Judaisation in the first Hebrew translation of Romeo and Juliet

Ram and Jael (Salkinson 1878), the earliest Hebrew version of Romeo and Juliet, is a highly domesticating translation containing numerous Jewish cultural elements. This is attributable to the fact that the translation formed part of an ideologically loaded Jewish Enlightenment initiative to establish a European-style literary canon in Hebrew and reflecting Jewish values at a time when the language was still almost solely a written medium prior to its late nineteenth-century re-vernacularisation in Palestine. This chapter discusses the unusual sociolinguistic background to Ram and Jael and analyses its main Judaising features, which include the treatment of non-Jewish names; holidays and rituals; establishments; oaths and expressions; mythological figures; and foreign languages, as well as the insertion of biblical verses

Yiddish narrative prose from its beginnings to "Shivhei Habesht" (1504-1814).

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