Chapter 3 Translation as Judaization

Casual Concealment

While in some cases, as we shall see, translators actively concealed their use of extra-Jewish works, in most cases, it seems that translators and, no less importantly, publishers, simply saw no need to acknowledge their non-Jewish sources. This holds particularly true for Yiddish translations, which, as may be gleaned from Figure 8 above, rarely acknowledged their sources in full.

A telling example is the Yiddish translation of one of the first modern subject encyclopedias, Die curieuse Orographia (1715), by the Lutheran pastor and famed geographer Johann Gottfried Gregorii (1685–1770), also known as Melissantes. Published around 1792 under the title Seyder harey olem beshraybung (Description of the order of the mountains of the world), this anonymous translation offered its readers a heavily abridged albeit generally faithful translation of the German source. It featured some Hebraisms and additions, but for the most part, the translator’s primary task was to condense Melissantes’s verbose, almost 800-page-long tome into a manageable Yiddish booklet, totaling less than 50 pages.⁶

The translation made no mention of Melissantes, and the source was further obscured by the book’s Hebraized title. Still, Yiddish readers of the period would have been hard-pressed to imagine the book was anything but a translation. Yiddish (and, for that matter, Hebrew) works on natural history and geography were uncommon, and those that were published were almost always translations, whether or not they acknowledged their sources. If any doubt remained as to the provenance of Seyder harey olem, the book’s organization according to the Latin alphabet would have been a foolproof indication of its reliance on a foreign source. This organization, a particular oddity of the book, resulted, for instance, in the appearance of mountains beginning with the Hebrew letters kaf (כ, the eleventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and kuf (ק, the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet) immediately after mountains beginning with the Hebrew letter bet (ב, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet).⁷

Still, the translator not only neglected to mention the existence of a source text but also expunged any mention of non-Jewish literature from the translation. A highly erudite man of science, Melissantes peppered his book with numerous references to canonical authors—ancient, medieval, and contemporary—none of whom appeared in the work’s Yiddish translation. That these omissions were made to conceal the fact that the work drew on non-Jewish sources seems unlikely. More probable is that the translator simply assumed that the names of authorities such as Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, Seneca, and Augustine—all of which appeared in his source—would mean little to Yiddish readers.⁸

Evidence of similar assumptions is found throughout Old Yiddish literature. German belletristic works such as Die sieben weisen Meister, Eulenspiegel, and Die schöne Magelone appeared in numerous translations and editions. While some translations made a point of Judaizing some or all of the Christian elements that appeared in their sources, others were less invested in adapting their sources. Consequently, some popular Yiddish translations featured such elements as Christian churches, holidays, and rituals.⁹ Many translations also reproduced the German titles of their sources. It would have been impossible for contemporary readers to imagine these works, many of which were also extremely popular outside the Jewish literary realm, as domestic works. Still, there seems to have been no expectation that the translators acknowledge the author, language, or even the very existence of a source.

A somewhat amusing expression of the dismissive approach to source acknowledgment among Yiddish translators is found in a Yiddish version of David Gans’s Tsemaḥ David. As discussed in Chapter 2, the second part of Gans’s Hebrew book originally opened with an attempt to legitimize his reliance on non-Jewish sources by appealing to both ancient and contemporary Jewish authorities, such as Maimonides and Farissol. This lengthy apologia was omitted in the book’s Yiddish translation, which appeared in 1697. Explaining the omission, the publisher, Zalman Hanau of Frankfurt, wrote: “This [= Gans’s preface] is too boring (tsu lang vayl) for the reader, [who] has no patience (di gedult nit hobn) to read it.… But the essence of the matter is that all that is written here has been taken (aroys genumn) from the Hebrew and German (taytsh) chronicles or books of geography.”¹⁰

Having reduced one of the most charged, ancient, and complicated debates in Jewish history—the debate surrounding the legitimacy of non-Jewish wisdom—to mere tedium, Hanau goes on to berate Gans for his extensive references to obscure sources throughout his work, such as “Kasius or Bastius or Goltsius or other strange names.”¹¹ This list of names may sound merely formulaic, but Hanau is referring here specifically to Georg Caesius (1543–1604), Martin Boregk (Boreccios, d. 1588), and Hubert Goltzius (1526–1583)—all of whom are mentioned in the introduction to Gans’s Tsemaḥ David and cited several times throughout the Hebrew work.¹² Clearly, for Hanau, the names of these chroniclers were hardly selling points; on the contrary, they were a sure way to intimidate potential Yiddish readers, for whom such names would have been entirely devoid of meaning.¹³

It would seem then, that Yiddish translators’ particular propensity to produce unacknowledged translations was not necessarily motivated by the desire to conceal the non-Jewish origins of their translations but rather by a recognition of their readers’ literary tastes. There was also an unsentimental assessment of these readers’ level of erudition at play here; the creators of Yiddish literature often viewed their target readership as being largely uneducated and assumed a significant imbalance between their own literary refinement and their readers’ relative ignorance. This may be gleaned from the prefaces and introductions that featured in numerous early modern Yiddish works, in which the authors or printers explained (often in Hebrew!) their resort to the vernacular.¹⁴ This paternalistic view contributed to the prevalence of unacknowledged Yiddish translations, which may have been guided by the (not entirely unreasonable) assumption that references to the authors of German, Dutch, Italian, or Latin works would hardly impress a Yiddish readership.

This view of the readership was matched by the equally dismissive approach to authorship that, as we saw in Chapter 1, characterized Yiddish literature in the early modern period. With few exceptions, Old Yiddish translations (and Old Yiddish literature more generally) tended to appear anonymously, or under their publishers’ names.¹⁵ As discussed, this was by no means unique; similar practices are attested in the literatures of other contemporary vernaculars. However, while early modern translations of literary works into the various European vernaculars often appeared anonymously, they did not as often apply the same negligent attitude to acknowledging their sources. In fact, many translations that were unacknowledged in Yiddish were acknowledged in other vernacular translations, including in the mediating translations used by the Yiddish translators. The various Yiddish translations of the Thousand and One Nights which appeared throughout the eighteenth century, offer an interesting example. None of these translations made any mention of Antoine Galland, and the earliest, the aforementioned Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot even went as far as to present itself under a Judaized title.¹⁶ In direct contrast, the German mediating text used by the latter translator appeared anonymously, but identified its French source in its title, which read: The Thousand and One Nights … first translated from the Arabic into French by Mr. Galland and from the same into German (Die Tausend und Eine Nacht … erstlich vom Hrn. Galland … aus der Arabischen Sprache in die Frantzösische, und aus selbiger … in Teutsche übersetzt).¹⁷ The same phenomenon is found when comparing the Yiddish translation of Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1710) with its immediate Dutch source, identified by Moritz Steinschneider. While the Yiddish translator, Yosef ben Ya‘akov Maarssen, acknowledged that the book was a translation of a “one-hundred-year-old Dutch book,” he did not identify his source by name. Boccaccio’s Dutch translator, on the other hand, acknowledged his Italian source in the book’s title, which read: Fifty amusing stories or curiosities from Giovanni Boccaccio (Vijftigh lustighe historien oft nieuwigheden Joannis Boccatij).¹⁸ Clearly, then, Yiddish translators tendency to obscure their sources was unparalleled among other vernacular translators during the same period.

