Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. 1. Louis Kelly, The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West (Oxford, 1979), 1.

2. 2. On cultures of literacy among early modern Jews, see Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish: prakim le-toldoteha (Tel Aviv, 1978), 24–39; Re’uven (Robert) Bonfil, Be-mar’ah kesufah: chayey ha-yehudim be-‘Italiyah bi-yemey ha-Reneysans (Jerusalem, 1994), 120–22; Shlomo Berger, Aubrey Pomerance, Andrea Schatz, and Emile Schrijver, “Speaking Jewish—Jewish Speak: Introduction,” Studia Rosenthaliana 36 (2002–2003): vii–xv; Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008): 5–18; Edward Fram, “Limud sfat ha-makom be-Krakov ba-me’ot ha-16 ve-ha-17: hayitakhen?” Gal-ed 25 (2017): 23–37.

3. 3. On early modern translation in general, see Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007), 7–38; Karen Newman and Jane Tylus, Introduction to Early Modern Cultures of Translation, ed. Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (Philadelphia, 2015), 1–24.

4. 4. Moses Mendelssohn, Letter to August Hennings, June 29, 1779. Quoted in Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, NY, 2000), 78.

5. 5. Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit, 1967), 42–43.

6. 6. Leonard J. Greenspoon, “Jewish Translations of the Bible,” in The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York/Oxford, 2014), 2095.

7. 7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 87.

8. 8. See, e.g., Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, 1993); Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York, 2003).

9. 9. Sherry Simon, Translation Sites: A Field Guide (New York, 2019), 104.

10. 10. There exist also other understandings of translation, which are closer to the early modern Jewish view. See my discussion of these approaches in the conclusion.

11. 11. The relationship between history and translation studies has become the focus of a great deal of attention in recent years. See, e.g., the various contributions to the special forum of the journal Translation Studies 5, no. 2: Rethinking Methods in Translation History (2012): 131–261. More recently, see Julia Richter, Translationshistoriographie. Perspektiven & Methoden (Vienna, 2020); Christopher Rundle, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Translation History (London, 2022).

12. 12. Ya‘akov Emden, Sefer birat migdal oz (Zhytomyr, 1873), 214.

13. 13. Shaul ha-Levi, approbation to Barukh Schick of Shklov, Sefer Uklidos (The Hague, 1780), (n.p. [1]). Translation (with slight modifications) according to Tal Kogman, “Science and the Rabbis: Haskamot, Haskalah, and the Boundaries of Jewish Knowledge in Scientific Hebrew Literature and Textbooks,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 62 (2017): 142.

14. 14. See, e.g., Babylonian Talmud (BT) Sanhedrin 100b; BT Chagigah 15b.

15. 15. Robert Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes Towards History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times,” Jewish History 11, no. 1 (1997): 29.

16. 16. On the early modern ghetto as a means of bringing Jews closer to Christians, see Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley, 1994), 68–77; Robert Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns of a Jewish Society in Crisis: Italian Jewry at the Close of the Sixteenth Century,” Jewish History 3 no. 2 (1988): 18.

17. 17. Bonfil, “Change in Cultural Patterns,” 18.

18. 18. Ha-Levi, approbation to Schick, Sefer Uklidos, [1]. The same logic is repeated in other Hebrew works of the period; see Chapter 2 below.

19. 19. For an overview of the central role played by translation in early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, see, in addition to the works cited in note 3 above, Scott L. Montgomery, “Why Did Modern Science Emerge in Europe? An Essay in Intellectual History,” Know 3, no. 1 (2019): 69–92; Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl A. E. Enenkel, eds., Translating Early Modern Science (Leiden/Boston, 2017); Gottfried Hagen, “Translations and Translators in a Multilingual Society: A Case Study of Persian-Ottoman Translations, Late Fifteenth to Early Seventeenth Century,” Eurasian Studies 2, no.1 (2003): 95–134; B. Harun Küçük, “Early Modern Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 407–19.

20. 20. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 16, 153–54; Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893).

21. 21. Gideon Toury, “Translation and Reflection on Translation: A Skeletal History for the Uninitiated,” in Jewish Translation History: A Bibliography of Bibliographies and Studies, ed. Robert Singerman (Amsterdam, 2002), xix. See also the survey of Hebrew translation history in Robert Singerman, “Between Western Culture and Jewish Tradition: Translations to and from Hebrew,” in A Sign and a Witness: 2,000 Years of Hebrew Books and Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Leonard Singer Gold (New York, 1988), 140–54. See Chapter 4 below for further examples and a discussion.

22. 22. Following Steinschneider, most scholarship on medieval Hebrew translations has focused on translations from Arabic. More recently, a large-scale collaborative project has sought to amend this by investigating medieval Hebrew translations from Latin. See Alexander Fidora, Gad Freudenthal, Resianne Fontaine, Harvey J. Hames, and Yossef Schwartz, eds., Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies, 2 vols. (Boston/Leiden, 2013).

23. 23. See Robert Singerman, ed., Jewish Translation History: A Bibliography of Bibliographies and Studies (Amsterdam, 2002).

24. 24. Nitsa Ben-Ari and Shaul Levin, “Traditions of Translation in Hebrew Culture,” in The World Atlas of Translation, ed. Yves Gambier and Ubaldo Stecconi (Amsterdam, 2019), 199.

25. 25. See Chapter 4.

26. 26. On this late development, see David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010), 214–20; Francesca Bregoli, Introduction to Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Other in Early Modern Europe, ed. Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman (Philadelphia, 2019), 6–7.

27. 27. On the relatively organized nature of medieval Hebrew translation, see Ram Ben Shalom, Yehudey Provans: Reneysans be-tsel ha-knesiya (Ra‘anana, 2017), 445–82.

28. 28. On German translations of Yiddish works, see Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, 2012); Jerold C. Frakes, The Cultural Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2007). On translations from Hebrew, see Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2012); Zur Shalev, “Benjamin of Tudela, Spanish Explorer,” Mediterranean Historical Review 25, no.1 (2010): 17–33; Stephen Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996).

29. 29. For some notable studies of Hebrew translations see, e.g., Zohar Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (1992): 41–61; Tal Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mad‘aim ḥinuḥ Yehudi le-mad‘aim ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit ba-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem, 2013); Gideon Toury, “Reshit ha-tirgum ha-moderny le-‘ivrit: od mabat eḥad,” Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 11 (1997); Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction (Syracuse, NY, 2016); Zvi Malachi, The Loving Knight: Amadis de Gaula and Its Hebrew Adaptation (Lod, 1982); David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, 1981); Itsḥak Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo: His Life, Works and Times (Leiden, 1974); Jiřina Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David,’ ” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972): 3–15. On Yiddish translations, see Rebekka Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network: Dialogues between Protestant Missionaries and Yiddish Writers in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 4 (2022): 731–63; Jerold C. Frakes, The Emergence of Yiddish Literature: Cultural Translation in Ashkenaz (Bloomington, IN: 2017); Ruth von Bernuth, “Das jischev fun Nar-husen: Jiddische Narrenliteratur und jüdische Narrenkultur,” Aschkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 137–39; Claudia Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. A Yiddish Romance: A Critical Edition with Commentary (Leiden, 2015); Astrid Lembke, “Ritter außer Gefecht. Konzepte passiver Bewährung im Wigalois und im Widuwilt,” Ashkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 63–82; Marion Aptroot, “I Know This Book of Mine Will Cause Offence’: A Yiddish Adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Amsterdam 1710),” Zutot 3 (2003): 152–59; Erika Timm, “Die jiddische Literatur und die italienische Renaissance,” in Alte Welten neue Welten. Akten des IX. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für germanische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Michael S. Batts (Tübingen, 1996), 60–75; Paucker, TYV, 151–67; El‘azar Shulman, Sfat Yehudit-Ashkenazit u-sifruta (Riga, 1913), esp. 123–40, 164–71, 208–11.

30. 30. Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 30.

31. 31. Toury, DTS, 26. Notwithstanding these cautionary remarks, elsewhere Toury does venture to suggest an ahistorical definition of Jewish translation, based on three central criteria: creator, language, and theme. See Toury, “Translation and Reflection,” x–xi.

32. 32. On the need to arrive at a culturally specific definition of translation, see Ronit Ricci, “On the Untranslatability of ‘Translation’: Considerations from Java, Indonesia,” Translation Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 287–301.

33. 33. Toury, DTS, 31.

34. 34. Toury, DTS, 93–113.

35. 35. See, e.g., Ayn vunderlikhe sheyne historye mit nomen di zibn vayzn maynsters fun Rom … hot mikh der tsu getribn, … oys das holandshn tsu translitirn (Amsterdam, 1776), cover page.

36. 36. See, e.g., Privilegos del poderozo rey Karlo (Constantinople [Istanbul], 1740), title page; David ben Moshe Atias, La Guerta de Oro (Livorno, 1778), 8v. On these translations, see Tamir Karkason’s work in progress, and Matthias B. Lehman, “A Livornese ‘Port Jew’ and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 51–76. See also Karkason, JEWTACT #228–29, 432, 464, 466–67.

37. 37. See, e.g., Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira (Wrocław, 1798), pp. 4–5 of preface.

38. 38. Meir ben Yehudah Leib Neumark, “Tekhunat ha-havaya,” [Prague(?)], 1703; MS Bodl. Opp. 184. Title page.

39. 39. In characterizing translational methods, I use such terms as “faithful,” “liberal,” “domesticated,” “foreignized,” or “Judaized” for reasons of convenience; these should not be taken as an assessment of translational quality or value. The recent critique of the use of such terms by scholars of translation is well taken; more accurate terms, however, are still a desideratum. See Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (New York, 2017); Lawrence Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (Lincoln, NE, 2019).

40. 40. See Chapter 1.

41. 41. Her Ditriekh (Krakow, 1597), 22v. It should be noted that the term “Yiddish” is a modern term, which did not appear before the eighteenth century. Early modern Jews, in contrast, did not have a designated word for their language and most often simply used Taytsh, which could mean either German or what we would today term Yiddish. See Marion Aptroot, “Writing ‘Jewish’ not ‘German’: Functional Writing Styles and the Symbolic Function of Yiddish in Early Modern Ashkenaz,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55, no. 1 (2010): 115–16.

42. 42. For a comparative reading of the translation and its source, see Joseph Perles, “Bibliografische Mittheilungen aus München,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 25, no. 9 (1876): 351–61.

43. 43. Shild burger (Amsterdam, c. 1727). For discussion, see Ruth Von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York, 2016), 78. For an example from another genre of Old Yiddish literature, see Benyamin ben Zalman Croneburg’s Kurioser antikvarius (Neuwied am Rhein, 1752). Croneburg presents the book as the first “word-for-word translation into Jewish” (vort tsu vort oyf [Yehudis] tsum erstn mol iber zetst) of its unnamed source. In fact, the book is a near-transliteration into Hebrew characters of the German Protestant theologian Paul Ludolph Berckenmeyer’s Neu-vermehrter curieuser Antiquarius (Hamburg, 1708).

44. 44. Bernuth, Wise Men, 78.

45. 45. Bernuth, Wise Men, 79.

46. 46. David Damrosch, “Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the Formation of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2007): 195. For a fascinating counterexample, in which a culture adopts a foreign script as a means of bringing the translation closer to its source, see Ronit Ricci, “Citing as a Site: Translation and Circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 331–53.

47. 47. Bernuth, Wise Men, 84. See also Ester Lapon-Kandelshein and Shifra Baruchson-Arbib, “Hebrew Scientific Publications from the 15th to the 18th Centuries: Social and Cultural Aspects,” La Bibliofilía 104, no. 2 (2002): 171–72; Ran Ha-Cohen, “Germanit be-’otiyot ivriyot: kama he‘arot al ma‘arekhet ketivah hibridit,” in Ha-sifriyah shel tnu‘at ha-haskalah: yetsiratah shel republikat ha-sfarim ba-ḥevrah ha-yehudit ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit, ed. Shmu‘el Feiner, Zohar Shavit, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, and Tal Kogman (Tel Aviv, 2014), 459–74.

48. 48. While this definition also applies to missionary translations, I do not devote sustained discussion to such translations, which adhered to different norms, were produced by different agents, and were inspired by different motivations than translations produced for and by Jews. Still, missionary translations are included in the electronic database on which some of the findings in this study are based. A sustained discussion of such translations, particularly in the eighteenth century, is the focus of a DFG research project headed by Rebekka Voß of Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

49. 49. One essay that has already begun to do so is Magdaléna Jánošíková, “United in Scholarship, Divided in Practice: (Re-)Translating Smallpox and Measles across Seventeenth-Century Jewish Communities,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 133, no. 2 (2022): 289–309.

CHAPTER 1

1. 1. Isaac De Pinto, “Réflexions critiques sur le premier chapitre de VII tome des Œuvres de M. de Voltaire, &c.,” in Lettres de quelques Juifs Portugais, Allemands et Polonais, à M. de Voltaire, vol. 1 (1762; repr., Paris 1781), 12–13.

2. 2. Israel Ya‘akov Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, 2006), 21.

3. 3. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard D. Cooperman (Syracuse, NY, 2000), 26.

4. 4. For a critique of this approach, in addition to the studies discussed in Chapter 4 below, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995); Robert Bonfil, “Rabanim, Yeshuim u-ḥidot: Iyun be-olamo ha-tarbuti shel R’ Moshe Zakut,” Italia: Studi e Ricerche Sulla Storia, la Cultura e la Letteratura Degli Ebrei d`Italia, 13–15 (2001): 169–89; Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2014); Maoz Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev: dat u-mada ba-khtivah ha-rabanit ba-me’ah ha-shmoneh esreh (Jerusalem, 2021).

5. 5. See, e.g., Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman, eds., Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2019); David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010), esp. 224–25; Robert Liberles, “Overlapping Spheres: Jews and Christians in Early Modern Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55, no. 1 (2010): 39–40.

6. 6. Debra Kaplan and Magda Teter, “Out of the (Historiographic) Ghetto: European Jews and Reformation Narratives,” Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 2 (2009): 365–93.

7. 7. For some notable studies, in addition to the studies listed in note 4 above, see, e.g., Rebekka Voß, Sons of Saviors: The Red Jews in Yiddish Culture (Philadelphia, 2023); David I. Shyovitz, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia, 2017); Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art Between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden, 2014); Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, IN, 2007); Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood (New Haven, 1996). For a useful overview of the debates surrounding cultural transfer in Jewish history, see Micha J. Perry and Rebekka Voß, “Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History,” Jewish History 30 (2016): 1–13.

8. 8. See, e.g., Cornelia Aust, The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe (Bloomington, IN, 2018); Adam Teller, Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwill Estates (Stanford, 2016); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2014); Debra Kaplan, Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford, 2011); Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge, 2006); Claudia Ulbrich, Shulamit und Margarete: Macht, Geschlecht und Religion in einer ländlichen Gesellschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1999).

9. 9. See, e.g., Andrew Berns, The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Search of Truth (Cambridge, 2015); Francesca Bregoli, “Jewish Scholarship, Science, and the Republic of Letters: Joseph Attias in Eighteenth-Century Livorno,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 7 (2007): 97–181; Daniel Jütte, “Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Towards a Framework,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 378–400.

10. 10. See, e.g., Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, 2001); Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 125–32, 180–90; Rebekka Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network: Dialogues between Protestant Missionaries and Yiddish Writers in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 4 (2022): 731–63; Rebekka Voß, “Love Your Fellow as Yourself: Early Haskalah Reform as Pietist Renewal,” Transversal: Journal for Jewish Studies 13, no. 1 (2015): 3–11; Avraham Siluk, “Isaac Wetzlar’s Pietist Surroundings: Some Reflections on Jewish–Christian Interaction and Exchange in 18th Century Germany,” Transversal: Journal for Jewish Studies 13, no. 1 (2015):12–19.

11. 11. The JEWTACT database can be found at https://aranne5.bgu.ac.il/jtact/index.php. For more on the database, see the Appendix.

12. 12. For a useful overview of the history of Hebrew translation (though not in the early modern period), see Gideon Toury, “Hebrew Tradition,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Mona Baker (New York/London, 2009/2011), 427–34. On Hebrew translation in the Middle Ages, see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893); Alexander Fidora, Gad Freudenthal, Resianne Fontaine, Harvey J. Hames, and Yossef Schwartz, eds., Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies, 2 vols. (Boston, 2013).

13. 13. On translation and Jewish cultural survival, see Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, 2009).

14. 14. On translation as a form of dialogue between Jewish communities today, see Omri Asscher, Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews (Stanford, 2020).

15. 15. For a recent and useful survey of the Hebrew translation movement in the Middle Ages and references to further literature, in addition to the works cited in note 12 above, see Gad Freudenthal, “Why Translate? Views From Within Judaism: Egodocuments by Translators from Arabic and Latin into Hebrew (Twelfth–Fourteenth Centuries),” in Why Translate Science? Documents from Antiquity to the 16^th Century in the Historical West, ed. Dimitri Gutas (Leiden, 2022), 544–56. See also Resianne Fontaine, “Translations: Medieval Period,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures (EJBC), forthcoming.

16. 16. For a discussion of these changes, see Alexander Fidora, Resianne Fontaine, Gad Freudenthal, Harvey J. Hames, and Yossef Schwartz, “Latin-Into-Hebrew: Introducing a Neglected Chapter in European Cultural History,” in Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies, vol. 1: Studies, eds. Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal (Boston/Leiden, 2013), 1:9–18.

17. 17. Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 5.

18. 18. On mobility as a central theme in late medieval and early modern Jewish history, see Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 23–56.

19. 19. On the making of the Sephardic diaspora, see Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York, 2013).

20. 20. On these distinctions, see the chapter on “Criteria for the Periodization of Yiddish” in Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (New Haven, 2008), 2:719–33; Erika Timm, “Das jiddischsprachige literarische Erbe der Italo-Aschkenasen,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg, 2000), 161–75. On the shifting borders of Ashkenaz more generally, see Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shuḥhan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26, no. 2 (2002): 251–76; Adam Shear, “Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe,” in The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture, ed. Judith R. Baskin and Kenneth Seeskin (Cambridge, 2010), 142–49.

21. 21. Davis, “Reception of the Shulḥan ‘Arukh,” 276.

22. 22. On the often close connections between the Italian and Ashkenazic Jewish communities in Italy, see Moshe Avigdor Shulvass, Ḥayey ha-yehudim be-Italyah bi-tekufat ha-renesans (New York, 1955), 55–61.

23. 23. On these tensions, see Shulvass, Ḥayey ha-yehudim be-Italyah. See also David Sclar, “Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Alliance, Disunity, and Independence in the Orbit of Moses Hayim Luzzatto,” Jewish Quarterly Review (forthcoming).

24. 24. Cecil Roth, for instance, argued that while it is true that each community had its own place of worship, “the differences between them were of no great importance; even the pronunciation of Hebrew, which elsewhere forms one of the greatest bars between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, was identical, all following the Italian variant.” See Cecil Roth, Venice (Philadelphia, 1930), 137–38. For a different view, see Shulvass, Ḥayey ha-yehudim be-Italyah, 58–61; David Malkiel, “The Ghetto Republic,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore, 2001), 117–42.

25. 25. Sclar, “Revisiting.”

26. 26. Kenneth R. Stow, The Jews in Rome: The Roman Jew, vol. 1: 1536–1551 (Leiden, 1995), xliv. See also Kenneth R. Stow, “Ethnic Amalgamation, Like It or Not: Inheritance in Early Modern Jewish Rome,” Jewish History 16 (2002): 107–21; Kenneth R. Stow, “Ethnic Rivalry or Melting Pot: The ‘Edot’ in the Roman Ghetto,” Judaism 41, no. 3 (1992): 286–96.

27. 27. On the importance of linguistic communities in early modern Europe, see Burke, Languages and Communities. On the changes that occurred in Jewish society in Italy, see Robert Bonfil, “Change in the Cultural Patterns of a Jewish Society in Crisis: Italian Jewry at the Close of the Sixteenth Century,” Jewish History 3, no. 2 (1988): 11–30.

