800, showing the numbers of Jewish translators in each translational site by century. As this figure makes clear, while Jewish translation in Italy continued on a small scale into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it skyrocketed in Ashkenaz. During this period, translation emerged as a primary mechanism for cultural transfer and as a central catalyst for cultural innovation and historical change within the Ashkenazic cultural realm. Initially in Yiddish, but over time within the Ashkenazi literary realm more broadly, Jewish translation assumed an unmistakably central position, enabling central and eastern European Jews of various classes, genders, and ages to tackle the cultural developments of their day.

The difference between Jewish translation in central Europe and in Italy is expressed not only in the total number of translators active and translations produced throughout the period, but also in the kinds of works that dominated the two libraries. In keeping with the medieval tradition of Hebrew translation, Italian translators favored works in the fields of science, philosophy, and religion, whereas Ashkenazi translators were more interested in the translation of poetry and prose, at first into Yiddish and, later, with the rise of the Haskalah, into Hebrew. As discussed in Chapter 4 below, these translations would subsequently become an important platform for the development of original works in Yiddish (such as hymns, tkhines [Yiddish paraliturgical prayers and devotions] popular science, and short stories) and in Hebrew (such as children’s literature, prose, and plays).

The Languages of Jewish Translation: Target Languages

There were three primary target languages of Jewish translation in early modern Europe: Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino (Figure 4).⁴⁵ In addition, a small number of translations appeared in Judeo-Italian. Each of these target languages of translation bore its own unique characteristics, drawing on different source libraries, employing different kinds of selection criteria, and addressing different target readerships. Let us focus a narrow lens on each language individually.

Hebrew

The largest library of Jewish translation during the early modern period was the Hebrew one, which accounts for 60 percent of all translations in the database (Figure 4). The dominance of Hebrew as a language of translation may perhaps seem surprising. The majority of studies of early modern Jewish translation have in fact focused not on Hebrew but on Yiddish, primarily because Yiddish literature is often imagined to have been much more receptive to non-Jewish influence. While this is true in the Ashkenazi context, where Yiddish translation took up 60 percent of all translations produced between 1500–1800, a pan-European view reveals that during the early modern period, Hebrew served as a primary conduit for the movement of new texts and ideas from Christian Europe into the Jewish cultural sphere.⁴⁶

The dominance of Hebrew furthermore suggests that translational activity was not restricted to the lay classes, but was also actively pursued by—and for!—rabbinically trained Jews. And indeed, as discussed in further detail below, throughout the early modern period, Hebrew translations were produced by rabbis or rabbinical thinkers. Most of these translations centered on works of science, but in some cases translations made their way into distinctively religious texts, such as works of halakha, polemics, catechisms, and sermons.⁴⁷

The ubiquity of texts translated into Hebrew further contributes to the refutation of the already widely debunked myth of Hebrew’s death in the diaspora and its subsequent “revival” by Zionism.⁴⁸ Looking at the rich library of early modern Hebrew translations reveals that Hebrew literature served as a busy marketplace of texts and ideas, of both domestic and foreign provenance. Of course, one should not exaggerate the prevalence of Hebrew literacy in early modern Europe. For most Jews during this period, Hebrew was a language that could be read, but not necessarily comprehended.⁴⁹ Hebrew readership was limited to the learned Jewish elites, making demand only a marginal aspect of the choices made by Hebrew translators.

This Hebrew disregard for demand is perhaps most conspicuous in the Italian context. As noted above, Italian Jews continued to produce Hebrew translations, and particularly translations of Italian works, long after the linguistic assimilation of Italian Jewry.⁵⁰ These translations allowed Italian translators to address learned Jews well beyond the peninsula. In this sense, Hebrew translation functioned in Italy in the same way as Latin translations functioned in Christian Europe in the same period. Such translations continued to appear in relatively large numbers—Peter Burke counts no fewer than 1,140 of them—between the invention of printing and the end of the eighteenth century.⁵¹ As Burke notes, they “ensured a wide geographical distribution at the price of appealing to a cultural minority.”⁵²

The international reception of Hebrew translations by Italian translators is demonstrated, for instance, by the first description of the Americas to appear in Hebrew, that is, Avraham Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam. Written in the first half of the sixteenth century, as David Ruderman has shown, the book was, in large parts, a translation of Italian author Fracanzano da Montalboddo’s Paesi nouamente retrouati et Nouo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato (New lands that were revealed and the new world named after Alberico Vespucci from Florence, 1507).⁵³ Initially distributed in manuscript form, Farissol’s translation was first published in Venice in 1586, but does not seem to have made much of a mark on contemporary Italian Jewish literature. As Ruderman notes, “many Italian Jews may have gone directly to the Italian literature, more popular and more widely diffused, in order to satisfy their curiosity about the new discoveries.”⁵⁴ Throughout the following centuries, however, Igeret orḥot olam became wildly successful among Hebrew readers in central and eastern Europe. The book was published in Offenbach in 1720, then again in Prague in 1793, after which it moved to eastern Europe, where it was published three more times until 1822.⁵⁵ Parts of Fasrissol’s book were also translated into Yiddish and published in Halle in 1711.⁵⁶

