Utopias of Translation: The Jewish-Arabic Language between Fear and Confidence. Decolonizing Echoes of Arab Jewish Thinkers of All Times; Utopías de la traducción: el judeo-árabe entre el temor y la confianza. Ecos descolonizadores de pensadores judíos ár

Abstract

A utopian promise of bi-national and inter-religious coexistence nestles in the Judeo-Arabic language, a millennia-old translator between two cultures that national-colonial political theology reduces to enmity. In translation (in a philosophical sense), seeking to de-essentialize Hebrew and Arabic, I see utopia as enabling the decolonization of political theology for the sake of a cosmopolitics of language. For a millennium the Arabic and Hebrew languages, whose enmity today is considered inexorable, were able to think, believe, and create —with others— different expressions of the fear of the same God. From some fragments of Judeo-Arabic texts of the 10th and 11th centuries, based on a heteronomous ethical and political perspective, I analyze the utopian potentialities of the act of translation.