28. 28. On the continued influence of Iberian culture on Sephardic Jews in the Italian peninsula, see Cecil Roth, “The Marrano Press at Ferrara, 1552–1555,” The Modern Language Review 38, no. 4 (1943): 307–17.

29. 29. Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford, 2014), 32.

30. 30. Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment, 31–34; Shulvass, Ḥayey ha-yehudim be-Italyah, 38–43; Malkiel, “The Ghetto Republic,” 122.

31. 31. On these translations, see Tamir Karkason, JEWTACT #432, 467; Ahuvia Goren, JEWTACT #475, 476, 77; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #4; Roni Cohen, JEWTACT #536. On Ibn Basa, see Ahuvia Goren’s study on Jewish-Italian Preaching Manuals, currently under preparation. On Ashkenazi, see Kedem Golden and Yehosheva Samet Shinberg, “Mi-shirey Ossian: Tirgum ivri me’et Pinḥas Ashkenazi min ha-mizmor ha-rishon shel ‘Fingal,’ ” Deḥak 13 (2021): 105–130. It should be noted that it is difficult to determine the precise lineage of Italian authors, and while it stands to reason that names such as Tedeschi denote Ashkenazi lineage, this is not ironclad.

32. 32. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #64, 162, 165, 225, 298, 497, 498, 499, 500; Karkason, JEWTACT #384; Ya‘akov Z. Mayer, JEWTACT #422.

33. 33. On the cultures of literacy among western Sephardim, see Cecil Roth, “The Role of Spanish in the Marrano Diaspora,” in Hispanic Studies in Honour of I. González Llubera, ed. Frank Pierce (Oxford, 1959), 299–308; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 178–80. On the rise of Hebrew literacy among western Sephardim in Amsterdam, see Irene Zwiep, “An Echo of Lofty Mountains: David Franco Mendes, a European Intellectual,” Studia Rosenthaliana 35, no. 2 (2001): 285–96; Moisés Orfali, “On the Role of Hebrew Grammars in the Western European Diaspora and the New World,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden, 2019), 431–51. On the phenomenon of Hebrew translations by Amsterdam Sephardim (primarily via the French and Portuguese), see Shlomo Berger, “Amadores das Musas,” Scripta Classica Israelica 15 (1996): 274–88.

34. 34. Mauro Zonta, “Medieval Hebrew Translations of Philosophical and Scientific Texts: A Chronological Table,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freudenthal (Cambridge, 2011), 17–73. Zonta does not provide any details about his criteria for determining a work’s origin, and his list seems to include a few inaccuracies (see, e.g., Tamar Nadav, JEWTACT #305, 606). Still, to date, the list provides the most comprehensive bibliography of medieval Hebrew translations.

35. 35. See, e.g., Mayer, JEWTACT #63, 71, 344–45; Magdaléna Jánošíková, JEWTACT #337, 339, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394; Goren, JEWTACT #28, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #62, 161; Nadav, JEWTACT #549, 557.

36. 36. On Yiddish literature in Italy in general, see the essays and bibliographies in Chava Turniansky and Erika Timm, eds., with Claudia Rosenzweig, Yiddish in Italia: Yiddish Manuscripts and Printed Books from the 15th to the 17th Century (Milan, 2003). On Bovo d’Antona and Paris un’ Viene, see Claudia Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. A Yiddish Romance: A Critical Edition with Commentary. (Leiden, 2015); Erika Timm, Paris un Wiene: Ein jiddischer Stanzenroman des 16. Jahrhunderts von (oder aus dem Umkreis von) Elia Levita (Tübingen, 2015).

37. 37. See Chone Shmeruk, “Yiddish Printing in Italy,” in Yiddish in Italia: Yiddish Manuscripts and Printed Books from the 15th to the 17th Century, ed. Chava Turniansky, Erika Timm, and Claudia Rosenzweig (Milan, 2003), 179–80; Lucia Raspe, “Minhag and Migration: Yiddish Custom Books from Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews, ed. Javier Castaño, Talya Fishman, and Ephraim Kanarfogel (London, 2018), 242–43; Lucia Raspe, “Portable Homeland: The German-Jewish Diaspora in Italy and Its Impact on Ashkenazic Book Culture, 1400–1600,” in Early Modern Ethnic and Religious Communities in Exile, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Cambridge, 2017), 26–43.

38. 38. Since Zonta’s list does not distinguish between macrotexts and translations, Figure 1 reflects the number of translated sources, rather than the number of macrotexts. It should also be noted that Zonta’s list does not include translations of belletristic texts and includes only Hebrew translations in the fields of science and philosophy, whereas the JEWTACT database aims to cover translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Italian in all genres. And indeed, a few Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Italian translations are included in the data reflected in the chart. Still, the discrepancy is not significant, as the overwhelming majority of translations which appeared in Italy throughout the early modern period continued to be translations into Hebrew. Furthermore, in terms of genre, as discussed below, Italian translation was largely dominated by translations of works of science (including medicine and history) and philosophy (including theology) well into the seventeenth century.

39. 39. The high numbers of translations in specific periods often results from the prolific activity of individual translators (e.g., Natan he-Me’ati in the thirteenth century, Yehudah Romano in the fourteenth century, and Yosef ha-Kohen, Azariah de Rossi, and Avraham Yagel in the sixteenth century).

40. 40. Samuel David Luzzatto, Kinor na‘im (Vienna, 1825), 5–13, 26, 84–89. Includes translations of Giovanni Della Casa, Giambattista Marino, Silvio Stampiglia, Pietro Metastasio, and others, accompanied by reproductions of the Italian or Latin sources. For further information, see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #356, 358, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364.

41. 41. See “Ha-yom atem yots’im be-hodesh ha-aviv” in Ephraim Luzzatto, Eleh bney ha-ne‘urim (London, 1766). Cf. Pietro Metastasio, “La Primavera” (Rome, 1719). For a discussion, see David Mirsky, The Life and Work of Ephraim Luzzatto (New York, 1987), vii, 93, 98. And see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #320.

42. 42. On Romanelli’s translations, see Ḥayim Schirmann, “Kovets shirey Shmuel Romanelli bi-khtav yad,” Tarbiz 35 (1966): 373–95. See also Karkason, JEWTACT #332, 343, 347, 365, 366, 371, 385.

43. 43. My discussion of the functions and positions of translated literature draws on the theoretical insights detailed in Itamar Even-Zohar’s seminal article, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, ed. James S. Holmes, J. Lambert, and R. van den Broeck (Leuven, 1978), rev. ed. in Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990): 45–51. While I am mindful of the critique voiced by scholars of translation concerning the tendency of polysystem theory to overlook the unequal power relations at play in translation as well the theory’s penchant for binary classification, I do find it a helpful framework for understanding the differences between Italian and Ashkenazi approaches to translation. For critiques of polysystem theory and descriptive translation studies more generally, see, e.g., Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), 59–60; Theo Hermans, Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained (1999; repr., New York, 2014), 14–15, 117–19, 151–61.

44. 44. On Jewish translation in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Zoran, “Past and Present in Hebrew Literary Translation,” 333–56; Toury, “Translation and Reflection,” xxiii-xxviii; Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction (Syracuse, NY, 2016).

45. 45. For reasons of convenience, I do not distinguish in this analysis between Yiddish and German-in-Hebrew characters (Jüdisch-Deutsch), Ladino and Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew or Hebrew-Aramaic, Judeo-Italian, or Judeo-Tuscan, and so on. For more on this, see the appendix.

46. 46. It should be noted that the greater proportion of Hebrew translations corresponds with the greater number of Hebrew books printed throughout the early modern period. As Shlomo Berger notes, this disproportion should not be taken as an indication that Hebrew works enjoyed wider circulation and reception; it stands to reason that the opposite was the case. See Shlomo Berger, “Yiddish on the Borderline of Modernity: Language and Literature in Early Modern Ashkenazi Culture,” in “Early Modern Culture and Haskalah,” ed. David Ruderman and Shmuel Feiner, special issue, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 114–15.

47. 47. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #62, 306; Goren, JEWTACT #75, 76, 221, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244. See also Goren’s study on translation in preaching manuals, currently in preparation.

48. 48. On the problematic representation of premodern Hebrew as a dead language, see Lewis Glinert, ed., Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile (New York/Oxford, 1993).

49. 49. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008): 5–18.

50. 50. See, e.g., Goren, JEWTACT #27, 29, 35, 44, 45, 82, 135, 157, 158, 159, 160, 240, 241, 243, 396, 399, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 476, 477, 486, 487, 601, 602; Karkason, JEWTACT #343, 347, 365, 366, 371, 385; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #41, 320, 356, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 599; Mayer, JEWTACT #285, 375; Gal Sofer, JEWTACT #619, 631, 635, 636, 637, 638.

51. 51. Peter Burke, “Translations into Latin in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007), 65.

52. 52. Burke, “Translations into Latin,” 71.

53. 53. David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham Ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, 1981), 134–36.

54. 54. Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 164.

55. 55. For a publication history, see Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 164–66.

56. 56. Moshe Ben Avraham, Tla’ot Moshe (Halle, 1711). On the translation, see Chone Shmeruk and Israel Bartal, “Tla’ot moshe—sefer ha-giografiya ha-rishon be-Yiddish,” Kathedra 40 (1986): 121–37; Hilde Pach, “Moushe’s Choices: Was the Compositor of the Oldest Yiddish Newspaper a Creator or an Epigone?” Studia Rosenthaliana 40 (2007–2008): 203–4.

57. 57. Joanna Weinberg, “Azariah de’ Rossi and the Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. David Ruderman (New York/London, 1992), 269n2.

58. 58. On the history of Hebrew printing in the early modern period, see Meir Benayahu, “Ha‘atakat merkaz ha-defus mi-Venetsia le-Amsterdam ve-ha-hitḥarut beneyhen le-ven ha-defus be-Kushta,” in Mehkarim al toldot yahadut Holand, ed. Joseph Michman (Jerusalem, 1974); Marvin J. Heller, Introduction to The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2011); Adam Shear and Joseph R. Hacker, “Book History and the Hebrew Book in Italy,” in The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy, ed. Joseph R. Hacker and Adam Shear (Philadelphia, 2011).

59. 59. Ya‘akov Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim (Venice, 1683), [2].

60. 60. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 235.

61. 61. For more on this translation, see Iris Idelson-Shein, “Of Wombs and Words: Migrating Misogynies in Early Modern Hebrew Medical Literature in Latin and Hebrew,” AJS Review 46, no. 2 (2022): 243–69.

62. 62. Compare, e.g., Avraham Wallich, Sefer dimyon ha-refu’ot (Frankfurt am Main, 1700), 50–54, 65–67 with Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim, 11v, [2] of introduction. Wallich’s indebtedness to Zahalon was already noted in passing by Harry Friedenwald, “The Use of Hebrew Language in Medical Literature,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2 (1934): 99. More recently, Magdaléna Jánošíková conducted an extensive comparative reading of the two works. See Magdaléna Jánošíková, “United in Scholarship, Divided in Practice: (Re-)Translating Smallpox and Measles across Seventeenth-Century Jewish Communities,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 133, no. 2 (2022): 289–309.

63. 63. Cf., e.g., David de Silva, “Pri Hadas” (c. 1735). National Library Israel, Ms. Benayahu, E 208, 378v–379r; Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim, 89r.

64. 64. Avraham ben Solomon Nansich (Nanzig), Aleh trufah (London, 1785), 2r–2v. See also Barry Levy, Planets, Potions, and Parchments: Scientifica Hebraica from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Eighteenth Century (Montreal/Kingston, 1990), 78–79: §108–§109. On Zahalon’s appearance in Sefer ha-ḥeshek and Zevaḥ Pesaḥ, see Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Master of an Evil Name: Hillel Ba‘al Shem and His ‘Sefer ha-ḥeshek,’ ” AJS Review 28, no. 2 (2004): 223–24.

65. 65. Cf. Itsḥak Lampronti, Paḥad Itsḥak, 2 vols. (Venice, 1750), 2:100r; Daniel Sennert, Practicae Medicinae, 6:359 (1628; repr. Wittenberg, 1635). And see Zahalon’s much-abridged translation of the same paragraph: Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim, 28r.

66. 66. See Idelson-Shein, “Of Wombs and Words,” 243–69. While originally born in Metz, Tuviah received his medical training in Padua.

67. 67. See Goren’s upcoming work.

68. 68. Zohar Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (1992): 56–58; Iris Idelson-Shein, “No Place Like Home: The Uses of Travel in Early Maskilic Translations,” in Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, ed. Joshua Levinson and Orit Bashkin (Philadelphia, 2021), 129–46.

69. 69. See Chapter 4 below for a discussion of this phenomenon.

70. 70. Elisabeth Hollender, “Die Schriftfunde,” in Von den Ausgrabungen zum Museum: Kölner Archäologie zwischen Rathaus und Praetorium. Ergebnisse und Materialien 2006–2012, ed. Sven Schütte and Marianne Gechter (2nd ed., Cologne, 2012), 144–52; Erika Timm, “Ein neu entdeckter literarischer Text in hebräischen Lettern aus der Zeit vor 1349,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 142 (2013): 317–443. For a history of Old Yiddish language and literature, see Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, 2 vols. (New Haven, 2008); Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish: prakim le-toldoteha (Tel Aviv, 1978); Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, trans. and ed. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford, 2005); Jerold C. Frakes, The Emergence of Yiddish Literature: Cultural Translation in Ashkenaz (Bloomington, IN: 2017). On the Jewish community of Cologne more generally, see Ephraim Shoham-Steiner and Elisabeth Hollender, “Beyond the Rabbinic Paradigm: Lay Leadership in the Early Medieval Jewish Community in Cologne,” Jewish Quarterly Review 111, no. 2 (2021): 236–64.

71. 71. On the Cambridge manuscript in general, see Leo Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature (c. 1382), 2 vols. (Leiden 1957); Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 26–32; Baumgarten, Introduction, 132–37.

72. 72. Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents, 1:xxvi–xxix.

73. 73. On the problem inherent in the notion of a “Jewish theme,” see Max Weinreich, “Old Yiddish Poetry in Linguistic-Literary Research,” Word 16, no. 1 (1960): 101.

74. 74. James W. Marchand, Review of “L. Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature,” Word 15, no. 2 (1959): 386.

75. 75. Jerold Frakes, The Politics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (New York, 1989); Gabriele L. Strauch, Dukus Horant: Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten (Amsterdam, 1990), 9–23.

76. 76. See facsimile reproduction and transcript in Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents, 1:61, 65.

77. 77. Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents, 1:61.

78. 78. Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 29.

79. 79. Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 29.

80. 80. On the centrality of translation in the development of “young” literary polysystems, see Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature,” 47–48.

81. 81. See Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 13–18; Shlomo Berger, “Functioning within a Diasporic Third Space: The Case of Early Modern Yiddish,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008), 68–86.

82. 82. Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona, 503–31.

83. 83. Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona, 71–72.

84. 84. On the Yiddish translations of the German Wigalois, see Astrid Lembke, “Ritter außer Gefecht: Konzepte passiver Bewährung im Wigalois und im Widuwilt,” Aschkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 63–82; Achim Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter: Studien zum jüdisch-deutschen ‘Widuwilt’ (‘Artushof’) und zum Wigalois der Wirnt von Gravenberc (Tübingen, 2000); Leo Landau, “Arthurian Legends or the Hebrew-German Rhymed Version of The Legend of King Arthur,” Teutonia: Arbeiten zur germanischen Philologie 21 (Leipzig, 1912); Leo Landau, ed., “A nit bekanten nusekh fun der Artus-legende,” in Landoy-bukh (Vilna, 1926), 129–40; Jerold Frakes, Early Yiddish Epic (Syracuse, NY, 2014), 181–237; Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdische-Deutsche Literatur nach einem handschriftlichen Katalog der Oppenheim’schen Bibliothek (in Oxford), mit Zusätzen und Berichtigungen,ˮ Serapeum 10, no. 3 (1849): 43; Shabbethai Bass, Siftey yeshenim (Amsterdam, 1680), 67 §39. See also Annegret Oehme, The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations (Leiden, 2022).

85. 85. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 308, 309. For a discussion, see Arnold Paucker, “Das Volksbuch von den Sieben weisen Meistern in der jiddischen Literatur,ˮ Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 57 (1961): 177–94; Jennifer Juillard-Maniece, “From German to Yiddish: Adaptation Strategies in the Kuhbukh and the Sieben weisen mainster bichel” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2013): 156–218.

86. 86. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #7, 8, 9, 10, 329. For discussion, see Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdisch-Deutsche Handschriften,” Serapeum 25, no. 3 (1864): 39–48; Paucker, TYV, 228–49; Ruth von Bernuth, “Das jischev fun Nar-husen: Jiddische Narrenliteratur und jüdische Narrenkultur,ˮ Aschkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 137–39; Hermann-Joseph Müller, “Eulenspiegel im Land der starken Weiber, der Hundsköpfe und anderswo: Fünf unbekannte Eulenspiegel Geschichten in einem jiddischen Druck von 1735,ˮ in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, ed. Walter Röll and Simon Neuberg (Tübingen, 1999), 200–26; Hermann-Josef Müller, “Ein wenig beachteter ‘Eulenspiegel’ in hebräischen Lettern: Eulenspiegel als Kristallisationsgestalt in einem Nowidworer Druck von 1806,ˮ in Röllwagenbüchlein: Festschrift für Walter Röll zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen Jaehrling, Uwe Meves, and Erika Timm (Tübingen, 2002), 411–32; Iris Idelson-Shein, “Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel,ˮ Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 1 (2018): 28–59.

87. 87. Erika Timm, “Zur jiddischen Fabelliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies—Division C: Talmud and Midrash, Philosophy and Mysticism, Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Jerusalem, 1981), 159–64; Eli Katz, Book of Fables: The Yiddish Fable Collection of Reb Moshe Wallich (Detroit, 1994), 16–17.

88. 88. See Haim Schwarzbaum, The Mishle Shu’alim (Fox Fables) of Rabbi Berechiah Ha-Nakdan: A Study in Comparative Folklore and Fable Lore (Kiron, 1979). Another example is offered by the Mayse bukh (1602), as discussed in Chapter 2 below.

89. 89. See, e.g., “Min ha-metsar ikh tue an rufen Got,” c. 1600, repr. in Diana Matut, ed., Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas (Leiden, 2011), 1:135–39. See also the tales collected in the famous Old Yiddish collection MS Munich, Cod. Hebr. 100, which includes both transliterations of German works and original material in Yiddish. See also Zfatman’s discussion of Mayse Prag, which combines both foreign and domestic tales: Zfatman, DISS, 1:232–48.

90. 90. See the studies mentioned in the introduction, note 29.

91. 91. Shlomo Berger, The Bible in/and Yiddish (Amsterdam, 2007); Shlomo Noble, Ḥumesh-taytsh: an oysforshung vegn der traditsye fun taytshn Ḥumesh in di khadorim (New York, 1943).

92. 92. Marion Aptroot, “Bible Translation as Cultural Reform: The Amsterdam Yiddish Bibles (1678–1679)” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1989), esp. 112–15, 120–78; Marion Aptroot, “In Galkhes They Do Not Say So, but the Taytsh Is as It Stands Here: Notes on the Amsterdam Yiddish Bible Translations by Blitz and Witzenhausen,ˮ Studia Rosenthaliana 27, no. 1/2 (1993): 136–58. See also Erika Timm, “Blitz and Witzenhausen,” in Studies in Jewish Culture in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem 1993), 60*–66*.

93. 93. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), 57n12 (Witzenhausen appears mistakenly there as Witzenberger).

94. 94. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #139, 140, 314, 421, 482, 483. On the translations of apocryphal works, see Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852–1860), 199, §1338–39; 208, §1397; Zfatman, BIB, 42–44 §21–22; 59–60 §42, 82 §67, 106–8 §96–97, 126 §116; El‘azar Shulman, Sfat Yehudit-Ashkenazit u-sifruta (Riga, 1913), 49–54; Leo Fuks and Rena Fuks-Mansfeld, “Yiddish Language and Literature in the Dutch Republic,ˮ Studia Rosenthaliana 20, no. 1 (1986): 38; Ruth von Bernuth, “Shalom bar Abraham’s Book of Judith in Yiddish,ˮ in The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines, ed. Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti, and Henrike Länemann (Cambridge, 2010), 127–51.

