Early Yiddish Literature

While much ink has been spilt to corroborate or refute the so-called Spielmann, or Shpliman, theory, i.e. the hypothesis that Yiddish medieval bards wrote and propagated Old Yiddish epics, much less scholarly attention has been dedicated to the historiographical and political incentives behind the theory that dominated the field of Old Yiddish for many decades. In this chapter I aim to fill this gap and investigate the Shpilman theory in its historical context through a close examination of the theory's main founders and propagators, and a discourse analysis of the scholarly works in which the Yiddish Shpilman was constructed, and even invented. Ultimately, I argue that the hypothesis should be understood in light of the rise of interest in Jewish folklore, and especially Jewish folk performance between the two world wars. More specifically, the Spielmann theory constitutes part of a much wider endeavour, undertaken by artists and historians alike, to reinterpret and reimagine Yiddish folklore as art heritage.

Paulus Fagius and the First Published Yiddish Translation of the Humash -Constance, 1544 ABRAHAM DAVID The Nasi Family and the Reconstruction of Tiberias in the second half of the 16 th century ANDREAS LEHNARDT Neues Licht auf Metatron Das Fragment eines unbekannten mystischen Traktats in der Forschungs-und Landesbibliothek Gotha MICHAEL KRUPP und STEFAN SCHREINER Ein weiterer bislang unveröffentlichter Schutzbrief des Propheten Muhammad für die Juden Jemens Rezensionen Zeitschriftenschau Arabische Judaika (Fortsetzung)

Einen bedeutenden Aspekt jüdischen literarischen Schaffens bildet von jeher die Auseinandersetzung mit und die Neubearbeitung von Quellen, die außerhalb der jüdischen Tradition entstanden sind. Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen jiddischen Adaptationen nichtjüdischer Stoffe, insbesondere mit der Geschichte der Witwe von Ephesus, einer Erzählung, die in vielen verschiedenen Versionen existiert. Pierre Bourdieu und Roger Chartier stellten 1985 fest, dass ein Buch sich gerade dadurch verändere, dass es sich nicht verändere, wenn die Welt sich verändert oder wenn die Art zu lesen sich verändert. Ausgehend von dieser Aussage und ihren Implikationen wird eine Arbeitshypothese vorgeschlagen, die auf dem Konzept eines besonderen Rezeptionsmodus basiert (›counter reception‹).

ַ ‫אויסגא‬ ‫דיש‬ ‫ייִ‬ ISBN 978-3-943460-09-4 9 783943 460094 Der vorliegende Sammelband ‫לקט‬ eröffnet eine neue Reihe wissenschaftlicher Studien zur Jiddistik sowie philologischer Editionen und Studienausgaben jiddischer Literatur. Jiddisch, Englisch und Deutsch stehen als Publikationssprachen gleichberechtigt nebeneinander. Leket erscheint anlässlich des xv. Sym posiums für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland, ein im Jahre 1998 von Erika Timm und Marion Aptroot als für das in Deutschland noch junge Fach Jiddistik und dessen interdisziplinären Umfeld ins Leben gerufenes Forum. Die im Band versammelten 32 Essays zur jiddischen Literatur-, Sprach-und Kulturwissenschaft von Autoren aus Europa, den usa, Kanada und Israel vermitteln ein Bild von der Lebendigkeit und Vielfalt jiddistischer Forschung heute.

