Reading Across Cultures - by Caroline Gruenbaum (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Examines how medieval Jewish writers and poets adapted Christian romances and Classical fables into Hebrew, creating a sense of a shared elite culture among Ashkenaz Jews and Christians. This book is part of a broader effort within medieval studies to understand Christian-Jewish relations in this period"--

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Caroline Gruenbaum is Assistant Director of Digital Content at the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization and the coeditor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Romance.