Beyond the Borders: Isaac Baer Levinsohn’s Efes Damim Translated into European Languages

Efes Damim (“No Blood”, 1837) is a well-known apologetic fiction work by a renowned Russian Jewish author Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860). Composed, at least explicitly, as a reaction to ritual murder accusation against Jews, and therefore addressed to the external audience, this work was devised to be translated from Hebrew – first of all, into Polish. However, the first language Efes Damim was translated into was English (in 1841), and the Russian and German versions followed more than 40 years later, decades after the author’s death. In this talk, I will discuss the way the Efes Damim was adapted, through the translations, into the different contexts the translators lived in; the difficulties they encountered while translating not only the language, but the very worldview Levinsohn lived with; and the differences between the original Hebrew text and the translations. I argue that, although Levinsohn did not reach his goal in refuting the ‘blood libels’, his book crossed several borders, physical and metaphorical, linguistical and mental, by being translated into other languages.