Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

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Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature  JEAN BAUMGARTEN     JEROLD C. FRAKES

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published in English 2005 Originally entitled Introduction à la littérature yiddish ancienne by Jean Baumgarten © Les Éditions du cerf All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–927633–1 EAN 978–0–19–927633–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn

Author’s Preface to the French Edition Yiddish language and literature, which were for a long time locked up in a complex network of prejudice and a priori associations with ideological debates and conflicts, and long considered an inferior component of Jewish culture, have never fully freed themselves from the accompanying cluster of preconceived notions. Thus the study of Yiddish has been surrounded by an emotional atmosphere, nourished as much by its detractors as by its partisans. The same may also be observed with respect to the earliest period of Yiddish literature, which, up until quite recently, was either unknown or neglected as a minor component of European Jewish culture. Everything pertaining to this field of research is thus confined in a space of narrow dimensions; sometimes subject to the individual, scholarly passions of specialists, sometimes it becomes merely the prey of those nostalgic for a vanished world. The reality of the languages and literatures of the diaspora has for several centuries been conceived from a romantic and folkloristic perspective, particularly on the part of militants, who, in their perception of traditional Jewish culture, project issues of identity and politics onto the material. That which has, since the nineteenth century, brought together numerous scholars interested in Old Yiddish, has more often than not been no more than a poorly disguised contempt for this literature, defined as the expression of an obsolete society, and as the manifestation of the darkness of the ghetto and of the obscurantism of an age gone by. By all evidence, such ideologically motivated ideas and judgements have changed considerably since the Second World War, and the study of Old Yiddish literature is now recognized as a field essential to the understanding of traditional Ashkenazic culture. The present project arose directly out of the transformations that have taken place in recent decades both in the field of Jewish studies and in the comprehensive conception of what has constituted European society during the modern period. One must acknowledge, however, that the current state of Yiddish studies remains quite precarious, at least in France. It is a marginal field, tolerated by the core disciplines, but not without certain stereotypes that have deformed their perception of it. Its contours remain blurred and its status ambiguous: first of all, quite simply, because, although the fact that a text was written in Yiddish may constitute a criterion of differentiation, that feature in itself does not suffice to constitute a specific field of study. From this perspective, then, Yiddish texts have no value except as they can be integrated into the complex totality of Jewish culture and can be linked with other constituent elements of European

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Judaism. Additionally, if one considers the complexity of the Yiddish compositions in their dynamic relations with Hebrew culture and other coterritorial, non-Jewish cultures, the longevity of this literature, which appeared in the Middle Ages and which has endured up to our own day, and the vast geographical area where Yiddish was spoken, including both western and eastern Europe, then one begins to comprehend the difficulties involved in delimiting this field which both transcends the partitions of its constituent disciplines and their divisions into cultural domains and crosses numerous fields of enquiry. It is thus a field which is sometimes associated with central issues and sometimes is relegated to the margins of existing disciplines and which thus can seem to lack a methodological foundation of its own. Hence the lack of definition that tends to make Yiddish studies fragile, a kind of cross-discipline that exists in the interstices of a multitude of disciplines such as history, linguistics, literature, religious and cultural anthropology, and folklore. The study of this literature presents numerous difficulties characteristic of interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of multiple fields of enquiry. In order to circumvent these diverse obstacles, it seemed necessary to take another approach to vernacular Jewish literature: first of all, by rejecting the pejorative conception of this literary corpus, considered as a diffuse, almost random, ensemble of texts, fixed in changeless forms and transmitted in a manner practically unaltered from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. From that perspective, early Yiddish texts would then be no more than simple witnesses to a society beyond the bounds of history. In fact, however, Old Yiddish literature resounds with issues central to Jewish society during the period of the Renaissance. The texts are constant witnesses to the conflicts and tensions characteristic of this era of crisis and innovation. The clearest conflict is that between the champions of orthodoxy, who attempt to confine the faithful to a passive role (or to a state of semi-ignorance), and the simple Jews who insist on a more active participation in religious life. This dichotomy, which imparts to the texts such a dynamic and vivid aspect, is at the core of many of the texts of Old Yiddish literature. The Jewish composition of vernacular texts is in this respect a reflection (one among many others, of course) of Jewish life at the time and reveals numerous key issues; in particular, the position of women, children, and the uneducated in the religious and cultural life of the society. By means of these texts, it is possible to identify the strategy employed by Jewish society, during this period of increasing instability and a basic questioning of the culture’s principal beliefs, to persevere, fight against ignorance, and transmit the fundamentals of Jewish traditions to the common people. One can thus better appreciate the enormous efforts expended on teaching morals, the desire for religious education, and the distribution of sacred texts which appear, beginning in the sixteenth century, just as does the affirmation of new forms of piety by those who had often felt banished to the margins of religious life. Yiddish texts thus cast no

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insignificant amount of light on Jewish spirituality at the close of the Middle Ages, a period marked by a profound desire to modify the means of the common people’s access to religious culture. The relegation of Yiddish texts to the category of popular literature, as opposed to the learned culture of Hebrew, has likewise long contributed to a distorted understanding of this literature. By contrast, my present purpose is to restore the Yiddish texts to the larger context by privileging complex and dynamic relations among various cultural registers: in the first place, because Yiddish texts, due to their dependence on, and dynamic relation with, Hebrew-language culture, integrate numerous forms and terms from learned rabbinical culture. It is not a matter of a simple and passive assimilation of literary models native to the context of learned culture, but of a broad spectrum of relations and reappropriations which range from simple adaptation to the creation of original texts based on a tradition common to the entirety of the Jewish people, which also includes rewriting a diverse set of features of Hebrew literature. One may likewise distinguish within Old Yiddish literature (to a degree that should not be overestimated, however) an echo of resistance to ideas originating among religious insiders and of religious conflicts which had split Jewish society since the Renaissance, particularly concerning the question of pedagogy and the transmission of the religious tradition. It has likewise often been maintained that Old Yiddish literature constitutes an autonomous domain, a virtually isolated collection of cultural artefacts, as opposed to other aspects of Jewish life, especially those centred around Hebrew. This conception, particularly influenced by ideological considerations, has contributed to a distorted image of vernacular Jewish literature. By contrast, my intention is to present a comprehensive approach to this literature: first of all, in its dynamic relations with the Hebrew tradition, with which it shares multiple points of contact (just as there are also concrete differences). My purpose will be to specify the articulation of these two creative registers in the context of an always bilingual, and generally trilingual Jewish society––Hebrew, Yiddish, and the coterritorial, majority language of the surrounding, non-Jewish culture. For, finally, Yiddish literature originated in the context of contact with non-Jewish surrounding cultures (in particular German culture), whose influence on its development and forms are not to be denied. It is also necessary to take into account the phenomena of cultural ‘porosity’ and cultural transference which from the outset characterize numerous Yiddish texts. Thus restored to a religious and comprehensive cultural context and to the perspective of the longue durée, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, Yiddish literature cannot but appear more distinct in its unity and its internal logic. Contrary to certain fragmentary descriptions, born of onesided and derogatory assessments, I will attempt to demonstrate that cultural compositions in Yiddish bring into play an intricate web of complex factors,

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historical and social as well as religious. Thus by means of a study of the system of production and marketing of books, focusing on authors and their audiences, as well as through an analysis of the form and content of the Yiddish works, I hope to offer a less constrictive view of vernacular texts, no longer considered from a strictly ideological perspective or according to restrictive a priori conceptualizations, but instead presented as a literature in its own right. It goes without saying that such a project could not have been carried out without the patient work of generations of scholars who have investigated Old Yiddish literature, beginning especially with Ber Borokhov, Israel Zinberg (Tsinberg), Max Erik, Elazar Shulman, and Max Weinreich, and extending up to our day with scholars at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, such as Dov Sadan, Chone Shmeruk, Chava Turniansky, and Sarah Zfatman. My study belongs to the tradition of their research which has contributed so effectively to a better understanding of a literary tradition that has, up until now, too often been misunderstood. It is both a duty and a privilege to acknowledge this debt to those scholars who opened the way to Yiddish studies and whose writings have revolutionized our conceptions of vernacular Jewish literature. It is likewise a pleasant duty to thank those who offered help and encouragement, during the entirety of this work: Astrid Starck, Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Alex Derczansky, Ron Barkai of Tel Aviv University, and Sylvain Auroux, director of the research unit Historie des théories linguistiques of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In the course of several sojourns in Jerusalem I profited from the excellent working conditions at both the National and University Library in Jerusalem and the Centre Français de Recherche de Jérusalem of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. I sincerely thank their directors for their warm welcome and their assistance, which greatly contributed to the progress of my work on this project. Likewise I would like to thank Nicolas-Jean Séd and Mireille Le Flem, as well as the production staff at Cerf. Finally to my father, my wife Danièle, and our children François and Gabriel my sincere thanks also, for their assistance, their patience, and their encouragement.

Author’s Preface to the English Edition Since the completion of the original edition of this work at the end of the 1980s, the study of Yiddish has experienced a very noticeable development. It is now a recognized field in which numerous scholars in the disciplines of philology and the history of Jewish literature work throughout the world. As a result of the work of several generations of scholars since the end of the nineteenth century, early Yiddish has become a fertile field of research that is indispensable for a thorough knowledge of traditional Ashkenazic society. Moreover, specialists in other fields, such as history, Germanic philology, religious anthropology, and the sociology of knowledge and literacy in traditional societies, must now take this wealth of literary material into account in order to understand the many facets of Jewish vernacular languages and cultures in Europe. That which was a marginal field of Jewish studies even a century ago has been transformed into a field of research whose importance for an understanding of historical Ashkenazic culture can now no longer be denied. Many basic works of scholarship are, however, still lacking in early Yiddish studies, such as grammars, dictionaries, and handbooks on the language and literature. The present work attempts to delineate in broad strokes the history of early Yiddish literature and present as complete a panorama as possible of this still unfamiliar field of Jewish studies to the educated lay reader, to students, and indeed even to specialists in the field. Instead of aiming for an exhaustively comprehensive study, which, due to the sheer extent and complexity of the field, would have been impossible in a single volume, I have here attempted to disentangle from the complex cultural skein and draw forth the essential characteristics of early Yiddish literature and focus on the kinds of specific issues that they represent. I hope that this volume may contribute to research in this field and even stimulate readers to take up the exploration of the diverse and inspiring culture of early Yiddish literature, and that the many students and scholars now working on this material may continue to investigate this rich field of Ashkenazic culture that has thus far still yielded up only the tiniest portion of its treasures. That there is a second, revised edition of the book, and that it appears in English, is due to Jerold C. Frakes, to whom I express my gratitude for his work as editor and translator. I tender my thanks also to Jeremy Dauber, Eli Katz, Joseph Sherman, and Dov-Ber Kerler, whose cordial assistance, judicious counsel, and incisive critique have aided the progress of the project and improved the book in ways too numerous to enumerate. I also offer a warm expression of my thanks to the kind and expert staff of the Oriental Reading

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Room of the Bodleian Library, especially Richard Judd and Silke Schaeper, the Skirball Foundation, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. I dedicate this second edition to Danièle, François, Gabriel; to Yuval; and finally also to Yael, Pascale, Celia, and Gabriele, as a friendly memento of our mutual sojourn in Oxford. Jean Baumgarten Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris Oxford, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies January 2004

Editor and Translator’s Preface Following the publication, almost fifty years ago, of an edition of the codex, Cambridge University Library .-.  (dated 1382), early Yiddish studies underwent a profound renaissance and transformation, manifested in the ensuing years in hundreds of articles, books, editions, and reviews in the fields of Jewish studies, linguistics, and particularly in German studies. The clichéd distortions––even in some scholarly circles––that Old Yiddish is simply German, or that its literature is purely derivative, have now all but disappeared in the face of the steadily accruing number of serious linguistic, philological, literary, and cultural studies of this significant body of texts that has in recent years reached the point that a new comprehensive survey of the corpus and the scholarship devoted to it is in order. Several decades before the publication of the Cambridge texts, especially during that brief but astonishingly fertile interwar period in Eastern Europe when Yiddish scholarship in a variety of fields flourished, there were several such attempts at partial and comprehensive synthesis: Elazar (Elias) Shulman’s Sfas yehudis ashkenozis usifruso (Riga: Levin, 1913), Max Weinreich’s Shtaplen: fir etyudn tsu der yidisher shprakhvisnshaft un literaturgeshikhte (Berlin: Vostok, 1923) and Bilder fun der yidisher literatur-geshikhte (Vilna: Tomor, 1928), Max Erik’s Vegn altyidishn roman un novele: fertsnter-zekhtsnter yorhundert (Warsaw: Der veg tsum visn, 1926) and Di geshikhte fun der yidsiher literatur, fun di eltste tsaytn biz der haskole-tkufe (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1928), and Israel Zinberg (Yisroel Tsinberg’s) Altyidishe literatur fun di eltste tsaytn biz der haskoletkufe (2nd edn. Vilna: Tomor, 1933), vol. vi of Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn, 9 vols. (Vilnius: Tomor, 1929–37), but no comprehensive history of early Yiddish literature has now been published for almost three-quarters of a century. The early essays in Chone Shmeruk’s brilliant collection, Sifrut yidish: perakim le-toldoteah (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1978), are of the genre of literary history, but are not (and do not intend to be) broad enough in scope to constitute a comprehensive history of early Yiddish literature. During these decades numerous significant discoveries and/or publication of additional texts have radically altered the content and cultural scope of the corpus: among them the verse couplet from the Worms Makhzour of 1274, the eight texts of the Cambridge manuscript of c.1382 from the Fostat genizah in Cairo (noted above), the remarkable fable collection of the Ki-bukh that was published in Verona in 1595, and most recently the complete text of the magnificent Renaissance epic Pariz un Viene that was published in Verona in 1594. These texts, among others, significantly broaden the scope of early

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Yiddish literature and, most importantly (via the manuscript from the genizah), extend the beginnings of mature Yiddish literature back to a significantly earlier date than previously thought possible. Thus a serious gap in the scholarship has for decades severely hindered not just specialists in Yiddish studies, but also those in other fields of Jewish studies and in other national literatures of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, in linguistics, and the history of the biblical tradition, among others. One should also note that, as the above list of titles indicates, no comprehensive survey of early Yiddish appeared originally in a language other than Yiddish and Hebrew (Zinberg’s fine study has since been translated into English), which has also severely limited the accessibility of the field to many non-specialists. With the publication in 1993 of the exceptionally wide-ranging and thorough study by Jean Baumgarten, both of these problems have been solved at once. It is difficult to choose what the primary virtue of this book might be, for there are many. Fortunately the author conceives of his work, in the tradition of those scholars named above, not as a narrow, empirical and would-be asocial philological task (often the model in recent decades in the fields as conceived by German studies), but rather as the study of an entire culture via its literature, and thus he conceives of literature and its essential connection to social and historical processes in a broad sense. He begins the study with four chapters (approximately a quarter of the whole) addressing pertinent issues of the larger cultural context of the literature: the origin of the language and of the literature in the context of the development of European vernacular literatures during the Middle Ages, the manufacture and distribution of early printed books in Yiddish, and the role of lingua sacra–lingua franca (Hebrew–Yiddish) bilingualism in the development of early Yiddish literature. In treating the literature itself, he operates similarly, so that he deals not just with the typical secular genres of the European Middle Ages of epic, romance, prose narrative, and the late appearance of the drama, but also with biblical translation and commentary, with ethical and moral treatises, prayers, and the broad range of literature d’usage (medical, legal, historical, etc.) that give shape and contour to cultural history. In my review of the original edition of the book (Speculum 71 (1996), 682– 3), I noted both the immense breadth and depth of research demonstrated by the work and the scope of the documentation of that research in the notes and bibliography. In consultation with the author, I have in this revised edition endeavoured to verify and ensure the accuracy of titles, dates, names, and historical data in both the bibliographical references and elsewhere in a book that brims over with such data. It is indeed a daunting task, but one essential to the reliability and thus long-term utility of such a work of scholarship. In the course of his survey of the broad corpus of Old and Middle Yiddish literature, where many of the basic texts have not yet been competently edited, it is necessary for the researcher to deal directly with incunabula and manuscripts of texts as a matter of course. Thus in the original

