Chapter 2 Ploughing a Field to Which You Have No Claim

Why Translate? A Look at Previous Responses

Previous attempts to answer the question of early modern Jewish translators’ motivations have focused primarily on two kinds of translations: the translations of literary texts into Old Yiddish, and late-eighteenth-century translations into Hebrew.¹⁷ The most sustained treatment of the issue appears in Sarah Zfatman’s study of early Yiddish belles lettres. Zfatman argues that there exists an “essential and discernible difference between the sublime moral aims of Yiddish literature which drew on domestic sources, and the purely entertaining purpose of Yiddish works which drew on foreign sources.”¹⁸ These observations correspond with the different functions served by Yiddish translations of Hebrew works, on the one hand, and of works from European vernaculars (particularly German and Dutch), on the other. As discussed in Chapter 1, Jewish translators drew on two distinct libraries—a Jewish/Hebrew library and a foreign (non-Jewish) library. Their treatment of these two libraries was largely differential and, while some translations (whether wittingly or unwittingly) combined both, they often served distinct purposes. Translations between Jewish languages (e.g., from Hebrew to Yiddish, from Judeo-Arabic to Hebrew, from Hebrew to Ladino) set out to disseminate Jewish knowledge to those who were unable to obtain it in its original tongue. Translations of foreign works, on the other hand, served different, widely diverse functions, including the acquisition of scientific knowledge, the improvement of literary techniques, cultural refinement, or, particularly in the case of Yiddish translation of belletristic texts, leisurely enjoyment. And yet, a closer scrutiny of the paratexts of Yiddish translations of both Hebrew and foreign works reveals a less tidy scheme than previously imagined.

Admittedly, as Zfatman notes, Yiddish translations of German and Dutch prose often presented themselves on their title pages as entertaining (kurts vaylig) or amusing (lustig).¹⁹ However, similar declarations are also to be found in the paratexts of no few Yiddish works that drew on Hebrew sources, such as Mayse beyt David bi-yemey Paras (1599), Sefer ben Sira (1586), the Melokhim bukh (1544), or the Shmuel bukh (1544).²⁰ In addition, Yiddish translations of foreign works often also presented other selling points besides entertainment value or economic interests. As one early-eighteenth-century translator put it, these translations were produced “not for the sake of money alone, but for the sins of the masses to atone” (nit um vilen dos geringe gelt alayn, zondern mezake ha-rabim tsu zayn).²¹ Another translation, from later in the century, portrayed itself on its title page as a tale from which great morals (fil musar) might be learned. The message seems to have been of particular importance to this translator, who appended to each chapter of the book a lengthy discussion, about a page long, of the moral encompassed therein. Chapter 1, for example, is said to exemplify the importance of charity; Chapter 2 demonstrates that even when one is overwhelmed by misfortune, one must continue to place one’s trust in God, and so on.²² Interestingly, these moralistic discussions differ from other parts of the translation in their use of language, displaying a Yiddish rich in Hebraisms and biblical allusions. This would seem to suggest that the greater part of the text is a transcription or near-transcription of a German work, whereas the moralistic musings are the translator’s own addition.

A particularly striking example of a moralistic translation of a foreign work is an unacknowledged Yiddish translation of the Arabian Nights that appeared in 1718 under the title Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot (Mirrors of the assembling women).²³ In the preface to this work, the unnamed translator explains his choice of title: “I have called this book a mirror of the world [shpigl for der velt] or Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot because … it reflects the entire world, in all its flaws and glories.”²⁴ The translator goes on to describe the moral, cultural, didactic, and religious merits of his translation over the course of two lengthy introductions. He explains that the book exposes readers to a wealth of knowledge from around the world, assists parents in educating their children, and offers allegories of a distinctly moral and religious value. The translator has no qualms about also noting his commercial interests in producing the work, or emphasizing its entertainment value, but he seems to have viewed these considerations as complementing his more “sublime” motivations, explaining that entertainment is essential for combating idleness, which, he argues, leads to crime, promiscuity, and blasphemy.²⁵ Anticipating, perhaps, skepticism from his critics, the translator adds that even though there are those who will view the work as a mere cornucopia of tales and fables, the essential morality of such tales is a well-known fact of Jewish tradition. Indeed, he argues, the ancient Jewish sages themselves “provided various tales and fables in order to bring men under the bond of morality [den mentshen in (musar) tsu brengen].”²⁶

Still, Zfatman is skeptical of such moralizing in Yiddish literary texts; “at times”—she writes—“the Yiddish transcriber felt ill at ease with profane literature, whose only purpose was leisure, and he invested in efforts in order to ‘elevate’ his book of adventure and promiscuity, particularly by adding lofty morals.… Clearly, these additions are entirely artificial, and bear little relevance to the tale’s narrative.”²⁷ Paucker is similarly incredulous, arguing that “the moralizing and pieties which introduced or concluded [Yiddish translations] were matters of routine, … often mere eye-wash.”²⁸

However, I see no reason to dismiss the explanations provided by the translators themselves. Such selective reading of sources seems to me particularly problematic in the case of Old Yiddish literature. What access do we have to the ulterior motives of these largely anonymous translators, about whom we know so little, that would permit us to ignore their—often long and elaborate—prefaces? And even if we assume that there are such unspoken agendas underlying the text, why should they be of greater interest to the historian than those that appear on its surface? If in fact Yiddish translators conceived of the translation of non-Jewish texts as a tool for religious and moral edification, this should not surprise us. Such an understanding was also shared by Hebrew translators, such as Avraham Yagel and Leon Modena, who, during the early modern period, translated Christian catechisms and ethical works into Hebrew. As Bonfil notes, “such translations differed from the medieval translations of the works of non-Jewish authors, as medieval translators treated their sources as reservoirs of ‘neutral,’ scientific information, whereas [early modern translators] were pointedly interested in matters concerning religious morals and faith.”²⁹

Other Yiddish translators stressed the didactic value of their texts.³⁰ Several eighteenth-century translations of literary works such as Miguel de Cervantes’s (1547–1616) “La Gitanilla” (The little gypsy girl) or Thomas-Simon Guellete’s (1683–1715) Les mille et un quart d’heures (One thousand and a quarter hours) portrayed themselves as a means to improve the reading, writing, or speaking capabilities of their readers, particularly the young.³¹ The same justification also appeared in Yiddish translations of works from other genres, such as Benyamin ben Zalman Croneburg’s Kurioser antikvarius (1752), which was depicted as a kind of primer for acquiring the basics of High German [di hokh daytshe shprakh grundlikh … mit fundament tsu erlernen].³² Croneburg offered his readers an exceedingly faithful translation of his unacknowledged source, even transcribing the Latin expressions that appeared therein, and spelling out the digits, so as to teach their correct pronunciation.³³ Clearly, then, entertainment and materialistic considerations cannot be considered to have been the sole motivations for the translation of foreign works into Yiddish.

