Translation and Westernization:Gulliver's Travelsin Ladino

Abstract

leksander Ben Ghiat's translation ofJonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is an important literary document as well as a valuable resource for the student of Sephardic social and intellectual history, and my goal in this article is to provide a philological analysis of it.' Ben Ghiat was a prolific writer. He was born in Izmir, Turkey, and received his education there, first in a meldar (a Jewish religious primary school), then in one of the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU). These schools were opened in the Ottoman Empire after 1860 by French Jews, whose goal was to bring Western cultural values, progress, and moral education to their Oriental co-religionists. The AIU saw its work as a civilizing mission. The general system of teaching imitated those principles dominant in nineteenth-century Republican France. At first the teachers came from Paris, but later they were recruited in the Middle East and instructed in France. For the