ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the broad contours of a Jewish approach to translation from late antiquity to the present, beginning with an exploration of the role played in such an approach by conceptions of the special relationship of Jews with Hebrew, which express both the attachment to Hebrew as a sacred ‘original’ and the necessity of translation. The special relationship of Jews with this original tongue and the ‘source orientation’ that derives from it produce a variety of styles and techniques in Bible translation. Beyond the Bible, Jewish approaches to translation are shaped by Jewish liminality and diasporic displacements, casting Jews as mediators and translators at the margins of more-dominant cultures. Finally, this chapter asks whether ‘the translational turn’ in the humanities, informed as it is by post-colonialism, is also a ‘Jewish turn’ in Translation Studies, moving away from paradigms that have been shaped, consciously or not, by Christian linguistic presuppositions.