An altogether different view of Jewish translators’ motivations is offered by scholars of early maskilic translations, that is, translations produced by members of the Jewish Enlightenment around the end of the eighteenth century. These scholars tend to view translation, particularly from German and French into Hebrew, as an essentially ideological undertaking, a means to bridge the gap between Jews and Christians and a gateway to Jewish acculturation and “modernization.” In his overview of the history of Jewish translation, for instance, Gideon Toury argues that, having declined over the early modern period, translation was once again picked up by the Haskalah, which “aimed at bringing Jewish culture closer to the achievements of the surrounding cultures.”³⁴ According to Toury, maskilic authors took up translation as a “distinct strategy,” designed to bring about the creation of a modern Hebrew library.³⁵ For Toury, as well as other scholars of maskilic translations such as Zohar Shavit and Tal Kogman, these translations were an essentially new phenomenon, quite distinct from the Yiddish and Hebrew translations that preceded them.³⁶

This view of Hebrew translation stands in direct contrast to Zfatman’s view of Yiddish translation as predominantly instrumentalist in nature. Scholars of maskilic translation often emphasize its deeply ideological nature, as well as the translators’ complete disregard for questions of marketability or accessibility.³⁷ What the two approaches share, however, is a tendency to downplay or to dismiss the translators’ own presentation of their motivations in their prefaces as mere apologetics. In addressing the explanations for translation that appeared in medieval Hebrew translations, for example, Toury writes: “Many medieval translations were preceded by (often rather lengthy) prefaces, some of them amounting to minor treatises on translation. Those prefaces tended to be overwhelmingly apologetic in tone.… Translators may or may not have had genuine reasons for apologizing, but their over-indulgence in apologetics should be seen first and foremost as a convention of the time.”³⁸

The prevalent understanding of the role of Jewish translation in the Haskalah is closely linked to what has become known among historians as “the modernization thesis”—that is, the view that the eighteenth century constituted the dawn of a new age, and that it was the Enlightenment that paved the way for this unprecedented historical moment.³⁹ And yet, Jewish translation had begun to flourish long before the eighteenth century and was carried out not only by members of the Haskalah or of the other burgeoning secular elites but also by religious thinkers, rabbis, and other so-called “traditionalists.” As I discuss in Chapter 4, viewing the corpus of maskilic translations against the backdrop of this wider library of translated works challenges its “modernist” image, allowing us to pinpoint more carefully elements of continuity and change in Jewish attitudes toward translation throughout history.

The celebratory view of maskilic translation as a gateway to modernity is further complicated by recent trends in the field of critical translation studies. Over the past few decades, historians and scholars of translation in colonialist settings, such as Tejaswini Niranjana, Maria Tymoczko, and Vicente Rafael have called our attention to the power dynamic inherent in any form of translation, and especially in translations between hegemonic and minority or subaltern cultures. As Niranjana points out, “translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within … asymmetrical relations of power.”⁴⁰ It is precisely these power structures that have contributed to contemporary scholars’ disillusionment with translation and their skepticism surrounding the viability of translation as a means for intercultural dialogue. As Felski observes, translation is perceived today by many in the fields of literature and cultural studies as “a form of social homogenization, part of a more general flattening out of cultural and linguistic differences.”⁴¹ This suspicion toward translation is not unwarranted. As we shall see throughout the following pages, the translational choices made by Jewish translators were often deeply inspired by their unusual position as part of a religious and ethnic minority within early modern Europe. Nevertheless, looking at the paratexts of early modern Hebrew and Yiddish translations, we encounter a complex understanding of translation, which challenges both the celebratory view of translation as a cultural bridge and its pessimistic view as a cultural abyss.

In fact, Jewish authors and translators seem to have shared modern scholars’ apprehensions concerning the cultural hazards posed by translation. At the same time, they insisted on the absolute necessity of translating non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages, producing Hebrew and Yiddish translations at a dizzying pace, at times, with little or no regard for the needs of their target readers (see Chapter 1). How, then, did these translators navigate between their own vigilance toward non-Jewish culture and the choice to translate foreign works?

Looking at the paratexts of early modern Jewish translations, one finds that translators often tended to present their works as serving a primarily conservationist function—even as a means of fortifying Jewish culture in the face of foreign influence. This somewhat unintuitive view of translation appeared with exceptional regularity particularly in Hebrew translations but also pervaded translations into Yiddish. In contrast to the more standard justifications surveyed in Chapter 1 for the selection of a particular source text—justifications of a didactic, literary, financial, or cultural nature—these conservationist justifications seem to reflect a pointedly Jewish understanding of translation and intercultural exchange. Indeed, the conservationist view of translation implied by these justifications closely corresponds with the unique status of Jews as a European minority community that aspired to preserve its distinctiveness while at the same time maintaining close ties with the surrounding majority culture(s). Three central, closely interrelated, motivations stand out in particular: (a) the notion that translation may serve to fortify Jewish faith and tradition; (b) the notion that translation is a means for reclaiming lost Jewish knowledge; and (c) the notion that translation is a form of cultural gatekeeping. A closer scrutiny of each of these motivations affords a view into the specifically Jewish understanding of translation as it emerged in the early modern period.

Translation and Religious Fortification

Perhaps the most widespread justification appearing in early modern Jewish translations was the attribution of religious value to the source text in spite of—or even, in some cases, specifically because of—its Christian origins. This explanation often had distinctly polemical and/or messianic dimensions.⁴² An interesting example is the Yiddish geography Sefer tla’ot Moshe published by Moshe ben Avraham the Proselyte in 1711. The cover page depicts the work as follows: “A description of the entire world, and of the Ten Tribes … which is proven from Jewish books as well as the books of the nations which attest to the same, and also the writings of R. Avraham Farissol in his Sefer igeret orḥot olam.”⁴³ While Tla’ot Moshe presents itself as a synthesis of various sources, the book is for the most part, as Chone Shmeruk and Israel Bartal have shown, a translation of two sources in particular: the first, the domestic or Jewish source—Igeret orḥot olam—is acknowledged right on the book’s title page and again throughout the translation. The second source text—the Latin Tabularum geographicum contractarum by the Dutch author Petrus Bertius—is mentioned only in passing in the body of the text.⁴⁴ Admittedly, the translator does acknowledge his use of some non-Jewish sources on the book’s title page but, in contrast to his treatment of his Hebrew source, apparently saw no need to mention these sources by name. For Moshe ben Avraham, it seems, the value of the non-Jewish source inhered not in the name of its author, its cultural prestige, or its scientific or literary merit, but solely in its admission of the truth of the Jewish messianic myth of the return of the Lost Tribes.⁴⁵ Moshe’s choice to obscure his non-Jewish source reflects a widespread norm among Jewish translators. Ironically, one finds the same practice among some of the so-called “domestic” authorities to whom these Jewish translators refer in their introductions, most significantly Avraham Farissol. As David Ruderman has demonstrated, large parts of Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam were, in fact, translated from a book by the Italian author Fracanzano da Montalboddo.⁴⁶

But there were some Jewish translators who not only acknowledged their non-Jewish sources but indeed trumpeted the Christian origin of their works. One such translator was the enigmatic sixteenth-century author Moshe Botarel. Sometime around 1561, Botarel published a Hebrew book titled Eyn mishpat. In direct contrast to the Jewish translators discussed thus far, Botarel’s approach to translation was entirely unapologetic. In fact, he went so far as to introduce his Christian source on the book’s title page. Thus, the title reads “Eyn mishpat, derived from the mouth of a gentile scholar (yatsa mi-pi ḥakham goy).”⁴⁷ Further information on the source text is provided in the work’s preface, in which Botarel identifies his source as the work of “a certain gentile by the name of Michael, who speaks in all innocence [masiaḥ lefi tumo].”⁴⁸ This innocent gentile was, in fact, none other than the famous prophet Michel de Nostredame, better known by his Latin name Nostradamus.⁴⁹ Curiously, Eyn mishpat is a translation not of Nostradamus’s famous Les Prophéties (1555) but, rather, of a forgotten almanac for the year 1562, which was only available in manuscript form.⁵⁰ This manuscript somehow made its way to Botarel, who translated Nostradamus’s idiosyncratic French into heavy-handed Hebrew, peppered with French terms.

