Wacks, Davidhttps://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/82022024-03-29T08:28:29Z2024-03-29T08:28:29ZTranslation in Diaspora: Sephardic Spanish-Hebrew translations in the sixteenth centuryWacks, David A.https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/220202019-02-05T19:51:43Z2016-01-01T00:00:00ZTranslation in Diaspora: Sephardic Spanish-Hebrew translations in the sixteenth century
Wacks, David A.
In this essay, I discuss three Hebrew translations made by Sephardic Jews writing in from a position of a double diaspora (from ‘Zion’ and from Sepharad, or Spain): Joseph Tsarfati’s Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, Jacob Algaba’s Amadís de Gaula by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, and Joseph Hakohen’s Historia general de las Indias by Francisco López de Gómara. These Sephardic translators sought to appropriate these very popular Spanish texts and place them in the service of a Jewish literary culture, one whose values were often at odds with those of the original authors and readers of the Spanish originals. At the same time, the Sepharadim were deeply identified with Iberian vernacular culture, and these translations were a form of cultural capital upon which they traded in the broader Jewish context of Western Christendom and the Ottoman Empire. The lens of diaspora can help us to better understand Sephardic translation from Spanish to Hebrew by focusing on the significance of language use, cultural identity, and Jewish literary culture in the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century.
2016-01-01T00:00:00ZIn Memoriam Ángel Sáenz-Badillos Pérez, 1940-2013Wacks, David A.https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/186792019-02-05T19:51:04Z2014-01-01T00:00:00ZIn Memoriam Ángel Sáenz-Badillos Pérez, 1940-2013
Wacks, David A.
Summary of biography and scholarly career of Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, prominent Spanish Hebraist
7 pages
2014-01-01T00:00:00ZVernacular Anxiety and the Semitic Imaginary: Shem Tov Isaac ibn Ardutiel de Carrión and his CriticsWacks, David A.https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/124792019-02-06T00:07:45Z2012-01-01T00:00:00ZVernacular Anxiety and the Semitic Imaginary: Shem Tov Isaac ibn Ardutiel de Carrión and his Critics
Wacks, David A.
Shem Tov ibn Isaac Ardutiel (Santob de Carrión) lived in the fourteenth century, period of intense vernacularization of literary practice in Castile. Shem Tov has long been imagined as a model of multiculturality, and the lasting impact of his diglossic literary legacy is undeniable. He is a compelling case study of the role of Hebrew literature in the age of Hispano-Romance vernacularity. Shem Tov writes at a time when Spanish Jewish authors voice considerable ambivalence about the practice of vernacular literature. In this essay I offer a new reading of Proverbios morales and his Hebrew Debate between the pen and the scissors as veiled critiques of Castilian literary practice and a defense of Hebrew in an age of vernacularization.
The ambivalence and anxiety that characterized Jewish approaches to the vernacular are mirrored by modern critics of the literature of Spain’s Jews. Spanish criticism of Shem Tov’s work is revealing of conflictive modern Spanish attitudes toward the role of Jewish authors in a national literary legacy. In the second part of this essay I demonstrate how the anxieties that characterized Jewish-Christian literary relations in 14th century Castile are still alive and well in 19th and 20th century Spanish scholarship.
2012-01-01T00:00:00ZConflicted Identity and Colonial Adaptation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus contra judaeos and Disciplina clericalisWacks, David A.https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/120222019-02-05T19:50:46Z2012-01-01T00:00:00ZConflicted Identity and Colonial Adaptation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus contra judaeos and Disciplina clericalis
Wacks, David A.
Book chapter from collection of essays on Converso studies.
2012-01-01T00:00:00Z