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French edition, the author included hundreds of text citations from Old and Middle Yiddish, of course, but also from Hebrew, Aramaic, Italian, German, Latin, etc., all of which then appeared in French translation in the original French edition of the book. In all, some 20 per cent of the book consists of such text citations, which then constitutes a veritable labyrinth of bibliographical detail. In the present volume citations have been verified by comparison with the original source texts and translated into English directly from those texts. The Bible is cited from the Revised Standard Version; all other translations are mine. In a number of cases the original texts of quotations included in Dr Baumgarten’s French edition have defied all attempts to verify their accuracy (generally due to bibliographical imprecision), which has led to several modes of coping: in some cases it has been possible to locate citations of these Yiddish/Hebrew passages in previous works of scholarship (which, in turn, provided insufficiently precise bibliographical information to locate the passage in the original text), in which case I have translated from that citation and provided a reference to that publication. In a very few cases the author has provided me with a transcription of the original passage and its bibliographical information from his own notes, from which I have then translated and passed on the provided bibliographical information. In still fewer cases I have been unable by any means to verify passages cited in the French edition of the book. In some of these cases, I have, in consultation with the author, revised the presentation such that a similar, verified, passage could be included in place of the unverified citation; in other cases, where substitution was impossible or inappropriate, the unverified passage is marked with * and the English translation is based on the author’s French translation as it appeared in the French edition of this book. In the matter of issues concerning the presentation of Hebrew-alphabet texts, names, and book titles, another cluster of problems arises in a book such as this. In the original French edition, all Hebrew-alphabet material was either translated or transcribed into the Roman alphabet (or both), thus making the book accessible to the broadest possible Francophone audience. In general a comparable goal has been set for the English edition, but the difficulties involved in such a project are myriad and the solutions chosen for the English edition differ from those of the French edition; they must thus be explained here in some detail. The titles of publications of modern Hebrew and Yiddish scholarship are cited in the standard systems of Roman transcription (those of the Encyclopedia Judaica and YIVO, respectively). To impose Israeli pronunciation on pre-Israeli (in a practical sense: pre-1915) Hebrew, however, would be anachronistic, even ludicrous, particularly since the pronunciation of this Ashkenazic Hebrew is well documented (and still used for some purposes in the twenty-first century). The problem is easily demonstrated: how to represent the common name spelled mem-shin-he in Hebrew? Few informed readers of the present volume would hesitate for a

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moment in answering: it must be Moshé, or Móyshe, or Moses, the forms of, respectively, Israeli Hebrew, modern Yiddish, and English. Each choice has its motivations and, like it or not, its historical and even political ramifications. The choice of Israeli Hebrew, Moshé, for instance, immediately aligns one––willy-nilly––with the rabidly anti-Yiddish ideology of Zionism. The choice of the modern Yiddish Móyshe declares openly one’s alliance with the Yiddishist, and, up until recently, generally anti-Zionist, cause. Choosing Móyshe also indicates that one would choose Sóre, not Sárah, Yánkev, not Yaakóv, etc. Historically, however, there is perhaps no reason to choose either of these options over the other, since neither necessarily represents the actual phonetic realization of the name of any Ashkenazic Jew in the Old and Middle Yiddish periods who were named for the biblical figures Moses, Sarah, or Jacob, for early Yiddish was pronounced like neither Israeli Hebrew nor modern standard (YIVO) Yiddish. While linguists can reconstruct much about the various dialectal and historically developing pronunciations of the period, there was and is no single standard. In central Europe at least and until the eighteenth century, our hypothetical Moshé/Móyshe/Moses was almost certainly never addressed in any of these phonetic forms, but rather in the phonetic realization of early West Yiddish, which resembled Máushe, or, perhaps more likely Mó:ushe. Thus regardless of whether one chooses the Israeli Hebrew, the modern standard Yiddish, or the culturally equivalent English form, one is imposing a historically unjustifiable norm. For names I choose the English option here, for two reasons: it is no more nor less ideological in its consequences than the others, and it is after all the proper English form in a book in English. Perhaps it seems at this point that I have made too much of this simple point, but one must recall what was said at the outset––and what will become immediately apparent upon opening the book to practically any page––this ‘problem’ arises dozens of times on most pages. This choice (and the one to be discussed next) quite simply determines the reader’s perception of the material discussed in the course of the book. Perhaps even thornier than the issue of how to present names is how to deal with book titles, which obviously do not have convenient non-translated English forms. Most early Yiddish texts bear titles that derive either directly from Hebrew or Aramaic, or from this Semitic component of Yiddish, which immediately adds the complication of the relationship of Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation to the entire mixture (not entirely absent from the above discussion of traditional Jewish names either, of course). There were for instance a number of early Yiddish commentaries on the Mishnaic tractate Avot, entitled Midrásh le-pirkéi avót (Israeli), or Mídresh le-pírke óves (modern standard Yiddish), or Mídrash le-pírkey óvous (traditional Ashkenazic). As was also the case with the names discussed above, it again seems to me that neither Israeli Hebrew nor modern standard Yiddish is appropriate in rendering the titles of early Yiddish texts. In most cases there is no possibility here

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of slicing through the Gordian knot by imposing English on the problem, for a mere translation of the title into English instead of (and not in addition to) the original title generally obscures rather than clarifies (except in cases like the Maase-bukh, where one of the forms––in its modern Yiddish realization Mayse-bukh––has been adopted into English scholarly usage on the text). It seems most appropriate here to try and approximate a standardized Ashkenazic Hebrew form (for those texts that have such a title; in the French edition, the problem of the Roman-alphabet form of both names and titles was left unaddressed, and the usage was rather inconsistent with respect to both names and titles). For the Germanic components of titles, the transcription process is anything but straightforward. Numerically the vast majority of published Roman-alphabet transcriptions of early Yiddish that have appeared in scholarly and quasi-scholarly publication of the last century have been produced by Germanists who have not simply transcribed but often have come close to translation of the original text into a perceived form of late medieval German (e.g. schön for the various early Yiddish spellings of the word shin-jod-waw, shin-waw-jod-nun, or shin-waw-nun, which has become sheyn in modern standard Yiddish). That will obviously not do here. Instead, I have opted to recognize the linguistic commonplace that graphemic systems are as a rule quite conservative and thus often do not directly account for innovative phonetic developments in the language. Thus in those very few cases in which such a choice is necessary in this book, I transcribe not Germanized schön but YIVO-ized sheyn, except in those cases where it is clear that early Yiddish pronunciation differed significantly from modern Yiddish (particularly with respect to some few vowels and diphthongs, e.g. early Yiddish shoun vs. YIVO shoyn) (as also in the aforementioned example: Mó:ushe, not Móyshe). The process having been explained at such length, however, the reader should nonetheless realize that there is very little in the way of non-Semitic components in early Yiddish titles. Beyond that, there are only occasional individual early Yiddish words that occur in the text. After so much introduction, the principles of transcription employed in the present volume are in fact quite simple and can be reduced to: Modern (post-1915) Hebrew: standard Encyclopedia Judaica (EJ) system. Modern Yiddish: standard YIVO system. Pre-modern Hebrew: standard principles of traditional Ashkenazic phonology. Pre-modern Yiddish is transcribed according to YIVO principles modified to account for what can be reconstructed as the phonology of early Yiddish (e.g. shoun not YIVO shoyn). Names are spelled according to the standard English form of EJ. Unquoted words that have become naturalized in English are used in their anglicized forms. My rule of thumb here is: if it can be used in English

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unitalicized, then its common English spelling (usually borrowed from biblical studies or Israeli Hebrew) is used (e.g. Torah, Yom Kippur). The titles of pre-modern Hebrew books written beyond the confines of Ashkenaz (whether temporally or geographically; i.e. ancient or Sephardic texts) are cited in Israeli transcription, as the default ‘nonAshkenazic’ mode. But when the topic at hand is an Ashkenazic translation of or commentary on such texts, that is, when such titles are ‘embedded’ in an Ashkenazic cultural context, an Ashkenazic transcription is generally also added in parentheses: thus Pirkei Avot or simply Avot, but Reb Anshel’s commentary on Pirkei Avot (Pirkey ovous). Such a complex practice makes for some problems for the reader: on any given page there may well be book titles in Ashkenazic Hebrew, quoted words in quasi-YIVO-ized Old Yiddish, anglicized traditional Jewish names, for instance: Zevi Hirsch b. Jerahmiel Khotsh (or Hotsch) wrote the books Seyfer ˙ (translated in early Yiddish as Taytsh-zouhar) and Segulous unakhlas Tsvi refuous. Let the reader be forewarned: s/he is here entering orthographically difficult territory. That difficulty is not contrived by either the author or the editor/translator, but rather reveals the cultural, linguistic, and orthographical layering that is historical Ashkenazic culture, whether expressed via Hebrew or Old Yiddish language and literature. It would be both inaccurate and a mystification to claim that the languages of this culture cannot be rendered into the Roman alphabet, but one should note that any attempt to transmit the linguistic data of one culture in an alphabet devised to represent the language of another culture tends toward some elements of distortion of some types of information (phonetic or otherwise). The hybrid system here employed is intended specifically to diminish that cultural distortion at the risk of requiring the reader to ‘shift gears’ orthographically with some regularity. One final complication must also be explained here: in the original French edition, the author also included not just French translations of pertinent excerpts from early Yiddish literature, but in the case of some few selections (primarily poetic passages), he also provided Roman-alphabet transcriptions of the original texts. As the complicated explanations above, as well as the transcriptions scattered through the field of early Yiddish studies, demonstrate, no single and simple system of transcription for specifically Old and Middle Yiddish texts has been devised that represents them adequately to the broad audience that might have recourse to them. In the end, those who wish to read early Yiddish texts in the original language must do so in the Hebrew alphabet in which they were written––not because those texts must be guarded against direct access by ‘outsiders’, but for the same reason that, for instance, anyone not willing to settle for reading Tolstoy in translation will learn not just the Russian language, but necessarily, automatically, and without even imagining an alternative, also the Cyrillic alphabet in which Russian

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is written. Thus after careful consideration, I decided to eschew transcriptions in the English edition and instead provide the original Hebrew-alphabet texts of those passages cited in transcription in the French edition. In the present volume then these few citations are presented both in English translation and in the original Hebrew-alphabet text, all of which I have edited anew from manuscript and/or early print. Some readers might object that if some text excerpts are presented in the Hebrew alphabet, then one might as well have eschewed all transcription and simply printed all originally Hebrew-alphabet texts, words, phrases, titles, names, etc., in the Hebrew alphabet. In his wide-ranging overview of several centuries of literary and cultural history, however, the author seeks a broader audience than would have been comfortably addressed by that method. Thus here those readers without a knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet can still have access to the content of the entire book, for even those passages here cited in the Hebrew alphabet are also presented in a parallel English translation. Finally, one might note that in following this practice of transposing into the Roman alphabet Hebrew-alphabet names, titles, and occasional individual words, while also including selected text excerpts in the original Hebrewalphabet text, there is a precedent of some note: the English translation of Israel Zinberg’s Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn, which follows the same practice. In the decade since the publication of the original edition, there has been much further work in the field of early Yiddish, not least by the author himself. It seemed then appropriate for the English edition to reflect the progress in the field: two stages of revision have thus been carried out in preparing the English edition. First, in addition to translating the book, the editor/translator has undertaken a number of modifications to revise the book for an anglophone audience: as noted above, text citations have been verified and translated from the original source language, and the text excerpts transcribed in the French edition are here edited in the Hebrew alphabet; in addition, bibliographical data have been verified, corrected, and standardized according to the format of the Modern Language Association; references to manuscripts, their repositories and signatures have been standardized; numerous sections of the book have been revised and (generally) expanded for the sake of clarification and accuracy based on more recent research. Finally, a glossary has been added, for as the reader will notice on practically every page, there is a specialized vocabulary employed to analyse and discuss the various aspects of Jewish culture herein treated. While most readers will be familiar with some of these terms, only experts will know them all. These terms are thus glossed in place in the text and the recurring ones are also collected into a glossary at the end of the book for the sake of convenient reference. That glossary should, however, be considered very strictly a tactical guide to these terms as they are used in this volume only and not as a comprehensive lexicon of the terms in their inevitably broader range of meanings

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as they appear throughout the Jewish tradition. All revisions have been undertaken by the editor/translator with the approval of the author, who has also contributed not a few revisions and clarifications. The result is the revised, second edition. In 2001–2, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Skirball Foundation (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies), and the Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund (University of Southern California) generously supported this project, too, and enabled its completion. My thanks are also due my editor, Hilary O’Shea, Enid Barker, and the staff at Oxford University Press, for seeing a most difficult project through all stages of the publishing process. Without the generous aid of librarians expert in the field of Ashkenazic studies and a number of colleagues who have provided encouragement, information, and constructive criticism at particular moments or over the course of a longer period of time, no such project would have been possible. Of particularly aid were Richard Judd, Doris Nicholson, and the staff of the Oriental Reading Room in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and, in alphabetical order: Jeremy Dauber (Columbia University), Edward Fram (University of Be’er Sheva), Mirjam Gutschow (Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana), Eli Katz (University of California, Berkeley), Dovid Katz (Universitetas Vilniaus), Benjamin Richler (Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem), Benjamin Sadock (Columbia University), Joseph Sherman (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies), Barry Trachtenberg (SUNY Albany), and most of all, Jean Baumgarten (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Jerold C. Frakes University of Southern California

Contents Abbreviations 1 The Invention of a Language: Yiddish among the European Vernaculars 2 The Emergence of Yiddish Literature and the Crisis in Jewish Society 3 The Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books 4 Bilingualism and the Development of Old Yiddish Literature 5 Yiddish Bibles 6 Medieval Epic and Romance in Yiddish 7 Elia Levita and the Romanzo Cavalleresco 8 Books of Morality and Conduct Ethico-Mystical Treatises in Yiddish The Books of Custom and Conduct: Minhogim sforim 9 Prayer in the Vernacular Tkhinous ‘Prayers of Supplication’ Yiddish and Bilingual Rites of Daily Prayer (sidurim) and Holiday Prayers (makhzourim) 10 Yiddish Narrative 11 Terrestrial Suffering in a Topsy-Turvy World Megilas Vints: An Historical Poem on the Pogrom in Frankfurt am Main in 1616 Yiddish Medical Texts (Fourteenth–Eighteenth Centuries) Purim-shpil and the Jewish Carnivalesque Tradition

xx

1 26 38 72 82 128 163 207 237 248 260 274 285 296 328 328 341 359

Conclusion: From the Old to the New

386

Glossary Bibliography Index

388 391 445

Abbreviations BB Bek BGDSL BH BM BT EJ Er EYT Git HUCA JJS JT Ket Kid M Meg MGWJ MHG Ned OHG Pes REJ Sanh Shab St. CB St. Serapeum

Taan Yad Yev ZGJD

Bava Batra Bekhorot Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur Bibliotheca hebraea, ed. Johann Christoph Wolf, 4 vols. (Hamburg 1715–33) Bava Metsia Babylonian Talmud Encyclopedia Judaica Eruvin Early Yiddish Texts, ed. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Gittin Hebrew Union College Annual Journal of Jewish Studies Jerusalem Talmud Ketubot Kiddushin Mishna Megila Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Middle High German Nedarim Old High German Pesahim ˙ des Études Juives Revue Sanhedrin Shabbat Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in bibliotheca bodleiana (Berlin: Friedlaender, 1852–60) (citation by catalogue item number) Moritz Steinschneider, ‘Jüdisch-Deutsche Literatur nach einem handschriftlichen Katalog der Oppenheim’schen Bibliothek (in Oxford) mit Zusätzen und Berichtigungen’, Serapeum 9 (1848), 313–36, 344–52, 363–8, 375–84; 10 (1849), 9–16, 25–32, 42–8, 74–80, 88–96, 107–12 (with index, 54–5, 57–9, 68–70); rpt. as book: Moritz Steinschneider, Jüdisch-Deutsche Literatur (Serapeum, Leipzig 1843–1849) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1961) (citations by item number) Taanit Yadaim Yevamot Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Judentums in Deutschland

Citations from the Bible are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV).

 The Invention of a Language: Yiddish among the European Vernaculars

Contrary to common opinion, there was interest in Yiddish even before the nineteenth century, when a number of scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums began the scholarly and philological study of vernacular Jewish languages and literatures. The Yiddish language had already experienced its first linguistic study during the Renaissance, when some European scholars began to consider the possibility of using vernacular languages as vehicles of study and scholarship, and when grammarians began to codify the grammatical structure of those languages. This early recognition of Yiddish must be linked with the interest in vernaculars that emerged at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the first grammars of the principal languages of Europe were published.1 At about the same time that these first treatises on European vernaculars were appearing, the first bibliographies, systematic grammatical studies, lexica and brief collections of texts in Old Yiddish were published. The language became the object of theoretical reflection, which then helped to provide some measure of order and form in matters of orthography. While such changes naturally took their own specific forms in Jewish culture, they must be viewed in the context of the larger process of the vernacularization of knowledge that had begun during the European Middle Ages. It was during this period that the distinction was established between, on the one hand, the vernaculars,2 which were viewed as unstable, lacking grammatical rules, and limited to the register of speech, and, on the other hand, the classical languages, such as Latin, which were viewed as literary languages, endowed with a grammar and stable rules of usage. The vernacular was long banned from the realms of literature, scholarship, and the university. One may note, however, a development in such thought that ushered in a progressive recognition of the vernaculars as languages of knowledge, 1

See, especially, Anders Ahlquist, ‘Les Premières Grammaires des vernaculaires européens’, in Sylvain Auroux, ed., Histoire des idées linguistiques, ii: Le Développement de la grammaire occidentale (Liège: P. Mardaga, 1992), 107–14. 2 Dante, who contributed to enhancing the prestige of the vernacular, also notes this opposition of the vernacular––‘which we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses’ (De vulgari eloquentia, 1. 1, ed. Aristide Marigo, 4th edn. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968)––and the classical languages, especially Latin.