The translation itself is largely faithful to its source; in some places, it is an almost word-for-word rendition of the French source. In fact, while Botarel claims on his title page to have translated the work from Latin, he clearly calls upon Nostradamus’s French to complement his use of Hebrew where needed. The month of April, for instance, is termed avril (אבריל); the French word for gray—gris—is transcribed as grisim—apparently for lack of a better Hebrew term; a rose is a flordlis (fleur de lis in Nostradamus’s manuscript), and so on.⁵¹ Botarel does occasionally stray from his source to neutralize distinctly Christian terms. Thus, for instance, whereas the source text opens by praising “our Lord Jesus Christ” [nostre Seigneur Iésus-Christ], Botarel begins his book by praising “our Lord God” [ha-tehilah le-el ha-‘adon], and where Nostradamus addresses Pope Pius IV as “Nostre beatissime sainteté”—our most blessed saint—Botarel simply uses “the pope.”⁵² Still, Botarel clearly had no qualms about translating, albeit in a slightly abbreviated form, the letter to the pope that was appended to the manuscript.⁵³

At first glance, then, Eyn mishpat appears to be a largely faithful Hebrew rendering of a Christian text. But closer scrutiny reveals a much more complex view of translation which characterized Botarel’s treatment of his source. Understanding Botarel’s translational attitude requires a careful, intertextual reading of the book’s paratext, and particularly the title page and the translator’s preface. Here, Botarel initiates a kind of coded conversation with his Hebrew readers, which is key to understanding the translation in its entirety. It is perhaps this unique paratext that allowed Botarel to produce such an uncharacteristic early modern Hebrew translation. Let us begin to crack this carefully constructed code by looking at the title page, which identifies the work as one that describes “our salvation and redemption (ge’ulatenu u-fedut nafshenu).” This messianic message is reinforced in the introduction, in which Botarel explains his choice to translate Nostradamus’s almanac, writing that “I have seen the great desire amongst the learned and the unlearned that the day will come when we shall reach our longed-for wish (ha-mevukash ha-mekuveh).”⁵⁴ But as the reader progresses from Botarel’s enthusiastic introduction to the body of the text, a certain tension is revealed; the book is a collection of grim prognostications, replete with natural calamities, disastrous plagues, bloody wars, and monstrous births that will torment Europe over the coming year. The question arises, then, who exactly is going to be redeemed? And how?

Having anticipated, perhaps, his readers’ bewilderment at the stark difference between the mirthful introduction and the book’s somber content, Botarel explains that the work “speaks of the good that awaits us [i.e., Jewish redemption] in riddles and in scattered places, divided and dispersed here and there, in small portions.”⁵⁵ These riddles permeate Botarel’s preface, which calls upon a wide range of well-known Jewish texts to create that “indigenous theory” discussed by Genette as one of the main purposes of the preface, and which is intended to provide the reader with “the most reliable interpretive key” to understanding the text. Thus, on the book’s title page, Botarel anticipates that “the false gods will be destroyed [ve-ha-elilim karot yikareitun] speedily and soon [be-‘agal’a u-vi-zman kariv], Amen.” These lines incorporate verses from the highly contentious Aleynu prayer, which was considered to include anti-Christian and polemical elements, and from the Kaddish prayer, in which the mourner asks that the Messiah arrive “within the life and days of the House of Israel, speedily and soon.”⁵⁶ In combining the messianic utterances of the Kaddish with the fantasies of eschatological vengeance of the Aleynu prayer, Botarel signals to his readers on the book’s title page the kind of sophisticated polemic and inversion of the source that the translation entails.

The preface drives the message home. Here, Nostradamus is presented as “an envoy sent unto the nations [tsir ba-goyim shaluaḥ] from the Lord, who watches over his people, and remembers the covenant of our fathers.… Michael, a gentile who speaks in all innocence.”⁵⁷ The term “a gentile who speaks in all innocence” hinges on the halakhic notion according to which a gentile’s testimony is admissible only when the speaker is not aware that he is in fact offering testimony. In using the phrase to designate Nostradamus and his prophecies, Botarel gestures towards the translation’s utility for a Jewish readership specifically. His use of the term legitimizes the translation by presenting his source as the admissible, unwitting testimony of a gentile. No less importantly, Botarel thus signals to his Hebrew reader that the book contains a hidden message for Jews, which is concealed even from the eyes of the greatest seer of them all—Nostradamus. This message is reinforced by Botarel’s likening of Nostradamus to the biblical prophet Balaam (Numbers 22) elsewhere in the preface.⁵⁸ One of the few gentile prophets mentioned in the Bible, Balaam was tasked by King Balak of Moab with cursing the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land. However, he was unable to defy God’s will and ended up blessing the Israelites instead. In likening Nostradamus to Balaam, Botarel once again underlines the involuntary nature of his source’s Jewish utility.

As demonstrated by such scholars as Elliott Horowitz and Rebekka Voß, early modern fantasies of Jewish salvation often possessed violent undertones.⁵⁹ And indeed, for Botarel, it seems that Nostradamus’s almanac contained the promise not only of Jewish redemption, but also of Jewish revenge. The message is most conspicuously articulated in Botarel’s presentation of Nostradamus as “an envoy sent unto the nations,” an unmistakable reference to Obadiah 1:1: “We have heard a message from the Lord: An envoy was sent to the nations to say, ‘Rise, let us go against her for battle.’ ”⁶⁰ According to the biblical prophecy, the heavenly envoy will encourage the nations to declare war on Edom, by the end of which Edom will be made “small among nations, … utterly despised” (Obadiah 1:2). As is well-known, Edom was often identified with Christianity in the European Jewish imagination. Botarel’s dense preface thus integrates several separate prophetic traditions that thicken the meaning of Nostradamus’s enigmatic prophecies and harness the French seer’s grim prognostications to the Christians in order to deliver an empowering message to the Jews.