95. 95. Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network,” 753.

96. 96. See Felix Rosenberg, “Ueber eine Sammlung deutscher Volk- und Gesellschaftslieder in hebräischen Lettern,” Part 1, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1888, no. 3: 270, 272–73; Diana Matut, Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas, 1:50–56, 1:284–87 (edition), 2:101–8, 2:273–74 (discussion). Cf. e.g., Anon., “Fun grunt des hertse mayn,” c. 1600, repr. in Matut, Dichtung und Musik, 1:284–87; “Von grund des hertzen mein,“ in Zwo wahrhafftige newe Zeitung (Magdeburg, 1605), n.p.

97. 97. See Roni Cohen’s study of this translation, in progress. See for now Cohen, JEWTACT #628.

98. 98. Magdaléna Jánošíková and Iris Idelson-Shein, “New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Quarterly Review 113, no. 3 (2023).

99. 99. Tamir Karkason, “The Iberian Diasporas in the 18th and 19th Century,” in Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese: A Comprehensive Handbook, ed. Ruth Fine and Susanne Zepp (Berlin, 2022), 319–51.

100. 100. See, e.g., Matthias B. Lehmann, “A Livornese ‘Port Jew’ and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 51–76.

101. 101. See Karkason, JEWTACT #143, 147, 148, 149, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 282, 283, 284, 301, 464, 466; Cohen, JEWTACT #522, 525, 526; Manrique, JEWTACT #383. See also David M. Manrique, “The Personification of the Angel of Death in a Castilian Version of the Dance of Death (Ms. Parma, Palatina 2666),” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 44 (2019): 117–57.

102. 102. Karkason, JEWTACT #228, 432; Mayer, JEWTACT #84.

103. 103. Karkason, JEWTACT #229, 467.

104. 104. Jánošíková, JEWTACT #312. See also Cohen, JEWTACT #522, 525, 526.

105. 105. Jánošíková, JEWTACT #313.

106. 106. Privilegos del poderozo rey Karlo (Kustandina, 1740). For details see Karkason, JEWTACT #229, 228.

107. 107. Karkason, JEWTACT #301.

108. 108. See, e.g., Lehmann’s description of the rise of secular genres in Ladino (Lehmann, “A Livornese ‘Port Jew,’ ” 52).

109. 109. Yosef ben Ya‘akov Maarssen, Patent fon zayner keniglikhe mayestet fon Napols un’ der baydn Sitsilien (Amsterdam, 1740). While the translation itself is no longer extant, the title page has survived and is reproduced in Mirjam Gutschow, Inventory of Yiddish Publications from the Netherlands c. 1650—c. 1950 (Leiden/Boston, 2007), 227, plate 19. See also Shalhevet Dotan-Ofir, “Ha-sifrut ha-didaktit be-Yiddish be-Amsterdam ba-shanim 1650–1750: Historiah ḥevratit u-tarbutit” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2011), 250–51. Maarssen’s translation was mediated by a Dutch translation of selected articles from the privilege. The Ladino translation is the focus of in-progress research by Tamir Karkason. For now, see Karkason, JEWTACT #228.

110. 110. On the Ladino translation, see Laura Minervini, “Una versione giudeospagnola dell’Orlando Furioso,” in Los judaizantes en Europea y la literatura castellana del Siglo de oro, ed. Fernando Díaz Esteban (Madrid, 1994), 295–98; Laura Minervini, “An Aljamiado Version of Orlando Furioso: A Judeo-Spanish Transcription of Jeronimo de Urrea’s Translation,” in Hispano-Jewish Civilization after 1492: Proceedings of Misgav Yerushalayim’s Fourth International Congress, 1992, ed. Michel Abitbol, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Yom Tov Assis (Jerusalem, 1997), 191–201.

111. 111. Karkason, JEWTACT #432.

112. 112. Alessandro Guetta, “Antonio Brucioli and the Jewish Italian Versions of the Bible,” in Jewish Books and Their Readers: Aspects of the Intellectual Life of Christians and Jews in Early Modern Europe, ed. Scott Mandelbrote and Joanna Weinberg (Leiden, 2016), 45–73.

113. 113. Guetta, “Antonio Brucioli.”

114. 114. See Asher Salah, “A Matter of Quotation: Dante and the Literary Identity of Jews in Italy,” in The Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn and Joseph Shatzmiller (Leiden, 2013), 167–98.

115. 115. Sandra Debenedetti Stow, “A Judeo-Italian Version of Selected Passages from Cecco D’Ascoli’s Acerba,” in Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: The Pre-Modern World, ed. Sophia Menashe (Leiden, 1996), 283–311.

116. 116. Goren, JEWTACT #412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 486.

117. 117. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #56, 57, 122, 129, 130, 131, 132, 142, 315, 316; Jánošíková, JEWTACT #303.

118. 118. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #13, 82; Goren, JEWTACT #397; Mayer, JEWTACT #461.

119. 119. See, e.g., Jánošíková, JEWTACT #386, 389, 390, 394, 407, 428; Mayer, JEWTACT #125, 150, 151, 152. Latin could also serve as a mediating language for the translation of works from Arabic. See Jánošíková, JEWTACT #387.

120. 120. On these translations, see Gideon Toury, “Translating English Literature via German—and Vice Versa: A Symptomatic Reversal in the History of Modern Hebrew Literature,” in Die literarische Übersetzung: Stand und Perspektiven ihrer Erforschung, ed. Harald Kittel (Berlin, 1988), 139–57; Shavit, “Literary Interference” 41–61; Iris Idelson-Shein, “Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things: Abraham Ben Elijah of Vilna Encounters the Spirit of Mr. Buffon,” AJS Review 36, no. 2 (2012): 295–322.

121. 121. See, e.g., the following translations, which acknowledge their distant Urtext but not their immediate sources or mediating texts: Idelson-Shein and Jánošíková, JEWTACT #378; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #357, 490; Goren, JEWTACT #43.

122. 122. Itzḥak Baer, “He‘arot ḥadashot al sefer Shevet Yehudah,” Tarbiz 6 (1935): 156. For other examples, see Goren, JEWTACT #43, 44; Idelson-Shein and Jánošíková, JEWTACT #378. And see my discussion of Mordekhai ben Yeḥiel ha-Kohen of Schmallenberg’s “Ets ha-sade” in Chapter 3.

123. 123. Examples are numerous. For a select few, see, e.g., Ḥayyim Ben Natan, Sefer ha-ma‘asim ([Hanau?], 1623); Sefer ha-refu’ot (Jeßnitz, 1722); Yosef ben Ya‘akov Maarssen, Ayn bashraybung fun der rebeliray tsu Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1707); Leib ben Ozer, “Bashraybung fun Shabse Tsvi,” 1711. MS NLI Heb 8°5662. F. 14v.

124. 124. Paris un’ Viena (Verona, 1594).

125. 125. Mordekhai ben Moshe Drucker, Mikveh Yisrael (Amsterdam, 1691). The translator claims to have translated the work, by the famous Jewish author Menashe Ben Israel, from “leshon goyim Ashkenazim,” which would seem to imply German. However, the book seems to have been translated from the Dutch. See Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdisch-Deutsche Literatur, nach einem handschriftlichen Katalog der Oppenheim’schen Bibliothek (in Oxford), mit Zusätzen und Berichtigungen,” Serapeum 10, no. 1 (1849): 12–13, §205; Shlomo Berger, “Ashkenazim Read Sepharadim in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,“ Studia Rosenthaliana 35, no. 2 (2001): 260–61; Henri Méchoulan and Gerard Nahon, “Introduction,ˮ in Menasseh Ben-Israel, The Hope of Israel, eds. Gerard Nahon and Henri Méchoulan (Oxford, 1987), 91.

126. 126. Eliyahu ben Moshe Gershon of Pincow, Mlekhet maḥshevet (Berlin, 1765), title page of part 1.

127. 127. Fidora et al., “Latin-into-Hebrew: Introducing a Neglected Chapter,” 9–18.

128. 128. See, e.g., Sofer, JEWTACT #619, 620, 621, 624, 625, 626, 627, 629, 630. On some of these translations see Gal Sofer, “Kitvey ha-yad ha-‘ivriim shel Mafteaḥ Shlomo u-ferek al ha-magiya shel ha-Shabtayim,” Kabbalah 32 (2014): 135–74.

129. 129. See Burke, “Translations into Latin,” 68.

130. 130. See Jánošíková and Idelson-Shein, “New Science in Old Yiddish.”

131. 131. On Curio, see Richard Loth, “Das Medizinalwesen, der ärztliche Stand und die medizinische Fakultät bis zum Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts in Erfurt,ˮ Jahrbücher der Königlichen Akademie Gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt (N.S.) 30 (1904): 445–46.

132. 132. See Jánošíková and Idelson-Shein, “New Science in Old Yiddish.” For a philological analysis of the work, see Ewa Geller, “A New Portrait of Early Seventeenth-Century Polish Jewry in an Unknown Eastern-Yiddish Remedy Book,” European Judaism 42, no. 2 (2009): 62–79. Geller argues that the book was a translation of the medieval Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (see Ewa Geller, “Yiddish ‘Regimen sanitatis Salenitanum’ from Early Modern Poland: A Humanistic Symbiosis of Latin Medicine and Jewish Thought,” in Jewish Medicine and Healthcare in Central Eastern Europe, ed. Marcin Moskalewicz [Oxford, 2019]), 13–26). However, see our discussion in Jánošíková and Idelson-Shein, “New Science in Old Yiddish.” Shabbethai Bass, in his bibliography, mentions a 1663 Yiddish version of the popular Sieben weisen Meister that, he claims, was translated from the Latin. Given, however, that all other Yiddish versions of this popular German work were based on German or Dutch editions, I find this unlikely. See Bass, Siftey yeshenim, 24 §15.

133. 133. Ma’ase gadol ve-nora (Offenbach, 1715). On the translation, see Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852–1860), 208, §1397; Zfatman, BIB, 106–7, §96. Another Yiddish translation that utilizes a Latin work is the 1717 translation of Itsḥak ben Avraham of Troki’s polemical Ḥizuk emunah, which relies on Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s bilingual edition of the book (Christoph Johann Wagenseil, Tela ignea Satanae [Schönnerstaedt, 1681]). However, the 1717 translator relied on the Hebrew text that was reprinted in Wagenseil’s book. See Sefer ḥizuk emunah (Amsterdam, 1717). For a discussion, see Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld, “Yiddish Language and Literature,” 38.

134. 134. Jánošíková and Idelson-Shein, “New Science in Old Yiddish.”

135. 135. Menaḥem Mendel Zlatkin, Reshit bikure ha-bibliografia ba-sifrut ha-ivrit: Ha-sefer Siftey yeshenim me-rabbi Shabbetai Meshorer Bass (Tel Aviv, 1958), 31–32; Johann Christoph Wolf, Bibliotheca Hebraea, (Hamburg, 1715), 1:12–13. More recently, see Patrick Benjamin Koch, “ ‘Many Books on Issue of Divine Service’: Defining Musar in Early Modernity,” Journal of Jewish Studies 71, no. 1 (2020): 7–8, 14–15.

136. 136. Shabbethai Bass, Masekhet derekh erets (Amsterdam, 1680).

137. 137. Cf. Bass, Masekhet derekh erets; Eberhard Rudolph Roth, Memorabilia Europae (1678, repr. Ulm, 1682). For a comparative reading of the two works, see Iris Idelson-Shein, “Shabbethai Meshorer Bass and the Construction (and Deconstruction) of a Jewish Library,” Jewish Culture and History 22, no. 1 (2021): 1–16.

138. 138. Reprinted in Devora Bregman, “Shirey ha-ḥalifut asher le-Ovid be-tirgum Shabbethai Ḥayim Marini,” Daḥak 3 (2013): 172. On Marini’s translation, see Bregman, “Shirey ha-ḥalifut”, 169–75; Jakob Goldenthal, Rieti und Marini oder Dante und Ovid in hebräischer Umkleidung (Vienna, 1851), 26–27; Laura Bonifacio, “L’episodio di Dafne e Apollo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio tradotte da Shabbetay Hayyim Marini,” Henoch 13 (1991): 319–35.

139. 139. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, “After Ovid: Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Receptions of the Metamorphoses,” in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto, 2007), 14–35. And see the essays collected therein.

140. 140. See the USTC database at https://www.ustc.ac.uk/ (accessed March 2022; search term: meta*; author: Ovidius Naso, Publius).

141. 141. John Tholen, Producing Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ in the Early Modern Low Countries (Leiden, 2021), 16.

142. 142. Paucker, TYV, 16. For more on this, see my discussion in Chapter 2 below.

143. 143. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #6, 20, 52, 144, 146.

144. 144. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #7, #8, 9, 10, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 308, 309, 329, 434, 435, 436.

145. 145. Frakes, The Emergence of Yiddish Literature, 180.

146. 146. Paucker, TYV, 16.

147. 147. Zohar Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Beginning of Hebrew Children’s Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988): 405.

148. 148. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 267, 268, 508, 509, 510, 511; Cohen, JEWTACT #528, 578. On maskilic translations of Gessner’s Tod des Abels, see Ḥayim Shoham, Be-tsel haskalat Berlin (Tel Aviv, 1996), 49–64. On Gessner’s popularity outside the Jewish literary sphere, see Gabrielle Bersier, “Arcadia Revitalized: The International Appeal of Gessner’s Idylls in the 18th Century,” in From the Greeks to the Greens: Images of the Simple Life, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison, WI, 1989), 34–47.

149. 149. See Shavit, “Literary Interference Between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (1992): 57–58; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 119, 120, 121, 322, 324, 409; Goren, JEWTACT #232.

150. 150. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #165, 298, 320, 364; Karkason, JEWTACT #343, 365, 366, 371; Goren, JEWTACT #35; Mayer, JEWTACT #375.

151. 151. Karkason, JEWTACT #432.

152. 152. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #319, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495. On Gellert’s popularity among the maskilim, see Gideon Toury, “Shimush muskal be-mashal ha-maskili: Christian Fürchtegott Gellert ba-sifrut ha-ivrit,” in Nekudot mifneh ba-sifrut ha-ivrit u-zikatan le-maga‘im im sifriyot aḥerot, ed. Ziva Shamir and Avner Holzman (Tel Aviv, 1993), 65–74.

153. 153. On these translations, see Moritz Steinschneider, Jüdische Schriften zur Geographie Palästina’s (X–XIX. Jahr) (Jerusalem, 1892), 26–27; Rehav Rubin, “Chug ha-’areṣ by Rabbi Solomon of Chelm: An Early Geographical Treatise and Its Sources,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 8 (2008): 131–47; Rehav Rubin, Portraying the Land: Hebrew Maps of the Land of Israel from Rashi to the Early 20th Century (Berlin, 2018), 103–36; J. H. Chajes, “Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (2021): 1–24. See also Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #64, 65, 66; Mayer, JEWTACT #422.

154. 154. See, e.g., Verhandelingh der toover-sieckten … gestelt in’t Latyn by Dan. Sennertum (Dordrecht, 1638); Daniel Sennerts Gottseelige Betrachtung, wie man christlich leben, und seeliglich sterben soll. Auß d. Lat. ins Teutsche gebracht durch Georg Richter (Nuremberg, 1645). Various works by Sennert were also translated and adapted into English by Nicholas Culpeper. On Sennert‘s reception in the Ottoman context, see Natalia Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert im frühneuzeitlichen Istanbul: Studien zur Rezeption des Paracelsismus im Werk des osmanischen Arztes Ṣāliḥ b. Naṣrullāh Ibn Sallūm al-Ḥalabī (Freiburg, 2012).

155. 155. See the USTC database at https://www.ustc.ac.uk/ (accessed September 2021).

156. 156. See Shifra Barukhson, Sefarim ve-korʼim: Tarbut ha-kriʼah shel Yehudey Italyah be-shilhey ha-Renesans (Ramat Gan, 1993), 45–67.

157. 157. Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira (Wrocław, 1798), introduction [4] (n.p). As I show in a forthcoming study, while Ben Ze’ev’s Hebrew and Aramaic translations are based on Walton’s polyglot, the German-in-Hebrew translation that appears in the book is heavily indebted to August Herman Niemeyer, ed., Sittenlehre Jesu des Sohns Sirach, trans. J. W. Linde (Leipzig, 1782).

158. 158. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #1, 254, 498, 499; Mayer, JEWTACT #164. It should be noted that the image of Buffon that reached Jewish readers in the first years of the nineteenth century was entirely different from that of the combative French naturalist whose adherence to strict naturalism had earned him a reputation as a deist. In fact, the Hebrew translation of selections from Buffon’s Histoire naturelle was mediated by a German translation of an adaptation of Buffon, titled Génie de M. de Buffon. This adaptation was created by an Italian author by the name of Giovanni Ferri, who recast Buffon as “the rival of Lucretius and Plato” and presented the works as “a testament to the advantages of our healthy philosophy over the errors of the ancients.” See [Giovanni Ferri de St. Constant], Génie de M. de Buffon (Paris, 1778), viii. On the Hebrew translation, see Idelson-Shein, “ ‘Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things’,” 295–322.

159. 159. For some examples, see Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network,” 731–63; D. Oppenheimer, “Abraham Jagel und sein Cathechismus,” Hebräische Bibliographie 37 (1864): 19–20; S. Maybaum, “Abraham Jagel’s Katechismus Lekach-tob,” Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin 10 (Berlin, 1892): 3–18.

160. 160. Jánošíková, JEWTACT #407; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #338.

161. 161. Goren, JEWTACT #75, 326; Mayer, JEWTACT #95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 115.

162. 162. On Neumark, see Moritz Steinschneider, “Mathematik bei den Juden (1551–1840),ˮ Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 49, no. 9/10 (1905): 592–95; Joshua Teplitsky, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (New Haven, 2019), 51–54. For another example from scientific literature, see the discussion of Mordekhai ben Yeḥiel Michal ha-Kohen mi-Schmallenberg, “Ets ha-sade,” in Chapter 3 below.

163. 163. The actual source language has been debated by bibliographers. See Adolf Neubauer, Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the College Libraries of Oxford (Oxford, 1886), p. 704, §2059. And see Steinschneider’s reponse in Moritz Steinschneider, “Mathematik bei den Juden (1551–1840),ˮ Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 49, nos. 9/10 (1905): 595.

164. 164. Cf., e.g., Petro Galtuchio (Pierre Gautruche), Philosophiae ac mathematica totius clara, brevis, et accurate institutione (1653, repr. Vienna, 1661), table 5 fig. 6; table 8 figs. 3, 4, 5; Meir ben Yehudah Leib Neumark, “Tekhunat ha-havaya” ([Prague?], 1703), MS Bodl. Opp. 708, 25r, 27r, 28r.

165. 165. Neumark, “Tekhunat ha-havaya,” 3r (mistakenly bound as page 28v in bound mss.). Cf. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 197.

166. 166. Neumark, “Tekhunat ha-havaya,” 5r (27r in bound mss.). Cf. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 200.

167. 167. Bonfil, “Rabanim, yeshu‘im u-ḥidot,” 169–89; Robert Bonfil, “Preaching as Mediation between Elite and Popular Cultures: The Case of Judah Del Bene,” in Preachers of the Italian Ghetto, ed. David B. Ruderman (Berkeley, 1992), 67–88; Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 196–98, 369–70.

168. 168. Gianfranco Miletto, “Jesuit Influence on Italian Jewish Culture in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” in The Tragic Couple: Encounters Between Jews and Jesuits, ed. James Bernauer and Robert Aleksander Maryks (Leiden, 2014), 103.

169. 169. Ahuvia Goren, “Ha-metodah ha-mada‘it, ha-te’oriah ha-atomistit u-farshanut ha-mikr’a be-haguto shel rabi Moshe Ḥefets (1664–1712),” Zion 88, no. 1 (2022): 90–91. See also Jeremy Brown, New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (Oxford, 2013), 89–99.

