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Iris Idelson-Shein, "Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe" (U Penn Press, 2024)
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Hello and welcome to the New Books and Jewish Studies Channel of the New Books Network Podcast. My name is Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here today with Iris Adelson Schein. We'll be talking about her new book, between the Bridge and the Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe. One of the constants of Jewish history is that Jews have learned from the cultures around them. But this exchange of information was not an easy endeavor. Not only did Jews speak a different language, but their cultural touch points were different. If they were to learn from the people around them, their translations had to be deliberate, sometimes taking creative license in order to create buy in among the Jewish community. Between the Bridge and the Barricade explores how translations of non Jewish texts into Jewish language impacted Jewish culture, literature and history from the 16th century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Adelson Schein charts major paths of textual migration from non Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translations, translators, motives and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in the Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer called the JEWT Database, Adelson Schein reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allow for early modern Jewish translations to make intensely creative and radical departure from the source texts. From quote Judaizing names, places and motifs and languages to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidentally. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures, yet was uniquely Jewish in character. Between the Bridge and the Barricade isn't just about translation though. It's about how ideas spread, how people learn, how identity is formed, and it helps explain how we got the Judaism we have today. So welcome.
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Iris Adelson Schein
Thank you, thank you so much for that great presentation.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you and why did you write this book?
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Iris Adelson Schein
So I am a literary historian of early modern Europe. I specialize particularly in Jews in the German speaking realm and I teach at the Department of Jewish History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. And why did I write this book? So I, you know, I. One of the, one of the ways I got to this book was kind of a roundabout way because I never actually studied Jewish history myself. I studied my training as a European historian. I studied at Tel Aviv University in what we somewhat provincially in Israel called general history, which is really just European Christian history. And as someone who grew up in a secular Jewish family and as a woman, I always felt that pre modern Jewish texts were none of My business, I didn't have the kind of training that was necessary in order to be able to. To read those kinds of texts. And so I was very interested, though, in minority majority relationships in the 18th century and in the early modern period more generally. And I had planned to write a dissertation about constructions of race in the German Enlightenment. And my advisor, my dissertation supervisor, who was Shulamit Vorkov, who's brilliant historian of Germany, suggested that I have a look at the ways that Jews were depicted in German literature of the time. And I did, and it was very interesting. And it got me thinking about the fact that Jews were. There was something special about Jews in the sense that they weren't just objects of this German racial scrutiny, but they were all also writing works of their own to respond to these depictions. And they were creating notions of identity and difference of their own. And I, very hesitantly at first, found myself reading Hebrew texts from the 18th century. And as I began to do that, it very quickly occurred to me that while I was reading, I wasn't reading those kinds of opaque and very unfamiliar texts that I'd expected to find, but I was actually reading texts that were very familiar to me. And in some cases, I was reading unacknowledged translations of texts that I'd already read before in German or in French. And that sparked my interest in translation as a form of dialogue between Christians and Jews. At first, I worked on specific translations, and I became kind of a detective of translations of sorts. I would take books that are usually considered to be Jewish, books that have nothing to do with the surrounding culture, and I would show that they are, in fact, translations of works from Latin, German, French and so on. And I thought, well, I have to write a book about this. But that took time because I needed the research to mature. But I also needed to convene a group in order to be able to do that. But I think we're going to. We'll have the opportunity to talk about that in a little bit. So that's. That's really where this book originates.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And let's talk about the title. So the title includes two images, the Bridge and the Barricade. I'm wondering if you can talk about each of those elements in the title. And not only why did you choose the title, but what is the bridge and what is the barricade that you're referring to?