Perhaps, however, this heavily coded message was lost on its actual Jewish readers, for whom Botarel’s approach to the translation of Christian themes and content was too flippant. The book was published in one edition only, of which only a single copy is extant today, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Botarel’s book seems to have had little impact on contemporary readers; I have found no mention of it in contemporary or near-contemporary works, and it is nowhere to be found in Shabbethai Bass’s bibliographic magnum opus, Siftey yeshenim (1680). Later bibliographers and modern scholars have also, as a rule, devoted little attention to the book. Relying on an error that appeared in Isaak Benjakob’s nineteenth-century bibliography, the book has been consistently referred to in contemporary research as a translation of Nostradamus’s Les Prophéties—a misidentification that would have been discernible to any reader who ventured beyond Botarel’s introduction.⁶¹

Still, its descent to obscurity notwithstanding, Botarel’s Eyn mishpat offers a striking example of a two-faced translation, which appears faithful, even submissive, to its source but is in fact deeply subversive. A similar, albeit more moderate, phenomenon may be identified in some of the Old Yiddish translations of German epics and chapbooks that appeared throughout the early modern period. A large number of these translations were near-transliterations of their sources, exhibiting a fidelity that could only have been achieved in languages as close as Yiddish and German. These translations’ affinity to their source texts was such that some scholars tend to view them as mere “mechanical copies” rather than translations per se.⁶² And yet, as Arnold Paucker and others have shown, on closer inspection one finds in these near-transliterations occasional, nearly imperceptible, expressions of infidelity, indeed of insubordination, to the non-Jewish source.

A widespread norm, for instance, among Old Yiddish translators was to replace the Christian denominators and figures that appeared in their sources with derogatory or polemical terms. We have already seen one example of this in “Dukus Horant’s” inconsistent treatment of the term Kirche (in Chapter 1), and further examples abound (see Chapter 3). Of course, such occasional deviations from the source text facilitated the much smoother reception of the non-Jewish source within the Jewish literary system and constituted one of the classic norms of early modern Yiddish translation. Locating this translational norm against the context of the Hebrew translational system, however, reveals a broader polemical understanding of translation, which complicates our understanding of the power relations between the hegemonic or dominant source and its faithful, seemingly submissive translation.

Alongside the polemical understanding of translation, there also existed other arguments for its religious utility. Translators of scientific texts, for instance, often presented the information that appeared in their sources as an attestation to God’s greatness.⁶³ A case in point is offered by the Lithuanian rabbinical thinker Avraham ben Eliyahu of Vilna (1750–1808), son of the Vilna Gaon and a well-known rabbinical thinker in his own right. Around 1800, Avraham published a book on natural history, titled Gevulot arets (Borders of the land). While no mention was made of the book being a translation, Gevulot arets was for the most part, a secondhand, heavily Judaized translation of the magnum opus of the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle (1747–1786).⁶⁴ Avraham opened his unacknowledged translation as follows: “Lift up now thine eyes and see [Gen.13:14] how … the Blessed One sustains and feeds [zan u-mefarnes after ‘birkat ha-mazon’] the outcasts in all four corners of the earth and in the islands and deserts. And both ears of everyone that heareth it shall tingle [1 Sam. 3:11], and his heart will be filled with the love of the creator, and he will lift up his hands unto God in the heavens [Lam. 3:41].”⁶⁵ Of course, the Jewish theological framing of the work would have been entirely foreign to Buffon, a suspected deist, but for Avraham, it was by looking beyond the confines of the known world and of the known literature that the greatness of God was made most evident. He thus justified, at one and the same time, his interest in world geography and his own unacknowledged act of venturing outside the Jewish literary realm.

Similar declarations concerning the religious merit of non-Jewish scientific knowledge appear in numerous other translations, both Hebrew and Yiddish.⁶⁶ A slight variation on the theme is offered by Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim (The path of the tree of life), which, as noted in Chapter 1, is largely a translation of parts of Johannes Curio’s De Conservanda Bona Valetudine (The preservation of good health, 1557), combined with passages from Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on Pedanius Dioscorides’s Materia Medica (1544/1586). Like Avraham of Vilna, this translator also chose to domesticate his Latin source texts in some places, to deliver messages that would be particularly meaningful to his Jewish readership. A case in point is the book’s first chapter, which discusses the negative health effects of sorrow or fear (tristitia in Curio’s Latin, zorg in the Yiddish translation). Following his Latin source closely, the translator cites Proverbs 17:22: “a broken spirit drieth the bones.”⁶⁷ While Curio then continues to discuss the hazardous health effects of melancholy, the translator seizes the opportunity to offer an explanation for the putative physical inferiority of the Jews. Indeed, he argues, given the close connection between anguish and poor health, “it should come as no surprise [kayn khidesh] 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 shreknsh].”⁶⁸

Derekh ets ha-ḥayim features two short introductions—the first, which appears on the book’s title page, is written in Hebrew, and the second, in Yiddish, appears in the body of the text. The inclusion of such Hebrew introductions in Old Yiddish books was not unusual; although inaccessible to most Yiddish readers, as Dovid Katz notes, such introductions often served as “a message to the elite … that [the] book is kosher … and that they need not be too alarmed.”⁶⁹ And indeed, the Hebrew introduction sets out to locate this unusual Latin-to-Yiddish translation within a deeply traditionalist background and to portray the translator’s motivations as pure and pious: “The life of the soul and that of the body are closely connected, as the sages of musar [hakhmey hu-musar] have taught … and as our sages of blessed memory [RaZaL, i.e., the sages of early rabbinic literature] have explained, the way of the tree of life … precedes the Torah, for the preservation of health is a great obligation … and it is for this reason that I have translated [this book] into the language of Ashkenaz [=Yiddish] so that the most excellent preservation may be accessible to all.”⁷⁰ The translator is referring here to the authors of medieval Jewish ethical literature, particularly Maimonides, who composed works on the preservation of health and argued that “a healthy and sound body is in the Lord’s path, for it is impossible to grasp knowledge of the Creator if one is sick.”⁷¹

The Yiddish-language introduction offers a brief summary of the Hebrew preface, while omitting the references to the sages of musar and to Razal. The translator adds only that: “as God has given me health and a little wisdom [gizunt un’ epes khokhme] I have taken it upon myself to fulfill the commandment of preparing this book which is used by the entire world.”⁷² The slight difference between the two introductions—the recourse to the highest authorities of Maimonides and Razal in the Hebrew introduction and the emphasis on the book’s utility in the Yiddish one—adequately reflects the traditional division of labor between Hebrew and Yiddish literature in early modern Ashkenaz. Whereas Hebrew was the language of a narrow, learned elite, which was expected to focus on religious studies and to abstain from the pursuit of “secular knowledge,” Yiddish literature cut across classes, spaces, genders, and generations. And yet, in addressing both his Hebrew readership and his Yiddish one, the unnamed translator of Curio and Mattioli’s Latin tracts felt compelled to underscore the book’s religious utility and to ground it within a traditionalist Jewish framework.⁷³

Translation as Reclamation

A closely related justification that appeared in Jewish translations was that translation from European tongues was a form of reclaiming lost Jewish knowledge. This understanding of translation stems from the age-old myth surrounding the Jewish origins of science and philosophy. The myth is rooted in antiquity; Josephus for instance, claimed that it was Abraham who taught science to the Egyptians, who then taught it to the Greeks.⁷⁴ In the Middle Ages, the myth began to appear frequently in the works of Jewish authors such as Yehudah ha-Levi, Maimonides, and Immanuel ha-Romi, who used it as a means to justify their interest in extra-Jewish science and philosophy. These authors believed that all knowledge had already been given to humanity in the Bible, whether in revealed or concealed form. However, the galut, Jewish exile, had brought about a decline in the Jews’ ability to perceive these truths, and so the gentiles had usurped the original knowledge of the Jews.⁷⁵ In the late Middle Ages, the myth was harnessed by Hebrew translators such as Eli Ben Yosef Havilio and Ashtori ha-Parḥi to justify their Hebrew translations of Latin works.⁷⁶ As the centuries progressed and suspicions toward translation intensified, it began to appear with increasing regularity in Hebrew—and to a lesser extent also Yiddish—translations of the works of Christian authors.