Creative Concealment

Another incentive for the obfuscation of the source, among both Hebrew and Yiddish translators, seems to have been the understanding of translation as creative work that characterized early modern translations in general. As discussed in further detail below, beginning in the sixteenth century there arose in Europe a distinction between the supposedly slavish task of word-for-word translation, which had often characterized medieval translations and which continued to be used for pedagogical purposes in early modern Europe, and the purportedly more noble task of creating a fluent translation. Of course, the specific degree of liberty that translators should take with their sources, and the circumstances under which such liberties might be taken, remained the focus of much debate, and yet, as Theo Hermans notes, “the demise of the literalist temper was sealed in the seventeenth century.”¹⁹ Translation thus came to be thought of as deeply creative, requiring, as the French philosopher Charles Batteux (1713–1780) argued, “if not as much genius, at least as much taste … as to compose. Perhaps even more.”²⁰

Some translators seem to have viewed their task as that of compilation and harmonization rather than mere translation. This understanding, which drew on humanist literary practices, entailed copying, excerpting, translating, adapting, juxtaposing, and citing of some sources sometimes, but not all sources all the time.²¹ A case in point is offered by the prolific Hebrew translator and author Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–1578). As Robert Bonfil has masterfully shown, Ha-Kohen’s great chronicle Sefer divrey ha-yamim le-malkhey Tsarfat u-malkhey beyt Otoman ha-Togar (History of the kings of France, and the kings of the house of Ottoman the Turk, 1554), drew on a dizzying array of sources, both domestic and foreign—Latin chronicles, medieval Hebrew manuscripts, Italian avvisi or newsletters, and Spanish works—only a fraction of which were cited by name.²² Tuviah ha-Kohen constitutes another example: the Padua graduate’s famous Ma‘ase Tuviah drew on multiple Latin sources, which were merged, translated into Hebrew, and complemented by the translator’s own insights and observations. Only some of these sources were acknowledged.²³

A creative understanding of translation seems to have been particularly widespread among Hebrew translators. The translation of a work from contemporary European vernaculars, or from Latin, to the ancient Hebrew language was an arduous task, requiring much research, adaptation, and creative thinking. In the introduction to his aforementioned “Tokhen ha-kadur” for instance, Meir Neumark describes the immense difficulties facing the Hebrew translator of the time. He begins by citing the great medieval translator Shmuel Ibn Tibbon, who famously determined that the task of the translator was “to transfer the contents of the book as they are, without change, into the language of the translation.”²⁴ This formidable task, Ibn Tibbon noted, requires impeccable command of both source and target languages. And yet, Neumark remarked, the challenge of translation into Hebrew was exacerbated by “the disappearance of our Holy Tongue from our lips.”²⁵

A little over half a century later, in 1755, the Tibbonide dictum would once again be conjured to portray the travails of translation into Hebrew. This time, the translator was none other than the famous German Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, and the source was Edward Young’s well-known English poem, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, which Mendelssohn translated via a mediating German text.²⁶ Noting how difficult it had been for Ibn Tibbon to translate from Maimonides’s Arabic into Hebrew, Mendelssohn asked: “And if this is true with regard to the languages of the East [from areas] close to the land of Israel such that they were almost the same tongue, what can we do with regard to languages of the west[?] … The ways of the Hebrew tongue and its refined language are far removed from the refined speech of those nations with the languages of their respective lands (Gen. 10:20)—who will draw them close so that they be joined together (Ezek. 37:17)?”²⁷ Mendelssohn’s reply was that Ibn Tibbon’s rules applied only to the translation of works of religion and science (ḥokhmah), such as the works of Maimonides or those of Bahya Ibn Paquda (whose Ḥovot ha-levavot [Duties of the Heart] had been translated by Yehudah Ibn Tibbon, Shmuel Ibn Tibbon’s father), “for in [translating] these books, one may not deviate in the slightest from the words of their authors.” But in translating literary works, Mendelssohn argued, the translator maintains a much greater degree of liberty.

Of course, the task of translation into Yiddish was much simpler. But some Yiddish translators did share the early modern understanding of translation as a form of creative genius. One such translator was Elye Levita (Bokher), whose beloved Bovo d’Antona was a translation of an Italian chivalric poem. While Bokher notes in the introduction that the work is a translation of a previous source, the title page makes no mention of this, suggesting instead that the work is “a handsome creation easily recognizable as Elye Bokher’s” (man kent vol Elye Bokers gemakht).²⁸ The translator was furthermore identified on the title page by the name “Elye the author” (Elye ha-meḥaber). And indeed, Bokher took exceeding liberties with his source and his translation included numerous deviations, omissions, and additions, some of which were clearly designed to (mildly) Judaize the work while others seem to have been the result of his own literary preferences.

There is, perhaps, something disingenuous about exemplifying the creativity of Yiddish translation via an Italian-to-Yiddish translation. As Claudia Rosenzweig notes, the language gap between Italian and Yiddish meant that Yiddish translations of Italian works, such as Buovo de Antona or Paris e Vienna, required a greater degree of authorial investment than translations from German. Indeed, translation from German or even Dutch into Yiddish was often tantamount to transliteration, and the work of translators of German books such as Kaiser Oktavian, Eulenspiegel, or Schildbürger was often limited to mild Judaization or the neutralization of Christian terms and, at times, not even that. Italian-to-Yiddish translations were thus often (though not always) characterized by greater liberty, creativity, and prestige than their German-to-Yiddish counterparts.²⁹

And yet, some translators from languages linguistically closer to Yiddish do seem to have understood their endeavor to be creative, requiring the same or almost the same degree of creative effort as translating from Italian. In his translation of Boccaccio’s Decamerone, for instance, the prolific Dutch translator Yosef Maarssen related the difficulties he had encountered in translating his source via the Dutch: “the Dutch tongue … is distinct from all other tongues (fun ale andre leshoynes ob geshaydn iz), because all tongues correspond with one another in terms of grammar, only Dutch is exceptional. This is why it is hard to translate (iber zetsen), and particularly this book [which is] over a hundred years old, and at the time the Dutch language was even harsher (herber) than it is now.”³⁰

Maarssen’s claim that “all languages” apart from Dutch correspond closely with one another is bewildering. It could be that he was referring specifically to the linguistic and grammatical proximity between Yiddish and German, perhaps seeking thereby to distinguish his work from the near-transliterations of German Volksbücher so derided by his contemporaries. Whatever the meaning of these puzzling prefatory remarks, in fact, Maarssen seems to have greatly exaggerated his translational efforts. As Marion Aptroot has shown, while Maarssen offered a slightly abridged version of his source, for the most part, the text was hardly adapted.³¹

Some German-to-Yiddish or Dutch-to-Yiddish translators did, however, demonstrate a higher level of authorial investment. The creative aspect of these translations had less to do with linguistic adaptation and more with their treatment of narrative elements. Some Yiddish translations incorporated their own original tales into their translations or wove together tales from disparate sources; others turned prose into poetry; still others added original frame narratives, and more.³² Oral transmission also contributed greatly to the revision and adaptation of international tales in Yiddish. While their exact routes of transmission are much more difficult to follow, upon reaching the Yiddish literary sphere international folktales were often heavily Judaized and assimilated into a distinctly Jewish narrative universe, in which Jewish rabbis and Hasmonean rulers took the place of Arthurian kings and chivalric knights.³³

Finally, as discussed in Chapter 2 above, drawing on the myth of the Jewish origin of the sciences, Jewish translators often understood translation as an act of reclaiming lost Jewish knowledge. This meant that these translators could view their endeavor as a complex form of returning the foreign text to its pristine Jewish form, making any acknowledgment of the non-Jewish source entirely superfluous.

Active Concealment: The Obfuscation of Specific Sources

We have seen, then, that the obfuscation of foreign sources in Jewish translation was not necessarily the result of a desire to conceal the non-Jewish provenance of the text or to present foreign works under a Jewish guise. Whether they viewed their work as deeply creative, or believed that their readers would have little interest in the chain of transmission of the work, translators often simply saw no need to cite their sources. But there were also those cases in which Jewish translators actively concealed their sources, at times going to great lengths to do so. This was often the result of one of two separate considerations: either a wish to conceal the use of a particular source, or a desire to conceal the traces of any non-Jewish influence on the work. Although both forms of concealment entailed some degree of deception even by early modern standards, they were inspired by different rationales and should therefore be addressed separately.

