Many years ago, in the olden days of microfiche, I stumbled across a private collection of Jewish printing from India held by the Valmadonna Trust Library (Hill). Intriguingly, the collection included late-nineteenth-century Judeo-Arabic literary translations by Solomon Twena, a Calcutta-based Baghdadi rabbi (fig. 1). Years later, when the miracles of digitization drew me back for a closer look, one of Twena’s titles caught my eye: עמק הארזים (Emek ha-arazim), Hebrew for “the valley of the cedars”—a translation of Grace Aguilar’s 1850 novel The Vale of Cedars; or, The Martyr (fig. 2). Immediately, I was riveted. As a nineteenth-century Sephardic woman writer, Aguilar was already a rare breed; but how did her novel come to be transmogrified into an obscure Judeo-Arabic dialect? In the expansive scholarship on world literature, I had never encountered the likes of a conservative Baghdadi rabbi in India reworking the literary prose of a Jewish Englishwoman (who, as I would later learn, had attended Protestant church services).
Fig. 1. Solomon Twena. Image courtesy of the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Center.
Fig. 2. Grace Aguilar. Image courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collections.
This unlikely couple and the text that linked them became my entry point into a multilingual literary history framed doubly by the particularities of diaspora and the “universal” conditions of world literature. As I continued researching the translations of The Vale of Cedars (henceforth Vale), I uncovered a story of interconnection, influence, and global networks that transformed my understanding of modern Jewish literary history. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dozens of novels were translated repeatedly into Hebrew and multiple Jewish vernacular languages, primarily Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. They were translated across vast distances, in sites such as Odessa, Vilna, Istanbul, Tunis, and Calcutta, by Jewish intellectuals who spoke different languages and inhabited disparate cultural worlds but shared an allegiance to the ideas and goals of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. To date, very little is known about the circulation and transmission of such novels across East-West lines; modern Jewish studies in general remains regionally siloed.Footnote 1 The untold translation history of a novel such as Vale holds the promise of opening new vistas onto Jewish literary history, particularly by revealing previously unrecognized connections between the manifold, far-flung projects of literary renewal emanating from the Haskalah.
A movement of Jewish cultural renewal and of social and religious reform, the Haskalah is considered the locus of modern Jewish thought and literature (Pelli, Age). Its exponents, known as maskilim, sought to bring the Jewish masses into the modern world through educational, social, and religious reforms and to repurpose biblical Hebrew as a modern literary language; their efforts also spurred literary revivals in the Jewish vernacular languages, which at different times either complemented or competed with Hebrew. Per standard histories, the Haskalah movement originated in eighteenth-century Germany and ended in Russia in 1881; research on Haskalah activity outside Europe has not yet meaningfully altered that narrative.Footnote 2 This framing excises the literary and intellectual contributions of Asian and African Jews from the historical record, impoverishing scholarly understanding of Jewish modernity (Levy, “Reorienting”). Furthermore, literary Haskalah scholarship has focused on original writing in Hebrew and German, and more recently on Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism, eliding the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century renaissance of Judeo-Arabic publishing as well as the considerable body of Ladino translations and thriving Ladino press (Borovaya).
Building on prior collaborative work with Allison Schachter (Levy and Schachter, “Jewish Literature” and “Non-universal Global”), in this essay I call for a new approach to the literary Haskalah focused on Jewish multilingualism, diversity, and interconnection, and grounded methodologically and epistemologically in translation. In my view, the Jewish enlightenment projects of Germany, Russia, Galicia, England, Ottoman Turkey and Greece, Iraq, India, and North Africa (among other places) had distinct ideological motivations, timelines, linguistic contours, and cultural influences. Yet across this kaleidoscopic spectrum, maskilim committed themselves to pan-Jewish renewal and fraternity and embraced belletristic literature as the privileged vehicle of their mission.Footnote 3 Both the convergences and the divergences of these myriad Haskalah projects should inform the narrative of modern Jewish literary history.
To denote a historical understanding and conceptual model that can encompass the full range of Jewish literary-enlightenment projects from the 1780s through the 1930s, I propose the term “Global Haskalah.” This moniker does not connote a unified Haskalah movement, let alone a unified Jewish literature or national ethos: I am not arguing that Twena, translating from Hebrew into Judeo-Arabic in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta, was taking part in the same Haskalah as the Jewish literati of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Rather, I am arguing that their respective projects were related in spirit and in practice and can be read in conversation. Such transregional conversations could be diachronic or synchronic; across the putative East-West divide in the Jewish world, maskilim corresponded directly (Karkason) and translated one another’s work.
Translation played a major role within the literary flank of the Haskalah, and most of the major Hebrew writers of the period were also translators. Most Haskalah ideologues valorized Hebrew, an elite liturgical and literary language shared by all Jewish communities but taught almost exclusively to men, and disparaged the Jewish vernaculars—the languages of the Jewish masses, including women. In practice, however, they also wrote and translated copiously into the vernaculars in order to reach more readers. The corpus of literary works that were retranslated into different Jewish languages includes widely circulated European novels such as Robinson Crusoe (Garrett; Wolpe; Malul) and The Count of Monte Cristo, original novels by Jewish authors in Hebrew and European languages, such as Love of Zion and Vale, and novelistic reworkings of traditional Jewish narratives.
The translators adapted foreign works to reflect Haskalah ideology and their Jewish readers’ sensibilities; conversely, when translating Jewish texts, they emulated European aesthetics. While negotiating and recombining highly disparate linguistic and cultural influences, they freely mixed religious and secular genres and styles. Their imaginative rewritings resulted in polyglossic, culturally hybrid texts that mediate between Christian European literature, Jewish tradition, and their readers’ local cultures. For example, in the circa 1820 Yiddish Robinson Crusoe, “Friday” is renamed “Shabes” (שׁבּת), Yiddish for “Sabbath” (Garrett 215); in the 1900 Ladino version from Constantinople, Crusoe passes time by reading both shipping maps and the Torah, and sings a סאלמיאמיינטו (salmeamiento; “psalm,” from the Spanish salmo) (Nahmias 92, 70); and in the circa 1900 Judeo-Arabic version from Tunis, Crusoe praises God using Islamic epithets adopted by Maghrebi Jews (Sitruk 23–24). In all three editions, Robinson Crusoe becomes marked by Jewish diasporic difference, albeit in strikingly different ways (Levy, “Diasporic Difference”). By mapping the trajectories of works such as Robinson Crusoe and Vale that journeyed through Hebrew and multiple Jewish vernaculars, I aim to adumbrate a global and relational history of Jewish literary modernity. Further, comparative reading of the different translations reveals how the translators refracted shared Jewish heritage and memory through diverse linguistic and cultural prisms. This two-part process—reconstructing the chain of transmission, reading comparatively—constitutes my method.Footnote 4
Beyond its contributions to Jewish literary history, the Global Haskalah invites a reconsideration of nineteenth-century world literature from a minor, diasporic perspective and an investigation of how the historical contingencies of diaspora modulated the categories of “global” and “world.” In the Jewish context, diaspora was a millennial historical condition that gave rise to a collective memory whose production of knowledge emphasized religious longing for Zion and the commemoration of multiple expulsions and dispersals. This diasporic history, inflected by Jewish multilingualism, produced an extensive religious, legal, and literary canon as well as a theologically rooted temporality and calendar. As a staging ground of world literature, diaspora elicits relations of cultural identity, language, and social organization that may differ from those found in national, transnational, regional, and subnational literary contexts. Nineteenth-century Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic were literary vernaculars being transformed by print modernity, but without undergoing parallel processes of nationalization.Footnote 5 Furthermore, the Global Haskalah was intertwined with the world economic system and with empire, yet it did not utilize a direct center-periphery model of transmission. Rather, nineteenth-century Jewish literature was polycentric, circulating in a global but minoritized ethnoreligious network (Levy and Schachter, “Jewish Literature”). The various Haskalah projects in different global regions formed a “complex matrix…based on the transfer of knowledge and ideas,” connections that were facilitated by imperial contexts and conditions (Evri and Behar 296–97), as well as prior histories of diasporic textual transmission and philanthropic networks.
