Chapter 4 Between the Trickle and the Tide
Maskilic Translations Around the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
For nearly two centuries, the Haskalah has been depicted as the harbinger of modern Jewish literature. According to the traditional narrative, for most of history “Jewish intellectual activity had been confined almost exclusively to the study of the sacred Jewish texts, the Bible, the Mishnah, … the Talmud, and other religious writings.”1 But in the late eighteenth century, a burgeoning cohort of intellectual pioneers assembled in Berlin and began to establish a new kind of secular Hebrew literature, which corresponded with the non-Jewish literatures of its time. From Berlin, this new literature disseminated eastward, to Galicia, Poland, and Russia, and finally also to modern Israel.2
Attempts to nuance this narrative, from both literary and historical perspectives, have become increasingly widespread. Scholars of Italian literature have long questioned the Germanocentrism that the traditional genealogies of modern Hebrew literature (and Jewish modernity more generally) often entail.3 Similarly, scholars of Old Yiddish literature have pointed to the rise of secular forms of writing in Yiddish long before the consolidation of the Berlin Haskalah.4 More recently, literary historians and critics have questioned the utility of creating a genealogy of modern Jewish literature more generally. As Ofer Dynes and Naomi Seidman remark, “the question of where modern Jewish literature began is clearly far too linear and lacking in self-consciousness to serve as a useful guide to the subject.”5 And yet, notwithstanding its futility, the question of the origins of modern Hebrew literature “has not ceased to be asked,” as Dynes and Seidman note.6
The various answers that are given to this question often focus on the putative novelty, in the late eighteenth century, of Hebrew translation. When the maskilim approached their literary task of creating a secular Hebrew library, so the story goes, “not one of them knew how to create texts according to European models, on which these pioneers had not been raised.”7 The solution was translation; by importing works from the German to the Hebrew literary system, the maskilim were able to furnish the Jewish library with a new and unprecedented type of secular literature. While recent studies such as Dynes and Seidman’s have underscored the admixture of modern and ancient modes of writing in maskilic prose, translation is still often presented as a tool for importing external forms of writing that had little to do with the Jewish literary past and everything to do with its future.8
One of the most influential advocates in recent years of this view of translation as a force of innovation in Jewish literary history has been the culture studies scholar Zohar Shavit. In a recent article, for instance, Shavit argues that the maskilim “attempted to offer an alternative repertoire of books, most of them translations, that would differ drastically from those on the traditional rabbinical bookshelf. [These new books] voiced an unprecedented, revolutionary process of modernization in European Jewish society.… [They] not only effected a radical transformation in the corpus of Jewish literature, but also performed a key role in the transition of Central European Jewry from its pre-modern, traditional stage to the modernity of the Haskalah.”9 In Shavit’s account, translation served as a central conduit for the importation of modernity from the non-Jewish to the Jewish world. By bringing Jews into contact with non-Jewish literature, translation severed the ties that bound Jews to the past, even as it linked the Jewish and non-Jewish present. Appropriately, as we shall see, recourse to ancient Jewish texts in the works of maskilic translators is often presented by Shavit and others as having been either an accidental remnant of past traditions or, more often, a strategic choice designed to disseminate foreign and radically innovative ideas, themes, and texts under the guise of Jewish traditionalism.
As the reader of this book will undoubtedly discern, the characterization of maskilic translation as a radical break with past literary traditions entails the marginalization of the phenomenon of early modern Jewish translation. Indeed, we saw in the Introduction that one of the great scholars of translation, Gideon Toury, characterized Jewish translation in early modern Europe as a marginal activity, one that pales in comparison with past and future endeavors. Other studies offer similar characterizations; in a 2018 volume dedicated to Jewish Translation—Translating Jewishness, for instance, the editors argue that: “It was really only the Haskalah movement that brought with it a true expansion of Jewish translation efforts.”10 An earlier overview of the history of Jewish translation, by Gabriel Zoran, overlooks the early modern period entirely. While Zoran is aware that “the history of Hebrew translation does not, of course, begin in the nineteenth century,” he presents this history as a series of great leaps—first from medieval Spain to late-eighteenth-century central Europe, and then again from there to the second half of the nineteenth century.11
In recent years, however, the burgeoning interest in translation before the Haskalah has led to some embarrassment. What becomes of the maskilic project of so-called “modernization through translation”12 when faced with the realization that translation was by no means a new phenomenon in the late eighteenth century? What happens to the Promethean image of the maskilic translator when we take into account the steady influx of Hebrew and Yiddish translations throughout Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries? How does the image of the revolutionary translator hold up against that of the traditionalist translator? How does it correspond with those rabbis, rabbinical thinkers, and other Jewish authors who, as we have seen in the chapters above, viewed (and, in the eighteenth century, continued to view) translation as a way of moderating the flow of non-Jewish ideas into the Jewish cultural sphere? Could it be that an activity that had been largely perceived, until the late eighteenth century, as a preventive measure against direct exposure to foreign literature suddenly became a deliberate means of achieving the very kind of exposure it had earlier guarded against?
Translation and the “Maskilic Muddle”
One—perhaps the most prevalent—solution to the “problem” of the appearance of translations before the Haskalah has been to simply subsume any translation produced by Ashkenazi Jews before the last quarter of the eighteenth century into the capacious category of “Haskalah.” In her discussion of Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, for instance, Ewa Geller presents this early-seventeenth-century Yiddish translation as “one of the forerunners of the Enlightenment attitude.”13 In similar fashion, in discussing the Polish rabbi Shlomo of Chelm’s eighteenth-century translation of the works of Christian van Adrichem (1533–1585) and Matthaeus Seutter (1678–1756), Rehav Rubin presents Shlomo as “a forerunner of the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah), which emerged in the next generation.”14 Further “forerunners” are found in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where the first Yiddish translations of the complete Bible appeared. These translations, produced by Yekutiel Blits and Yosef Witzenhausen, were, as Marion Aptroot has shown, largely based on the Dutch Statenvertaling (1637) and on Luther’s German Bible (see Chapter 1). In contemporary research, they have been described as constituting the “buds [of Enlightenment] which would fully flourish only a century later.”15
One wonders, however, in what sense the translation of seventeenth- and even sixteenth-century works can be considered to constitute a form of “modernization” or Enlightenment. Moreover, does the existence of so many examples not suggest that the intellectual blossoming that these so-called “buds of Enlightenment” are said to foretell was already in full bloom in the early modern period? Indeed, although the overall volume of translational activity increased considerably over the early modern period, Jewish translation was hardly an idiosyncrasy before the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, as we saw in Chapter 1, Jewish translation underwent profound changes during the early modern period, and translational activity saw a significant increase in Ashkenaz, with the number of translators almost tripling each century between 1500 and 1800 (Figure 2). Still, the growth in translational activity in Ashkenaz had already begun in the sixteenth century, and by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, translation into Jewish languages was hardly a novelty, even in the Ashkenazi context.