An appealing example is found in an unpublished manuscript titled “Ḥug ha-arets” (Circle of the earth), by the Polish rabbi Shlomo of Chelm (c. 1716–1781). In the preface to the book, which constitutes a Hebrew geography of the Holy Land, Shlomo, a renowned rabbinical author, acknowledges his reliance on a non-Jewish source but does not identify the source by name.⁷⁷ This work has recently been shown to be a translation of two Latin sources: the Dutch humanist Christian van Adrichem’s Theatrum Terrae Sanctae (1590) and the German mapmaker Georg Matthaeus Seutter’s Atlas Novus (1745).⁷⁸ The book’s preface affords an unusual view of a Jewish rabbi-translator’s self-perception:

May the Temple be built and the Holy City restored.… And if, God forbid, I shall not live to see it restored, may God at least permit me to behold its ruins.… And I shall stand from afar on the lookout [Mitspah] and look at its sight on the map [mapah].… And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns [Prov. 24:31]. And I shall take pity on the holy cities which have been draped in foreign garments the thirsty swalloweth up [sha‘af tsamim; Job 5:5]⁷⁹ in foreign tongues.… And I shall remove their veils and I shall recognize their visages.… And I shall copy [=translate] from the foreign tongue into our holy tongue.⁸⁰

For Shlomo, then, translation was a form of returning Jewish knowledge to the Jewish tongue. His understanding of the act of translation as reclamation enabled him to perform an almost acrobatic rhetorical maneuver, from which the translation emerged as the real source, while the source became a mere derivative copy. This unique understanding of originality and authorship was coupled with a messianic view of translation. Indeed, in Shlomo’s description, it was almost as though by transferring the description of holy sites from the Latin to the Hebrew script, he was able to transfer the land itself from the gentiles to the Jews.

Another example is offered by the aforementioned Meir Leib Neumark of Hanau, who, in 1703, produced at the behest of his patron David Oppenheim a Hebrew translation of an unidentified German geographical work, titled “Tokhen ha-kadur” (Measure/Astronomer of the world). In his preface to the translation, Neumark explains that all knowledge originates in Judaism, including philosophy, which, he observes (following Abravanel), arose from a chance encounter between the Greek Plato and the prophet Jeremiah.⁸¹ He then likens the sciences to a young girl who had been taken from the Jews by the gentiles: “My spirit aches as I see a captive Israeli maiden (na‘arah shevuyah yisraelit) taken from Yehdah and forced to serve a gentile mistress (nokhrit ha-moshelet).”⁸² Like his later contemporary, Shlomo of Chelm, Neumark, too, viewed his text as having been originally Jewish, thus creating a kind of reversed causality that rendered the original non-Jewish text a fake. Viewed in light of this unique understanding of the reversed translational cycle, it seems only natural that Jewish translators would deem any acknowledgment of their non-Jewish source entirely superfluous.

Similar discussions of translation as an act of reclamation appeared in the writings of Jewish translators the likes of David Gans, Barukh Schick of Shklov, and even in the works of maskilic authors such as Barukh Lindau, Itsḥak Satanov, and Avraham Van Oven.⁸³ The German maskil Naftali Herz Wessely (1725–1805) offers a particularly interesting treatment of the myth. In 1780, Wessely published his Ḥokhmat Shlomo—a Hebrew translation (which had been circulating in manuscript form for two and a half decades) of the apocryphal book known as the Book of Wisdom or Sapientia Salomonis, attributed to the biblical King Solomon.⁸⁴ Reflecting on his undertaking in the introduction, Wessely raised a pointed question. He argued that translation is always a tricky business, requiring, as the great medieval Hebrew translator Shmuel Ibn Tibbon noted, fluency in both source and target languages and an acute comprehension of the book’s subject matter.⁸⁵ And yet, he noted, the translation of biblical works is an especially difficult task, given the sanctity and complexity of the Hebrew language as well as the intricate, often obscure nature of the works’ contents. Given these complexities, he asked, was not the retranslation of biblical apocrypha from the “languages of the nations” back into Hebrew a hopelessly futile task?

For if indeed it is true that the author [of this book] was King Solomon, … and the book was written in Hebrew but lost, and we were left with naught but the translations made by the Greeks and the Romans, and then the Germans and the French, well then in attempting to return the book to its home, I was overcome with fear and trembling, for if the first translator did not adequately understand the Hebrew roots [or] the book’s content, [then] rather than consume the nectar of King Solomon’s … wisdom, we would receive the nonsense of the translator and his fancies. Moreover, I was concerned that during the years in which it had resided among the Egyptians and Assyrians, that they had harmed the book, and done with it as they pleased.⁸⁶

Wessely’s introduction bears a striking similarity to Neumark’s earlier portrayal of Jewish knowledge as a captive maiden among the nations. In contrast to Neumark, however, who cast no doubts on the unspoiled virtue of the Hebrew text that had been held captive by the foreign work, for Wessely, that virtue was a matter of anxiety and uncertainty. Indeed, Wessely’s introduction seems, on first reading, liable to undermine the legitimacy of the entire project of Jewish translation. If Jewish knowledge had been usurped by the gentiles, who was to say that it had not been corrupted over the course of time? Who was to vouch for its integrity? And yet, these (clearly rhetorical) concerns are promptly mitigated as Wessely explains that, notwithstanding its trials and tribulations, the book remained pious through and through: “for the sun of righteousness shone upon its words, and their wings which spread above were a cure, which sheltered the ark of the covenant of God … and their tongue was a remedy to cure the wounds of the tongues of deceit.”⁸⁷

Wessely’s presentation of the travails of the biblical apocrypha are an unmistakable metaphor for the trials of diasporic Jews. More importantly, his putative concerns surrounding the book’s potential erosion at the hands of the gentiles reflect the growing concerns, in the late eighteenth century, surrounding the increasingly familiar relationships between Jews and Christians, particularly with respect to Jewish maskilim such as Wessely himself. As we shall see in Chapter 4, such usage of translation to unpack concerns surrounding Jewish-Christian relations was extremely widespread in late-eighteenth-century maskilic literature. But perhaps most interesting in Wessely’s discussion of translation is the overwhelming importance ascribed to the Hebrew tongue, which has the power to resonate through the centuries, slicing through layers of gentile mediation, to reach Wessely’s ears in its pristine, untainted form. It is this purifying power of the Hebrew language that made Jewish translation, as we shall presently see, an essentially redeeming act. Sheltering Jewish literature from the inquisitive tongues of the gentiles, the Hebrew language prevented the corruption of the captive maiden of Jewish knowledge, preserving its virginal form until such time as it could be rediscovered and redeemed by its true, appropriate partners—the Jews.

