Cultural Translation

The book is the result of more than 30 years of research into translated Hebrew texts produced by the Haskalah. Its point of departure is the assumption that most of the texts published during the Haskalah period are translations in the broad sense of the term and are, more specifically, cultural translations since they played an active role in the dynamics of the Jewish society's culture and the changes it underwent. In fact, these translations participated in the major cultural and social reformation led by the maskilim. This movement of Jewish intellectuals, which arose at the turn of the nineteenth century, sought to transform Jewish society in both the private and the public spheres, and recruited the translated texts as agents of change, for introducing into Jewish society a new habitus and new social models, like those of Bürgerlichkeit and Bildung, at a time when the written word was a dominant tool of public discourse and the main platform of social polemics.
Translated texts occupied such a dominant position because it was easier for the maskilim to translate texts than to compose them from scratch and because translations facilitated the introduction of new and foreign models into the receiving system, since the translated texts benefited from the source texts’ prestige and legitimacy.