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Iris Adelson Schein
Yeah, so we. We often tend to think about translation in spatial categories or spatial metaphors. There's a wonderful book by a scholar of translation called Sherry Simon, who says that we use these spatial metaphors to try and make concrete an activity that eludes definition. And I think she's quite right. One of the most perhaps ubiquitous metaphors is the Tower of Babel. You'll find the image of the Tower of Babel in numerous books on translation, posters and so on. Usually if you look at posters, you just write translation on Google Images and search for that. You'll find many, many uses of Pieter Brueger's image of the building of the Tower of Babel, and so on. And another ubiquitous metaphor is, of course, the metaphor of the bridge, right? So there's this idea that translation is a way of bridging between cultures, between communities, between languages. It's a way of coming together, making people closer. And that's an image that you'll find already pretty early. It's a notion of translation as kind of the harmonious coming together of people from different cultures and a way of connecting people across gaps. But in recent years, there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with this specific metaphor. There's talk of, you know, burning the bridge of translation or decolonizing the bridge of translation and so on. And scholars have justifiably drawn our attention to the fact that translation doesn't just bring us together, it also sets people apart. It also erases difference. It's also complicit in missions of colonization, in the mission, the Christian mission. It also contributes to the disappearance of languages and eliminates the need to learn languages other than English, say, or other dominant languages, and so on. So there's been a lot of critique surrounding the notion, the use of that metaphor, of. Of the bridge. And scholarship has kind of shifted to emphasizing translation as a border, as something that not only bridges differences but also sets them up. Now, in the book, what I try and argue is that both of these perspectives do teach us something about translation. Translation is. It does bridge people, it does connect people, and it is also complicit in setting up borders, in conveying sometimes negative ideas that make it across the bridge in colonization, in missionization, and so on and so forth. But it does both of these things. And what I do is I offer a third kind of spatial metaphor, which is that of the ghetto, which may at first sound like another, you know, variation on the notion of the British. But what I have in mind specifically is the early modern Jewish ghetto, which, as the historian Robert Bonfil has taught us, was a way of segregating, but it was also a way of allowing Jews to be part of the wider society. If you look at the early modern period. There really were two dominant ways of treating the problem of Jewish existence within Christian society. One was expulsion, which the ghetto prevented. The ghetto allowed Jews to remain within Christian society, but from kind of a safe distance, which allowed. He writes that this was a way of closing in order to permit opening and segregation to mediate integration. So what I argue in the book is that translation kind of mimicked that same rationale of the ghetto. It allowed Jews to remain clothed within their own cultural spaces, but to also be able to absorb the surrounding culture. And if I could just speak about this for one more moment, then I originally had a different title in mind for the book. The press kind of convinced me to reformulate the title, but my original title was Not To Need Another Nation. And that I think that it comes from a really beautiful text written by one Rabbi Shaul Halevi of the hague in the 18th century, where he talks about translation. He kind of reflects on translation and he says, you know, there was a time in which Jews had all the knowledge in the world, and now we've lost it because of the exile and the Gentiles have taken it over. And he writes that what do we do? Well, if an Israelite should navigate among the nations to learn sciences from foreign books, waves of foreign knowledge will divert him from the straight path. So you have this problem. There's knowledge. You want to participate in that knowledge, you want to be able to absorb that knowledge, but it's also dangerous, right? It can divert you from the straight path. And then he says, well, the solution is translation, because translation allows us, he writes, to restore the crown to its original splendor and wisdom to its proper dwellings, so that Israel shall not need another nation. So you can see here a view of translation that is very unique and very interesting and complex, in which translation functions as both a bridge and a barricade. It brings people together. It prevents cultural isolation, but it also prevents cultural assimilation.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
In your book, you use the word domestication a lot to talk about what's going on. Can you speak a little bit about that process of domestication and how it dovetails with what you just talked about?