Numerous scholars have set the stage for my intervention, whether by exposing world literature’s foundational debt to colonialism (Mufti), historicizing the formation of the secular reader (Allan), illuminating subnational and regional models of multilingualism and literary circulation (Hofmeyr; Thornber; Ricci; Orsini; Kothari), rethinking the relationship between and bordering of “originals” and “translations” (Emmerich; Selim; Johnson), or questioning the utility of literary periodization for nonlinear temporalities (Friedman). Alexander Beecroft helpfully proposes numerous paradigms (“ecologies”) of world literature beyond the national, including the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, but not the diasporic.Footnote 6 While blending elements of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, diasporic literature departs from both. Twentieth-century Yiddish literature, for example, is at once vernacular in its particularity and cosmopolitan in its global reach (Levy and Schachter, “Non-universal Global”). Scholarship on other diasporic literatures offers pertinent insights. Following the transatlantic alliances of twentieth-century Black intellectuals, Brent Hayes Edwards posits diaspora as a strategic translational practice and a discourse that articulates difference (Practice 11, 13). For Edwards, the African diaspora as a frame for knowledge production “inaugurates an ambitious and radically decentered analysis of transnational circuits of culture and politics” that exceeds the frames of nations and continents (“Uses” 52)—a description apposite to the Jewish experience, where diaspora was at once a historic condition and a cultural practice, and translation was an endemic feature thereof.Footnote 7 I also join Jason Frydman in asking how “diasporic literary, linguistic, and identitarian formations consistently disrupt and supplement nation-based discourses” as well as the predominantly modern emphasis of the discourse of world literature (233).Footnote 8 In the Global Haskalah, diaspora complicates the secularity of world literature, as the translators striate novels with the literary and liturgical genres of the Jewish canon, commingling reference points in space and time as well as secular and theological temporalities.
Additionally, in the Global Haskalah, multilayered (sequential) translation and rewriting were directly facilitated by the diasporic relations between Hebrew and the Jewish vernacular languages. By “rewriting,” I mean a translation that revises the source text significantly, at times even obscuring its own relation to the source. Although they were constitutive of many modernizing literatures in the long nineteenth century, multilayered translation and rewriting have received limited attention in world literature scholarship. André Lefevere emphasizes the ideological functions of literary rewriting and argues for the “importance of rewriting as the motor force behind literary evolution” (2); other scholars recast the history of the novel as a form constituted through translation (McMurran; Johnson). In his study of Haskalah-era translations, Gideon Toury notes that the “borderline between original writing and translation tended to be rather obscure,” and works were often attributed primarily, if not exclusively, to the translator rather than to the original author (142).
How does such multilayered rewriting illuminate processes of cultural accommodation and resistance within the modernizing literary projects of diasporic and colonized peoples? I link the Global Haskalah’s translation practices both to the Haskalah’s reform agenda and to empire, with a nod to the many other nineteenth- and twentieth-century “renaissance” and “reform” projects in which literary practice was part of a social praxis informed by politics of enlightenment, nationalism, and anticolonial resistance (Levy, “Before”). The Jewish-language engagements with the novel originate during Jewish encounters with empire in Russia, central Europe, Asia, and North Africa. In the case of Vale, the dissemination of Aguilar’s English novel into a panoply of Jewish languages, culminating with its retranslation in Calcutta under the aegis of colonial trade, illustrates that Jewish-language literatures, like other nineteenth-century world literatures, were interpolated by British imperialism (Said). Although numerous scholars link the global spread of the novel to empire (Hofmeyr 14; Gagnier 3; Joshi), this point has remained tangential to Jewish literary historiography. Scholars have already reckoned with the German context of early Haskalah thought and with the nineteenth-century Haskalah’s Russian and Hapsburg imperial contexts (Litvak) but have yet to map the influence of British and French imperialism on modern Hebrew and Jewish vernacular literatures.Footnote 9
In what follows, I showcase the constellated dynamics of diaspora, translation, and world literature as they manifest in the multilingual family of novels originating with Vale. A historical romance motivated by Anglo-Jewish concerns, Vale is distinguished by its uses of the medieval Sephardic past, whose memory animated nineteenth-century Jewish enlightenment and reform efforts as a topos of Jewish cultural eminence and a template for modern Jewish subjectivity. Aguilar’s novel was republished in dozens of editions in English and multiple editions in German, and it was translated from German into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic multiple times. A popular Yiddish spin-off was retranslated into Ladino, and a third Yiddish version staged it as a four-act play.Footnote 10 Despite its popularity, the novel has not been widely studied. This essay represents one of the first studies of the novel’s translations, and certainly the first such comparative study.Footnote 11 By following the novel’s journey from England to Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Tunisia, and India, one learns how each translation accommodates local visions and needs while maintaining continuity with other editions, forming a family of texts.
The Vale of Cedars: English Literature, Jewish Literature, World Literature
Aguilar was born in London in 1816 to Sephardic parents whose ancestors fled the Portuguese Inquisition. After she suffered a serious childhood illness, her mother taught her Jewish history and religion and had her tutored in the classics. Aguilar started keeping a journal at age seven; she wrote her first play at twelve, penned poetry at fourteen, and began writing Vale at fifteen. At eighteen she turned to writing to support the family, starting with a volume of poetry. That same year, she completed Vale but declined to seek a publisher; it would be published posthumously. Aguilar’s literary and religious works deal mainly with Jewish subjects, although she also wrote a popular romance of Scottish history (The Days of Bruce). Her reputation, however, was founded primarily on her theological works. This was during a time of so-called sympathetic persuasion for English Jewry, when “philosemitic societies” were formed for the purpose of befriending Jews in order to proselytize them. For Aguilar, Anglo-Jewish women’s ability to withstand conversionist pressure depended on their religious education; her work aimed to fortify their Jewish identity and equip them with arguments to refute evangelical conversionists (Ragussis, “Writing” 71; Galchinsky 161; Valman 88; Fay). From 1838 to 1844 Aguilar published her major theological works and wrote domestic novels espousing Victorian ideologies of womanhood and femininity. Despite failing health, she wrote prolifically during her final years, producing her nonfiction masterpiece, Women of Israel (Valman 93; Fay 220).
Scholarship on Aguilar’s career focuses on her triangulation of Judaism, Protestantism, and the Sephardic legacy of Catholicism; much of her historically oriented work sought to “reconcile present concerns of reform and [Jewish] emancipation with racial and cultural history” (Fay 216). Aguilar’s association with Protestants included attending church services, and her advocacy of Jewish religious reform invited criticism from her coreligionists. Her engagement with Protestantism has been interpreted variably, as targeting either Jewish identity or English identity. Nadia Valman argues that what distinguishes Aguilar’s work is “not her assertion of Jewish cultural and religious difference but her attempt to articulate a Jewish identity in the language of Evangelical Christianity” (100; see Dwor 99), whereas Kathrine Klein suggests that Aguilar “expands these Protestant boundaries to designate English values and, hence, incorporate Jewishness into English national identity” (111).