This essay seeks to demonstrate how the spoken language became a central feature of modern Yiddish literature. This vocal strain was used at first to replace otherworldly with enlightened discourse, esoteric book culture with colloquial style, hackneyed phraseology with straight talk, and Hasidic speech with parody. Not until 1864 -66, however, did the new orality enter its second phase, when the Hebrew writer Shalom-Yankev Abramovitsh fashioned an autonomous Yiddish-speaking voice and manipulated the Jewish textual tradition at will. Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz further developed the new orality by introducing gendered speech and professional argot, creating in turn a Yiddish of the common man, woman, and child and a Yiddish Sublime. In the next phase, two verbal artists, Eliezer Shteynbarg and Itzik Manger, perfected a single, minor speech genre that was performable, accessible, and sophisticated at the same time. Shteynbarg's Mesholim (Fables; and Manger's Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems; 1935) created a sovereign space for spoken Yiddish where all communication occurred in the mother tongue. Even while the oral-based writings of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz were enjoying extraordinary popularity in the major urban centers of North America, new dialects of spoken and written Yiddish came into being there: this new vocal strain ranged from Yiddish humor magazines to the Yiddish American polyphony of Jacob Glatstein's Yidishtaytshn (Yiddishmeanings; 1937).

Preface to His Yiddish Bible Translation Aleksandra Geller Auseinandersetzung über die jiddische Orthographie in der Kulturzeitschrift Literarishe bleter Asya Vaisman " A is for the Almighty " : Transmitting Values through Contemporary Hasidic Children ' s Literature Transliteration des Hebräischen Hebrew Transliteration Danksagung Acknowledgements Autoren und Herausgeber Authors and Editors 9 Vorwort zwischen Außenseitertum und Konversion. Nathan Cohen (Bar-Ilan-Universität) gibt einen Überblick über Kriminalliteratur in jiddischer Übersetzung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Älteres Jiddisch Die Ältere Jiddistik hatte von Beginn an einen festen Platz im Programm des Symposiums und ist im vorliegenden Band sowohl mit literaturwissenschaftlichen als auch philologischen Arbeiten vertreten. Erika Timm (Universität Trier) untersucht einen als Gegengeschichte zu Ritualmordlegenden entstandenen Erzähltyp sefardischen Ursprungs, der schon früh auch auf Jiddisch überliefert ist. Wulf-Otto Dreessen (Universität Stuttgart) rekonstruiert die Anfänge des Shmuel-bukhs im Umfeld der deutschen Heldenepik. Diana Matut (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) ediert ein frühneuzeitliches jiddisches Lied, das die Sicht der westlichen auf die östlichen Aschkenasim illustriert. Simon Neuberg (Universität Trier) kontrastiert die Sprache der Tsenerene und des Meylits yoysher, der beiden viel gelesenen Werke des Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi aus dem 17. Jahrhundert. Sprachwissenschaft Die sprachwissenschaftliche Sektion enthält Arbeiten zu diachronischen wie synchronischen Fragestellungen, die stets auch die kulturgeschichtliche Dimension des Sprachgebrauchs fassbar werden lassen. Roland Gruschka (Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg) untersucht eine Postkarte eines der Gründerväter der Stadt Petach Tikwa aus dem Jahre 1902 und legt deren historische und sprachgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge frei. Ewa Geller (Universität Warschau) widmet sich der weitgehend unbekannten Jiddischen Grammatik des Schöpfers der › Universalsprache ‹ Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof. Jürg Fleischer und Lea Schäfer (Philipps-Universität Marburg) analysieren den Kasusgebrauch nach Präpositionen in westjiddischen Quellen des 19. Jahrhunderts und stellen eine Tendenz zum einheitlichen Objektkasus fest. Alexander Beider (Paris) geht der Etymologie und Geschichte ostjiddischer Ortsnamen nach. Moshe Taube (Hebräische Universität Jerusalem) beschreibt spezifijische Konstruktionen mit dem Relativpronomen vos, die in Grammatiken bisher nicht verzeichnet wurden. Stefffen Krogh (Universität Aarhus) sucht nach den dialektalen Wurzeln des heute bei den Satmarer Chassidim gesprochenen Jiddisch. Adam has gone before daybreak into the wild wood alone. Adam says, " the wood is wild and every ' wild ' is beautiful. " Lawrence Rosenwald : On Itzik Manger's " Khave un der eplboym " 19 But she is afraid of the wood, she prefers the apple tree. And if she doesn ' t go to him, he comes to her in dream. He rustles and bends over her. She hears the word "bashert. " 4 Forget what " he, " the great " he, " 5 what he forbade you. And Eve breaks offf an apple and feels strangely light, she circles lovingly around the tree, like a great butterfly. And " he " who forbade the tree, he himself says, " it ' s beautiful, " and holds the great sunset back for a moment. That is the dream every night, but what is the truth ? And Eve feels how the tree weeps down into her hair. " Don ' t cry, lovely appletree, you rustle and sing in me and you are stronger than the word that is warning me about you. " And Eve takes hold of the apple tree with both hands around, and over the top of the apple tree tremble the pious stars … 4 Meaning " fated "-but one can speak of one ' s beloved as being " bashert, " as we might say, " you were the only one for me. " 5 " Der groyser ' der ', " the great " der ". " Der " is the masculine form of the Yiddish defijinite article. So one might say, " the great he-guy. " 8 Gen 3 : 20. Richard Fein suggests that an additional efffect of muter is to make Eve ' s motherhood universal rather than tribal (personal communication). 9 E.g., Roskies (1995 : 258) : " No need to tread lightly across the biblical story : [ Manger ] and his father and mother were the biblical story. No need to reimagine the ancient Near Eastern setting : eastern Galicia was the biblical setting. No need to study Scripture and midrashic commentary because Yiddish language and folklore were the sacred texts. " There is much truth in what Roskies writes, but some of what Manger accomplishes in the present poem is getting lost. 10 Manger 1984 : 3 (my translation). 19 The efffect is oddly similar to that of the poem ' s great and monumental counterpart, Thomas Mann ' s Joseph and His Brothers, the fijinal volume of which appeared in 1943-Mann was working on it in 1941-and which, on a far grander scale, balances these same two essential literary qualities of clarity and mystery.