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The Invention of a Language

study, and literary expression.3 Beginning in the eighteenth century this distinction resurfaces in somewhat different form in the opposition of national languages to regional speech and dialects, which were viewed as having neither rules nor grammar. Such was also the case with Yiddish, which up through the nineteenth century and lingering on among some even at the close of the twentieth century was often stigmatized as a ‘hybrid jargon’ or as a form of ‘corrupt German’. As was the case with other European minority languages and Jewish languages of the diaspora, the status of a language in its own right was long denied to this vernacular of the European Jews.4 A tradition of the linguistic study of Yiddish emerged during the Renaissance period, which documents a concern in Ashkenazic Jewish society with the role of the vernacular, its characteristic traits, and its relationships with coterritorial and other Jewish languages (e.g. Hebrew).5 Let us recall that the first codifications of Yiddish appeared at the same time that the major European vernaculars were also receiving their first linguistic treatments. Some scholars thus maintained that all languages were organized according to systems of grammar and that a vernacular was no less susceptible to codification than were the classical languages.6 Jewish communities thus experienced a development parallel to that of other traditional 3 See Mirko Tavoni, ‘La linguistica rinascimentale’, in Storia della linguistica, ed. Giulio C. Lepschy, vol. ii (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 169–312. 4 See Jean Baumgarten, ‘La Définition nationale de la langue et de la littérature yiddish chez les savants de la Wissenschaft des Judentums (XIXe–XXe siècle)’, in Philologiques III: La Notion de littérature nationale dans l’espace franco-allemand, ed. M. Werner and M. Espagne (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1993), 405–29; Tavoni, ‘La linguistica rinascimentale’. On the development of modern literary Yiddish, see the definitive study by Dov-Ber Kerler, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 5 On this tradition, see Ber Borochov, ‘Di bibliotek fun yidishn filolog: fir hundert yor yidishe shprakhforshung’, Der Pinkes 1 (1913), (separate numbering within volume) coll. 1–66; Karl Habersaat, ‘Materialien zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’, Orbis 11/1 (1962), 352–68; idem, ‘Zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik: eine bibliographische Studie’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 84 (1965), 419–35; Max Weinreich, ‘Studien zur Geschichte und dialektischen Gliederung der jiddischen Sprache, erster Teil: Geschichte und gegenwärtiger Stand der jiddischen Sprachforschung’, 3 vols. (diss. Marburg, 1923), published as: Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung, ed. Jerold C. Frakes (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993); idem, Shtaplen: fir etyudn tsu der yidisher shprakh-visnshaft un literatur-geshikhte (Berlin: Vostok, 1923). 6 See Louis Kukenheim, Contributions à l’histoire de la grammaire italienne, espagnole et française à la Renaissance (Amsterdam: N.v. Noordhollandsche uitgevers maatschappij, 1932); G. A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–8); W. Keith Percival, ‘The Grammatical Tradition and the Rise of the Vernaculars’, in Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. xiii: Historiography of Linguistics, 2 vols., ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 231–75; idem, ‘Renaissance Linguistics: The Old and New’, in Studies in the History of Western Linguistics in Honour of R. H Robins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 56–68; L. Giard, ‘Du latin médiéval au pluriel des langues: le tournant de la Renaissance’, Histoire, Épistémologie, Langage 6/1 (1984), 35–55. On the subject of French, see C. Longeon, ed., Premiers combats pour la langue française (Paris: Livre de poche classique, 1989).

The Invention of a Language



European societies, which had undergone two significant changes: first of all, the supremacy of Latin, the sacred and international language, had been severely compromised by the rise of the vernaculars. One witnesses a readjustment of the respective roles of the languages and a determination to increase the role of the vernaculars. Latin gave up a portion of its domain, while the vernaculars were freed from their imposed state of inferiority and rose to the rank of languages of culture and scholarship. Secondly, the distribution of printed books, especially in the vernacular, modified the means of access to knowledge and called into question the cultural monopoly of the educated elite in the realm of letters. A similar development may be noted within traditional Jewish society: alongside Hebrew and Aramaic, which up to this point had been the only languages employed in the transmission of texts central to the Jewish tradition, Yiddish developed as a literary language and even encroached somewhat upon the domain of Hebrew, although the sacred language never lost its dominant position.7 Moreover, as a result of the development of the printing press, literature in the Jewish vernaculars was distributed thoughout the various European Jewish communities. Before the first half of the sixteenth century, practically all Jewish books were printed in Hebrew. Such books circulated principally in the world of scholars and the educated. From that time on, however, the demand for books in the vernacular grew. Thus books in Ladino were printed for Marranos in Italy who wished to reestablish contact with the sacred tradition and strengthen their religious practice.8 Between 1552 and 1555, collections of Judaeo-Spanish prayers were thus published in Ferrara,9 and in 1556 there followed the important Biblia en lengua espanola, published by Abraham Usque, followed by Consolaçam as tribulaçoens de Ysrael (1553), published by Samuel Usque. Bilingual liturgical collections were also published in Judaeo-Italian, for instance, in Bologna (1538) and Mantua (1561).10 The printing of books in Yiddish responded to this same demand for the distribution of sacred texts among those Jews who, due to an imperfect knowledge of Hebrew, had grown more distant from Jewish traditions. This increase in the number of 7 See Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish: perakim le-toldoteah (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1978); Yiddish translation: Prokim fun der yidisher literatur-geshikhte (Tel Aviv: I. L. Perets, 1988) (the Yiddish volume presents revised versions of most of the essays, and differs as well in replacing two essays of the original edition with two other essays). 8 See Haïm-Vidal Sephiha, Le Ladino (judéo-espagnol calque): structure et évolution d’une langue liturgique, 2 vols. (diss. Sorbonne, 1979 (Paris III) ) (Paris: Association Vidas Largas, 1979). 9 The Libro de Oraciones de todo el año and the Sedur de Oraciones des mes of 1552, edited by Yom Tov ben Levi Athias; the Mahazor. Orden de Roshasanah y Kipur (1553), the Psalterio de ˙ David in Hebrayco dicho Thehylim (1553), and the Orden de Oraciones de mes (1555) by Abraham Usque. The Catholic offensive embodied in the Counter-Reformation would have as one of its consequences the discontinuation of publishing books in the Jewish vernacular in Italy. 10 See Giulio Busi, Edizione ebraiche del XVI secolo nelle biblioteche dell’Emilia Romagna (Bologna: Analisi, 1987).



The Invention of a Language

Yiddish books had a direct effect on the religious life of the Jewish population. While cultural communication and liturgical practice may not have undergone radical change, they did nonetheless experience a remarkable development. The great interest in ancient and oriental languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Turkish, the rediscovery of the Jewish grammarians David Kimhi and Saadia Gaon, the desire to know the Old Testament in the ˙ original, speculations on the origin of languages and the mystery of the Hebrew alphabet connected with Christian cabbalism, stimulated the study of Hebrew, but also, as a side-effect, the study of Jewish vernaculars.11 The emergence of a grammatical tradition in Yiddish is one of the direct consequences of the interest in Hebrew studies which was manifested among Renaissance humanists. The tolerant attitude, full of curiosity concerning Jewish texts such as the Zohar, that we find in Guillaume Postel, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Johannes Buxtorf, among other scholars, well illustrates the change in attitude on the part of some Christians toward the thought and languages of the Jews.12 In the German lands, where the first treatises on Yiddish appeared, there are numerous factors that must be taken into account. It is necessary to recall the influence of the Reformation, which assigned a central role to prayer, sermons, and mystical revelation in the vernacular. Martin Luther criticized the gap that had developed between the knowledge of the educated elite and the culture of the people who lived in semi-ignorance, sometimes even in great spiritual and religious poverty. Luther made use of his Muttersprache (native language) for spreading the basic elements of his doctrines and for writing pamphlets, whose great impact is now well known.13 It is not without significance that 1534 was the year of publication of both Luther’s translation of the Bible and the first known printed book in Yiddish, the Mirkeves ha-mishne (‘The Second Chariot’), a bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish biblical 11 See Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony, Sixteenth Century Christian Hebraica in the Age of Renaissance Nostalgia (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1983); Louis Kukenheim, Contributions à l’histoire de la grammarie grecque, latine, hébraïque à l’époque de la Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1951): S. Kessler Mesguich, ‘Aspects et tendance de l’enseignement de l’hébreu en France, du Moyen Âge à la fin du dix-septième siècle’, Pardès 12 (1990), 108–21. 12 See Jean Baumgarten, ‘L’Étude de la langue yiddich à la Renaissance (XVIe et XVIIe siècle)’, in Astrid Starck, ed., Westjiddisch: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit/Le Yiddish occidental: Actes du Colloque de Mulhouse (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1994), 99–112; François Secret, Les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Duno, 1963; rpt. Milan: Arché, 1985). On the texts from this period that treat Yiddish, see Jerold C. Frakes, Isagoge in linguam hebraeogermanicam: The Study of Yiddish During the Age of Humanism (forthcoming), which includes a study, editions, and English translations of the relevant texts. 13 On the relations between the Reformation and the emergence of the vernacular as a language of culture and a vehicle for the transmission of religious traditions, see Guy Bedouelle and Bernard Roussel, eds., Le Temps des Réformes et la Bible, Bible de tous les temps 5 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989); and Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, ii. 244–318.

The Invention of a Language

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concordance, published in Cracow. Numerous works in both Latin and German include information about the Yiddish language, while books in Yiddish, especially the translations of the Bible known by the name Khumesh-taytsh,14 were published in the principal German-speaking cities that had been won over to the Reformation, among them: Constance, Augsburg, Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel.15 In Protestant colleges and theological faculties, Hebrew was taught as an indispensable means of access to the divine word and the Old Testament, but in addition German was also taught, a new development linked with the pedagogical reform that took shape during this period.16 The purpose was to promote the knowledge of canonical Jewish texts in their original language, with the specific goal, one should note, of being better able to refute the ‘errors’ of Jewish religion. In this context and from this perspective, Yiddish also played a pedagogical role, a minor one, to be sure, but one that should not be ignored. The texts that treat the Jewish vernacular are never linguistic studies that attempt to define the actual phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics of Yiddish or to systematize its rules of usage and linguistic practice. Most often they are simply brief tracts intended to be used as introductions to the basic rules of the language for self-study, so that one could learn acceptable pronunciation and reading skills, and, secondarily, perhaps also writing and translating. From this pedagogical perspective, Yiddish was viewed particularly as a step toward Hebrew, that is, as a tool designed to facilitate the student’s gradual progress from German via Yiddish to the Hebrew and a comprehensive reading of the Old Testament. In the structure of Yiddish, a language not without kinship to Middle High German, but written in the Hebrew alphabet, one sees that it can only play a peripheral and minor role for students of theology: Yiddish is considered a simple supplement or a preliminary training tool for the study of Hebrew, the primary language of the sacred texts of Judaism. Thus the Lutheran Paulus Fagius could write in his preface to Elia Bahur Levita’s Shmous devorim/ ˙ Nomenclatura hebraica, a Yiddish–Hebrew–Latin–German dictionary, published in Isny in 1542:

14 On the Yiddish translations of the Bible, and on translation methods, see Shloyme Noble, Khumesh-taytsh: an oysforshung vegn der traditsye fun taytshn khumesh in di khadorim (New York: YIVO, 1943); Nechama Leibowitz, ‘Die Übersetzungstechnik der jüdisch-deutschen Bibelübersetzungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, dargestellt an den Psalmen. 1. Teil: Syntaktisch-stilistische Untersuchung’ (diss. Marburg, 1931). 15 On the history of Hebrew printing and the Yiddish publishing in Basel during the Renaissance, see Joseph Prijs, Die Basler hebräischen Drücke 1492–1866 (Olten: Urs Graf, 1952). 16 See Rudolf von Raumer, ‘Der Unterricht im Deutschen’, in Karl von Raumer, Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit, 3rd edn. (Stuttgart: S. G. Liesching, 1857–61), iii. 75–175. On the pedagogical reform by Wolfgang Ratke and the teaching of German, see Erika Ising, Wolfgang Ratkes Schriften zur deutschen Grammatik (1612–1630) (Berlin: Akademie, 1959).



The Invention of a Language Ad lectorem

En $oDQH IW$oL DYMLTX nomenclaturam hebraicam Heliæ Leuitæ Hebræi, quam ille superiori anno cum mecum in Germania esset, me hortatore, pro tyronibus et studiosis linguæ hebraicæ obiter congessit, Et quia totus in hoc incumbo, ut quibuscunque rationibus possum, sanctam linguam apud eius studiosos, pro mea uirili commendem ac promoueam. Arbitratus autem fuerim istud ipsum etiam aliquo modo fieri, si quod in alijs linguis facimus, etiam in lingua ʃancta rerum uocabula hebraice sonare discamus: curaui, ut libellus iste, quem in eum usum Helias confecit, in communem studiosorum utilitatem excusus prodiret: qui ut eo gratio esset, adiunxi ipse hebræis latina et germanica uocabula, que iuxta seriem alphabeticam hoc ordine collocantur. Primus ordo continet germanica uocabula, hebraicis tamen typis, quibus Iudæi Germani cum germanica scribunt, utuntur. Secundus ordo purè hebraica. Tertius latina. Quartus ordo nostra germanica. Quod si hanc meam operulam studiosis gratam esse intellexero, operam dabo, ut à me quoque breui habeant librum colloquiorum hebraicorum, nec non et conscribendarum epistolarum. Vale. Ex Isna Mense Iulio, anno salutis M. D. XLij // To the reader: Behold, student of the holy language, here is a Hebrew glossary which at my suggestion the Jew Elia Levita has compiled for novices and students of the Hebrew language during his spare time in the past year when he was with me in Germany. And because I dedicated myself completely to this project to the best of my abilities and to the extent of my powers, I recommend and promote the holy language among those who study it. Now I think that this goal would be attained, were we to do that which we do with respect to other languages, in learning to pronounce the names of things in the holy language. That is why I have taken care to publish for the common use of students this little book which Elia has written to that end. And so that it would be more pleasant still, I have myself added to the Hebrew words the Latin and German words, which one finds in alphabetical order. The first column consists of German words in Hebrew letters as used by the German Jews when they write this language; the second is purely Hebrew; the third is Latin; the fourth is German. If I should know that this modest book would find favour among students, I would apply myself straight away to furnishing them with a Hebrew conversation book and even a guide to writing letters.17

Here we must note the parallel role assigned to European vernaculars by numerous Renaissance pedagogues, who considered the mastery of German, French, or English a means of access to a better knowledge of Latin. The acquisition of the grammatical rules of the living language was to function as useful practice for learning Latin grammar. In the eyes of Christian humanists there was an identical relation between a knowledge of Yiddish and the comprehension of Hebrew. Manuals of German grammar were published during this same time 17 At the end of Levita’s Shmous devorim is found a brief conversation guide, just as in the Sofo beruro of Nathan Nata (Nosn Note) Hanover. In Johannes Buxtorf ’s Thesaurus grammaticus linguæ sanctæ hebrææ, the paragraph devoted to Yiddish (‘Hebræo-germanica’) includes an example of a letter: Formula epistola familiaris et modi scribendi inter Judæos usitati.

