ABSTRACT
Jewish translation history begins with with the centrality of words and texts to Jewish religion, culture, and society. A second premise is the consistent linguistic configuration of the Jews, a minority group throughout most of their history, with Hebrew, the sacred language; a series of widely -used Jewish vernaculars, such as Yiddish; and the Jewish proficiency in, and creative contributions to, the languages of the majority. In the modern period, Jewish translation practices proliferated and acquired new significance. This essay highlights four Jewish ’translational turns’: the age of Jewish Enlightenment; modernism; the forging of a modern, spoken, secular Hebrew, which became the lingua franca of the State of Israel; and the ongoing collective effort to bear witness to the Holocaust. In the twenty-first century, with the new celebration of Jewish multilingualism, translation has started to come to the foreground of research on Jewish literature and culture.