Historians have taken issue, furthermore, with the teleological nature of the notion of “forerunners of the Jewish Enlightenment.” Thus, Shmuel Feiner argues that the notion is, in fact, “a nineteenth-century invention, intended to prove that the Haskalah movement had immanent roots and to present it as a continuous trend throughout history, one that is not contradictory to tradition.”16 Having originated in the Haskalah movement itself, the concept of “forerunners” continues to skew our understanding both of the Enlightenment and of early modern Jewish culture. It creates a teleological historical narrative that is then harnessed to make early modern Jewish openness to extra-Jewish knowledge comprehensible within a tradition–modernity, religion–science binary.17
Partly in recognition of these issues, some studies have suggested extending the temporal limits of the Haskalah proper further back, into the early modern period. In a 2018 study, for instance, Abigail Gillman writes of a “Yiddish and German Haskalah in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”18 Underscoring the importance of the aforementioned Yiddish Bible translations published in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Gillman argues that “it cannot be denied that [Moses Mendelssohn] who was the ‘first’ German Jewish translator of the Hebrew Bible was also the third to produce a Jewish Enlightenment Bible.”19 In underscoring the exaggerated novelty often ascribed to maskilic forms of writing by historians, Gillman joins scholars of Old Yiddish literature such as Max Weinreich and Shlomo Berger, who argue for the crucial importance of situating maskilic prose on a literary continuum with Old Yiddish literature.20 In a different context, but somewhat similarly, Isaac Barzilay writes of an Italian Haskalah that existed in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods.21 If, Barzilay argues in his much-debated essay, we define the Haskalah as “a show of readiness on [the Jews’] part to limit somewhat the area of their own uniqueness while widening the area of communication with the dominant culture,” then Haskalah is “almost coeval with Jewish existence.”22 Barzilay does note some fundamental differences between his two so-called Haskalahs—most importantly, the ideological-political, rationalistic, and organized character of the later Haskalah, which, he claims, was not foreshadowed by the Italian case. However, as Adam Shear notes, many of these distinctions also do not apply or were much less pronounced in the Berlin Haskalah during the second half of the eighteenth-century.23
We are left, then, with a mammoth Haskalah, which began even before the European Enlightenment, sometime in the sixteenth century, and ended long after it. Several historians, however, urge us to adopt a more historically contextualized understanding of the Haskalah and its periodization. In an influential study, Olga Litvak, for instance, argues for the need to distinguish between a Jewish Enlightenment, which she identifies with select intellectuals active in the eighteenth century, and the Haskalah movement, which she identifies with the nineteenth century and with eastern European cultural trends.24 A particularly valuable perspective is offered by David Ruderman, who argues that “the loosely connected community of Jewish intellectuals … who sought out secular wisdom, mastered the sciences, learned medicine, read non-Jewish books in European languages, and integrated this newly acquired knowledge into their scholarly and religious agendas have a long pedigree. They emerge centuries earlier [than the Haskalah] as products of the knowledge explosion generated by the printing press and by the universities of early modern Europe.”25 Elsewhere, Ruderman notes that, rather than viewing the Haskalah as a break with tradition, it is more productive to see it as “a product of the continuous encounter of Jews with the … culture of Europe that had emerged with particular intensity from the late sixteenth century on and, at the same time, as a unique and novel expression of and response to particular developments [in] the eighteenth century.”26
Adopting this wider view of the role of non-Jewish knowledge in general—and translation in particular—in Jewish history undermines the portrayal of maskilic translation as a “radical innovation,” a complete negation of past literary traditions. Rather, we need to ask how the motivations, norms, and mission of maskilic translation corresponded with those of earlier Jewish translations. How did the scope and functions of translation change in the decades surrounding the end of the eighteenth century? What particular challenges did maskilic translators face? And how does viewing the phenomenon of maskilic translation against the wider context of the early modern translational project change our understanding of the Haskalah as well as, perhaps, of European Jewish history more generally?
Translation and Transformation Before the Haskalah
As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, throughout the early modern period, new kinds of texts, genres, and ideas were regularly being incorporated into the Jewish library through translation. This was not a traumatic encounter by any means: the gradual incorporation of these texts, their domestication and Judaization, and the monitored nature of their infiltration allowed for their smooth absorption by the target culture. In fact, notwithstanding the lively polemics surrounding the legitimacy of non-Jewish knowledge that took place throughout Jewish history and particularly in the early modern period, I know of no one translation from foreign to Jewish languages that stirred significant controversy. Admittedly, Azariah De Rossi’s Me’or eynayim (Light of the Eyes, 1573), which drew on multiple foreign sources, remained the focus of heated debate for centuries, but it was not the act of translation specifically that elicited the inflamed reaction but rather De Rossi’s treatment of rabbinic literature and his position on rabbinical chronology.27 Some critics did call attention to De Rossi’s utilization of foreign literature in his book; however, as Meir Benayahu remarks, “the use of literature in several languages was not an unusual phenomenon.… [It was] however [De Rossi’s] recourse to such literature in his interpretation of each and every debate which appeared in the rabbinical sources which … made it appear as though Jewish faith requires [this literature]. Naturally, this elicited bewilderment and opposition.”28 Robert Bonfil goes so far as to suggest that the entire affair was a tempest in a teapot, a result of “the uproar of a vociferous minority who themselves did not have a very precise idea of what heresies they suspected the book to contain.”29
As we saw in Chapter 2, the translation of German epics and chapbooks into Yiddish was also frowned upon by the authors of more “prestigious” literary works. But this critique focused on the issue of genre, rather than translation. As such, it mirrored similar debates taking place within the contemporaneous non-Jewish—and particularly German—literary sphere. As Roy Pascal notes, while the German Volksbücher “remained popular for centuries [they] were derided after the middle of the sixteenth century by the learned as vulgar and immoral … and they lived on only among the lower classes.…”30 For both Jews and Christians, the concerns surrounding the Volksbücher had more to do with class and literary preferences than with anxieties surrounding exposure to other European cultures or religious sects. That it was not translation that was the issue at stake here is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the fact that the same authors who were most vehemently opposed to these works were, in some cases, active participants in the production of other Jewish translations (see Chapter 2).
In a period that witnessed a number of inflamed controversies, then, Jewish translation seems to have largely stayed under the cultural radar. This is not to say that non-Jewish knowledge was viewed positively among early modern Jews; as argued in Chapter 2, translation was largely viewed as a solution to the problem of the unadulterated consumption of precisely such knowledge. Appropriately, in those cases in which translation was in fact considered an act of transgression, it was in the context of translation not into Jewish languages but rather out of them. Seidman notes that for medieval Jews, the translation of Hebrew texts into non-Jewish tongues constituted “a profound violation, the pillage of Jewish treasure[s] and [their] exposition to unfriendly eyes.”31 The same seems to hold true for the early modern period; in his Yudisher theriak (Jewish antidote, 1615), for instance, the Yiddish author Zalman Tsvi of Aufhausen responded to a recent German anti-Jewish work by the Jewish convert to Christianity Samuel Friedrich Brenz. Brenz’s polemic included (mis)translations of Talmudic fragments as well as information derived from the medieval Hebrew manuscript “Toldot Yeshu.” In his response, Zalman corrected Brenz’s mistranslations of the Talmud, noting the absence of precise citations in Brenz’s source.32 He furthermore denied (disingenuously!) the very existence of the medieval manuscript, noting that “an apostate [mumar] or scallywag [lozer vogel] … wrote about it to beat us and slander us with it.”33
It was perhaps, in part, the gradual nature of early modern Jewish translation that allowed it the relative legitimacy it enjoyed as a literary activity during this period. The heavily moderated and, at the same time, heterogeneous and decentralized character of early modern Jewish translation meant that it could go almost unnoticed as a cultural endeavor by Jews of the period. And yet, even while this endeavor was largely tolerated, or even encouraged, by the Jewish religious elite, the steady trickling of texts in translation gradually weathered the bedrock of Jewish literature and culture. In order to accommodate the new texts, ideas, genres, and fashions that these translations were constantly importing into the Jewish library, the basic structures of that library needed to remain in a state of constant but contained flux, shifting ever so slightly to make room for these innovations. Translated works thus shaped early modern Jewish culture, even as they were shaped by it.
