Between the Bridge and the Barricade is a groundbreaking study of how Jews found (or failed to find) knowledge through translation.
Iris Idelson-Shein, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, argues that “translation functions as a means not (or not only) of eliminating difference, but of coming to terms with it.” So as Jews emerged from the ghettos of Europe into modernity, their efforts to translate non-Jewish works into languages like Yiddish “was vital for Jewish literary, linguistic, religious, and cultural survival.” Idelson-Shein writes that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, rabbis and proponents of the Enlightenment, converts from and into Judaism, and physicians and printers all drew on European-language texts — including German, Dutch, Italian, and even Latin — to expose their colleagues and communities to new knowledge.
The book examines the period between 1450 and 1800, a time characterized by rapid religious, technological, political, and social changes. Given the rise of print, the spread of new scientific knowledge, European colonial expansion, and many other developments, it was necessary for Jews to adapt and have access. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was translated into Hebrew; the tales of Christian Knights were retold in Yiddish (but about great rabbis), as were Arabian Nights and Histoire Naturelle.
These instances, Idelson-Shein argues, “allowed Jewish authors to both conceal the foreignness of their new ideas and texts, and, at the same time, adapt their sources to the norms, world views and requirements of the Jewish target culture.” Citing the historian Michael Meyer’s 1967 The Origins of the Modern Jew, she notes that translation is a means of bridging tradition and modernity. But not all knowledge was allowed to cross — some was barricaded out. Idelson-Shein notes that sadly, Jewish women do not seem to have been involved in these translation efforts — though she posits that perhaps some of the anonymous Yiddish works were done by women.
As Idelson-Shein concludes, this diverse range of translation efforts “was not so much a harbinger of modernity as it was a reflection on modernity, a wide-ranging, multivalent debate over its tensions, promises, hazards, and contradictions.”
Dr. Stu Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost of Yeshiva University. He has edited or coedited 17 books, including Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity and Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought, and has lectured in synagogues, Hillels and adult Jewish educational settings across the U.S.
