II Workshop (Online) in the framework of the DFG project, “The Jewish Library in Argentina: Carlos M. Grünberg’s Cosmopolitan Poetry and Polyglot Translation”, directed by Dr. Cynthia Gabbay
and hosted by Prof. Liliana R. Feierstein’s Chair in Transnational Jewish Studies at the Department of History and Theory of Culture, Humboldt Universität Berlin.
Subject: “Modern and Contemporary Jewish Translation and Multilingualism: Practices, History, and Semiotics /
Prácticas, historia y semiótica de la traducción y el multilingüismo judaicos en la época moderna y contemporánea /
Pratiques, histoire et sémiotique de la traduction et du multilinguisme juifs à l’époque moderne et contemporaine”.
Date: July 29-30, 2025
Place: Online
Lecturing languages: English, Romance and Jewish Languages
Assistant: Maia Avruj
The 20th and 21st centuries have witnessed an impressive literary and translation phenomenon of global scope (Gambier & Stecconi, 2019). While our goal is to better understand the historical, cultural, semiotic, and/or philological aspects of Jewish translation, we also invite specialists in general translation studies to contribute their comparative insights into both the theory and practice of translation—whether related to sacred or secular texts, narrative or poetry.
By way of introduction, we recognize Jewish translation as a longstanding tradition valued in the Diaspora not only because it serves as a practical tool for survival, communication, and pedagogical transmission, but also because it enables the multiplication of meanings and, consequently, fosters debate and the Talmudic spirit surrounding text, thought, and knowledge.
While our previous workshop in June 2024 focused on case studies linking Europe and Latin America, this II Workshop will center on the trajectories of literary Jewish translation in the modern and contemporary eras worldwide, and from historical, cultural, and/or semiotic perspectives.
At the beginning of the modern era, the translation of secular texts written in European languages into Jewish languages often took the form of transcreation, enabling extensive rewriting—even to the point of rendering the original author and text invisible. Later, in a more moderate fashion, the domestication of translated secular texts became common practice (Idelson-Shein, 2024).
In the contemporary context, the concept of Jewish translation requires definition, as the expression is particularly polysemic. Clarifying this definition will be instrumental in examining a variety of texts, both sacred and secular. While our objects of study are written in both Jewish (Aslanov, 2011) and non-Jewish languages, some may appear in Hebrew (Ben-Ari & Levin, 2019) and Arabic abjads, others in the Latin alphabet, or in other Western and non-Western scripts.
We are interested in exploring literary translations between Jewish languages, as well as between Jewish and non-Jewish languages. At the same time, we welcome studies of translations between non-Jewish languages (la‘az–la‘az) that nonetheless carry a distinct Jewish semantic or linguistic identity.
Indeed, a text can express a Jewish dimension in a Jewish language to varying degrees depending on its textual intentionality (see the cases of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish in Bunis 2013). However, it can also do so without necessarily employing a Jewish language (Gabbay 2025). Modern and contemporary Jewish literatures are often written in la‘az (non-Jewish languages), and their Jewishness may manifest in a range of ways, including intertextuality with Jewish texts; biblical semantic fields; the alternating use of borrowed words from Jewish languages—that is, the insertion of explicit or implicit multilingual dimensions (Weissmann 2018); the incorporation, codified or not, of the names of G-d; and the use of traditionally Jewish hermeneutic or translational methods such as calque (ladinar). Further markers include narrative contextualization that traces Jewish experience, a historicity of language referencing Jewish life or customs, and allusions to Jewish thought and mysticism.
Within this framework—and given that Jewish diasporic literature has evolved into various forms of minor literatures (Deleuze & Guattari 1975) and ultraminor ones (Moberg & Damrosch 2017; “ultranano literature,” Gabbay 2024a)—this workshop invites papers that engage with the theoretical and practical definitions of “contemporary Jewish translation”. Topics of interest include the formation of genres such as postmemory (Hirsch 2012) through translation (Gabbay idem); specific practices such as gendered translation (Simon 1996; Gabbay 2022a) and homophonic translation (Broqua & Weissmann 2019); and the implications of these approaches for the renewal and revitalization of Jewish languages (Pons 2020; e.g., Neo-Djudezmo in Latin America, Gabbay 2022b). We also welcome contributions that address how these dynamics play out in contexts of intellectual exchange between Latin America and Europe (Feierstein & Gerlingt 2008; Feierstein 2011), and more broadly, in global frameworks of cultural and linguistic circulation (Waligórska & Kohn 2018).
In the realm of Jewish literature and translation, we also recognize multilingualism as a fundamental phenomenon. We encourage critical engagement with the challenges that multilingual literary texts pose for modern and contemporary translation (Gabbay 2024b), particularly in an era marked by glottopolitical tensions between the formation of a global language and the literary and/or postvernacular cultivation of endangered languages—such as certain Jewish languages, numerous regional languages in Europe, and Indigenous languages across the world.
Therefore, our workshop invites specialists in Translation Studies—regardless of disciplinary background—to offer perspectives that reflect on the particularities of the translational era we inhabit and the literary phenomena of transfer between major and minorized languages, contributing tools for the study of contemporary Jewish translation, multilingual writing, and other minor and ultraminor literatures.
Please send your proposal (up to 300 words) and a short bio
before June 20, 2025
to: cynthia.gabbay@hu-berlin.de ; jewishtranslation@gmail.com ; maia.avruj@gmail.com
Also, sign in to the Network for the Study of Jewish Translation and Multilingualism in the Modern and Contemporary Ages following this form
and follow the project’s Blog, Truchmans & Polyglotries