Other Italian-to-Hebrew translations produced by Italian Jews enjoyed a similar afterlife in central and eastern Europe. Azariah de Rossi’s Me’or eynayim, for instance—which drew on various sources in Italian and Latin—was initially published in Mantua in 1573, after which it appeared in multiple editions in Berlin, Vienna, Vilna, and Warsaw from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a major source of inspiration for the Jewish Haskalah.⁵⁷

Of course, in part, the publication history of these books reflects the changes that occurred in the Hebrew printing industry, but they also signify the appeal of Italian-produced Hebrew translations outside the peninsula.⁵⁸ Particularly instructive in this respect is the book Otsar ha-ḥayim by the Roman-born physician and chief rabbi of Ferrara, Ya‘akov Zahalon (1630–1693). While predominantly a translation of the Latin works of German and French authors Daniel Sennert and Lazare Rivière, rather than of Italian works, Otsar ha-ḥayim is distinguished by its explicit appeal to a wide readership—from rabbinical scholars and talmudists to small-town physicians.⁵⁹ As Ruderman observes, “Zahalon’s textbook was the first … work published in Hebrew to provide a general orientation to medicine. The author’s interest in reaching a general public … suggests a nonelitist view of his profession and its specialized knowledge.”⁶⁰ Of course, as was true for other Hebrew works of its time, the dissemination of knowledge that Zahalon pursued in his book was never truly nonelitist; in choosing to write the book in Hebrew (and publish it in folio format!), Zahalon strictly limited its reception to the narrow upper crust of Jewish society. Otsar ha-ḥayim made no attempt to target women, nor did it address most Jewish men, who did not possess the kind of rabbinical training that would have made Hebrew literature accessible to them.⁶¹ Still, published in Venice in 1683, the book made its greatest impact on readers and authors outside of Italy. While it was never republished, large parts of the book were copied by the German physician Judah Leib Wallich and republished in his Sefer dimyon ha-refu’ot (Book of parallel remedies, 1700).⁶² Select paragraphs of Zahalon’s book were also copied by the Jerusalem-based physician David De Silva, who borrowed liberally from Otsar ha-ḥayim and the works of other Hebrew authors.⁶³ Traces of Otsar ha-ḥayim are also to be found in other eighteenth-century works produced in both central and eastern Europe, such as the maskilic Aleh trufah (Remedy leaf, 1785) by Avraham ben Shlomo Nansich of the Hague, and works of practical Kabbalah, such as Zevaḥ Pesaḥ (Passover sacrifice, 1722) by Ya‘akov Pesaḥ, and Sefer ha-ḥeshek (The book of longing, c. 1740) by Hillel Ba‘al Shem.⁶⁴

Italian Jewish literature, on the other hand, seems to have remained largely unimpressed by Otsar ha-ḥayim. Thus, when in 1750 Itsḥak Lampronti, Zahalon’s later successor to the Ferrara rabbinate, found himself in need of a paragraph from Sennert’s oeuvre, he turned directly to the Latin source rather than to Zahalon’s Hebrew translation.⁶⁵ The same is true for Tuviah ha-Kohen, who incorporated several translated paragraphs from the works of Sennert and other Latin physicians in his well-known Ma‘ase Tuviah but made no mention of Zahalon, and seems to have made no use of his earlier translations of Sennert’s works.⁶⁶

It seems then, that Hebrew translations produced in Italy were, for the most part, consumed by readers outside the peninsula. This appears to hold true for most, but not all, such translations. Indeed, some Italian-to-Hebrew translators in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy made no attempt to target readers in Ashkenaz or elsewhere. The translations produced by these Italian Jews remained in manuscript form, incorporated Italian terms or even whole passages in Italian or Judeo-Italian, and clearly targeted Jews who were literate in Italian. In a forthcoming study, for instance, Ahuvia Goren reveals the phenomenon of the translation of Italian preacher manuals and the incorporation of translated texts and fragments in early modern Hebrew sermons. Goren suggests viewing such translations as a means of domesticating non-Jewish ideas and texts and preparing them for use in sacramental contexts.⁶⁷

In addition, as discussed above, for many Italian authors, translation into Hebrew seems to have been a direct continuation of the medieval tradition of Hebrew translation and was based on the desire to create a Hebrew-language library, regardless of demand. The corpus of Hebrew translations produced by Italian Jews thus offers a curious kind of meeting point between modern texts and medieval pursuits. It included translations of some of the most innovative and often controversial works of the time, but targeted a near-inexistent readership, perpetuating a medieval tradition that no longer corresponded with the literary tastes and requirements of early modern Italian Jews.

Of course, Jewish translation in Ashkenaz fulfilled largely different functions, but here too, translation into Hebrew was an endeavor largely motivated by ideology rather than demand. Thus, during the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there emerged a small but not insignificant corpus of translations of German children’s books into biblical Hebrew. The production of such translations, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 4, was particularly popular among members of the Jewish Haskalah.⁶⁸ Significantly, unlike their German source texts, these maskilic translations never seem to have truly targeted children. They were written in biblical Hebrew, densely packed with biblical allusions and overtly didactic detours. With few exceptions, the maskilic translators often employed much duller storytelling techniques than the ones used by their source texts.⁶⁹ For these translators, the translation of children’s books from German into Hebrew seems to have been an end in and of itself, and it entailed complete disregard for the needs and capabilities of the target readership.

