IrisIdelson‐Shein: Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024; pp. xii + 252.

Research over the last few decades has revealed the close connections of Jews to their surrounding societies in every age and cultural sphere. The actual mechanisms of intercultural exchange, however, often remain vague. Iris Idelson-Shein's ground-breaking book aims to rectify this disjuncture by identifying translation as the most ubiquitous form of Christian-Jewish cultural transfer in early modern Europe. Presenting the first comprehensive study on Jewish translation in early modern Europe, it follows the translational turn in cultural studies and traces the enormous impact of translation on Jewish culture, literature, and society during a period of rapid change and increased intercultural encounters. Idelson-Shein takes the reader on an exciting journey into the unknown terrain of Jewish translation, broadly defined as texts originating in Latin script transferred into Hebrew script. The Jewish translational project thus comprised translations from European languages (Latin, German, Italian, French, Dutch, English, etc.) into Jewish languages, that is, Hebrew and the Yiddish vernacular, but to a lesser extent also Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Judeo-Italian. The main argument of the book is captured in the concept of “translation as ghettoization” (p. 6): segregated by walls of Hebrew script, translation served as a site of simultaneous integration of non-Jewish culture and separation from it, in order to consume it from a safe distance and in a heavily monitored form. The opening chapter maps the various translational sites, languages, corpora, avenues, agents, and main characteristics of early modern Jewish translation. In its two major centres, Ashkenaz (German lands, Poland–Lithuania) and Italy, the topography of translation was shaped by a great variety of translators, from physicians, rabbinical thinkers, and book printers to converts, missionaries, Hebraists, and members of the early Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. According to different criteria of selection, such as popularity, prestige, and availability, they introduced European works of science and philosophy as well as literary and religious genres into the early modern Jewish library. While the consumption of foreign literature, so-called “external books,” was traditionally opposed in Judaism, translations of these texts into Hebrew and Yiddish rendered them licit. Three main agendas for what translators considered legitimate forms of cultural exchange and interreligious transfer are advanced in Chapter 2, all of them conservationist in nature: the strengthening of Jewish religion and faith, the reclamation of lost Jewish knowledge, and translation as cultural gatekeeping. Chapter 3 zooms in on the methods and norms of early modern Jewish translation in comparison to contemporaneous translation in other European (and non-European) literatures. A major difference is singled out in the practice of unacknowledged or partially acknowledged translations by Jewish translators, as they typically obscured their source texts for different reasons, termed casual, creative, and active concealment (of specific sources or any non-Jewish traces). Yiddish translations, most of which appeared anonymously, deemed it unnecessary, even off-putting, to acknowledge their sources. Hebrew translators, on the other hand, in line with early modern translation theory, applied more liberal norms to their task than the medieval practice of word-for-word translations, including compilation and adaptation. Especially the provenance of religious core texts and genres, such as prayers, catechisms, and Bibles, was obfuscated. For example, translations of Pietist works were not acknowledged. One may add that in line with prevalent messianic considerations of translatory adaptation, authors linked to Halle Pietism would have been particularly problematic, since this branch of Pietism was deeply invested in the mission to the Jews. Besides deviations like abbreviation or expansion, disagreement, and misunderstandings, the most pervasive norm of Jewish translation in this period for straying from the source was domestication — by means of intertextual allusion to the Hebrew canon and Judaisation, among others. Jewish translation eventually presented “a solution to a problem,” with domestication as a “defensive technique” (p. 124) for the minority culture to avoid the dangers of unmediated exposure to the allures of Christian literature. The focus of Chapter 4 is the dramatic proliferation of Jewish translation from the late eighteenth century onwards. In contrast to previous scholarship, Idelson-Shein reads these translations by authors of the Haskalah not as a radical innovation of Jewish cultural production and the propelling of the Jewish library into modernity, but as part and parcel of the early modern project of Jewish translation. Context-sensitive text analysis nevertheless reveals changes in maskilic translation that became more professional and programmatic. Significantly, in accordance with developing modern translational norms in the German literary system, the practice of acknowledging sources took hold. At the same time, the unique norm of domestication, which characterised early modern Jewish translation, persisted into the early nineteenth century. Like their predecessors, translators of the Enlightenment era continued the practice to “reinvigorate Judaism, rather than subvert it” (p. 144). Transformation through translation is thus aptly compared to the boiling of water: a process of gradual transition until inadvertent innovation reached a tipping point, rather than a revolution of assimilation. Iris Idelson-Shein's learned monograph navigates the Jewish and non-Jewish textual corpus with deep knowledge and theoretical sophistication to make sense of the dazzling “polyphony of early modern translation” (p. 56). Not once does the reader get lost in this endless labyrinth, until an unobstructed vista on Jewish-Christian encounters is opened up, providing us with a fresh and fuller picture of Jewish culture and its relationship to its surroundings in early modern Europe between submission and subversion, polemic and dialogue. The book clearly demonstrates that translation was a pervasive and formative feature of Jewish culture in the early modern period — to the extent that we may indeed speak of an age of Jewish translation. Cross-references between the chapters are very helpful for reading them as standalone pieces (when reading the book as a whole, they are not as vital, sometimes almost seeming repetitive). Beautifully written and powerfully argued, this brilliant book will not only shape scholarship on the early modern period in Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations, but also serve as a critical intervention in the field of translation studies, challenging the still-enduring notion of translation as either representing cultural openness or, in its post-colonial view, the imperialist suppression of the subaltern. Rather than emphasising its assimilationist or antagonistic functions, the “unique Jewish perception of translation as a means both to cross and to reinforce the cultural and religious borders between Christians and Jews” (p. 81) highlights the more nuanced middle ground of negotiating difference. Idelson-Shein shows that early modern Jews neither unconditionally absorbed European literature and culture nor rejected its appeal, but rather how Jewish translators translated European culture both textually and culturally, actively adapting the non-Jewish works to their new target audience. They thereby built bridges, albeit not without implementing border control between the Jewish and the non-Jewish cultural realms. Between the Bridge and the Barricade is available as an open-access edition. It draws on an impressive statistical sample of 650 translations into Jewish languages (many of them newly discovered) collected in the pioneering JEWTACT database (https://aranne5.bgu.ac.il/jtact/index.php), co-edited by the author. The digital database is an invaluable research tool for scholars of various disciplines. It presently includes over 750 translations from between 1450 and 1830 and continues to expand as new translations are discovered (currently also into the nineteenth century). Both the book and database inspire future scholars to delve deeper into specific translational corpora, particularly Ladino and Judeo-Italian, but also Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, or French as Jewish minor languages, translational sites outside Europe, and various groups of agents involved in Jewish translation. Beyond the scope of the present book, more could be said about translations into Jewish languages by Christian missionaries and Hebraists (some are included in the database, but not exhaustively) and further research into the gendered dimensions of Jewish translation in the early modern period may provide additional insights (cf. pp. 55–8), for example, in the field of translated prayers for women. The empirical data presented in Iris Idelson-Shein's masterful study highlight the immense value for historians in using “translation” as a central approach to studying cultural contact. This approach allows us to better understand the processes of cultural exchange between Jews and Christians, rather than simply categorising their outcomes and products as cross-cultural phenomena.