Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Europe: Jewish-Christian Translation Cultures in the Context of the 18th-Century Pietist Mission to the Jews

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The research project deals with Jewish translation as a field of cultural exchange between Jews and Christians largely neglected by modern scholars. It posits translation as the primary and most ubiquitous mechanism of Christian-Jewish cultural transfer in early modern Europe. In the framework of the SPP 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures,” the project focuses on Yiddish translations made for the Pietist mission to the Jews by Jewish converts and Christian missionaries, members of the Institutum Judaicum in Halle. Besides textual translations, translation practices in personal conversations between Jews and missionaries are also analyzed.Building on the results of the first grant period of the SPP, the renewed project will systematically deepen the study of various forms of cultural translation in the Halle mission both with regard to texts and personal meetings. Expanding on the research design of the first SPP phase, translation is understood on the one hand in a literal sense and on the other hand as performed action. The aims, strategies, and tactics of the missionaries and translators will be studied in these two areas of translation. The project aims to show that planning and execution of the missionary enterprise were by no means static, rather processes of translation developed in dynamic interaction between missionary impetus and Jewish reaction. In order to better understand the role of Jews for missionary translation, Jewish reception of the Pietist mission will be further explored. The project will compare the development of missionary translation practices in Germany and Poland where the Halle Pietists traveled first, contributing a Jewish/Yiddish Studies perspective to the overall aims of the SPP in the second grant period: an emphasis on regional and chronological characteristics of translation and a critical evaluation of early modern translation from an intercultural and postcolonial point of view.