The elitist nature of Hebrew literature is also manifested in the primary genres that dominated the corpus. Philosophy and science were by far the most popular genres among Hebrew translators in both Italy and Ashkenaz. However, Hebrew translators also drew on other genres, such as religion, history, magic, and, increasingly towards the eighteenth century, belles lettres.

The Languages of Jewish Translation: Source Languages

Given the particular literary norms of the early modern period, it is often difficult to identify with certainty the specific language on which an individual translator may have drawn. At times, a translator will have had recourse to his source only through a mediating text. Yiddish translators in Amsterdam, for instance, often relied on mediating texts in Dutch for their translations of works from Spanish, French, Italian, and even German and Hebrew.¹¹⁷ Works in Latin were also often translated via a mediating text: either via German, in the case of translations into Yiddish, or Italian, for Hebrew translations.¹¹⁸ Other times, Latin also served as a mediating language, particularly for the translation of works from Greek.¹¹⁹ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, maskilic translations of French or English works—such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, or Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle—often relied on mediating texts in German.¹²⁰ As unforthcoming as Jewish translators often were in acknowledging their sources, the acknowledgment of such mediating texts was even rarer.¹²¹

Sometimes an author will claim to have translated from one language when in fact he seems to have relied on another. Thus, for instance, in his famous Shevet Yehudah (Scepter of Yehudah, 1554) the Sephardi historian, Shlomo Ibn Verga (1460–1554) drew on multiple sources, of which he translated select passages—often word for word—that he then incorporated into his book. In at least one of these cases, Ibn Verga claimed to have translated from Latin (ne‘etak mi-leshon Latin le-leshon ha-kodesh) when in fact he was drawing on a Spanish source.¹²² Another sixteenth-century author, one Moshe Botarel, published in 1561 a book titled Eyn mishpat, which he also claimed to have translated from Latin. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2 below, however, the translation was, in fact, based on a French text. It could be that for early modern Hebrew authors, the term “Latin” served as a general placeholder for Romance languages or Latin script. If this is indeed the case, it would be part of a wider phenomenon of Jewish translators who generally only identify the language of their source as non-Jewish, utilizing such terms as galkhes¹²³ (Latin script, from the Hebrew galaḥ—lit. shaved, denoting the tonsures of some monastic and clerical orders), kristn shprakh¹²⁴ (Christian language), leshon goyim¹²⁵ (language of the gentiles), or even leshonam shel akum¹²⁶ (the tongues of idolators).

Still, based on those translations whose source texts may be identified with reasonable certainty, it is possible to make some informed observations about the kinds of scholarly and intellectual networks in which early modern Jews participated (Figure 5).

Source Languages for Hebrew Translations

Unsurprisingly, the most popular source language for Hebrew translations in early modern Europe was Latin (Figure 6). In choosing to translate Latin texts, early modern Hebrew translators were continuing a late-medieval tradition. As discussed above, throughout the Middle Ages Jews in southern Europe had focused primarily on the translation of works from Arabic into Hebrew. As Zonta, Alexander Fidora, Yossef Schwartz, and others have shown, however, Latin literature also played a role in the formation of the medieval Hebrew library, gradually increasing in importance until it became the dominant source library for Hebrew translations in the fifteenth century.¹²⁷ The trend continued in the early modern period. Of 268 Hebrew translations produced between 1500 and 1800 whose source language is known to us, 39 percent were translated from Latin. Of course, the predominance of Latin as a source language changed as a function of genre, space, and, most importantly—time, decreasing significantly to 26 percent in the eighteenth century (of which the majority are translations of magical recipes or grimoires¹²⁸). This decline corresponds with the decline of Latin as a literary language and is also attested by the decline in the number of vernacular-to-Latin translations, which began, as Burke has shown, in the mid-seventeenth century.¹²⁹

As Latin decreased in importance as a source language for Jewish translation, the significance of German increased, accounting for 29 percent of all Hebrew translations produced between 1700 and 1800 that are featured in the database. As we have seen, works in other languages were often mediated through German. The prominence of German would continue to increase in the first decades of the nineteenth century, accounting for 66 percent of all Hebrew translations in the sample that were produced between 1800 and 1830.

Source Languages for Yiddish Translations

In contrast to the Hebrew library of scientific translations, which was dominated by Latin source texts, Latin translations into Yiddish were rare; where they existed at all, they were most often mediated by German translations.¹³⁰ But there are some exceptions to the rule, and the most outstanding among these is the anonymous Yiddish healthcare manual Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim (The path of the tree of life). Published in 1613, probably in eastern Europe, the book constitutes a Yiddish translation of parts of two sixteenth-century Latin texts: De Conservanda Bona Valetudine (The preservation of good health, 1557), by Johannes Curio (d. 1561), the town physician and professor of medicine at Erfurt;¹³¹ and a commentary on the Materia Medica of Dioscorides titled De Epitome Plantis Utilissima (1544/1586) by Pietro Andrea Mattioli (d. 1577), an Italian medical doctor, naturalist, and humanist.¹³² Another Yiddish translation that may have relied on a Latin source is the anonymous translation of the apocryphal narrative of Susanna (from the Book of Daniel), which appeared under the title Ma‘ase gadol ve-nora (A great and awesome tale). While the book’s precise source has yet to be identified, the anonymous translator claimed to have translated the book from Latin.¹³³ Other Yiddish translators seem to have had some command of Latin, even when relying on German sources, as indicated by the occasional appearance of Latin terms (in either Latin or Hebrew script) in a handful of Yiddish works.¹³⁴