Some translators concealed the use of some non-Jewish source texts while trumpeting their use of others. In some cases, translators claimed to have translated one work while in fact relying on quite another. A relatively well-known example is the maskil Barukh Lindau’s Hebrew textbook Reshit limudim (1788). In the book’s preface, Lindau attributed the information derived for his book to some of the highest authorities of Enlightenment scientific thought, among them Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the famous German geographer Anton Friedrich Büsching (1724–1793), and the Jewish ichthyologist Markus Bloch (1723–1799).³⁴ But while Lindau did occasionally rely on Buffon and on Büsching (both of whom were also translated by other Hebrew authors during the period), his primary source was much less prestigious.³⁵ Not a decade after the publication of Reshit limudim, Pinḥas Hurwitz, author of the best-selling Sefer ha-brit (Book of the covenant, 1797)—and himself a frequent borrower of other writers’ works (among them, ironically, Lindau himself)—claimed that the book was, in fact, a translation of a well-known German children’s book by the Göttingen pedagogue Georg Christian Raff (1748–1788).³⁶ In a more recent comparative reading of the two works, Tal Kogman shows that Reshit limudim was indeed largely a heavily abridged, free translation of Raff’s Naturgeschichte für Kinder (Natural history for children, 1778). Lindau was not alone; as Kogman reveals, fragments of Raff’s book were also translated by other maskilim, such as Aaron Wolfsohn-Halle (1754–1835), Menaḥem Mendel Lefin (1749–1826), and Shimshon Bloch (1784–1845), none of whom acknowledged their reliance on this popular German children’s book.³⁷

Did Lindau and other maskilim conceal their use of Raff’s book in order to present their translations as drawing on more highbrow sources? Perhaps. But it could also be that Lindau viewed Naturgeschichte für Kinder and other works by Raff—which drew heavily on Buffon and Büsching—as mere mediating texts. If this were indeed the case, it would have made sense to Lindau not to mention Raff by name. As discussed in Chapter 1, the use of unacknowledged mediating texts (particularly in German) was a widespread norm among Jewish translators in the early modern period and into modernity. Even those translators who presented their works as translations, and provided information on their sources, tended to suppress their use of mediating texts and portray themselves as having drawn on the Urtext in its original language. In fact, elsewhere in Reshit limudim Lindau also used a Hebrew mediating text without acknowledgment. In the introduction to the book, he incorporated a Hebrew translation of a fragment from Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” which was copied in its entirety from the work of the esteemed Jewish scholar and rabbi Yosef Shlomo Delmedigo (YaSHaR mi-Kandia, 1591–1655). While Delmedigo was certainly no lowbrow German children’s author, Lindau made no mention of his mediation either, presenting the translation as though it had been drawn directly from Ptolemy.³⁸

Additional reasons for concealing specific non-Jewish sources while flaunting the use of others abound. Some translators seem to have been reluctant to cite sources that might have proved more problematic for their readers not necessarily because they were written by Christians but because they were the products of particularly controversial authors: suspected atomists, deists, or Pietists.³⁹ An enigmatic mid-eighteenth-century medical manuscript, titled “Ets ha-sade” (Tree of the field, c. 1751), is a case in point. Composed in Yiddish, the manuscript was prepared by one Mordekhai Ha-Kohen of Schmallenberg, who boasted a rabbinic lineage going back to the well-known seventeenth-century talmudist Shabbethai Ha-Kohen, known as the Shakh. In a Hebrew introduction to the book, Ha-Kohen flaunted not only his lineage and extensive rabbinical training, but also his command of Latin, French, and other European languages.⁴⁰ It was owing to his polyglot erudition, he explained, that he had decided “to compose a book of medicine from what I have labored and discovered in the works of our sages …, and what I have learned from the books of the sages of the nations, but from which I have gathered the worthwhile and discarded the superfluous. And the greater part [of the treatments collected herein] I have tried and tested myself, and I have now brought all these together under one roof.”⁴¹

With the exclusion of the short concluding chapter,⁴² however, the manuscript itself featured little in the way of rabbinical discussions. It did, on the other hand, appear to draw heavily on the works of such learned physicians as Lazare Rivière, Andreas Vesalius, and Franciscus Sylvius, who were cited copiously throughout the work.⁴³ In addition, the Yiddish text was peppered with numerous Latinisms (in both Hebrew transliteration and Latin script), creating the impression that the scribe had indeed consulted the works of these learned physicians in their original Latin and that he had anthologized and translated the observations and remedies with which he concurred. And yet, a closer look reveals that, aside from some minor omissions and additions, “Ets ha-sade” was largely a wholesale Yiddish translation of the German physician Christian Weisbach’s (1684–1715) Warhaffte und gründliche Cur aller dem menschlichen Leibe zustossenden Kranckheiten (True and thorough cures for all diseases affecting the human body, 1712).⁴⁴

Weisbach had studied at the medical faculty in Halle, where he became involved in the local Pietist ferment. His book, which bore a strong Pietistic stamp, was largely an attempt to popularize the central tenets of medical Pietism, inspired by Georg Ernst Stahl.⁴⁵ Ha-Kohen’s translation of the book was meticulous. He even copied Weisbach’s lengthy German introduction, modifying it ever so slightly to make it appear as if it were his own original text. Here, for example, I juxtapose Weisbach’s discussion of the relevance of the study of the soul for medical practice (left-hand column) with the corresponding passage in Ha-Kohen’s book (right-hand column), followed by a translation. The slight departures made by the translator are highlighted in bold.

You should not wonder that I also reflect here on the souls [seele/neshome] of men. We who practice medicine consider men as a whole … and must therefore consider the soul, as the mover and governor of the body, even as a theologian or a minister [Theologus, oder seel-sorger/talmid khokem unt neshome dokter], if he wishes to save the souls of men, [and] to bring about rebirth and renewal, … must point his attention even to the fragile hut [that is] the body.

As this comparison suggests, Ha-Kohen offered his readers a near-transliteration, with minimal Judaization, of Weisbach’s text. Only terms that were specifically Christian (Theologus, Seelsorger) or that would ring foreign to the Jewish reader (Seele⁴⁸) were replaced with Hebraisms (talmid khokhem, neshome …).⁴⁹

Significantly, however, while the Yiddish scribe made no attempt to conceal his use of non-Jewish sources, even boasting of his familiarity with such works, Weisbach’s name was nowhere mentioned in the book.⁵⁰ One can only speculate as to Ha-Kohen’s motivations for concealing his reliance on Weisbach. In the introduction to the book, he portrayed himself as a polyglot and well-read student of medicine, and it could be that he wished to create the chimera of extensive reading, independent experimentation, and original research, rather than admit that the work was a wholesale translation of a vernacular textbook.

However, in speculating on the translator’s motivation, the Pietist context of the source text should also be taken into account. As Rebekka Voß has recently shown, Yiddish authors around the mid-eighteenth century actively engaged with the German Pietists of their time, often incorporating—even translating—their texts and ideas into their Yiddish works.⁵¹ None of the authors discussed by Voß openly acknowledged their Pietist sources of influence, suggesting that such an acknowledgment was deemed problematic at the time. Viewed in this context, it seems unsurprising that Ha-Kohen would conceal his translation of a Pietist work. In fact, while maintaining the general Pietist “mood” of the book—including, for instance, the discussion of the importance of vernacular writing, of a holistic view of body and soul, and of religious renewal and reform—Ha-Kohen took pains to tone down the more glaring expressions of Pietism in his source.⁵²

In some cases, the concealment of particular sources had to do with the desire to maintain a distance between particular readers and those sources. Thus, when the Galician maskil Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev (1764–1811) published his bilingual translation of the Book of Ben Sira in 1798, he made a point of acknowledging the sources for his Hebrew translation, but not for his Yiddish (or rather Jüdisch-Deutsch) one. In the preface to the work, Ben Ze’ev explained that he had long dreamed of translating Ben Sira, but that he was loath to base his translation on an unnamed German version of the book that had reached him. Echoing Wessely’s earlier discussion in his own translation of the apocryphal Sapientia Salomonis (Solomon’s Wisdom, discussed in Chapter 2 above), Ben Ze’ev noted that the German translation was necessarily flawed, being a translation of an Eastern (Hebrew) text into a Western (German) language. “Had I proceeded to translate the book [from German]”—he wrote—“I would have produced a twisted book, devoid of majesty and of glory.”⁵³

Luckily, Ben Ze’ev noted, “God wished that I should succeed [in my translation] and He provided me with the great biblical book, with a translation into four great languages, and these are Syriac, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, and [this book] is known as Poliglota [and] was printed in London almost two hundred years ago.”⁵⁴ Ben Ze’ev was referring to the prestigious Biblia sacra polyglotta (1653–1657), curated by the Anglican Bishop Brian Walton (d. 1661).⁵⁵ And indeed, the translation showcases the Galician maskil’s profound erudition, his command of Greek, Syriac, German, and Hebrew, as well as his embrace of humanistic antiquarian traditions, alongside the contemporary biblical zeal.