While the reclamation myth, with its characteristic sexual undertones, was particularly prevalent in Hebrew translations, which targeted a male readership, a milder version of the myth also appeared with some regularity in Yiddish translations, particularly of biblical apocrypha. Thus, for instance, towards the end of the sixteenth century an unnamed Yiddish translator produced a manuscript translation of Luther’s German version of the book of Ben Sira, claiming that “the goyim use this book in their prayers/churches [the translator uses the derogatory “tifles”] and call it a book of morals [bukh der tsukht] … [but] the greater part [of the book] is taken from [the books of] Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.”⁸⁸ A later translation of Ben Sira by the Dutch Jewish translator Yosef Ben Ya‘akov Maarssen appeared in 1712, and was based on the Dutch version that appeared in Adolph Visscher’s Biblia das is de gantsche heylige Schrifture (1648–1701).⁸⁹ Maarssen, an unusually prolific translator, presented the book’s utility in a brief Hebrew preface that appeared on the title page:

Behold, this is a wondrous novelty, an old and ancient book, which was composed and prepared by the High Priest (ha-kohen ha-gadol) Joshua ben Yozadak, and because of our sins we were exiled from our land [and] can no longer rise to observe the books that we once had, and many of them have been lost to us, and have disappeared, and this is one of those books. But before it was lost, it was translated [ne‘etak] by his grandson, Joshua ben Sirak, from the Holy Tongue to the Egyptian language; and from Egyptian, the gentiles of the nations translated [it] into their own tongues … and as I have seen its great wisdom and utility I set my mind to translating this book from the Dutch language to our Yiddish [mi-leshon holandsh le-leshoneno Ashkenazi] to benefit the masses, and may the author of this book redeem us, that we may return to our land and witness the building of our Temple in our day and find there our books and all that we desire, Amen.⁹⁰

One is struck by the close proximity between Maarssen’s presentation of the translation of Ben Sira as an act with distinctly messianic implications and Shlomo of Chelm’s similar treatment of the translation of geographical works from Latin. In all of these descriptions, translation, reclamation, and redemption are intrinsically bound together, and the act of translation functions as a bridge stretching not between Christians and Jews, but rather between the Jewish past, present, and posterity.

Translation as Gatekeeping

The cultural ferment that characterized European society in the early modern period also left its mark on Europe’s Jews. The modest Hebrew library that had thus far targeted a narrow group of rabbinically trained Jewish men could no longer satisfy the appetite of an increasingly growing readership. Translation offered a double solution to the dilemma that faced Jewish authors during this time: on the one hand, the adaptation of foreign texts to Jewish tongues was a sure and swift means to enrich the Jewish library, while on the other hand, by making non-Jewish literature available in Jewish languages, translators were able to control the infiltration of ideas and discoveries into the Jewish cultural sphere. A keen observer of the cultural changes of his time, the sixteenth-century rabbi Moshe Isserles (c. 1525–1572) was quick to pick up on the necessity of translation in the changing literary climate. In his glosses to the Shulḥan arukh (Set table), Yosef Karo’s authoritative sixteenth-century codification of Jewish law, Isserles added a caveat to Karo’s original prohibition on the reading of profane books, even on Shabbat.⁹¹ Isserles, who sought to make the book more congenial for Ashkenazi Jews, argued that one should indeed refrain from reading such works in non-Jewish languages, but that in the holy tongue it is permitted (bi-leshon ha-kodesh sari).⁹² Isserles’s exemption was promptly adopted by Jewish translators, most prominently by his disciple, David Gans, who quoted the great rabbinic authority in the introduction to his Tsemaḥ David.⁹³

A similar distinction between licit reading in Hebrew and illicit reading in non-Jewish languages appears in the preface to Farissol’s Igeret orḥot olam. Farissol spares no harsh words in condemning those who dabble in foreign works: “To quiet their sadness and grief, they read songs and filthy romances, and books of ancient, fabricated wars … and they please themselves in the children of strangers [be-yaldey nokhrim yaspiku].”⁹⁴ Farissol’s own book—in large part an unacknowledged translation, let us recall, of an Italian book—is presented as an appropriate alternative to such idle literary pursuits. That Farissol chose, at one and the same time, to both deride the consumption of profane non-Jewish works and to translate one of them into Hebrew himself reveals the unique Jewish perception of translation as a means both to cross and to reinforce the cultural and religious borders between Christians and Jews.

One way of comprehending this complex and perhaps, to our mind, contradictory line of thought is by following the biblical allusion that appears at the end of Farissol’s admonition. The original passage appears in Isaiah 2:6: “thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers.” The great medieval biblical commentator R. Shlomo Yitsḥaki (Rashi) interprets the passage as follows: “They please themselves in the children of strangers. They cohabit with the daughters of the heathens and mingle with them, and they would bear children to them, with whom they are always pleased, and they occupy themselves [with them] and dote on them and fuss over them.”⁹⁵ Once again, then, the Jewish encounter with foreign literature is articulated through the use of sexual rhetoric. This time, however, the foreign text is imagined to hold not a captive Jewish maiden but, rather, a foreign femme fatale. Drawing on Isaiah’s admonition, the allusion likens the consumption of foreign works to an illicit sexual encounter, whose almost inevitable result is the breaking of the Jewish bond.⁹⁶ It is only through the translator’s mediation that the temptation may be mitigated and the foreign text enjoyed.

The allusion to Isaiah 2:6 is surprisingly ubiquitous in early modern Hebrew translations. It appears, for instance, in Gans’s Neḥmad ve-na‘im (Pleasant and agreeable, 1592). In the introduction to the work, Gans seeks to legitimize his interest in astronomy (ḥokhmat ha-tekhunah), by contrasting it to the study of physics: “The study of physics (ḥokhmat ha-teva) from their books [that is, foreign books] is prohibited by Ḥazal, [for] these things attract the heart of the nation to mockery and foreign fallacies, and [the Sages] have already raised their voices like a shofar [against] those who read external books [sfarim ḥitsonim] which are not from the Children of Israel, and who please themselves in the children of strangers.”⁹⁷ Curiously, here the Talmudic edict against the study of “Greek wisdom” is understood to apply not, as was often argued, to philosophy, but rather to physics, and Gans uses it to draw the line between licit (astronomical) and illicit (physical) non-Jewish knowledge. Once again, the objection to the consumption of foreign works seems to exclude translation. As Andre Neher has shown, Neḥmad ve-na‘im was, in part, an unacknowledged translation of a near-contemporary German almanac published under the title Astronomia Teutsch Astronomei (German astronomer’s astronomy, c. 1570).⁹⁸