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Iris Adelson Schein
Yes. So let me just very briefly explain what domestication is. So domestication is a very well known term in translation studies. It's. It's usually defined as a way of making the text feel less foreign to the target readership. It's a way of diminishing or erasing the foreignness of the text. And in essence, any translation is to some extent domesticated just by Taking a text from one language and transfer it and get into another language, you've already done something to make it feel and sound less foreign. And there's a great kind of. One of the first thinkers to think about translation and domestication was Friedrich Schleiermacher, who said that translators always have two options. They either bring the text to the reader or bring the reader to the text. Nowadays we tend to think about domestication less in kind of that, in that dichotomous kind of way. We realise that translations can be both domesticating and foreignizing. But there has been a movement in recent years to more foreignising works. I remember that when I was a child, translations of Robinson Crusoe, for instance, Friday would be called Sheshet in Hebrew, Alice in Wonderland would be called Aliza in Hebrew and so on. Whereas today it'll be Alice and Friday simply in Hebrew letters. So there has been a trend towards more foreignizing or less domesticated translations. But in the context of early modern Jewish translation, the essence of translation was domestication. So when Jews translated in this period, the goal was to take these foreign texts and to make them Jewish. And this was done in a number of ways. I would say that. And there are several motivations for this. I would say the main motivation was to make these texts kosher, to make them more palatable to Jews, to detoxify. They actually speak in those terms. There's a great saying by Rabbi Yaakov Emden, one of the great rabbis of the 18th century, where he says that, sure, foreign literature has its benefits and you can learn a lot from it. But he writes that what little honey floats on the surface of foreign texts merely masks the venom that lurks in their depths. And so you need to detoxify these works in order to make them safer for Jews. And there are different ways of doing that. One way of doing that is to eliminate any trace of Christianity within these texts or of other religions. So you'll have texts that whenever there's, for instance, you can have a story, and if in that story a priest appears or there's a church someone goes to, that'll simply become something else. That the church will become a shop, the priest will become a merchant and so on. That's a very mild form of domestication through a mission. There are more polemical ways of domestication. In some cases, Jews will use derogatory terms to replace Christian terms. The most famous example is the use of the word, the Yiddish derogatory term tiffle for the German kirche kirche being a church and tiefle being kind of a play on words where Tifla resembles the Hebrew word Tefillah prayer, but also tefill, something that is distasteful. So that's kind of one example of that. So that often happens as well. And sometimes you'll find texts in which the entire story is simply entirely Judaized. You know, I mentioned Robinson Crusoe before, so there's a pretty late translation in which Robinson Crusoe becomes a Jewish merchant from Galicia, his Friday becomes a Judaized servant by the name of Shabbos. You know, Robinson is constantly preoccupied in how to keep kosher on the island and so on. So that's a very aggressive form of domestication. But I would venture to say that almost all Jewish translations that you'll find in the early modern period participate in domesticating in some way or another. And perhaps the most interesting thing to find is the fact that even translations that are translations for the translators themselves, the manuscript translations that weren't made for distribution weren't supposed to reach any kind of audience. They are still domesticated. So it's such a pervasive norm that it really shapes the way Jews think about translation. It's not just a measure for making these texts safer or more palatable, it's actually the essence of Jewish translation in this period.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And it really feels like it, it was foundational to early modern Judaism. You speak in the book also about, you know, later eras of Judaism. Let's talk it. Let's talk just kind of modern Judaism instead of early modern Judaism, the era of Mendelssohn and things like that. I'm wondering if you could just kind of take us a little bit on that journey from medieval translation, which you touch on very briefly in the book, to then why it changed and became so different in the early modern period with domestication, with really an explosion of translations happening, and then how it did change as the early modern period ended and you ended up in the Enlightenment.
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Iris Adelson Schein
Okay, so let me start by saying that Jewish translation in the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment has been extensively studied, whereas translation in the early modern period was up until recently considered to be virtually non existent. And there are reasons for this which we'll get to, but I'll start with the Middle Ages. So translation in the Middle Ages occurred primarily in the Iberian context. It was a huge project, a very elite project, and it clearly inspired early modern translators to an extent, to a certain degree. When Jews translate in the early modern period, they usually, in many cases, I would venture to say most cases, they don't actually acknowledge their sources and they don't reflect too much on the fact of translating. But when they do and when they feel the need to justify what they're doing, and they will turn to the Middle Ages and they'll say here what we're doing is no different from what Maimonides did, or they'll reference Shmuel IBN Tibon and so on. So they have this project in mind as they're translating. And there are certainly continuities, particularly if you look at what's going on in Italy, because Italy did have this tradition of translation in the late Middle Ages and even earlier, but predominantly in the late Middle Ages. So for the Italian Jews translating in the early modern period, they are continuing a medieval tradition, but there are significant differences as well, because Italian Jews become more linguistically assimilated during the early modern period. And so whereas earlier translations from Latin