And yet, the Jüdisch-Deutsch translation that occupied the bottom half of each verso page of Ben Ze’ev’s Ben Sira drew on an altogether different tradition. Addressing this latter translation in passing in the preface, Ben Ze’ev claimed that he had appended to his book a translation into “easy and simple German, for the benefit of the uneducated [‘am ha-’arets], for it is a useful [and educative] book, for all readers, young and old.” “As to the quality of my translation”—he added—“I will let the reader be the judge.”⁵⁶ For the unsuspecting reader, it would appear as though the Jüdisch-Deutsch translation was Ben Ze’ev’s own creation, modeled perhaps after Moses Mendelssohn’s famous Jüdisch-Deutsch Bible, Netivot ha-shalom. And yet, as readers of this book may already suspect, in preparing this translation Ben Ze’ev drew precisely on those German translations he had so adamantly condemned in the book’s preface. In fact, Ben Ze’ev’s Jüdisch-Deutsch translation relied heavily—in many verses, to the point of near-transliteration—on a German translation prepared in 1782 by J. W. Linde and edited by the Protestant theologian August Hermann Niemeyer.⁵⁷

Ben Ze’ev’s choice to conceal the German source of his Yiddish translation while trumpeting the sources of his Hebrew translation reflects not only the ubiquitous understanding of Yiddish-reading Jews as less sophisticated but also traditional concerns surrounding the democratization of knowledge facilitated by Yiddish literature. Yiddish readers would have been able to read Ben Ze’ev’s German-Jewish Ben Sira, but they would not have been aware of its Lutheran sources.⁵⁸ In this way, Ben Ze’ev maintained the same kind of control over the Jewish literary sphere as his early modern predecessors had, reserving direct excursions into non-Jewish literature to Hebrew readers such as himself and ensuring a strictly mediated access for the majority of Jewish readers.

Active Concealment: The Concealment of Non-Jewish Influence

Finally, some Jewish translators seem to have gone to great lengths to conceal any traces of non-Jewish influence on their works. In such cases, concealment was designed to facilitate the work’s smooth reception among Jewish readers. It bears emphasizing that, as the examples above demonstrate, such concealment was by no means a prerequisite for the reception of translations. Indeed, it stands to reason that, as surprising as the prevalence of the phenomenon of early modern Jewish translation may be to us today, most contemporary readers were likely aware that many Hebrew and Yiddish books, especially in the fields of science and medicine, did in fact draw on previous sources in European languages. Active concealment seems to have been prevalent, however, in translations of works possessing a distinct religious dimension, such as prayer books, Bibles, and works of religious instruction. We have seen above, for instance, how the first Yiddish and Judeo-Italian Bible translations that were based on Christian translations suppressed their sources, presenting themselves as having drawn directly from Hebrew.

Another example of active concealment of the act of translation is Avraham Yagel’s 1595 Hebrew catechism, titled Lekaḥ tov (Good lesson), which has been shown to be an unacknowledged translation of one of the best known Latin catechisms of its time, the Catechismus minor seu Parvus Catechismus catholicorum (1558) by the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius.⁵⁹ Yagel made no mention of Canisius or of his catechism anywhere in the book, and while contemporary Italian Jews may have been familiar with the Latin source, later Jewish readers, particularly in central and eastern Europe, seem to have viewed the book as an entirely domestic treatise of religious instruction. These readers, who often read the book in Yiddish translation, understood it to be “valuable and useful for all Jews” and “appropriate for everyone who calls himself an Israelite.”⁶⁰ Recent research into Yagel’s oeuvre reveals further concealed Italian and Latin sources, which were used in the production of several of Yagel’s other works. At the same time, however, in a few other works, Yagel was forthcoming about his use of non-Jewish sources.⁶¹ What motivated Yagel to conceal his use of Christian sources in some works but not in others remains to be understood.

Another Hebrew catechism from around the same period exemplifies a particularly devious case of concealment. In 1554, the Ferrara-born author Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580) published his Sefer ḥinukh beḥirey Yah (Book of educating God’s chosen people). Tremellius was a convert from Judaism to Calvinism, and his book was in fact a Hebrew translation of John Calvin’s Genevan Catechism (Le catéchisme de l’Eglise de Genève, 1537). The Hebrew translation made no mention of Calvin, however, and the cover page and preface portrayed the book as the work of a Jewish rabbi.⁶²

Ashkenazi translators were also not loath to conceal their sources. Rebekka Voß has recently revealed that the early eighteenth-century Yiddish prayer book Liblikhe tefile (1709) by Aharon ben Shmuel Hergershausen was largely a translation of a German prayer book by the Lutheran theologian Johann Habermann (1516–1590), titled Christliche Gebete für alle Not und Stende der gantzen Christenheit (Christian prayers for all needs and estates in all of Christendom, 1567). No less than sixteen of the twenty-three Yiddish tkhines or personal devotions that appeared in the book were lifted from Habermann, often almost verbatim and only mildly modified to omit distinctly Christian terms and add a Jewish flavor to the text.⁶³ Similarly, recent research by Roni Cohen has uncovered an unacknowledged and mildly Judaized Yiddish translation of one of the earliest Protestant morning hymns, generally attributed to Martin Luther, that appeared in a collection of Yiddish tkhines from the early seventeenth century.⁶⁴

Intertextual Allusion

Domestication was often achieved—particularly (but not exclusively) in Hebrew translations—through the use of intertextuality. The reliance on intertextuality in Hebrew writing is, as Jeremy Dauber notes, hardly coincidental: “the language itself, after all, is largely composed of words appearing in … classical texts.”⁷⁰ In translating a work into Hebrew, the immediate source was necessarily only one of a multitude of ancient and medieval texts on which translators drew. As Dauber and others have shown, while it changed significantly over time and space, the use of intertextuality in Hebrew literature was largely intentional and was based on the expectation of an attentive reader, well-versed in the riches of the Jewish canon.⁷¹ In referencing the Bible, Jewish liturgy, or rabbinic literature, Hebrew authors were able to “conjure a range of associations, so as to ensure the desired reception of the [translated] work.”⁷²

In the particular context of translation, we saw in Chapter 2 above how Moshe Botarel used biblical intertextuality as a means to subvert his otherwise faithful translation of Nostradamus’s prophecies, thus undermining his source in ways that would only have been comprehensible to readers well-versed in Jewish canonical texts and traditions. Other examples abound. Dvora Bregman shows, for instance, how in his Hebrew translation of parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Shabbethai Marini used intertextual references to the Song of Songs in order to bestow religious undertones on the erotic scenes that appeared in his source.⁷³

In scientific works, biblical names were often assigned to newly discovered phenomena, conveying a worldview according to which all recent scientific discoveries were already present in the Bible.⁷⁴ Thus, for instance, Peru—which was, of course, a land entirely unknown to Europeans before the sixteenth century—often appeared in Hebrew texts under the name “Ofir”—denoting a legendary biblical land.⁷⁵

Biblical allusions were particularly widespread in maskilic translations; numerous late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Hebrew translations infused their foreign sources with biblical terms, names, locations, or whole verses, which were designed to ensure a suitable reception of the text among Hebrew readers. The Polish maskil and prolific translator David Zamość, for example, chose, in his Hebrew translation (via German) of Richard Steele’s story of Inkle and Yarico, to change the name of Steele’s deplorable English sailor from “Thomas Inkle” to the biblical “Bera.” The name, which is derived from the Hebrew term for “evil”—r‘a—is also an allusion to the evil king of Sodom mentioned in Genesis 14:2. By transforming Steele’s English colonist into an infamous biblical villain, Zamość ensured that Hebrew readers would pick up on the tale’s critical tone.⁷⁶

