Introduction

Translating the Ghetto

Reflecting in 1779 on his German translation of the Hebrew Bible, the famed German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) explained that the work constituted “the first step to culture from which my nation is, unfortunately, held at such a distance that one [might] almost despair over the possibility for improvement.”⁴ Mendelssohn’s portrayal of his Bible translation is characteristic of the celebratory view of translation as a means for promoting intercultural dialogue, the harmonious coming together of two distinct cultures. Proponents of this view tend to depict translation, and particularly interreligious translation, as intrinsically linked to cultural openness and tolerance. The scholarly treatment of Mendelssohn’s own translation is a case in point. In The Origins of the Modern Jew (1967), for instance, the historian Michael Meyer framed the translation as a kind of bridge between tradition and modernity: “it was with no less an aim in mind than the bridging of this gulf that Mendelssohn carried through his … translation of the Pentateuch into pure German. For the orthodox it would open the door to culture; for the assimilated it would make possible a return to the Torah.”⁵ More recently, Leonard J. Greenspoon wrote that Mendelssohn’s translation was “a means of bringing his fellow Jews into closer contact with German society, its ideas and ideals.”⁶

Over the past several decades, however, a different view has begun to emerge, and translation—an activity whose most stable characteristic is perhaps that of versatility—has begun to change its meaning. Where translation was once perceived as a distinctly dialogic enterprise, a way of building bridges between cultures, scholars of translation have of late wearied of those “corps of translators”⁷ whose literary bridges, they argue, serve as conduits not (or not only) for tolerance but for the erasure of cultural difference, the silencing of minority voices, and the reinforcement of Western and/or Christian cultural hegemony.⁸ If translation is a bridge, argues Sherry Simon (echoing Heidegger), it is one that “separates before it joins; … ‘gathers’ difference, [and] has an active role in creating and reinforcing borders, not only in unmaking them.”⁹ For Simon and other recent scholars of translation, the bridge formed by translation is a site not only of reconciliation but also of struggle. Read through the suspicious eyes of contemporary criticism, Mendelssohn’s translation thus appears less “the first step toward culture” as much as a step away from one.

These opposing views have, over the past three decades, become the dominant modes of understanding the cultural impact and significance of translation.¹⁰ This book offers a third way of approaching translation, one that is neither celebratory nor suspicious. Focusing on the vast translational enterprise taken up by early modern European Jews, the book aims to unveil the intense cultural creativity that translation often entails, as well as its unique value for historians in general and for scholars of the Jewish past in particular.¹¹ A highly scrutinized religious and ethnic minority in a rapidly changing Europe, early modern Jews faced immense pressures to convert and to assimilate to their Christian surroundings. Consequently, the question of the possibility or impossibility of intercultural dialogue confronted them as a real and pressing dilemma. Their response, as this study sets out to demonstrate, was neither to resist the temptation offered to them by non-Jewish culture nor to succumb to it unconditionally—but rather to translate it, and meet it on their own terms.

For European Jews, translation was a particularly appealing means of cultural transfer. Jewish authors acknowledged what they viewed as their own cultural inferiority. At the same time, they feared the potential hazards posed by direct exposure to non-Jewish texts and ideas. The unadulterated consumption of foreign works was often frowned upon by Jewish religious thinkers, who employed the rhetoric of contamination or annihilation to describe the attendant risks of such indulgence. The eminent German rabbi Ya‘akov Emden (1697–1776), for instance, warned his readers not to engage in the literature of the gentiles directly, “so that you do not approach the doors of their houses, and drink their evil waters, … and so that you are not taken captive in their fortresses.”¹² Emden’s contemporary, Rabbi Sha’ul ha-Levi (d. 1784), offered an equally dramatic description, cautioning: “if an Israelite should navigate among the nations to learn sciences from foreign books, waves of foreign knowledge will … divert him from the straight path.”¹³ In fact, even Mendelssohn himself voiced similar apprehensions in the Hebrew preface to his Bible translation, portraying the translation as a means to combat the consumption of foreign works by Jewish readers, as discussed in Chapter 2, below.