As translations seeped into the Jewish cultural sphere, they also paved the way for the emergence of new genres of Jewish writing. An emblematic example is the genre of the midrashic epic; by reframing biblical episodes in epic form, works such as the Shmuel bukh (1544) and the Melokhim bukh (1544) offered Old Yiddish readers Jewish alternatives to popular Christian chivalric tales. As Chava Turniansky notes, in creating this corpus Old Yiddish authors answered the call to present “worthy substitutes in order to replace [non-Jewish] poems with other true and meaningful ones based on Jewish sources, while at the same time preserving the interesting, attractive, and aesthetically pleasing elements of the foreign epic poetry.”34 The same impetus led to the rise of other genres of Yiddish literature, such as the mayses or short stories. As we have seen, the greatest of these works, the anthology known as the Mayse bukh, portrayed itself as a pious alternative to the translations of profane German works, combining midrashic and haggadic material with international tales. Other storybooks followed suit, weaving together translations and original or otherwise domestic sources to create a hybrid kind of Jewish literature that was neither wholly foreign nor domestic.35 Other genres of Jewish writing were also forged by translation; from books of practical medicine, world geographies, and Hebrew bibliographies to Jewish catechisms, translation transformed the Jewish literary landscape and shaped new ways of thinking about literature, science, religion, Judaism, the body, and the world.
These profound literary and cultural changes partially justify the insistence by modern scholars on viewing translation as a form of cultural innovation, an activity that disrupted the integrity of the borders between Jews and non-Jews and transformed the very core of Jewish culture. In this respect, Shavit and others are correct in arguing that translation is often inextricably bound with innovation. But during the early modern period, the transformations effected by this literary activity were largely inadvertent. Early modern Jews, with their unique understanding of translation as a form of reclamation and gatekeeping, could hardly be suspected of having adopted translation in order to initiate a cultural or literary revolution. Rather, the attitude of these translators resembles what Else Vieira has characterized (in a different context) as “an attitude towards relationships with hegemonic powers which involves the acceptance of foreign nourishment but a denial of imitation and influence in the traditional sense.”36 This is to say, Jewish translation in the centuries and decades preceding the Haskalah was a form of transfusion, a means of reinvigorating Jewish culture through the careful and largely unacknowledged appropriation of texts from the surrounding cultures.
But what about the Haskalah? How did the image of translation that took shape in the decades surrounding the end of the eighteenth century correspond with earlier understandings? Did the maskilim use translation as a means of revitalization, or did they view it as a route to revolution? Did they, like their early modern predecessors, use translation into Jewish languages to feed on their surrounding cultures, or to be devoured by them?
Transformations in Maskilic Translation
Scope and Centralization
The most immediately discernible change in the phenomenon of Jewish translation around the end of the eighteenth century was its volume. Beginning in the last quarter of the century, new translations, particularly into Hebrew, began to proliferate at a dizzying pace. Of 245 works that can be reasonably assumed to have been translated between 1730 and 1830 and that currently feature in the JEWTACT database, at least 172 (70 percent) were translated between 1780 and 1830. What had begun as a slow stream in the sixteenth century became a massive wave in the early nineteenth century.
This growth in the number of translations was facilitated by various social, technological, and cultural factors, both internal and external. In the particular context of Jewish literature, one should also note the maskilim’s desire to significantly expand the Hebrew-language library of secular or quasi-secular literature. While the maskilim were by no means the first to create secular literature in Hebrew, the domain of Jewish belles lettres had been largely occupied, until the late eighteenth century, by Yiddish. As Hebrew increasingly entered the same literary territory as Yiddish, it began to emulate the governing patterns of the competing Jewish literary system. Thus, Hebrew translators began to draw on the very same library that had been serving Yiddish translators for centuries—that is, the German library.
As translation from German moved from the Yiddish library to the more prestigious Hebrew one, it became not only more prolific but also more programmatic. Journals such as Ha-me’asef (1783–1811) and, later, Bikurey ha-‘itim (1820–1831), as well as poem and short-story anthologies and children’s books, became major platforms for the publication of Hebrew translations of songs, idylls, fables, and other short texts. This allowed for the introduction of numerous translations by a wide range of translators over a relatively short period of time.37 These developments mirrored similar processes taking place outside the Jewish literary system around the same time. In addition to the century’s profound demographic changes, the rise of journals and periodicals throughout eighteenth-century Europe facilitated the swifter and wider dissemination of texts and ideas, leading to an increased number of translations in the various European national tongues.38 This dovetailed with other changes in eighteenth-century reading habits and the book market, including the absolute increase in the numbers of printed material, the rise of the novel, and the establishment of reading societies and public libraries. These and other developments both satisfied and encouraged the contemporary expansion of book readership among middle-class Europeans.39
Another factor contributing to the proliferation of translation—whether Jewish or non-Jewish—was the rising interest, throughout Enlightenment Europe, in vernacular languages, national literatures, philology, and translation as a discipline. This interest led not only to a growing number of translated texts but also to a change in translational norms, as translators gradually became less ambiguous about their sources, thus making it much easier to identify translations produced during this period. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a profound change in what I have characterized above as one of the most distinctive norms of early modern Jewish translation—the production of unacknowledged translations. This is not to say that unacknowledged or partially acknowledged translations ceased to appear after 1775, but as translation became more programmatic and professional, it was accompanied by the newfound expectation that translators cite their sources.