Following Aguilar’s death in 1847 at the age of thirty-one, her mother published her major literary works, including Vale in 1850 and The Days of Bruce in 1851. Both novels have been read in connection with Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which had appeared thirty years before.Footnote 12 Ivanhoe inspired countless imitations and adaptations, becoming a key literary model for depicting ethnic, racial, and religious relations in emerging or reconfiguring nations (Halevi-Wise 15; Ragussis, Figures 126); Georg Lukács even traces the rise of the historical novel directly back to Scott (22, 30–64). A key plotline concerns the Jewish maiden Rebecca, who falls in love with Ivanhoe. Rebecca thwarts readerly expectations when she fails to convert and join Christian society in England. Instead, she sails away to Granada, dramatizing the formation of English identity at the expense of the unassimilable Jews.
Aguilar had spoken about her desire to counter the misrepresentation of Jewish women in the many conversionist novels inspired by Ivanhoe. In a letter to a friend, she professed, “My wish…was to portray a Jewess, with thoughts, and feelings peculiar to her faith and sex, the which are not in general granted that race, in Tales of the present day” (qtd. in Galchinsky 162). While Vale also begins with an interfaith romance, it ends with the formalization of the Inquisition and the Jewish heroine’s death in Spain as a martyr to her faith, signaling the advent of a diminished national epoch. Revising Scott, Aguilar mobilizes the Jewess to present a politics of nation that equates greatness with religious pluralism and tolerance. Further, she augments her symbol through the trope of the crypto-Jew: the Iberian Jews who lived publicly as Catholics but practiced Judaism behind closed doors.
Vale has all the trappings of popular romance: unrequited love, a rich historical setting, political intrigue, a murder, torture, a last-minute rescue, and vengeance. Set in 1479, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the story follows Marie Henriquez, a young crypto-Jewish woman who lives in an idyllic valley (“vale”) hidden in the Sierra Toledo mountains while passing in outside society as a Catholic. During a stay in Castilian high society she falls in love with the English nobleman Arthur Stanley but refuses his marriage proposal; shortly after, she marries her Jewish cousin Ferdinand, and the newlyweds live outwardly as Spanish nobles while secretly practicing Judaism. The jealous villain Don Luis Garcia murders Ferdinand and frames Stanley. To save Stanley, Marie subverts his trial on the witness stand by declaring her Jewish faith. Queen Isabella holds Marie as a royal prisoner, hoping to convert her, but Don Luis kidnaps her to the Inquisition’s torture chambers. Near death, Marie is rescued by her uncle Julien. On learning of Stanley’s execution order, she races back to the palace, exposes Don Luis, and saves Stanley at the eleventh hour; she dies at home in Stanley’s arms. An epilogue takes readers to Stanley’s wedding to a Spanish princess at Westminster Abbey, where guests gossip about his failed bid to stop the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
Despite telling a Jewish story that epitomizes the dialectic of minority acculturation and resistance, stylistically Vale is a Protestant English text. Absent are any intertextual engagements with a Jewish literary corpus. Instead, each chapter of Vale is headed by a short epigraph from Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Scott, or the British Romantic poet Felicia Hemans—paratexts situating the text in the English literary tradition. (These epigraphs vanish from all its translations.) Literary scholars have construed Vale as a gothic historical novel enjoining Protestant mores and Victorian femininity: Catholic fanaticism supplies the pretext of Aguilar’s sentimental appeal for English religious tolerance, while Marie, a fifteenth-century crypto-Jew, embodies nineteenth-century Protestant values, suppressing her romantic longings in order to marry within the faith and uphold domestic virtues (Dwor; Klein; Fay; Galchinsky 149–50). Other focal points of criticism include female sympathy, as Aguilar plays up the deep mutual affinity between Queen Isabella and Marie (Valman 105–09; Galchinsky 165–66; Ragussis, “Writing” 68; Moran 141, 145), and martyrdom (Moran). Departing from most critics, Michael Galchinsky affiliates Vale with the Anglo-Jewish Haskalah (17), while Richa Dwor receives Aguilar’s historical romances as calls for the “creation of a Jewish literary tradition in English” (98).
But what happens when the novel moves into new languages and social contexts? In its travels though the network of Global Haskalah, its narrative is adapted to address different Jewish communal needs during the high era of Romantic nationalism and European imperialism. Whereas Aguilar addresses an English Protestant readership to defend Jewish identity, her novel was subsequently translated into German and then reworked by a series of Jewish men in Europe, Africa, and Asia to serve their modernizing agendas for specifically Jewish reading publics, in a time of rapid expansion of secular reading practices. In some cases, the translators added a preface, guiding reader reception. In other cases, the translators’ intentions are intimated through their stylistic and editorial choices. In all cases, the Jewish-language translations Judaize the text; recenter the narrative on a new, male protagonist; and promote the Haskalah’s literary revitalization of Jewish historical memory.
The Journey of The Vale of Cedars in the Global Haskalah
Haskalah-era Jewish translators worked in both standard (newly “national”) languages and Jewish languages. Their translations into Jewish vernacular languages tended to instrumentalize literature as a vehicle of modernization, whereas translations in standard languages promoted civic responsibility and social integration among their Jewish readers. Although the first translation of Vale was into Danish in 1855, its journey into the Jewish vernaculars begins with the 1856 German edition by J. Piza, a prominent member of Hamburg’s Jewish community, which was warmly received by German Jewry and reissued twice by Jewish cultural institutions. Piza’s adaptation, which he retitled Marie Henriquez Morales, pared down the original and omitted the final section about Arthur Stanley’s efforts to save Spanish Jews (Hess 42). In his preface, Piza explains his changes in terms of the national character and literary sensibility of the English versus those of the Germans. Piza’s German translation served as a new source text for two subsequent translations into Hebrew, not only because European maskilim often translated from German but because his leaner narrative style was more amenable for rewriting into languages lacking prior novelistic traditions.Footnote 13
The novel’s German reception reveals the position of a Jewish bourgeoise seeking cultural integration into German society. Jonathan M. Hess sees the novel’s German reception as exemplary of the nineteenth-century German Jewish fascination with Spanish Jews, a phenomenon dubbed the “Sephardic mystique”; as Hess points out, “novels and novellas about the Iberian Jewish experience became a fixture in German-Jewish literary life” (28). Vale was particularly germane to this audience because “the dual life of the conversos in Spain could serve indirectly as a model for [German] Jews eager to transform Judaism into a domestic religion that would be tolerated but hidden from view” (12). At the same time, both Hess and scholars of English literature note that the Inquisition was already a familiar setting for European historical fiction and gothic fiction, part of a well-tested recipe for successful melodrama (Hess 35). Where both the English and German versions fell into familiar patterns of post-Enlightenment anti-Catholic sentiment, however, the Jewish-language rewritings would reshape the narrative to fit other ideological imperatives.