While they are almost unavoidable in Hebrew, biblical allusions are also found in Old Yiddish translations, where they similarly function to amplify the meaning of the text. An elegant example is offered by the tale of the rabbi-werewolf that appears in the Mayse bukh. The best-known version of this international tale appeared in Marie de France’s medieval “Bisclavret.” In its various non-Jewish iterations, it featured a knight who metamorphoses into a werewolf and is tricked by his evil wife into remaining in lupine form. In the Mayse bukh version, the protagonist experiences a no-less surprising transformation—from a Christian knight into a Jewish rabbi. As Astrid Lembke has shown, the contours of the story remained more or less the same, but in the Yiddish adapter’s treatment, the tale became “a story about the self-empowerment, agency, and self-confidence of a vulnerable minority.”⁷⁷ This transformation was achieved through the intense Judaization of the narrative but also, I would argue, through the subtle incorporation of two distinct references, the first biblical and the second contemporary. The first of these references appears in the tale’s opening line, which presents it as “the tale of a great rabbi who lived in the land of Uz” [im land genant Uts].⁷⁸ Modeled on the first verse of the biblical book of Job—“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1)—the story’s opening communicates to the reader that the tale is one in which a Job-like figure will endure great adversity. It furthermore conveys the main preoccupation of the tale: the problem of the suffering of innocents. Significantly, this philosophical problem takes on a pointedly political meaning in the tale of the rabbi-werewolf, which targeted a European minority for whom the question of pious persecution bore deep contemporary meanings.

The second, contemporary reference consolidates the tale’s political dimension. Cursed by his wife and transformed into a werewolf, “the good rabbi,” we are told, “sprang out the window [and began to wander] in a great forest called the forest of Bohemia (ayn grosen vald den man nent den femer valt; i.e., Bömerwald).”⁷⁹ Fascinatingly, then, the rabbi’s lupine leap out the window is matched by a narrative leap, which relocates the story from the Bible to Bohemia. The metamorphosis from pious rabbi to persecuted wolf is thus also a shift from the biblical Mediterranean to the contemporary diaspora. In this fashion, the story creates a sophisticated symmetry between exile and animality, reframing a medieval feudal tale as a messianic parable of Jewish exile and redemption.⁸⁰

Judaization

As the adaptation of the international tale of the man-turned-werewolf begins to reveal, in some translations, domestication entailed aggressive intervention, inserting information, ideas, events, or storylines that were entirely absent in the source. In some Yiddish prose translations, such as Isaac Reutlingen’s Kayzer Okatavian (1580), Bovo d’Antona, or the maskilic Robinzohn, di geshikhte fun Alter Leb (c. 1820), formerly non-Jewish protagonists and plotlines were Judaized, whether explicitly or vaguely.⁸¹

Other Yiddish translators made no attempt to obscure the foreign origins of their works, preferring instead to use wordplay in order to replace the Christian terms in their sources with derogatory or polemical terms.⁸² Words like Sakrament, Taufe (baptism), or, as we have seen, Kirche (church), were replaced with pejorative terms like sheker tame (filthy lie), shmad (a derogatory term for conversion), and tifle.⁸³ Shared by Yiddish translators across the board, this practice appears even in works that constituted near-transliterations of their German sources.

Other translators simply neutralized Christian references.⁸⁴ An interesting example comes from an early Yiddish translation of the popular collection of tales Les mille et un jours: contes Persans (One thousand and one days: Persian tales) by François Pétis de la Croix. Not to be confused with Antoine Galland’s better-known Mille et une nuits (which, as we have seen, was also translated into Yiddish), Pétis de la Croix’s book originally appeared in 1710–1711, becoming a huge success almost overnight.⁸⁵ Its popularity was such that some stories from this derivative work were even introduced into volume 8 of Mille et une nuits by the book’s first publisher, much to Galland’s dismay.⁸⁶ The Persian tales seem to have struck a chord among Yiddish readers as well, who participated enthusiastically in the orientalist craze that swept eighteenth-century Europe.⁸⁷ At least two additional translations or editions of the work appeared in Warsaw during the nineteenth century, but have since been lost.⁸⁸ The extant edition, which appeared under the title Toyzent unt ayn tag, constitutes a slightly abridged but generally faithful translation of the 1712 German translation of the first two volumes of Pétis de la Croix’s Persian tales. The language is predominantly German-in-Hebrew characters, almost entirely devoid of Hebraisms. No publication or authorship details are given in the book, but in the extant edition housed at the Goethe University Library in Frankfurt, an unknown hand notes that the book was published in Amsterdam sometime during the eighteenth century.⁸⁹

The Yiddish translation of Pétis de la Croix’s Persian tales provides a particularly interesting case of cultural transfer, as it constitutes a meeting point of not two, but (supposedly) three separate religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As such, this second- or even third-hand translation offers an unusual opportunity to compare the limits of translatability between Christians and Jews. As is most often the case with Old Yiddish translations, Toyzent unt ayn tag divulged no information regarding its source.⁹⁰ Once again, the translation differs in this respect from other contemporaneous translations of Pétis de la Croix’s book, such as those into German, Dutch, and English.⁹¹ As one continues reading, other idiosyncrasies of the Yiddish version reveal themselves. In the book’s preface, Pétis de la Croix claimed that the work was, in fact, a translation of the Persian tales told by a certain Sufi dervish of Isfahan by the name of Moclés.⁹² In the first two volumes the remainder of the preface was dedicated to an attempt to distinguish the work from Galland’s earlier and more famous tales, but in later volumes Pétis de la Croix appended an important disclaimer. Here, he noted that while the original (supposedly Persian) work was burdened by numerous “licentious tales,” the translator had chosen to omit the majority of these tales from the translation “for fear of annoying the reader” (de peur d’ennuyer le lecteur).⁹³ And yet, Pétis de la Croix’s book was far from chaste, featuring numerous scenes of passion, temptation, extramarital affairs, murder, and violence, all of which are repeated in the book’s German translation and, in abridged form, in its Yiddish translation. This was hardly unusual; with few exceptions, Yiddish translators rarely engaged in bowdlerization.⁹⁴

But Pétis de la Croix had another bone to pick with his putative source; the Persian tales, he argued, are “replete with tales of the false miracles of Muhammad” (de faux miracles de Mahomet).⁹⁵ Once again, this did not stop him from communicating these Islamic-tinted tales to his readers. In fact, Pétis de la Croix’s Persian tales included references not only to Muhammad but also to a litany of other non-Christian deities, beliefs, rituals, and customs. Where such references required explication, the author added explanatory glosses. Thus, the reader learned that Kesaya was an “idol worshipped in the old days in Kashmir,”⁹⁶ or that the word “Sofi” [= Sufi] comes from the words “Suf,” “Safa,” and “Tesaouf” [= Tasawwuf], signifying wool, purity, and mysticism, respectively.⁹⁷

These references and glosses were reproduced, with minor variations, in all of the contemporary translations I have reviewed (into German, English, Dutch, and Italian) with the exception of the Yiddish translation, from which each and every reference to non-Jewish deities, rituals, and beliefs was pedantically eliminated. Thus, in one of the key scenes from the frame narrative, the Princess Farrukhnaz of Kashmir has a dream, which she interprets as a message “sent to her from the great Kesaya …, to warn her that all men were nothing but traitors, who would return only infidelity and ingratitude for the tender affection of women.”⁹⁸ The Yiddish translation repeats the episode almost verbatim, with one small difference; the word “Kesaya” is replaced by the Yiddish/German word got (God).⁹⁹ Elsewhere in the book, Bedouins (Beduinische Araber) become thieves (royberz);¹⁰⁰ an audience of “Muslims and infidels” (Muselmännern und Ungläubigen Audienz) becomes an audience simply of “people” (mentshen oydiyents);¹⁰¹ and a mosque (Mosquee) becomes a house (hoyz).¹⁰²

A comparison of Pétis de la Croix’s treatment of the Islamic themes in his putatively Persian hypotext, the German translators’ treatment of Pétis de la Croix’s French book, and the Yiddish translator’s treatment of his German source unveils the distinctiveness of Jewish domestication. As discussed in further detail below, while Christian translators did not abstain from domestication—indeed, Pétis de la Croix’s translation has been noted for its transformation of the Persian court into the “luxurious and decadent world of Versailles”¹⁰³—as a rule, they displayed no reservations in mentioning the rites, sites, customs, or beliefs of other peoples. For the Yiddish translator, on the other hand, domestication meant purging the text of any mention of their very existence.