would have been a way of encountering Latin literature, in the early modern period, most Italian Jews from, I would say the 17th and certainly in the 18th century would have been able to read Italian texts much better than they would have been able to read Hebrew texts. But there are also other differences, very significant differences between what's going on in the Middle Ages and what's going on in the early modern period, first of all, the spaces of translation change. So I've mentioned Italy, but the real explosion of translation in the early modern period happens in Ashkenaz, where translation is almost an entirely new phenomenon. So as translation kind of moves from the Iberian peninsula into Central and Eastern Europe, it changes significantly. One of the things that will change will be the source languages. Iberian translators had relied predominantly on Arabic source texts and later on Latin source texts. Ashkenazi translators will rely a lot on German, Dutch, other European vernacular. Latin will continue to play an important role, but Arabic won't. The target languages will also change. So the medieval project of translation was a project of translation into Hebrew, but the project of translation in the early modern period is a project of translation into Hebrew, but also Yiddish, Ladino, and to some extent judo, Italian. There'll be new genres, new kinds of works. There'll suddenly be translations of prose works which were very, very rare in the earlier period. Much less emphasis on philosophy, which was kind of a very big genre for the medieval translators. And of course, print will make a huge difference. There'll be new audiences. These texts that are being translated are now not only for this small, tiny elite of Hebrew reading, Jewish men who can attain these manuscripts, but it's read by women, it's read by possibly children, by non elite men. So you really have to employ new considerations and think more carefully about what kinds of texts you're translating, how you're going to translate them, and so on. So you really can't see this project as a continuation of the medieval project. I would say that this is a new. A new project, a new way of thinking about translation. I think things get a little less clear when you talk about the Haskalah. One of the questions I think the book raises is to what extent is the Haskalah really, or at least in its early stages, the 18th century and early 19th century Haskalah, to what extent is this really an entirely different movement, an entirely different phenomenon?
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And for, for our listeners, give like a paragraph on the Haskalah. What is it in case people don't know that term?
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Iris Adelson Schein
Yeah, so the Haskalah is. That's, that's a tough question. The Haskalah is a term that is given to a. A way of thinking or a group of authors, predominantly Hebrew authors, that begin to produced texts in the 1780s, primarily, first preliminarily in Berlin and later in Galicia. And the movement kind of moved towards Eastern Europe. And there's a lot of debate about what the borders of the Haskalah actually are usually, I think Shmuel Feiner, who's kind of the great historian of the Haskalah, has given the definition that has really stuck, which is that the Haskalah is the Hebrew case ofis, the Jewish case of the Enlightenment. And he urges us to use the term the Jewish Enlightenment. But there's also been a lot of pushback from scholars of the 19th century, like Olga Litvak, who says, well, maybe the Haskalah, which really peaks in the 19th century, isn't the Jewish Enlightenment, maybe it's romanticism. So I won't get into all of that, but it does have to do with my project as well, because I really only deal with the early Haskalah up until the 1820s in the book. And my argument is that in contrast to many. I mean, in many cases, the Haskalah is viewed as kind of has this kind of Promethean image, right? The Maskilim convened in Berlin, and up until the late 18th century, Jews in Ashkenaz were kind of only reading rabbinical literature, and there was nothing else, and they didn't have any idea of what was going on outside of Judaism. And then the Maskilim arrive in Berlin. They bring modernity into Judaism for the first time, and they do it via translation. Gidon Turi, who's a great scholar of translation and really one of the greatest scholars of translation in general and of the Haskalah, Maskilic translation in particular, will say that the Maskiline, when they wanted to initiate this project of Jewish modernity, they didn't have any example, any models for modernity. So what they did is they brought them from outside through translation. The problem is that when you look at early modern translation and when you start to begin to discover this kind of huge project of translation that was going on in the 16th, 17th and early 18th century, before the Haskalah, it complicates that notion that nothing was there before the Haskalan, that the Maskilim had to. And that Maskilic translation was necessarily something revolutionary and new. And so what I've tried to show in the book is this continuity between what was going on in the early modern period, particularly in Yiddish, and what the Maskilim were doing. And the more I work on Yiddish translation, Yiddish literature in the 18th century, the less novel the Haskalah appears to me. And I think that's, of course, there are significant differences. There are new genres. There are new. The Maskilim are really interested in children's literature, which is a new genre. They're much more interested in philosophy than earlier Ashkenazi translators. They're more interested in kind of highbrow European or German poetry, but they still are very. They will reproduce a lot of the norms and genres and techniques of earlier translators into Yiddish.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
You did say, though, and correct me if I misunderstood your point later in the book, that some of the hallmarks of early modern translation gets softened, let's say, or even disappear in the Haskalah. For example, the idea that in the Haskalah people are much more apt to credit their sources, as opposed to an early modern Judaism where they don't want to tell you they took, you know, this particular story from a Christian source, or that the idea of domestication is much more downplayed. Authenticity becomes a little more important in the Haskalah than it did in the early modern period, where you could change anything you wanted to and it was fine. That is one of the points you make in the book, correct?
