Reading across Cultures

Translating Romances, Fables, and Poetry in Medieval Ashkenaz

Caroline Gruenbaum

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781501782435
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Reading across Cultures explores a body of innovative Jewish literary works from the Middle Ages. In late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ashkenaz—the Jewish communities in northern France, Germany, and England—Jewish authors translated several Old French and German stories into Hebrew. These stories are distinctly non-Jewish, drawing on the Christian romances of King Arthur and Alexander the Great and the classical fables of Aesop.

Caroline Gruenbaum argues that these translations—rather than adapting stories that reflected Jewish religious or cultural practice—represent a body of secular Hebrew literature in Ashkenaz and evidence of a shared literary culture between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe. Reading Hebrew animal fables, folktales, and chivalric romance, Gruenbaum describes an intellectual climate that allowed the literati of medieval Ashkenaz to read across cultures. In these translations, produced by medieval Jews for entertainment and for wisdom, Gruenbaum finds a new literary awakening in Ashkenaz.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Jewish Knights
• 1. Education, Literacy, and Intellectual Culture in Medieval Ashkenaz
• 2. Languages of Translation in a Diglossic Society
• 3. Translating Morality: Berechiah ha-Nakdan and His Animal Fables
• 4. “Of Foolish Passion”: Chivalric Romance in Medieval Jewish Culture
• 5. Converts and the Limits of Medieval Jewish Literature
• Conclusion: Finding a Place for Literature of Ashkenaz
• Appendix: Literary, Scientific, and Philosophical Texts and Translations Produced in Ashkenazi Communities in the Medieval Period (ca. 1000–ca. 1400)
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page