The Invention of a Language



period that had as their purpose to teach ‘the art of speaking properly’ (Kunstsprache), and were intended especially for instructional use in Protestant universities.18 One cannot but note the obvious relationship between these earliest grammars and primers of the German language and the texts concerning Yiddish, especially in the description of the alphabet, the system of consonants and vowels, and the analysis of the parts of speech.19 An additional important factor was the development of the publishing industry, which promoted the printing and distribution of treatises on the Hebrew language and the Jewish vernaculars. The existence of private collections among humanists, in which were found manuscripts and printed books in Semitic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, etc.) and in the Jewish vernaculars (Yiddish, Ladino, etc.), stimulated an interest in both Jewish languages and their standardization, while at the same time promoting the compilation of the first printed bibliographies and collections of texts. The first bibliography of Yiddish books was published in Johannes Buxtorf ’s Thesaurus grammaticus linguæ sanctæ hebrææ (Basel, 1609).20 The author explains: Etenim characteres ejus scripturæ accuratè nosse, non solum ad Germanica legenda prodest, sed et ad Hebræa ipsa manuscripta. Testantur id Bibliothecæ principum, et vel una maximè Illustrissimi Electoris Palatini, aliarumque Academiarum inter Christianos, in quibus aliqua manuscriptorum Hebraicorum copia est: testari poterunt id singuli, qui manuscriptos libros Hebraicos habent. Hi non tantum quadrato biblico, sed et Germanico charactere exarati sunt. At quotusquisque inter nostros reperitur, qui eos vel legat vel intelligat? In talibus autem, quin multa arcana contineantur, quæ historiam Hebraicam mirificè illustrarent, si à peritis legerentur, nihil est dubitandum. Sic Judæi in literis quotidianis familiaribus et quibuslibet scriptis suis, communiter hodie eodem charactere utuntur. Ista legere nemo poterit nisi hujus scribendi rationis peritus. Testis sit pulvis, qui tales libros ubertim operit. A good knowledge of the Hebrew letters is not only useful for reading JudaeoGerman, but also that which is written in Hebrew. This is demonstrated in the libraries 18

For example, Laurentius Albertus, Teutsch Grammatik oder Sprach-Kunst (Augsburg, 1573). Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, iii. 244–318; Heinrich Weber, ‘Die Ausbildung der deutschen Grammatik (einschließlich der niederländischen)’, Histoire, Épistémologie, Language 9/1 (1987), 111–31; Erika Ising, Die Anfänge der volkssprachlichen Grammatik in Deutschland und Böhmen. Dargestellt am Einfluß der Schrift des Aelius Donatus ‘De octo partibus orationis ars minor’, pt. i: Quellen (Berlin: Akademie, 1966). 20 In the chapter entitled ‘Lectionis hebræo-germanicæ usus et exercitatio’, p. 648. There he makes reference to such books published in Basel as, for example, the Maase bukh (1602), the Brantspigel (1602), the Frawen büchlein (1602), collections of prayers (Machsor [sic]) (all according to Buxtorf ’s orthography), Tefilo mi-kol ha-shono, Birkas ha-mozoun, Slikhous and to such biblical lexica as the Seyfer lekakh tov and the Seyfer shel Rebi Anshel. The principal references to books in Yiddish are found in the following bibliographies: Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca universalis (Zurich, 1545); Carlo Giusepe Imbonati, Mogeyn ve-kherev u-milkhomo: bibliotheca latino-hebraica (Rome, 1644); Johannes Buxtorf, De abbreviaturis hebraicis (Basel, 1613); Giulio Bartolloci, Kyrias seyfer: bibliotheca magna rabbinica, 4 vols. (Rome, 1675–93); Jacques Le Long, Bibliotheca sacra (Paris, 1709). 19

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The Invention of a Language

of princes, of the illustrious Elector of the Palatinate, and in other Christian academies, where there is found a multitude of Hebrew manuscripts. Individuals who have Hebrew books and manuscripts also confirm this observation. These books are written not only in the biblical square script [square rabbinical script], but also in German characters [Ashkenazic cursive]. How few there are among us who can read or understand them. There is no doubt but that such books contain numerous secrets which would illuminate Hebrew history in an exceptional manner, provided they were read by experts. In their daily letters and other diverse writings, the Jews generally make use of these same letters. Therefore, nothing can be read without a certain knowledge of this script, as is witnessed by the dust which these books collect everywhere.

Also to be taken into account is the development of popular Jewish literature in Yiddish and the increase in popular books in small formats that were distributed by pedlars and bookshops in the Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe. This development stimulated the systematic study and analysis of the language of the Ashkenazic Jews.21 From the time of the Reformation, the conversion of Jews played a decisive role in the production of texts concerning the Yiddish language. In addition to the publication of theological texts intended to refute the ‘errors’ of Judaism and bring Jews back to ‘the straight and narrow path of the Christian faith’. Protestants printed Yiddish translations of the gospels, breviaries, and missals, and polemical anti-Jewish texts, in which one finds glossaries or brief treatments of the Jewish vernacular intended for missionary pastors assigned the duty of preaching and evangelizing in the urban ghettos and villages inhabited by Jews. According to the formulation of Johann Heinrich Callenberg, it was a matter of ‘promoting the recognition of Jesus Christ among the Jewish people’.22 In the eighteenth century, at the Institutum judaicum in Halle, which was devoted to the study of Judaism, this tradition culminated in the printing of Christian literature in Yiddish and promoting the activity of Lutheran missionaries among the Jews.23 A similar missionizing impulse is discernible in the Catholic sphere during the Counter-Reformation and in the foundation of the Jesuit order, which set about publishing breviaries and the New Testament, but also grammars of 21

Jean Baumgarten, ‘Les Livres populaires yiddish dans les communautés juives d’Europe’, Histoire, Épistémologie, Langage 12/1 (1990), 55–76. 22 Johann Heinrich Callenberg, Kurtze Anleitung zur Jüdischteutschen Sprache (Halle: Jüdisches Institut, 1733; rpt. in Hans Peter Althaus, ed., Johann Heinrich Callenberg and Wilhelm Christian Just Chrysander, Schriften zur jiddischen Sprache, Quellen zur Geschichte der jüdischen Sprache 3 (Marburg: Elwert, 1966) ), p. 8 (1733); p. 12 (1966). 23 Johann F. A. de Le Roi, Die evangelische Christenheit und die Juden in der Zeit der Herrschaft christlicher Lebensanschauungen unter den Völkern, 3 vols. (Karlsruhe: H. Reuther, 1884–92), i. 246–69. On the tradition of missionary grammars, see Althaus, Schriften zur jiddischen Sprache; Friedrich Christian Benedict Avé-Lallemant, Das deutsche Gaunerthum in seiner social-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung zu seinem heutigen Bestande, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1858–62), iii, 218–29; Max Weinreich, Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung, 121–64.

The Invention of a Language

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the languages of Asia and the American Indians.24 Doctrinal treatises were also published, in order to help priests of the missionary orders preach in vernacular languages, to convert and reconquer territory given over to superstition, paganism, and even heresy. These books often ended with glossaries and brief tracts that provided the rudiments of the grammar of the vernacular language. Unlike Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, whose grammatical traditions had already begun in antiquity, most vernacular languages had, up to the period of the Renaissance, still not been subjected to either practical or theoretical linguistic analysis.25 It is thus interesting to observe what formal criteria, principles of classification, and models are employed in the first analyses of the Ashkenazic vernacular. Two essential traits characterize the treatises on Yiddish published by Christians, beginning in the Renaissance. First of all, it is a matter of quite static descriptions of the language, intended primarily for the specific purpose of deciphering and understanding Yiddish texts. The authors did not attempt either to analyse linguistic structures or to extrapolate the formal rules necessary for comprehending the workings of the vernacular or for practising ‘the art of fine speaking’. The authors were content to provide brief information about correct pronunciation and Hebrew–Roman alphabetical correspondences that were necessary for students of Hebrew, so that they could familiarize themselves with a language closely related to German but written in Hebrew characters. Secondly, it is not a matter of distinguishing between correct and incorrect forms, and thus of establishing grammatical rules of ‘proper usage’, but rather simply of defining Yiddish as a ‘deviation’ or a ‘corruption’ of German, which was considered an elegant and pure language. Finally, the texts of humanists, theologians, and Christian Hebraists concerning Yiddish are characterized by several rather precisely defined categories whose models were to be found in German grammars of the Renaissance period. These treatments, whether in Latin or German, included a description of the letters of the alphabet and a classification of the vowels and diphthongs, designed to teach acceptable pronunciation of the sounds,26 followed by some brief remarks on specific issues concerning the relationship of Yiddish and German, and a small collection of texts, including letters, prayers, translations of scripture (such as some Psalms or selections from the Pentateuch), such that one might have some practice in reading the Bible. The first listings of the parts of speech did not appear 24

This was especially the role of the Sacræ Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, which published numerous alphabet books, manuals, dictionaries, and grammars, especially in Semitic languages. 25 Kukenheim, Contributions à l’histoire de la grammaire grecque, latine et hébraïque. 26 Equivalent to the sections which one finds in the German grammars, which include chapters entitled ‘Beschreibung der Buchstaben’ (‘description of the letters’) or ‘Laut und Buchstaben Lehre’ (‘rules of sounds and letters’).

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The Invention of a Language

until the seventeenth or eighteenth century, particularly in the grammars of the missionaries.27 The first primer is found in the works of Johann Boeschenstein, Elementale introductorium in hebraeas litteras teutonice et hebraice legendas (Augsburg, 1514), which presents the letters of the Hebrew alphabet followed by comments on particular aspects of their usage.28 From this time on, those who published such texts insisted on employing different fonts, distinguishing between rabbinical square script, which Paulus Fagius,29 for instance, termed scripturam assyriacam or ksivo osuris, and Ashkenazic cursive, termed ksivo ktono, mashait/masket or Kurrent Schrift.30 Fagius’ presentation of the consonants of the ‘alphabetum hebræo-germanicum’ is as follows (from Compendiaria): b d f g h j k 27

beth daleth fe, veth and waw gimel he jod kaph

In the survey of these early treatments of Yiddish that follows here, I make no attempt to correct either the recurring imprecision in descriptions of the language or even the outright mistakes and misrepresentations; their Roman-alphabet transcriptions are here preserved. 28 Refer to the bibliography below for bibliographical information concerning the sixteenthand seventeenth-century books consulted and cited. Johann Boeschenstein was one of the pioneers in the study of Hebrew in Europe. He taught in Ingolstadt, Augsburg, Regensburg, Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Antwerp, Zurich, and Nuremberg. Among his students were Ulrich Zwingli and Johannes Reuchlin. He is especially to be noted as the author of a treatise on Hebrew grammar (Hebraicae grammaticae institutiones, 1514), a Latin edition of Moses Kimhi (Rudimenta hebraica, 1520), German translations of Jewish prayers (Tefilous ho-ivrim, ˙ 1525), and grace after meals (1530). The question of his origins has provoked great discussion. While he himself fiercely denied any Jewish ancestry, Sebastian Münster, on the other hand, calls him baptizatus judaeus ‘baptized Jew’. Melanchthon likewise considered him a Jew and remarked that for some period of time Boeschenstein lived on income earned by reciting Psalms in the synagogue in Regensburg for any of the faithful who requested it of him. He relates that in 1518 Boeschenstein affixed to the door of an inn in Regensburg a proclamation on which was written: ‘I, Johann Boeschenstein, will teach, for a modest sum of money, anyone who wishes, to write and read Hebrew in six days. He who so desires should present himself at this inn.’ See Joseph Perles, Beiträge zur Geschichte der hebräischen und aramäischen Studien (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1884), 27–30; Moshe N. Rosenfeld, Der jüdische Buchdruck in Augsburg in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (London: private printing, 1985), 6, 21–33. 29 On Paulus Fagius, see Chapters 3 and 7, pp. 46 and 167. In both his ‘De variis literarvm figuris sev notvlis’, from Compendiaria isagoge in linguam hebræam (Constance, 1543) and ‘Svccincta ratio legendi hebræo-germanica’, from Prima qvatvor capita Geneseos (Constance, 1543), he presents brief information about Yiddish orthography and pronunciation. 30 On the history of this script, common for popular Jewish books in Yiddish, see Herbert C. Zafren, ‘Variety in the Typography of Yiddish, 1535–1635’, Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 137–63, and idem, ‘Early Yiddish Typography’, Jewish Book Annual 44 (1986), 106–19.

The Invention of a Language l m n p r s t vv x z c

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lamed mem, final mem nun, final nun pe resh samekh, s[h]in, zayin31 teth double waw koph+shin tsade tsade

In his ‘Lectionis Hebræo-Germanicæ Usus et exercitatio’, Johannes Buxtorf presents a brief paragraph concerning the five final letters (kaph, mem, nun, pe, tsade; often known by grammarians as kam’nappes or kemanpaz).32 In his Elemental | oder lesebüchlen (Hundsfeld, 1543), Paul Helicz also distinguishes between the final and common forms of these consonants (here––final | common): schlechte kof | krumme kof, geschlossene mem | offene mem, schlechte nun | krumme nun, pe | fe, schlechte czadick | krumm zadick [sic].33 The so-called begadkefat consonants are also treated separately by some of these early scholars, that is, the consonants beth, gimel, daleth, kaph, pe, taw, whose ancient pronunciation as stop or fricative was determined by their phonetic environment in Hebrew. In Yiddish the situation is quite different, such that the letters simply represent different phonemes without allophonic variation dependent on phonetic environment; they are generally distinguished by diacritical marks added: thus, for instance, a kaph with a raphe (a line over the letter34) = ch; likewise a beth with a raphe = v. As many of these early scholars of Yiddish indicate, three consonants in Yiddish have multiple phonetic realizations: beth: b, v, f; f at the beginning of a word could be written with waw, pe, or beth. kaph: k, q, and kh. Buxtorf explains that kaph without raphe is found only in Hebrew words. pe: p or ph, f, ff; double pe represents pf, ph, or pff. In ‘Svccincta ratio legendi’ he also adds shin = sch. From his Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguæ Sanctæ Hebrææ (Basel, 1609). Wagenseil reports that these letters are called, respectively: schlechte Cóf, geschlossen Mèm, schlechte Nùn, Uffé, and schlechte Záddik by the Jews; see ‘Bericht wie das Jüdisch-Teutsche zu lesen’ (Königsberg, 1699). 33 Max Silberberg, ed., Elemental- oder Lesebüchlein des Paul Helicz (Breslau: Verein jüdisches Museum, 1929). 34 According to Buxtorf, transversa virgula. According to Elias Schadeus, a Lutheran missionary and Hebrew teacher at the university of Strasbourg, überzwerch strichlein. See his Mysterium (Strasbourg, 1592), which includes a chapter entitled ‘Ein gewisser Bericht von teutschhebräischer Schrift, deren sich die Juden gebrauchen’. 31 32

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The Invention of a Language

Additionally: taw is not used in Yiddish except in words from the Semitic component, generally at the beginning or at the end of a word (taw nunquam in Germanicis vocibus usurpantur (‘taw is never used in German words’), says Buxtorf). To be noted is that pe can represent b; teth the sound d; zayin the sound s: koph the sound g; shin the sound z. Other phonemes: shin + pe is sp, shin + teth is st (Boeschenstein); koph + shin is x (Fagius, Compendiaria). Paulus Fagius identifies the vowels of Yiddish as follows (Compendiaria): aleph (a), ayin, jod (e), jod (i), waw, aleph + waw (o), waw (u). Wagenseil also identifies only five simple vowels, represented by four graphs: aleph (a or o), ayin (e), jod (i), waw (u and o) (‘Bericht’). Helicz omits a altogether and classifies the remaining vowels as: ayin (e), jod (i), aleph (o), waw (u), waw + jod (ü). Thomas Blebelius lists the vowels as: aleph (a), ayin (e), jod (i), waw with holem (o), waw (u), waw + waw (w).35 Buxtorf distinguishes four Yiddish ˙ waw (u/o), jod (i/e), ayin (e), aleph (a). August Pfeiffer explains that vowels: the aleph rarely represents o, and that ö is represented by ayin.36 Elias Schadeus insists on the differences between Hebrew, which makes use of vowel pointing to identify the vowels, and Yiddish, in which vowel pointing is rarely used. It is used only when there would otherwise be semantic ambiguity; for example, mem + jod + resh could represent meer with a sere or mir with a ˙ hirek (ch. 2). ˙ The representation of the diphthongs of Yiddish differs dramatically, depending on which scholar is describing them. Fagius lists them as: aleph + waw + jod represents au; waw + jod likewise represents au. ayin + waw + jod + jod represents eu.37 jod + jod represents ei or ai.38 jod + aleph represents ie. waw + jod represents œ. Helicz’s list, on the other hand, consists of the following: waw + jod represents ü. jod + jod represents ei. aleph + waw + jod represents au and eu. 35

Thomas Blebelius, ‘Isagoge brevissima exhibens rationem legendi et scribendi Hebræogermanicum, cuius usus hoc tempore frequens est’, in Compendium Hebrææ Lingvæ ex Grammatica Blebelii Quanta heri potuit brevitate & perspicuitate collectum, et ad puerilem institutionem ominino accommodatum (Wittenberg, 1594). 36 August Pfeiffer, Critica Sacra de Sacri Codicis Partitione, Editionibus variis, Lingvis Originalibus et illibatâ Puritate fontium (Dresden, 1680). At the end of the volume there is a section entitled ‘De lectione ebræo-germanico’. 37 In ‘Svccincta ratio legendi’, Fagius indicates that eu is represented by aleph + waw + jod + jod. 38 In ‘Svccincta ratio legendi’, Fagius indicates that ai is represented by aleph + jod.