The biblical allusion continued to appear in Hebrew works in the eighteenth century, reproducing the same dichotomy between the direct and indirect consumption of foreign literature and allowing Hebrew translators (or would-be translators) to chart the difference between appropriate and inappropriate Jewish-Christian relations. Toward the end of the century, for instance, the German rabbi Moshe Sofer (the Ḥatam Sofer) planned to publish a Hebrew-language book on astronomy and physics “so that his disciples may learn from it, so that they do not please themselves in the children of strangers.”⁹⁹ According to Sofer’s grandson, the plan was abandoned after the Lithuanian kabbalist Pinḥas Hurwitz published his own Sefer ha-brit, rendering Sofer’s book superfluous.¹⁰⁰

Earlier in the century, in Neumark’s “Tokhen ha-kadur,” we are told that Jewish readers “will empty wisdom from their sacks and please themselves in the children of strangers, [they will] covet their languages, which they consider more pure and sophisticated.”¹⁰¹ Neumark’s description of the readers’ lust for foreign languages once again reveals the significance of the Hebrew tongue (or script) as a means for Jewish self-preservation. As in Wessely’s poignant description of the Hebrew word’s ability to preserve its purity under layers of time and language, so too in Neumark’s admonition does the temptation of the foreign tongue pose a dire threat to Jewish existence. As noted above, Neumark himself served as a semiprofessional translator on behalf of the chief rabbi of Prague, David Oppenheim. For Neumark, the Ḥatam Sofer, Gans, Farissol, and others, then, the solution to the problem of Jewish readers “pleasing themselves in the children of strangers” was not to have them abstain from foreign literature entirely but rather to produce a Hebrew-language library of works of astronomy, geography, and other natural sciences in translation.

This somewhat unintuitive understanding of the act of translation also appears with surprising regularity in other genres of early modern Jewish translation. In a book dedicated to matters of ethics and religious code, the ever-perceptive Ya‘akov Emden offers a particularly rich variation on the theme. Emden, who elsewhere in the book criticizes Azariah De Rossi for having “pleased himself in the children of strangers,”¹⁰² begins his discussion with the traditional myth of the Jewish origin of wisdom. He explains that there is nothing new in the works of the gentiles, and that all scientific progress is merely Jewish wisdom in Christian garb. He then goes on to remind his readers of the talmudic prohibition against the reading of so-called “external books,” pointing out the contested nature of this prohibition. Finally, he explains that his own writings offer the ideal solution to the problem: “I have brought unto you all the good parts of the morals of those of the nations known for their wisdom. And God knows and is witness to the great pains to which I have gone, and all the toils I have undertaken for you, so that nothing of the morals will escape your attention, in whatever language it is written, and also to save you so that you do not approach the doors of their houses and drink their evil waters, and so that you are not taken captive in their fortresses.”¹⁰³ Translation emerges here as a selfless act of courage in which the translator puts himself at risk and ventures into the volatile realm of foreign words for his readers’ benefit. Elsewhere, Emden draws a dismal portrait of the hazards of learning foreign tongues. He was particularly adamant about avoiding the French language and literature, which, he claimed, “is based on the foundations of disdain, foul speech, lust, and adulterous desires.”¹⁰⁴

A no less dramatic vignette is painted by Rabbi Shaul ha-Levi of The Hague in his haskamah (approbation) to Rabbi Barukh Schick of Shklov’s translation of Euclid’s Elements: “If an Israelite should navigate among the nations to learn sciences from foreign books, waves of foreign knowledge will entangle him to divert him from the straight path. And now our teacher and master, Rabbi Barukh … of Shklov has arisen to translate the book of Euclid into the Holy Tongue to restore the crown to its ancient site, and wisdom to its home, so that Israel shall not need another nation [lema‘an lo yitsarḥu Yisrael le-‘am aḥer].”¹⁰⁵ For Ha-Levi, Emden, and other Jewish authors, then, in an era of increased Jewish thirst for knowledge, translation served as a kind of floodgate against the rising tide of foreign words.

Significantly, this idiosyncratic view of translation as cultural gatekeeping also characterized members of the Jewish Enlightenment. In Moses Mendelssohn’s famous preface to his Bible translation, titled Or la-netivah (Light for the path, 1783), the famed philosopher explained his motivations for preparing this Jüdisch-Deutsch Bible translation. According to Mendelssohn, the translation was designed to serve

Jewish children wanting to understand words of discernment [who] run to and fro seeking the word of God (Prov. 1:2, Amos 8:12) from the translations of Christian scholars. For Christians translate the Torah in each and every generation, according to their languages, in their nations (Gen. 10:20) in keeping with contemporary need.… However, that path upon which many of our nation’s youth tread has many a snare and stumbling block for those whose feet slip (Job 12:5), and great harm has emerged from there. For Christian translators—who do not have the traditions of our Sages, and who do not heed the masorah, not even accepting the vocalization and cantillation that we have in our possession—treat the words of the Torah like a breached wall, everyone contending against it and doing with it as he pleases. They add and delete and change the divine Torah, not only the vowel points and the cantillation, but sometimes even letters and words (for who will stem their senselessness?) according to what they think and perceive. As a result, they sometimes read in the Torah not what is written there, but that which occurs to them (Ezek. 20:32).¹⁰⁶

Of course, this explanation, which appears in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew preface, contrasts sharply with his better-known depiction of his translation in his oft-quoted letter in German to his friend August Hennings. As discussed in the introduction, Mendelssohn presented his translation in this letter as a “first step to culture from which my nation, alas, is so estranged that one is almost ready to despair of the possibility of improvement.”¹⁰⁷ The discrepancy between Mendelssohn’s two explanations for his Bible translation—the one in German, and the other in Hebrew—has caught the attention of previous scholars, some of whom have attempted to solve it by doubting the sincerity of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew preface. Michael Meyer, for instance, writes that “the truest expression of Mendelssohn’s motivation is unquestionably his letter to Hennings.… [However], in his introduction to the translation Mendelssohn of course could not mention this intention to disseminate ‘culture.’ ” The rabbinical thinker David Kamentsky is more adamant: “Mendelssohn’s original intention,” he writes “was to ‘acculturate’ his nation, This was a predesigned and premeditated plan, and all the talk of ‘translating for the children’ … are mere lies and deceit.”¹⁰⁸

Here, we begin to see how envisioning maskilic translation as inherently innovative—as a complete break with the Jewish, or at least Ashkenazi, past—often entails a selective reading of the translators’ own words. More recent readings of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation by David Sorkin, Abigail Gillman, Naomi Seidman, and others have complicated this presentation, allowing us to see Mendelssohn as both an innovator and a traditionalist, a careful consumer of Enlightenment values and ideals.¹⁰⁹ To these valuable perspectives, I would add that viewing the translation against the background of the broader corpus of Jewish translation in this and earlier periods provides a fuller understanding of Mendelssohn’s view of his translation as both a bridge and a barricade: a way of bringing Jews closer to non-Jewish culture, but from a position of safety within the confines of Jewish culture.

Another telling example is offered by Mendes’s poem, cited above. The poem depicts the views of a supposed critical reader, who prods Mendes to explain his actions in translating Metastasio’s Italian into Hebrew. At first, the reader seems to voice suspicions regarding the importation of foreign works into the Jewish literary sphere. But in its final verse, Mendes’s poem takes an unexpected turn. The grumpy reader concludes his tirade on translation by pointing out to the translator: “Know that your labor has been for naught/The Hebrew tongue is no longer in season/Knowledge is no longer sought/And no one heeds the cries of reason.”¹¹⁰ In Mendes’s view, then, the enemies of translation are not those obstinate guardians of tradition—members of the rabbinical or religious elite—but rather those who have turned their backs on tradition, on the holy tongue of the Jews, and on the sacred pursuit of knowledge.