Interesting as these expressions of Latin-to-Yiddish transfer may be, however, the overwhelming majority of Yiddish translations drew on more expected source languages; 65 percent of all Yiddish translations in the database, which appeared between 1500 and 1800, were translations of German works, and 14 percent were based on Dutch sources (Figure 7).

Of course, Yiddish literature’s indebtedness to German was partly a result of the close linguistic proximity between these two languages, which made German a particularly appealing source library for Yiddish translators, who often merely transliterated entire works from German into Hebrew characters. But Yiddish translators’ overwhelming reliance on German had to do not only with the linguistic but also with the functional proximity between the two languages.

An illustrative example is offered by the well-known seventeenth-century bibliographer, Shabbethai Meshorer Bass. In the landscape of early modern Jewish literature, Bass stands out as a particularly intriguing figure: he was a pioneer of genres, being both the first modern Jewish bibliographer and the first author to produce a modern travel guide designed specifically for Jews. Bass is also one of the few Jewish translators who is known to have published translations in both Hebrew and Yiddish. And he produced both of these books, the Hebrew bibliography and the Yiddish travel guide, within the span of one year.

The first, and better-known, of these two translations is his monumental Siftey yeshenim (Lips of the sleeping, 1680), which, as Christian Wolf and Menaḥem Mendel Zlatkin have shown, drew heavily on previous bibliographies that had been produced in Latin.¹³⁵ Bass’s second translation was an enigmatic travel guide, written in Yiddish and titled Masekhet derekh erets (Tractate on the ways of the world, 1680).¹³⁶ This latter book differed considerably from Siftey yeshenim in its language, content, target readership, and reception, and yet the two works were tied together by a shared secret: their unacknowledged usage of foreign sources. While Bass had used Latin works for his Hebrew Siftey yeshenim, in his Yiddish Masekhet derekh erets he turned not to the Latin library but to the German one; the greater part of the book was a translation of the popular German travel guide Memorabilia Europae (1678) by Eberhard Rudolph Roth (1646–1715), a professor of philosophy at Ulm.¹³⁷ This difference between Bass’s choices as a Hebrew translator and his choices as a Yiddish one reflects the different roles that Hebrew and Yiddish played within the Ashkenazi literary realm of the period and suggests that Jewish authors understood the difference between the two Jewish tongues as being parallel to that between Latin and German.

Criteria for Source Selection

In the early eighteenth century, the Italian rabbi and physician Shabbethai Marini (c. 1690–1747) took it upon himself to translate the first three books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Hebrew. The translation, which remained in manuscript form, was accompanied by an apologetic preface in which Marini addressed the question that, as we shall see in Chapter 2 below, overshadowed the entire project of Jewish translation in early modern Europe. “Dear reader,” he wrote, “in innocence I shall inform you, what possessed me to utter in this poem the words of the pagans.”¹³⁸ The answer was that the poem provided an excellent example of poetic writing, which could be used as a model by Hebrew authors.

Marini was not the first author to contemplate the appropriateness of perpetuating and disseminating Ovid’s work. Already in antiquity, the Metamorphoses elicited both admiration and admonition. In Christian Europe, Ovid was often treated with wariness, largely in light of the pagan nature of his work, but this did little to diminish his appeal.¹³⁹ The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) currently lists more than five hundred print editions of the work (or parts thereof) that appeared in Europe between the invention of printing and the mid-seventeenth century, in Latin, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, English, German, Greek, and Catalan.¹⁴⁰ Another recent survey counts no fewer than 152 editions of the Metamorphoses published in the Low Countries alone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁴¹ It was likely at least in part this broad appeal that made the Metamorphoses both attractive and available as a source for Hebrew translation, and that prompted Marini to translate it notwithstanding its controversial nature.

Indeed, one of the foremost reasons for selecting a specific text for translation into Jewish languages was its popularity outside the Jewish literary realm. This holds particularly true with respect to Yiddish translations, where economic interests played an important role in the selection of sources for translation. Although one may take issue with Paucker’s assertion that “it is hard to discern any ethical motives in [the] choices [of Yiddish translators],”¹⁴² it is true that the creators of Yiddish books were quick to identify potential best sellers, and to translate them, at times in multiple versions and editions. Modern classics such as the One Thousand and One Nights (1704–1717) or Robinson Crusoe (1719) appeared in Yiddish long before their appearance in Hebrew.¹⁴³ Other beloved German and Dutch works, such as the comic chapbook Eulenspiegel (1510), the medieval Arthurian epic Wigalois, and the international story cycle known as the Seven Wise Masters (Die sieben weisen Meister, 1473), were translated time and again throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.¹⁴⁴

