Cultural Translation

The Haskalah Library and the Making of the Modern Jew

Zohar Shavit

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783111338101
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology
• Index: History

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the maskilim, a group of young Jewish intellectuals who were starving for universal knowledge and for engagement with wider social circles, set out to reform Jewish society by expanding its cultural boundaries and building a bridge to the Enlightened world. Through dialogue with the non-Jewish society, and by introducing their fellow Jews to the texts and cultural goods of that society, mainly through translation, they sought to promote their social agenda and impart to their readers a new habitus, new social models of Bürgerlichkeit and Bildung, and a new awareness of civil equality and civil rights. This book explores this translational project and the ways by which it strove to affect a profound cultural change in the Jewish world.

Zohar Shavit, professor emerita at the School for Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University, is an internationally renowned authority on the history of Israeli culture, child and youth culture, and Hebrew and Jewish cultures, especially in the context of their relations with various European cultures. In 2025, she won the Israel Prize in the field of Culture and Arts for her groundbreaking research on childrens' culture, cultural transition, and the cultural history in Israeli and Jewish society.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 From Friedländer's Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe—Outlining the Map of Jewish-Hebrew Children's Literature in the German-Speaking Sphere
• Chapter 2 The Very Beginning: The Publication of the Lesebuch für Jüdische Kinder as a Turning Point
• Chapter 3 Translated Texts as Vehicles of Social Change
• Chapter 4 Robinson der Jüngere in the Service of the Haskalah: Joachim Heinrich Campe, the Haskalah and the Bildung Project in Jewish Society
• Chapter 5 Between Salvation and Welcoming the Stranger: The Path of Les bergères de Madian into the Literature of the Haskalah
• Appendix 2 Translations of Joachim Heinrich Campe's Works into Hebrew
• Appendix 3 David Samoscz's Books and Translations
• Appendix 4 Books by Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis Translated into German
• Person Index