Such Judaization is particularly discernible in translations of literary texts, Hebrew and Yiddish translations of scientific works were also often Judaized. Translators added observations, remedies, advice, and admonitions that would have been of particular relevance to Jews. One such translation specifically retailored for a Jewish readership was the seventeenth-century medical manual Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim. As we saw in Chapter 2, the book’s anonymous Yiddish translator drew on two earlier medical works in Latin. At the same time, he peppered his translation with observations and recommendations surrounding the particular health hazards that affected Jewish well-being in the diaspora. Thus, for instance, to his source’s observations on the importance of sleeping on a light stomach, he added that “this holds particularly true on Shabbes when people eat leftovers [from the first of the three Shabbes meals] in the morning and from this many illnesses emerge.”¹⁰⁴ Elsewhere, in a discussion of the adverse health effects of sadness and fear, he inserted the following observation: “It should come as no surprise (kayn khidush) that [the People of] Israel are weak and have little power, since because of our sins in the golus [diaspora] we are constantly subject to many worries and woes [fil zorg un’ der shrekns].”¹⁰⁵

Foreignization

Judaization was, then, a key feature of early modern Jewish translation. There are, however, cases in which translators defy our expectations, retaining—or even adding—precisely those things we would expect them to omit. We saw in Chapter 1 how the late medieval Yiddish “Dukus Horant” combined the domesticating tifle with the foreign Kirche at a distance of just a few lines, and similar phenomena can be found throughout Jewish literature. A striking example comes from the 1600 version of Eulenspiegel, in which, as we have seen, the translator, Binyamin ben Yosef Merks of Tannhausen, deliberately corrupted such terms as Heiliger Geist (Holy Ghost) and Taufen (baptism) to polemicize against his Christian source. At the same time, Merks had no qualms about retaining such terms as Christ or Sanct (saint), nor even of translating in full a clearly Judeophobic tale about how Eulenspiegel sold his excrement to the Jews, claiming that it was “prophet berries.”¹⁰⁶

In Hebrew translations, the use of foreign terms to compensate for the absence of adequate Hebrew equivalents often furnishes a whiff of the foreign source used by the translator. This frequently occurs in scientific translations, which feature many terms that lack Hebrew equivalents.¹⁰⁷ Such terms are often distinguished in the translation by the use of brackets, a different typeface, or other paratextual features, thus breaking the fluency of the translation and forming crevasses in the text through which the foreign voices that domestication aims to muffle are transmitted to the reader. Indeed, it is often precisely these terms that enable us today to identify early modern Hebrew texts as translations and to determine their precise sources.

Contrary to Venuti’s intuitions, however, Jewish forms of foreignization were often no less ethnocentric or aggressive than the corresponding techniques of domestication, and they often appeared alongside one another in one and the same translation. We saw above how Moshe Botarel offered his readers a deeply foreignized translation of Nostradamus’s almanac for 1562, only to argue that the source text inadvertently prophesied the annihilation of Christianity and the coming of the Jewish Messiah. We have also seen how Yiddish translators of German works often highlighted the foreign nature of their sources, exploiting the mention of Christian rites, rituals, or figures to make light of Christianity and lambaste Christians.

At other times, foreignization was less strategic or planned and was simply the result of the slippage characteristic of translation. A somewhat amusing example comes from a “visual translation” that is featured in the beloved Amsterdam Haggadah, produced by Avraham bar Ya‘akov in 1695. As Rehav Rubin has shown, Avraham, a convert to Judaism, reproduced in this Haggadah a litany of illustrations that were lifted from contemporary non-Jewish literature, including several engravings taken from a collection of biblical illustrations by the leading Swiss engraver Matheus Merian (1593–1650). In one, an illustration of the temple in Jerusalem, a small cross is discernible atop the roof of the temple. Apparently, “during the copying process, the artisan who prepared the plates for the Haggadah forgot to erase [the cross]. Since the Amsterdam Haggadah and its illustrations merited numerous replicas over the centuries, this symbol of Christ found its way into many [other] Haggadahs.”¹⁰⁸

Avraham bar Ya‘akov’s reproduction of the cross may have been inadvertent, but it offers a visual representation of his own hybrid identity as a convert to Judaism. Indeed, the figure of the convert provides a pointed expression of the impossibility of a truly faithful translation, as well as of the creative power of untranslatability. In Jewish legal thought from the Middle Ages onwards, conversion from Judaism was considered impossible: “a Jew, even a converted Jew, simply could not become a goy.”¹⁰⁹ Christians were equally doubtful as to the power of baptism to ensure commitment to Christianity, and converts’ motivations and convictions were met with heavy suspicion.¹¹⁰ Fueling this suspicion was, among other things, the notion that desire for economic gain often motivated conversion and that, given the opportunity, the converts were liable to return to Judaism. The case of the Yiddish printer Shmuel Helicz attests to the fact that these suspicions were not always entirely unfounded.

The Helicz brothers were the founders of Jewish printing in Poland, and it is to them that we owe the first printed Yiddish books. In 1537, the three brothers, along with several other family members, converted to Catholicism. The brothers’ reasons for converting have been the focus of debate; some historians argue that the conversion was inspired by financial duress, while others point to the contemporary persecution of Jews in Poland.¹¹¹ The conjecture that their conversion may have been insincere seems to be supported by the fact that Shmuel, or Paul as he came to be known after his conversion, later returned to Judaism.¹¹² Whatever the reasons for his adoption of Catholicism, Shmuel/Paul Helicz’s conversion and reconversion were accompanied by a series of translations that encapsulate the ambivalent position of Jewish converts/translators in early modern Europe. Indeed, Helicz’s case itself nicely encapsulates the connection between translation and conversion.

The first book that Helicz published after his conversion to Christianity was a Yiddish translation of the New Testament (1540). As Majer Balaban noted, the translation (carried out by another convert, one Johann Harzuge, and dedicated to the bishop of Krakow, Piotr Gamrat) was in fact a transliteration into Hebrew characters of the German Bible produced by none other than Martin Luther.¹¹³ The translator went so far as to transliterate what was ostensibly Luther’s most contested rendering, that is, his translation of Romans 3:28 as “dass der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben” [that a person is justified without the works of the law, by faith alone]. Of course, the word allein (alone) was Luther’s own addition to the biblical text and was a means of justifying the Protestant doctrine of sola fide—justification by faith alone. As Magda Teter and Edward Fram note, “for Catholics, this was a prime example of how Luther had corrupted scripture, and yet here it was in a work published by a new Christian, dedicated to the … bishop of Cracow.… The book was printed … to spread the Gospel among the Jews—and it taught them the wrong faith.”¹¹⁴ The translator’s slip was that of someone not yet fully immersed in Catholic translational norms.

The translation that accompanied Helicz’s reintroduction to Judaism was an entirely different story. Having returned to Judaism sometime before 1551, Helicz moved to Constantinople, where he reestablished himself as a printer of Hebrew books. A seasoned publisher, well-versed in the literary norms and conventions that dominated the Jewish literary system, Helicz chose to announce his return to the faith by publishing two books with deep symbolic value. The first was an edition of the Pentateuch, published in Constantinople around 1551, part of an ambitious but apparently unsuccessful attempt to publish the entire Hebrew Bible. For Shmuel, who presented himself on the title page of the translation as “Shavu’el” (returned to God), this book served perhaps as a corrective to his translation of the New Testament a mere eight years earlier.¹¹⁵ The second translation was the apocryphal book of Judith, published by Helicz in Constantinople in 1552. Once again, the translator was not Helicz himself but rather one Moshe Meldonado, who presented the work as a translation from the Latin: “I have found the book of Judith written in the Latin tongue and decided to translate it into our Holy Tongue so that the righteousness of God, who extended his grace to us under siege and straitness, shall be known.”¹¹⁶ Like the Pentateuch translation, which served as penance for Shmuel’s translation of the New Testament, the translation of an apocryphal book seems to have been a means of doing penance for his conversion. Indeed, there could be no more fitting translation for a returning Jew than the apocryphal works, which were viewed as books that had been appropriated by gentiles and were now being brought back into the fold. In Helicz’s translation of Judith, then, conversion and translation were conflated in a manner that allowed both printer and book to return to Judaism at one and the same time.