But it was not merely a work’s popularity among European readers that determined whether or not it would be translated into Yiddish. Source selection was inspired by numerous other considerations as well, which may or may not be available to us today. In his study of the translation of early Yiddish epics, Jerold Frakes, has convincingly shown that translators tended to prefer works that “were provided with questionable anti-wiving practices, ‘husbanding’ quests substituted for wiving quests, and … the insistent and recurring role, for instance, of socially transformative singing as a mode of wiving.”¹⁴⁵ For his part, Paucker identifies “at least some discrimination in favour of ‘virtue rewarded’ as against the ‘martial deeds.’ ”¹⁴⁶

In selecting sources for Hebrew translations, on the other hand, a more significant role was assigned to considerations of cultural and literary prestige. This holds particularly true for maskilic translations in the decades surrounding the end of the eighteenth century. As Zohar Shavit notes, “once certain writers were marked as writers of the Enlightenment, they became an object for translation into Hebrew”¹⁴⁷ and were translated time and again by maskilic translators. Salomon Gessner’s idylls and poems, for instance, which received praise from such Enlightenment authors as Rousseau and Diderot and enjoyed immense popularity among European readers during the second half of the eighteenth century, were translated into Hebrew more than a dozen times between 1775 and 1830.¹⁴⁸ The works of Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818), a central figure of the German Aufklärung and a disciple of Rousseau, were also translated a dozen times into Hebrew and Yiddish.¹⁴⁹ The celebrated Italian poet and librettist, Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), was another favorite, whose works were translated at least ten times into Hebrew¹⁵⁰ and once into Ladino,¹⁵¹ and the famed German novelist and poet Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s (1715–1769) rhymed fables were translated at least six times by four different translators.¹⁵²

Scientific prestige was also a consideration. The works of the Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert, for instance, were a relatively popular choice for Jewish translators around the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As noted above, fragments from his Practicae Medicinae were translated in Tuviah ha-Kohen’s Ma‘ase Tuviah, Zahalon’s Otsar ha-ḥayim, and Lampronti’s Paḥad Yitshak. Also popular among Hebrew translators was the Catholic priest and theologian Christiaan van Adrichem’s (1533–1585) Theatrum Terrae Sanctae (Theater of the Holy Land, 1590), parts of which were adapted by no fewer than four Hebrew authors in both central and eastern Europe between 1621 and 1781.¹⁵³ In selecting these works, Hebrew translators were complying with the taste of their non-Jewish contemporaries. Sennert’s works in particular were extremely influential in early modern Europe. His medical tracts (or parts thereof) were translated into English, German, Dutch, and Arabic,¹⁵⁴ and his works appeared in at least 186 Latin editions between 1594 and 1650.¹⁵⁵

Alongside popularity and prestige, availability would also have been an important (and closely connected) consideration among Jewish translators. While in comparison to the Middle Ages, the rise of print had immeasurably simplified the acquisition of books, for most Jewish readers, books—especially the prestigious kinds of books that were preferred by Hebrew translators—remained a luxury. Readers often had to rely on the collections of acquaintances or, at times, university libraries.¹⁵⁶ As late as 1798, the Galician maskil Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev (1764–1811) related how he had for years been hoping to translate the apocryphal book of Ben Sira into Hebrew, but was unable to obtain a good source text. Finally, he managed to locate a copy of Brian Walton’s magisterial Biblia sacra polyglotta (1653) in the libraries of two Christian clerics, who allowed him to peruse the work, thus paving the way for the appearance of the first printed Hebrew translation of the book.¹⁵⁷

At times (but not always!), religious considerations seem to have played a role in the selection of sources for translation. While translations of the works of more controversial authors such as Voltaire or Buffon did exist (some of them produced by distinctly rabbinical translators),¹⁵⁸ many Jewish translators tended to rely on texts written by authors with whom they shared a strictly conservative world view. The works of Catholic theologians, Jesuits, Pietists, and other distinctly Christian authors were a popular choice among Hebrew and Yiddish translators, who often dressed their religious musings in Jewish garb to deliver what might then, upon a superficial reading, be viewed as devout Jewish works.¹⁵⁹ Augustine of Hippo’s City of God (c. 430), for instance, was translated into Hebrew at least twice during the sixteenth century;¹⁶⁰ the works of Thomas Aquinas were translated no less than ten times, by three different translators, namely Itsḥak Abravanel (1437–1508), Eli ben Yosef Habillo (fifteenth century), and, as Goren has discovered, Ya‘akov Zahalon.¹⁶¹

This preference for the works of devout Christian authors is particularly conspicuous in the field of scientific translations. An interesting example is afforded by an enigmatic but prolific translator by the name of Meir ben Yehudah Neumark.¹⁶² Like other Hebrew translators of his time, Neumark did not identify his source text in the translation, but he did point out that the book was: “translated from the works of the … Sages of the Nations.” The manuscript was bound with a cover page, in which a different hand identified it as a translation from Latin.¹⁶³ It turns out that Neumark’s manuscript was, at least in part, a translation of several chapters of the Jesuit author Pierre Gautruche’s (1602–1681) textbook, Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius clara, brevis, et accurate institutio (The Clear, Brief, and Precise Instruction of all Philosophy and Mathematics, 1653).