The concerns voiced by these early modern Jewish authors were not new. Indeed, the legitimacy of extra-Jewish knowledge—often referred to as “external books” (sefarim ḥitsoniyim) or “Greek science” (ḥokhmah yevanit)—had long been a contested issue among Jews.¹⁴ But with the rise of print the question became more pressing. The wider reach of printed texts and the growing literary appetite resulted, as Robert Bonfil has argued, in “the necessity for redefining and restructuring [the] space … between inside and outside, between licit and illicit readings, [and] between securely checked knowledge and its opposite.”¹⁵

These increasing concerns surrounding interreligious contact between Christians and Jews preoccupied not only early modern Jews, but also Christians. Indeed, just as Jewish authors were attempting to restructure the metaphorical space between the two groups, Christian authorities were undertaking to restructure the actual physical spaces between them. This goal was achieved by such means as ghettoization and discriminatory legislation, which were imposed by Christians with the aim of keeping Jews near enough to contribute to European society and economy but distant enough so as to limit fraternization between the two groups. As Bonfil argues: “Segregation in ghettos coexisting with the reintegration of the Jews into Christian society forced a change in gentile attitudes. The reception of Jews into Christian society was transformed by means of the ghetto from being exceptional and unnatural into being unexceptional and natural.^”16 Ghettoization thus emerged in the early modern period, almost as a prerequisite for integration. Here, again, Bonfil’s poignant phrasing comes in handy: “Could anything be more paradoxical than closing in order to permit opening, segregation to mediate integration?”¹⁷

In a sense, the phenomenon of early modern Jewish translation mimicked the very same and seemingly paradoxical rationale of the early modern ghetto, allowing Jews to benefit from close interaction with Christian literature while at the same time maintaining sufficient distance to limit the hazardous effects of unmediated engagement with these works. In other words, in the same way as the ghetto allowed Christians to benefit from Jews at a safe distance, translation offered Jews the ideal solution to the predicament of Christian-Jewish interaction. It allowed for the heavily monitored introduction of extra-Jewish knowledge in an often deeply domesticated form: “So that”—as ha-Levi explained—“Israel shall not need another nation.”¹⁸ As a literary activity, translation was perfectly suited to the combination of attraction and anxiety with which many early modern Jews viewed the cultural developments of their day. By adapting non-Jewish works into Hebrew script, Jewish translators were able to carefully monitor the kinds of texts and ideas that made their way into the Jewish cultural sphere and to mold them to the needs of a Jewish target readership.

It is this special Jewish understanding of translation as ghettoization that is the focus of this book. The following chapters examine the ways in which early modern Jews used translation to engage in a complex conversation with their Christian neighbors while also using it for communication between different classes, genders, and communities within the Jewish world. Although fraught with mutual suspicion, misconception, and polemic, these conversations also elicited immense creativity, innovation, and imagination. The multifaceted complexion of this dialogue was made possible by the very nature of early modern translation and by its liberal understanding of authorship and originality. This unique view allowed translation to become a means both of separation and of reconciliation.

Jewish Translation Studies and the Early Modern Period

Recent decades have witnessed a growing recognition of the critical role played by translation in early modern Europe. Translation has been shown to have played a decisive role in the defining cultural movements of the period, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, as well as in the dissemination and consolidation of scientific knowledge throughout and beyond Europe.¹⁹ As noted above, a less celebratory view of translation has also emerged in recent decades, exposing translation’s complicity in early modern colonialist enterprises, missionary efforts, and the promotion of prejudice more generally.

This awareness of the critical importance of translation during the early modern period has received only limited currency within the field of Jewish studies. Even though the centrality of translation in Jewish history has long been recognized—Jews have often been termed “Europe’s translators” or “a translating people”²⁰—studies of Jewish translation have tended, by and large, to overlook the early modern period. To date, no sustained attempt has been made to grapple with the corpus of early modern Jewish translations in its entirety, and its scope, geography, development, agents, and sources remain largely unknown. This scholarly oversight finds striking expression in the work of one of the great scholars of translation studies in general and of the history of Jewish translation in particular, Gideon Toury. Discussing the early modern period in a 2002 essay, Toury argued that “unlike the Middle Ages, Hebrew translation during this interim period seems to have lacked any distinct profile. To the extent that it was performed at all, it certainly lagged behind anything Jews did in Hebrew, which, with very few exceptions, was no longer up to European standards anyway.”²¹