Change of Genre

For Jewish translators, domestication meant not only expunging the non-Jewish religious elements of the text and Judaizing its language, narrative, or setting but also making it more familiar to a Jewish readership by adapting it to the literary norms of the target culture. In their Hebrew and Yiddish translations, Jewish translators created works that brought together not only distinct languages and cultures but also different genres, registers, and target audiences. A case in point is Shabbethai Bass’s Yiddish translation of the popular German travel guide Memorabilia Europae (1678), mentioned in Chapter 1. The German book was designed to serve as a guide for young German gentlemen (Kavaliere) as they set out on their grand tours through Europe’s cultural capitals. In the book’s preface, the author, Eberhardt Rudolph Roth observed: “Travel is a very fine, useful thing.… However, there are many who … would have been better off remaining at home. For there are those who travel to foreign lands in order to return home with all kinds of strange new vices, clothes, and foolish and adventurous ideas.… Others become loud atheists, and shy not from sins of all sorts.”¹¹⁷ Roth’s book aimed to combat this phenomenon and to offer young travelers a guide that would ensure a safe, pious, and instructive journey. To this end, he included in his guide brief descriptions of various European cities, including the main tourist attractions therein—everything from historical monuments and impressive architectural sites to colorful markets and warm baths. The second part of Roth’s book sketched a succinct route through Europe; a third provided basic medical advice for various medical emergencies that might occur en route; a fourth contained instructions on the handling of horses and carriages; and a fifth included short prayers and blessings for the journey.

Clearly, a book such as Roth’s Memorabila would have seemed wholly irrelevant to a seventeenth-century Jewish readership. As Elhanan Reiner notes: “Travel for travel’s sake was not part of Jewish leisure culture of those days, and the majority of travelers were poor vagrants, a large portion of whom were refugees from the Thirty Years’ War and the Polish pogroms.”¹¹⁸ Still, in 1680, a mere two years after its original publication, parts of Roth’s book were translated (without acknowledgment) into Yiddish by the Jewish bibliographer Shabbethai Bass. In a preface of his own, Bass, like so many other Jewish translators before him, underscored the importance of profane knowledge for Jews. “This is particularly true,” he emphasized, “in this day and age, in which making a living is as hard as parting the Red Sea [so gar shver … mamash ke-kriyas yam Suf]. Therefore [even the] learned Jew must make sure that he has some income, so that he may study in peace.”¹¹⁹

The differences between the German source and its Yiddish translation could not be more profound. The lengthy discussions of the benefits and hazards of travel for the cultural refinement of Europe’s youth were entirely omitted, as were the chapters on horseback riding and carriage maintenance, the treatment of medical emergencies, and the descriptions of Europe’s major cities and cultural centers. In addition, Bass omitted routes that would have been unavailable to Jewish travelers, to whom specific travel bans and restrictions applied. In lieu of these routes, he inserted routes to popular Jewish mercantile centers such as Amsterdam and to various eastern European cities. Finally, Bass added a chapter on currency conversion rates in these trading centers, which was absent from Roth’s book. In this way, Bass recast Roth’s tour guide for young German gentlemen as a road book or merchants’ manual, designed specifically for Jewish itinerant merchants.¹²⁰

Changes of genre were characteristic not only of Yiddish but also of Hebrew translations. A particularly widespread norm, especially in the eighteenth century, was to repurpose German children’s books for Jewish adults. Often presented as a peculiarity of maskilic translations, such as Lindau’s Reshit limudim or the various Hebrew and Yiddish translations of the works of Campe,¹²¹ the phenomenon was also shared by translators who were not distinctly associated with the Haskalah, such as Avraham ben Eliyahu of Vilna, who, as noted in Chapter 2, translated a children’s adaptation of the works of Buffon. Another example is provided by the Hamburg-born author Moshe Heida.¹²² In 1711, Heida published a Yiddish arithmetic book under the title Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev (Opus of art and ingenuity). The book seems to have enjoyed a positive reception in contemporary rabbinic circles; in 1765 it was cited by Rabbi Eliyahu ben Moshe Gershon of Pinczow as one of the sources for his own Hebrew arithmetic book titled Melekhet maḥshevet (Opus of meditation/calculation), alongside Eliyahu Mizraḥi’s well-known Hebrew Kitsur torat ha-mispar (Abridged art of the number, 1546) and Moshe Eisenstadt’s Yiddish Ḥokhmat ha-mispar (Art of the number, 1712).¹²³ This was a rare case in which a Hebrew work of science acknowledged its reliance on previous Yiddish sources. Heida’s book also boasted approbations from several prestigious rabbinical authorities, including Naphtali Katz, the chief rabbi of Frankfurt (1650–1719).¹²⁴

Heida did not divulge information about his sources but explained that he had perused previous works on arithmetic and found them either too lengthy or too haphazard. His own book was presented as the golden mean, providing just the right level of requisite arithmetical knowledge.¹²⁵ Heida seems to have drawn on multiple sources in preparing his book; one of which was a book published only three years earlier, by the Regensburg teacher and pedagogue Georg Heinrich Paritius, titled Compendium Praxis Arithmetices (1708).¹²⁶ Itself an adaptation of the author’s earlier and much heftier Praxis Arithmetices (1706),¹²⁷ Paritius’s compendium was designed primarily for the use of young readers, as is clear from the dedication, in which the author identified his prospective readers as “young people who admire art and virtue” (Kunst und Tugend liebende Jugend).¹²⁸

Paritius used various pedagogical means to make the book accessible to its young readership. The first chapter of the compendium, for instance, uses questions and answers to teach readers how to pronounce the various numbers: “How should these two number signs 12 be pronounced together?/Answer twelve” (Wie werden diese zwey Zahl-Zeichen 12. zusammen außgeprochen?/Antwort Zwölf).”¹²⁹ Heida’s Yiddish book reproduces this format, with only slight variations in the language and numbers used: “How should 101 be pronounced[?] answer one hundred and one” (Vi verden 101 oys geshprokhen[?] antvort hundert un‘ ayns).¹³⁰

While the two works are similar both topically and in terms of their arrangement, Heida’s book also departs from Paritius’s text in numerous ways, offering discussions and examples found nowhere in the German compendium and that may have been drawn from other sources. And yet the linguistic proximity between some of the texts in the two books leaves little room for doubt as to the relationship between them; in some places, the language and phrasing in the two works is almost identical.¹³¹ Heida seems to have drawn on Paritius’s textbook for children but complemented it with other works, thereby fashioning his own work not for children but rather, as he explains in the book’s introduction, “for the benefit of the residents of the land (yoshve ha-arets) and its merchants and traffickers (kin‘aneha, acc. to Isaiah 23:8), … who are not well-versed in the Hebrew tongue.”¹³² An additional readership imagined by Heida seems to have been the rabbinical reader, who is often required, as he notes, “to pass judgement on issues relating to numbers and fractions.”¹³³

Abbreviation, Addition, and Amalgamation

One of the most widespread translational techniques among early modern translators into Hebrew and Yiddish was abbreviation. Jewish translators often displayed impatience with long, verbose presentations, overviews of current debates and controversies, or lengthy, nuanced discussions of detail. Abbreviations of this sort were characteristic of early modern translation more generally. As Peter Burke notes, during the early modern period, “long texts [were often] abridged in translation, reduced to as little as half of their original length.”¹³⁴

At times, such abbreviations resulted in translations that represented a significantly diluted version of their source. This happened often in Yiddish works, which, as noted above, catered to a readership that was understood to be less intellectually inclined.¹³⁵ In the aforementioned Seyder harey olem, for instance, Melissantes’s meandering, multipage entries became short, lexical descriptions, consisting of no more than a few lines each. Some mountains seem to have piqued the translator’s interest, and he translated their elaborate descriptions in greater detail, although never remotely in full. Interestingly, it was not the mountains of the Holy Land that particularly arrested him, as one might have expected—those, in fact, were treated offhandedly—but instead volcanoes, such as Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius, and “exotic” mountains or mountain ranges, such as the Andes.¹³⁶ It may have been that the translator assumed that these distant, perilous mountains would excite his readers’ imagination.