The earliest Hebrew translation effort was undertaken in 1872 by Yehuda Leib Gordon, a central luminary of the Haskalah, but Gordon abandoned the effort after publishing only a few chapters.Footnote 14 Nonetheless, given Gordon’s stature in the field, his interest in Vale is noteworthy. A few years later, two unrelated Hebrew translations appeared in full. One version, titled האמונה והאהבה (Ha-emunah ve-ha-ahavah; Faith and Love), appeared as a roman-feuilleton (serialized novel) in 1874 and 1875 in the Mainz-based Hebrew-language weekly The Lebanon. The story’s installments were introduced only as being translated from a foreign language by Yeshay’a Gelbhoyz, or Sigmund Gelbhaus, an Austrian rabbi and scholar, without mentioning Aguilar (Brenner). Gelbhaus then published the complete translation in 1875 as a book retitled מלחמת האמונה והאהבה (Milhemet ha-emunah ve-ha-ahavah; The War of Faith and Love). Gelbhaus’s preface to the book rectifies the elision of Aguilar in the version published in The Lebanon. Here Gelbhaus praises Aguilar for her learned, God-fearing writings, and explains that he selected Vale for its power to fortify religious devotion through its depiction of pure faith and martyrdom (קקדושת השם). Gelbhaus then situates the novel within the Haskalah’s enlightenment ethos:
תעלה שמש ההשכלה…והעם ההולכים בחשך איסבלנות יראה אור גדול ולא יוסיף לצרור ליהודי באשר הוא יהודי ויתן
לו להאחו בארץ מולדתו כלכל אזרח הארץ—כזאת וכזאת תכלית הספור הזה אשר הוא לפניך.
For the sun of Enlightenment [haskalah] to rise…and for those walking in darkness and intolerance to see a great light, to cease oppressing the Jew for his Jewishness, and permit the Jew to make a place for himself in the land of his birth, just like every citizen of the land—such is the purpose of the story before you.Footnote 15
He notes that he altered the content in keeping with the spirit of the new Hebrew literature; his version is considerably abridged, condensing and simplifying the storyline.
In its melding of secular European literary aesthetics with the Haskalah’s religious reformist tenets, Gelbhaus’s translation exemplifies the germination of modern Hebrew literature then underway. Yet that very same year (1875), another Hebrew writer, the Lithuanian-born Avraham Shalom Friedberg, published his own translation in Warsaw. It is this version that would shape the transmission of Vale throughout the greater Jewish world. Friedberg’s rewriting, far from being derivative, is original and accomplished. His language and style are arguably more poetic than those of Gelbhaus, but more importantly, he adapts the narrative in ways that enhanced its appeal to modernizing Jewish communities, facilitating its absorption into Jewish vernacular languages.
One can likely trace Friedberg’s interest in translating the novel to another romantic work of period fiction, Abraham Mapu’s 1853 אהבת ציון (Ahavat Tsiyon; Love of Zion), often called the first Hebrew novel. A story set in the biblical era and replete with love, calumny, and restoration, Love of Zion had a transformative effect on an entire generation of eastern European Jewish youth; among them was the young Friedberg, who formed a close friendship with Mapu. Naomi Seidman sees Love of Zion as the “basis for a new form of Jewish reading, with its own pleasures and practices” (35), and demonstrates how it inspired a host of Hebrew and Yiddish novels about Jewish romantic love (42). In the Middle East and North Africa as well, Love of Zion achieved great popularity among Jewish reading publics and was translated into Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and multiple times into Judeo-Arabic (Tobi and Tobi 7). Under the thrall of Love of Zion, and emulating his mentor, Friedberg turned to writing and translating historical novels, including Vale (Menda-Levy). Friedberg’s commercially successful adaptation of Vale was published in two volumes in 1875 and 1876, totaling over three hundred pages, and was reprinted in 1893 and 1902. The title page is emblazoned with the Hebrew title:
עמק הארזים: ספור מראשית דרכי האינקוויזיציה בספרד בעקבות העבריה המהללה בסופרי אנגליה Miss Grace Aguilar עם נוספות הרבה מקרות העת ההיא מאת א. ש. פריעדבערג
The Vale of Cedars, from the Early History of the Spanish Inquisition, Following the Jewess Most Esteemed among English Writers, Miss Grace Aguilar, with Many Additions from the Annals of That Era, from A. S. Friedberg
A Cyrillic imprimatur of the transliterated bibliographic information (as required by the Russian censors) follows at the bottom (fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Title page from Friedberg’s translation, third edition (1902), in Hebrew and Russian, with Aguilar’s name in English.
Friedberg’s “many additions” include a historical prologue on the origins of the Inquisition and a new opening chapter fabricating a different backstory for the plot. He also introduces a new protagonist, Pedro, who replaces Arthur Stanley, the Gentile love interest. In Friedberg’s version, Pedro, the son of a Jewish nobleman, is raised believing he is Catholic; Marie is renamed Miriam. Friedberg sets a new chapter in 1460, nineteen years before Aguilar’s story begins. As Spanish armies go out to battle with Arabs, a crypto-Jewish warrior named Don Sebastian is being interrogated in a torch-lit dungeon. Sebastian’s nephew Julien infiltrates the Inquisition to save him. The dying Sebastian enjoins Julien to reveal their secret Jewish identity to Sebastian’s young son Pedro on the youth’s twenty-fifth birthday; using his blood as ink, Sebastian leaves Pedro a message on his cloak (possibly Friedberg’s nod to limpieza de sangre, the Inquisition’s “purity of blood” doctrine). From here, the plot largely follows Aguilar’s storyline until Friedberg alters the ending. Pedro, left for dead on the battlefield, is rescued by Julien and brought to the vale. As promised, on Pedro’s twenty-fifth birthday, Julien reveals the great secret. Miriam is reunited with Pedro, but Don Garcia finds them in the vale and kills him; Miriam dies of a broken heart.
What accounts for these plot changes? Janine Strauss suggests that for traditional Jewish readers, Friedberg’s replacement of Arthur Stanley with Pedro heightens the romantic tension by introducing the possibility of marriage. Strauss also postulates that as a Jewish reformer, Friedberg was keener on instructing readers in proper Jewish practice (by means of Julien’s tutelage of Pedro) than on conveying the catechism of the priest tasked with converting Marie. While insightful, these explanations overlook Friedberg’s principal motives. Historical romance was a hugely popular genre across a wide range of nineteenth-century literatures; in the Haskalah, it addressed anxieties about Jewish masculinity. The theme of romantic love between two Jewish partners was important to Friedberg primarily because the Jewish adoption of heteronormative romance based on European models was a tacit goal of Haskalah literature. The maskilim saw themselves as reinvigorating and restoring Jewish masculinity through the dissemination of these norms, for which Love of Zion served as a prototype (Seidman). Furthermore, in both the English and Hebrew versions, the plot serves moralizing ends, but through different politics of gender. Whereas Aguilar envisions Jewish fidelity and resistance in the form of feminine virtue, Friedberg is interested in fashioning the maskilic subject through the figure of the male converso who successfully embodies a dual identity: a private, confessional self and a public, civic self. In Friedberg’s hand, idealized Jewish masculinity supplants Victorian femininity, drawing the reader’s attention to a backstory about Pedro’s repressed Jewish identity. Thus, whereas Aguilar’s English novel addresses Gentile readers in a quest to recast tolerance as an ecumenical project, and whereas the German reception of Piza’s translation focused on the novel’s universalism and Jewish acculturation, Friedberg’s Hebrew version emphasizes Jewish romance, Jewish men as fighters and martyrs, and the millennial longing for Zion. And it does all this handily through allusions to the classical Hebrew canon, from the Bible to the Spanish Golden Age.