The Invention of a Language

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Johannes Meelführer39 lists them as follows: aleph + waw represents au. aleph + jod represents ai. ayin + jod represents ei, as do jod + jod and aleph + jod + jod. waw + jod represents ô (probably = ö) or ü. Wagenseil and Buxtorf distinguish among only three diphthongs, albeit somewhat differently: Buxtorf identifies the diphthongs as jod + jod (ei), waw + jod + jod (eu/ew/ü/ö), waw + jod (au/aw).Wagenseil, on the other hand, lists them as waw + jod (ü/ö/eu/au), waw + jod + jod (eu/ew), and jod + jod (ei). As do most of the other scholars, Johannes Boeschenstein notes that the vocalic onset of a word (in principio) is indicated by a silent aleph preceding the vowels jod and waw and the diphthongs double jod, waw + jod. Several of the scholars note a further set of orthographic rules: The letters heth and taw are only used in Yiddish words from the Semitic ˙ of Yiddish (the sound t is normally represented by teth). component Sebastian Münster adds samech to these letters used for Semitic.40 As Boeschenstein explains: ‘haec tria elementa non scribuntur nisi in lingua sancta’ (‘these three letters are not written except in the Holy Language’) and Johannes Buxtorf comments on heth: ‘nullum habet ˙ usum in Germanicis’ (‘it has no use in German words’) and on taw ‘hujus usus in Germanicis nullus est’ (‘its use for German words is nil’). The absence of the vowels a and e at the beginning or in the final (i.e. unaccented) syllables of certain types of words, where Yiddish represents no vowel, as in morgn or vatr. The absence of the letter he in certains words such as German geht, which is represented in Yiddish by gimel + ayin + teth. The presence of a silent aleph at the end of certain words. Paulus Fagius speaks here of ornament (ornatus causa). In the Seyfer midous (Isny, 1541), edited by Fagius, this silent aleph is designated by the equivalent Yiddish expression (tsirung); as in lob’. A silent aleph is also inserted into 39

‘De Scriptura Judæorum’ from Grammaticæ Hebrææ compendiosa institutio (Ansbach, 1607). 40 Sebastian Münster, Institutiones grammaticae in hebraeam linguam (Basel, 1524). This text includes a chapter entitled ‘De lingua vernacula Hebraicis scribenda characteribus’. In another work by Münster, Dikduk delishan arami [sic] (Basel, 1527), there is some attempt to compare the languages. Thus, the author explains that ‘our writers tend to mix Aramaic words with Hebrew words. Exactly as in our day: if they do not know how to translate a Hebrew word, they make use of the vernacular (Spanish or German)’. In another passage, in speaking of the relationships among Aramaic, Chaldean, and Hebrew, at the time of the Jewish return to Israel following the Babylonian exile, he explains that the Jews brought the Aramaic language with them, ‘exactly as, if one were to give to our German Jews the possibility of settling in the Holy Land, they would make German the vernacular, for only a small number of them would be able to speak Hebrew’.

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The Invention of a Language

words in which there appear three waw in a row, such as in the nouns, vv’undr (the aleph thus appears between vv and u). Double consonants are never written or marked by a dagesh in Yiddish words (contrast, for instance, with German Müller). The appearance of a prosthetic daleth in verbal forms that begin with erin standard German, such as dertseyln (vs. German erzählen). Such a prosthetic d is also found in Bavarian dialect. Apocope in words such as Yiddish un (cf. German und). Syncope in Yiddish words such as az and azo (cf. German als and also). Substitution of letters in such words as Yiddish mir (cf. standard German wir), which is in fact a common dialectal variation in German. The existence of diminutives with -lekh (equivalent to -lein), such as kindlekh, meidlekh. In turning to the grammars compiled by the missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one notices that while a number of rules and definitions which are simply taken from earlier texts appear again, there are also several important modifications of that earlier tradition. First, the representation of the phonological system of Yiddish demonstrates some modification, since these texts document the period of transition from Middle Yiddish (1500–1750) to early Modern Yiddish (since 1750).41 Secondly, in the description of the parts of speech, there appears a series of a priori linguistic assumptions regarding the nature of the Yiddish language, whose echoes are still detectable up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly among the German scholars and philologists associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums.42 Yiddish is defined as a vermischte Sprache ‘mixed language’.43 Several observations follow from this postulate: Yiddish is considered as a ‘deviation’ from German, the normative, pure language. 41 I adopt here the periodization of the language as defined by Max Weinreich, who distinguished three periods in the history of Yiddish: Old Yiddish (1250–1500), Middle Yiddish (1500–1750), and Modern Yiddish (since 1750); see his Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh: bagrifn, faktn, metodn, 4 vols. (New York: YIVO, 1973), ii. 383–9; English: History of the Yiddish Language, ed. and transl. Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 719–33. 42 Thus Leopold Zunz, in his work Die Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (Berlin: Asher, 1832), 438–42, speaks of Yiddish as a hybrid and composite dialect. This idea continues to appear even up to our own time, for example, in the work of A. Zivy, who comments: ‘JudeoGerman is a heterogeneous mixture of the most diverse linguistic elements, which the Jews have adopted and preserved in the lands of the diaspora. Judeo-German does not possess an actual grammar any more than does any other dialect. In most cases, it is a matter of corrupted German and an arbitrary combination of diverse roots, for which no rules exist’ (Elsässer Jiddisch: Jüdisch-deutsche Sprichwörter und Redensarten (Basel: Victor Goldschmidt, 1966), 5). 43 Johann Heinrich Callenberg, Kurtze Anleitung zur Jüdischteutschen Sprache (Halle, 1733). On this Protestant theologian, see Althaus, ‘Nachwort’, in Callenberg and Chrysander, Schriften zur jiddischen Sprache, 283–94.

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Johannes Jacob Schudt speaks of a grob und verdorben teutsch ‘crude and corrupted German’.44 Yiddish is defined as a ‘corrupted language’, impure, based on a system of ‘deformations’, ‘alterations’, and ‘corruptions’ of German. As Callenberg remarks: ‘Eine geringe Vermischung macht keine eigene Sprache’ (‘a simple mixture does not make an independent language’). Christian Möller insists on the fact that the Jews write the words according to their corrupte Ausrede ‘corrupt pronunciation’.45 Schudt explains that the German Jews have eine sonderliche lächerliche Ausrede ‘curious, ridiculous pronunciation’. He brands the pronunciation of the Jews ‘coarse and defective’, especially the e equivalent to i (e.g. mein liben––mein leben, mihl––mehl), a characteristic which in fact corresponds to a dialectal characteristic of the time among the non-Jewish German-speaking inhabitants of Frankfurt.46 This characteristic resulted in a merciless indictment of Yiddish by Johannes Christoph Wagenseil: Mit keiner Sprach sind die Juden jemals | so | wie man zu reden pflegt | lästerlich | als mit unserer Teutschen umbgangen | dann sie haben solcher einen gantz frembden Thon und Laut gegeben | die guten teutschen Wörter gestümmelt | geradbrecht | verkehret | neue uns unbekandte erdacht | wie auch unzählich viel Hebreische Wörter und Red-Arten in das Teutsche gemischet | daß solcher gestalt | wer sie Teutsch reden höret | nit anderst glaubt als sie reden pur lauter Hebreisch | indem fast kein einiges Wort verständlich fürkommet. The Jews have never treated any other language so––to use the conventional expression––blasphemously as they have our German language, for they have given it a completely foreign intonation and accent; they have mutilated, fragmented and inverted the good German words and invented new ones unknown to us, as well as mixed into German innumerable Hebrew words and phrases, so much so that whoever hears them speak German can only imagine that they are speaking pure unadulterated Hebrew, in which not a single intelligible word occurs.47 44 Johannes Jacob Schudt, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1714–18; rpt. Berlin, 1922). This survey of Jewish history and customs notably includes a chapter entitled, ‘Von der Franckfurter und anderer Juden Teutsch-Hebräischen Sprache’ (pt. ii, bk. vi, ch. 16, pp. 281–96). 45 Christian Möller, Sifrey ha-bris khadosho: Novum Testamentum hebræo-teutonicum (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1700), unpaginated. This book includes a chapter entitled ‘Bericht wie das Jüdisch-Teutsche zu lesen’, the majority of which is simply plagiarized from Wagenseil’s ‘Bericht’. 46 For Heinrich Heine claims: ‘Here in Frankfurt the noble caste of traders meet to make their deals and talk their gibberish (und schachert und mauschelt); for that which we call mauscheln or talk jargon in northern Germany is nothing other than the common speech of Frankfurt, which is spoken by both uncircumcised and circumcised’; cited by Lazar S¸aˇineanu (Lazare Sainéan/ Shayn), Studiu dialectologic asupra graiului evreo-german (Bucharest: E. Wiegand, 1889); expanded French translation by the author: ‘Essai sur le judéo-allemand et spécialement sur le dialecte parlé en Valachie’, Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 12 (1903), here 100. 47 See Johannes Christoph Wagenseil, ‘Fürtrag’ to the Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Redund Schreibart (Königsberg, 1699), unpaginated (quaternio ). On Wagenseil, see Josef Weissberg, ‘Johann Christof Wagenseils “Bericht wie das Jüdisch-Teutsche zu lesen” ’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Sprache 25 (1966), 154–68.

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The Invention of a Language

Wilhelm Christian Justus Chrysander drew up a list of other ways that Jews had of corrupting German.48 First of all by the multiplication of syllables (Vermehrung), for instance in the word dererben (‘inherit’),49 which is, in German, ererben; or gefinden (‘find’), in German, finden; secondly, by the principle of confusion (Verstämmelung), as in the words az, German als, or aso, German also; by transposition of letters (Verwechslung), as in mir for wir, nicks for nichts or leyen for lesen; and finally, by deformation in pronunciation (Verziehung). Caspar Calvör likewise speaks of a verkehrte Aussprache (‘corrupted pronunciation’). Thus one puts an o in place of a (Isroel, Israel), an e in place of a (fregen, fragen), an ei in place of a (Yeikev, Jakob),50 an aa in place of au (glaab, glaub)51; finally, by means of the omission especially of short e or syllable-final e.52 The same notion of mixture is also applied to one aspect of the Hebrew component of Yiddish, by means of which Germanic inflectional endings are added to Hebrew substantives. One thus finds verbal forms deemed hybrids, such as akhlen (‘eat’), which derives from the Hebrew root akhal to which has been added the verbal suffic -n. The same principle applies to darschen (‘preach’), which comes from Hebrew darasch; badken (‘inspect’) from Hebrew badak. Calvör makes similar comments regarding the forms of compound analytic verbs, such as mauchel zeyn (‘excuse’), composed of the auxiliary verb ‘to be’ and the Hebrew substantive mauchel; or nistar werden (‘disappear’). In these early studies, the pronunciation of Yiddish is likewise treated in terms of its deformation of Hebrew and German. Callenberg notes that taw is pronounced s, as in bereshis (‘in the beginning’) or kosev (‘writing/ document’). Vowels are treated similarly: haarets is pronounced hoorets (‘the land’), kokav is pronounced kokov (‘star’), hepets is pronounced heipets ˙ ˙ 48 Wilhelm Christian Just Chrysander, Jüdisch-Teutsche Grammatick (Leipzig: Johann Christoph Meisner, 1750); rpt. in Callenberg and Chrysander, Schriften zur jiddischen Sprache. Chrysander remarks (p. 3 (1750); p. 217 (1966)): ‘Since the Jews consider German a pagan language (Heydensprache), they do not think it worth learning in an accurate manner. They write without grammar. They do not always distinguish number and gender, and substantives from adjectives, etc. Since they care little for accuracy in our language, they are even less concerned with its purity. The Polish Jews contribute not a little to the corruption, both written and oral, of German words. They come to Germany frequently in order to educate Jewish children. There is an element of dominance involved, when the Jewish nation everywhere, even beyond Germany, diverges from the language of the country and uses words which they have misshapen, distorted and torn to bits.’ He identifies three reasons for the Jewish corruption of German: the love of the Hebrew language, the tendancy to cultivate distinctive modes of life, and the desire to prevent Christians from understanding them. 49 The distorted transcription of Yiddish words employed by the authors treated in this section is preserved for the sake of clarity in characterizing their work. 50 This phonetic realization is also a characteristic of the Bavarian dialect of the Lech valley region. 51 Also characteristic of the Swabian dialect of German. 52 This item is in fact a matter of several distinctive features common to several German dialects.

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(‘desire’/‘will’). Calvör and Wagenseil both note that Christians designate such Jewish pronunciation mauschel or mauscheleien (derived from the name Moses: Moushe, Moushele), which means ‘speak in the manner of Moses’, that is, as the Jews. Beyond Hebraisms and Germanized words based on Hebrew roots, some authors, including Chrysander and Wagenseil, note the use of sonderliche Wörter (‘peculiar words’). These are a collection of nouns borrowed from Romance languages, such as Old French, or Middle High German, which have been preserved in Yiddish, while they are no longer in use or have become obsolete in the modern source languages, such as, ette for Vater (‘father’), belzel for Töchterlein (diminutive for ‘daughter’ < Latin puella), leien for lesen (‘read’ < Latin legere), enk for euch (‘you’ plural; also found in the Austrian and Tyrolian subdialects of Bavarian), breyleft or brauloft for Hochzeit (MHG brutlouft, Dutch bruiloft, Franconian brautlauff, Rhenish brulof, Saxon broleft), bentschen (< Latin benedicere) for segnen (‘bless’), and oren (< Latin orare) for beten (‘pray’). The earliest observations on Yiddish dialects began to appear at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. One can of course already note some dialect information in the texts of the humanists and the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance. Thus, for instance, in the Yiddish texts of Elia Levita, one notes the influence of High German dialects (Swabian and Bavarian); in Schudt’s Jüdisch Merkwürdigkeiten, there is some attention to the speech of the Jews of Frankfurt am Main. These authors are nonetheless unaware of the distinctions among the large-scale dialect territories of Yiddish. It is not until the missionary grammars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that these dialect territories begin to be differentiated. Thus Callenberg and Calvör explain that ‘the German words used by the Jews are borrowed from diverse German dialects (Hochdeutsch ‘High German’, Plattdeutsch ‘Low German’, and even Holländisch ‘Dutch’/‘Low Franconian’)’. There were also other Christian authors drawn to an interest in Yiddish, in general by theological or social motives. While they are not works written by philologists, these treatises are nonetheless of clear significance, for they contain valuable information concerning the representations of Jews in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and many a pertinent observation on Jewish languages. Among these texts one should note those designed as self-study manuals for learning Yiddish. Written primarily by merchants, in German and for a popular audience, these booklets proposed to teach the rudiments of the language necessary for conducting business transactions. The oldest text of this type is the Elemental / oder lesebüchlen (Hundsfeld, 1543), by Paul (Asher) Helicz, a converted Jew and the first translator of the New Testament into Yiddish (Cracow, 1543).53 This book 53 The original title is Elemental oder Lesebüchlein. Doraus meniglich mit gutem Grund underwisen wirt. Wie man deutsche büchlen Missiuen oder Sendbriue, Shuldbriue so mit ebreischen oder

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includes brief information useful for merchants, such as the numerical equivalents of the Hebrew letters, a very few comments on the vocabulary of monetary terms, weights and measures, along with the names of the months. It also provides two sample texts: the pater noster and a letter of credit, both in German written in the Hebrew but in an orthography and with a vocabulary inconceivable in the Yiddish of the period. In this same vein, one should note the work by Eberhard Carl Friedrich Oppenheimer Hodejus EbraeoRabbinicus, Kürtze und deutliche Anweisung, wie . . . die . . . Bücher und Briefe, Contracte, Handschriften, Wechselzettle usw. des heutigen Judenteutsch zu lesen und zu verstehen (Leipzig, 1731).54 Other such works existed in the Jewish world, such as that of Shabbetai b. Joseph Bass, Masekes derekh erets (Amsterdam 1680), which is both a travel guide and a brief treatment of the Yiddish language.55 Certain books of this type are addressed to rather a specialized audience, such as the Vol-eingerichtete Buchdruckerey (Nuremberg, 1733), a multilingual manual intended for printers and publishers, which includes a chapter on Yiddish; or the book by Wolf Ehrenfried von Reitzenstein, Der vollkommene Pferde-kenner (Uffenheim, 1764, 1780), a manual for horse traders, which contains interesting observations on the various types of Yiddish spoken by Jewish horse traders.56 Among the manuals for the use of merchants, the book by Carl Wilhelm Friedrich, Unterricht in der Judensprache und Schrift, zum Gebrauch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (Prenzlau, 1784), is the richest in linguistic material; it includes a phonological description of the Yiddish of East Prussia and offers the first classification of Yiddish dialects.57 Jüdischen buchstaben geshriben werden. Auch die Zol, Jar, Monad und anders zu gehörig. See Majer Balaban, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Druckereien in Polen’, Soncino Blätter 3 (1929), 9; Chone Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit shel defusei polin be-yidish ad gezirot tah ve-tat’, ˙ Kiryat sefer 52 (1977), no. 7; Nokhem Shtif, ‘Paul Heliczes elemental oder lesbikhlen’, Filologishe shriftn 3 (1929), 515–24; Abraham Meir Habermann, Perakim be-toldot ha-madpisim ha-ivrim veinyene sefarim (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1978), 142; and idem, ‘Ha-madpisim bnei Hayim Helits’, ˙ Kiryat sefer 33 (1957–8), 509–20; Moshe N. Rosenfeld, ‘The Origins of Yiddish Printing’, in Origins of the Yiddish Language, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 111, 122. A facsimile edition was published in 1929 by the Verein jüdisches Museum in Breslau (ed. Max Silberberg), from the copy found in the municipal library of that city. 54

