Retranslation and Power: Attempts of Conversion of Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century by Scottish Protestant Missionaries through Retranslations from English Texts

Abstract

The Free Church of Scotland was an Evangelical movement from the 19th century that attempted to bring to Christianity different religious groups by means of establishing stations all over Asia. This research sheds light on the Mission to the Sephardic Jews located in Constantinople led by the Scottish missionary Alexander Thomson (1820–1899). This reverend retranslated educational books for children from English into Judeo-Spanish in order to use those texts as teaching materials in the Protestant school the mission had opened in the late 1840s in that region.The retranslated text underwent different editions from the 1850s to the 1880s. However, no major linguistic changes can be attested in the late edition, which proves ideological reasons over purely linguistic ones for retranslating this text. Unlike American Protestant missionaries, who rejected making explicit references to Christian ideology in their late works, the Free Church of Scotland changed their proselytizing strategy through the years by means of making their ideological intentions more overt, defying the agreed tactic among Protestants in Constantinople at the time. This research will prove to be useful in ascertaining the relation between power and retranslation, a recent acclaimed phenomenon in literature and translation studies.