Friedberg’s Judaizing plot changes are profoundly accentuated by his linguistic transculturation of the novel. Haskalah-era Hebrew prose fiction was written in a flowery pastiche of verses and phrases drawn from the Bible and other classical Jewish sources, a style known as מליצה (melitsah; “euphuism”), such that even secular European romance was filtered through the echo chambers of Jewish textuality.Footnote 16 For example, Friedberg’s new introductory chapter engages extensively with the biblical story of Joseph, repeating the motifs of wine and imprisonment. In the new backstory, Don Sebastian tells his captors how he was kidnaped and thrown into a בור (bor; “pit”; Friedberg 1: 10); the word bor recurs when the priest who had been torturing him throws him back into בור שבותו (bor shevuto; “the pit of his imprisonment”; 1: 16). Julien takes Sebastian’s coat (כתנת; kutonet) and writes on it in Sebastian’s blood (1: 21), an unmistakable reference to Joseph’s כְּתֹ֥נֶת פַּסִּֽים (ketonet pasim; “ornamented tunic”; JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh 79 [Gen. 37.32]), which his brothers dip in goat’s blood. Sebastian’s imprisonment is also narrated through the language of Joseph’s internment in the Egyptian prison. Given these allusions, when Julien asks Sebastian why he left אמק הארזים (“the Vale of Cedars”; Friedberg 1: 19), Friedberg’s readers would think of Joseph leaving Israel for Egypt.
Additionally, when Julien turns up in the dungeon disguised as a priest, he reveals himself to Sebastian by quoting verses from the twelfth-century Iberian Hebrew poet Judah Halevi:
אֵיךְ יֶעֱרַב לִי אֲכֹל וּשְׁתוֹת בְּעֵת אֶחֱזֶה,
כִּי יִּסְחֲבוּ הַכְּלָבִים אֶת-כְּפִירָיִךְ?
אוֹ אֵיךְ מְאוֹר יוֹם יְהִי מָתוֹק לְעֵינַי בְּעוֹד
אֶרְאֶה בְּפִי עֹרְבִים פִּגְרֵי נְשָׁרָיִךְ?
(1: 18)
How could eating and drinking please me
when dogs are dragging your lions by their teeth?
How could the light of day be sweet
when I see your eagles caught in the ravens’ beaks?Footnote 17
In the story’s diegetic context, Julien could be describing his distress at seeing Sebastian turned prisoner of the Inquisition. But any educated Hebrew reader would have identified these verses from Halevi’s famous poem צִיּוֹן, הֲלֹא תִשְׁאֲלִי (“Tsiyon, ha-lo tishali”; “Won’t You Ask, Zion”), in which the poet laments the Jewish exile from Zion and refers to Jews in the Diaspora as prisoners, as this poem was absorbed into Jewish liturgical tradition as a qinah, or lamentation, commemorating the destruction of the Temple. This double-voiced intertext thus cleverly links the novel’s characters to their own illustrious Andalusian past while also reminding contemporary Hebrew readers of the long, ongoing history of Jewish exile. Conjoining three historical moments—the tenth- to twelfth-century Sephardic Golden Age, the fifteenth-century Inquisition, and Friedberg’s own epoch, the nineteenth-century Haskalah—it forms an accordion of temporal layers that meshes the secular historical time of the novel with the theological time of Jewish exile, evincing a recursive, diasporic temporality.Footnote 18
In rewriting the novel, Friedberg infuses the entire text with the Haskalah’s enlightenment ethos. After Pedro has accepted his Jewish identity and expressed a desire to avenge the Inquisition’s Jewish victims, Julien counsels him by quoting Isaiah 52.13, הִנֵּה יַשְׂכִּיל עַℶְדִּי (“Indeed, My servant shall prosper”; JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh 970 [or “My servant shall act wisely”; English Standard Version]), saying,
״הנה ישכיל עבדי״—אמר ישעיהו נביאנו ברוח ה׳ עליו
See, my servant shall act wisely [Hineh yaskil ‘avdi], said our prophet Isaiah.
He then adds,
לא בגבורה יעש עוד ישראל חיל, כי אם בהשכל ודעת (Friedberg 2: 138)
Not through heroism will Israel prevail, but rather through wisdom and reason [ki im be-ha-sekhel ve-da’at].
This is a maskilic variation on the well-known verse from Zechariah 4.6:
לֹ֚א בְחַ֙יִל֙ וְלֹ֣א בְכֹ֔חַ כִּ֣י אִם־בְּרוּחִ֔י JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh 1387)
Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit.
In these two quotations, the Hebrew words ישכיל (yaskil; “act wisely”) and שכל (sekhel; “reason”) connote the Haskalah semantically as well as lexically, through their common root ש-כ-ל (s-kh-l). Reenvisioning the story through the ideological lens of the Haskalah, Friedberg transforms Vale from a thematically Jewish text into a linguistically and culturally Jewish text.
This ideological and imaginative rewriting, I argue, is the fulcrum for the novel’s passage into the Global Haskalah network: repackaged as a compelling and culturally digestible prototype, Friedberg’s Judaized adaptation would become the new source text for the Yiddish edition and two Judeo-Arabic editions, as well as two later Hebrew editions published in Israel.Footnote 19 The Yiddish version, דיא אונגליקליכע מרים (Di ungliklekhe Miryem; The Unfortunate Miriam), was printed in Vilna in 1888 in two volumes and reprinted in 1910 or 1911. Yiddish enjoyed an exponentially wider readership than Hebrew, especially because it included women—perhaps explaining Yoyne Trubnik’s decision to center Miriam in the new title. Sentimental romance novels were common in the Yiddish literature of the period, achieving particular dominance in the 1880s and 1890s. The title page of the edition from 1910 or 1911 fashions itself as
די אומגליקלעכע מרים; אָדער, די בלוטיקע געשיכטע פֿון דער אינקװיזיציע. איין העכסט אינטערעסאַנטער היסטאָרישער ראָמאַן פֿון אַמאָליקע פֿינצטערע צײַטן, װאָס ייִדן האָבן איבערגעטראָגן אױף זיך אין לאַנד איספּאַניע. איבערזעצט פֿרײַ פֿון יונה (המכונה זיידל) טרובניק.
The Unfortunate Miriam; or, The Bloody History of the Inquisition—The Most Interesting Historical Novel of the Dark Times, Which the Jews Endured in Spain, Translated Previously by Yoyne-Zeydl Trubnik.
Note that it does not acknowledge Aguilar (fig. 4).Footnote 20
Fig. 4. An edition of Trubnik’s translation from 1910 or 1911, with title and publication information in Yiddish.
Trubnik’s Yiddish version begins with Friedberg’s new opening chapter. While Friedberg’s Hebrew novel assumed a select male readership, the Yiddish rewriting adapts it for a popular audience, sprinkling folksy Yiddishisms, didactic additions, and readers’ aids throughout the prose. It is written in Daytshmerish, a Germanized register characteristic of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature.Footnote 21 Trubnik glosses terms unfamiliar to his readers such as עוואנגעליע (evangelye; “the Gospels”), which he renders as די קריסטלעכע תּורה (di kristlekhe toyre; “the Christian Torah”; Trubnik 1: 3) as well as more formal German terms such as געשטענדניש (geshtendnish; “confession”), referring to the Christian practice of confession, to which he adds a parenthetical Yiddish translation, מודה זײַן זיך (moyde zayn zikh; “to confess”; 1: 6). After first mentioning the Inquisition, Trubnik also adds a long explanatory footnote (1: 3). His parenthetical glosses and footnotes bridge Christian practices and Jewish idioms, performing an in-text cultural translation.