170. 170. Maoz Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev, 287–94, 338–56; Kahana, “Sefer ‘Merav’ ha-avud ve-ḥazon ha-dat ha-mada‘it: Perek lo yadu‘a be-olamo shel ha-rav Yehonatan Eybeshits,” Zion 89, no. 2 (2019): 229–77.

171. 171. Kahana, “Sefer ‘Merav,’ ” 234. See also Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev, esp. 264–65, 287–94, 299–300, 338–44, 349–51.

172. 172. Wolff BR”Y of Dessau, “El ha-ḥokhmah,ˮ Ha-me’asef (April 1810), 3–8. Cf. Aloys Blumauer, “An die Weisheit,” in Freymaurergedichte von Blumauer (Vienna, 1782), 2. See also Moshe Pelli, Sha‘ar la-haskalah: Mafteaḥ mu‘ar le-Ha-me’asef (Jerusalem, 2000), 170. Following the translator, Pelli identifies the name of the source author but not the source text.

173. 173. Cf. Aloys Blumauer, “An die Weisheit,” 16; Wolff BR”Y of Dessau, “El ha-ḥokhmah,” 6.

174. 174. On the translations produced by these physicians, see Goren, JEWTACT #75, 76, 237, 238, 341, 342; Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #11, 12; Jánošíková, JEWTACT #295, 299, 386, 387, 478, 479.

175. 175. On the complex relationship between conversion and translation, see especially Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, 1993); Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago, 2011); Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 115–52. See also the famous discussion in Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200.

176. 176. See Carlebach, Divided Souls, 163–69; Magda Teter and Edward Fram, “Apostasy, Fraud, and the Beginnings of Hebrew Printing in Cracow,” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2006): 31–66. See also Plewa, JEWTACT #518, 519, 567, 571, 614; Goren and Plewa, JEWTACT #68.

177. 177. See Yitzhak Tzvy Langerman, “Peurbach in the Hebrew Tradition,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 (1998): 137–50; Mayer, JEWTACT #249, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406; Plewa, JEWTACT #533, 559, 562, 566, 597, 598, 600, 603, 607.

178. 178. On Amsterdam’s centrality to the seventeenth-century European book trade, see Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2019). On Jewish book printing in Amsterdam, see Avriel Bar Levav, “The Religious Order of Jewish Books: Structuring Hebrew Knowledge in Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 44 (2012): 1–8; Benayahu, “Ha’atakat merkaz ha-defus mi-Venetsia le-Amsterdam”; Ahuvia Goren, “Benyamin Dias Brandon’s Orot Hamizvot (1753): Halacha and Polemics in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 46, no. 1–2 (2020): 187–208.

179. 179. On these translations, see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #55, 126, 128, 141, 142, 379, 418, 419, 420, 443, 444. On Bass, see above.

180. 180. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #105, 106, 107, 521, 523.

181. 181. This also holds true for Old Yiddish literature more generally, which was produced primarily by anonymous authors and translators. See Zfatman, DISS, 56–79.

182. 182. Zfatman, DISS, 78.

183. 183. Marcy L. North, “Early Modern Anonymity,” in Oxford Handbooks Online, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford University Press, 2015).

184. 184. See Jordan R. Katz, “Jewish Midwives, Medicine and the Boundaries of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, 1650–1800” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2021), 138–79.

185. 185. As reported by Barukh Schick in his Sefer Uklidos (The Hague, 1780), (n.p. [7]). On Schick and his testimony, see David E. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York, 1995), 22–45. The Gaon’s purported support of the sciences has been the focus of lively debate over the centuries. See, e.g., Shmuel Werses, Hakitsa ami: sifrut ha-Haskalah be-‘idan ha-modernizatsiya (Jerusalem, 2001), 26–29, 63–64; Immanuel Etkes, The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image (Berkeley, 2002), 53; Idelson-Shein, “ ‘Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things,” 295–322.

186. 186. Iris Idelson-Shein, “Rabbis of the (Scientific) Revolution: Revealing the Hidden Corpus of Early Modern Translations Produced by Jewish Religious Thinkers,” American Historical Review 126, no. 1 (2021): 54–82. See also Goren’s in-progress study on translation in Italian preaching manuals. On Heida, see Chapter 3.

187. 187. I refer here specifically to translation into Jewish languages. Early modern translations between European languages by Jewish women are rare, but not inexistent. A case in point is Henriette Herz’s German translations (from English) of the works of Isaac Weld and (with Friedrich Schleiermacher) of Mungo Park.

188. 188. Hilary Brown, Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition (Oxford, 2022), 1.

189. 189. Deborah Uman, Women as Translators in Early Modern England (Newark, 2012), 36.

190. 190. See Brown, Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation, esp. 1–7, 19–49; Brenda Hosington and Hannah Fournier, “Translation and Women Translators,” in The Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, ed. Diana M. Robin, Anne Larsen, and Carole Levin (Santa Barbara, 2007), 369–75; Marie-Alice Belle, “Locating Early Modern Women’s Translations: Critical and Historiographical Issues,” Renaissance and Reformation 35, no. 4 (2012): 5–23. See also Chapter 3 below.

191. 191. See Chava Turniansky, “Yeladot u-na’arot be-sifrut Yiddish be-et ha-ḥadashah ha-mukdemet,” Masekhet 12 (2016): 65–84.

192. 192. Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (Basingstoke, 2015), 74.

193. 193. Katz, Yiddish and Power, 75. A different but corresponding connection between Yiddish translation and feminine agency appears in Lembke, “Ritter außer Gefecht,” 63–82; see also Annegret Oehme, He Should Have Listened to His Wife: The Construction of Women’s Roles in German and Yiddish Pre-Modern ‘Wigalois’ Adaptations (Berlin, 2020), 52–67.

194. 194. Idelson-Shein, “Of Wombs and Words.” 243–69.

195. 195. See, e.g., Itsḥak Reutlingen, “Das ma‘ase der kayzerin mit tsvey zoyn” (1580), 66v. MS Munich, Cod. Hebr. 100, Bavarian State Library (targets women only). See also Turniansky, “Yeladot u-na’arot be-sifrut Yiddish,” 74.

196. 196. See Chapter 2 for examples as well as Katz, Yiddish and Power, 72–83; Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, trans. and ed. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford, 2005), 156–57. On the popularity of these works, see esp. Paucker, “Das Volksbuch von den Sieben weisen Meistern,” 177–94; Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter; Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona.

197. 197. See esp. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston, 1998), 52–65.

198. 198. Katz, Yiddish and Power, 75.

199. 199. Bernuth, “Das jischev fun Nar-husen,” 134.

200. 200. Yiddish works by Jewish women do, however, include international stories that were probably orally transmitted from the surrounding cultures. For a discussion of such tales, see Zfatman, DISS, 160–83. For an example of such a story in a work by a Jewish woman, see Glikl bas Judah Leib, Zikhronot Glikl, 1691–1719, bilingual ed., Hebrew translation by Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 2006), 80–106.

201. 201. Further research, which is currently being carried out by Roni Cohen, may correct this observation.

202. 202. Katz, “Jewish Midwives,” 138–79. See also Jánošíková, JEWTACT #307, 480.

CHAPTER 2

1. 1. David Franco Mendes, Teshu’at Israel bi-yedey Yehudit (Rödelheim, 1803), [13]. In Hebrew:

[…] אֱמוֹר נָא הַמְּשׁוֹרֵר! מַה זֹֹֹאת עָשִׂיתָ

?בַּעֲבוֹדַת שְׂדֵה אִישׁ זוּלָתֶךָ

הֲלֹא יָדַעְתָּ כִּי אָדוֹן קָנִיתָ

וְלֹא יֵאָמֵר עוֹד חָפְשִׁי שְׁמֶךָ

1. 2. Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer, Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie (Tübingen, 1984). On the impact of Skopostheorie, see Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (Philadelphia, 2006), 47–60, 63–67.

2. 3. Anthony Pym, On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation Between Cultures (1997, trans. and rev. Heike Walker, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2012), 12.

3. 4. For an overview, see David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995); Jacob J. Schacter, ed., Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures: Rejection or Integration? (Northvale, NJ, 1997), esp. the chapters by Gerald G. Blidstein and David Berger, 1–56, 57–141; Maoz Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev: Dat u-mada ba-ktiva ha-rabanit ba-me’ah ha-shmoneh esreh (Jerusalem, 2021), esp. 15–31.

4. 5. For a discussion and further examples, see David Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures, 57–141; Yitzhak Tzvi Langerman, “The Astronomy of Rabbi Moses Isserles,” in Physics, Cosmology, and Astronomy, 1300–1700: Tension and Accommodation, ed. Sabetai Unguru (Dordrecht/Boston 1991), 83–98; Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev, 15–31.

5. 6. Jeremy Dauber, In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (New Haven, 2010), 7. See also Robert Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes Towards History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times,” Jewish History 11, no. 1 (1997): 29–30.

6. 7. David Gans, Tsemaḥ David (Prague, 1592), part 2, 3r.

7. 8. On the sources used by Gans in Tsemaḥ David, see Jiřina Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David,’ ” Judaica Bohemiae 7 (1972): 3–15. Interestingly, Gans’s other famous work, Neḥmad ve-na’im, does not acknowledge its sources. For a discussion of that work and its source(s?), see Andre Neher, David Gans (1541–1613) and His Times, 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem, 2005), 74.

8. 9. Menaḥem Mann Amelander, She’eris Yisroel (Fürth, 1767), [3]. For a discussion, see Bart Wallet, “Links in a Chain: Early Modern Yiddish Historiography in the Northern Netherlands, 1743–1812” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012), 176–78.

9. 10. Amelander, She’eris Yisroel, 1r.

10. 11. Leo Fuks and Rena Fuks-Mansfeld, “Yiddish Language and Literature in the Dutch Republic,” Studia Rosenthaliana 20, no. 1 (1986): 49–50; Wallet, “Links in a Chain,” 176–208.

11. 12. Amelander, She’eris Yisroel, 91r. See also Wallet, “Links in a Chain,” 177.

12. 13. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge, 1997), 222. On the importance of paratexts in Old Yiddish literature, see Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650–1800,” Book History 7 (2004): 31–61.

13. 14. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015), 61. See also the earlier objections within literary criticism to the search for authorial intent, particularly Roland Barthes’s foundational essay “The Death of the Author” (1967); repr. in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 142–48.

14. 15. See, e.g., Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68; Felski, The Limits of Critique.

15. 16. Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, introduction to Thresholds of Translation: Paratexts, Print, and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Britain (1473–1660) (London, 2018), 5. For more on the importance of paratexts for the historical study of translation, see Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, “What Texts Don’t Tell: The Uses of Paratexts in Translation Research,” in Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester, 2002), 45–60.

16. 17. Some studies have been dedicated to identifying the motivations underlying particular translations, or clusters of translations. See, e.g., David A. Wacks, “Translation in Diaspora: Sephardic Spanish-Hebrew Translations in the Sixteenth Century,” in A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. César Domínguez, Anxo Abuín González, and Ellen Sapega (Amsterdam, 2016), 2:351–63.

17. 18. Zfatman, DISS, 1:102. For further context, see Zfatman, DISS, 1:86–103.

18. 19. See, e.g., Arabishe ertselung / toyzend und ayn nakht (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1794); Yosef ben Ya‘akov Maarssen, “Ayn sheyn mayse,” in Ayn beshraybung fun di rebleray tsu Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1707); Shild burger (Amsterdam, c. 1700); Benyamin Ben Yosef Merks of Tannhausen, “Vunderparlikh unt zeltsame historyen Til Eylin Shpigls” (c. 1600), Bavarian State Library, MS Munich, Cod. Hebr. 100, 134v. For further examples see Zfatman, DISS, 1:87–89.

19. 20. Sefer ben Sira (Krakow, 1586); Mayse beyt David bi-yemey Paras (Basel, 1599), [1]; Melokhim bukh (Krakow, 1582); Shmuel bukh (Augsburg, 1544).

20. 21. Sefer ha-refu’ot (Jeßnitz, 1722), title page. The translation presents itself as a translation of an Egyptian source. I have not yet been able to identify the source text.

21. 22. Historie Hertsog oyz holendish Flandrn (Prague, 1762), 2b, 5b–6a. See also Zfatman, DISS, 1:89–93.

22. 23. The precise meaning of the term tsov’ot is contested. See Admiel Kosman, “Ma‘ase ha-kiyor ve-kano be-mar’ot ha-tsov’ot u-ḥokhmat ha-nashim,” in Mi-perot ha-ilan al parashat ha-shavu‘a, ed. Leib Moskovitz (Ramat Gan, 2005), 2:204–8.

23. 24. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot (Wandsbek, 1718), 1a. On this translation, see Ḥayim Liebermann, “Tirgum Yidi bilty yadu‘a shel sefer Elef layla va-laya,” Aley sefer 4 (1977): 156–62; Zfatman, DISS, 1:90–92.

24. 25. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 4b. See discussion in Zfatman, DISS, 1:90–91.

25. 26. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 5a.

26. 27. Zfatman, DISS, 1:89, 93.

27. 28. Paucker, TYV, 19. See also 105–6.

28. 29. Robert Bonfil, “Sifriyoteyhem shel yehudey Italia beyn yemey-ha-beynayim la-et ha-ḥadashah,” Pe‘amim 52 (1991): 8.

29. 30. See Meier Schüller, “Beiträge zur Kenntnis der alten jüdisch-deutschen Profanliteratur,” Festschrift zum 75jährigen Bestehen der Realschule mit Lyzeum der Isr. Religionsgemeinschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1928), 85.

30. 31. Toyzent und ayn firtel shtund: Tartarishe historien (Prague, 1775); Shpanishe hayden oder tsigayners (Amsterdam, 1700–1730). On the latter translation, which is based on a mediating text in Dutch, see Shlomo Berger, “The Spanish Pagan Woman and Ashkenazi Children Reading Yiddish circa 1700,” in Children and Yiddish Literature from Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, ed. Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (New York, 2016), 9. The translation of Guellete’s book, which was mediated by a 1775 German translation, has previously been misidentified as a translation of Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes. See Zfatman, BIB, 138–39 §135 (on a lost earlier edition), 142–43 §141.

31. 32. Benyamin ben Zalman Croneburg, Kurioser antikvarius (Neuwied am Rhein, 1752), [1].

32. 33. That the transcription of the digits into words was a conscious choice, and not a printing necessity, is clear from the appearance of a few solitary digits on p. 2v of the book.

33. 34. Gideon Toury, “Translation and Reflection on Translation: A Skeletal History for the Uninitiated,” in Jewish Translation History: A Bibliography of Bibliographies and Studies, ed. Robert Singerman (Amsterdam, 2002), xix.

34. 35. Gideon Toury, “Reshit ha-tirgum ha-moderny le-‘ivrit: od mabat eḥad,” Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 11 (1997): 107. For a similar view, see Zohar Shavit, “Cultural Translation and the Recruitment of Translated Texts to Induce Social Change: The Case of the Haskalah,” in Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts, ed. Jan Van Coillie and Jack McMartin (Leuven, 2020), 33.

35. 36. Toury, “Reshit ha-tirgum,” 108; Zohar Shavit, “Ha-tafkid she-mile’u ha-tekstim le-yeladim yehudim be-maga beyn ha-tarbut ha-‘ivrit ha-yehudit ve-ha-germanit bi-tkufat ha-haskalah,” Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 11 (1997–1998): 100; Tal Kogman, “Maga‘im beyn-tarbutiyim be-tekstim she sh-haskalah ‘al mad‘ey ha-teva,” in Ha-haskalah li-gvaneyhah: Iyunim ḥadashim be-toldot ha-haskalah u-ve-sifrutah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and Israel Bartal (Jerusalem, 2005), 29. These studies are inspired by Itamar Even-Zohar’s model of translation, on which see Chapter 1 above.

36. 37. Zohar Shavit, “Ha-rihut shel ḥadar ha-haskalah ha-yehudit be-Berlin: Nituaḥ ha-mikra’ah ha-modernit ha-rishonah le-yeladim yehudim,” in Ke-minhag Ashkenaz u-Polin: Sefer yovel le-Khone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 1993); Tal Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mada‘im ḥinukh Yehudi le-mada‘im ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit ba-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem, 2013), 72–74.

37. 38. Toury, “Translation and Reflection,” xvii.

38. 39. Annelien de Dijn, “The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 785–805.

39. 40. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), 2. See also Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (New York, 1999); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988; repr., Durham, 1993).

40. 41. Rita Felski, “Comparison and Translation: A Perspective from Actor-Network Theory,” Comparative Literature Studies 52, no. 3 (2016): 751.

41. 42. A polemical view of translation already existed in the Middle Ages. See Daniel J. Lasker, “Latin into Hebrew and the Medieval Jewish-Christian Debate,” in Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies, vol. 1, Studies, ed. Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal (Boston/Leiden 2013), 333–47. Polemical translations were also produced by Christian translators of Jewish works. See Aya Elyada, “Zwischen Austausch und Polemik: Christliche Übersetzungen jiddischer Literatur im Deutschland der Frühneuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 69 (2017): 47–73; Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2012), 114–15.

42. 43. Moshe ben Avraham of Amsterdam, Tla’ot Moshe (Halle, 1711).

43. 44. Chone Shmeruk and Israel Bartal, “Tla’ot moshe—sefer ha-gi’ografiya ha-rishon be-Yiddish,” Kathedra 40 (1986): 121–37.

44. 45. On the book’s messianism, see Shmeruk and Bartel, “Tla’ot Moshe,” 122, 128. Another author who used translations of non-Jewish sources to prove the existence of the ten Lost Tribes beyond the Sambatyon River was Itsḥak Lampronti. On Lampronti’s discussion see David Malkiel, Isaac’s Fear: An Early Modern Encyclopedia of Judaism (Boston, 2022), 130–51.

45. 46. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, 1981), 134–36.

46. 47. Moshe ben Leon Botarel, Eyn mishpat (Constantinople [Ferarra?], 1561). For an initial discussion of the work see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893), 962, §574. On the question of the book’s location of publication, see Yitsḥak Yudlov, “Sefer Eyn mishpat,” Aley sefer 6 (1979): 118–20.

47. 48. Botarel, Eyn mishpat [2].

48. 49. Nostradamus’s full name appears on the last page of the translation as: מיקייל דנוסטארי דאמוש. See Botarel, Eyn mishpat [51].

49. 50. A different version of the almanac appeared in print in Paris: Michel de Nostredame, Almanach nouveau pour l’an 1562 (Paris, 1561). However, Eyn mishpat contains many details that appear in the manuscript but not in the print edition. On the differences between Nostradamus’s two almanacs, see Jacques Halbronn, “Une attaque réformée oubliée contre Nostradamus (1561),” Bulletin de l’Association d’étude sur l’humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance 33 (1991): 48–49. The original 1561 manuscript has been lost, but a reproduction was printed in 1906 as Michel de Nostredame, Reproduction très fidèle d’un Manuscrit inédit de M. de Nostredame (Mariebourg, 1906).

50. 51. Cf. Nostradamus, Reproduction très fidèle, 33, 41, 42, 47; Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 22, 27, 29.

51. 52. Nostradamus, Reproduction très fidèle, 5, 42; Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 2, 27.

52. 53. Nostradamus, Reproduction très fidèle, 1–4; Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 50–51.

53. 54. Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 1.

54. 55. Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 1–[2]. In the extant copy, the second page is mistakenly bound as page 12.

55. 56. On the polemical interpretation of the Aleynu prayer in the medieval and early modern periods, see Ruth Langer, “The Censorship of Aleinu in Ashkenaz and Its Aftermath,” in The Experience of Jewish Liturgy: Studies Dedicated to Menahem Schmelzer, ed. Debra Reed Blank (Leiden, 2011), 144–66.

56. 57. Botarel, Eyn mishpat, 1. Steinschneider notes that Nostradamus in fact came from a family of Jewish converts; however, Botarel does not seem to be aware of his purported Jewish background. See Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen, 962.

57. 58. Botarel, Eyn mishpat, [2].

58. 59. Elliott Horowitz, Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ, 2006); Rebekka Voß, “Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore,” AJS Review 36, no. 1 (2012): 1–41; Voß, Sons of Saviors: The Red Jews in Yiddish Culture (Philadelphia, 2023), 98–105.

