DIASPORIC DIFFERENCE: The Global Jewish Journey of Robinson Crusoe

As an inherently decentered and transnational mode of identity, culture and language, diaspora offers fertile grounds for the production of world literature. Yet diasporic literature diverges from national and regional models of world literature as well as related typologies of comparison due to particularities I collectively term “diasporic difference.” This essay elucidates diasporic difference in nineteenth-century Jewish-language translations of Robinson Crusoe made during the Haskalah, or global Jewish Enlightenment movement. After mapping the novel’s translation history in Hebrew and Jewish vernacular languages (Ladino, Judeo-Arabic and Yiddish), I show how the manifestations of Jewish diaspora play out at different levels, from the novel’s diasporic pathways of circulation to each individual edition’s linguistic and aesthetic attributes. Drawing upon this case study and prior scholarship, I argue that diaspora combines different scales of literary space and time, expanding world literature’s horizon of inquiry beyond a singular modern “world.” Further, diaspora may challenge distinctions between North-South and South-South models by absorbing both trajectories of circulation into a “minor” diasporic network of lateral exchange. Finally, given diaspora’s merging of a shared culture of origin with heterogeneous local influences, the translingual comparison of texts within a diasporic constellation resists classification as either intercultural or intracultural comparison. The multilingual Jewish translation history of Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the modulation of diverse cultures through the unifying force of diasporic connection and calls for an alternative approach to comparison.