Trubnik’s translation of Friedberg’s new opening chapter indulges in graphic descriptions of torture, amplifying Jewish suffering and martyrdom. Sebastian is tortured nearly to death; Julien revives Sebastian with smelling salts, medicine, and wine. Here, the Yiddish text says:
און מיט אַ גרױס געװיין האָט ער אָנגעהױבן צו קלאָגן די קלאָגליד פֿון יהודה הלוי, װאָס האָט געקלאָגט אױף חורבן בית המקדש; ״װי קען מיר מײַן עסן און טרינקען באַקומען, װען איך זע דאָס פֿלייש פֿון
מײַנע העלדן אין די ציין פֿון הינט״ (1: 11) !
And with a great cry he [Julien] began to sing R. [Rabbi] Halevi’s song of lament for the destruction of the Temple [khurbn beysamigdesh]; “How should I accept my food and drink, when I see the flesh of my heroes in the teeth of the dogs!”Footnote 22
Trubnik quotes only the first line of Halevi’s poem, translating it into Yiddish while glossing it for the reader. Throughout the novel, Trubnik also peppers the text with classic Yiddishisms, for example writing that Miriam
האָט זי זיך באַשלאָסן צו באַגראָבן דעם סוד טיף בײַ זיך אין האַרצן אױף אייביק. נאָר דער מענטש טראַכט און גאָט לאַכט, טױזנטער געדאַנקען דענקט דער מענטש, און איין געלעגנהייט קערט איבער אַלע זײַנע געדאַנקען צו גאָרניט. (1: 34).
decided to bury the secret [of her love for Pedro] deep in her heart forever, but man plans and God laughs [der mentsh trakht un got lakht], a man thinks thousands of thoughts, and a single occurrence turns all of his plans to naught
In this instance, he unnecessarily explains a proverb that would have been familiar to any Yiddish speaker.
Later, in his rendering of Miriam’s climactic declaration at Stanley’s trial, Trubnik employs evocative Yiddish terms:
איך װייס זעלבסט װי װיכטיק מײַנע רייד װעלן זײַן אַז פֿון זיי הענגט אָפּ דאָס לעבן אָדער דער טױט פֿון אַ מענטשן, נאָר אומזיסט האָפֿט איר, מײַנע הערן, אױף מײַנע רייד צו שטעלן, איך קען ניט זײַן שױן באַגלױבט, דערמיט װאָס איך בין ניט פֿון איין שטאַם מיט אײַך, איך שטאַם פֿון אַזאַ פֿאָלק, װאָס זײַן עדות זאָגן נעמט זיך ניט אָן בײַ אײַערע שופֿטים, מײַן רעליגיע איז ניט אײַער רעליגיע, אײַער גאָט
איז ניט מײַן גאָט!…איך בין איין ייִדיש קינד! (1:111)
I know myself how important my speech will be, since the life or death of a man depends on it, but you hope in vain, my lords, to base your decision on my speech. I cannot be deemed credible [bagloybt], for not only am I not from the same lineage [shtam] as you, I come from a people whose testimony [eydes zogn] is not accepted among your judges [shoftim], my religion is not your religion, your God is not my God!…I AM A JEWISH CHILD! [IKH BIN EYN YIDISH KIND!].Footnote 23
The last sentence, highly idiomatic in Yiddish, is enlarged, offset, and centered on the page. In Friedberg’s more elegant Hebrew version, Miriam declares !!!עִבְרִיָּה אָנֹכִי (“Ivriyah anokhi!”; “I am a Hebrew [woman]!” or “I am a Jewess!”), also vocalized, enlarged, and typographically centered (Friedberg 1: 148). By comparison, in Aguilar’s English prose, Marie declares, “My evidence is valueless. I belong to that race whose word is never taken as witness, for or against, in a court of justice. I cannot take the oath required, for I deny the faith in which it is administered. I am a JEWESS!” (Aguilar 122). In Aguilar’s novel, “Jewess” is capitalized, but the font is not enlarged, nor is the sentence offset.Footnote 24 Despite their differences in tone and diction, both the Hebrew and the Yiddish versions visually and performatively dramatize this moment for the reader. (Friedberg translates “race,” used repeatedly by Aguilar in the nineteenth-century sense of “nation” or “tribe,” into Hebrew as עם [‘am; “people”], whereas Trubnik uses the Yiddish שטאם [shtam; literally “stem,” meaning “origin,” “lineage,” or “tribe”].)
Near the end of the novel, Pedro echoes Miriam’s pronouncement:
מרים, מײַן זיסע מרים! — האָט פּעדראָ אױסגערופֿן מיט אַלע כּוחות, װיי איז מיר, װאָס איך האָב דיך באַליידיקט אין די געדאַנקען דערפֿאַר, װאָס דו ביסט אַ ייִדיש קינד! װוּ ביסטו איצט מײַן טײַערע?
(Trubnik 2: 58)
“Miriam, my sweet Miriam!”—Pedro called out with all his strength, “Woe is me [Vey iz mir] that I had insulted you in my thoughts because you are a Jewish child [a Yidish kind]! Where are you now, my dear?”
For Pedro, a Spanish warrior, to express himself in such quaint terms seems amusingly incongruous, yet also authentic to Yiddish discourse, exemplifying Trubnik’s domesticating translation strategy. Even Trubnik’s didactic overtures convey a Yiddish cultural sensibility. For example, when Trubnik translates the philosophical conversations between Pedro and Julien, he sharpens the point Julien makes (quoting from Isaiah) about intellect’s superiority over force, reflecting prevalent Yiddish cultural attitudes:
ניט מיט דער שװערד װעלן מיר זיך קענען העלפֿן… — דאָס באַגערט ניט גאָט פֿון אונדז, ניט מיט מלחמה װעט זיך [דער] ייִד
(Trubnik 2: 84).העלפֿן, נאָר מיט שׂכל און פֿאַרשטאַנד
Not with the sword will we be able to help ourselves…. That is not what God wants of us. The Jew will not save himself with war, but with intelligence [seykhl] and understanding.
All told, the Yiddish translation is sensational, romantic, and didactic. While popularized for the Yiddish reader, it reflects maskilic attitudes and employs cultural strategies associated with Haskalah literature; it likely would have been received as “literary” by its readers, but not by contemporaneous European Jewish intellectuals.
The Yiddish version, however, was not the final transformation of Aguilar’s Vale. Surely unbeknownst to Trubnik, even as he sat in Vilna translating from Hebrew to Yiddish, another Jewish intellectual a world away in Tunis was busy reworking Friedberg’s Hebrew edition into Arabic. It is here, in this moment of the Hebrew edition’s simultaneous transmissions into Yiddish in Vilna and (oceans apart) into Judeo-Arabic in Tunis, that the Global Haskalah thesis crystallizes. In parallel with Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic underwent a literary renaissance from the mid–nineteenth to mid–twentieth centuries, most prominently in Tunis (Tobi and Tobi); unlike its Yiddish counterpart, however, the Judeo-Arabic Haskalah is still in early stages of scholarly recovery and awaits literary analysis. Jewish intellectuals in Arabic-speaking regions subscribed and contributed to the eastern European Hebrew journals as well as to local Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic newspapers. Like Hebrew newspapers in Jerusalem and eastern Europe, the Judeo-Arabic press in Baghdad, Calcutta, and Tunis included literary supplements, or feuilletons, that featured translations of both Jewish and popular European works. The translation history of Vale presents a rare opportunity to compare not only translations in two different Jewish vernacular languages—Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic—but also two different Judeo-Arabic translations from the far ends of the Arabic-speaking Jewish diaspora, Calcutta in the East and Tunis in the West.