Although subtractions tended to be less radical in Hebrew translations, which catered to more theoretically inclined tastes, Hebrew translators, too, were often reluctant to reproduce the information that appeared in their sources in full. Zahalon, for instance, opened his Otsar ha-ḥayim (see Chapter 1) by stating that the book “offers a set table (shulḥan arukh) without differences of opinion, as often appear in books of medicine, for I have included [only] the most proper, accepted, and proven methods.”¹³⁷ And indeed, Zahalon offered his readers a much-abridged translation of his Latin sources. Lengthy explications of the various diseases, their causes, diagnoses, and treatment became short, lexical entries, while the sources’ general order of presentation and classification were retained intact. Certain chapters, however, were translated in full, and some were even expanded. One example of such expansion is in the chapter on hypochondriac melancholy; Zahalon explains that it “is the cause of many sicknesses, is difficult to cure, and I myself have suffered from it to some degree, and so I chose to expand upon it.”¹³⁸

Such additions were not unusual in Jewish translations; indeed, where some translators abbreviated their sources, others saw the need to expand, at times heavily. An interesting example comes from the earliest Yiddish (or, for that matter, Jewish) version of the Arabian Nights, which appeared in Wandsbek (in present-day Hamburg) in 1718 (as briefly noted in Chapter 2). The book, published anonymously under the title Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, made no mention of its source. It was not until 1977 that Ḥayim Liebermann identified the work as a translation of the Arabian Nights. Based on the translator’s use of French terms in Hebrew transliteration, Liebermann deduced that the translator had used the French version and was perhaps a resident of France.¹³⁹ However, closer inspection reveals the work to be a near-transliteration of the German translation of Galland’s French Arabian Nights, which first appeared in 1710 and was reprinted, in several editions, throughout the eighteenth century.¹⁴⁰ The translator provided his Yiddish readers a close translation of the German text, with sporadic Hebraisms for good measure.¹⁴¹

And yet the translator’s treatment of his source was far from slavish; in fact, he reframed Galland’s Arabian Nights within a narrative of his own. In this new frame narrative, Galland’s famous Persian princess, Scheherazade, is recast as an Indian (and vaguely Jewish) princess by the name of Melela;¹⁴² the Persian sultan Shahryar becomes the Indian king Bendrari; and the tales are told during the day, not at night. No longer is the king a vengeful wife-killer but rather a beloved monarch, whose only fault is his distrust of women. With the absence of an heir looming, Melela, the daughter of one of the king’s advisers, volunteers to marry the king in order to prevent the throne from being usurped by foreigners. Offering a long, involved adventure tale about an Arab prince who falls in love with a beautiful princess who has been locked in a castle by her own father, Melela’s father attempts to dissuade her from this marriage. This tale is the longest individual tale in the collection. It combines intricate storytelling techniques (parts of the narrative are communicated through correspondences between the protagonists) with a dizzying number of subplots (one of which tells of the “beautiful princess Medusa”¹⁴³) and takes up almost half of the entire booklet.¹⁴⁴

Exactly why the Yiddish translator chose to reframe the Arabian Nights in an original narrative of his own composition must remain a mystery. Perhaps this was a means of concealing the book’s indebtedness to Galland’s wildly popular source, or perhaps the translator wished to amplify the exoticism of the tale by relocating it to the even more “remote” India, where, in Yiddish imagination, marvels and monsters reigned. More probably, the translator saw in the Arabian Nights an opportunity to offer his own creative variation on a recent and hugely popular collection that had already been published in a large number of editions and translations. Whatever his motivation, in using Galland’s Arabian Nights as a platform for his own literary creation, our unnamed translator was by no means unusual. Yiddish translators often combined their own original tales with translation, offering their readers books and stories that transgressed the boundaries between imitation and innovation, Jewish and foreign, copying and creating.

Deviations Inspired by Disagreement

In some cases, translators disagreed with a claim or an approach put forth in their source text and therefore deviated from that text in order to deliver messages of their own, at times in direct opposition to those found in the source. In Elye Bokher’s Bovo d’Antona, for instance, the translator purged his Italian source of the many monsters that festered between its pages. Explaining this choice in the body of his text, he noted that “I would rather not write [of these things], I consider [them] lies.”¹⁴⁵ Curiously, one monster still managed to make its way into the Yiddish translation—that is, Bovo’s erstwhile nemesis and subsequent companion, the dog-headed Pelukan, who receives a much more sympathetic treatment in the Yiddish version of the tale than in the original Italian.¹⁴⁶

Naturally, disagreement was a more prominent motivation for deviations in scientific translations. Tuviah Ha-Kohen, for instance, incorporated in his Ma‘ase Tuviah a short translation of Chapter 2 of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s famous astronomical treatise, Sphaera Mundi, originally written sometime in the early thirteenth century. Enjoying some popularity among medieval and early modern Jewish writers, Sphaera Mundi appeared in several Hebrew translations in both print and manuscript form from the fourteenth century onwards and was the focus of at least two known commentaries, by Matityahu Delacrut and Moshe Almosnino.¹⁴⁷ It might seem jarring that Tuviah, the author of a work that boasted of its innovative nature, would base his astronomical discussion on such a dated text, but Sacrobosco’s work continued to enjoy wide appeal even into the seventeenth century and was still the preferred textbook at universities for most of the early modern period.¹⁴⁸ The existence of several other Hebrew translations of, and commentaries on, the work would also have contributed to its appeal for Tuviah.

Still, writing almost five hundred years after Sacrobosco, Tuviah was forced to adapt his translation to tackle the astronomical discoveries of the previous half-millennium—most notably, of course, those of Copernicus. Thus, to Sacrobosco’s brief discussion of the phenomenon of the solstice, Tuviah added the following (the words in bold type are Tuviah’s addition to the source):

The colure of the solstice [igul ha‘amadat ha-shemesh in Hebrew, solstitia in Sacrobosco’s Latin] passes through the poles of the earth [olam; mundi] and the polar points that are the pole of Cancer and the pole of Capricorn. But when the ancients named these two polar points “the points in which the sun stands” [Tuviah refers here to the etymology of the term solstice from the Latin sol—sun, and sisto—stop, stay] [they meant] not that the sun actually stands in one place, for it cannot be imagined that the sun stands, for all things that move do not stand as argued by Aristotle.¹⁴⁹

Political considerations also inspired deviations from the source. In Avraham Ben Eliyahu’s translation of Buffon, for instance, we read that Jews are always of a darker complexion than other Europeans. This message was reinforced by a footnote in which the translation (following Isaiah 61:9) emphasized that “all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed, and say: who is like your people, one nation in the world and one language.” Remarkably, a comparison of this Hebrew discussion with its source reveals that Avraham manipulated his translation to deliver a message that is the opposite of the original. For Buffon, the variability of Jewish complexion was in fact an indication of the circumstantial nature of physical variety. Thus, he explained in the Histoire naturelle that “the Jews of Portugal alone are tawny [but] the German Jews of Germany, those of Prague, for example, are not swarthier than the other Germans.”¹⁵⁰ Avraham’s deviation from his source is understandable when we consider the political significance ascribed to Jewish darkness in rabbinical thought in premodern Europe. In upholding darkness as a product of piety, Avraham was walking a well-trodden path. The anonymous, approximately thirteenth-century, Sefer nitsaḥon yashan, for instance, argues that Jews are black because they conceive in the darkness, whereas non-Jews engage in sexual relations during the day, which allows them to view beautiful images that are then imprinted on their offspring.¹⁵¹