This article is about the translation evolution on the Latin-Hebrew-German axis, of a philosophical text about the nature of the human soul by the “angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas. The article focuses not on the inter-textual relations or the translation as the final product of a transparent translator or its manufacturing processes, but the experience of the translation encounter and its evolution. It is exposed like a mini-play. Act I takes place in the last generation before the Expulsion from Spain, when Eli Habillo – a prolific and enigmatic Hebrew translator who worked out of a deep familiarity with the scholastic establishment (the “Christian yeshivas,” as he called the universities of his time) – meets the foreign text, studies Latin to become familiar with it and master it, and sets out to “return a lost object to its owners,” as he writes in a sort of confession combining an introduction, apologetics, and polemics. Act II occurs in mid-19th century Leipzig, the first generation of the Emancipation, when a manuscript by Habillo is discovered by a quintessential emancipation intellectual, the scholarly Rabbi Adolph Jellinek, who uses the text to anchor his identity, passions and vulnerability in a somewhat imagined line of interreligious dialogue and recognition. Instead of applying timeless theoretical models to those translation encounters, the article uses contemporary research writing to develop the historical moment and incorporate it into the theory of translation encounter. It focuses on the translation performance and its ethics of multiplicity, not on the transfer of meanings from one language to another.

In Act III Eli Habillo, who in the text itself plays with concealing and revealing his presence, comes back, this time in a poetic voice: at the end of the medieval manuscript an unknown poem was discovered, in the tradition of Sephardic poetry in its heyday, and we read the translator’s ultimate poem.