First published in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was translated into numerous Jewish languages between 1784 and the early 20th century: Judeo-German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic (in Tunisia), and Ladino. In some of these languages, it was translated multiple times, and many of the translators took liberties with the text, sometimes working not from the English original but from an 18th-century German adaptation. Perhaps the most transformed, writes Chen Malul, was Yosef Vitlin’s Yiddish version:
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More about: English literature, Jewish language, Ladino, Translation, Yiddish