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Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Europe

Objective

Contemporary scholarship has often envisioned modernity as a kind of immense cultural earthquake, originating somewhere in western or central Europe, and then gradually propagating throughout the continent. This massive upheaval is said to have shaken the very foundations of every culture it frequented, subsequently eliminating the world which once was, to make way for a new age. This project offers a new understanding of modernization, not as a radical break with tradition, but as the careful importation of new ideas by often timid, almost inadvertent innovators. The project focuses on the rich corpus of translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages, which developed during the early modern period. Largely neglected by modern scholars, these translations played a pivotal role in fashioning Jewish culture from the sixteenth century into modern times.

Jewish translators were never merely passive recipients of their non-Jewish sources; they mistranslated both deliberately and accidentally, added and omitted, and harnessed their sources to meet their own unique agendas. Throughout the process of translation then, a new corpus was created, one that was distinctly Jewish in character, but closely corresponded with the surrounding majority culture.

JEWTACT offers the first comprehensive study of the entire gamut of these early modern Jewish translations, exposing a hitherto unexplored terrain of surprising intercultural encounters which took place upon the advent of modernity—between East and West, tradition and innovation, Christians and Jews. The project posits translation as the primary and most ubiquitous mechanism of Christian-Jewish cultural transfer in early modern Europe. In so doing, I wish to revolutionize our understanding of the so-called early modern “Jewish book,” revealing its intensely porous, collaborative and innovative nature, and to offer a new paradigm of Jewish modernization and cultural exchange.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2018-STG

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Host institution

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 496 900,00
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 496 900,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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