Aguilar_Twena_commentary_Valley-of-Cedars

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Commentary

Grace Aguilar, Solomon Twena (translator), “The Vale of Cedars,” 1892. Commentary by Lital Levy

In the 1830s, a young Sephardic Englishwoman named Grace Aguilar wrote a historical romance titled The Vale of Cedars. Set in medieval Spain during the early days of the Inquisition, the work had all the makings of a bestseller: unrequited love, a rich historical setting, political intrigue, a murder, torture, a zero-hour rescue, and vengeance. But unlike other popular English novels, the heroine of this tale is Marie Morales, a crypto-Jewish woman who rejects marriage to a Christian suitor and dies a martyr to her faith. Published posthumously in 1850, The Vale of Cedars was a success. By the end of the century, the novel would make its way into the Jewish-language literary circuit, appearing in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic editions.

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Vale’s transmission into Jewish languages was prefaced by the appearance of the 1857 German edition, which was warmly received by Germany Jewry. J. Piza’s free adaptation pared down Aguilar’s novel, producing a version more easily adapted into modernizing literary languages. From this German version, The Vale of Cedars then appeared in Hebrew in two separate and independent editions. One version, retitled “Ha-emunah ve-ha-ahavah” (“Faith and Love”), first appeared as a roman feuilleton in the Hebrew weekly The Lebanon (Mainz) from 1874-1875 without attribution to Aguilar. Sigmund Gelbhaus, the translator, also published the complete translation as a book in 1875. That same year, the Hebrew writer Avraham Shalom Friedberg published his own translation as a book in Warsaw (reissued in 1893), titled Emek ha-arazim (The Vale of Cedars) and attributed to Aguilar. Friedberg’s version added a short historical prologue about the Inquisition and a lengthy new first chapter that creates a new backstory for the plot. It also introduces Pedro, a new Jewish male protagonist who replaces Marie’s Gentile love interest, and recenters the novel around Pedro’s story. Friedberg’s version shaped the novel’s reception throughout the Jewish world; it was adapted into Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic as well as two modernized and abridged Hebrew editions (1954 and 1970). The Yiddish version, Di ungliklekhe Miriam (The Unfortunate Miriam), was printed in Vilna in 1888 and reprinted in 1910.

In the same year (1888), the first of the two Judeo-Arabic translations was undertaken by the Tunisian Jewish polymath Jacob Chemla, a key figure in the Maghrebi Haskalah. An important translator and journalist, Chemla edited the Judeo-Arabic journal El-Boustan (The Garden) from 1892 to 1897. His translation appeared as a feuilleton in El-Boustan from 1888 to 1889; in the 1930s it was republished in Tunis as a book titled The History of the Jews in Spain (Qissat al-Yahud fi Ispaniya). Chemla’s version follows Friedberg, though the title page mentions neither Friedberg nor Aguilar. His translation Arabicizes of all the Hebrew elements of Friedberg’s additions, and adds popular Arabic poetry characteristic of North African Jewry as well as several digressions into different episodes in Jewish history. Chemla’s translation choices suggest that he aspired to stoke the communal sympathies and religious fervor of his readers and points to their lack of Hebrew literacy.

Meanwhile, at the other far end of the Judeo-Arabic speaking world, the Calcutta-based rabbi Solomon Twena printed his own translation as a feuilleton in the literary supplement of his Judeo-Arabic newspaper Magid mesharim (The Speaker of Truths) from 1892 to 1893, and again as a two-volume book in 1894-1895. Twena served the expatriate Baghdadi community employed in British trade in Asia; his Magid mesharim was one of several Judeo-Arabic newspapers published by Baghdadi Jews in India during the second half of the nineteenth century. It appeared weekly in Calcutta from 1890 to 1900 and carried news of Jews in Baghdad as well as local news of Jewish communities in India, announcements of births, deaths, and marriages, shipping news and schedules, and worldwide Jewish news. It also contained a literary supplement, Magid mishneh, that appeared as a full-page section toward the end of each issue. In this feuilleton, Twena printed a wide range of cultural sources including literature translated from Hebrew and other languages, folk stories, and his own Hebrew sermons. Twena’s literary supplement was intended to enrich the cultural and spiritual lives of his male readership, Iraqi Jewish merchants in Iraq, India, Burma, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in Asia.

A fairly literal translation of Friedberg’s text into the Baghdadi Jewish dialect of Arabic, Twena’s version of The Vale of Cedars preserved the Hebrew titles, biblical quotations, and intertextual literary elements such as verses by the medieval poet Judah Halevi, suggesting that his readership was equally comfortable with both Hebrew and Arabic. The selection presented here is excerpted from Twena’s translation of the new material added by Friedberg. In this dramatic scene, Julian, a Jewish man disguised as a Christian doctor, finds his uncle Sebastian, Pedro’s father, dying in the underground torture chambers of the Inquisition. Pedro has been raised as Christian nobility and is unaware of his paternal Jewish lineage. Julian promises Sebastian on his deathbed that when Pedro comes of age (on his twenty-fifth birthday), Julian will reveal the secret, instruct Pedro in the tenets of Judaism, and bring him to the Vale of Cedars, his Jewish family’s hidden home. I have added parenthetical notes to show how Twena uses both colloquial Arabic and liturgical Hebrew in his narrative prose.

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Aguilar_Twena_commentary_Valley-of-Cedars