Conclusion Of Bridges and Barricades

Translation is often narrated through the metaphor of movement: texts migrate from one language to another; translators bring the text to the reader through domestication or move it away through foreignization; translation forms a bridge over which texts are carried and where cultures may meet. As Michael Emmerich notes, such metaphors “cleave so well both to the etymology of the word ‘translation’ itself and to the spatial metaphors implicit in the language we use when we speak of translation …, that at times it seems almost impossible to think of translation in any other way.”¹ Underlying these metaphors of movement is a sense of liberty, a feeling of limitlessness enabled by translation. Translations seem to allow us to travel throughout the world without visas, passports, or border crossings. They grant us the opportunity to encounter other cultures without the inconvenience of learning foreign languages or the discomfort of leaving our own familiar spaces.

There is, indeed, something almost inevitable about our tendency to talk about translation through metaphors of space and movement. If thinking about translation as set in space helps us, as Sherry Simon observes, “to try and make concrete an activity that eludes definition,”² then movement lets us maintain something of its mutability. Throughout this book, I too have located Jewish translation in a specific space—that of the early modern ghetto. But in contrast to the metaphor of movement and the sense of liberty from which it ensues, the site of the ghetto is one of segregation, designed specifically to restrict movement, to limit intercultural encounter and exchange.

Perhaps, however, in the context of translation, the distance between limit and liberty, segregation and encounter, is not so great after all. In fact, there is something deeply restrictive about the kind of liberty afforded by translation, which offers one of the safest forms of tourism, protecting the reader from all the hazards and challenges that a more direct encounter with foreignness entails. As Lawrence Venuti reminds us, it is the very purpose of translation to “[reconstitute] the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist it in the target language [and] to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar.”³ Thinking about translation in this way, as both a bridge and a barricade, may help us to understand why, contrary to our a priori expectations, translation, as a cultural and literary activity, raised virtually no resistance among early modern Jews.

As we have seen throughout this book, translation stirred authors from different, seemingly opposing corners of the Jewish literary world: rabbis and maskilim; Hebrew and Yiddish authors; Ashkenazi, Italian, and Sephardi Jews; converts into Judaism and converts out of it; printers and physicians; proponents of innovation and champions of conservation. These diverse writers translated their sources into different Jewish languages for different Jewish readerships, drew on texts from both Latin and the European vernaculars, translated into different registers and genres, employed different translational techniques, and understood translation in largely disparate ways. Further research is required to determine more fully the differences between the distinct corpora of Jewish translation. In attempting to offer a holistic overview of the phenomenon I have doubtless glossed over many disparities and idiosyncrasies. Much work still needs to be done to uncover the scope and character of Ladino and Judeo-Italian translation, as well as to determine the relationship between Jewish translation in Europe and outside of it. The study of translations designed for early modern Jews in other languages and scripts is a further desideratum. Still, the diverse body of translations surveyed in the chapters above suggests a firm and widespread belief among early modern Jews that rendering foreign texts in Hebrew script was vital for Jewish literary, linguistic, religious, and cultural survival.

The dialectical nature of Jewish translation was made possible by the unusual linguistic and orthographic reality that characterized Jewish society in early modern Europe. It was the unique status of Hebrew script, almost entirely inaccessible to non-Jews and almost universally accessible to Jews, that facilitated the emergence of a kind of parallel Jewish literary universe. Within this self-contained “other dimension,” Jews could converse with one another on the issues of the day, using the same works that circulated in Christian Europe but in a domesticated, Judaized form. Jewish translation thus allowed Jews to participate in the cultural ferment that took over early modern Europe from a position of safety, and to consume Christian works without the hazards of venturing outside the Jewish cultural realm.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule; indeed, translation into Yiddish and Hebrew could be—and at times was—envisioned as a means of bringing Jews closer to Christianity, even to the point of subsuming them. This holds particularly true for the various missionary translations that appeared throughout the early modern period.⁴ These translations were motivated by an understanding of translation that was almost diametrically opposed to the one surveyed in the chapters above. As Aya Elyada has demonstrated, Christian missionaries, writing in Hebrew characters, attempted to mimic the style and language of Jewish works, thus coupling translation with deception.⁵ Clad in artificial Jewish garments, such pseudo-Jewish translations provide a fascinating glimpse into Christian perceptions of Jews. But they also display an essential misunderstanding of what Jewish translation set out to achieve. In direct contrast to these missionary translations, Jewish translators did not desire to deceive their readers, nor did they aspire to assimilate Jews into another religion or culture. On the contrary, as a cultural and literary phenomenon, Jewish translation consisted of the attempt to assimilate Christian texts into the Jewish literary sphere, to convert Christian texts into Jewish ones. In this sense, missionary translations were paragons of the problem of untranslatability.