The Changing Ethics of Acknowledgment
In 1771, the German-born maskil Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison (1741–1797) published his first Hebrew work—an introduction to the sciences for Jewish readers, titled Ma’amar ha-torah ve-ha-ḥokhmah (Essay on Torah and wisdom). Throughout the book, Levison referred his readers to the works of such scientific and philosophical authorities as Copernicus, Newton, Descartes, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, and Petrus van Musschenbroek.40 In addition to this inventory of scholarly references, he appended a Note to the Reader on the first page of the book, which read as follows: “And you, dear reader, do not be alarmed or dismayed to see that I have included in this book some matters and things that have already appeared in other tongues.… I have translated them (he‘etaktim) word for word, without adding or removing, and without mentioning the names of their authors, for in this I followed the ways of Maimonides, may his memory be a blessing.41 Levison repeated this point in a later work, explaining that in perusing the works of previous authors, “in some cases I have forgotten the name of the author, even though I have written his words, and there is no harm in this, for those who have read books will know from which belly these things have emerged and will be able to make the distinction between the words of previous authors and my own. And those who do not [read books] will benefit from finding the truth, regardless of by whom it was said.”42
In his apologia, Levison conjured up Maimonides, who had dismissed the need to acknowledge sources, famously explaining in his introduction to his Shemonah prakim (Eight Chapters) that “one should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.”43 And yet, Levison’s rhetorical acrobatics seem to have been inspired less by Maimonidean ethics and more by an attitudinal change, which was particularly prevalent in the eighteenth-century German literary system, and which strove for greater transparency in translation. As the century progressed, translational practices such as literary embellishment, translational infidelity, and the presentation of translations as original works met with increasing disapproval and began to be identified either as outdated or, worse, as French conventions.44
These changes took time, and the transition to modern translational norms was not complete by the end of the eighteenth century. Still, the phenomenon of partially acknowledged and unacknowledged translations, a definitive feature of Jewish translation from the mid-sixteenth century onward, particularly in Ashkenaz, began to wane in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figure 9). Late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century maskilic translators seem to have been particularly aware of the increased emphasis on transparency in translation. Of the myriad Hebrew translations of German poems, idylls, and other literary works that appeared in the maskilic journals Ha-me’asef and Bikurey ha-‘itim during the decades surrounding the end of the eighteenth century, only a handful did not acknowledge their sources in full.45 In one particularly interesting instance, a Hebrew translation of Salomon Gessner’s (1730–1788) idyll, “Menalkus und Alexis,” which had originally appeared without acknowledgment in Itsḥak Satanov’s Sefer ha-ḥizayon (c. 1775), was republished in the 1783 issue of Ha-me’asef with a note acknowledging both its Hebrew translator and its German source.46 What had been an almost universal translational norm a mere eight years earlier now met with increasing disapproval.47
Those authors who did not catch up with the changing tides were chastised, as evidenced by the case of Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev. In 1802, Ben Ze’ev published a Hebrew reader titled Bet ha-sefer (School, lit. house of the book). The second part of the book included a selection of poems, the majority of which were translations of German works by such authors as Ewald Christian von Kleist, Albrecht von Haller, and Christian Fürchtegott Gellert.48 The poems were translated into Hebrew, alongside several other Hebrew poems collected from the works of maskilim, among them Ephraim Luzzatto, Yosl Rychnov, and Ben Ze’ev himself. While Ben Ze’ev acknowledged in the introduction to the book that most of the poems appearing in the work had been copied or translated from previous works, he did not cite any specific sources.49 And yet, the times had changed: Ben Ze’ev’s liberal treatment of the works of other authors now drew criticism, and a list of the names of the original authors was appended to the third edition of the book, which appeared in 1809. The list, which was reprinted in all later editions, was accompanied by a militant apologia by Ben Ze’ev, which reads: “In this [list of sources] I have saved my soul from the ravenous fangs of a known critic who, possessed by writer envy and lacking the talent to produce his own work, criticized my book, … castigating me for covering myself in a talith that is not my own.… And it is not the way of compilers of useful things to write from whence they came.… Still, to rid myself of this harmful evil I have appended this list.”50
Figure 9. Percentage of Acknowledged, Partially Acknowledged, and Unacknowledged Translations in Ashkenaz, 1650–1830.
Based on a sample of 201 translated texts.
The name of Ben Ze’ev’s “known critic” is no longer known to us, but a clue may perhaps be found in the Bohemian author Juda Jeitteles’s Bney ha-ne‘urim (Young people, 1821), which includes a brief epigram poking fun at an unnamed author who had been criticized for plagiarism and for “compiling things from the books of others and cloaking [himself] in a talith that is not his own.”51 Whether the epigram, which appeared more than a decade after Ben-Ze’ev’s death, is a reference to this affair must remain unresolved. What is clear is that an era had ended: Jewish translators were now expected to cite their sources.
The Implications of Domestication
Translations, Anthony Pym reminds us, “are for the person who stays home. Or are they”—he slyly adds—“so that the person stays home?”52 Indeed, as we have seen, domesticity was a defining principle of Jewish translation in early modern Europe. Throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, translation into Jewish languages was often viewed as a way of monitoring the influx of non-Jewish ideas and texts and of preventing Jewish readers from being swept away by the waves of foreign knowledge that awaited them beyond the Jewish literary sphere. Translation was also viewed as a means of reclaiming Jewish knowledge and reinvigorating Jewish culture. Jewish translators thought of translation as a way of consolidating Hebrew as a literary language, perpetuating the medieval translational tradition, or consolidating Jewish faith. The domestic nature of Jewish translation was accentuated by the prevalence of domestication as a translational technique. From the smallest omissions of distinctively Christian terms to the intense Judaization of the language, narrative, and ideas found in the source, domestication featured alongside (and often in tandem with) the production of unacknowledged translations as a distinguishing feature of Jewish translation in early modern Europe.
While maskilic translators, as we have seen, became increasingly open about their sources and attempted to offer more adequate translations, the tendency to domesticate or Judaize non-Jewish sources persisted into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, it is to the library of maskilic translations that we owe one of the most heavily Judaized specimens of Jewish translation, namely the c. 1820 Yiddish translation of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s German adaptation of Robinson Crusoe (1779). Attributed to the Galician maskil Yosef Vitlin, this deeply domesticated translation reinvents the Christian Crusoe as a Jewish merchant by the name of Alter leb (lit. “Old man-live”—a name given to Jewish children born after the death of a sibling), while his Caribbean slave, Friday, is transformed into a Judaized, vaguely African slave named Shabbes.53 If other maskilic translations opted for less brazen forms of Judaization, the tendency to replace distinctly Christian features of the source, including names, rituals, and ideas, was widespread in maskilic literature. Even so prolific and professional a translator as the Polish David Zamość (1789–1864), who tended to openly acknowledge his sources, producing some of his translations in bilingual editions alongside their German source, subjected his translations to some form of Judaization. He changed the Christian names that featured in his sources to Jewish names, some of them biblical; omitted discussions that may have been irrelevant or offensive to Jewish readers; and added messages that would not have been relevant to non-Jewish ones.54
Such reproduction of earlier Jewish translational norms in maskilic translations has not gone unnoticed by researchers. As is often the case, Toury is particularly perceptive, remarking in passing that “as a rule, the norms which governed acceptability in [maskilic] Hebrew were a vestige of former historical phases. Indeed, being so very slow in picking up changes, these norms were most appropriate for another facet of their task …: namely, to protect Hebrew literature from inundation by foreign waves, in [the] face of the huge volume of imported goods.”55 For Toury, the persistence of antiquated translational norms (such as domestication) in maskilic translation stems from the “cultural lag” that characterized Jewish literature more generally and should not be viewed as an earnest manifestation of the maskilic world view. One wonders, however, why one would assume that the domestication techniques that prevailed in so many of their translations, and to which maskilim such as Vitlin clearly devoted a great deal of attention and creative thought, were the product of a mere unreflective adherence to outdated literary norms.
