The 72 Languages of the Torah – Jewish Translations of the Bible
Conference of the German Association for Jewish Studies (VJD)
25–28 February 2019, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf
The history of Jewish Bible translation that have come down to us as written texts starts with the Septuagint, the translation of the Torah into Greek for the Hellenized Jewish population of Alexandria, Egypt, from the third century B.C.E. It continues through the Targumim for the Aramaic speaking Jewish, the revisions of the Septuagint, the Syriac-Aramaic Peshitta from the first century C.E., Judeo-Arabic translations and the translations into all languages spoken by Jews from the Middle Ages to the present.
Research on Jewish Bible translations is closely connected with developments in the Philologies, Jewish Studies, Theology, Linguistics, Literary Studies and Cultural History. Aim of this conference is to bring scholars of all levels of experience in contact to share their research and to create an exchange between different approaches regarding Jewish Bible translations from different epochs and cultures in order to give an impetus for further research and possibly to lead to future research co-operations.
Invited speakers are David Bunis, Willem Smelik, Moshe Taube, Ronny Vollandt and Irene Zwiep.
Possible topics are
- Form and function of Bible translations
- Linguistic and cultural adaptive and modernizing processes which can be found in Bible translation
- The specific linguistic varieties of Bible translations
- The influence of Bible translations on target languages
- The conservative character of Bible translations or breaks with traditions
- Comparative studies to translations of specific books of the Bible
Abstracts for 20-minute papers in German or English on philological, linguistic, cultural or religious topics and theoretical aspects of Jewish translations oft he Bible are welcome. Doctoral candidates and postdocs are encouraged to present their research to a broader audience. It is possible to propose sessions with several papers (with an abstract for each paper). Please send the abstracts (max. 300 words) by November 1, 2018, tojiddisch@hhu.de
Organisation:
Marion Aptroot, Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf
Saskia Dönitz, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main
Ronny Vollandt, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich