Reading across Cultures

Reading across Cultures explores a body of innovative Jewish literary works from the Middle Ages. In late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ashkenaz—the Jewish communities in northern France, Germany, and England—Jewish authors translated several Old French and German stories into Hebrew. These stories are distinctly non-Jewish, drawing on the Christian romances of King Arthur and Alexander the Great and the classical fables of Aesop. Caroline Gruenbaum argues that these translations—rather than a