Course
Course 7.5 credits • YIDC06
The course YIDC06 is currently not being offered
This course will focus on the bridges built between Hebrew and Yiddish in order to make the biblical text as well as its traditional commentary accessible to European Jews, both through full translations and retellings, of the entire corpus or chosen passages.
The Hebrew Bible (Tanach) is written in Hebrew (and some Aramaic) – a language that European Jews hardly understood, as they spoke Yiddish in their daily lives.Yiddish texts composed since the Middle Ages and up to the twenty-first century will be studied, encompassing full and literal translations, didactic literature, retellings
in prose and in poetry, and dramatic and cinematic adaptations of biblical scenes. In order to allow a broader understanding of the Yiddish corpus, also texts in German, English, and Swedish – Germanic languages related to Yiddish – will be considered. These often differ significantly from the Jewish translations and shed light on the Christian stance regarding the definition of the biblical corpus, its interpretation, its use in liturgy, and the history of its translation and retelling. The course will pay attention to cultural-historical contexts and processes that influenced the translation of the Bible, such as diglossia and multilingualism, text criticism, the history of reading and literacy, the advent of print, Humanism and the Reformation.