Many today would emphatically reject Toury’s characterization of early modern Jewish culture. Still, the vast majority of studies of Jewish translation have focused on the medieval period, thanks, in part, to the enduring influence of Moritz Steinschneider’s magisterial Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (The Hebrew translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as transmitters, 1893).²² Thus, the definitive bibliography of Jewish Translation Studies, published in 2002, includes a mere 24 pages on early modern translations into Hebrew, as compared to 126 pages on medieval Hebrew translations.²³ More recent studies devoted to Jewish translation have done little to amend this imbalance. In a recent overview of the “traditions of translation of Hebrew culture” for the World Atlas of Translation, Nitsa Ben-Ari and Shaul Levin echo Toury’s observation almost verbatim, maintaining that: “The 16th–18th centuries saw the rise of a new center of multilingual Jewish culture … in Italy. However, translation activity in this period lacked a distinct profile and was hardly noticed as a distinct cultural activity.… But change was imminent with yet another territorial shift of the cultural center … and a movement aimed at bringing Jewish culture closer to the achievements of the cultures surrounding it.”²⁴ Ben-Ari and Levin are referring, of course, to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. And indeed, in contemporary studies the Haskalah is often imagined as the renaissance of Jewish translation. Maskilic translators are seen as having broken with the putative isolationism of earlier literary traditions, to import a new kind of literature from beyond the Jewish literary pale.²⁵

The marginalization of the early modern period in the history of Jewish translation is related, in part, to the relatively late development of the field of early modern Jewish history more generally.²⁶ This late development is matched by the now widely contested but still prevalent image of early modern Jewry (particularly in Ashkenaz) as being steeped in a deep and grudging traditionalism and antipathetic to the cultural, scientific, technological, and other innovations that characterized the non-Jewish European culture of the day. The significant changes that occurred in Jewish translational practices and norms from the late Middle Ages onwards are another contributing factor. These changes were characterized, among other things, by the transition from a sustained project of translating philosophical and scientific works from Arabic, initiated by a narrow elite of Hebrew translators in southern Europe (Spain, Italy, and southern France), to the spontaneous activity by translators across the continent who translated works of various genres from Latin and the European vernaculars into Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages.²⁷

But perhaps the most important factor contributing to the scarcity of studies of early modern Jewish translation has to do not with contemporary historiographic trends but with early modern translational norms, which pose a significant methodological challenge for contemporary historians. As we shall see throughout the coming chapters, many Jewish translations produced during the early modern period did not declare themselves as translations at all, and even when they did, they did so only in passing and did not identify their sources. These translational norms make the phenomenon of Jewish translation incredibly easy to overlook.

This is not to say that scholars of early modern Jewry have entirely ignored translation. Several major studies, published over the past few years, have focused on translations from Hebrew and Yiddish into German, Latin, and other European languages.²⁸ Other studies have focused on individual translations—or, less often, on small clusters of translations—of non-Jewish works into Hebrew or Yiddish, primarily those produced by maskilim from the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.²⁹ These studies have done an admirable job of exposing the translational endeavors and norms of certain local Jewish elites, authors, or intellectuals. However, they have not situated their respective translations or corpora of translations within the wider context of an overarching early modern Jewish translational project that spanned a broad array of countries, authors, genres, languages, readerships, genders, and classes. Thus, while long recognized by scholars as a flourishing site of translation, Yiddish literature has been studied almost in isolation from Hebrew literature and other libraries of Jewish translation. Moreover, scholars of translation have tended to focus on the “usual suspects” of Jewish-Christian cultural exchange, such as authors of the Jewish-Italian Renaissance, or maskilic authors. And yet, as the following chapters will show, in the three centuries stretching from 1500 to 1800, cultural transfer was not limited to the enthusiastic importation of non-Jewish modes of thought by a small number of “secular” intellectuals but was also taken up by timid, almost inadvertent innovators, who devoted themselves to the careful translation, adaptation, and indeed, Judaization of non-Jewish culture.