Other studies offer different explanations for the continued use of seemingly archaic translational norms by the maskilim. A widely accepted view is that maskilic translators deliberately chose to utilize traditionalist norms in order to placate any potential opposition and to pave the way for the smooth reception of their otherwise subversive works. In her discussion of Vitlin’s Alter Leb, for instance, Leah Garrett argues that domestication functions in this translation as a façade. “ ‘Ignorant’ Jews,” she explains, “had to be taught how to become enlightened … and one of the best ways to educate them was through didactic literature that at first glance seemed respectably Jewish but on a closer look perpetuated Maskilic tendencies.”56 Domestication was thus a form of deception, a ruse designed to cloak the maskilic translator’s innovative agenda: “the more extreme the propaganda, the more necessary its ‘camouflage.’ ”57
A similar understanding of the role of domestication in maskilic translation can be found in Zohar Shavit’s recent discussion of Shimon BaRaZ’s pedagogical essay “Ḥinukh ne‘arim: Al devar ḥinukh ha-banim ka-ra’uy” (Education of youth: On the proper education of boys), published in Ha-m’easef in 1787. Shavit shows BaRaZ’s essay to be an unacknowledged Hebrew adaptation of select paragraphs of Rousseau’s Émile (1762), peppered with phrases from the Jewish canon, especially the works of Maimonides. She argues that “Baraz’s presentation of passages taken from Émile masquerading as those of Maimonides was part of the strategies employed by the Maskilim to minimize opposition and hostility to the translation of ‘foreign’ texts.”58
And yet, as we have seen, in reality there seems to have been little opposition or hostility to the translation of foreign works in early modern Ashkenaz. In fact, throughout the early modern period and well into the early nineteenth century, rabbinical figures in both Italy (e.g., Ya‘akov Zahalon, Itsḥak Lampronti) and Ashkenaz (e.g., David Oppenheim, Shlomo of Chelm, the Vilna Gaon), seem to have supported the translation of foreign works into Hebrew letters, whether producing such translations themselves or urging their disciples to do so (see Chapter 1). Rabbinical authors also contributed approbations to Jewish translations, a practice that continued even into the first decades of the nineteenth century.59
This is not to say that domestication was not a requirement of the Jewish literary system, or that it did not entail a deceptive dimension. Much like the connection between translation and innovation, so too is the association of domestication with deception not entirely unfounded, but it does require a more nuanced treatment. As discussed in Chapter 3, during the early modern period domestication served myriad purposes, of which the covert dissemination of non-Jewish ideas or, as Garrett would have it, “propaganda,” does not stand out as particularly significant. Admittedly, domestication did often entail deceit, especially where it served missionary purposes, as in the case of Immanuel Tremellius; where it was used to veil the use of potentially controversial sources, as in the case of Mordekhai Ha-Kohen’s translation of a Pietist textbook; or in the hybrid Jewish-Christian Bible translations of Yosef Witzenhausen, Yekutiel Blits, and Yedidya Recanati. But for the most part, domestication seems to have been an elementary norm of Jewish translation, one that did not necessarily entail the kind of strategic, almost devious planning ascribed to it by modern scholars of the Haskalah.
In fact, active domestication techniques appear to have been equally prevalent in translations that were produced in manuscript and were not intended for publication. Many such translations were produced for personal use or private learning, thus making the need for deception or veiled propaganda superfluous. A case in point is a 1583 Yiddish manuscript consisting of a translation of Lorenz Fries’s popular recipe book, Spiegel der Artzney (The physician’s mirror, 1518). In a dedication found at the end of the manuscript, the scribe, a certain Moshe ben Ya‘akov, notes: “I the writer have finished this book for my father-in-law, Shalom b”r Yo‘ets the physician.”60 The book, then, was designed for the private use of the scribe’s father-in-law. Nevertheless, throughout his translation, Moshe made active efforts to domesticate his translation, eliminating references to Jesus, the New Testament, and other distinctly Christian motifs.61 These omissions were made not to deceive the reader—Moshe had no qualms about copying the printer’s colophon and citing the precise title and edition of his source. Rather, they display the scribe’s understanding of the domestically oriented norms of translation that existed within the target culture, and his voluntary adherence to these norms even when translating for his own (or his family’s) edification.
A later example is offered by Meir ben Yehudah Leib Neumark’s early-eighteenth-century translation of the work of the French Jesuit Pierre Gautruche. As discussed in Chapter 1, the translation was commissioned by Rabbi David Oppenheim of Prague. And yet, even in this unambiguous case of a translation designed for the personal use of one of the most powerful rabbis of eighteenth-century Ashkenaz, domestication prevails. Thus, for instance, in discussing the division of the heavens, Gautruche argues that his astronomical views are supported not only by empirical observation but also by Holy Scripture. He then cites Job’s reference to the heavens as being “hard as a mirror of cast bronze” (Job 37:18), followed by St. Paul’s testimony about being “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2).62 In his Hebrew translation, Neumark repeats the unproblematic reference to Job (“as Job has taught us in his book, the sky is solid as metal”), but omits the reference to the New Testament, citing the Talmud in its stead (“Were it not for the bustle of Rome, we would hear the sound of the sphere of the sun.” BT Yoma 20b).63
A reading of the maskilic translations themselves, such as those of Vitlin and BaRaZ, further problematizes the suspicious approach to their domestication techniques. In fact, in his translation of Campe’s Robinsohn, Vitlin made no attempt to conceal the foreign provenance of his work, candidly acknowledging on the title page that “this story is translated in all languages of the world, as well as in Yiddish (ivri-daytsh).”64 As for BaRaZ’s essay in Ha-me’asef, while he made no mention of Rousseau in this particular essay, in other pieces BaRaZ was forthcoming about his sources, citing his use of the works of such Christian authors as Campe, John Locke, and Salomon Gessner.65 Like their early modern predecessors, then, for maskilic translators such as Vitlin and BaRaZ, domestication had little to do with deliberate deception. Rather, it was the view of translation as a means to enrich, invigorate, and maintain the cultural borders of Jewishness that prompted Jewish translators across time and space to domesticate their sources. Indeed, domestication was the raison d’être of Jewish translation, whose aim, as Venuti writes in a different context, was “to bring back a cultural other as the same.”66 Rather than speaking of domestication as deception, then, we would perhaps be better served by thinking of Jewish translation as domestication. For Jews, importing works from foreign literatures necessarily meant embedding them within the target culture, Judaizing them—as indeed the act of translation was often termed in both Hebrew and Yiddish.67
Interestingly, this same early modern insistence on domestication also characterizes one of the most prominent genres of maskilic translation around the beginning of the nineteenth century—that is, the translation of German travel tales. Acutely aware of the hazards entailed in exposure to other cultures, the maskilim used such tales to unpack their concerns surrounding intercultural encounters and to envision a form of interreligious exchange that would reinvigorate Judaism, rather than subvert it.