In handling his source text, Neumark provided a meticulous translation. He even went so far as to include rough sketches of the illustrations that appeared in Gautruche’s source.¹⁶⁴ Within the body of the text, Neumark offered a form of Jesuit science in Jewish garb. Thus, for instance, he used his Jesuit source text to combat heliocentrism, explaining first that “Scopernicus [sic] and his scholarship suggest that the sun and the firmaments do not have any motion, but stand at the center of the world, [but] the earth, which is enclosed in the center of the lunar cycle, circles the world’s core, which is the sun,”¹⁶⁵ but then going on to object that “the truth is that the planet of earth and water is the center of the world, and its center is the core of … gravitation which holds her [= the earth] from moving for all of eternity … and this is by design of the shekhinah in perfect harmony with all that is proper and reasonable.”¹⁶⁶

Neumark’s translation of the astronomical textbook of this French Jesuit seems to reflect a wider phenomenon among Jewish translators of the early eighteenth century, whose contours have been charted by such historians as Bonfil, Ruderman, Gianfranco Miletto, and Josef Sermoneta.¹⁶⁷ According to Miletto, “the Catholic church and the rabbis had two common goals: to safeguard their respective traditions, and to adapt them to a modern cultural context. The rabbis often adopted culturally Catholic models, adjusting them to their needs and for a Jewish milieu.”¹⁶⁸ More recently, in his study of Italian Jewish responses to the Scientific Revolution, Ahuvia Goren reveals that Neumark’s contemporary Tuviah ha-Kohen used Jesuit scientific works to justify his continued adherence to the geocentric model. While Tuviah’s rejection of Copernicus has often been presented as the product of obstinance or even deception, Goren shows that in combating heliocentrism, Tuviah relied primarily on the well-known Almagestum novum (New almagest, 1651) by the famed Jesuit astronomer, Giovanni Battista Riccioli.¹⁶⁹ In a similar vein, but slightly different context, Maoz Kahana has recently demonstrated the conceptual, ideological, and even social affinities between the great rabbinical thinker Yonatan Eibeschütz (1690–1764) and Jesuit thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁷⁰ According to Kahana, Eibeschütz identified “a shared religious interest between the Jewish people and the Jesuit scholars [namely] the common struggle to preserve the tenets of … religion: divine creation, providence, the eternity of the soul, and the existence of God.”¹⁷¹

Such recourse to translation in order to strengthen tradition was characteristic also of later authors, and even appeared in the pages of the maskilic journal Ha-me’asef. In the 1810 issue, for instance, an obscure maskil by the name of Wolff BR”Y of Dessau published a Hebrew translation of the poem “An die Weisheit” (On wisdom) by the Austrian Jesuit Aloys Blumauer (1755–1798). In a short preface to the poem, the translator explained that he had translated the poem, in part, because of its scathing attack on the Greeks.¹⁷² He went on to repeat Blumauer’s blistering ridicule of “the Sophists of the land of Greece/who with wisdom claimed to be aligned/but their art was naught but trickery/where you [God] enlighten, they would merely blind.”¹⁷³

Agents of Jewish Translation

Unsurprisingly, learned Jewish physicians, such as Ya‘akov Zahalon, Tuviah ha-Kohen, and Judah Leib Wallich (d. 1735), played a significant role in constructing the library of Jewish translations.¹⁷⁴ These physicians were in a privileged position to import works into the Jewish library, owing to their command of Latin—a prerequisite for medical training in early modern Europe—as well as the legitimacy that the pursuit of medicine had enjoyed within the Jewish cultural realm at least since the Middle Ages. In translating medical or other scientific works from Latin into Hebrew, these physicians perpetuated the tradition forged by medieval rabbi-physicians, most famously Maimonides, who had no qualms about combining religious and secular learning and importing whatever cultural and scientific goods they deemed useful from well beyond the Jewish literary realm.

These Jewish physicians were joined, toward the late eighteenth century, by a new cohort of translators, members of the early Haskalah. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, translation into Jewish languages became much more prolific and more centralized. In part, this development had to do with the rise of maskilic journals and anthologies, which allowed for the publication of a large number of translations within a relatively short period of time. Other reasons for the increased interest in translation among the maskilim are discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

Converts were also in a particularly advantageous position to produce translations.¹⁷⁵ Converts to Judaism, like Moshe ben Avraham (c. 1711) or Avraham ben Ya‘akov (c. 1669–1730), brought with them the kind of cultural capital—including a knowledge of languages and literatures—that authors born into Judaism often lacked. In much the same way, thanks to their familiarity with Jewish languages and literary norms, converts from Judaism to Christianity, such as Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580), Paul Helicz (c. 1540), and Heinrich Immanuel Frommann (?–1735), became conduits for the dissemination of Christian and missionary works in Hebrew and Yiddish translation.¹⁷⁶ These translators were joined by Hebraists and missionaries who contributed Hebrew and Yiddish translations of their own.¹⁷⁷

