What can we learn from diachronic comparison of English traditional Haggadah translations from 1770-now about the Jewish communities they were created for.

The Haggadah text is central to Jewish identity and ritual. Balin (1999) states that each printed Haggadah can be seen as a barometer registering the mood of a particular Jewish community in its time and place. I will argue that each printed translated Haggadah can be seen as a barometer registering the mood of a particular translator in his/her time, place and culture, thinking of a particular Jewish community while translating. This lecture focuses on the English translations of the traditional Ashkenazi Haggadah and how variant translations reflect cultural-historical developments of the communities they were created for.

This lecture is a summary of PhD research by the speaker who examined hundreds of English Haggadot from 1770 (the first English translation) to modern times. The sheer mass of different texts necessitated that, in addition to traditional close reading methods, a variety of distant reading tools for computer-assisted analysis of texts (algorithmic and ‘distant’ readings) be used, coupled with visualization of results in the form of graphs, visually annotated texts, etc., in order to identify patterns and shifts requiring explanation. Hence, a digital corpus with 106 different English translations was created on which corpus analysis was done.

The translation changes and shifts thus found are compared with cultural-historical developments.

Balin, C.B. (1999) “The Modern Transformation of the Ancient Passover Haggadah” In: Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Lawrence Hoffman p. 189. University of Notre Dame Press.