See Borochov, ‘Di biblioteyk’, no. 19; and Avé-Lallement, Das deutsche Gaunerthum, iii. 242. See Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in bibliotheca bodleiana (Berlin: Friedlaender, 1852–60), no. 6862. 1; hereafter citation as St. CB and catalogue item number. 56 See Habersaat, ‘Zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’, 427; and ‘Materialien zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’. During the 1950s in the Swiss villages of Endingen and Lengnau, Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg found quite similar varieties of Yiddish spoken by horse traders; see ‘The Horse Dealer’s Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau’, in Field of Yiddish, i, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954), 48–62; and eadem, Jiddisch auf alemannischem Sprachgebiet: 56 Karten zur Sprach- und Sachgeographie (Zurich: Juris, 1973), 10–11. 57 Borochov, ‘Di biblioteyk’, no. 42; Habersaat, ‘Zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’, 429. 55

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Not to be overlooked among the material from the eighteenth century are the many antisemitic tractates devoted to the Yiddish language. Beyond the desire to ridicule the language of the Jews, and by that means also their religion and way of life, such books also seek, by means of attention to the vernacular, to penetrate the imagined ‘secrets of the Jews’ and to stigmatize their allegedly diabolical conceptions of Christ and the Christian religion. Some authors conceal themselves behind pseudonyms, such as J. W., in his Jüdischer Sprachmeister (1714), a manual which takes the form of a dialogue between Joune (Jonah) and his master Itzick (Isaac). Despite their antiJewish bases, Christoph Gustav Christian’s Jüdischer Dolmetscher (1735), Philog Lottus’ (J. P. Lütke), Kurtze und gründliche Anweisung zur TeutschJüdischen Sprache (Freiburg, 1733), and Bibliophilus’ Jüdischer Sprachmeister oder Hebräisch-Teutsches Wörterbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 1742), contain important observations on the phonological system of West Yiddish and a rich sample of eighteenth-century spoken Yiddish.58 Another important development was in the criminological research on Yiddish, which was considered a derivation of Rotwelsch, the language of the urban underworld in Germany.59 In 1510 the Liber vagatorum was published, a book which speaks of deceitful beggars and vagabonds and includes a vocabulary list of Yiddish terms. Martin Luther’s contention (Von der falschen Betler bueberey, 1528), that the language of the slums derives from Jews, is based in particular on this book. Although few of them are of any interest, and most are tainted by antisemitism, there are quite a few books written by police officers among the texts concerning the language of the underworld (Gaunersprache).60 Worthy of mention among them is, however, the general survey by Friedrich Christian Benedict Avé-Lallement, a police official in Lübeck, which includes important material for the history of Yiddish, its literature, and its philological tradition.61 This author was one of the first to 58 See Borokhov, ‘Di biblioteyk’, 7–12; Dovid Katz, ‘On Yiddish, in Yiddish and For Yiddish: 500 Years of Yiddish Scholarship’, in Mark H. Gelber, ed., Identity and Ethos, Festschrift Sol Lipztin on the Occasion of his 85th Birthday (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 27, and the bibliographies in the works cited by Borokhov and Habersaat; Alexandre Derczansky, ‘Les rapports du yidich occidental et de la littérature yidich ancienne’, in Astrid Starck, ed., Westjiddisch: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit/Le Yiddish occidental: Actes du Colloque de Mulhouse (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1994), 78–83. 59 The term Rotwelsch, derived from roth (‘beggar’) and welsch (‘incomprehensible language’), designates the language of thieves. The word Kauderwelsch (‘jargon/lingo/gobbledygook’) also exists in German. This expression was sometimes used in the nineteenth century to designate Yiddish. Among the many studies of Rotwelsch, see especially Joseph Maria Wagner, ‘Rotwelsche Studien’, Archiv für die Studien der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 18 (1863), 197–246. 60 Such as the book by J. K. von Train, Chochemer-loschon: Buch der Gauner und Diebs vulgo Jenischen Sprache (Regensburg, 1832; rpt. Leipzig, 1998). 61 Das deutsche Gaunertum in seiner social-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung zu seinem heutigen Bestande, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1858–62). On the subject of criminological publications, see Borokhov, ‘Di biblioteyk’, 12–13 and Habersaat, ‘Materialien zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’, and ‘Zur Geschichte der jiddischen Grammatik’.

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suggest the theory that the origins of Yiddish are to be found in the ninth and tenth centuries among Jews who had been expelled from France and had thereafter settled in the Rhine Valley and Lorraine.62 This body of texts thus in fact gathers together some actual linguistic observations, although they are generally still rather brief and linked to essentially pedagogical, theological, or antisemitic purposes. For the most part, the treatises from the nineteenth century aim less at a comprehensive understanding of the development from the German once spoken by Jews (Judendeutsch) toward the contemporary language of Ashkenazic Jews, or at showing the relations between the Germanic dialects and Yiddish, than at defining the differences between German and a presumed Jewish corruption of German. There one notices in particular the beginnings of a number of prejudices against the Jews and their language, which go far toward explaining the long-term marginalization of Yiddish and the discredit from which the language has suffered. While these early codifications do begin to analyse the status of Yiddish, a negative attitude toward Jewish speech and a number of antisemitic stereotypes nonetheless make themselves felt which will mark European culture with their imprint even into the twentieth-first century. It is not until the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century that the first strictly linguistic studies and general grammars appear in which Yiddish is considered no longer simply in relation to German or as a marginal and slightly ‘exotic’ curiosity, but as a language in its own right.63 Nonetheless, analysis of these texts that concern themselves with Yiddish and were published from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century makes it possible to demonstrate a double process which marks the entire conception of vernacular language up to the twentieth century. On the one hand, one witnesses the ‘invention’ of a language, which is given its first official recognition primarily by Christian scholars. From a simple, common language known for its use as a means of spoken communication, the vernacular of the Ashkenazic Jews became a medium of written traditions and an object of instruction and linguistic codification. On the other hand, however, these beginning stages of the theorization of the language are accompanied by the first distortions and derogatory definitions, which participate in the same desire to circumscribe, misrepresent, and restrict the living reality of the actual usage of Yiddish. This pejorative representation seems quite in keeping with the system of exclusion that characterizes a number of aspects 62 This is also the idea later suggested by Max Weinreich as one worthy of more study. Due to Weinreich’s treatment of the topic, however, it has since become canonical in Yiddish studies, despite significant evidence against the theory. More recent work points to the likelihood of Yiddish’s origins in the Danube valley. See Max Weinreich, Geshikhte, ch. 6: ‘Di historishgeografishe determinant: loter, dos vigele fun yidish’, vol. i, pp. 334–53; and the collection of essays in Dovid Katz, ed. Origins of the Yiddish Language. 63 In particular the grammar by Solomon Birnbaum, Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (Vienna/Leipzig: Hartleben, 1918; rpt. of 4th edn. Hamburg: Buske, 1984).

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of Western thought during the period, in this case simply in marginalizing or excluding Jewish existence. The first texts focused on the Yiddish language appear at about the same time in both the Jewish and the Christian communities. This interest should be viewed in connection with the national ‘discovery’ of the European vernaculars, which, beginning in the sixteenth century, accompanied the publication of the first grammars. This attention to Yiddish responds, however, to defined needs, while at the same time participating in a specifically Jewish cultural context. This tradition was tied to the programme of learning to write and of comprehensively reading the Bible in primary school (kheyder). Glosses in Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages form the first written traces of a Yiddish linguistic tradition.64 The glosses consist of words written in the Hebrew alphabet and inserted into the original text, particularly into biblical commentaries. Such glosses may be written in the margins of the Hebrew text or even arranged as separate glossaries of vernacular terms. When the author of the commentary finds it difficult to render clearly his idea or to translate a difficult expression, he turns to the vernacular and translates the term from the original text. These glosses are identified as laazim (singular laaz), a term which designates any foreign language into which a holy text can be translated.65 We might thus note a commentary on the Prophets, copied from a thirteenth-century text, which includes Yiddish words introduced by the abbreviation bash (be-ashkenaz) or by ve-korin or she-korin (‘[and] which one reads’). Likewise, one finds complete phrases, such as, for example, the commentary on Isa. 14: 23, translated by $YWRQ UYM YZ URYQRP 'NWA (RSV ‘and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction’).66 We might cite 64

Erika Timm, ‘Jiddische Sprachmaterialien aus dem Jahre 1290: Die Glossen des Berner kleine Aruch. Edition und Kommentar’, Fragen des älteren Jiddisch, Trierer Beiträge, Sonderheft 2, ed. Hermann-Josef Müller and Walter Röll (Trier: Universität Trier, 1977), 16–34; and eadem, ‘Zur Frage der Echtheit von Rashis jiddischen Glossen’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 107 (1985), 45–81; Gernot Heide, ‘Über die Lexik älterer jiddischer Glossare’, in Jürgen Jaehrling, Uwe Meves, and Erika Timm, eds., Röllwagenbüchlein. Festschrift für Walter Röll zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 345–68. 65 Menahem Banitt, ‘Laaz’, EJ x, coll. 1314–15. Laaz is the abbreviation for loshoun am zor ˙ ‘language of a foreign people’. See Mishna, Meg 2. 1 (BT Meg 17a): ‘If one reads the megilo backwards, one has not fulfilled one’s obligation; if one reads it by heart, in a translation into Aramaic or any other language, one has not fulfilled one’s obligation. But one may read it in a language other than Hebrew [be-laaz] that is understood by those listening; and the person who does not understand Hebrew and who listens (to the reading of the megilo) in Hebrew has fulfilled his obligation.’ See also Ber 18a; BT Sota 49a; JT Sota 7. 1 and Ps. 114: 1: ‘When Israel went forth from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language (me-am louez) . . .’ On the question of the glosses in Judaeo-French, see Jean Baumgarten, ‘La Question du “judéofrançais” vue par les philologues allemands et français (XIXe–XXe) siècle’, in Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Philologiques I: Contribution à l’histoire des disciplines littéraires en France et en Allemagne (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1990), 393–412. 66 Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften der Königlichen Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München (Munich: Palmische Hofbuchhandlung, 1875; 2nd edn. 1895), no. 66 (4). See

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further examples of biblical glossaries,67 glossaries of the Psalms,68 or the prophetic books.69 Two texts relevant in this context appeared in several editions: the Kleyne orukh of Asher ben Jacob Halevi (fourteenth century), an abridged dictionary of terms from the Talmud, which also included Old Yiddish glosses (bi-leshonenu or bi-leshon ashkenaz),70 and the Makrey dardekey, a glossary of the Tanakh (the traditional designation of the Bible) and Rashi’s commentary in Hebrew, Italian, and Arabic, and including translations of Hebrew words into Yiddish.71 The Yiddish glosses are found interlinear (above the line), between the columns of the folio manuscript, or in the margins. It is worth noting that in addition to word definitions, there are also explanations of entire phrases, interpretive glosses, and aggadic commentary, which constitute the earliest traces of biblical commentary in Yiddish, a kind of text that became quite important, especially in homiletic literature. From the sixteenth century onwards, this tradition continued with lexica and concordances. Noteworthy among Yiddish lexicographical treatises are Seyfer beeyr moushe (Prague, 1604–5) and Seyfer lekakh tov (Prague, 1604) by Moses ben Issachar Sertels,72 and Mirkeves ha-mishne (Cracow, 1534, 1552, 1584) of Rabbi Anshel, a concordance to the Tanakh. There were also bilingual thematic lexica, such as Khinukh koton by Israel ben Abraham (Cracow, 1640), and also some multilingual lexica, such as Shmous devorim (Isny, 1542) by Elia Levita, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, and German; Diber tov (Cracow, 1590) by Mordekhai Samuel Jacob ben Jekuthiel, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian73; and Sofo beruro (Prague, 1660) by Nathan Nata also Josef Perles, ‘Jüdisch-deutsche Glossen eines Schülers des R. Moses Haddarshan aus dem XIII. Jahrhundert’, Beiträge, 145–55. 67

Moritz Steinschneider, Catalog der hebräischen Handschriften in der Stadtbibliothek zu Hamburg (Hamburg: Meissner, 1878; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), MS 92, cat. no. 53. 68 Moritz Steinschneider, Verzeichnis der hebräischen Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1878–97; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1980), no. 50. 2 (glossary of the Psalms from the fourteenth–fifteenth century). 69 The Makhberes dating from 1437 by David ben Jacob; see David Samuel Loewinger and Bernard Dov Weinryb, Jiddische Handschriften in Breslau (Budapest, 1936), 5–8. 70 Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften . . . München, no. 204; St. CB, no. 2042; idem, ‘Jüdische Literatur und Jüdisch-Deutsch’, Serapeum 25 (1864), no. 156; Perles, Beiträge, 9–112. It was translated into Latin in 1490 by the Christian Hebraists Conrad Pellikan and Johannes Reuchlin. Two distinct printed editions are extant (Cracow, 1591/1619 and Prague, 1707). 71 Joseph Perles, ‘Der Makre dardeke und die Handschrift desselben’, Beiträge, 113–28; Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften . . . München, no. 63. 2; St., Serapeum 25, no. 156; St. CB, no. 3953. 72 The former is a dictionary of terms from the Pentateuch, and the latter of the Prophets and Hagiographical books. 73 The preface to this work explains that ‘everyone is obligated to study the Torah with his child and to speak the holy tongue quite young. As soon as the child begins to speak, one should teach him both languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. He can also learn Italian, in addition.’ See St. CB, no. 3448.