Book printers were also active agents of Jewish, and particularly Yiddish, translations, which were considered financially lucrative. The phenomenon seems to have been particularly prevalent in Amsterdam, which was a center of early modern book production and trade.¹⁷⁸ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Amsterdam-based printers such as Ya‘akov Maarssen and his son Yosef (d. 1754), or Shabbethai Bass, produced a wide range of Yiddish and, to a lesser extent, Hebrew translations.¹⁷⁹ Other publishers, such as Uri Phoebus (1623–1715), Yosef Athias (1634–1700), and Samuel Helicz (sixteenth century) commissioned their translations from semiprofessional translators, the majority of whom were to remain forever anonymous.¹⁸⁰ It is to such anonymous translators that we owe the majority of Old Yiddish translations. In fact, out of 152 Yiddish translations that appear in the JEWTACT database and were produced between 1500 and 1800, no fewer than 104 (68 percent) were created by unknown translators.¹⁸¹

Sarah Zfatman contrasts the prevalence of anonymous translations of foreign works with the tendency found among Yiddish translators of domestic, that is Hebrew, books to sign their names to their translations. According to Zfatman, “the preoccupation with this kind of literature was not thought of highly, and the authors were thus reluctant to sign their names on their works.”¹⁸² This may well be true; however, it bears mention that anonymity was by no means unique to early modern Yiddish literature. As Marcy North has observed, to understand early modern notions of authorship we must think of “a world in which the author’s name was not yet a standard feature on the title page and in which class expectations, dangerous political controversies, and even literary fashions gave many writers good reason to circulate their texts anonymously.”¹⁸³

Occasionally translations were commissioned not by a publisher but rather by a patron or even an individual client. A few examples are available from the eighteenth century. Neumark produced his translation of Gautruche’s Mathematicae totius, as well as several other translations of Latin and German works, at the behest of the renowned bibliophile and chief rabbi of Prague, David Oppenheim. Around the same time, in Amsterdam, a midwife by the name of Rachel Salomons commissioned a translation of a Dutch treatise titled Korte en Bondige Verhandeling van de Voortteeling en ‘t Kinderbaren (A short and concise treatise on reproduction and childbirth), originally published in 1680.¹⁸⁴ Towards the end of the century, the Vilna Gaon is rumored to have urged his disciples to translate non-Jewish works—a request which may have been the driving force behind the translations produced by Rabbi Barukh Schick of Shklov and by the Gaon’s son, Avraham ben Eliyahu of Vilna.¹⁸⁵

The latter phenomenon, of rabbinical translators and supporters of translation, is particularly interesting. In recent years, a small corpus of studies has begun to focus attention on the interest of rabbinical thinkers in both Italy and Ashkenaz in the translation of works from foreign languages into Hebrew. As this growing corpus of studies reveals, throughout the early modern period, rabbis and rabbinical thinkers such as Ya‘akov Zahalon, Itsḥak Lampronti, Leon Modena, Shlomo of Chelm, Avraham ben Eliyahu, and Moshe ben Yosef Heida took an active interest in the translation of non-Jewish works in such fields as medicine, science, philosophy, and theology.¹⁸⁶ The fact that these early modern rabbinic thinkers joined the authors of Yiddish chapbooks and the emerging literary vanguards in Italy and central and eastern Europe to take an active part in the dissemination of non-Jewish texts prompts us to change the way we think about strict ontological classifications and religious, cultural, and social boundaries. Indeed, the scope of the early modern Jewish translational project was so vast and so varied that it necessarily challenges the conflation of modernity with secularism, which, though having come under some scrutiny in recent decades, is still reproduced in so much contemporary historiography and continues to hold a great deal of political valence today.

Translation and Jewish Women

The library of Jewish translation was, then, deeply heterogenous, with one glaring exception: to date, I have been unable to identify even a single translation produced by a Jewish woman.¹⁸⁷ Admittedly, Yiddish translations often appeared anonymously, and some may have been produced by women, but there is currently no evidence to support this. Indeed, of the hundreds of translations into Jewish languages known to us to have been produced during the early modern period, none can be proven to have been produced by, or (with one exception, discussed below) even specifically for, women.

This radical exclusion of women from the project of early modern Jewish translation stands in direct contrast to the corresponding reality outside the Jewish literary realm. As Hilary Brown notes, “in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, … more women became active as translators than at any previous time in history.”¹⁸⁸ The increasing presence of Christian women translators during this period has traditionally been understood to correspond with the secondary status of translation as a literary activity. “Seen as marginal, feminine, and secondary,” so the argument goes, “translation allowed women … to enter the literary sphere and to engage in conversations typically seen as beyond a woman’s scope.”¹⁸⁹ And yet, recent research by Brown and others has problematized the association of translation with femininity and with women’s literary agency. As these studies show, in early modern Europe, translation was often viewed as an activity bearing profound literary, religious, and political significance. At times, even as an activity superior to original writing.¹⁹⁰

The complete absence of early modern Jewish women translators seems to confirm this more recent approach. While this absence corresponds with the scarcity of Jewish women authors in the premodern period more generally, it also underscores the complex power dynamics that characterized the phenomenon of Jewish translation. As I discuss in the next chapter, for early modern Jews, translation meant more than merely importing foreign texts into the Jewish literary realm. Rather, it was a means of engaging in religious polemics, literary reclamation, and cultural gatekeeping. It was often performed by key members of the community, who viewed themselves as having taken on the hazardous mission of venturing into the foreign literary realm in order to prevent less learned readers from having to do so themselves. Such an understanding of translation, as an activity requiring immense responsibility, learning, and religious stability, coupled with the virtual exclusion of Jewish women from the literary and religious elite more generally, made Jewish men’s monopoly over translation almost inevitable.

