Sacred Text in a Secular World: Old Yiddish Bibles in Modern German-Jewish Culture

During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, translations and adaptations of biblical texts from Hebrew into Yiddish enjoyed great popularity in the Ashkenazi communities of Central and Eastern Europe, with Bible-related texts predominating the corpus of Old Yiddish literature for centuries. With the Haskala movement of the late 18^th century, Old Yiddish Bibles (together with other religious texts in this language) came under fierce attack from the side of the Maskilim, who took great efforts to replace the traditional Old Yiddish translations with their own German versions of the sacred text. Yet the biblical works in Old Yiddish, which ceased to appear in the German lands already at the beginning of the 19^th century, were not entirely forgotten. They continued to be the object of translation, examination, and discussion in the work of 19^th- and early 20^th-century German-Jewish scholars. The engagement of these scholars with Old Yiddish biblical texts, which stands at the focus of this paper, entailed an interlingual translation – from Old Yiddish into German, as well as intricate acts of intercultural translation, which involved the relocation of the Old Yiddish biblical texts from their literary, historical, and cultural context of premodern Ashkenaz, to that of Jewish culture and scholarship in modern Germany. By exploring several cases of such "diachronic translation", this paper aims to shed light on a relatively unknown chapter not only in the history of Old Yiddish texts, but also in the cultural and intellectual history of the German Jews.