For readers of nineteenth century European Jewish novels, “Faith and Love” would likely seem familiar. The first installment introduces readers to the noble Arthur Stanley, bravely crossing the Sierra Toledo mountains in Spain to reach a lovely woman hiding in a remote vale of cedar trees. Many nineteenth century German-Jewish historical romances were set in Spain, often during the Inquisition, emphasizing Jewish faith and heroism as they sought to insert Jews into popular German narratives of the time, which used the fanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition to celebrate the Protestant world’s civilization and tolerance (Hess, 36).

The roman feuilleton’s second installment, featured here, introduces readers to the lovely and courageous Miriam, who dramatically confesses her Jewish identity to Stanley, shocking him and testing his allegiance to the Spanish crown. While Stanley accedes to Miriam’s insistence that he must leave, he is unwilling to accept her refusal to marry him, setting up the narrative twists and turns that follow. These are all familiar features of popular fiction in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and Eugene Sue’s popular The Mysteries of Paris (1842-3): beautiful young women in danger, evil villains, heroic knights, and love deferred. In its adaptation as a roman-feuilleton, “Faith and Love” also has one of the most important features of this sort of serialized fiction: the words “to be continued” (ha-hemshekh yavo) at the very end of this and subsequent installments. Whether published weekly, as was the case with this feuilleton, or daily, roman feuilletons aimed to keep readers eagerly awaiting to buy the next paper so that they could read the next installment.

Most roman feuilletons were initially published in the press and, if they were well received, later republished in book form. The Vale of Cedars, however, was initially published as an English novel and then was transformed into a Hebrew roman feuilleton which was also republished as a book a few years later. Ha-levanon acknowledges that this text was translated, but provides no details about the original text, author, or language. Perhaps the editors of this Orthodox publication were hesitant about attributing the text to a woman, even a highly regarded Jewish woman writer. Perhaps they were unaware of the connection to Aguilar, since Gelbhaus’s translation was based on J. Piza’s German translation, published as Marie Henriquez Morales (1856) and Das Cederenthal (1857). Perhaps they did not care about the origins of the text, publishing in a time in which popular fiction was often reproduced without crediting authors or translators. In any case, Gelbhaus’s Hebrew version was reprinted as a novel in 1875, the same year that Avraham Shalom Freidberg (1838-1902) published his own Hebrew translation, titled Emek ha-arazim (The Vale of Cedars) in Warsaw. Over the next few decades, free translations of Aguilar’s work appeared in other Jewish languages, including Di ungliklekhe Miriam (The Unhappy Miriam) in Yiddish in Vilna in 1888, Emek ha-arazim (The Vale of Cedars) in Judeo-Arabic in Calcutta in 1892-1893 and Qissat al-Yahud fi Ispaniya (The History of the Jews in Spain) in Judeo-Arabic in Tunis in the 1930s. The translations and transformations of The Vale of Cedars demonstrate the broad circulation of this and other popular roman feuilletons across Europe and across global Jewish cultures.

Sources:

• Grace Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr (1850).
• Jonathan Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Further Reading:

• Janine Strauss, “From The Vale of Cedars by Grace Aguilar to Emek ha-arazim by Abraham Shalom Friedberg,” (Hebrew) in Ha-kenes ha-ivri ha-mada’i ha-shelosh-esraeh be-eiropa universtitat Madrid, ed. Menahem Zohori (Jerusalem, 2001), 93-98.