Toward a Definition of Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe

In a thoughtful reflection on the ambiguities of “Jewish translation,” Naomi Seidman emphatically rejects “any model that views Jewish translation as an essential phenomenon.” In fact, she argues, Jewish translation is “hard to categorize not only because it takes shape in a variety of contexts and periods, but also because translation is a term for doubleness and difference, the very site of undecidability and ambivalence.”³⁰ This essential fluidity of translation as a cultural activity is also recognized by Toury, who argues that “any definition, especially if couched in essentialist terms, specifying what is allegedly ‘inherently’ translational, would involve the untenable pretense of fixing, once and for all, the boundaries of a kind of object that is characterized by its inherent variability.”³¹ Nevertheless, a working definition of translation would seem to be a prerequisite for any study of this phenomenon in its historical and cultural manifestations. In the absence of such a definition, we run the risk of overlooking the existence of various translational practices and projects that took place in different historical settings—as previous treatments (or the lack thereof) of the early modern Jewish translational project aptly demonstrate.³²

Toury offers a helpful solution. In his well-known discussion of the notion of “assumed translation,” he suggests treating as a translation “any target-culture text for which there are reasons to tentatively posit the existence of another text, in another culture/language, from which it was presumably derived by transfer operations and to which it is now tied by a set of relationships based on shared features, some of which may be regarded—within the culture in question—as necessary and/or sufficient.”³³ This means that any text considered by its designated readers to be a translation should be treated as such by scholars, even if it does not comply with our own contemporary notions of “translation.” This approach allows researchers to study pseudo-translations (texts that present themselves as translations but are, in fact, original works), transcriptions, adaptations, and other works as translations, so long as they are perceived as such in the cultural context in which they are produced.³⁴

What, then, did “translation” in general—and “Jewish translation” in particular—mean to early modern Jews? Clearly, no one definition can cover the vast period, spaces, genres, languages, and works that this study aims to discuss. During the early modern period, translational activity targeting Jewish readers took a dizzying variety of forms: from “literal” translations or even word-for-word transcriptions into Hebrew characters, to free adaptations and interpretive paraphrases. The translators themselves do not seem to have differentiated starkly between these various practices and tended to refer to them using the same terminology—ha‘atakah (lit. copying) in Hebrew; iber zetsen (translating), fartaytshen (lit. “Germanizing”), or even transletirn³⁵ in Yiddish; and kopiar (copying) or tresladar (translating) in Ladino.³⁶ While some terms—such as ha‘atakah or iber zetsen—could be used to signify the translation of both foreign and domestic texts, the term tirgum (“translation” in contemporary Hebrew) was used exclusively in the context of translation between Jewish languages, and between Hebrew and Aramaic.³⁷

Attempts to evaluate the “Jewishness” of a translation are also hampered by the shifting cultural, literary, and linguistic trends that characterized the early modern era. In Italy, for instance, patterns of Jewish literacy changed drastically over the early modern period, resulting in the near disappearance of Yiddish translations in Italian-speaking spaces during the seventeenth century. At the same time, the cultural significance of translation into Hebrew also changed, as Italian Jews gradually became more linguistically assimilated into their surrounding environments. In fact, as I discuss in Chapter 1, whereas the phenomenon of Hebrew translation in early modern Ashkenaz is striking in its novelty, in seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century Italy it is its putative anachronism that is surprising. Translation into Jewish languages, then, may have meant one thing in one cultural context and quite another in others.

Yet, in spite of the wide array of terms, modes, and meanings of translation in general, and Jewish translation in particular, early modern translators do seem to have had some notion, fuzzy though it may have been, of “Jewish translation.” A 1703 Hebrew manuscript bearing the somewhat presumptuous title “Tekhunat ha-havaya” (Measure of existence) offers an interesting example. The work’s title page presents the manuscript as a translation (ha‘atakah) of an unnamed Latin source (ne‘etak mi-leshon Latin) which has been “Judaized (hityahed) and brought under the wings of the shekhinah (the divine presence).”³⁸ As I discuss below, however, aside from the omission of some distinctly Christian motifs that appeared in its source and the addition of a few fleeting references to Jewish sources, the manuscript constituted a more or less faithful³⁹ Hebrew translation of its Latin source.⁴⁰ How then should we understand this translator’s claim that the work had been “Judaized” and “brought under the wings of the shekhinah”?