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Iris Adelson Schein
The first point, absolutely. The Maskilim are much more. The Maskulim are writing in a period in which they're writing in Germany. There is a lot of discussion in Germany about norms of translation and the importance of transparency in translation. And the musculim are absorbing a lot of that, even though in some cases you will find that they distinguish between translation into Jewish languages and translations into Germans. One of the fascinating cases is Mose Mendelssohn, who's probably the only name of a translator I will say that anyone will be familiar to anyone hearing this podcast. So Moses Mendelssohn translates into, on the one hand into German and on the other hand into Hebrew. And it's fascinating to see that he employs different norms of translation when he translates into these two different languages. When he translates into German, he credits his sword source. He remains anonymous. He creates a translation that is very, very close to the source, whereas when he translates into Hebrew, he doesn't mention the source at all. It's a much more liberal translation. So there's still kind of a difference between. But yes, absolutely. As the Haskalah progresses into the 19th century, there is an expectation that translators be more transparent about their use of non Jewish sources, and they begin to even take pride in these sour to the point where they even sometimes take pride in sources they never actually used. You'll have translators saying, oh, we translated Buffon. But in fact, they're translating some children's book that does translate or adapt, Buffon. But they are still very, very interested in domestication. You'll still find that these translations are domesticated and there's been a debate as to why. In fact, one of the most I mentioned this translation of Robinson Crusoe' and it's called Die Schichtechte van alter Leb, the story of old Leb, which is a very traditional kind of Jewish name. This is a very deeply domesticated translation, and it is a masculine translation. So the translations that the Haskalat, the masculine, produce, I would say that they are no less domesticated, but they often don't try and conceal the fact that they're translating, even though that does still happen sometimes. And the question that many have raised us is why are these translations domesticated? And the prevalent view up until recently has been that what they're trying to do is to propagate radical ideas under the guise of traditional works. So, for instance, someone will translate, as shown that one of the authors of Hamasef, which is a very prominent masculic journal, translates Vouso, but presents it as the thought of Maimonides. And she says, you know, what he's trying to do is to disseminate this very radical form of enlightening thinking, but associate it with. With a traditional kind of Jewish thinker. I don't think this is the case because I think there was never really much opposition to translation. They didn't need to conceal the fact that they were using non Jewish sources. Everyone was using non Jewish sources. And my suspicion is that most readers would have known when they were reading a translation. They just didn't really care so much. I think it really has to do with the fact that this is how they think about translation. The domestication is translation, and it remains translation for these thinkers well into the 19th century. Even in later translations beyond the Haskalah, there'll be translators who say, well, we're translating Shakespeare to get back at the British who took our works. So it really is a very Jewish way. I would say it's a very Ashkenazi way of thinking of translation up until, say, the late 19th century.
- [36:22]
Rabbi Mark Katz
One of the discussions that I found the most fascinating in your section on the Haskalah was that about travel literature and the role that travel literature played for these thinkers. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about Jewish translations of travel literature and why it really wasn't about travel as much as you would think.