North African Jews were generally less well versed in Hebrew than were their Levantine coreligionists; Tunis became a center of Judeo-Arabic publishing in part because of local demand for translation of Hebrew sources (Tobi and Tobi 4, 7). Seeking to compete with the cultural influence of French, Judeo-Arabic literature in colonial North Africa transposed the themes and ideas of the Hebrew Haskalah into local idioms. One especially important venue of North African Judeo-Arabic literary translation was the journal אלבוסתאן (El-boustan; The Orchard), published intermittently from 1888 to 1906, and edited by Jacob Chemla from 1892 to 1895. A key figure in the Maghrebi Haskalah, Chemla was a famous journalist, ceramic master, legal scholar, author, and translator. His literary fame grew following his 1889 Judeo-Arabic translation of The Count of Monte Cristo, which was reissued in seven volumes totaling over fifteen hundred pages. His translation of Friedberg’s edition of Vale, which he renamed קצת אליהוד פֹי אספאניא (Qissat al-Yahud fi Ispaniya; The History of the Jews in Spain), appeared in El-boustan as a feuilleton in 1888 and 1889 (Vassel 32) and was republished as a stand-alone volume sometime in the 1930s.Footnote 25 The volume’s title page reads:
קצת אליהוד פֹי אספאניא - הייא אלקצה אלתאריכֹייה. דאת אלוקאיע אלחקיקייה לא כֹיאלייה. קצה מואתרה עלא אלקלוב תגֹררי דמע אלעיון. מן עדאב קום אליהוד סאבק תחת סלטת רהבאן אלאנכויזיסיון. תעריב מ׳ יעקב שמלה הי״ו
The History of the Jews in Spain, a Historical Novel, of Real and Factual, not Fictional, Essence, That Moves the Heart and Draws Tears from the Eyes. From the Torments of the Jewish Nation Formerly under the Authority of the Priests of the Inquisition, Arabicized by Ya’akov Chemla
The book’s title page mentions neither Friedberg nor Aguilar, and is undated (fig. 5).
Fig. 5. Title page of Chemla’s translation with title in Judeo-Arabic and publication information in French.
Chemla’s title change presents the text as history rather than fiction. North African Jewish readers generally preferred historical novels, especially “books that were based on the ancient sources and devoted to the Jewish people” (Tobi and Tobi 9); Chemla’s repackaging and translation choices reflect this preference. In his introductory section on the history of the Inquisition, Chemla explains to his readers that Jews, whom he calls אלאומה אלאסראילייה (al-umma al-isra’iliyya; “the Israelite people or nation,” using the Islamic locution أمة [umma]; Chemla 3), were particularly susceptible to persecution. Heightening the drama, Chemla addresses the reader directly:
יא קארי! אידא תשאלני מנהם אלמקתולין בהאד אלעדאב ומא
הווא סבב קתלהם? (5)?
O reader! If you would, ask me, Who were the victims of these torments and for what reason were they killed?
Early in the novel, when Sebastian asks why Julien left the safety of the vale, and Julien explains that he left to avenge his father’s murder, Sebastian responds with a lengthy speech about ancient Jewish history; another new historical digression about debates between Christianity and Judaism follows a few pages later (23–25). Here and elsewhere, Chemla’s additions introduce Jewish historical content for the reader’s edification.
On the linguistic level, however, Chemla translates the entire text, including all of Friedberg’s canonical Hebrew intertexts, into a neutral register of literary Arabic. Chemla’s choices suggest both that he aspired to stoke the communal sympathies and religious fervor of his North African Jewish readers and simultaneously that his readers lacked mastery of Hebrew, perhaps even the ability to read the Bible in the original; at the same time, his Arabic style brings the text closer to the idiom of the Nahda, or modern Arabic renaissance. His translation flattens out Friedberg’s biblical allusions, erasing their intertextuality. Where Friedberg had consolidated his allusions to the Joseph story by using the word כתנת (kutonet) to describe Sebastian’s cloak, Chemla replaces kutonet with the Arabic קמיץ (qamīṣ; “shirt”; 27), departing from the Joseph motif. Yet on the next page he adds new liturgical content:
וכממל כלאמהו באלתוחיד. באלכלאם אלדי כֹרגֹ מן ענד אלרב סובחאנהו, באלכלאם אלמגֹרוס פֹי קלב כל מנהו יהודי יסמא, באלכלאם אלמנזל בין עינין אליהודי, באלתוחיד אלדי יכֹרגֹ מן פֹם אלאסראילי פֹי כל פֹצל פֹי אליקצֹא וקת אלנום וחתא וקת כֹרוגֹ רוחהו לם ינסאה: ״שמע ישראל ה׳ אלהנו ה׳ אחד!״
(28)
And he [Sebastian] concluded his speech with oneness [tawḥīd, the essence of monotheism in Islam]. With the words that came from the Lord Almighty, the words planted in the heart of all who are Jewish by name, with the words of the household [the mezuzah] and between the eyes of the Jew [tefillin, or phylacteries], with the tawḥīd that escapes the mouth of every Jew [al-isrā’īlī] in every moment of waking and sleeping, and that which he does not forget even as his spirit passes: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One [Shema yisra’el h’ eloheynu h’ ehad]!”
This remarkable addition alludes in Arabic to the core Jewish daily rituals and Judaism’s central affirmation of faith, the prayer “Shema Yisra’el” (“Hear O Israel”), using the Islamic term توحيد (tawḥīd). Chemla renders only the words of the Shema prayer in Hebrew and the rest of the passage in Arabic, Judaizing the Islamic concept of tawḥīd by redefining it through Jewish articles of faith. Chemla’s changes thus make the text decidedly less Hebraic, more Arabic, and more Judeo-Islamic. He familiarizes the story to his readers by moving the text closer to their local Maghrebi Jewish traditions and correspondingly farther from the maskilic Hebrew of Friedberg, including its biblical intertexts. Chemla also allows his readers’ religious attachments to shape the literariness of the text: he uses literature to impart religious guidance and affirmation, and, conversely, he converts an essential, sacred prayer into an element of the diegesis. Far from demonstrating the supposedly secularizing logic of the novel, this translation indicates instead how literary and religious traditions transform one another (Allan 4).
A few years later, the novel was Arabicized once again, this time in Calcutta. This version, a fairly literal translation of Friedberg’s text into the Baghdadi Jewish dialect of Arabic, was the work of the aforementioned Twena, a well-respected rabbinic scholar. Despite the conservative religious attitudes expressed in his writings on Jewish legal matters, Twena moonlighted as a translator of secular and sometimes even salacious fiction such as The Mysteries of Paris, which he printed in the literary supplement of his Judeo-Arabic newspaper מגיד מישרים (Magid mesharim; ֿThe Speaker of Truths) (Avishur). Here the colonial context is elemental, since Twena’s core readers were Baghdadi Jews employed in British trade in Asia; in addition to printing news and a literary supplement, Twena’s publication also provided information on shipping schedules (Bashkin). Twena serialized the translation of Vale in his newspaper from 1893 to 1895, then reissued it as a two-volume book in 1894 and 1895 (fig. 6).Footnote 26
Fig. 6. The title page of Twena’s Judeo-Arabic translation, in Hebrew, using two different script styles.
Twena’s title page attributes the novel directly to Friedberg, eliding Aguilar. Of note, Twena’s title page is written entirely in Hebrew (using two different scripts, Rashi script and block script) rather than Judeo-Arabic, although it refers to itself as a translation into the Arabic dialect of Jews in India. For Twena and his readers, who followed a long tradition of Arabic-Hebrew linguistic and cultural hybridity, there would be no philosophical or cultural schism between the Hebrew title page and Arabic body text. Here, as in all his translations, Twena employed a now-archaic sociolect of Baghdadi Jews with no analogous literary precedents, yet he fully replicates Friedberg’s work without curtailing the text’s length or detail. His successful re-creation of Friedberg’s narrative in a hybrid Arabic vernacular not only attests to his skill as a translator but also indicates his confidence in his mercantile readers’ appetite for lengthy, highbrow fiction.
