In his essays in Cultural Translation in Modern Europe (2007), Peter Burke famously pointed out that “the study of translation is or should be central to the practice of cultural history” (38). Burke's statement well applies to the scope of Guetta's volume, which offers a counter to the preponderance of studies concerned with translation into Hebrew or, particularly in the Renaissance period, from Hebrew into Latin. We thus discover that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, Jewish translations from Hebrew having as target language the vernacular were not only a diverse phenomenon but also a rich one that significantly contributed to the transmission of knowledge and the development of literary cultures.
Expanding on a series of previously published articles and book chapters, Guetta's treatment significantly contributes to the understanding of early modern Jewish engagement with the disciplines or genres to which the works translated belong, the translators that produced them, and the readership for which they were intended. It also tries to indirectly map the progressive abandonment by Italian Jews of Judeo-Italian—that is, the written language reflecting regional and dialectical variants that Jews used until around 1550—and the subsequent, more consistent embrace of a standardized vernacular, although still written in Hebrew letters.
Organized thematically, the book includes seven chapters, each of them offering finely contextualized case studies revolving around a different kind of translation from Italian into Hebrew. Thus, the first chapter examines dictionaries. Among the dictionaries discussed in this chapter we find pedagogic tools that enjoyed lasting popularity among the Jewish audience, such as Dabber Tov (or, based on its first entry, Or-Lustro), first published in Venice in 1579, but also the much more complex and ambitious Tzemaḥ Tzaddiq (Venice, 1587), the Hebrew-Latin-Italian dictionary by David de’ Pomis (1525–88), that had been composed with both the Jewish and the Christian audience in mind. Chapter 2 discusses biblical translations, by far the vastest corpus of extant Jewish versions in Italian. This group also includes several biblical glossaries compiled between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, according to Guetta, allowed their authors to partly circumvent ecclesiastical prohibitions regarding the translation of the bible into vernacular by providing the intended readership diffuse interpretations of single passages.
Attention is here also devoted to the Italian version of the Haggada, made by the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (1571–1648). First published in Venice in 1609, alongside the Yiddish and Ladino versions, the translation, as Guetta points out, reveals Modena's degree of comfort with the surrounding Christian culture when its renders Shabbat with Sabato and, even more surprisingly, Pesaḥ with Pasqua. Philosophical lexicons and the Italian translations of two of the most influential philosophical works of the Middle Ages—that is, Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed and Yosef Albo's Book of the Principles—are dealt with in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 5 examines a variety of rhymed translations of liturgical and para-liturgical medieval Hebrew poems, while chapter 6 offers samples of Italian versions of traditional Sabbath songs. Finally, the last chapter deals with the Italian and Latin translations of the classical ethical Jewish work, Chapters of the Fathers.
While offering a thorough and valuable overview of early modern translations from Hebrew into the vernacular, Guetta's analysis leaves some questions at the margins. One of these questions has to do with the often unclear relationship between translation and imitation as a rhetorical genre (imitatio). Did the Jewish translators put the same emphasis on eloquence as did Italian theorists of the Renaissance who addressed the practice of conversio? Another aspect that would have been worth exploring is the polyglot environment in which these translations were produced, at a time when the idea of an essential correspondence between Hebrew and Italian, rather than a relative similarity, led to the creation of several multilingual compositions, some of them simultaneously readable in the two languages.
These are line of inquiries that others will hopefully take on, for, indeed, a nonsecondary aspect in Guetta's valuable study is that it indicates the many opportunities for further work on Hebrew into Italian translations and their place in the evolving cultures of early modern Jewry.