A similarly befuddling understanding of Jewish translation is attested in early modern Yiddish translations, particularly in the near-transliteration of chivalric epics and popular chapbooks from the German into Hebrew letters. A 1597 Yiddish version of the German epic Sigenot, for instance, presents itself as a work taken from German or Christian script (galkhes) and translated (fartaysht) into Jewish (yudish).⁴¹ The translation itself is, in fact, a near-transliteration, with the omission of distinctly Christian elements.⁴² A later Yiddish translation, this time of the German chapbook Schildbürger (1727), similarly claimed to be “translated [iber zetst] from High German into Jewish-German [oyz der hoykh taytsher galkhes shprakh in yudish taytsh].”⁴³ Here again, the “Jewish translation” was little more than a near-transliteration of its German source, give or take a few minor omissions, particularly of distinctly Christian terms and motifs. Discussing this latter translation, Ruth von Bernuth raises a pointed question: given that the deviations from the German sources “are linguistically so modest,” Bernuth writes, “what did the publisher mean when he claimed to be offering his own translation?”⁴⁴

In providing an answer to this question, Bernuth underscores a salient feature of Jewish translation: “the issue here”—she argues—“is one of script: ‘Christian German’ means German written or printed in Latin characters [whereas] ‘Jewish German’ signifies simply text written or printed in a Hebrew hand or font.”⁴⁵ Indeed, for early modern Jews, it was the text’s metamorphosis from the Latin script (galkhes) to the Hebrew script (yudish) which rendered it a “Jewish translation.” This emphasis on script reflects the unique position of Hebrew script within early modern Europe; while Jews from different spaces, classes, and genders understood different languages, both Jewish and non-Jewish, what united them all, over and above anything else, was the Hebrew script—which was, at least ideally, accessible to all Jews. This unique orthographic reality confirms David Damrosch’s suggestion that “alphabets and other scripts … serve as key indices of cultural identity, often as battlegrounds of independence or interdependence.”⁴⁶

The political valence of script is particularly discernible in the project of Jewish translation, where themes, ideas, and books bring together but script sets apart. During the early modern period, script remained the main cultural border between Christians and Jews; the overwhelming majority of Christians would have been unable to read a work in Hebrew letters, while for many Jews, particularly in Ashkenaz but also elsewhere, Latin script remained largely incomprehensible. Translating or transcribing a book from Latin letters to Hebrew ones thus constituted, as Bernuth notes, “an invitation to take part in an encounter with … Christian culture of the time but from a position of safety within the confines of Hebrew type.”⁴⁷ As we shall see in Chapter 2 below, it was precisely this “position of safety,” enabled by the mobilization of the text from Latin to Hebrew script, that served as one of the primary motivations for the production of translations by early modern Jews. Producing a translation in Hebrew script meant targeting a necessarily Jewish audience, whether learned (and thus able to read in Hebrew) or unlearned (and able to read in Yiddish or Ladino). At the same time, transferring a book from Latin to Hebrew script largely meant excluding a non-Jewish readership.

In keeping with the ambiguity of the early modern understanding of translation, in this book I have chosen to treat the various translations, transcriptions, and free adaptations that appeared in Jewish languages from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century as forming part of one and the same phenomenon of early modern Jewish translation. Bearing in mind the unique understanding of Jewish translation that characterized the period, I treat any text that originated in Latin script and was rendered into Hebrew script as a Jewish translation.⁴⁸

Structure of the Book

The different chapters of this book aim to offer a holistic view of Jewish translation in early modern Europe, focusing on translation from European to Jewish languages. In these chapters I attempt to answer the fundamental questions surrounding the phenomenon of Jewish translation, as I understand them.

