Cassen and her collaborator from Yeshiva University will create a two-volume translation that bridges Jewish, colonial, Latin American, and European studies.
Flora Cassen, associate professor in the departments of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies and history, won a $299,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work with her collaborator, Ronnie Perelis, on a translation of two important early modern Jewish texts about the Americas.
Cassen will focus on Joseph ha-Kohen’s “The Book of New India,” a Hebrew translation of Lopez de Gómara's Spanish history of the New World. Ha-Kohen's version intentionally mistranslates parts of Gómara’s text and contains critiques of Spanish imperialism and colonialism not found in the original, reflecting the author’s multiple expulsions from Spain and Italy for being Jewish. “Ha-Kohen is a European Jew, but his translation gives another perspective, decentered from the standard European narrative,” Cassen said.
Perelis, an associate professor at Yeshiva University, will concentrate on Luis Carvajal the Younger’s religious anthology, a spiritual diary that shows how a converso — someone forcibly converted to Christianity — reconstructed Jewish beliefs and traditions in Mexico. In 1596, Luis Carvajal the Younger, his mother, and his sisters were all publicly burnt at the stake by the Inquisition for secretly practicing Judaism.
Cassen and Perelis’s project aims to create a two-volume translation, bridging Jewish, colonial, Latin American, and European studies. Both texts are by minority authors and shed light on what European conquest might mean for non-Christian populations. According to Cassen, they also show how worldviews shifted at that time, and how differently situated groups grappled with those changes.
The grant will fund graduate assistants for both scholars and provide a break from teaching. Cassen said she and Perelis will also benefit from the support of worldwide collaborators with expertise in some of the more obscure facets of the texts. “We realized this is a global project that requires additional linguistic and textual knowledge, so we’ve put together a group of international advisors to help,” Cassen said. “Working on this is a dream.”