59. 60. See also Jeremiah 49:14.

60. 61. See, e.g., Isaak Benjakob, Otsar ha-sefarim (Vilnius, 1880), 439; Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen, 962, §574. See also Yitsḥak Yudlov, “Sefer Eyn mishpat,” Aley sefer 6 (1979): 118.

61. 62. See, e.g., Zfatman, DISS, 69; Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish: prakim le-toldoteha (Tel Aviv, 1978), 29

62. 63. Seyder harey olem beshraybung (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1792), title page. Cf. Johann Gottfried Gregorii, Die curieuse Orographia, oder Beschreibung derer berühmtesten Berge in Europa, Asia, Africa und America (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1715). For more on the religious uses of science, see Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev, esp. 276–86.

63. 64. Iris Idelson-Shein, “Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things: Abraham Ben Elijah of Vilna Encounters the Spirit of Mr. Buffon,” AJS Review 36, no. 2 (2012): 295–322.

64. 65. [Avraham ben Eliyahu], Gevulot arets (Berlin, 1800), title page.

65. 66. See, e.g., Seyder harey olem beshraybung, title page; Baruch Lindau, Reshit limudim (Berlin, 1788).

66. 67. Johannes Curio, De Conservanda Bona Valetudine (Frankfurt am Main, 1557), 2r; Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim (n.p., c. 1613), 4–5.

67. 68. Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, 5.

68. 69. Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (Basingstoke, 2015), 46.

69. 70. Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, title page.

70. 71. Maimonides, De‘ot, 4:1. English trans.: Maimonides, The Book of Knowledge from the Mishneh Torah, trans. from Hebrew by H. M. Russel and J. Weinberg (New York, 1983), 35. On the development of this idea in the works of early modern rabbinical thinkers, particularly in Ashkenaz, see David Sorotzkin, Ortodoksiya u-mishtar ha-moderniyut (Tel Aviv, 2011), 299–309.

71. 72. Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, 3.

72. 73. On the division of labor between Yiddish and Hebrew literature, see, e.g., Shmuel Niger, Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (Detroit, 1941); Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 12–22; Shlomo Berger, “Functioning within a Diasporic Third Space: The Case of Early Modern Yiddish,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008): 68–86.

73. 74. Louis H. Feldman, “Abraham the Greek Philosopher in Josephus,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 99 (1968): 143–56.

74. 75. For a detailed history of the myth of the Jewish origins of science and philosophy, and references to further research, see Abraham Melamed, Rokḥut u-tabaḥut: Ha-mitos al mekor ha-ḥokhmot (Jerusalem, 2010).

75. 76. Jean-Pierre Rothschild, “Motivations et méthodes des traductions en hébreu du milieu du XIIe à la fin du XVe siècle,” in Traduction et traducteurs au moyen âge, ed. Geneviève Contamine (Paris, 1989), 289–90.

76. 77. There are several examples of this practice. See, e.g., Schick, Kne ha-midah (Prague, 1784).

77. 78. Rehav Rubin, “Chug ha-’areṣ by Rabbi Solomon of Chelm: An Early Geographical Treatise and Its Sources,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 8 (2008): 131–47.

(“

1. 79. The King James Version (KJV) translates the relevant passage from Job (“ושאף צמים חילם as “the robber swalloweth up their substance.” Here, I have combined the KJV’s translation of the verse with the more ubiquitous interpretation of צמים as derived from צימאון—“thirst,” which seems more in line with the context of the passage.

2. 80. Shlomo of Chelm, “Ḥug ha-arets,” National Library Israel, Ms. Heb. 28°8310, fol. 1. For additional examples, see Melamed, Rokḥut u-tabaḥut, 321–40.

3. 81. Neumark, “Tokhen ha-kadur” (1703), MS Bodl. Opp. 184, 3r–3v.

4. 82. Neumark, “Tokhen ha-kadur,” 2v. For a strikingly similar presentation, see the presentation of biblical apocrypha in Isaac ben Yehudah Leb Friedlander’s song in Naftali Herz Wessely, Ḥokhmat Shlomo (Berlin, 1780), [13 (my pagination)].

5. 83. See David Gans, Neḥmad ve-na‘im (Jeßnitz, 1592), 9r–v; Barukh Schick, Sefer Uklidos (The Hague, 1780), 1; Abraham Van Oven, Derekh ish yashar (London, 1778), 18–19. On Lindau and Satanov, see Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mada‘im, 63.

6. 84. Wessely, Ḥokhmat Shlomo.

7. 85. See Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s introduction to his translation of Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed: Shmuel Ben Yehudah Ibn Tibbon, Preface to Sefer moreh nevukhim by Moshe ben Maimon, repr. Jerusalem, 1960.

8. 86. Wessely, Ḥokhmat Shlomo, First introduction [18]. Similar concerns are also raised in Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev’s translation of Ben Sira. Ben Ze’ev criticizes Wessely for relying on a German translation and claims to have solved the dilemma by using the London Polyglot printed in 1657. See Ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira (Wrocław, 1798), introduction [4–5] and second note (n.p.).

9. 87. Wessely, Ḥokhmat Shlomo, First introduction [19].

10. 88. “Bukh der tsukht.” C. 1598. Oxford Bodl. Ms. Opp. 607. 33r. For an initial discussion of the translation, see Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdische Litteratur und Jüdisch-Deutsch,” Serapeum 25, no. 3 (1864): 41–42, §391. My comparative reading confirms Steinschneider’s suspicion that the translation is based on Luther’s German, with minor Judaization (e.g., Luther’s “Das wort Gottes” [the word of God] becomes in Yiddish “di Torah gotes”). The Old Yiddish translations of biblical apocrypha are the focus of work in progress by Ruth Von Bernuth.

11. 89. On the translation, see Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld, “Yiddish Language and Literature,” 38.

12. 90. Yosef ben Ya‘acov Maarssen, Sefer Yehoshua ben Sirak (Amsterdam, 1712), title page. For an example in Hebrew, see Wessely’s translation of Ḥokhmat Shlomo.

13. 91. Yosef Karo, Shulḥan arukh: Oraḥ ḥayim, 307:16.

14. 92. Moses Isserles’s gloss to Karo, Shulḥan arukh, 307:16.

15. 93. Gans, Tsemaḥ David, 2:2v.

16. 94. Avraham Farissol, Igeret orḥot olam (Venice, 1587), 2r.

17. 95. Rashi on Isaiah 2:6. English translation: Israel Wolf Slotki, Isaiah: Hebrew Text and English Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (London, 1949). Slightly revised according to the Hebrew source.

18. 96. Further examples of the use of the passage in this sense abound. In addition to the examples discussed below, see, e.g., Yonatan Eibeschütz, Ya’arot dvash, parts 1 and 2 (1797, repr. Lublin, 1897), 49, 341.

19. 97. Gans, Neḥmad ve-na‘im, 9v.

20. 98. On Gans’s sources for this book, see Andre Neher, David Gans (1541–1613) u-zmano: Maḥshevet Israel ve-ha-mahapekha ha-mada‘it shel ha-me’ah ha-shesh-esre (Jerusalem, 2005), 74. Neher mentions the translation in passing, but further research is required to assess Gans’s treatment of his source. See also Mayer, JEWTACT #50.

21. 99. Quoted in Maoz Kahana, “Megaresh ha-shedim mi-Presburg: Perek ba-ḥashiva ha-mada‘it shel R. Moshe Sofer,” AJS Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 10.

22. 100. Kahana, “Megaresh ha-shedim,” 10–11. On Sefer ha-brit, see David Ruderman, A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinḥas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy (Seattle/London, 2014).

23. 101. Neumark, “Tokhen ha-kadur,” 3v.

24. 102. Ya‘akov Emden, Sefer birat migdal oz (c. 1747, repr. Zhytomyr, 1874), 38.

25. 103. Emden, Sefer birat migdal oz, 214. I thank Ahuvia Goren for referring me to Emden’s discussion. On Emden’s own engagement with foreign literature, and for an initial discussion of his possible sources, see Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev, esp. 204–7, 258–62.

26. 104. Ya‘akov Emden, Mitpaḥat sefarim (1768, repr. Lviv, 1870), 75. See also Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1700–1750, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Bloomington, IN, 2020), 5. Ironically, Emden cites in support of his arguments against reading in French a book which, he writes: “I happened to read where one must not contemplate holy things”; Emden, Mitpaḥat sefarim, 75. He seems to be referring to the German novel, Der Dänische Robinson, which describes, among other things, the prurient adventures of a Danish traveler in Paris. See Der Dänische Robinson oder die Reisen Niels Bygaard, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1750), 46ff.

27. 105. Shaul Ha-Levi, approbation to Schick, Sefer Uklidos, [1].

28. 106. Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, trans. Edward Breuer, introduced and annotated by Edward Breuer and David Sorkin (New Haven, 2018), 290. For the Hebrew, see Moses Mendelssohn, Or la-netivah (Berlin, 1783), n.p. [50].

29. 107. Moses Mendelssohn, Letter to August Hennings, June 29, 1779. Quoted in Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, NY, 2000), 78.

30. 108. Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit, MI, 1967), 43; David Kamentsky, “Haskamoteyhem shel gedoley ha-rabanim la-ḥumashim shel rabi Shlomo Dubnow,” Yeshurun 8 (2000): 732–33.

31. 109. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago, 2018), 15–85; Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 164–76; David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1996).

32. 110. David Franco Mendes, “Teshu’at Israel bi-yedey Yehudit” (Rödelheim, 1803), [13].

33. 111. David Franco Mendes, Gmul Atalya (Amsterdam, 1770), 4v.

34. 112. Mendes, Gmul Atalya, 4v–5r. Gans uses the same terms to justify his use of foreign sources. See Gans, Tsemaḥ David, 2:2v.

35. 113. On the importance of Hebrew orthography in the writings of the Berlin Haskalah, see Ran Ha-Cohen, “Germanit be-’otiyot ivriyot: kama he‘arot al ma‘arekhet ktivah hibridit,” in Ha-sifriyah shel tnu‘at ha-haskalah: yetsiratah shel republikat ha-sfarim ba-ḥevrah ha-yehudit ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit, ed. Shmu‘el Feiner, Zohar Shavit, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, and Tal Kogman (Tel Aviv, 2014), 463–66.

36. 114. Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld, “Yiddish Language and Literature,” 55. See also Nachum Shtif, “Ditrikh fun Bern: Yidishkayt un veltlikhkayt in der alter Yidishe literatur,” Yidishe filologye 1, no. 1 (1924): 1–11; Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish, 32–37; Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford, 2005), 155–57.

37. 115. Ya‘akov b. Avraham of Meseritz, “Preface,” in Ayn sheyn mayse bukh (Basel, 1602), 7.

38. 116. For a discussion, see Jakob Maitlis, “Some Extant Folktales in Yiddish Mss,” Fabula 12 (1971): 212–17. For a discussion of one of these tales, see Chapter 3 below. Zfatman mentions that Ya‘akov Ben Avraham of Meseritz was also involved in the publication of one of the wildly popular Yiddish translations of Die sieben weisen Meister. See Zfatman, DISS, 1:98–99.

39. 117. Wallet, “Links in a Chain,” 203–4.

40. 118. Michael Stanislawski, “Toward the Popular Religion of Ashkenazic Jews: Yiddish-Hebrew Texts on Sex and Circumcision,” in Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer, ed. Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner (Detroit, 2008), 93–106; Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008): 5–18. On the objections to Hebrew-to-Yiddish translation see Avriel Bar-Levav, “Intimiut tekstualit u-vrit ha-kri’ah beyn gerush Sepharad le-Amsterdam,” in Ba-derekh el ha-modernah: Shay le-Yosef Kaplan, ed. Avriel Bar-Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem, 2018), 145–68. A similar phenomenon may be found in translations into Judeo-Arabic, as recently discussed by Avi-ram Tzoreff, “Acknowledging Loss, Materializing Language: Translation and Hermeneutics of Gaps in Nineteenth Century Baghdad,” Middle Eastern Studies (2022): 4.

41. 119. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens,” in Das Problem des Übersetzens, ed. Hans Joachim Störig (Stuttgart 1963), 5.

CHAPTER 3

1. 1. Toury, DTS, 63.

2. 2. At the same time, the concept of translational norms has also drawn some criticism for its rigid structuralism, overemphasis on the target culture, and overall inattention to imbalances of power, ambiguities in translation, individual choice, historical specificity, and the general messiness of life and literature. See, e.g., the essays collected in Current Issues in Language and Society 5, no. 1–2 (1998), especially the essay by Anthony Pym: “Okay, So How Are Translation Norms Negotiated? A Question for Gideon Toury and Theo Hermans,” 107–13. For a sympathetic yet critical view, see Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (New York, 1999), 55–56. For an overview of other critiques, see Siobhan Brownlie, “Descriptive vs. Committed Approaches,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd ed. (London/New York, 2009/2011), 77–79; Mona Baker, “Norms,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd ed. (London/New York, 2009/2011), 193.

3. 3. See Gideon Toury, Normot shel tirgum ve-ha-tirgum ha-sifruti le-ivrit ba-shanim 1930–1945 (Tel Aviv, 1977). See also Toury, DTS, 163–65.

4. 4. On the variability of norms in general, see Toury, DTS, 65–67, 82–87.

5. 5. See discussion of this in the context of the Haskalah in Toury, DTS, 164–67. See also, in the Jewish-medieval context, Rina Drory, “Muda‘ut, zikaron u-shikhaḥa be-maga‘eha shel ha-tarbut ha-yehudit im ha-tarbut ha-Arvit be-yemey ha-beynayim,” in Ma‘agalim u-ksharim: Iyunim ba-sifrut ha-yehudit u-ba-sifrut ha-‘arvit shel yemey ha-beynayim (Jerusalem, 2021), 110–25.

6. 6. See, e.g., the translator’s use of the Hebrew term har for mountain, rather than the German Berg. Cf. Seyder harey olem beshraybung (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1792); Johann Gottfried Gregorii, Die curieuse Orographia, oder accurate Beschreibung derer berühmtesten Berge in Europa, Asia, Africa und America (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1715). On abridgment as a translational norm, see below. A more substantial deviation from the source is the addition of a description of the so-called Judenberg (the Jews’ mountain), which does not appear in Melissantes. The description, which would have particularly interested a Jewish readership, features a greater number of Hebraisms than other parts of the translation, and seems to be the translator’s original contribution to the text. See Seyder harey olem, 23.

7. 7. Cf. Seyder harey olem, 9r–11v; Gregorii, Die curieuse Orographia, 248–336. For a different approach, see Shabbethai Bass’s Masekhet derekh erets, in which the translator organized his German source text according to the Hebrew alphabet. Cf. Shabbethai Bass, Masekhet derekh erets (Amsterdam, 1680); Eberhard Rudolph Roth, Memorabilia Europae (1678; repr., Ulm, 1682).

8. 8. Cf. Seyder harey olem, 1v, 3r–4r; Gregorii, Die curieuse Orographia, 30, 31, 49.

9. 9. Compare, for instance, the three different Yiddish versions of the tales of Till Eulenspiegel, which appeared in 1600, 1735, and 1736. It is only the 1735 edition that neutralizes the Christian elements found in the source. Cf. e.g., [Hermann Bote?], Ein kurtzweilig lesen von Dyl Ulenspiegel, facsimile of the 1515 edition (Leipzig, 1911), 3v; Binyamin ben Yosef Merks of Tannhausen, “Vunderparlikh und zeltsame historien Til Eylin Shpigilz,” c. 1600, Bavarian State Library, MS Munich, Cod. Hebr. 100, fol. 134r.; Eylin shpigl (Prague, 1735), [1], [3]. A rare exception is the mention of a bishop in the 1735 edition, but Eulenspiegel’s pretend visits to church, which appeared in the same story in the source, are omitted. Cf. Eylin shpigl, [19]–[20]; [Bote], Ein kurtzweilig lesen, 120v–r. For a discussion of the Christian elements found in Old Yiddish translations more generally, see Paucker, TYV, esp. 125, 129, 131–32, 134, 136.

10. 10. David Gans, Tsemaḥ Dovid izt fon dem loshn ha-koydesh tsum taytsh iber zetst wordn, trans. anon. (Frankfurt am Main, 1697), 38v. I thank Rebekka Voß for referring me to this translation.

11. 11. Gans, Tsemaḥ Dovid, 38v.

12. 12. See, e.g., Gans, Tsemaḥ David, part 2, 2v, 35r, 39r, 99r, 109r. On Gans’s sources in general, see Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David.’ ” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972). See also Mayer, JEWTACT #50; Jánošíková, JEWTACT #273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280.

13. 13. A further example is found in Alexander ben Moshe Ethoyzen’s Beys Yisroel, published in Yiddish in 1719. Ethoyzen noted that he had drawn the information for his book from various sources, but that identifying these works would be of little service to the reader. He furthermore noted his plan to publish the book in Hebrew as well, and declared that he would cite his sources in the Hebrew version. See Chone Shmeruk and Israel Bartal, “Yerushalayim ba-zman hazeh le-r’ Aleksandri ben Moshe Ethoyzn,” Shalem 4 (1984): 447.

14. 14. On these introductions, see Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650–1800,” Book History 7 (2004): 31–61; Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2008): 5–18; Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston, 1998), 52–65. See also Moshe Heida’s introduction to Melekhet maḥshevet, discussed below.

15. 15. See Zfatman, DISS, 56–79.

16. 16. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot (Wandsbek, 1718); Arabishe ertselunge oys toysend und ayn nakht (Hamburg, c. 1720); Arabishe ertselung / toysend und ayn nakht (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1794).

17. 17. Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, Worinnen Seltzame Arabische Historien und wunderbare Begebenheiten … erstlich vom Hrn. Galland aus der Arabischen Sprache in die Französische, und aus selbiger … in Teutsche übersetzt (Leipzig, 1710; repr. 1730). See also the English translation: Arabian Nights Entertainments: Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories … Translated into French from the Arabian [sic] Manuscript by Mr. Galland of the Royal Academy and Now Done into English (London, 1706).

18. 18. Yosef Ben Ya‘acov Maarssen, Sheyne artlekhe geshikhtn (Amsterdam, 1710); Dirck Volkertzoon Coornhert, Vijftigh lustighe historien oft nieuwigheden Joannis Boccatij (1564; repr. Amsterdam, c. 1644). See below for a discussion of the translation and its relationship with its source. For the first identification of the source text, see Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852–1860), 1507 §5954.6.

19. 19. See Theo Hermans, “Concepts and Theories of Translation in the European Renaissance,” in Übersetzung—Translation—Traduction, vol. 26: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Haralld Kittel et al. (Berlin, 2007), 2:1425.

20. 20. Charles Batteux, “Contenant les Règles de la Traduction,” in Lettres sur la phrase françoise comparée avec la phrase latine (Paris, 1748), 64. At the same time, it should be noted that European translators who strove for what Venuti has termed “fluency” in their translations often omitted their own names from the texts. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995), 43–44.

21. 21. On these practices in Latin literature, see especially Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, 2010); Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2020).

22. 22. Reuven (Robert) Bonfil, introduction to Yosef Ha-Kohen, Sefer divrey ha-yamim le-malkey Tsarfat u-malkhey beyt Otoman ha-Togar, ed. Reuven Bonfil (Jerusalem, 2020), 1:19–23.

23. 23. See discussion in Iris Idelson-Shein, “Of Wombs and Words: Migrating Misogynies in Early Modern Hebrew Medical Literature in Latin and Hebrew,” AJS Review 46, no. 2 (2022): 243–69. See also Goren, JEWTACT #237, 238.

24. 24. Shmuel Ben Yehudah Ibn Tibbon, preface to Sefer moreh nevukhim by Moshe ben Maimon (repr., Jerusalem, 1960), 1r.

25. 25. Meir ben Yehudah Leib Neumark, “Tokhen ha-kadur” (1703), MS Bodl. Opp. 184, 3v.