The Literature of Destruction has a history, a poetics and a message only tangentially related to the libels, expulsions and massacres that it ostensibly documents. What for historians are unique events arising out of peculiar social, political and economic factors are for the Jewish poets and threnodists an undifferentiated and uninterrupted manifestation of evil perpetrated against the people of God. While this literature, which dates back to the Book of Lamentations, has been edited, annotated and anthologized, only its most recent offshoots have as yet been subjected to literary analysis. This article focuses on one genre, the pogrom poem, to show the dramatic convergence of history, religious belief and literary tradition in an age of unprecedented violence.

This paper investigates the origins of the description of the Tsenerene, the popular 17th century Yiddish Bible adaptation, as the “women’s Bible.” Tracing a genealogy of the term that locates its origins in the late 19th and early 20th century arguments for or against the importance of Yiddish in Eastern European society, I propose that the Tsenerene has become a convenient mythopoetic tool for crafting and navigating a range of Jewish identities and ideologies. Lack of scholarly critical assessment of the Tsenerene as women’s Bible has generated mistaken assumptions about the readership and audience. Further, examination of the contents of the work fails to produce a compelling case for an overwhelmingly female character or readership. I suggest a metastructure within the text indicating a distinctly rabbinic pedagogical dialogue between text and reader that has never been examined, demanding an investigation of the contents of the work itself.

Sixteenth-century editions of the early Yiddish epic Shmuel-bukh evidence a range of editorial stances toward the transmission of the epic itself, as well as the biblical and rabbinic materials upon which it draws. Here, a comparison of two such editions, Augsburg 1544 and Krakow 1578, discloses how the intertextual practices of Shmuel-bukh editors evolved over time from a relatively flexible exegetical orientation towards the biblical text to one of increasing literalism and fidelity. The evolving editorial practices of Shmuel- bukh’s redactors suggest that the transmission of this genre involved the assumption of exegetically nuanced and historically diverse stances vis-à-vis biblical and extra-biblical authority. The very instability of Shmuel-bukh thus opens up an enlightening perspective on the dynamic conjunction of exegetical ideology and implicit poetic practice.