- [36:44]
Iris Adelson Schein
Yeah. So I started to work on travel literature in the Haskalah in my first book. And one of the things that I was really fascinated by was the fact that these translators, these masculine, were very, very interested in travel, which is no I mean, there's nothing very unusual about that. The 18th century, travel was a very, very popular genre of writing. But they were interested in a specific kind of travel literature, which was travel tales for children. And they would translate them in, you know, disproportionately. They were represented very, very disproportionately within the canon or the library of masculic translations. And it was clearly not about demand, as opposed to what was going on in French literature and English literature when everyone wanted to read these travel books. In the case of the Haskalah, they were translating these works into Hebrew, into biblical Hebrew. So very few people would have been able to read it. And they were producing these texts at such a rate that it was really. It was hard to explain why this was so popular. It was to the point where it was kind of a masculic initiation rite to translate a travel book. The children. And just to give you a sense how scarcely these books were read, often when I take these books in the library, I have to cut open the pages myself. And it's very clear that no one's ever read these books, or no one read it for pleasure. Then it's probably just me and a small group of other scholars who are interested in it. So this raised two questions for me. One was why travel literature? And why specifically travel literature for children? And as I read through this literature, I found two things that kept coming up. One was the way that these Maskilim were using translation, travel as a metaphor, as a metaphor for the Haskalah project, for their own kind of endeavors, their own cultural endeavor. And it was a very comfortable way of talking about the Haskalah. Because if you're a Jewish author in this period, you will often have to explain why you are venturing outside of the Jewish cultural and literary realm. You will be aware of the fact that, as that saying by Rabbi Shaul Halevi of the Hague exemplifies, you may be diverted or swept by the tide of non Jewish knowledge. So this way of thinking about acquiring knowledge as a way of traveling outside and having to deal with all the dangers or the hazards and travails of faraway sea travel, it's really ingrained within Jewish notions of knowledge consumption in this period. But it's also a way of accentuating just how important this. This project is. So just to give one example, you have a Maskile by the name of Moses Mendelssohn, Frankfurt, not to be confused with the more famous Moses Mendelssohn, who translates a book about the discovery of America by Joachim Heinrich Campe, who's a superstar for these masculine, he's very, very prominent source for most of them. And he tells the story, or this anecdote of how Columbus, when he sets out to discover America, he goes first to the Corps de Genoa, which is his homeland, and he tells them, well, I want to set off to discover a new passageway. And they dismiss him. And in the German sources, this is told kind of in matter of fact way, but for Mendelssohn Frankter, this is huge. So he goes back and he really develops a scene and he goes back to it several times in the book and he says, well, this is the way of the wise man. He will always try to better his country, his people's situation, and they will always be doubtful of him. But still he'll go back and he'll try to awaken them and will try to benefit them, even if they admonish him. It's clear, it's very, very clear that he's talking about himself. And this is just one of many, numerous examples. So I think that's why they're so interested in travel. Why children's literature though, why travel books for children? And here I think this goes back to the issue of domesticity, of domestication, because if you were to translate, if you're writing for a European audience in this period, then you're writing for an audience that is interested in faraway Trav and also very deeply interested in the colonization of distant lands. And it's not the Jews, aren't. They are too. But in this particular project, it has little to do with European expansionism, I think, and much more to do with the question of acculturation. You don't want, if you're a masculine, and you're using trans travel as a metaphor for the masculine project, you don't want your traveler to settle out in some, you know, desert island in the Caribbean. You want him to come back, back. And this ideal of coming back, of coming back with the findings and the riches of the journey, really coincides with the norms of children's literature, which, if you think about travel tales for children, at the end of the day, the child will always come back, right? The hero, the protagonist, they're always going to come back because that's what you want to kind of market to children. This is the home of is. There's no place like home, right? So I think that really serves them very, very nicely. They find this literature and they say, ah, this is the kind of message that we want to deliver to our readers.
- [43:08]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Nobody Dies on the way there or home in children's literature. Exactly. So can we talk a little bit about your method? So your book owes a lot to the Jutakt database. And unlike a lot of books, actually, you really talk about your method throughout the book instead of talking about it in the introduction and then just giving the details afterwards. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what the Jutat database is. What is it and why is it so important? And why talk about it throughout the course of the book?
