An Ancient Psalm, a Modern Song: Italian Translations of Hebrew Literature in the Early Modern Period

This volume presents the culmination of research on an almost ignored literary corpus: the translations into literary Italian of classical Hebrew texts made by Jews between 1550 and 1650. It includes poetry, philosophy and wisdom literature, as well as dictionaries and biblical translations produced in what their authors viewed as a national tongue, common to Christians and Jews. In so doing, the authors/translators explicitly left behind the so-called Judeo-Italian. These texts, many of them being published for the first time, are studied in the context of intellectual and literary history. The book is an original contribution showing that the linguistic acculturation of German Jews in the late 18th century occurred in Italy 150 years earlier.