Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe, with Iris Idelson-Shein

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Between the Bridge and the Barricade explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. She reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allowed for early modern Jewish translators to make intensely creative and radical departures from the source texts—from “Judaizing” names, places, motifs, and language to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidentally. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures yet was uniquely Jewish in character.

As a site of intense negotiation between different cultures, communities, religions, readers, genres, and languages, these translations become an ideal entry point into the complex relationships between early modern Christians and Jews. At the same time, they also pose a significant challenge for modern-day scholars. But, for the careful reader, who can navigate the labyrinth of unacknowledged translations of non-Jewish sources into Jewish languages, there awaits a terrain of surprising intercultural encounters between Jews and Christians. Idelson-Shein uncovers the hitherto hidden non-Jewish corpus that played a decisive role in shaping early modern Jewish culture.

Iris Idelson-Shein is an associate professor in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her research interests include cultural translation, Old Yiddish literature, and the histories of science, gender, and the body in early modern Ashkenaz. Idelson-Shein received her PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2011, and has held visiting positions at Goethe University in Frankfurt, LMU Munich, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia. She is co-editor of German Jewish Cultures, a book series published by Indiana University Press, and a member of the Israel Young Academy.