Worldly Wisdom and the Jewish Tradition of Translation

A Yiddish translation of “Arabian Nights” sounds like the set-up to a Borscht Belt joke. Yet, as a recent finalist for a National Jewish Book Award shows, such a work is not only real, it testifies to the intellectual dynamism of the Jewish people throughout the ages.

As the Israeli scholar Iris Idelson-Shein documents in her “Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in 1718, an anonymously produced version of the Arab folktale collection appeared under the title “mar’ot ha-tsovot,” or “Mirrors of the Assembling Women.” In the preface, the translator writes “I have called this book a mirror of the world [shpigl for der velt] or ‘mar’ot ha-tsovot’ because it reflects the entire world in all its flaws and glories.” 

Over two long introductions, the unnamed writer then describes the religious, moral, cultural and didactic merits of the work, which includes Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor. It, he states, incorporates a wealth of knowledge from around the world and provides educational content for parents to use for their children. Anticipating some push-back from his community, the translator adds, as Idelson-Shein puts it, “even though there are those who will view the work as a mere cornucopia of fables, the essential morality of such tales is a well-known fact of Jewish tradition. Indeed, he argues, the ancient Jewish sages themselves ‘provided various tales and fables in order to bring men under the bond of morality [den mentshen in musar tsu brengen].’”

Incorporating the best of world literature, “Between the Bridge and Barricade” argues, helped Jews emerge into the modern era. Between 1450 and 1800, countless books were made accessible from European languages and Latin through Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Italian versions. They were produced by Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, printers and doctors, rabbis and proponents of the Enlightenment. “Translations,” writes Idelson-Shein, “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.”

During these centuries of social, political  and technological upheaval, using translation to filter in, or bridge, useful scientific, spiritual and educational knowledge “was vital for Jewish literary, linguistic, religious, and cultural survival,” as barricading out less edifying material. In one of the more striking examples of repurposing, a 1709 Yiddish prayer book by Aharon ben Shmuel Hergershausen turns out to have been largely an unacknowledged translation of a German prayer book by a Lutheran theologian named Johann Habermann produced in 1567 and titled “Christian prayers for all needs and estates in all of Christendom.” Around 16 of the 23 Yiddish tkhines, or personal prayers, that appeared in Hergershausen’s work were borrowed from Habermann’s, reworked with Jewish flavoring. Another Yiddish prayer collection utilized Protestant morning hymns composed by Martin Luther himself. 

More often than not, the translators were aware that their project came with significant challenges and spiritual dangers as they encountered opportunities for cultural exchange. Simmering beneath the surface of the entire endeavor was “a deep ambivalence towards non-Jewish culture and an acute awareness of the dangers inherent in direct, unmediated exposure to that culture.” Thus they strove to strike a balance between imitation and innovation, copying and re-creating.

The diverse range of works chronicled by Idelson-Shein using the Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer database, including Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” into Hebrew, tales of Christian Knights retold in Yiddish but about great rabbis, “Robinson Crusoe” (also Yiddish, in 1719) and the Vilna Gaon’s son’s translation of the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s “Histoire Naturelle” “was a reflection on modernity, a wide-ranging, multivalent debate over its tensions, promises, hazards, and contradictions.” 

Through translation, Jews were able to navigate the unrelenting winds of change sweeping through their world, allowing writers to “both conceal the foreignness of their new ideas and texts, and, at the same time, adapt their sources to the norms, world views and requirements of the target Jewish culture.” As the historian Daniel Schwartz put it in a recent issue of the journal Sapir, “by selectively absorbing and tweaking the linguistic forms, cultural frames and intellectual currents of theirGentile neighbors even as they maintained their communal borders — be they physical or invisible — Jews kept Judaism from petrifying.”

Subject to ever-shifting political powers, cultural currents, religious polemics and rapidly-changing technological developments, Jews turned to translation as a mediating force, accepting but adapting, leaving our textual tradition as the People of the Book immeasurably richer as modernity moved unceasingly forward.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”