But the intricacies of early modern Jewish translation were not only misunderstood by early modern missionaries; modern scholars have also mistaken them. We have grown so accustomed to thinking about translation through its European Christian versions that translations that do not fit the missionary mold are often either marginalized (as in the case of most early modern translations) or misunderstood (as has often been the case with maskilic translations). This tendency to overlook divergent ways of thinking about translation extends beyond the field of early modern Jewish history. In part, it is the centrality of Christian European understandings of translation, particularly their missionary and colonialist expressions, that informs the contemporary suspicion towards translation and the rise of untranslatability as a cause célèbre in such fields as comparative and world literature.⁶ Ironically, in its disregard for differing notions of translation, this insistence on untranslatability in contemporary European and North American academic discourse often reproduces the same Eurocentrism that it sets out to critique.⁷

A wider, more comparative view of translation both within and beyond Europe reveals, however, that Jews were not singular in their understanding of translation as a means of both engagement with and resistance to hegemonic languages and literatures. Maria Tymoczko has demonstrated how the translation strategies employed by modern Irish translators changed according to the particular historical contexts in which they operated. In some cases, Irish translators exhibited “the tendency … to introject the [English] colonizers’ values and standards.”⁸ In others, translation was a form of resistance to English culture and a way of defining Irishness in opposition to Englishness.⁹ Finally, for some Irish translators, translation functioned as a way of establishing “an autonomous cultural stance … irrespective of the colonizing power’s approbation or condemnation.”¹⁰ From the works of Brazilian theorists and translators such as Oswaldo de Andrade and Haraldo de Campos we have learned that translation may also be used to reverse the power structures inherent in colonialism, enabling translators to “cannibalize” the literature of the colonizing culture, so as to strengthen and invigorate the culture of the colonized.¹¹ For Homi Bhabha, the very impossibility of smooth (cultural) translation “moves the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, … towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference.”¹² In all of these accounts, translation functions as a means not (or not only) of eliminating difference, but of coming to terms with it.

My own account of Jewish translation joins these alternative understandings of the cultural meanings and functions of translation. Throughout the chapters above, I have tried to make visible the phenomenon of early modern Jewish translations in two separate but interrelated ways. First, I have attempted to demonstrate that during the early modern period, European Jews were constantly, in one form or another, in dialogue with their Christian contemporaries. Whether they produced translations of their own or consumed translations produced by others, early modern Jews were deeply embedded in the non-Jewish cultures and literatures of their non-Jewish surroundings. Any attempt to understand European Jewish culture and literature thus necessarily entails locating them in their wider multilingual contexts.

Secondly, I have attempted to show that while Jewish translators have often been viewed as either advocates of acculturation or agents of assimilation, in fact they were careful and critical consumers of their surrounding cultures. For these translators, translation was a solution to a problem, a middle ground between isolation and assimilation. In their approach toward their non-Jewish sources, Jewish translators were thus simultaneously submissive and subversive; they accepted, yet they adapted—they at once embraced and rejected their sources. Translation thus served as a way of bringing Jews and Christians together, but also of setting them apart.