- [43:41]
Iris Adelson Schein
So the Jutat database. I mentioned earlier that I'd become interested in translation, but it was clear to me that in order to actually work on translation, I would need to collaborate with others. And this is because there are several challenges in working on this corpus. The first challenge is, of course, that it's a corpus that is made up of so many languages. Just over the course of past few minutes, I've mentioned texts that are translations of works in German, Latin, Italian. But there's also texts that are translated from Dutch, from any number of languages, any European. Just name a European vernacular. There is a Jewish translation. And the target languages are also very diverse. You have Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Judo, Italian. And that's one challenge. The next challenge is the fact that no one had worked on this before. In contrast to what was going on in the context of medieval translations, where you had this huge bibliography by Morris Steinschneider and others who'd worked on medieval translation, the widespread consensus was that during the early modern period, there were very few translations. And translations, if they existed, they weren't up to par. They were very different from what was going on in the medieval. In the modern period. And Jews were being kind of. The idea was that Jews were becoming more culturally ghettoized. They were more isolated, culturally isolated from the surrounding environment up until the Hasklah. And then finally there was the fact that these translations were often produced under the guise or marketed as original works, or not so much as original works, but they simply didn't mention the fact that they were translations. So it was clear that in order to be able to work on this very. I mean, this hugely diverse corpus, I would need. Need to do something that is impossible for one person to do. I'd need to simply read anything that was written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Judo Italian, and compare it to everything that was written in these other languages that I've mentioned. So what I did was I applied in 2018 for a very generous grant from the European Research Council, and I was very fortunate to receive that grant, which allowed me to simply recruit an amazing group of young researchers who are well versed in languages well beyond the ones that I am able to read and who are interdisciplinary and truly brilliant. And together we set out to do what at the time I thought would be absolutely impossible, which is to really map all the translations that appear between 1450 and 1800. And I've recently received more funding to expand the database into the 19th century. And that's what we did. We simply. We were given a room here at Bengal Yang University, and we sat in that room and we simply read and read and read. And at some point in time, we kind of developed the ability to identify in advance which works would probably be more prone to translations and which wouldn't. Although to this day, whenever I read a text from the early modern period, I immediately suspect that it is a translation or that it has some elements that are translated from other works. And so we developed this database, which is today open access, and it's entirely in English. It's available to anyone, both within Jewish studies, but we also want to reach people outside of Jewish studies. So anyone who's interested in finding out whether their favorite early modern text was translated into any Jewish language can just enter the database and find out. And I'm really proud of it because I think it promotes several ideals that I have about research. It really shows the value of collaborative research and it shows the value of sharing our data, our raw data. So one of the things that I really like about the database is that you can just do your own research. With our findings, there are certain browsing and search options. You can search for which translations, which translations of scientific texts from Chinese to Yiddish appeared between 1450 and 1632. So I'm hoping that it will become kind of a platform for further research on this topic.
- [48:36]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Thank you. We always end the same way. And you mentioned that you're going to expand your research into a bit of a later period than JUTAC already was covering. But I'm wondering, what else are you working on? Is translation going to keep being what you're doing in the short term? Do you have any other projects that you are thinking about?
- [48:56]
Iris Adelson Schein
Yeah, so I'm always going to be interested in translation. So that's definitely something that I plan to work on in the long term. I hope to at some point be able to work on translations between Jewish languages. So that's something that fascinates me because Jews are translating as a way of coming into dialogue not only with Christians, but also with one Another. So I'd love to start a new project on translations between Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, Judo, Arabic, and so on, on. But that's kind of something that I have in mind for the distant future. Right now, what I'm working on is a project that I half jokingly call Euffklerung, which kind of tries to expand that observation that I made earlier about the proximity between Yiddish literature in the 18th century and what would later become the Haskalah. So I've. I think I've been able to recognize a small corpus of works in Yiddish that participate in debates that are usually associated with the European Enlightenment about women's rights, about religious superstition, public education, and so on. And it's my sense that maybe when we talk about the Jewish Enlightenment, what we should be talking about of these Yiddish texts in addition to, or rather even before we talk about the Haskalah. So that's just kind of where this is going.
- [50:37]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Thank you very much for a fascinating conversation. Again, the book is between the Bridge and the Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe. And I've been talking with Professor Iris Adelson Schein. Thank you.
- [50:50]
Iris Adelson Schein
Thank you.
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Iris Adelson Schein
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Rabbi Mark Katz
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Iris Adelson Schein
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