In a different work from around the same period, Mendes elaborates further on the same theme: “I have been alarmed to see small foxes from our people … eagerly consuming the … nonsense of the gentiles … whose lips spew lies and foul thoughts, and they have defiled the honor of the pure and Holy Tongue, and the language of learning and of science.”¹¹¹ Mendes’s own translations are introduced as a means to combat this phenomenon. In describing his method of utilizing the works of Metastasio and Jean Racine, Mendes explains that he has “descended unto the garden of their poetry … and found bell and pomegranate [pa‘amon ve rimon, after Exod. 39:26] in their words. And I consumed their fruit and threw away the peel.”¹¹² Mendes, then, shares with other early modern Jewish translators the notion that the words, and even the languages, of the gentiles are potentially hazardous. It is only the skilled translator who is able to carefully defuse these words and to place whatever benefits they offer at the disposal of a Jewish readership. The translator is thus an indispensable part of the process of cultural transfer; it is his responsibility to moderate the flow of foreign culture into the Jewish community and to prevent, at one and the same time, both cultural isolation and cultural assimilation. It was this understanding of the importance of controlling the flow of non-Jewish knowledge into the Jewish literary sphere that guided maskilic translators’ and authors’ choice of language; whether they addressed their readers in biblical Hebrew or in German in Hebrew characters, the late-eighteenth-century maskilim saw the Hebrew letter as a means of both enabling and controlling the movement of texts and ideas.¹¹³

Yiddish and Gatekeeping

Given the emphasis placed by Isserles and later authors on the significance of the Holy Tongue in mediating foreign knowledge, it is perhaps unsurprising that the gatekeeping argument was prevalent in Hebrew works but did not appear in the same form in Yiddish translations. In contrast to the distinct domesticity of the Hebrew language, Yiddish occupied an ambivalent position between the foreign and the domestic, as well as within traditional Jewish hierarchies of knowledge. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that Yiddish authors and translators shared the understanding of translation as a form of cultural gatekeeping and viewed the increased interest in foreign works as an incentive for Jewish creativity. As Leo Fuks and Rena Fuks-Mansfeld note, “It is a general trend, that the editors and translators of … popular [Yiddish] literature tried to excuse themselves for their frivolous work by pointing out that it was better that the young people read Yiddish stories than that they read unworthy non-Jewish books.” As a paradigmatic example, they cite a statement that appeared on the title page of a rhymed paraphrase of the story of Esther, published in Amsterdam in 1649: “While I have seen that a lot of boys and girls went to buy galkhes books and wasted their time with this kind of trash I decided to give the young people a present by compiling this lovely book.”¹¹⁴

Another example is offered by the beloved Mayse bukh, first published in 1602. The book’s preface, composed by the publisher, Ya‘akov of Meseritz, harshly criticized the popular Yiddish transcriptions of German chapbooks such as Dietrich von Bern or Maynster Hildebrant, which, Ya‘akov claimed, “are pure filth … and are ungodly.”¹¹⁵ The Mayse bukh itself was presented in the preface as the antithesis to such works: a work of purely domestic provenance, based on midrashic and haggadic sources. What the publisher neglected to tell his readers, however, was that international tales, albeit heavily Judaized, also appeared in the book.¹¹⁶ It seems, then, that for Ya‘akov of Meseritz, the problem entailed in the Yiddish transliteration of German chapbooks and epics was not the recourse to non-Jewish literature in general but rather the specific form of those Yiddish transliterations of German works. The Mayse bukh offered a different, much more active, approach to translation, in which the non-Jewish tale was reframed to fit a Jewish mold.

I would venture to suggest that even those Yiddish translators who offered their readers near-transliterations of German chapbooks shared, at least to some extent, the concerns of the Mayse bukh’s publisher with respect to unadulterated access to vernacular works. As we shall see in Chapter 3 below, Yiddish translators often tended to omit from their works any distinctly Christian elements, as well as (particularly in the eighteenth century) other elements that they deemed inappropriate for a Jewish readership. In addition, these translators often obscured their non-Jewish sources, thus consolidating their position as the uncontested mediators between the Jewish reader and the Christian source and allowing their readers only indirect access to non-Jewish literature.

For Yiddish authors, however, gatekeeping was an even more complex task. As Bart Wallet has argued, the unique position of Yiddish literature—between Hebrew and German—meant that Yiddish translators were required to patrol not one, but two types of cultural borders. Thus, Wallet shows how Menaḥem Mann Amelander omitted from his book not only the Christian elements found in Basnage’s source text, but also the kabbalistic elements that appeared in his Hebrew sources: “Amelander consented with the traditional view that Kabbalah was exclusively for the rabbinic elite and could be dangerous in the hands of non-learned people. As the author of a book aimed at the whole Ashkenazi community, he could therefore not include mystical passages. As a true gatekeeper he closed the gates for knowledge which he regarded as the exclusive right of the rabbinic elite.”¹¹⁷

Amelander was not alone. As scholars such as Michael Stanislawski and Chava Turniansky have shown, Yiddish translations of Hebrew works were often purged of philosophical, esoteric, and certain halakhic discussions, indicating a fear of the inappropriate transmission of these discussions to the Yiddish-speaking masses.¹¹⁸

In a lecture delivered in 1813 to the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, the German theoretician Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that there are only two possible approaches to translation: “either translators leave the writer in peace as much as possible and move the reader toward the writer, or they leave the reader in peace as much as possible and move the writer toward the reader.”¹¹⁹ More than two centuries have gone by since Schleiermacher’s famous formulation, but the notion that translation moves on an axis between embracement and rejection is still widespread. Often, translation is celebrated as a sign of cultural openness, a means to overcome cultural, linguistic, and religious differences. This is Toury, Shavit, and Meyer’s understanding of translation and its relationship to Jewish modernization. Other times, translation is criticized as an imperialist act, aimed at the suppression of cultural diversity and the preservation of power relations between hegemonic and subaltern or minority cultures. This is the postcolonialist understanding of translation, which offers a pessimistic view of the possibility of intercultural dialogue.

And yet, looking at the paratexts of early modern Jewish translations challenges both of these views. For Jewish translators, translation was primarily a means of importing new, non-Jewish knowledge into the Jewish cultural sphere in a heavily monitored form, while at the same time maintaining the borders between Jews and their non-Jewish environments. Underlying the corpus of Jewish translations was a deep ambivalence toward non-Jewish culture and an acute awareness of the dangers inherent in direct, unmediated exposure to that culture. Jewish translation was thus a solution to a problem, and domestication—a defensive technique. This special understanding of translation reflects the essential ambivalence that characterized Jewish-Christian relations during the early modern period, a relationship that was marked, at one and the same time, by both assimilation and exclusion, attraction and repulsion, rivalry and respect.