Early Ashkenazic Poems about the Binding of Isaac

The First to the Fifteenth Century, 2008

Aya Elyada's book explores the less well-known "cousin" of Christian Hebraism, Christian Yiddishism. Christian interest in Western Yiddish began in the sixteenth century and continued until the second half of the eighteenth century. It was by and large a Protestant endeavor that was limited in scope to German lands, often undertaken by academicians and theologians. Elyada's work is a welcome addition to the field, as it broadens the scope of scholarship about Christian interest in Judaica, Jewish-Christian relations, and early modern ethnography. Her focus on Yiddish highlights the importance of language as a facet of Christian interest in Jews. Like Christian Hebraism, Christian Yiddishism was motivated by missionary aims, as well as by a theologicallydriven interest in Jewish texts and in contemporary Judaism. It was also fueled by early modern interest in vernacular languages, especially among Protestants. Elyada's focus on a spoken language allows readers glimpses of often impenetrable and mostly undocumented conversations that took place between Jews and Christians. While this is not an explicit focus of her work, Elyada includes several fascinating examples of these exchanges. In some cases, Christian missionaries who were well versed in Yiddish struck up conversations with Jews in inns and taverns. These missionaries were encouraged to mix "specifically Jewish terms" into their conversations in order to lure Jews into conversations (33-34). In a wonderful example, Elyada describes a polemical exchange between a traveling missionary and a Jewish bookseller in 1734. After having discussed the Yiddish books intended for women "to read on the Sabbath," the missionary recounts having argued that it was a "grave sin on account of the men, and especially of the rabbis, that the poor people are not instructed in works of Jewish law" (40-41). This Protestant "take" on the adaptation and translation into Yiddish, for Jews, of secular German works opens our eyes to the range of topics which conversations between Jews and Christians may have covered. The oral exchanges between Jews and Christians are also alluded to in Elyada's discussion of manuals designed to educate Christian merchants in Yiddish (chapter 5). Scholars such as Wagenseil claimed that knowledge of Yiddish was essential for gentile merchants, since it was in that language that Jews "conduct their correspondence, write their promissory notes, [and] produce their receipts" (83). These manuals, mostly dating from the eighteenth century, included lessons on the Jewish calculation of the year, the numerical system of the Hebrew alphabet, sample promissory notes, Yiddish terms for money, weights, and measures, and sample conversations between merchants. Such texts were often overtly polemical, and stressed that Yiddish could be used as a language of deception; nevertheless, they highlight the spoken nature of many Jewish-Christian interactions. Elyada's book is divided into three parts, each of which deals with a different aspect of Christian Yiddishism. The first part focuses on the theological reasons

Journal of Early Modern History, 2014

A Gay Who Speaks Yiddish is an illuminating study of the literature that pro vided Christian readers with a titillating peek into Yiddish, the language of the Jewish minority in German lands. Elyada's title invokes the absurdist nature of this enterprise, violating as it does the socio-religious boundaries that Yiddish, at least in part, served to maintain (xi). Indeed, the word " gay" (meaning non-Jew), is a classic example of lehavdL loshen, a term coined by Max Weinreich for Yiddish words that maintain Jewish social distinction. It is impossible for a goy to speak Yiddish; a gay is, by definition, someone else. And in fact, Elyada's volume is not about Christians who spoke Yiddish but about the Christian fascination with Yiddish and the way in which Christian depictions of the language served as a means by which to articulate the place of Jews in the shifting theological, cultural, economic, and social landscape of early modern Europe (9). Elyada's volume is rich with descriptions of the manuals and lexicons that provided a basic Yiddish vocabulary or grammar for Christian readers; these works often decried the degeneracy of the language (99), its use as an instru ment of deception and crime (12), its tendency to muddy Biblical truth (74), and its role in strengthening Jewish resistance to conversion (42). As Elyada points out, Christian Yiddishism was as much about cracking the code of the Yiddish language as it was about positing the nature of the Jews and their place in society. As such, Christian Yiddishism is part of the longer history of Christian evaluation of Jews and Judaism in efforts towards Christian self-def inition. The phenomenon of Christian Yiddishism also has a distinctive early modern flavor; it is part of what could be called an "ethnographic turn" in Christian evaluation of Judaism (4), a growing interest in Jewish customs, hab its and lifestyle. This type of ethnographic inquiry into Jewish life was a com plex blend of detailed description and condemnation. A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, therefore, joins the good company of Elisheva Carlebach's work,

Disseminating Jewish Literatures, 2020

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF JEWISH STUDIES (Ed. Martin Goodman), Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. !%$&!'%