The Campe Translations: Pedagogic Quest as Colonial Conquest
Given the tight link between translation and domestication in maskilic literature, it is striking that tales of faraway travel compose one of the largest corpora of turn-of-the-century maskilic translation. Particularly popular were the travel tales of the German pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818), who became, as Shavit notes, “the most privileged German writer in the Jewish-Hebrew system” and who continued to shape Jewish literature long after his prestige had declined in the non-Jewish literary sphere.68 At least fifteen separate translations of the works of Campe (including the aforementioned Robinsohn) into Hebrew, Yiddish, and German-in-Hebrew characters (Jüdisch-Deutsch) appeared between 1784 and 1830. The vast majority consisted of travel adventures and tales of colonial conquest for children, which became, through the process of translation, works for Jewish readers of all ages. To achieve this, the maskilim tended to omit the distinguishing features of the genre of children’s literature from their translations, such as illustrations, direct speech, frame narratives, talking animals, and more.69 Of course, in blurring the boundaries between the (Jewish) adult and (Christian) child, maskilic translators conveyed a paternalistic approach towards their readers, accentuating what they perceived to be the dire need for Jewish (re-)education. But beyond paternalism, there was another, less immediately discernible dimension to this conflation of children and Jews in maskilic translations. By way of this analogy, the maskilim inscribed the essential feature of childhood—perfectibility—into the image of the Jew, denying the obstinance so often ascribed to Jews by their Christian detractors.70
Of all the children’s authors favored by the maskilim, none was as beloved as Campe. Over the years, the relatively rich corpus of maskilic translations of Campe’s travel tales has been presented as particularly instrumental in the making of modern Jewish literature. There seems to be something almost intuitive in this association between travel, translation, and transformation. If, as one later Yiddish translator argued, “the face of modernism is turned outwards,”71 then translations of tales of exotic travel and colonialist conquest seem to offer a particularly appealing site from which to excavate the roots of Jewish modernity.72 Thus, in a recent study, Ken Frieden presents maskilic “sea tales” as reflecting a sea change in Jewish literature. “Until about 1800,” Frieden argues, “Jewish geography centered on the Land of Israel.” Beginning in 1807, however, with the publication of Moshe Mendelsohn-Frankfurt’s Hebrew translation of Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika (The Discovery of America, 1781), “a radically new travel literature arose in Hebrew. Under the star of the Berlin Enlightenment, authors such as Moshe Mendelsohn-Frankfurt and Mendel Lefin published books that charted a new literary route through the world.”73 Frieden’s study highlights the contribution of maskilic translations of German travel narratives (and of Hasidic travel tales) to the rise of modern Hebrew literature. His goal is to “[rewrite] literary history by returning to the origins of modern Hebrew narrative at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”74
But did maskilic travel tales really constitute such a moment of historical rupture? Did they really chart a new path that had not already been charted by the “exotic” adventures of ages past? Here again, the innovative aspect of maskilic translation, while not entirely unfounded, appears nonetheless to be exaggerated. In fact, in contrast to the “Zion-centered” approach that has been ascribed to them, it seems that medieval and early modern Jews were enthralled by exoticism and delighted in travel adventures and tales of faraway lands. One need only reflect on the multiple Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romance, which were adapted from Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, and other languages during the Middle Ages.75 At least seven distinct Hebrew versions of the Romance have reached us, and they relate the eponymous hero’s travels throughout the known—and unknown—world, including the lands occupied by Amazons, Cyclops, and Cynocephali; the gates of Heaven; and the depths of the ocean.76 Geographical works describing “exotic” lands were also in vogue throughout the early modern period. Many of these were also translations, and some even focused on the same discoveries that stood at the focus of maskilic sea adventures (e.g., Matityahu Delacrut’s Tsel olam,77 Avraham Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam, and Yosef Ha-Kohen’s Sefer ha-Indea ha-ḥadashah and Sefer Fernando Kortes).
Old Yiddish translators and authors seem to have had a particular appetite for exoticism: so much so, indeed, that some translators of German works went so far as to relocate their European tales in more “exotic” settings. The 1735 translation of Eulenspiegel, for instance, adds several tales to its German source. These additions depict the eponymous protagonist’s travels to faraway islands inhabited by warrior women, dog-headed cannibals, and anthropophagic apes.78 The tales have little to do with the original German source text, in which Eulenspiegel’s travels are limited to the familiar world of central Europe, particularly the German-speaking realm. Equally curious is a 1789 Yiddish adaptation of the thirteenth-century German Wigalois, which sets the classic German tale in China, thus reimagining this old Arthurian adventure as an orientalist tale.79 Yiddish translators were also enthralled by orientalist works such as the Arabian Nights (Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes, 1704–1717), the “Persian Days” (Les mille et un jours: contes persans, 1711, and the “Tartar Hours” (Les mille et un quart d’heures, contes tartares, 1715), all three of which were translated into Yiddish almost immediately following their initial publication in French, in some cases in several versions and editions.80 Perhaps, then, the putative shift of focus from the domestic to the exotic, which Frieden views as a novel feature of modern Jewish literature, was not so much a transformation as an intensification of an abiding medieval and early modern interest.
Of course, this is not to say that the maskilim simply replicated earlier literary conventions. Clearly, the genre of colonial travel tales for children that played such a prominent role in maskilic translation was a novelty of the late eighteenth century. Furthermore, the preoccupation with the issues of colonialism, slavery, and the burgeoning modern notions of race, while not unprecedented, became much more focused and intense.81 At the same time, it is crucial that we locate the maskilic preoccupation with travel in translation in its wider historical context. The question that emerges from such a contextualization is not so much whether maskilic travel tales constituted an absolute break with the Jewish literary past but rather how the maskilim drew on past traditions to tackle the particular challenges of their time. In order to answer this question, let us look closely at one particularly interesting translation of the works of Campe, produced by the Polish maskil Menaḥem Mendel Lefin.
On the Domesticity of Maskilic Travel
Born in the town of Satanov in 1749, Menaḥem Mendel Lefin has long been considered one of the father figures of the Galician Haskalah.82 A prolific author and translator, he published a string of translations throughout his literary career, both into and between Jewish languages. His best-known translations include his 1794 Hebrew translation of Samuel Auguste David Tissot’s Avis au peuple sur sa santé (Advice to the people about their health, 1761); his Ḥeshbon ha-nefesh (Moral stocktaking, 1808), which featured elements adapted from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography; and his Mas‘ot ha-yam (Sea journeys, 1818), a Hebrew translation of two of Campe’s travel tales.83
The latter book is of particular interest, providing an exquisite example of the domesticity of the maskilic preoccupation with faraway travel. Mas‘ot ha-yam includes translations of two distinct and very different works: the first is a close translation of Campe’s description of the English “discovery” of Palau (Kapitän Wilson’s[!] Schiffbruch bei den Pelju-Inseln, 1791), and the second is a heavily abridged translation of the same author’s description of an expedition to the North Pole led by the Dutch explorers Jacob van Heemskerk and Wilhelm Barents (Jacob Heemskerks und Wilhelm Barenz nördliche Entdeckungsreise und merkwürdige Schicksale, 1785).84 Mas‘ot ha-yam has long been held in the highest esteem. Nancy Sinkoff views it as a fine example of “Lefin’s subtle use of … literary form to disseminate his programme of enlightenment,”85 while Frieden identifies Lefin as “an innovator who was leagues ahead of his contemporaries”86 and Mas‘ot ha-yam as a book that “transport[ed] Hebrew readers … far beyond the traditional, Zion-centered world.”87
The first question to which the book gives rise has to do with the translator’s selection of sources: why did Lefin chose to translate these two specific tales? His choice of Wilson’s travel tale seems unproblematic: here was a captivating discovery narrative, replete with “noble savages” and exotic adventures, the likes of which were a favorite of maskilic translation. Heemskerk and Barents’s tale, on the other hand, is a rather tedious one, focusing on a lonely expedition to the North Pole in an ill-fated attempt to find a northeast polar passage from Europe to China. A superficial glance shows little connection between this tale—which describes near-endless journeys through the frozen deserts of the north and a few, somewhat repetitive encounters with polar bears—and Wilson’s much more lively colonial adventure. Lefin’s treatment of the two tales is also strikingly different; while he followed Campe’s descriptions of Wilson’s journey closely, inserting the occasional reference to divine providence and omitting only what appeared to him superfluous,88 he took exceeding liberties in adapting the narrative of Heemskerk and Barents’s expedition, condensing Campe’s over-one-hundred-page-long description into a succinct twenty-three-page narrative.
