From Metaphors to Mechanisms: Facts and Figures of Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe

Browsing through recent studies on the history of pre-modern European Jews, one often encounters such terms as "cultural entanglement,” or “connected histories.” These terms are used to try and make sense of the undeniable parallels between the literature and culture of medieval and early modern European-Jewish communities and those of their surrounding environments. The realization that such parallels exist is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Over the past three decades, historians of Jewish life, literature and culture in medieval and early modern Europe, have demonstrated that large paradigm shifts, intellectual trends, and cultural transitions left their mark on Jewish literature and art, where they often appeared in a heavily domesticated form. Thanks to recent studies, we now know that Jewish writers of different strata and languages actively engaged the cultures of their immediate and even remote environments in different, often complex ways, and yet, we still do not quite know how; how did ideas, information, intellectual trends, or scientific discoveries, move between early modern Christians and Jews? And which transformations did they undergo along the way?

This paper urges us to move beyond the productive yet ambiguous metaphors of “cultural entanglement”—to a discussion of demonstrable mechanisms of cultural transfer between early modern Christians and Jews. The paper builds on a bibliographic survey of over 500 translations of texts from European languages to Hebrew script, made available through the JEWTACT digital database. Drawing on this database, I trace the major routes of the migration of texts from non-Jewish literatures to Jewish ones, offering initial answers to such questions as: What were the primary sources for Jewish translation in early modern Europe? What were the main genres and languages in which these sources appeared? What were the selection criteria for the translation of European works into Jewish languages? At the same time, I will offer an overview of the main characteristics of each translational site and language, tracing the shifts and transformations which occurred within and between these sites throughout the period.