The Story of the Female Jewish Wine Merchant: An Example of Cultural Translation in Medieval Hebrew Literature

In this article I take the story of a Jewish female wine merchant (chapter 28, Mishle ha-ʿarav) as a witness of the phenomenon of cultural translation that was developing within the Jewish communities in Medieval Iberia and Provence. I present the Hebrew transcription of the story and provide the first English translation. Then, I examine the motivations that led the author of the work to stress the religion of the wine seller and the consequences of this fact from a cultural translation perspective. The objective is not to find the source and parallels of the story but to understand its meaning in a specific cultural context. Therefore, this article offers my reading of the story as a multilayered text in which we can see intermingled traces of different cultural traditions: the story of the hermit Barṣīṣā, the doctrine of martyrdom in Judaism and the ḥudud crimes in Islamic law.