Twena’s prose reflects the unique admixture of colloquial Arabic, Hebrew, and foreign loan words (mostly from English) that characterized his community’s vernacular:
וברגֹפֹא וברעדה נצא אל דכתר צובו …. ויקול הא האדא הווי
?סבסטיון אל גבור (Twena 1: 18) ?
Trembling and shuddering, the doctor bent down towards it [the body]…. He lamented: “Is this really Sebastian the hero?”
Here Twena chooses the English loanword daktur for “doctor,” rather than the Arabic طبيب (tabib) or the Hebrew רופא (rofeh), as well as the biblical Hebrew גִּבּוֹר (gibor) rather than the Arabic بطل (batal) for “hero.” He also describes the Inquisition’s torture devices using Friedberg’s Hebrew terms as opposed to their Arabic equivalents (Twena 1: 15; Friedberg 1: 15–16). Other English loanwords in Arabic, such as card (אל כארד; Twena 1: 5) appear occasionally, but the text offers scant evidence of its composition in India.
As opposed to Chemla, Twena retains all of Friedberg’s Hebrew intertexts, interpolating them into the Arabic-based narration. In so doing, he again reflects his readership’s cultural understanding of Arabic and Hebrew as complementary and continuous. The contrasting approaches of the two Judeo-Arabic translations are salient in their different renderings of the verses from Halevi’s aforementioned poem צִיּוֹן, הֲלֹא תִשְׁאֲלִי (“Tsiyon, ha-lo tishali”; “Won’t You Ask, Zion”). In quoting Halevi, Twena breaks from Arabic narration and transcribes the verses in the original Hebrew, whereas Chemla translates them into Arabic (Twena 1: 19; Chemla 20). Chemla then appends Halevi’s lines with a long string of unrelated verses in Arabic, an unattributed lamentation from a type of popular poetry that commonly appeared in pamphlets of liturgical verse in North African Jewish communities—essentially creating a new Arabic intertext that absorbs Halevi’s translated verses.
If all the Jewish-language translators infuse the novel with Jewish religious and cultural heritage, Chemla’s translation also revises novelistic form. Comparing the two Judeo-Arabic versions reveals that the Calcutta edition is more Hebraic and heteroglot, whereas the Tunisian edition is thoroughly Arabicized. Twena (in Calcutta) follows Friedberg’s novelistic narrative and form, while Chemla (in Tunis) abridges the narrative and introduces new historical and religious content as well as transgeneric intertexts. These findings, which point to the different cultural orientations of Judeo-Arabic writing in the East and West, underscore the importance of location and cultural specificity even within translations carried out in the same language group.
Diasporic World Literature and Cultural Memory
The global Jewish history of The Vale of Cedars begins with a novel that fuses the English literary tradition with Sephardic memory. Aguilar’s novel is an answer to the many European novels that equate liberal tolerance with the conversion of Jewish women to Christianity. Instead, Vale uses the language and cultural codes of English Protestantism to defend Judaism. This Anglo-Jewish novel then enters the global marketplace with translations into Danish and German. The German translation is embraced by German Jewry and circulates widely to other Jewish communities, becoming the springboard for two Hebrew adaptations that bring the novel in line with Jewish literary traditions and the Haskalah ethos. One of those Hebrew adaptations, which imaginatively Judaizes and masculinizes the narrative, serves as the source text for near-simultaneous translations into Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic. The Yiddish translation adapts the text for a popular Yiddish readership and ratchets up its dramatic effect. It also mediates German terms and Christian references through domesticating Yiddish glosses. Of the two Judeo-Arabic translations, one (from Calcutta) is linguistically hybrid but hews closely to the Hebrew Haskalah’s sensibilities; the other (from Tunis) is more uniformly Arabic and strays farther from the Hebrew source, reworking the text to reflect the Maghreb’s syncretic Judeo-Islamic culture. Ultimately, what begins as a Judeo-Protestant text evolves into a Judeo-Islamic text, closing the circle with the Jewish legacy of Islamic Spain (see fig. 7).
Fig. 7. The path of The Vale of Cedars through the Global Haskalah.
The successive retranslation of the novel by Jewish communities in Europe, Africa, and Asia is an affirmation of diaspora both as an exercise of cultural power for the sake of self-maintenance (Boyarin and Boyarin) and as a literary-translational practice (Edwards, Practice). A literary thread that begins with the Jewish heroines of Shakespeare and Scott leads to early-twentieth-century Calcutta after passing through Oldenburg, Mainz, Warsaw, Vilna, and Tunis—a trajectory that moves from West to East through multiple nonmetropolitan centers, and from English into Jewish vernaculars through the intermediaries of German and Hebrew. The translation history of Vale is at once an instantiation and a limit case of cultural imperialism, demonstrating both British Romantic literature’s ineluctable presence on the nineteenth-century world stage (Gagnier) and the various ways that a diasporic, minor culture modulated its expression and routes of transmission.
In this variant of world literature, the palimpsestic layering of textual heritage and cultural memory (with select erasures) accrues through the text’s repeated translations across the branches of a diaspora. Diasporic experience is inscribed in the rewritings linguistically, stylistically, and, in a sense, temporally: Vale’s myriad translators embedded liturgical texts, theological concepts, and expressions of collective memory within the narrative, anchoring it to their readers’ tradition. Jewish literary modernity unfolds in these rewritings as a novelistic processing of Jewish experience, or the development of a Jewish historical consciousness in fiction, where translation provides the means for this development. Gesturing both forward and back in time, modern but not quite modernist, the resulting works resist conventional literary periodization and stylistic categorization (Friedman; Warwick Research Collective).
The story of Vale exemplifies the Global Haskalah both in its interlinking of distant sites of Jewish enlightenment through circulation and translation and in its manifestations of cultural specificity and religious hybridity. The multiple translators of Vale assume authorial agency and imaginative freedom in successively reshaping the text. They rewrite Aguilar’s narrative in response to markedly different visions of Jewishness in the nineteenth century, all of which are culturally and linguistically distinct yet ideologically linked through the ethos of Haskalah and spiritually linked through the commemoration of Iberian Jewish martyrdom and resistance. Comparing the iterations of this novel, one senses the varied imperatives and focal points of Jewish enlightenment projects across a rich spectrum: the English Haskalah, whose focus was the acceptance and emancipation of British Jewry; the German Haskalah, which called for acculturation in German society; the eastern European Hebrew Haskalah, with its interest in revolutionizing Jewish life and its nascent Jewish nationalism, also giving rise to a popular Yiddish literature embracing the Jewish masses; the Baghdadi Haskalah, which sought a reconciliation of faith and modernity; and the North African Haskalah, which forged a Jewish alternative to the intensive forces of French colonialism. In these different ways, the translators of Vale “re-allegorized” (Hofmeyr 30) Aguilar’s story of crypto-Jews in Spain for Jewish readers who were negotiating their changing status in the variable frameworks of nation-states, empires and colonies, and trade diasporas. As they navigated the demands of a rapidly integrating modern world, Jewish intellectuals and readers throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas found pleasure and meaning in Aguilar’s romantic tale of Jewish valor.