In the German source, Heemskerk and Barents’s tale served as a foil for teaching young readers about the natural phenomena of the north: the polar bears, whales, and ice deserts that lay unexplored in the endless sun of the arctic summer. Campe used the tale, furthermore, to delve into a pseudo-anthropological description of the peoples of the north, who had sparked the imagination of not a few eighteenth-century authors, both Christian and Jewish.89 But Lefin demonstrated little interest in all this—his Hebrew translation omitted entire pages of Campe’s lengthy descriptions, retaining only the general skeleton of the journey’s narrative.90 In addition, like other maskilim of his time, Lefin purged the book of any distinct markers of children’s literature, such as illustrations or direct addresses to the child reader, preferring to present the work as a plain historical narrative that could appeal simultaneously to both children and adults. Stripped of its pedagogical techniques and anthropological messages, Heemskerk and Barents’s tale became almost as dreary as the desolate scenery it described. Clearly, while Lefin was enchanted by the allure of Wilson’s colonialist adventure, he found little in the Dutch North Pole expedition to commend and communicate to his readers. Modern scholars seem to have been equally unmoved by Barents and Heemskerk’s North Pole adventure, preferring—understandably—to focus on Lefin’s much more invested treatment of Wilson’s tale.91 But Lefin’s almost offhand translation of Campe’s North Pole narrative begs the question: why translate this particular tale at all?
In addressing in passing the question of Lefin’s selection of sources, Sinkoff argues that Lefin chose to translate tales “in which the encounter between enlightened, ‘civilized’ Europeans and ‘noble savages’ figures prominently as a leitmotif.”92 Yet, while this is true for Wilson’s Palau adventure, Heemskerk and Barents’s tale was not an encounter tale, and featured no savages—noble or otherwise. The choice would, perhaps, have been understandable had the two tales appeared in the same volume of Campe’s works, but whereas the North Pole tale appeared in volume 1 of Campe’s collected travel tales, Wilson’s Palau adventure appeared only years later, in volume 9. One can only speculate, of course, as to the motivations underlying a translator’s selection of a particular source. Heemskerk and Barents’s expedition was the first tale to appear in Campe’s collected voyages, and it could be that Lefin simply translated it before producing his more mature translation of Wilson’s journey, which appeared several years later. However, a reading of the two tales does suggest some commonalities that may have inspired Lefin’s selection.
In an unpublished introduction to Mas‘ot ha-yam, Lefin presents his motivation for translating Campe’s travel tales: “to awaken the soul of the reader … in order that he will see from this to what lengths the forces of perseverance and wisdom go—foreseeing the consequences with which God has graced human beings—toward withstanding tremendous and enduring dangers of cold and heat and hunger, thirst, wild animals, bandits, and severe illnesses.”93 And indeed, the suffering and travails of travel play a central role in both tales, serving, as Frieden notes, “to prepare [readers] to endure hardships without losing faith.”94 These hardships are particularly prevalent in Lefin’s translation of the North Pole adventure. Thus, at the height of their journey, the Dutch explorers find themselves stranded in the wintry darkness of Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya): “The fire seemed as though it too had lost its warmth, so that when they held their feet so close to the flames that their socks [batey ha-raglayim] caught fire, [only then] would they feel a little warmer, but they would not notice [the burning] until the smell of burnt flesh reached their noses. And they lost their spirits, as well as the power of speech and, seated around the flame, they appeared as mute golems, their faces sullen, their eyes sad, for they pitied one another, and one and all awaited their impending death.”95
A similar emphasis on the hardships of travel was characteristic of other maskilic translations of the same period as well. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, for maskilic translators around the turn of the century, travel served as a powerful metaphor for the project of the Haskalah.96 The maskilim used the perils of the journey to dramatize the hurdles they faced, while the emphasis on the gains of faraway travel served to alleviate concerns surrounding the maskilic project. In Moshe Mendelsohn-Frankfurt’s translation of The Discovery of America, for instance, the translator describes numerous occasions on which the crew of Columbus’s ship succumbs to despair, lamenting their decision to set sail to a new, unknown land. These laments form a recurring theme in the narrative, providing the translator with a powerful analogy for the doubts and skepticism encountered by the Jewish maskil. In a particularly poignant scene, Columbus’s crew cries out: “why have we left our homeland, our homes and properties, to follow this man of spirit [ish ruaḥ] towards nothingness, known to no man, and impassable also to him?”97 Translating Columbus’s response to these recurring doubts permits Mendelsohn-Frankfurt to articulate a militant maskilic response: “and [Columbus] neither did he set his heart to this also [Exodus 7:23], for he said in his heart, I know … that I am guiding them in the right direction.”98 Elsewhere in the translation, Mendelsohn-Frankfurt further accentuates his defense of maskilic innovation in the face of opposition, explaining that “this is the way of the wise man, whose soul yearns for discoveries.… And even if his brothers turn a blind eye to his efforts, even if they do him evil and are forever ignorant of his efforts on their behalf … still he will not sleep, and will work tirelessly to better their situation; he will endure their scorn and wrath, and … will forever courageously endeavor to help them.”99
But, for conservative maskilim such as Mendelsohn-Frankfurt and Lefin, travel was a means not merely to dramatize the hurdles to be overcome by the maskil but also to discuss the hazards facing Jews as they ventured beyond the traditional cultural realm. The various maskilic translations of Campe’s works all share a recognition that successful travel is a balancing act, requiring a precise combination of home and away. Thus, Mendelsohn-Frankfurt communicates how, upon their arrival in the “New World,” those same sailors who had been so concerned that they would never return from their voyage now “became very desirous to settle in that land, and forgot their homes and homeland, and they said: here shall we settle for ever and eternity. But Columbus did not find peace, but was concerned both night and day, wondering: how shall I return to my home.”100 The domestic message is brought home during Columbus’s second journey, in which he discovers that those sailors who had chosen to stay behind and not return to Europe “became corrupt … and razed the entire land and corrupted it.”101
Lefin, a devout proponent of conservative Haskalah, similarly offered his readers a deeply domestic understanding of faraway adventure. Indeed, in different but complementary ways, both travel tales that appear in Mas‘ot ha-yam are circular narratives, stories of journeys whose true destination is home. Heemskerk and Barents’s tale communicates to its readers little else beyond a description of the hazards of the journey, up until to the Dutch sailors’ joyous return to Amsterdam. In Campe’s original German version, the closing scene is short and almost anticlimactic; the sailors, we are told, “boarded and began their journey to Holland on September 15th … arriving after an uneventful journey in Amsterdam on November 1st.… Their sight aroused wonder and the tale of their adventures elicited astonishment.”102 This laconic finale gives Lefin little to work with; still, the translator tweaks the closing scene, adding his own unique Jewish touch:
Around mid-Elul they boarded the ship … to return to Holland.… They journeyed in peace without any hurdles or travails until arriving in Amsterdam in the beginning of Ḥeshvan.… And the people gathered round them within minutes, hungry for wonders and thirsty for news. Some asked questions, others expressed opinions, others wondered, and all were delighted and joyous and gave thanks and praise to the performer of mighty deeds, the master of wonders [po‘el gvurot, adon ha-nifla’ot; after the Yotser or blessing; my emphasis].103
Lefin’s additions to Campe’s source, which I have highlighted in the above quotation, are minor but meaningful. In underscoring the importance of providence in ensuring the sailors’ safe return, the departures comply with a general theme in Mas‘ot ha-yam, in which, as Frieden notes, “Campe’s abstract Providence becomes more explicitly God’s intervention.”104 But there is more here; the final sentence, which is Lefin’s original addition to the text, refers the Hebrew reader to the Yotser or (Creator of light) blessing, the first of two blessings uttered before the Shema in the Jewish morning prayer (Shaḥarit), in which the worshiper thanks God for the creation of light. In referencing the prayer, the translation’s finale offers an inversion of the darkness that had shrouded the sailors throughout their journey across the wintry arctic, signaling to the reader that the sun only rises once the journey is over.