26. 26. On the translation, see Gideon Toury, “Translating English Literature via German—and Vice Versa: A Symptomatic Reversal in the History of Modern Hebrew Literature,“ in Die literarische Übersetzung: Stand und Perspektiven ihrer Erforschung, ed. Harald Kittel (Berlin, 1988), 139–57; Gideon Toury, “Reshit ha-tirgum ha-moderny le-ivrit: od mabat eḥad,” Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 11 (1998): 109–10; Jeremy Dauber, “New Thoughts on ‘Night Thoughts’: Mendelssohn and Translation,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 2, no. 2 (2003): 132–47. The same poem would later be translated again by a number of maskilic translators. See Ḥayim Shirman, “Kovets shirey Shmuel Romanelli bi-khtav yad,” Tarbiz 35, no. 4 (1966): 374n; Fishel Laḥover, Toldot ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-ḥadashah (Tel Aviv, 1928), 1:95–96. See also Karkason, JEWTACT #335.

27. 27. Translation cited from Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, trans. Edward Breuer, introduced and annotated by Edward Breuer and David Sorkin (New Haven, 2018), 49. For the Hebrew, see [Moses Mendelssohn], Kohelet musar (Berlin, 1755), issue 6 (n.p.).

28. 28. Elye Bokher, Bovo D’Antona (Isny, 1541), title page.

29. 29. Claudia Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. A Yiddish Romance: A Critical Edition with Commentary (Leiden, 2015), 55. See also Paucker, TYV, 8–9. Paucker attributes the difference to the change in the character of the translators who, he argues, “were copyists and publishers, not poets” (Paucker, TYV, 9).

30. 30. Maarssen, Sheyne artlekhe geshikhte, 2v. On Maarssen and his translations, see Jacob Shatzky, “Di hakdomes tsu Yosef Maarssens khiburim,” Yivo-bleter 13 (1938): 377–89; Shalhevet Dotan-Ofir, “Ha-sifrut ha-didaktit be-Yiddish be-Amsterdam ba-shanim 1650–1750: Historiyah ḥevratit u-tarbutit” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2011), 245–51.

31. 31. Marion Aptroot, “I Know This Book of Mine Will Cause Offence’: A Yiddish Adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Amsterdam 1710),” Zutot 3 (2003): 156.

32. 32. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #6, 8, 436. For further examples and discussions, see Chapter 4, as well as Max Erik, Di geshikhte fun der Yidisher literatur: fun di elteste tsaytn biz der haskalah-tekufa (Warsaw, 1928), 338; Paucker, TYV, 185–227; Zfatman, DISS, 228–231; Jennifer Dowling, “A Maiden’s Tale,” Shofar 10, no. 4 (1992): 49–61.

33. 33. For an example, see Glikl bas Judah Leib, Zikhronot Glikl, 1691–1719, bilingual ed., Hebrew translation by Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 2006), 80–106. On the tale’s relationship with its putative source, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 40–41, 245nn138–39. For further examples, see the discussion of domestication by Judaization below.

34. 34. Baruch Lindau, Reshit limudim (Berlin, 1788), [4].

35. 35. Iris Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2014), 117–24, 403–5.

36. 36. Pinḥas Hurwitz, Sefer ha-brit ha-shalem (1797; repr., Jerusalem, 1990), 199. For examples of Hurwitz’s often unacknowledged reliance on Lindau, Schick, and other Hebrew writers, cf., e.g., Hurwitz, Sefer ha-brit, 194–95, 242, 244–45; Lindau, Reshit limudim, 26r–26v; Barukh Schick of Shklov, “Sefer tiferet ha-adam,” in Sefer amudey ha-shamayim (Berlin, 1777), 4v, 21v–22r, 26r. On Hurwitz’s reliance on Tuviah Ha-Kohen, see Shmuel Feiner, “Sefer ha-brit kore be-sifriyat ha-haskalah: Perek be-shlilat ha-ne’orut be-shilhey ha-me’ah ha-shemoneh esreh,” in Ba-derekh el ha-modernah: Shay le-Yosef Kaplan, ed. Avriel Bar Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem, 2018), 319–20. See also Resianne Fontainne, “Natural Science in Sefer ha-Berit: Pinchas Hurwitz on Animals and Meteorological Phenomena,” in Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Discourse, ed. Resianne Fontaine, Andrea Schatz, and Irene Zwiep (Amsterdam, 2002), 161–62; Noaḥ Rosenblum, “Ha-entsiklopediya ha-ivrit ha-rishonah: Meḥabrah ve-hishtalshelutah,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 55 (1988): 19–20; Tal Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mada‘im: ḥinukh Yehudi le-mada‘im ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit ba-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem, 2013), 54.

37. 37. Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mada‘im, 60–61, 134–36; Tal Kogman, “Siaḥ mada‘i ivri be-megamat shinuy ba-maḥatsit ha-rishonah shel ha-me’ah ha-19 be-Ashkenaz: Sheviley olam le-Shimshon Block ke-ve-sefer Toldot ha-’arets le-Yosef Sheinhok ke-mikrey mivḥan,” in Ha-maskil ba-et ha-zot: Sefer ha-yovel le-Moshe Pelli, ed. Zeev Gerber, Lev Hakak, and Shmuel Kats (Tel Aviv, 2017): 264, 277n42.

38. 38. Cf. Lindau, Reshit limudim, p. 3 of introduction (n.p.); Yosef Shlomo Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, part 2: Ma‘ayan gamin (Amsterdam, 1628), 3. Delmedigo’s translation of Ptolemy was cited again by a later Hebrew maskil, in 1828, but this time with adequate reference. See Itsḥak Baer Levinsohn, Te‘udah be-Israel (Vilnius, 1828), 98–100.

39. 39. See, e.g., Moshe Ḥefets’s concealment of his use of Gassendi, as discussed in Ahuvia Goren, “Ha-metodah ha-mada‘it, ha-te’oriah ha-atomistit u-farshanut ha-mikr’a be-haguto shel rabi Moshe Ḥefets (1664–1712),” Zion 88, no. 1 (2022).

40. 40. Mordekhai ben Yeḥi’el Mikhal Ha-Kohen mi-Schmallenberg, “Ets ha-sade,“ c. 1751–1753. National Library of Israel, Yah. Ms. Heb. 56, fol. 2r. For more on this translation, see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #502, 503.

41. 41. Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 2r.

42. 42. Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 218r–229v.

43. 43. See, e.g., Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 200v–201r.

44. 44. Christian Weisbach, Warhaffte und gründliche Cur aller dem menschlichen Leibe zustossenden Kranckheiten (1712. Reprint, Strassburg, 1722).

45. 45. Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, Pietismus, Medizin und Aufklärung in Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls (Tübingen, 2000), 57–139. For a brief biography of Weisbach, see Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, (Leipzig, 1751), 4:1867.

46. 46. Weisbach, Warhaffte und gründliche Cur, 5.

47. 47. Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 4v.

48. 48. On Yiddish translators’ tendency to replace Seele with the Hebrew neshome, see Ruth Von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York, 2016), 98.

49. 49. The greater part of the manuscript (up to fol. 205r, excluding chapters 2 and 113) is a near word-for-word translation of Weisbach’s book, with minor additions and omissions. The remaining folios seem to be an amalgamation of German and Hebrew sources, including Tuviah Ha-Kohen’s Ma’ase Tuviah, on which the scribe draws liberally (particularly when writing in Hebrew), acknowledging his Hebrew source in some instances but not in others. Cf., e.g., Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 161r; Tuviah Ha-Kohen, Ma‘ase Tuviah (Venice, 1707/1708), 132v. Some of the illustrations that appear throughout the manuscript are also copied from Tuviah’s book (see, e.g., the illustration of the female reproductive system), while others may be original or copied from yet another source. The editions of Weisbach’s book that I have seen contain no illustrations. See also Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 208v–209r; Veit Riedlin, Kurtze und gründliche Unterweisung, wie die meiste Krankheiten sicher, glücklich und so viel es seyn kan, durch annehmliche Artzneyen zu curiren (Frankfurt, 1709), 203–6.

50. 50. A fleeting reference toward the end of the manuscript mentions “a physician from Strasbourg” whose works had been consulted in the specific context of the section on melancholy. See Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” fol. 201v. Cf. Weisbach, Warhaffte und gründliche Cur, 544. In fact, while Weisbach had his book printed in Strasbourg, he was born near Magdeburg, studied in Halle and Basel, and practiced in Düsseldorf.

51. 51. See esp. Rebekka Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network: Dialogues between Protestant Missionaries and Yiddish Writers in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 4 (2022): 731–63; Rebekka Voß, “Love Your Fellow as Yourself: Early Haskalah Reform as Pietist Renewal,” Transversal: Journal for Jewish Studies 13, no. 1 (2015): 4–11.

52. 52. See, e.g., the omission of overtly pietistic expressions and the reference to Stahl in the preface. Cf. Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 4r; Weisbach, Warhaffte und gründliche Cur, 2–3. Ha-Kohen does translate a passing reference to Stahl later in the manuscript, but this reference does not discuss his Pietist ideology but rather his use of balsam pills for the treatment of uterine disorders. See Ha-Kohen, “Ets ha-sade,” 94v; Weisbach, Warhaffte und gründliche Cur, 139.

53. 53. Yehudah Leib ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira (Wrocław, 1798), p. 8 of introduction (n.p.).

54. 54. Ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira, Introduction [8].

55. 55. On the book, its production and reception, see Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57),” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (2001): 467–70; Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1645–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge, 2016), 151–54; Jacques Lelong, Discours Historique sur les principales editions des Bibles Polyglottes (Paris, 1713), 206–46.

56. 56. Ben Ze’ev, Ben Sira, final page of introduction.

57. 57. August Hermann Niemeyer, ed., Sittenlehre Jesu des Sohns Sirach, trans. J. W. Linde (Leipzig, 1782).

58. 58. Like many other German biblical scholars of their time, Niemeyer and Linde set out to correct what they viewed as Luther’s no-longer-adequate German Bible. Niemeyer, editor’s preface to Niemeyer, Jesus Sirach, 1, 7. On the critical attitude toward Luther’s Bibel in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), 29; Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago, 2018), 47.

59. 59. See D. Oppenheimer, “Abraham Jagel und sein Cathechismus,” Hebräische Bibliographie 37 (1864): 19–20; S. Maybaum, “Abraham Jagel’s Katechismus Lekach-tob,” Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin 10 (Berlin, 1892): 3–18. On Yagel, see David B. Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

60. 60. Morris M. Faierstein, “Abraham Jagel’s ‘Leqaḥ Tov’ and Its History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 89, no. 3/4 (1999): 319–50.

61. 61. On Yagel’s use of Christian sources in his “Gey ḥizayon” and “Bat sheva,” see Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science. For new discoveries concerning Yagel’s sources, see Goren, JEWTACT #396, 397, 400; Nadav, JEWTACT #549, 595.

62. 62. Immanuel Tremellius, Sefer ḥinukh beḥirey Yah (Paris, 1554). An earlier edition in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew appeared in 1551 and seems to have been reprinted in several editions and versions. It is unclear who exactly was the target readership for this edition. See Kenneth Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580), (Aldershot, 2007), 75. Joshua Andrew Johnson suggests that the book did not, in fact, target Jews, but rather Christian Hebrew-learners and new converts. See Joshua Andrew Johnson, “When Brethren Walk Together: Immanuael Tremellius (c. 1510–1580)” (MA thesis, Washington State University, 2019), 202–3. I am grateful to Mellanie Plewa for referring me to this study and for bringing the Greek version to my attention.

63. 63. Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network,” 752–55.

64. 64. See Cohen, JEWTACT #628. This intriguing translation is the focus of ongoing research by Roni Cohen.

65. 65. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 146–47.

66. 66. Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, ed. James S. Holmes, J. Lambert, and R. van den Broeck (Leuven, 1978); rev. Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990): 49.

67. 67. Maria Tymoczko, “Translation, Resistance, Activism: An Overview,” in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko (Amherst, 2010), 9. See also Tymoczko’s concluding chapter in the same volume (“The Space and Time of Activist Translation,” 227–54), and Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 119.

68. 68. See, e.g., Silvia Kadiu, Reflexive Translation Studies: Translation as Critical Reflection (London, 2019), 20–42; Anthony Pym, On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation Between Cultures (1997), trans. and rev. Heike Walker (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2012), 32–35; Anthony Pym, “Venuti’s Visibility,” Target 8, no. 2 (1996): 165–77.

69. 69. For a discussion of the use of domestication in manuscripts, see Chapter 4 below.

70. 70. Jeremy Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, 2004), 33; see also 34–35.

71. 71. Dauber, Antonio’s Devils, 39; Tova Cohen, “Ha-tekhnika ha-lamdanit—tsofen shel sifrut ha-haskalah,” Meḥkarey Yerushalayim be-sifrut ivrit 13 (1992): 137–69; Amir Banbaji, “Melitsah, Rhetoric, and Modern Hebrew Literature: A Study of Haskalah Literary Theory,” Prooftexts 38, no. 2 (2020): 238–77.

72. 72. Yehudah Friedlander and Ḥayim Shoham, Introduction to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Mot Adam me‘et Friedrich Klopstock, metargem Tsvi Ben David (Prag, 1817), trans. Zvi Ben-David (Ramat Gan, 1976), 28.

73. 73. Dvora Bregman, “Shirey ha-ḥalifut asher le-Ovid be-tirgum Shabbethai Ḥayim Marini,” Daḥak 3 (2013): 173–74.

74. 74. See discussion in Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind, 133; Tal Kogman, “Baruch Lindau’s Rešit Limmudim (1788) and Its German Source: A Case Study of the Interaction between the Haskalah and the German Philanthropismus,” Aleph 9, no. 2 (2009): 295.

75. 75. See, e.g., Avraham Farissol, Igeret orḥot olam (Venice, 1587), 14r–15v; Azariah ben Moshe de Rossi, Ma’or eynayim (Mantua, 1573), 58r–59v; Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, Moda le-vina (Berlin, 1789), 25r–26v; Hurwitz, Sefer ha-brit, 144; “Mashal ne’etak mi-leshon Ashkenaz,” Ha-me’asef (Königsberg, 1784), 4–5. And cf. Karl Wilhelm Ramler, “Die zwey Peruanischen Weisen” in Fabellese, part 2 of 2 (Leipzig, 1783), 162. For a discussion of this phenomenon in sixteenth-century Hebrew literature, see Limor Mintz Manor, “Ha-siaḥ al ha-olam ha-ḥadash ba-tarbut ha-yehudit ba-et ha-ḥadashah ha-mukdemet” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2011), 57–62, 193–95.

76. 76. David Zamość, Tokhaḥot musar (Wrocław, 1819), 172–76. For an instructive discussion of the use of biblical allusion in maskilic translation, see Friedlander and Shoham, Introduction, 26–27.

77. 77. Astrid Lembke, “Das unwillige Untier: Ehe, Gefolgschaft und Autonomie in den französischen und jiddischen Werwolferzählungen Maries de France (12. Jh.) und im Mayse-Bukh (1602),” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 68 (2018): 26.

78. 78. Ayn sheyn mayse bukh (Basel, 1602), 175r.

79. 79. Ayn sheyn mayse bukh, 177r.

80. 80. On the connection between exile and animality in this and other Old Yiddish tales, see Iris Idelson-Shein, “Kill the Hen that Crows Like a Cock: Animal Encounters in Old Yiddish,” Journal of Jewish Studies 71, no. 2 (2020): 321–44.

81. 81. See, e.g., Itsḥak Reutlingen, “Das ma’ase der kayzerin mit tsvey zoyn” (1580), Bavarian State Library, MS Munich, Cod. Hebr. 100, fol. 1–66; [Yosef Vitlin?], Robinzohn: Di geshikhte fun Alter Leb (c. 1820., repr. Vilnius, 1894). See also Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona, 161–62; Paucker, TYV, 44–103; Arnold Paucker, “Das Volksbuch von den Sieben weisen Meistern in der jiddischen Literatur,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 57 (1961): 177–94; Leah Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” Comparative Literature 54 (2002): 215–28. On Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, see below. This was also characteristic of Yiddish short stories (mayses), which featured Jewish oikotypes of international tales, such as the Mayse bukh’s tale of the rabbi-werewolf discussed above. For another examples, see Ayn sheyn mayse ([Offenbach?], c. 1711). For a discussion of the Judaization techniques employed in the tale, see Sarah Zfatman, “Ma‘aseh be-shivat bney Hyrkanus she-hafkhu le-avazim: le-darkey ‘ibudah be-Yiddish shel ma‘asiyah benle’umit (AT451),” Meḥkarey Yerushalayim be-folklor Yehudi 10 (1987/88): 32–93.

82. 82. On the intentional corruption of the source text in order to deliver anti-Christian messages in Old Yiddish translations, see Paucker, TYV, 7–12, 30–32, 241, 245; Ruth von Bernuth, “Das jischev fun Nar-husen: Jiddische Narrenliteratur und jüdische Narrenkultur,” Aschkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 138–39; Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford, 2005), 160–62; Elisheva Carlebach, “The Anti-Christian Element in Early Modern Yiddish Culture,” in Braun Lectures in the History of the Jews in Prussia, no. 10 (Ramat Gan, 2003), 12–20; Claudia Rosenzweig, “The Widow of Ephesus: Yiddish Rewritings and a Hypothesis on Jewish Clandestine Forms of Reading,” Aschkenas 25, no. 1 (2015): 97–113.

83. 83. See, e.g., Merks, “Vunderparlikh unt zeltsame historyen,” fols. 134r, 188v. On Kirche, see Chapter 1 above.

84. 84. For a discussion, see Paucker, TYV; Bernuth, Wise Men, 99; Iris Idelson-Shein, “Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no.1 (2018): 33–35.

85. 85. François Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours: contes Persans, vols. 1 and 2 of 5 (Amsterdam, 1711). On the book’s success, see Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford/New York, 2008), 277–78.

86. 86. See Robert L. Mack, introduction to Arabian Nights Entertainment (Oxford, 1995), xv.

87. 87. See my discussion in Chapter 4 below.

88. 88. Ḥayim Dov Friedberg, Beyt Eked Sefarim (1950–56; repr. Tel Aviv, 1970), 2:399 §79.

89. 89. Toyzent unt ayn tag (n.p., c. 1720).

90. 90. Zfatman and Friedberg speculate that the book appeared in Amsterdam. Zfatman presents the book as a translation of an anonymous compilation of sixteenth-century Persian tales from the German, and speculates that it was probably printed around 1720. See Friedberg, Beyt Eked Sefarim, 2:399 §78; Zfatman, BIB, 118 §102.

91. 91. See, e.g., Tausend und Ein Tag … Anfangs aus der Persianischen Sprache in die Frantzösische übersetzt von Hrn. Petis de la Croix (Leipzig, 1712); Pétis de la Croix, The Persian and Turkish Tales (…) Translated formerly from those Languages into French By M. Petis De La Croix, trans. William King (London, 1739); Persiaansche Lusthof ofte de duizent en een dag Persiaansche vertellingen uit het Fransche van den heer Pétis de la Croix in het Nederduitsch vertaalt (Amsterdam, 1724). A contemporary Italian translation does not mention Pétis de la Croix by name, but does identify itself as a translation of a French translation of a Persian work. See Anon., Novelle Persiane divise in mille, ed una giornata, tradotte in Francese, e Dal Francese nel volgare Italiano (Venice, 1743).

92. 92. Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours, vol. 1: p. 1 of preface (n.p.). On the book, its sources, and its reception, see Paul Sebag’s introduction to the modern edition, in François Pétis de la Croix, Histoire du prince Calaf et de la princesse de la Chine, 1710–1712, ed. Paul Sébag (Paris/Montréal, 1981).

93. 93. See, e.g., Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours, vol. 5 (Amsterdam, 1713), p. 1 of translator’s warning (n.p.). See also the translator’s warning appended to vol. 2 of the 1711 edition.

94. 94. Paucker, TYV, 13, 32–33. For some exceptions, see the discussion in Paucker, TYV, 251–306; Bernuth, Wise Men, 95.

95. 95. Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours 5:[1].

96. 96. Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours, 1:4n.

97. 97. Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jours, vol. 1: p.1 of preface; Tausend und Ein Tag, pp. 1–2 of preface.

