About

The Haggadah text is central to Jewish identity and ritual: it is read at Pesach/ Passover in a family setting as a prescribed, effectively public ritual action. The original Hebrew text is a compilation of Bible quotes, Mishnaic text and Midrash (homiletic explanations), probably as old as 200-300 AD. The oldest complete manuscript dates to the 10th century. At least six thousand variant Hebrew versions exist in print and manuscripts.

TRANSLATIONS

From early days it has been customary to translate the Haggadah orally into the vernacular for the benefit of people who did not understand the Hebrew. Aaron haKohen of Lunel (14th cent.) mentions it as a laudable custom, and says that it was done in England (Moses Isserles, in his commentary on Ṭur Oraḥ Ḥayyim, 473). A Latin translation was printed in Frankfurt on Main, 1512 (Wiener, Bibliographie der OsterHaggadah, No. 4), but this was not for the use of Jews.

An edition of Salonica, 1567, contains only the laws in Ladino, but Venice editions of 1609 contain translations of the whole Haggadah into Ladino, Italian, and JudæoGerman.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

While component Bible quotations have been frequently and variously translated into English since at least 1535, published translations of the complete Haggadah into English begin in 1770. Since then, the Haggadah has been published in at least seven hundred English versions. It is my aim to examine a large selection of these, representative of major periods, places , confessional traditions and movements, and publishing subgenres. I will focus particularly on the Ashkenazi traditional editions but will also look at some "modern" outliers.

No encompassing research on multiple English translations of the Haggadah has been done since the mid 20th century when Aaron Greenbaum, the translator of the Kasher Haggadah into English (Kasher,1950), compared earlier English translations in preparation for his translation, as he mentions in the introduction to his translation . Although his analysis is limited in its scope and depth and was executed without the help of digital tools available today, this research will use part of the guidelines for comparison laid out in Greenbaum’s work as a key for comparisons and analysis.

It is my aim to explore and analyse a corpus of multiple, historical, and contemporary retranslations of this semi-liturgical text with cross-cultural significance looking at both the traditional linguistic and the more contemporary cultural side of translation.

Link to (part of) my dissertation.


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