In his translation of Wilson’s travel tale, Lefin once again uses intertextual references to drive home the domestic message of the book. While Frieden correctly presents Lefin as a Hebrew author who “generally avoids quotations from Hebrew sources,”105 biblical allusions do occasionally appear in the translation, their scarcity only accentuating their import. Through the use of such intertextual references, Lefin establishes a powerful analogy between Wilson’s South Sea adventure and the biblical story of the Exodus. Thus, on reaching the island of Palau, Campe writes that the English decided to send a group (Kundschaft) to survey the unknown land.106 This is translated by Lefin as: “they decided to send spies that they may search the land [latur et ha-’arets].”107 Lefin’s choice of terms alludes to the post-Exodus story, in which the Israelites send spies to search the land of Canaan. The spies’ expedition, however, is unsuccessful, and is followed by the continued sojourn of the Israelites in the desert. In this way, Lefin signals to his readers, well-versed in the biblical tale and its interpretations, that for all its promise and intrigue, Palau is a mere diversion, a stop on the circuitous course toward the journey’s ultimate destination, the return home.
The domestic message is further accentuated through Lefin’s treatment of the colonialist encounter between the English sailors and the natives of Palau. As Sinkoff notes, “in the realm of metaphor, [Lefin] appears to be comparing the ‘noble savages’ [of Palau] with east European Jewry and the British and their world with Western, non-Jewish culture, and depicting their encounter as the result of a tumultuous journey.”108 Of particular significance is Lefin’s treatment of the image of the Palauan prince Libu. Libu is instructed by his father, the king of Palau, to accompany the British sailors back to their European home, in order to acquire from them “those things required for the advancement of his people.”109 In this way, Lefin underscores the aims of the conservative Haskalah, exploiting the colonialist encounter between the natives of Palau and the English sailors to discuss Judaism’s dialogue with the majority European culture. The image of Libu, in particular, serves as a means to portray the benefits offered by such an exchange and seems to be an almost unavoidable analogy for the “maskilic voyager,” Lefin himself.110
After reaching England, Libu learns to read and write in English, is amazed at the technological marvels and cultural fineries he encounters, and finally immerses himself in English society, all while maintaining his natural kindness, wisdom, and naïveté.111 Following his German source closely, Lefin notes that for all his amazement at the riches of English culture, Libu was set in his decision to return to Palau: “Whenever he would see or hear something new he would make a note to himself to use this novelty for the benefit of his nation” (bney ‘amo in Lefin’s Hebrew; sein Vaterland in Campe’s text).112
And yet, Libu’s journey is cut short. Before he can complete his quest and return to Palau, he is struck down by the pox, his last thoughts dedicated to his father and the great loss of wisdom that his death bodes for Palau: “and it did him well to be angry [after Jonah 4:9] because he would not be able to tell his father the king all the novel things that he had seen in the land of Britain.”113 The tale’s tragic closing scene depicts Libu’s father standing on the beach, staring at an indifferent ocean, waiting for a son who will never return. Lefin calls his readers to “imagine … this pious king, who abandoned his son in order to bring a blessing to his people and his mission was all in vain.”114 For Lefin, it seems, Libu’s ill-fated journey offered a final opportunity to reflect on the hazards and, potentially, the futility of venturing outside the familiar world. For all his good intentions, it seems, Libu still strayed too far from home.
Was Libu’s frustrated journey a metaphor for the radicalization of the Berlin Haskalah? As Sinkoff has shown, a one-time close affiliate of the maskilim, by the 1790s Lefin had become disenchanted with the movement.115 In an unpublished manuscript written sometime in the 1810s, he reflected on the role played by the increasing German literacy in the radicalization of the German maskilim:
Now, however, since this past [prejudice] has been pierced [i.e., the language barrier], everything proceeds very quickly.… A general mania for innovation took hold. Soon, the majority of the people scorned the esteemed Orthodoxy, the Sages of the Talmud and of the religion, who were mocked by shabby esthetes [armselige Schöngeistler].… Now they have become completely enlightened towards meanness. They are ashamed of their Jewish names. Hirsch was transformed into Herman and into Heinrich; Malkah was transformed into Amalie and into Maiblume. Moses’s prescriptions were examined and found no longer suitable for the spirit of the age. They switched to Deism, to indifference.116
Lefin’s words give voice to the promise and perils of foreign words. In order for the Haskalah to be successful, it is imperative that a language barrier be maintained between foreign tongues and the Jewish masses. Only the select few, whose adherence to tradition is beyond doubt, may cross this barrier. Only they are sure to return with the fruits of their labor to the Jewish everyman who must remain home. But once the barrier is broken, cultural openness becomes a route to assimilation. The collapse of the language barrier signifies the end of Jewish translation. No longer are non-Jewish works domesticated into the Jewish literary realm—rather, the Jewish self is now translated into the languages, cultures, and religions of the gentiles.
As Lefin’s reflections on the language barrier reveal, the decades around the end of the eighteenth century witnessed a significant change in the German-Jewish literary realm. The sheer volume of translations, the increasing exposure to imported ideas and works, the more organized nature of Jewish translational activity, and the changing ethics of acknowledgment joined other technological, social, and cultural changes. Faced with these profound changes, European Jewish culture was required to swifter, more radical transformations than it had ever before undergone. Under these conditions, things that were once easily absorbed by the Jewish literary system now became harder to accommodate, and the meanings and functions of translation began to change. Still, this was not the revolutionary process that previous studies have made it out to be. It is, perhaps, better understood as a kind of phase transition: like the boiling of water, in which a steady, long-term exposure to a gradually increasing variable results in sudden, nonlinear change.
Of course, it was not only the changes in Jewish translation that led to this tipping point. Other transformations that were taking place throughout Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century contributed to the growing unease surrounding translation specifically and non-Jewish knowledge more generally among members of the rabbinical elite. It was, however, only after this tipping point had been reached that translation began to be perceived as truly transformative and the phenomenon of traditionalist translators disappeared. Non-Jewish knowledge, whether in its original or its Judaized form, now became increasingly associated with assimilation and secularization, and its outright rejection became the battle cry of the new Jewish orthodoxy.
But for late-eighteenth-century Jewish translators, these developments still lay in the future. Translators during this period were still devoted to the gradual introduction of new texts and ideas into a deeply religious Jewish literary realm. Their translations convey an attempt to strike a balance between continuity and change, home and away, and they appear to have used translation as a means to unpack their concerns surrounding the radicalization of the process of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, of which their translations were a part. Their ambivalent attitudes toward their own project, their aspirations for reform and fears of revolution, reflect not only their link to their early modern past but also their Enlightenment sensibilities. Indeed, as recent studies of the Enlightenment have suggested, “the Enlightenment was not a philosophical doctrine, a coherent ensemble of ideas and values, nor even a reformatory program, but rather a polyphonic and deeply reflexive intellectual movement.”117 It was not so much a harbinger of modernity as it was a reflection on modernity, a wide-ranging, multivalent debate over its tensions, promises, hazards, and contradictions.118