98. 98. Tausend und Ein Tag, 3–4. “[Sie] vermeynte es sey ein Traum, welchen der grosse Kesaya … ihr zugeschickt, um ihr dadurch anzudeuten, daß alle Manns-Personen nichts als Verräther wären, welche die zarte Liebe der Weiber nur mit Untreue und Undanck zu belohnen pflegten.” Cf. Pétis de la Croix, Les mille et un jour, 1:4.

99. 99. Toyzent unt ayn tag, [2v]. Another oddity of the translation is the division of each tale into short story units, each of which constitutes one of the thousand and one days. This results in the appearance of 1001 story units in 380 pages. This division is absent in the German source, which simply dispenses with the division of the tales into days. The French source does divide the tales into days, but allows for much longer story units, amounting to a total of only 79 days throughout its two tomes.

100. 100. Tausend und Ein Tag, 225, 256; Toyzent unt ayn tag, 56r, 63r

101. 101. Tausend und Ein Tag, 241; Toyzent unt ayn tag, 59r.

102. 102. Tausend und Ein Tag, 153; Toyzent unt ayn tag, 31r. Curiously, a churchyard (Kirch-Hof) does make its way into the Yiddish translation. Cf. Tausend und Ein Tag, 230; Toyzent unt ayn tag, 57r.

103. 103. Susan Mokhberi, The Persian Mirror: Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2019), 35.

104. 104. Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, [6]; see also [11].

105. 105. Cf. Sefer derekh ets ha-ḥayim, [5]; Johannes Curio, De Conservanda bona valetudine (Frankfurt am Main, 1557), 2r.

106. 106. See Merks, “Vunderparlikh unt zeltsame historyen,” 153r–153v. For a detailed comparison between the German source, the 1600 translation, and the 1736 translation, see Paucker, TYV, 237–46.

107. 107. See, e.g., Botarel’s use of the French word gris for gray or Avraham ben Eliyahu’s use of the German word broyn (from “Braun”) for brown.

108. 108. Rehav Rubin, Portraying the Land: Hebrew Maps of the Land of Israel from Rashi to the Early 20th Century (Berlin, 2018), 119.

109. 109. Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko, introduction to Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present, ed. Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko (Philadelphia, 2020), 7. See also Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, 2001), 24–29.

110. 110. Carlebach, Divided Souls, 33–46.

111. 111. For an overview of the debate, see Magda Teter and Edward Fram, “Apostasy, Fraud, and the Beginnings of Hebrew Printing in Cracow,” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2006): 37–40.

112. 112. There has been some confusion as to the names of the brothers after their conversion; see Teter and Fram, “Apostasy, Fraud,” 64.

113. 113. Majer Balaban, “Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Druckerein in Polen,“ Soncino Blätter: Beiträge zur Kunde des jüdischen Buches 3 (Berlin, 1929–1930): 7–9.

114. 114. Teter and Fram, “Apostasy, Fraud,” 59–69.

115. 115. See Avraham Me’ir Habermann, “Ha-madpisim bney Ḥayim Helicz,” Kiryat Sefer (1958): 518; Teter and Fram, “Apostasy, Fraud,” 62.

116. 116. Moshe Meldonado, trans., Yehudit (Constantinople, 1552), first page of preface (n.p.).

117. 117. Roth, Memorabilia Europae, pp. 1–2 of foreword (n.p.).

118. 118. Elchanan Reiner, “Otsar ha-sfarim,” Et-mol 200 (2008): 41.

119. 119. Bass, Masekhet derekh erets, 2.

120. 120. For a comparative reading of the two works, see Iris Idelson-Shein, “Shabbethai Meshorer Bass and the Construction (and Deconstruction) of a Jewish Library,” Jewish Culture and History 22, no. 1 (2021): 1–16.

121. 121. Zohar Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Beginning of Hebrew Children’s Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988): 388–415; Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mada‘im, esp. 72, 76, 86, 103–4, 114, 129.

122. 122. Heida is mentioned in passing in Johann Jacob Schudt’s Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1714), 2:289–90.

123. 123. Eliyahu ben Moshe Gershon of Pinczow, Melekhet maḥshevet (Berlin, 1765), title page of part 1 (n.p.). While most bibliographies treat this as the first edition of the book, according to the preface, an earlier edition was published in Żółkiew. I have been unable to track down this earlier edition.

124. 124. Moshe Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev (Frankfurt, 1710). Publication year according to p. 17r (der yetsiger yohrtsahl, 1710).

125. 125. Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, last page of preface (n.p.).

126. 126. Georg Heinrich Paritius, Compendium Praxis Arithmetices (Regensburg, 1708). On Paritius, see Johann Gruber, “Georg Heinrich Paritius,” in Erzählen und Rechnen in der frühen Neuzeit: Interdisziplinäre Blicke auf Regensburger Rechenbücher, ed. Edith Feistner and Alfred Holl (Münster, 2016), 295–317. Similarities between Paritius’s compendium, Heida’s book, and the later works of Moshe Eisenstadt and Eliyahu ben Moshe Gershon of Pinczow should also be noted. The latter acknowledges his use of both Eisenstadt and Heida, as well as of non-Jewish works. Whether the two later works were based on Paritius’s book directly or on Heida’s adaptation is a question that still requires research. For now, on Eliyahu’s use of Paritius, see Goren, JEWTACT #291.

127. 127. Georg Heinrich Paritius, Praxis Arithmetices (Regensburg, 1706).

128. 128. Paritius, Compendium, dedication page (n.p.).

129. 129. Paritius, Compendium, 1:2.

130. 130. Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, 2r.

131. 131. This is particularly discernible at the beginning of each of the chapters and sections of the two books. Cf. Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, 3r with Paritius, Compendium, 1:4; Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, 5v with Paritius, Compendium, 1:5; Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, 32v with Paritius, Compendium, 2:1.

132. 132. Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, last page of preface (n.p.).

133. 133. Heida, Ma‘ase ḥoresh u-ḥoshev, p. 2 of preface.

134. 134. Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007), 31.

135. 135. On simplification in Yiddish translation, see Bernuth, Wise Men, 96–97; Turniansky, “Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge,” 11; Wallet, “Links in a Chain: Early Modern Yiddish Historiography in the Northern Netherlands, 1743–1812” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012), 203–8.

136. 136. Melissantes, Die curieuse Orographia, 47–89, 699–707, Seyder harey olem, 3–5r, 21v–22r.

137. 137. Ya‘akov Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim (Venice, 1683), [2].

138. 138. Zahalon, Otsar ha-ḥayim, 75v.

139. 139. Ḥayim Liebermann, “Tirgum Yidi bilty yadu‘a shel sefer Elef layla va-laya,” Aley sefer 4 (1977), 156. See also Zfatman, BIB, 116, §100.

140. 140. Another German translation, titled Arabische Liebes-Händel, und andere Seltzame Begebenheiten, appeared around 1706 but has since been lost. However, the linguistic similarities between the Yiddish and extant German translation are such that we may safely assume that the translator used the 1710 translation or one of its later editions.

141. 141. Cf., e.g., Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, 42 with Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 47v (where Kauffmann becomes soḥer).

142. 142. At the very beginning of the narrative, Melela proclaims her faith in God using the distinctively Jewish term “ha-shem yitbaraḥ” (Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 7v). On the other hand, her name (spelled מילילא) may be a heteropalindrom containing a pun on the Hebrew term for pagan gods—“אלילים.”

143. 143. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 36r.

144. 144. Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 9r–43r. In addition to the changes he makes to the frame narrative, the translator merges chapters that were distinct in the original, producing fewer and longer chapters than appeared in his source. Cf., e.g., Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, 45–46 with Mar’ot ha-tsov’ot, 47v, 51r.

145. 145. For the original and the English translation (slightly modified here), see Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona, 124 and n413.

146. 146. On the different portrayals of Pelukan and for an extensive comparison between the Yiddish text and its Italian source, see Rosenzweig, Bovo d’Antona, 136–57.

147. 147. For further details on these translations, see Steinschneider, DhU, §407–411 (pp. 643–47); Mintz-Manor, “Ha-siaḥ al ha-olam ha-ḥadash,” 164–71.

148. 148. Mordechai Feingold, “The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 378; Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (Chicago, 2008), 65–66.

149. 149. Tuvia Ha-Kohen, Maase Tuviah (Venice, 1707/8), 59a. Compare: Johannes Sacrobosco, “Sphaera Mundi,” in Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators (Chicago, 1949), 90.

150. 150. For a comparison of the two texts, see Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind, 149–50.

151. 151. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia, 1979), 224. For an example from the eighteenth century, see Yonatan Eibeschütz, Ahavat Yonatan (Hamburg, 1765), 59r.

152. 152. See, e.g., Tiler J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia, PA, 2007), 5–16; Julie C. Hayes, “Plagiarism and Legitimation in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Eighteenth Century 34, no. 2 (1993): 115–31.

153. 153. Miryam Salama-Carr, “The French Tradition,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 411–13 (1998, rev. London/New York 2009/2011). On the complicated relationship between plagiarism and translation more generally, see Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism. Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto, 2016), 191–217.

154. 154. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 46, 65.

155. 155. Elżbieta Tabakowska, “Polish Tradition,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (1998, rev. 2nd ed. London/New York, 2009/2011), 505. See also, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies: Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown, “The British Tradition,” 344–45; Anna Lilova, “The Bulgarian Tradition,” 354–56; Zlata Kufnerová and Ewald Osers, “The Czech Tradition,” 378; and Theo Hermans, “The Dutch Tradition,” 396.

156. 156. For a general overview, see Burke, “Cultures of Translation.”

157. 157. Iris Idelson-Shein, “Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things: Abraham Ben Elijah of Vilna Encounters the Spirit of Mr. Buffon,” AJS Review 36, no. 2 (2012): 304–6. This supports Toury’s argument that the same translator “may well be found to abide by different sets of norms and manifest different kinds of behaviour … in each role and/or context of operation” (Toury, DTS, 66).

158. 158. Stefanie Stockhorst, introduction to Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (Amsterdam, 2010), 13. See also Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Translation,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors, 4:181–88 (Oxford, 2002); Kenneth E. Carpenter, Dialogue in Political Economy: Translations from and into German in the 18th Century (Boston, 1977), 20–24.

159. 159. Gottfried Hagen, “Translations and Translators in a Multilingual Society: A Case Study of Persian-Ottoman Translations, Late Fifteenth to Early Seventeenth Century,” Eurasian Studies 2, no. 1 (2003): 106. See also B. Harun Küçük, “Early Modern Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework,” Journal of Early Modern History 21, no. 5 (2017): 407–19; Johann Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean, ed. Marilyn Booth (Edinburgh, 2019), 57–94.

160. 160. Feza Günergun, “Ottoman Encounters with European Science: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Translations in Turkish,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007); Gottfried Hagen, “Atlas and Papamonta as Sources of Knowledge and Power,” in Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi’nin Yazılı Kaynakları, ed. Hakan Karateke and Hatice Aynur (Ankara, 2012), 105–29; Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit: Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Kātib Čelebis Ǧihānnümā (Berlin, 2003), 190–215; Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “Some Remarks on Ottoman Science and Its Relation with European Science and Technology up to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire: Western Influence, Local Institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge (Hampshire, VT, 2004), 45–73; Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge (Austin, TX, 2015), 108–10; Küçük, “Early Modern Ottoman Science,” 1–13.

161. 161. Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990).

162. 162. See Natalia Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert im frühneuzeitlichen Istanbul: Studien zur Rezeption des Paracelsismus im Werk des osmanischen Arztes Ṣāliḥ b. Naṣrullāh Ibn Sallūm al-Ḥalabī (Freiburg, 2012).

163. 163. Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit, 191.

164. 164. Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago, 2011), esp. 41–65; Ricci, “On the Untranslatability of “Translation”: Considerations from Java, Indonesia,” Translation Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 287–301.

165. 165. Ricci, Islam Translated, 64.

166. 166. Ricci, Islam Translated, 271.

167. 167. Carpenter, Dialogue in Political Economy, 8, 20–24; Paucker, TYV, 168–69, 187.

168. 168. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 81.

169. 169. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20.

170. 170. Yaakov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2012), 114–15; Stephen Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996), 78–79; Theodor Dunkelgrün, “The Christian Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815, ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge, 2017), 316–48. For an example, see Faierstein’s discussion of the Latin and German translations of Yagel’s Lekaḥ tov: Faierstein, “Abraham Jagel’s ‘Leqaḥ Ṭov,’ ” 329–36. Faierstein notes that he was unable to consult the introduction to the 1740 German translation, produced by the convert Johannes Zacharias. A digital copy containing the introduction is now available and supports his general characterization. See ספר לקח טוב, oder Ein Buch der Guten Lehre (Bremen, 1740), [11–13], http://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE119817 (accessed March, 2019).

171. 171. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20. Aya Elyada, “Zwischen Austausch und Polemik: Christliche Übersetzungen jiddischer Literatur im Deutschland der Frühneuzeit,” ZRGG 69, no. 1 (2017): 48–49, 69–72.

172. 172. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (1974; repr. New York, 2018), 81.

CHAPTER 4

1. 1. Glenda Abramson, “Modern Hebrew Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman, Jeremy Cohen, and David Sorkin (Oxford, 2002), 516.

2. 2. See, e.g., Joseph Klausner, Historiyah shel ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-ḥadashah (1930; repr. Jerusalem, 1960), 1:1; Moshe Pelli, “When Did Haskalah Begin? Establishing the Beginning of Haskalah and the Definition of ‘Modernism,’ ” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 44 (1999): 55–96; Ya‘akov Shavit, “A Duty Too Heavy to Bear: Hebrew in the Berlin Haskalah, 1783–1819: Between Classic, Modern, and Romantic,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz, ed. Lewis Glinert (New York, 1993), 111–28.

3. 3. See, e.g., Hayim Bar Dayan, “Li-she’elat reshitah shel sifruteynu ha-ḥadashah,” Proceedings of the First World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1952): 302–6. See also the discussion of the so-called Italian Haskalah below.

4. 4. See Shlomo Berger, “Yiddish on the Borderline of Modernity: Language and Literature in Early Modern Ashkenazi Culture,” in “Early Modern Culture and Haskalah,” ed. David Ruderman and Shmuel Feiner, Special edition, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 113–22. See also note 20 below.

5. 5. Ofer Dynes and Naomi Seidman, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature,” Prooftexts 38, no. 2 (2020): 201. See also Amir Banbaji, “Melitsah, Rhetoric, and Modern Hebrew Literature: A Study of Haskalah Literary Theory,” Prooftexts 38, no. 2 (2020): 238–77.

6. 6. Dynes and Seidman, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature,” 203.

7. 7. Gideon Toury, “Reshit ha-tirgum ha-moderny le-‘ivrit: od mabat eḥad,” Dapim le-meḥkar be-sifrut 11 (1997): 108. See also Ḥayim Shoham, Be-tsel haskalat Berlin (Tel Aviv, 1996), 32.

8. 8. Even in their own—highly nuanced—assessment, Dynes and Seidman, following Ken Frieden (whose approach I discuss below), argue that “Hebrew translators forged a flexible and worldly idiom in which a modern literature could be produced … through the guiding and liberating constraints of translation and adaptation. Dynes and Seidman, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature,” 204.

9. 9. Zohar Shavit, “Cultural Translation and the Recruitment of Translated Texts to Induce Social Change: The Case of the Haskalah,” in Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts, ed. Jan Van Coillie and Jack McMartin (Leuven, 2020), 74.

10. 10. Magdalena Waligórska and Tara Kohn, introduction to Jewish Translation—Translating Jewishness (Berlin, 2018), 3.

11. 11. Gabriel Zoran, “Past and Present in Hebrew Literary Translation,” Harvard Library Bulletin 36, no. 4 (1988): 334n.

12. 12. Ya‘akov Shavit, “A Duty Too Heavy to Bear,” 119; Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction (Syracuse, NY, 2016), 6.

13. 13. Ewa Geller, “Yiddish ‘Regimen sanitatis Salenitanum’ from Early Modern Poland: A Humanistic Symbiosis of Latin Medicine and Jewish Thought,” in Jewish Medicine and Healthcare in Central Eastern Europe, ed. Marcin Moskalewicz (Oxford, 2019), 15.

14. 14. Rehav Rubin, “Chug ha-’areṣ by Rabbi Solomon of Chelm: An Early Geographical Treatise and Its Sources,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 8 (2008): 136; see also 147. For a different view of Shlomo of Chelm, but one that still embraces the notion of “forerunners of the Haskalah,” see Immanuel Etkes, “Li-she’elat mevasrey ha-haskalah be-mizraḥ eyropa,” Tarbiz 58 (1988): 95–114.

15. 15. Chava Turniansky, “Le-toldot ha-taytsh-khumash’—‘khumash mit khibur,’ ” in Iyunim be-sifrut: devarim she-ne’emru ba-erev likhvod Dov Sadan bi-mlot lo shmonim ve-ḥamesh shanah (Jerusalem, 1988), 26.

16. 16. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 2002), 28. See also Maoz Kahana, Tarnegolet beli lev: Dat u-mada ba-khtiva ha-rabanit ba-me’ah ha-shmoneh esreh (Jerusalem, 2021), 285–86.

17. 17. For critiques of this binary, in addition to the studies by Ruderman, Bonfil, Stern, and Kahana noted in Chapter 1 above, see Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005); David J. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008); William G. Bulman and Robert J. Ingram, eds., God in the Enlightenment (New York, 2016); Anton M. Matystin and Dan Edelstein, eds., Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality (Baltimore, 2018); Rebekka Voß, “A Jewish-Pietist Network: Dialogues between Protestant Missionaries and Yiddish Writers in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 4 (2022): 731–63.

18. 18. Abigail Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (Chicago, 2018), xvi.

19. 19. Gillman, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation, 85. See also Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford, 2005), 123–24.

20. 20. Berger, “Yiddish on the Borderline of Modernity,” 113–22; Max Weinreich, Bilder Fun Der Yidisher Literaturgeshikhte (Vilna, 1928), 276–77. See also Dynes and Seidman, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature,” 202.

21. 21. Isaac E. Barzilay, “The Italian and Berlin Haskalah (Parallels and Differences),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–1961), 17–54.

22. 22. Barzilay, “The Italian and Berlin Haskalah,” 18. Of course, we are confronted here with an essential ambiguity that lies at the heart of this debate, which has to do with the absence of an agreed-upon meaning for the terms Haskalah and Enlightenment and therefore also for the differences between them. For a classic and still highly useful presentation of the problems inherent in the definition of the Enlightenment, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 1–13.

23. 23. Adam Shear, “ ‘The Italian and Berlin Haskalah’—Isaac Barzilay Revisited,” in “Early Modern Culture and Haskalah,” ed. David Ruderman and Shmuel Feiner, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 49–66.

24. 24. Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012).

25. 25. David B. Ruderman, “Why Periodization Matters: In Early Modern Jewish Culture and the Haskalah,” in “Early Modern Culture and Haskalah,” ed. David Ruderman and Shmuel Feiner, Special edition, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 25–26. For a different view, see, in the same volume, Shmuel Feiner, “On the Threshold of the ‘New World’: Haskalah and Secularization in the Eighteenth Century,” in “Early Modern Culture and Haskalah,” ed. David Ruderman and Shmuel Feiner, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), esp. 40–42.

26. 26. David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995), 340.

27. 27. See Meir Benayahu, “Ha-pulmus al Sefer me’or eynayim le-rabi Azariah min ha-adumim,” Asufot 5 (1990): 213–19.