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Hanover, a thematic dictionary and conversation guide in Hebrew–Yiddish– Italian74; the Amsterdam edition of 1701, prepared by Jacob ben Zev, also included French.75 To these we should add the dictionaries of specialized vocabulary, such as Seyfer khanoukh la-naar (Amsterdam, 1713, 1718, 1743, 1769, 1780, 1794) by Joseph ben Jacob Maarsen, a language primer and manual of correspondence, and Mare ha-ksav (Berlin, c.1717) by Chaim ben Menahem Manush, which includes a vocabulary of the Semitic component ˙ of Yiddish. This lexicographical tradition continues in the Khumesh-taytsh, a literal translation of the Bible, in which a Yiddish word or phrase literally translates each corresponding word or phrase in the Hebrew original. There is an obvious relationship between the biblical lexica and concordances, and the vernacular word-for-word translations of the Tanakh, which were primarily intended to teach the ‘ignorant’ to read the holy text.76 The first systematic description of the Yiddish language, two pages on the rules of reading and writing, is found at the end of a book of ethics (seyfer musor) entitled Seyfer midous (Isny, 1542, and Prague, 1580).77 The anonymous author dedicates this afterword to pious women, the primary audience of this type of edifying book, and in particular to an identified individual woman: GYUP½AHNAÑ AYYNCRA RED U$NWQ IAYYRW RED IYRUQWD ADARWM AÏRW GRWP$NÏG WC (‘Dame Morada, a female doctor in the liberal art of medicine, resident in Günzburg’).78 He explains that this brief text has been published ‘for women, girls or whoever would like to read in the Seyfer midous but would have trouble with it or would not quite manage it. . . . For this reason, I will also briefly indicate the problems that a male or female reader may encounter so that they can deal with them’ (fol. 99v). The main correspondences between the consonantal and vocalic systems of Hebrew and Yiddish are then listed.79 Thus one reads, for example, that jod corresponds to i (hirek), as in the word nit, or to a close e (sere), as in er (ehre); aleph ˙ ˙ corresponds to open o (kames) or open a (pathah ). Thus in the word ˙ ˙ 74

St. CB, no. 6637. 23–4. In Kehilas Shloumou (Amsterdam, 1772, first published in Frankfurt am Main, 1722), a text intended to assist children in learning the holy tongue, the author, Solomon (of) London ben Moses Raphael of Novogrodek, in a brief vocabulary at the end of the volume, reprints terms from the lexicon by Natan Nata Hanover. See St. CB, no. 3301, and Perles, Beiträge, 138–40. 76 On these lexicographical treatises in Yiddish, see ch. 5, below, on the Bible in Yiddish. 77 See M. Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der abendländischen Juden während des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, iii: Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden in Deutschland während des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Hölder, 1888; rpt. Amsterdam: Philo, 1966), 280–97. 78 This is the only indication that there might have been female physicians during this period in the Ashkenazic communities of Germany; thus Morada may well have been an assistant to a physician, a midwife, or a practising nurse who dispensed remedies (refuous u-segulous). 79 This afterword, based on the correspondences between the vocalic system of Hebrew and Yiddish, seems to indicate that women, or at least some of the female readership, knew Hebrew as well as the vernacular. 75

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vonhaftig, the first aleph is an o (kames) and the second is an a (pathah). Silent ˙ as a ‘scribal ornament’ (RED ˙UK½AM $E aleph in word final position is defined AGNWRYC IYYA UP ½ YR$YG ‘it provides an ornament for the script’), equivalent to ornatus in Latin terminology, as employed by Paulus Fagius.80 The waw corresponds either to long u (melopum or shurek), or to a close o (holem), as in ˙ the words tut or broykhn; the ayin to an open e (segol). It is specified that vowels are indicated in some Yiddish words only when there would otherwise be semantic ambiguity. Concerning diphthongs and digraphs, the author provides several basic rules concerning waw and jod, whose vocalic value must be indicated in order to avoid any confusion. This digraph may correspond to a long u (shurek), as in künen, or to au, represented by very short vowels, either by a ‘half kames’ and a ‘half sere’, or by a ‘half pathah’ and ˙ written in contemporary ˙ ‘half melopum,’ as in the words German as˙ fraw, gnaw, baw (= frau, genau, bau), whose final diphthong is represented in Yiddish by the waw + jod + aleph).81 It is also pointed out that waw and jod can be read ö as in mögen, bösen. These brief observations are reprinted at the end of the edition of Yousifoun (Zurich, 1546) in a paragraph entitled ‘And now we shall speak briefly about the way to read and write Yiddish (taytsh).’ Both the Jewish and non-Jewish philological traditions produced positive results in the work of Elia Levita (Elye Bokher), the Italo-Jewish humanist, born and educated in Germany, who was simultaneously a massorete, grammarian, lexicographer, poet, and satirist. Far from having a conventional attitude toward the subject of the vernacular, as did a good number of other grammarians of the period, Elia Levita was the first to formulate a new conception of the history of the language’s structure, while bringing about a revolution in Yiddish literary form by means of his own poetic texts. Although he is particularly known for his radical ideas concerning the Massorah (the vocalic and consonantal structure of biblical texts), and for his treatises concerning the Hebrew and Aramaic languages,82 his studies of Yiddish have retained their fundamental importance. Noteworthy are: Shmous devorim (Isny, 1542), the first printed lexicon of Yiddish; Tishbi (Isny, 1541); and Meturgemon (Isny, 1541), which includes important observations on Yiddish etymology, phonology, morphology, semantics, and dialectology. He was in fact the first real linguist of the Yiddish language. His originality within Jewish culture of the Italian Renaissance is clear: he was one of the rare Jewish writers of the time to write in both Hebrew and Yiddish, including both scholarly work and poetic texts, such as the Bovo bukh (composed 1507, published Isny, 1541). The whole of his itinerant life was marked as well by a great intellectual mobility, for he wrote as much for a popular audience 80

See p. 13. The author distinguishes here between ‘semi-vowels’ or compound vowels (halb) and full vowels. 82 Gérard E. Weil, Élie Lévita: humaniste et massorète (1469–1549) (Leiden: Brill, 1963). 81

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as for the Christian humanistic elite, and he associated with multiple contrasting milieux. Beyond this apparent instability, however, a profound unity emerges from his work, at root deriving from the determinative disruptions in the culture of the period. In Levita we have one of the premier figures in the Jewish world of the Renaissance, and one deserving a thorough study.83 Contrary to the conventional view, the Yiddish language excited the interest of linguists, beginning in the sixteenth century, and brought about an uninterrupted tradition of scholarly work from that time up to the present. For much of that period, however, the language aroused the contempt and mockery of a part of the scholarly world, which saw in it nothing but a ‘hybrid jargon, a pure product of the Jewish ghetto’. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century––a period when, as a result of the emergence of national movements, Yiddish was rehabilitated and raised to the rank of a language in its own right––that the image of Yiddish began to change. It was not until after the founding of the state of Israel and the increase in the numbers of centres of Yiddish scholarship in European and anglophone universities that a marked change in perceptions of Yiddish came about. Numerous important works of scholarship have since been published which have drawn Yiddish out of the ghetto in which many had so often preferred to see it confined. Beyond the contributions specific to the field of Jewish interlinguistics, this body of research has made significant contributions to scholarship in the field of general linguistics.84 83

See ch. 7, below. On the history and the constitution of this field of research in the post-war years, see Avrom Novershtern, ‘Yiddish Research after the Holocaust: From the Folk to the Academic’, EJ Yearbook 1988–1989 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1989), 14–24. 84

 The Emergence of Yiddish Literature and the Crisis in Jewish Society

Old Yiddish literature developed between the thirteenth century, the date of the first known text in Yiddish,1 and the eighteenth century, when, under the influence of the Enlightenment, the literature of European Jews underwent a profound change. During these five centuries leading up to the time of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), which ushered in a new era in Jewish history, traditional Jewish society experienced continuous upheaval and a gradual evolution.2 One should not minimize the influence which both the internal development of the Jewish community and the inner tensions of Jewish society exercised on the appearance and establishment of vernacular Jewish literature. Without going to the extreme of considering that literature no more than an unmediated ‘reflection’ of the crisis that shook Jewish society at the beginning of the modern period,3 it is nonetheless clear that the general European atmosphere beginning in the sixteenth century weighed heavily on the emergence of Yiddish literature. Let us recall several significant facts that recurringly left their mark on Yiddish texts of the time. To be considered first is a social context marked by a series of expulsions, by discriminatory legislation, and even by massacres that both profoundly altered the cartography of European Judaism and shook the very foundations of traditional Jewish society. Secondly, this period, which coincides with the Renaissance in Europe, is characterized by a reorganization of the intellectual landscape, a spiritual revival, and a desire on the part of the authorities to strengthen the foundations of community life, in order better to control the endemic crises which were menacing Jewish existence. Nonetheless, it is inappropriate to reduce this era to no more than its most distressing and tragic aspects. First, because such extreme and coincident situations are 1

A rhymed blessing in the Worms makhzour (1272). See the two classic studies by Jacob Katz, Masoret u-Mashber (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1958); English trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961; rpt. New York: New York University Press, 1993); and Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973; rpt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 3 This is one of the theses of Max Erik, Di geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur: fun di eltste tsaytn biz der haskole-tkufe, fertsnter-akhtsnter yorhundert, mit bilder un melodyes (Warsaw: Kultur lige, 1928; rpt. New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1979). 2

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characterized by obvious paradoxes: on the one hand, the violence against the Jews, whose roots were already old in Europe, continued and intensified, exacerbated by social antagonisms, resentment based on economic factors, and religious squabbles. The various social groups and strata which comprised feudal society at the time––the clergy, the aristocratic authorities, the guilds formed by the urban middle classes, and the general populace––participated, to diverse degrees and with local variation, in this wave of hatred for the Jews. It served to stigmatize the Jewish presence within Christian Europe and to reduce its participation in economic, religious, and social life. Sudden anti-Jewish eruptions could take numerous forms, such as theological polemic,4 pogrom, extortion, expulsion, or discriminatory measures that decimated and weakened the Jewish population. Moreover, in numerous European cities the Jews had experienced the good will of some of their feudal lords, enjoyed privileges that assured their protection and their right of residence, and had been allowed to settle in new territories such as Poland, or to strengthen the structures of already existing communities. It is clear that the protection of certain Catholic and Protestant princes limited the suffering of the Jews, prevented the collapse of some European Jewish communities, and made it possible for Jewish life to overcome such dangers, even beyond the Jewish community’s own internal vitality.5 This tolerance had at root a theological basis: it was a matter of preserving the existence of the Jews (without, however, promoting their expansion), who, so it was held by Christian theologians, as a people functioned as witnesses to the veracity of Christianity. From the end of the sixteenth through the initial decades of the seventeenth century the Jews were readmitted to numerous countries, such as Germany, Bohemia and Moravia, Italy and Holland, and to some European cities as well, such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, where Jewish communities reappeared and their specific modes of life gained strength. Thus demographic and geographical expansion was accompanied by an improvement in the economic conditions in the cities, where a Jewish middle class had formed, consisting primarily of shopkeepers, travelling merchants and artisans.6 They took an active part in the national economies, but also participated in trade among the various European countries. This population, which well represented the socio-economic structures of Jewish society, was at one and the same time absorbed by everyday tasks, little inclined to study, and existing on the margins of learned culture. It would become the primary audience for popular books in Yiddish. They are the ones whom the texts designate proste yidn (ordinary Jews) or gemayne layt (common people), 4

Gilbert Dahan, ‘L’Affrontement’, in Les Intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 339–508. 5 Johnathan Irvine Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1550–1750) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985; 3rd edn. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 15. 6 On Jewish population statistics in Europe, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto, 9–10.

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referring to the middle strata of the communities. While study was not a central activity in their lives, and although they were strangers to the world of scholarship, they were no less desirous of reading material in the vernacular, and they constituted a substantial pool of potential readers. It was this urban audience that booksellers, printers, and pedlars targeted more than any other. On the other hand, the period is marked by a clear interest on the part of Christians in the thought and literature of the Jews, as demonstrated by the infatuation with Hebrew, the translations of numerous religious texts into European languages, and the passion of Christian Hebraicists for cabbala. There were a great many factors that, in addition to other important consequences relevant to our topic, stimulated the printing and distribution of Jewish books throughout Europe. While one may not, of course, directly link the emergence of Yiddish literature with these external factors, it was nonetheless by means of such changes that Yiddish was able progressively to penetrate and permeate the cultural space of Jewish society. Literature in the vernacular became a sounding board of multiple developments which characterized this period; it reflected the conflicts, tensions, and the major upheavals, at the same time that it helped to provide solutions––limited but original––to specific problems presented to Jewish society. The upheavals were, first of all, demographic. At this period, Europe had the largest Jewish population in the world. This diverse population comprised both strong communities of long standing, such as those of Germany or Italy, and smaller populations, consisting of small clusters of families living in isolated areas, the Jewish quarter, or the Jewish street of certain cities. The period between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, during which Yiddish literature took on definite form, is marked by an instability among the Jewish populace and a sudden rise in anti-Jewish acts that often had horrendous results. Wars and massacres altered the demographic balance, in some cases even emptying entire regions of their Jewish populations. Thus the Black Plague in Germany (1347–50) brought about a deterioration in the juridical status of Jews, a deep economic recession, and a reduction by half of the Jewish population of Europe. The Jews were both decimated by the epidemic and accused of poisoning wells and wishing to destroy Christianity. Massacres and expulsions took place in hundreds of communities in Germany.7 Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, the survivors rebuilt both an economic life and numerous important communities throughout Germany (among others: Augsburg, Ulm, Erfurt, Worms, Trier, Speyer, and Nuremberg), which indicates the spiritual and social vitality of Jewish society in the period. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, there appeared once again multiple waves of expulsions, bringing about the banishment of Jews from Germany and Moravia. Two conflicts were particularly destructive: the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which grew out of the antagonism between the 7

Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: Collins, 1969; 2nd edn. London: Penguin, 1998).

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Protestant German princes and the imperial Catholic authorities; and the Polish–Cossack War (1648–50), during which a mass extermination of the Jewish population took place.8 A map of the Jewish expulsions that took place in Europe between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries in fact covers a vast geographical zone that includes a large part of both eastern and western Europe. Thus one of the dominant characteristics of this troubled period was the sense of anxiety that affected every stratum of the Jewish populace. The wars, the recurring expulsions, and the legal bullying could not but exacerbate Jewish fears, but also stimulated their messianic expectations. These problems generated further social dysfunctions, such as the reduction in the extent of education and the threat of disintegration in internal community structures. These incessant perils that threatened the very survival of the Jews put them in dire need of protection, excited a desire to return to a religious practice both more devout and closer to the inner yearnings of the people, and ultimately also encouraged speculation concerning the coming of the Messiah. One detects in many Old Yiddish texts both echoes of this generalized fear that weighed heavily on daily life and the desire for a more intense religious life. The preface to the Yiddish translation of the Bible published in Constance in 1544 thus gives a clear picture of the physical and spiritual confusion that had taken control of the Jewish masses: ‘Day-by-day we observe how the heart withers in knowledge and understanding. . . . Furthermore, we see that numerous communities also continuously diminish and are destroyed by repeated expulsions, so that where previously ten communities existed, today––on account of our great sins––there remains barely a single one. And as a result of such expulsions, householders are forced to take up residence in hamlets. None of them has the means to engage a teacher to instruct his children.’9 The evocation of war and poverty and the increase in the number of beggars and tramps became a leitmotif of numerous texts.10 The ebb and flow of the population which characterized this period had direct effects on the conditions surrounding the emergence of Old Yiddish literature. Many banished Jews had indeed taken up residence in villages and hamlets located on the periphery of cities that they had been forced to leave under pressure of physical threat and expulsion. This ruralization affected 8 Nathan Nata (Nosn Note) ben Moses Hanover, Yeveyn metsulo; English trans. Abraham J. Mesch, Abyss of Despair (Yeven Metzulah): The Famous Seventeenth-Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish Life in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648–1649 (New York: Bloch, 1950). 9 See St., CB, 1187; Willy Staerk and Albert Leitzmann, eds., Die jüdisch-deutschen Bibelübersetzungen, von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Kaufmann, 1923; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 114–19. 10 Cf., for example, the introduction to Elhanan Hendel ben Benjamin Wolf Kirchhahn’s ˙ Seyfer simkhas ha-nefesh (Frankfurt am Main, 1707); see St., CB, 4929. 3. Later editions of the text were Sulzbach (1717), Amsterdam (1723), Prague (1720–30), Wilmersdorf (1718–26 ?).

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central and eastern Europe especially, while it remained more fragmentary and marginal in western Europe. At the same time, however, the centre of gravity of European Judaism had shifted to the east, that is, to Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and especially to Poland and Lithuania.11 In these two regions the Jewish population increased substantially. In 1300, approximately 30,000 Jews lived in Poland among a total population of 5 million. In 1575, they numbered between 100,000 and 150,000. The Polish nobility and landowners overtly favoured Jewish immigration. In order to stimulate economic activity and to colonize the land, they granted privileges and welcomed the Jews into the sparsely populated areas. There they founded new Jewish communities in both rural and village settings. A specific type of economic activity developed, in which the Jews played the intermediary role between the nobility and the peasants. The Jewish immigrants who came from western Europe, particularly from Germany, were trained and experienced in the crafts, commerce, moneylending and arenda.12 The nobles assigned them the management of the mills, taverns, distilleries, the care of the dairy and grain trade, the collection of the lord’s taxes from the peasants, and the stewardship of the lord’s estates.13 The establishment of Jewish families in the network of villages and hamlets belonging to Polish magnates is the origin of the development of the culture of the shtetlekh, the Jewish towns which endured up to the eve of the Second World War. It is this populace of yeshuvnikes or dorfyidn––the rural Jews who lived dispersed through the countryside, far from any synagogue or study house, rarely visited by the maggidim, the intinerant preachers, and rarely supervised by rabbis––who formed a significant portion of the readership of popular books in Yiddish. Jews also settled in cities such as Lublin, Cracow, and Lvov, which became important economic and religious centres. A middle class of Jewish merchants, tradesmen, and artisans developed there, from which a good part of the readers of Yiddish books came.14 11 See Salo Wittmayer Baron, Religious and Social History of the Jews, xvi: Late Middle Ages and Era of Expansion (1200–1650). Poland, Lithuania (1500–1600), 2nd edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 207–414; Johnathan Irvine Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1550–1750) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985; 3rd edn. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). 12 The term designates the leases granted by the Polish aristocracy to Jews: mills, distilleries, taverns, ponds, breweries, estates, etc.; see Abraham Wein, ‘Arenda’, EJ, iii, coll. 402–5. 13 See Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1916–20; rpt. New York: Ktav, 1975), index; Bernard Dov Weinryb, Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Rußland und Polen, i: Das Wirtschaftsleben der Juden in Rußland und Polen von der 1. polnischen Teilung bis zum Tode Alexanders II. (1772–1881) (Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1934; rpt. New York/Hildesheim: Olms, 1972), index; Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ‘The Middle Ages’, 640–5 in Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976). 14 On the relations between the urban and village communities, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 112–21.