This article reviews a corpus of poems retelling the Binding of Isaac composed by Ashkenazic Jews (mainly from the German territories) during the Middle Ages and early modern era. The poems, written in both languages of the Ashkenazim – the vernacular Yiddish and the literary Hebrew – are: Akeda Piyyutim, some 40 liturgical penitentiary poems written in Hebrew, and Yudisher Shtam, an epic poem written in Yiddish, of which an unusually extensive number of copies survived. These Hebrew poems and the Yiddish poem have been – independently from one another – the subject of thorough research. However, no comparison of the two corpora has ever been done. The present paper offers such a comparison, thus illuminating key cultural-historical aspects of pre-modern Ashkenazic society, including cultural transfer between co-territorial Jews and Christians; Hebrew versus Yiddish texts; ritual versus belletristic literature; written versus oral transmission; elite (educated) versus lay audiences; male versus female audiences; and the private versus the public sphere. The article identifies similarities in both form and content between the poems in the two languages. For example, they both employ a similar stanzaic form; they both describe the exemplary behavior of Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah in a sentimental tone; and they both make contemporary references within the classic narrative to Christianity as a persecuting religion. The differences between the two corpora relate also to both form and content. For instance, the Hebrew poems are much shorter than the Yiddish poem, and they reflect a deeper familiarity with classical Jewish sources and are more stylistically refined, while the Yiddish poem is more belletristic and conveys the influence of the medieval German epic. Also, whereas the Hebrew Piyyutim were contained in Maḥzorim used in the synagogue, there is no certainty as to the intended purpose of Yudisher Shtam. By identifying the differences and similarities between the two corpora, as well as their possible meanings and implications, the article sheds light on an interesting case in the history of the Jews in the German territories involving cultural exchange, cultural identity, and literary tradition.

The collaborative research project Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Europe (JEWTACT), directed by Dr. Iris Idelson-Shein, and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), invites applications for doctoral fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships. Successful candidates will be enrolled in the department of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University.

With the advent of print, the involvement of non-Jews in the production and transmission of Jewish books radically increased: rabbis entrusted their biblical commentaries to humanist master-printers; Christian Hebraists relied on learned Jewish correctors in the preparation of their Hebrew manuscripts for the press; baptised Jews copied, corrected, and censored Hebrew books. This cross-cultural cooperation in textual transmission – though sometimes fraught, uneasy, and even coercive – persisted well into the modern era, and resulted in untold artifacts crystallizing the unstable, ambivalent, and heterodox social currents which produced them.
This essay considers one such artifact: a manuscript commissioned in 1697 by the Lutheran Rector Christof Wagenseil. The manuscript contains an obscene Yiddish Purim play, copied by Wagenseil’s research assistant, the recently baptised Jew Johan Kemper. Though this is a document hand-written precisely thanks to the obstacles to printing it, for only one intended reader, Kemper nevertheless decorates his title-page with all the trappings of a printed book: architectural motifs, a dedication to Wagenseil himself, and detailed colophon. He also maintains with utter seriousness the rhetorical gestures of early modern Jewish books. Yet as soon becomes strikingly clear, all this dogged con- ventionality is merely the satiric set-up for Kemper’s own Christian conversion story, told as an inside joke between Wagenseil and himself. Taken together, these ironic uses of convention cast a bright light on the nuance, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability of Jewish textual transmission in the age of print.

This article presents poems by women in ‫טן‬ ‫,שרי‬ a modernist Yiddish miscellany published in New York between 1912 and 1926. These poems are shot through with sexual language and situations, which reflect varying ideas about gender held by the poets themselves and the editors of the journal. Considering the gendered authorship and the sexual themes of these poems, I will attempt to articulate what these poets and their New York editors assumed about women and Yiddish poetry.