28. 28. Benayahu, “Ha-pulmus al Sefer me’or eynayim,” 219. There may have been some controversy surrounding Barukh Schick of Shklov’s Kne ha-midah, a translation of an unknown English work, which appeared in two editions. Some copies of the first edition, published in 1783, featured an approbation from Yeḥezkel Landau (Noda bi-Yehudah), while others did not. In the latter copies, Schick explained that he had decided not to include approbations. Judging by the arrangement of Schick’s apologetic preface, it seems that the original copies appeared with the approbation, which was then replaced with the preface. This would suggest that Landau had rescinded his approbation. The later edition of the book featured approbations from a number of rabbis but, conspicuously, not from Landau. See Barukh Schick, Kneh ha-midah (Prague, 1784). Copies that include the approbation are housed at the Mehlmann Library, Tel Aviv University, and the National Library of Israel. A copy that does not include the approbation but features the preface instead, was housed at the (now defunct) Yad ha-Rav Herzog library. A digital edition of the latter copy is available in the Otzar HaHochma Digital Library: https://tablet.otzar.org/he/book/book.php?book=100601&width=0&scroll=0&udid=0&pagenum=1 (accessed August, 2021).

29. 29. Robert Bonfil, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 23–48.

30. 30. Roy Pascal, German Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1968), 53.

31. 31. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 137.

32. 32. Zalman Tsvi mi-Oyfn Hoyzn, Yudisher teriyak (1615; repr. Altdorf, 1680), 8v–9r. On Yudisher theriak, see Faierstein’s introduction to Zalman Tsvi mi-Oyfn Hoyzn, Yudisher Theriak: An Early Modern Defense of Judaism, ed. and trans. Morris M. Faierstein (Detroit, MI, 2016), 1–29.

33. 33. English translation (with minor changes) according to Zalman Tsvi mi-Oyfn Hoyzn, Yudisher Theriak, 49. For original Yiddish, see Zalmen Tsvi mi-Oyfn Hoyzn, Yudisher teriyak, 10r.

34. 34. Chava Turniansky, “On Old Yiddish Biblical Epics,” International Folklore Review 8 (1991): 32.

35. 35. In addition to the works discussed in chapters 2 and 3 above, see Zfatman, DISS, 232–48.

36. 36. Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, “A Postmodern Translational Aesthetics in Brazil,” in Translation Studies: An Interdiscipline, ed. Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pöchhacker, and Klaus Kaindl (Amsterdam, 1994), 67.

37. 37. For some examples of translations that appeared in Ha-me’asef and Bikurey ha-‘itim, and references for further reading, see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #34, 100, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 267, 268, 269, 321, 357, 452, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 495, 496, 504, 564; Cohen, JEWTACT #517, 520, 527–530, 534, 535, 537–540, 543, 546, 547, 554, 555, 565, 569, 570; Karkason, JEWTACT #333, 335. On the prevalence of translations in Ha-me’asef, see Shoham, Be-tsel haskalat Berlin, 30–41.

38. 38. On the importance of journals and periodicals in the eighteenth century, see, most famously, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge, MA, 1989), esp. 24–25, 72–73. On the increase in translational activity, see Armin Paul Frank, “Translation and Historical Change in Post-Renaissance Europe: From ‘Supranational’ to National Cultures,” in Übersetzung—Translation—Traduction, vol. 26: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Haralld Kittel et al. (Berlin, 2007), 2:1460–517; Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “The New Philosophies in Translation in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” in Kittel et al., Übersetzung—Translation—Traduction, 2:1609–14.

39. 39. On these developments in Germany in particular, see the classic work of Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesegeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974). More recently, see Helga Brandes, “The Literary Marketplace and the Journal, Medium of the Enlightenment,” in German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility, ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino and James N. Hardin (Rochester, NY, 2005), 79–102. For a helpful overview of these developments more generally, and the scholarly debates surrounding them, see Outram, The Enlightenment, 13–19.

40. 40. See, e.g., Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, Ma’amar ha-torah ve-ha-ḥokhmah (London, 1771), 18, 25, 28, 32, 42, 56, 60, 65. On Levison’s reliance on Newton and Musschenbroek, see Shimon Bolag, “Mivḥar mekorot mad‘ayim be-ḥiburim ivriyim min ha-me’ah ha-17 ve-ha-18,” Korot 9, no. 5–6 (1989): 141–45.

41. 41. Levison, Ma’amar ha-torah ve-ha-ḥokhmah, 1r.

42. 42. Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, Shlosh esreh yesodey ha-torah (Hamburg, 1792), 2v.

43. 43. Maimonides, The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics, trans. Joseph Isaac Gorfinkle (New York, 1912), 36.

44. 44. See Helmut Knufmann, “Das deutsche Übersetzungswesen des 18. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel von Übersetzer- und Herausgebervorreden,” Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel—Frankfurter Ausgabe 91 (1967), 2676–716; Wilhelm Graeber, “Blüte und Niedergang der belles infidèles,” in Kittel et al., Übersetzung—Translation—Traduction, 2:1460–519.

45. 45. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #259, 452, 489, 492, 493, 504, 505, 552.

46. 46. See Isaac Satanov, Sefer ha-ḥizayon (Berlin, c. 1775), 25v–27r; David Friedländer, “Eyn simḥa la-nefesh ke-simḥat asot ḥesed,” Ha-me’asef (November, 1783): 20–24. A third reprint appeared in 1821 in Bikurei ha-itim 1. See also Moshe Pelli, “Le-verur she’elot bibliyografiyot bi-yetsirato shel Iẓḥak Satanov,” Kiryat Sefer (1974): 437.

47. 47. The change is slightly less discernible in Yiddish, as the overall number of Yiddish translations decreased in the second half of the eighteenth century. Still, Yiddish, and particularly Jüdisch-Deutsch, translations do seem to have become more upfront about their sources towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #120, 256, 324, 409; Jánošíková, JEWTACT #469.

48. 48. For details, see Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT database, #317, 318, 319.

49. 49. Yehudah Leib Ben Ze’ev, Bet ha-sefer, part 2: “Limudey ha-meysharim,” (1802; 2nd ed., Vienna, 1806), [7].

50. 50. Ben Ze’ev, Bet ha-sefer, part 2 (3rd edition, Vienna, 1809), 308.

51. 51. Juda Jeitteles, Bney ha-ne‘urim (Prague, 1821), 136.

52. 52. Anthony Pym, On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation Between Cultures, 1997, trans. and rev. Heike Walker (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2012), 18.

53. 53. Robinzohn: Di geshikhte fun Alter Leb (c. early 19th century, repr. Vilnius, 1894). For a discussion of the Judaization techniques employed in this translation, see David Roskies, “The Medium and Message of the Maskilic Chapbook,” Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 3/4 (1979): 283; Leah Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” Comparative Literature 54 (2002): 215–28.

54. 54. Compare, e.g., David Zamość, Tokhaḥot musar (Wrocław, 1819), 172–716; Joachim Heinrich Campe, Sittenbüchlein für Kinder aus gesitteten Ständen (1777; repr. Munich, 1786), 73–77. See also the omission of the names of Greek gods in Zamość’s Hebrew translation of Herder’s “Das Kind der Sorge”: David Zamość, Agudat shoshanim (Wrocław, 1826), 44; Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Das Kind der Sorge” (1789), repr. in Gedichte, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1817), 7. A similar strategy was adopted by a later Hebrew translator of the same poem. See Cohen, JEWTACT #543.

55. 55. Toury, DTS, 163.

56. 56. Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 216. See also Roskies, “The Medium and Message,” 275–90.

57. 57. Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 219.

58. 58. Shavit, “Cultural Translation,” 85. See also Zohar Shavit, “Ruso bi-glimat ha-Rambam: Perek be-hakhnasat kitvey ha-ne’orut le-aron ha-sfarim ha-yehudi ha-ḥadash be-tkufat ha-haskalah,” Zion 79, no. 2 (2014): 136, 143, 146. See also Shoham, Be-tsel haskalat Berlin, 49–64. For a different and more nuanced view, see Seidman’s discussion of previous attempts to present the layout of Mendelssohn’s Bible as a deceptive strategy. Seidman instead views the translation as reflecting the essential ambiguities of the Enlightenment ideal of “toleration.” See Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 171–79.

59. 59. For a discussion of the phenomenon of rabbinic approbations in maskilic works and the complex reception of these approbations, see David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism, trans. Dena Ordan (Hanover, 2010), 21–27; Yehoshua Mondshein, “Haskamot shtukot mi-Valozhyn u-Vilna: Kabel et ha-’emet mi-mi she’amrah?” Or Israel 4, no. 16 (1999): 151–59; Tal Kogman, “Science and the Rabbis: Haskamot, Haskalah, and the Boundaries of Jewish Knowledge in Scientific Hebrew Literature and Textbooks,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 62 (2017): 135–49.

60. 60. Moshe ben Ya‘akov, “Sefer refu’ot bi-leshon Ashkenaz” [title by a later hand], Bodleian Library, Oppenheim Collection, Ms Opp. 690, fol. 409r.

61. 61. For a discussion, see Magdaléna Jánošíková and Iris Idelson-Shein. “New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 113, no. 3 (2023).

62. 62. Pierre Gautruche, Philosophiae ac mathematica, totius clara, brevis, et accurata institutio (1653; repr. Vienna, 1661), 89–90.

63. 63. Meir ben Yehudah Leib Neumark, “Tekhunat ha-havaya” [Prague?], 1703, MS Bodl. Opp. 708, 3v. For another example of the domestication of a source translated for private use, see Jordan R. Katz, “Jewish Midwives, Medicine and the Boundaries of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, 1650–1800” (PhD diss. Columbia University, 2021), 169.

64. 64. The first edition of the book is lost. However, all remaining editions present themselves as translations. See, e.g., Robinzohn di geshikhte fun Alter-Leb (Vilna, 1894); Robinzohn di geshikhte fun Alter-Leb (Krakow, 1989); Robinzohn di geshikhte fun Alter-Leb (Krakow, 1907).

65. 65. See Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #258, 260, 261, 268; Moshe Pelli, Sha‘ar la-haskalah: Mafteaḥ mu‘ar le-Ha-measef (Jerusalem, 2000), 171, 123; Shavit, “Ruso bi-glimat ha-Rambam,” 141, 150, 153–54.

66. 66. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London, 1995), 18.

67. 67. On the terms used to designate translation, see the Introduction.

68. 68. Zohar Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (1992): 50–51.

69. 69. On the maskilim’s tendency to omit such narrative models, which were a hallmark of philanthropinist prose, see Zohar Shavit, “Ha-rihut shel ḥadar ha-haskalah ha-yehudit be-Berlin: Nituaḥ ha-mikra’ah ha-modernit ha-rishonah le-yeladim yehudim,” in Ke-minhag Ashkenaz u-Polin: Sefer yovel le-Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 1993), 194–207; Shavit, “Literary Interference,” 51–57; Zohar Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Beginning of Hebrew Children’s Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988): 385–415; Tal Kogman, Ha-maskilim be-mad‘aim: ḥinuḥ yehudi le-mada‘im ba-merḥav dover ha-germanit ba-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem, 2013), esp. 72, 76, 86, 103–4, 114, 129. Some notable exceptions include the corpus of works by Barukh Shoenfeld and David Zamość, especially the latter’s translation of Campe’s Robinsohn, which maintained the dialogic form of the original, aimed at enticing readers. David Zamość, Robinzon der yinegere: ayn lezebukh fir kinder (Wrocław, 1824); Barukh Shoenfeld, Musar haskel (1811; repr. Berlin, 1859). Another rare Jewish translation that retains the dialogic form of the original intact is the anonymous 1784 German-in-Hebrew-characters adaptation; however, this version omits many of the other didacticisms of Campe’s version. See Anon., Historiya oder zeltzame und vunderbare begebenhayten aynes yungen zee fahrers (Prague, 1784).

70. 70. On the image of the obstinate Jew in the Enlightenment, see Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley, 2003). For more on the child-Jew analogy and its connection to the colonialist themes of Campe’s translations, see Iris Idelson-Shein, “No Place Like Home: The Uses of Travel in Early Maskilic Translations,” in Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, ed. Joshua Levinson and Orit Bashkin (Philadelphia, 2021), 140–43.

71. 71. Abram Efros, “Lampa Aladdina,” 1918, trans. Ludmila Lezhneva and Alan Myers, in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization,vol. 8: Crisis and Creativity Between World Wars, 1918–1939, ed. Todd Endelman, Zvi Gitelman, and Deborah Dash Moore (New Haven, 2020), 4.

72. 72. For discussions of these travel tales, see, e.g., Zalman Reyzn, “Campes ‘Entdekung fon Amerike’ in Yiddish,“ Yivo bleter 5 (1933): 36; Roskies, “The Medium and Message,” 283; Shavit, “Literary Interference,” 385–415; Iris Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2014), 161–78; Idelson-Shein, “No Place Like Home,” 129–44; Garrett, “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 215–28; Rebecca Wolpe, “Judaizing Robinson Crusoe: Maskilic Translations of Robinson Crusoe,” Jewish Culture and History 13, no. 1 (2012): 42–67; Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation.

73. 73. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 5, 7.

74. 74. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 254.

75. 75. For an overview of the different medieval versions, and of the rich scholarship surrounding this literature, see Eli Yassif, “Ha-masorot ha-‘ivriyot al Aleksander Mokdon: Tavniut sipuriot u-mashma‘utan ba-tarbut ha-yehudit shel yemey ha-beynayim,” Tarbiz 75, no. 3/4 (2006): 359–407.

76. 76. For a discussion and analysis of the wondrous elements appearing in the Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romance, see Dudu Rotman, Drakonim, shedim u-meḥozot ksumim: ‘Al ha-mufl’a ba-sipur ha-‘ivri bi-yemey-ha-beynayim (Be’er Sheva, 2016), 235–93. On other early travel narratives and Jewish interest in faraway spaces, see Martin Jacobs, Reorienting the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World (Philadelphia, 2014); Limor Mintz Manor, “Ha-siaḥ al ha-olam ha-ḥadash ba-tarbut ha-yehudit ba-et ha-ḥadashah ha-mukdemet” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2011); Ossnat Sharon-Pinto, “Ha-pil, ha-livyatan, u-Ninveh ha-ir ha-gdolah: ‘Sivuv r’ Petahiya me-Regensburg’ ve-‘Midrash Yonah’ ve-hadpasatam yaḥdav,” Meḥkarey Yershalayim be-folklor yehudy 30 (2016): 37–73.

77. 77. Mattatyahu ben Shlomo Delacrut, Tsel ha-olam (c. 16th century; printed Amsterdam, 1733); An earlier printed version of Delacrut’s book appeared in Yiddish under the title Yedi’at olam (n.p., 1719).

78. 78. Iris Idelson-Shein, “Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 1 (2018): 28–59.

79. 79. Historie oder moralishe ertselung [fun] riter Gabein (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1789). See also Achim Jaeger, Ein jüdischer Artusritter: Studien zum jüdisch-deutschen ‘Widuwilt’ (‘Artushof’) und zum ‘Wigalois’ der Wirnt von Gravenberc (Tübingen, 2000), 337–50. This translation and its printing press is the focus of research in progress by Ossnat Sharon-Pinto.

80. 80. Idelson-Shein, JEWTACT #6, 144, 145, 146, 367. Erika Timm explains “the high proportion of orient-related [Yiddish] texts” in that “for many Jewish readers even the most unrealistic orient was still mizraḥ, and in their minds was near to Jerusalem.” This seems highly speculative and, given the prevalence of geographical literature in Yiddish, unlikely. See Erika Timm and Hermann Süss, Yiddish Literature in the Franconian Genizah (Jerusalem, 1988), 47.

81. 81. See on these issues Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind.

82. 82. See the discussion in Nancy Sinkoff, “Tradition and Transition: Mendel Lefin of Satanow and the Beginnings of the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996), viii–ix.

83. 83. Tissot’s book was also translated into Yiddish four years earlier by Moses Markuse. For an interesting comparison between the two works, see Chone Shmeruk, “Moshe Markuze fun Slonim un der makor fun zayn bukh ‘Ezer Yisro’el,’ ” in Sefer Dov Sadan: Kovets meḥkarim mugashim bimlot lo 75 shana, ed. Shmuel Werses (Tel Aviv, 1977), 361–82. Another translation that has been attributed to Lefin (albeit, not unproblematically) is that of Campe’s description of Willem Ysbrandsz Bontekoe’s East Indian travel narrative. See Oniya so’ara (Zolkiew, c. 1815). But see also Frieden, Travels in Translation, 183–99.

84. 84. Joachim Heinrich Campe, “Jacob Heemskerks und Wilhelm Barenz nördliche Entdeckungsreise und merkwürdige Schicksale,“ in Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend (Hamburg, 1785); Joachim Heinrich Campe, “Kapitän Wilson’s Schiffsbruch bei den Pelju-Inseln,” Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebechreibungen für die Jugend, vol. 9 (Braunschweig, 1791).

85. 85. Nancy Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanov,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London, 2001), 93–94, 97.

86. 86. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 180. See also Klausner, Historiya shel ha-sifrut ha-ivrit, 227–30, 235–37.

87. 87. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 203.

88. 88. For a discussion of Lefin’s omissions from Campe’s description of Wilson’s journey, see Frieden, Travels in Translation, 223–29.

89. 89. See Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind, 120–21, 128.

90. 90. A lengthy discussion of the whale, for instance, is entirely omitted from Lefin’s translation. Cf. Mendel Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam (Zolkiew, 1818), 45r; Campe, “Heemskerks und Barenz,” 16–20. Another lengthy discussion that is entirely expunged is the anthropological survey of the peoples of the north, to which Campe dedicated several pages, including illustrations. Cf. Campe, “Heemskerks und Barenz,” 81–103; Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 53r–v.

91. 91. Frieden does analyze Lefin’s treatment of the North Pole expedition, but focuses primarily on issues of language and style, arguing that “the content of the story … is less important than Lefin’s original Hebrew style.” Frieden, Travels in Translation, 230.

92. 92. Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse,” 91.

93. 93. Translation cited from Frieden, Travels in Translation, 247–48. For a reproduction of the Hebrew text, see Frieden, Travels in Translation, 244–46. This draft introduction is extant in manuscript in the Yosef Perl Archive, at the National Library in Jerusalem, ARC 4°1153/124. For unknown reasons, it was never published by Lefin.

94. 94. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 217.

95. 95. Cf. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 48v; Campe, “Heemskerks und Barenz,” 48.

96. 96. Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind, 161–70.

97. 97. Moshe Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-’arets ha-ḥadashah kolel kol ha-gevurot ve-ha-ma‘asim asher na‘asu le-et metso ha-’arets ha-zot (Altona, 1807), 21; for further examples, see 15–17, 20, 21–22, 25–26.

98. 98. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-’arets, 23.

99. 99. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-’arets, 123–24.

100. 100. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-’arets, 50.

101. 101. Mendelssohn-Frankfurt, Metsi’at ha-’arets, 71. On the relationship between the maskilic emphasis on domesticity and the choice to translate children’s travel tales in particular, see Idelson-Shein, “No Place Like Home,” 137–38.

102. 102. Campe, “Heemskerks und Barenz,” 108.

103. 103. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 55v.

104. 104. Frieden, Travels in Translation, 223.

105. 105. Frieden, Travels in Translation., 206.

106. 106. Campe, “Kapitän Wilson,” 16.

107. 107. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 20r.

108. 108. Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse,” 93.

109. 109. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 31r. See also the depiction of the Palauan king on p. 29r: “Whenever the king visited the British, he would look closely at the fruits of their industry, in order to learn and explain to his people whatever he could from the arts and deeds of the Europeans.”

110. 110. See Idelson-Shein, “No Place Like Home,” 136–37.

111. 111. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 37r–39r.

112. 112. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 38v; Campe, “Kapitän Wilson,” 303.

113. 113. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 39r; Campe, “Kapitän Wilson,” 306.

114. 114. Lefin, Mas‘ot ha-yam, 40r; Campe, “Kapitän Wilson,” 312.

115. 115. On Lefin’s disenchantment with the Berlin Haskalah, see Sinkoff, “Tradition and Transition,” 29–34.

116. 116. Translation from: Sinkoff, Tradition and Transition, 32–33. For the original in Jüdisch-Deutsch, see Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, Letter on the languages of the Jews, in Perl Archive, N.D. MS NLI ARC 4° 1153/134, fol. 4v–5r.

117. 117. Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières: Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris, 2019), 29.

118. 118. Antoine Lilti, “In the Shadow of the Public: Enlightenment and the Pitfalls of Modernity,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 8, no. 3–4 (2020): 256–77.