The essay outlines the development of the modern scholarship of medieval Hebrew literature. Here, the definition of ‘medieval Hebrew literature’ excludes writing in Jewish languages other than Hebrew, and singles out literature from other types of non-literary Hebrew writing. The variety of literary types included in this survey ranges from liturgical and secular poetry (covered by Rosen) to artistic storytelling and folk literature (Yassif). Both early liturgical poetry (piyyut) and the medieval Hebrew story are rooted in the soil of the Talmudic period. The beginnings of medieval Hebrew storytelling were even more deeply connected to the narrative traditions of the Talmud. However, the constitutive moment of the birth of piyyut and narrative as distinct medieval genres had to do with their separation from the encyclopedic, all-embracing nature of the Talmud. The purpose of the essay is to explore especially the history of scholarship of these fields, in the following contexts: (1) Its internal development: its agendas, goals, necessities and achievements. (2) Its relation to contemporaneous literary criticism. (3) Its relation with modern Jewish history and historiography. We will show how, since its inception (in the Wissenschaft des Judentums) through the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries the scholarship of medieval Hebrew literature was enmeshed in various contemporaneous interests, issues, debates and ideologies, as well as with critical trends, fashions and practices.

In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies , 2019

An introduction from the editors of the special issue of In geveb on Religious Thought in Yiddish. Note: This special issue is being released in two segments. Not all of the pieces mentioned in this introduction have yet been published.

In the Italian duchies of the Habsburg Empire arose in the early modern period (17th–18th centuries) a rich, Hebrew language Jewish–Christian controversial literature, which has remained unnoticed even in the scientific literature devoted to this period, although the approximately fifty texts, identified so far, clearly demonstrate the importance of the genre. The intended project tries to analyze the newly identified manuscripts 1.) as a new phase in the long-lasting history of Jewish-Christian controversy, and 2.) as a mechanism of the cultural integration and modernization of the Jewish community. These new perspectives not only promise to fill out a void in our historical map of Jewish–Christian interactions, but might revolutionize our understanding of the relation of the Jewish minority and its Christian surroundings in Europe in an age whose impact can be felt even today. Moreover, the project is likely to make considerable progress in the Jewish–Christian dialogue, too.

From the late eighteenth century, as German Jews gradually replaced Yiddish with German, the publication of Old Yiddish literature practically ceased in Western and Central Europe. But this rich and once very popular literary corpus was by no means forgotten there. Rather, it gained a "second life" in the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, in the form of annotated anthologies and translations, bibliographic lists, and literary surveys. This article focuses on one prominent example, that of the German-Jewish folklorist Abraham M. Tendlau (1802-1878). In his popular anthologies, Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (1842) and Fellmeiers Abende: Märchen und Geschichten aus grauer Vorzeit (1856), as well as in his renown collection of proverbs Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (1860), Tendlau incorporated German translations of older Jewish folktales, which he took primarily from the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh (1602) and Seyfer mayse nisim (1696). The article analyzes Tendlau's translations of the Old Yiddish folktales against the backdrop of Jewish modernization and acculturation on the one hand, and, on the other, the culture of remembrance and nostalgia, which permeated Jewish culture in nineteenth-century Germany. By this, it hopes to shed light on the important yet hitherto underestimated role of Old Yiddish Literature in the formation of a distinct German-Jewish identity in the modern era.

Contributions to the History of Concepts, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 1-27

The article aims both to present the great potential of the field of modern European Jewish history to those who deal with conceptual history in other contexts and to demonstrate the potential of the conceptual historical project to those who deal with Jewish history. The first part illuminates the transformation of the Jewish languages in Eastern Europe–Hebrew and Yiddish–from their complex place in traditional Jewish society to the modern and secular Jewish experience. It then presents a few concrete examples for this process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part deals with the adaptation of Central and Western European languages within the internal Jewish discourse in these parts of Europe and presents examples from Germany, France and Hungary.

The article presents the eighteenth-century discussion on the place of Hebrew legacy within German culture. It argues that the exemplar of Hebrew poetry played a pivotal role in the work of a group of influential writers, especially members of the Sturm und Drang movement. As a reaction to anti-Biblical attacks by Deists and radical Enlightenment philosophers, German thinkers and poets posited the Old Testament as a model for sentimental and patriotic poetry. The Hebrew model acted as one of the cultural elements that allowed German literature of that period to distinguish itself from French-identified Neo-classical literature and develop its own stylistic and thematic avenues. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, new myths such as the Hindu-Aryan myth dethroned Hebrew myth from its central role in German identity. How- ever, the search for the roots of German culture in Asia grew out of biblical scholarship, and only gradually disengaged from it.