This is not to say, however, that translation had no impact, or even that it had little impact, on early modern Jewish women. The emergence of Yiddish literature in the late Middle Ages and its consolidation as a major literary language in the early modern period enabled Jewish women to participate in the literary world of their time, if not necessarily as authors, then certainly as readers.¹⁹¹ Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that women were the chief consumers of Yiddish translations of German works. Thus, the Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz argues that “it is common sense that Ashkenazic women were in fact the ‘first and foremost readers’ of Dukus Horant, Hildebrant, Ditrikh of Bern … and others.”¹⁹² Katz views the appearance of these German-to-Yiddish translations as having “empowered the women of Ashkenaz [who] became more sophisticated and ‘European’ … in terms of familiarity with chatter of the wider gentile world than some of their most learned menfolk.”¹⁹³

Assumptions about translation and reception based on scholarly intuition, or “common sense,” can only take us so far, however. In fact, exposure to non-Jewish literature did not necessarily constitute a way of empowering or of “Europeanizing” the Jewish reader. Rather, translation was often viewed as a way of maintaining the gap between Jewish readers and foreign works. This gap was made even greater by the particular norms that characterized Yiddish translation, discussed in Chapter 3 below, and which encouraged the production of unacknowledged translations, the omission of references to non-Jewish authors or works, and the use of denigrating terms for Christian rituals and beliefs. In addition, as I have shown elsewhere, translation into Jewish languages could also have negative effects on women. The cultural bridge that connected early modern Christians and Jews was a conduit for conveying not only new discoveries and scientific developments but also new forms of gendered discrimination and sexual repression.¹⁹⁴

As for the question of readership, it is true that some popular Yiddish translations (although by no means all of them) did target women or girls specifically on their title pages, either alongside men and boys or without them.¹⁹⁵ In addition, several didactic works in Old Yiddish offered indictments of women who consumed such translations.¹⁹⁶ However, studies have shown that gender was a symbolic category in early modern Yiddish texts, which often had more to do with social hierarchy and education than with biological sex.¹⁹⁷ As a result of this ambiguity, as Katz himself observes, the answer to the question of who exactly Old Yiddish literature was created for is “oblique, complex and never to be fully known.”¹⁹⁸

One eighteenth-century report by a Christian missionary communicates a conversation with a Jewish book trader who claimed that while Jewish men studied the Torah, women had only the Yiddish translations of Eulenspiegel and other fool’s narratives to read.¹⁹⁹ This anecdote should, however, be taken with a grain of salt; firstly, most Jewish men did not, in fact, dedicate their lives to the study of the Torah, and they were thus just as likely to consume translations of German prose as women were. Secondly, Jewish women were capable of reading original or semi-original Yiddish works, as well as translations from Hebrew into Yiddish. Some of these works, such as the Brant-shpigl, the Mayse bukh, or the Tsene u-rene, were virtual best sellers. Surviving Yiddish works by Jewish women often include stories taken from such works. But I know of no one story that appears in a work by an early modern Jewish woman and that draws directly on a translation of a foreign work.²⁰⁰ In addition, I know of no translations into Yiddish (or other Jewish languages) of works designed specifically for women, such as Christian women’s devotions, cookbooks, or household guides.²⁰¹

There is one interesting recent finding that indicates a more direct engagement with translation by a Jewish woman. I refer here to a Yiddish translation (briefly mentioned above) of a Dutch treatise titled Korte en Bondige Verhandeling van de Voortteeling en ‘t Kinderbaren (A short and concise treatise on reproduction and childbirth, 1680) by Samuel Janson. The translation, recently discovered by Jordan Katz, was commissioned by a Dutch Jewish midwife by the name of Rachel Salomons of Amsterdam. Rachel commissioned the translation in 1709 as part of her training to become a licensed midwife in Amsterdam.²⁰² Here we have, for the first time, unambiguous evidence of the way in which translation could potentially empower Jewish women. For this Jewish midwife, translation into Yiddish functioned as a means of overcoming the limits of her own literacy and forged a path towards professional advancement. Future research into the particularly gendered aspects of early modern Jewish translation may discover more such cases.

A granular view of the various corpora of Jewish translations in the early modern period reveals immense versatility. Translation connected authors from vastly different social strata, geographical areas, cultural groups, religious backgrounds, and ideologies. These diverse authors translated works from different periods, languages, and genres, into Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Italian. Some translations remained in manuscript form, targeting individual or narrow groups of readers; others were hugely popular and were read by men and women across space, time, and generation. Some translators drew on a rich tradition of Hebrew translation, while others were instrumental in creating an entirely new library of vernacular works in print. The polyphony of early modern translation is one of the main features that distinguishes the phenomenon from the earlier project of medieval Hebrew translation. The next chapter tries to make sense of this early modern passion for translation, focusing on the question of motivation: why were so many Jews, of such varied backgrounds, interested in translating works from European to Jewish tongues?