Chapter 1 sketches the general contours of early modern Jewish translation. The chapter builds on a bibliographic survey of almost 650 translations of texts from European languages to Hebrew script, made available through the JEWTACT digital database. Drawing on this database, it traces the major routes of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, offering answers to such questions as: Where did Jewish translation take place? What were its primary sources? What were the selection criteria for the translation of European works into Jewish languages? At the same time, the chapter also offers an overview of the main characteristics of each translational site and language, exploring the shifts and transformations that occurred within and between these sites throughout the period. It follows the movement of Hebrew and Yiddish translational activity from the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth century to central and eastern Europe during the following centuries, and attempts to understand the ways in which the disparate endeavors of Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Italian translations inspired, opposed, and otherwise informed one another.

Chapter 2 discusses the question of motivation, namely: What motivated early modern Jews to render works from non-Jewish languages in Hebrew script? The answer to this question, I argue, may be gleaned by looking closely at the prefaces and other paratextual elements of early modern Hebrew and Yiddish translations. In these often lengthy prefaces, Jewish translators offered reflections on the meanings and merits of translation into Jewish languages and constructed a unique image of translation, combining elements of tradition and innovation, submission and subversion, attraction and aversion. The chapter focuses on the three primary motivations offered in these prefaces, namely the notions: (a) that translation offers a means to strengthen Jewish religion and faith; (b) that translation offers a means of reclaiming lost or stolen Jewish knowledge; and (c) that translation is a form of cultural gatekeeping. Of course, as I discuss further below, there may well have been other, hidden agendas that inspired translators throughout the period discussed here; however, my discussion of the paratexts of Jewish translations focuses not on what Jewish translators desired to conceal but, on the contrary, what these authors, printers, and translators chose to trumpet. It is these revealed motivations for translation, I argue, that convey what passed within the early modern Jewish literary system as legitimate interreligious and intercultural transfer.

Chapter 3 is occupied with the methods of translation, and the question: How did early modern Jews translate? This chapter provides an overview of the norms of Jewish translation in early modern Europe and the ways in which they corresponded with the norms of translation in other European (and non-European) literatures during the same period. Particular attention is devoted to the phenomenon of translations that do not acknowledge their sources in whole or in part. The chapter asks why this particular translational norm was so prevalent among early modern Jewish translators, and to what extent these translators differed from their non-Jewish contemporaries. In other words, in addition to identifying the norms of Jewish translation in the period, this chapter sets out to answer the question: What is particularly Jewish about Jewish translation?

Chapter 4 attempts to identify the end of early modern Jewish translation. This chapter focuses on translations produced by authors of the Jewish Enlightenment in the decades around the end of the eighteenth century. While these translations have enjoyed greater scholarly attention than any other corpus of translation discussed in this book, rereading these works against the wider context of early modern works throws them into sharp critical relief. Thus, for instance, the maskilim’s tendency to domesticate their translations has often been presented in the context of the Haskalah as a form of deception, designed to propagate radical innovation under a traditionalist guise. And yet, similar translational practices are found in earlier Hebrew and Yiddish translations, in translations that appeared in manuscript and were designed for individual edification, as well as in rabbinical translations of the same period. The chapter aims to reposition early maskilic translations in their early modern context, reading them not as a radical break with past literary traditions but as a continuation—perhaps the final culmination—of a centuries-long process of textual transmission from non-Jewish languages to Hebrew script.

This book treats a complex phenomenon, which took place over a long duration of time and across huge swaths of Europe. It discusses, at one and the same time, Yiddish translations and Hebrew translations, transliterations and adaptations, translations produced on the Italian peninsula and translations produced in central and eastern Europe. It addresses translations authored by rabbinical thinkers as well as those produced by laymen and maskilim, literary translations and scientific works, and more. Chapter 1 reflects on this variety, attempting to offer some basic distinctions between these diverse corpora of translations while at the same time highlighting their overarching features. Other chapters are focused more on commonalities than differences. Of course, this kind of bird’s-eye view comes at a price; future studies may offer more nuanced discussions of local varieties of Jewish translation, or of the differences between earlier and later translational endeavors.⁴⁹ However, one of the aims of this book is to move beyond the kind of isolated histories of translation that previous studies have offered, toward a more holistic understanding of Jewish translation in early modern Europe. The chapters below will attempt to provide a multidimensional view of the phenomenon of early modern Jewish translation—not only as a distinct period in Jewish literary history but as a unique and meaningful cultural phenomenon.