Iris Idelson-Shein, "Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe" (U Penn Press, 2024)

Oct 25, 2025

Iris Idelson-Shein, an Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University, dives into the fascinating world of early modern Jewish translation. She reveals how translators creatively adapted foreign texts to make them relatable to Jewish readers. The discussion explores the metaphors of translation as bridges and barricades and highlights shifts from medieval practices to the Enlightenment era. Idelson-Shein also covers the significance of travel literature in children's education and introduces the JEWTACT database, emphasizing its role in the study of cultural transfer.

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INSIGHT

Translation As Bridge And Border

Translation functions both to connect cultures and to set boundaries, mirroring the early modern Jewish ghetto's logic.
It allowed Jews to absorb external knowledge while preventing cultural assimilation by 'domesticating' texts.

INSIGHT

Domestication As Core Norm

Early modern Jewish translation prioritized domestication to make foreign texts kosher and palatable.
Translators routinely altered Christian elements, Judaized characters, and even rewrote plots to detoxify sources.

ANECDOTE

Robinson Crusoe Reimagined As Jewish Merchant

Some Jewish translators fully Judaized characters, like turning Robinson Crusoe into a Galician Jewish merchant.
They rewrote details so the protagonist focuses on keeping kosher and Jewish practices on the island.

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One of the constants of Jewish history is that Jews have learned from the cultures around them. But this exchange of information was not an easy endeavor. Not only did Jews speak a different language, but their cultural touchpoints were different. If they were to learn from the people around them, their translations had to be deliberate, sometimes taking creative license of create buy in among the Jewish community.

Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (U Penn Press, 2024) by Iris Idelson-Shein explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in the Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer (JEWTACT) database, Idelson-Shein reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allowed for early modern Jewish translators to make intensely creative and radical departures from the source texts—from “Judaizing” names, places, motifs, and language to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidently. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures yet was uniquely Jewish in character.
Between the Bridge and the Barricade isn’t just about translation. It’s about how ideas spread, how people learn, how identity is formed, and helps explain how we got to the Judaism we have today.

Iris Idelson-Shein Associate Professor of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.

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