Between the years 1650 and 1800, Amsterdam became the center of Yiddish printing. Vernacular medical writings were among the variety of Yiddish books published in Amsterdam. The Yiddish remedies book Seyfer Yerum Moyshe, published in 1679, was written by Moyshe Rofe mi-Kalish. In this article I intend to examine the paratexts of this book and present as a case study the doctor's recommendations to confront the plague. He explains his remedies are credible and have been tried by many doctors. His book would not only save its readers from having to call a doctor and pay him a lot of money, but also give them remedies they can prepare in their homes or find in their pharmacies. Whether rich or poor, everyone should have access to remedies. Kalish stresses the fact that ultimately leading a pious life, together with these remedies, will promise health and longevity, with G-d's help.

La filologia della lingua yiddish è una disciplina nata nella seconda metà del XIX secolo e la sua storia ha risentito della storia stessa della lingua yiddish, una lingua che non è stata studiata in ambito accademico se non dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Le prime cattedre sono state istituite a Gerusalemme e a New York agli inizi degli anni Cinquanta. 1 All'interno della storia dello yiddish, è innanzi tutto necessario definire cosa si intenda per yiddish antico. Si tratta infatti di una nozione sconosciuta persino alla maggior parte dei parlanti. Secondo la periodizzazione stabilita da Max Weinreich, forse il maggior storico della lingua yiddish, e in seguito mantenuta da molti studiosi, 2 vi sono nella storia della lingua yiddish quattro fasi: 1. …-1250: Bacini della Mosella, del Reno, del Meno e del Danubio superiore. Le componenti dello yiddish sono quella ebraico-aramaica (loshn koydesh), romanza e tedesca. Non vi sono documenti scritti. 3 2. 1250-1500 circa: yiddish antico. Le comunità di parlanti yiddish comprendono Boemia, Moravia, Polonia, Lituania, Italia settentrionale, 'Eretz Israel (Terra d'Israele) ed Egitto. Allo yiddish si aggiunge la quarta componente, quella slava, ma la lingua scritta rimane quella occidentale. 3. 1500-1750 circa: yiddish medio. Lo yiddish si diffonde in Alsazia, Olanda, Germania settentrionale e Curlandia orientale. Formazione dei dialetti dello yiddish orientale. La lingua scritta è ancora quella occidentale. 4. 1750-…: yiddish moderno. In seguito alla Haskalà (l'Illuminismo ebraico) gli ebrei tedeschi abbandonano l'uso dello yiddish e passano al tedesco. I libri vengono stampati nei dialetti orientali. Lo yiddish si diffonde in Russia, America, Sud-Africa, Australia, Israele.

What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How-Do-You-Do than to place folklore and folk-speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik's formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian-Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh.' Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against the discovery of folklore: the overwhelming antipathy of the Jewish Enlightenment to fantasy, superstition, and folk custom;2 Rabinovitsh's concern for fostering a highbrow literary culture in Yiddish based on the realistic por-1. David G. Roskies, "Unfinished Business: Sholem Aleichem's From the Fair," Prooftexts 6 (1986): 73-74; Dan Miron, Sholem Aleykhem. Person, Persona, Presence (New York, 1971). 2. Dan Miron, "Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskalah," in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 219-249. 27 28 DAVID G. ROSKIES

A study of  three Yiddish translations of the Humash in the Sixteenth Century. One edition was by Paulus Fagius, a Christian hebraist. The second edition was by Paulus Aemilius, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. The third edition was by Leib Bresc, a Jewish scholar. Th first two editions were published in versions for a Christian audience and a Jewish audience. The difference was in the title page and Introductions. The text of the Humash was based on the tradition of the Yiddish  Teitsch Humash.

BOOK REVIEW: Claudia Rosenzweig, Josef Bamberger, האפיפיור היהודי: לתולדותיה של אגדה מימי הביניים באשכנז The Jewish Pope:History of a medieval Ashkenazic Legend (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009), 156 pp. (Hebrew),  ISBN 978-956-226-365-0
in: European Journal of Jewish Studies (Special Issue: Yiddish - Past and Present Perspectives), 4, 1 (2010), pp. 165-168.