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This migratory movement from the West promoted a demographic surge of Jews in eastern Europe and the consolidation of a specific Jewish culture in which Yiddish played an important role. It was of course a matter of colonizing sparsely inhabited territory, but likewise of settling Jews far from the great urban centres where the institutions of study, prayer, and teaching were concentrated. Thus the effect was to banish Jews to the periphery of urban life, into outlying areas where the conditions of the cultural transmission of Judaism became more problematic. While this colonization had a positive effect on the Jewish population of eastern Europe, it was not necessarily without dangers and threats for them. Did this settlement on one of the margins of Europe not risk promoting ignorance and making more difficult the education, religious observance, learning of Hebrew, and transmission of the principles of the religious tradition to the people? The sixteenth century in Europe is likewise marked by a process of intellectual questioning of the foundations of Christianity. It was not just church dogma that had eroded, but also the people’s confidence in the Church’s authority, which arose just at that moment when new fields of knowledge emerged and new heterodox groups began to assert themselves. It was a time of doubt, scepticism, the fragmentation of certitudes, and the ‘explosion of the Christian nebula’.15 Jewish society did not escape this profound crisis, which was marked particularly by a productive examination of issues having to do with transmitted truth and by a desire for renewal. The works of Elia (Bahur/Bokher) Levita, Azariah de’ Rossi, Joseph Solomon ˙ Delmedigo, and Leone (Judah Arye) of Modena (Leo Mutinensis) clearly express this ‘breaking of the vessels’,16 that is: the tremors internal to the Ashkenazic world and the appearance of a ‘secular’ component in Jewish culture. To a significant degree, Yiddish literature echoes this crisis which swept the Jewish masses of Europe during the Renaissance, and which was expressed in the renewal of speculation on issues of exile, and the coming of the Messiah, and in a popularization of themes from the cabbala.17 It was not just that Yiddish texts echoed the tensions that rent Jewish society, but their authors also in fact became agents of change by developing creative solutions to alleviate many of those social problems. Yiddish literature is 15

‘L’éclatement de la nébuleuse chrétienne’; the expression is from Jean Delumeau, La Civilisation de la Renaissance (Paris: Arthaud, 1967; rpt. 1984), 17–41. 16 See Mordechai Breuer, ‘Modernism and Traditionalism in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Historiography: A Study of David Gans’ Tzemach David ’, 49–88 in Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed., Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 17 In this respect Shabbatai Zevi was a central figure around which crystallized many kinds of ˙ fears and hopes of European Judaism of the period. See Gershom Scholem, Shabtai zvi veha˙ tnu‘ah ha-shabta’it biymei hayav (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1957); cited from the English transl. by ˙ R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676 (Princeton: Bollingen, ˙ 1973).

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often represented passively, as it were, a dull vernacularization of learned culture designed to satisfy the deficiencies of the ‘ignorant’. Far from being mere cultural porters or intermediaries, however, these authors participated in a regeneration of Jewish society by making concrete proposals for the reformation of customs and of the social and educational systems. Permeating numerous Yiddish texts of the time are recurring allusions to social conflicts, evocations of poverty, critiques of community authorities and cultural disparities, in addition to the dominance of messianic themes, all of which bear witness to this underlying scepticism––sometimes radically expressed––and which participate in this gradual rejuvenation of the society. If Yiddish literature experienced an undeniable expansion in European Jewish communities, it was also because those who had been traditionally charged with intellectual thought and its teaching and transmission were fulfilling their pedagogical duties at best imperfectly. One of the most salient phenomena of this period is, after all, the growing gulf between the religious culture of the elite and that of the lower classes of Jews. An obvious professionalization of knowledge may be observed as the privilege and property of a minority fringe of scholars who had access to the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the sacred tradition, were the masters of meaning and the bearers of truth, and on whom this knowledge conferred an elevated social status. This division, which tended to oppose two component parts of Jewish society, is at the heart of numerous Jewish texts of the period. Thus in his autobiography, Salomon Maimon describes clearly the social prestige conferred on scholars, the lamdonim or khakhomim: The study of Talmud is the primary goal of education among our people. Wealth, physical advantages, and talents of all kinds are of course of a certain value in their eyes and are held in some regard, but nothing can compare with a good Talmudist. He has the first claim on all offices and positions of honour in the community. When he enters an assembly of people, the entire crowd rises immediately out of respect for him and offers him the best seat, no matter his age and social class. He is the confidant, lawgiver, and judge of the common man. Anyone who does not demonstrate sufficient respect for him is, according to the opinion of Talmudists themselves, condemned to eternal damnation. The common man may not undertake to do anything that does not conform to the law, as defined by the Talmudist.18

While this rupture most certainly existed, it need not be exaggerated. It did, nonetheless, produce two concomitant phenomena: on the one hand, a growing number of Jews were left on the margins of cultural life, while on the other, ignorance itself tended to spread. Yiddish texts stigmatize in great 18 This text, certainly belated when it appeared in 1793 and imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, clearly reflects the opposition between the ‘scholar’ and the ‘common man’ that one finds in numerous Yiddish texts of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. See Salomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, ed. Jakob Fromer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911), 107; English: Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, transl. J. Clark Murray (London, 1888); abridged edn. by Moses Hadas (New York, 1947) (transl. here by JCF).

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detail the uneducated Jew, the amorets, as designated in modern Yiddish,19 that is, the Jew who commanded only a basic level of literacy and did not know the Bible or the sacred literature, due to an insufficient knowledge of Hebrew, did not understand halakhic principles of ritual or of domestic ceremony, and recited the prayers mechanically.20 Such a person was considered crude and uncouth, even bestial.21 The authors of Old Yiddish literature never ceased to warn against these two evils, which functioned as a source of disruption in the system of textual transmission. One of their claimed goals was thus to reduce the cultural disparities that had developed between the litterati and illitterati and to try to repair this split in Jewish society. There was a further consequence of poor education: the proliferation of heterodox practices, which was further exacerbated by the dangers arising from the growing distance from community life. An increasing number of Jews, confined in a syncretic subculture, seemed not to comprehend the essential attributes of Jewish ethics and law, and thus they escaped the control of the Torah and the supervision of the religious authorities. In the second part of his Seyfer simkhas ha-nefesh (Fürth, 1727), Elhanan Hendel ben Benjamin ˙ the state of abandon and Wolf Kirchhahn described in an evocative manner ignorance in which many Jews lived. In order to serve as a warning to his readers, he drew up a lengthy list of vices and flaws that he had observed in numerous small communities. He explains, for example: If an inhabitant of a yishuv has a melamed in his house, he thinks that he has mastered the Torah and that he can decide all matters relating to the dinim. But in behaving in this manner, the master of the house and the melamed are worse than heretics . . . The melamdim teach for money. They teach only the Gemoro and leave aside the khumesh and the twenty-four books of the Bible. They do not allow children to study beyond the bar mitsvo. Thus he knows nothing at all and remains a stableboy [with respect to learning].22 19 BT Sota 22a clearly explains that which is understood as ‘ignorant’ in the Jewish tradition: ‘Who is a boor? He who does not recite the shema in the morning and evening with its benedictions, according to the opinion of R. Meir. The sages say [the boor is] one who does not put on phylacteries. Ben Azzai says it is one who does not have ritual fringes on his clothing. R. Jonathan ben Joseph says it is one who has sons but does not raise them to study the Torah. Others say even one who studies the Torah and the Mishna but does not study with a rabbinical scholar, he is a boor. If he studies the Torah without studying the Mishna, he is a boor. Concerning one who studies neither the Torah nor the Mishna, it is written: “I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast” [Jer. 31: 27].’ 20 The Christian Hebraicist Johann Jacob Schudt maintains that the rise of the vernacular was the direct consequence of the ignorance of both Jewish men and women; see his ‘Von der Franckfurter und anderer Juden teutsch-hebräischen Sprache’, Jüdische Merkwuerdigkeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1714–18; rpt. Berlin, 1922), pt. ii, bk. vi, ch. 16, pp. 281–96, here pp. 281–2; M. Diefenbach, Judaeus convertendus (Frankfurt, 1696), 91; Johannes Buxtorf, Synagoga Judaica (Basel, 1603), 699; Johannes Christoph Wagenseil, Tela ignea Satanae (Altdorf, 1681), 72, 119. 21 See below, in the present volume, pp. 209–12. 22 See ch. 8 (p. 211) below. Yankev Shatsky published a facsimile edition of the text: Simkhes hanefesh: yidishe lider mit notn fun Elkhonon Kirkhan. Fotografisher iberdruk fun der ershter un

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Numerous authors insisted that a general deterioration in the transmission of the sacred texts was to be noticed. To a great degree, Yiddish literature also echoed this crisis in the educational system which was held up to a detailed examination. Writers harshly criticized the method of teaching, the decline in education, and the spread of ignorance.23 Several kinds of criticism dominate: on the one hand, some took aim at the schoolmasters (melamdim), who were too few in number, especially in the villages, and whose knowledge left much to be desired. Others were more concerned with the methods of instruction. The critics reproached the schoolmasters for placing too high a priority on mechanical repetition of the sacred texts to the detriment of comprehension and the learning of the grammar of Hebrew. Finally, the schoolmasters attached too much importance to the Talmud, whose complex subtleties perplexed children. The primary complaint against them, however, was their neglect of biblical study. One passage from the book of edification, Orkhous tsadikim (Prague, 1580–1), gives a good account of this intellectual sophistication: But our contemporaries are without comprehension. They do no more than mutually to confound one another and waste the best part of the day: half the day they devote to such study, and in general their study is haphazard, while their idleness is constant. By contrast, in the time of the Sages of the Talmud one studied ten years or more. . . . Nowadays no one does any of that, but rather everyone wants to study the Tosafists and novel interpretations, indeed novel interpretations of novel interpretations, even before he has comprehended the content of the Talmud. How can one make progress by this means, when one is doing the opposite of that which the Sages said. . . . But there is of course no need to sit all day long and gab. Most of the scholars themselves admit that they do not study in the proper manner and that the order of their studies is not appropriate (seder ha-limud ).24 For because of their eternal jabbering they accomplish nothing and learn neither Torah nor the Prophets and Writings (Ketuvim), nor Agadous or Midrashim nor any other field of knowledge.25

eyntsiker oysgabe velkhe iz dershinen in Fyorda in yor 1727 (facsimile of 1727 edn.) (New York: Mayzl, 1926), fol. 18v. 23

The topic is not relevant only for Yiddish literature, since in the same period the Maharal of Prague, among others, also criticized the teaching method in Jewish schools. See also Simhah ˙ Assaf, Mekorot le-toledot ha-hinukh be-yisrael, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1924–43); Moritz ˙ Güdemann, Quellenschriften zur Geschichte des Unterrichts und der Erziehung bei den deutschen Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf Mendelssohn (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1892; rpt. Amsterdam: Philo, 1968); Herman Pollack, Jewish Folkways in Germanic Lands (1648–1806). Studies in Aspects of Daily Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 50–84. 24 The progression of study is noted in a passage of Pirkei Avot 5. 21: ‘At five years, one is ready for scripture; at ten for the Mishna; at thirteen for the commandments; at fifteen for the Talmud.’ 25 Orkhous tsadikim, chap. 27; translated from Güdemann’s citation of a fifteenth-century text (Quellenschriften, pp. 33–4); cf. also the differing text in the edition of Orkhous tsadikim (Jerusalem: Eshkol, 1978), p. 231.

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The problem with the traditional system of pedagogy was that it placed a barrier in the midst of Jewish society which encouraged two distinct networks for the transmission of knowledge. Most students left school around the age of thirteen, the age at which they attained juridical adulthood in a religious sense. These ordinary Jews, quickly absorbed by a busy life, were forced to abandon further study. Their access to the holy texts was no more than fragmentary, discontinuous, imperfect, particularly during the readings of ouneg shabos (if they were able to read well enough) or during the communal readings in the synagogue during services, in the study house when a scholar explained a holy text, or when a preacher interpreted the biblical reading of the week (parashah/parosho). Most of the time, these simple Jews finally lost contact with the holy language, primarily due to the mnemonic aspects of traditional culture, in which repetition remained a key factor. Thus there were gaps in the specifically Jewish culture of many Jews, which Yiddish texts were in some measure able to fill. A tiny percentage of kheyder-pupils went on to study in the yeshivah, or, taken into the care of the community itself, were able to devote themselves almost exclusively to prayer and study. These initiates gained access to the high road of the tradition and thus to a knowledge of the rich tradition of literature in Hebrew and Aramaic. They constituted a kind of intellectual aristocracy with important privileges in the affairs of the Jewish community. A number of Yiddish texts echo this rupture and the tensions which arose among the various groups that ultimately resulted in the cultural marginalization of a significant portion of the population. The Yiddish authors deplored the fact that knowledge had been made so complicated that it had become incomprehensible to an ever growing outer fringe of the Jewish population. The methods of talmudic rabbinical hermeneutics were stigmatized as no more than obstructions to the access by the masses to the holy tradition. Criticized as well were the pilpul26 and the sophisticated interpretive methods applied to the talmudic texts, such as the khilukim (‘differentiations’), a meticulous investigation into––by all appearances––the most tenuous details of halakhic argumentation, and khidud (‘grinding or sharpening’), a complex type of mental gymnastics intended to extract the essence of the holy text. In his book of edification, the Seyfer Brantshpigl (Basel, 1602), Moses Henochs Altshuler Yerushalmi, provides an explanation of his reasons for writing in the vernacular, which proves quite revealing: ‘This book was written in Yiddish for women and for men who are like women and cannot study much. The sabbath and the holidays come, and they can read it and understand what 26 Isaac Sulkes speaks of scholars in his translation of the Song of Songs (Shir ha-shirim, Cracow, 1579): ‘The rabbis and the great scholars are occupied with their pilpulim and kharifus’ (sophistical discussions and sharp-witted argumentation). Sulkes then comments that no one would imagine it impertinent for someone to write in Yiddish what he had himself learned in his youth from his own rabbi. He then explains that those who write books in Yiddish are no less servants of God than the scholarly insider who writes complex religious treatises.

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they read. For our holy books are written in Hebrew; sometimes they include pilpul from the Gemoro, which many people cannot understand.’27 The Judaism that was taught seemed less and less to relate to the spiritual experience of simple believers. It was contained in a system closed upon itself, which only scholars and rabbis could master, and which had cut itself off from the living religious practice by means of sophistication and formalism. Another grievance commonly expressed in Yiddish books was that as a result of problems in both textual transmission and the instructional method (particularly due to the lack of repetition and thus of memorization of the religious texts), the holy language had become an inpenetrable and incomprehensible language for the common person. The ignorance of Hebrew, which was the essential language, did nothing but exacerbate the cultural disparities and reveal clearly the ever widening gap between the strata of Jewish society. Elhanan Kirchhahn, author of the Seyfer simkhas ˙ situation: ha-nefesh, aptly explained the Now, a lamdon [scholar] can read everything in loshoun koudesh [‘the holy language’] and if he does not keep the law, woe to him and his soul. In a community in which there are educated people, der gemayne man [the ordinary man] can go to them to ask their questions. But in many places where no lamdon lives, one cannot ask, and not everyone understands Hebrew. And many good Jews would serve God sincerely, but they do not know how to do so. Many people have said to me, literally in tears: ‘We are nothing but animals. We know nothing.’ That is the reason for my arranging this musor ve-toukhokho [moral rules and chastisements] [in Yiddish].

Criticism is likewise directed at the cantor in the synagogue, who favoured the voice and melody over the sense of the prayers, often taking no notice of the rules of prayer, accompanied the benedictions during the service with non-Jewish melodies, and sang secular songs at weddings.28 This lack of knowledge also affected those who had studied in their youth but who, in the course of time, had lost touch with Hebrew, as is found, for instance, in the introduction to Shekhitous u-vedikous (Amsterdam, 1667): And someone who would like to be a ritual slaughterer [shoukhet uvoudek] thinks that if he has received authorization (kabolo), then that must suffice. . . . But because one must run hither and thither in order to make a living, and the holy language is much too difficult for some . . . in the end he forgets it. He often has no meat for their meals. . . . Therefore, dear people, buy this book, and you will not need to run to the rabbi constantly. They [the laws] are nicely translated here into Yiddish.29

It was in this context of crisis that Yiddish literature developed and served a double function: on the one hand, it testifies to the authorities’ unavoidable 27

Seyfer brantshpigl (Basel, 1602), ch. 3, fol. 12v; St., CB, no. 6473. 1. Such criticism is found in Judah Leyb (Löb) ben Moses Zelikover (Löb Minden), Seyfer shirey Yehudo (Amsterdam, 1697); see Yankev Shatsky, ‘Yehude Leyb Zelikover un zayne “Shirey yehude” ’, Yivo-bleter 3 (1932), 140–7. 29 St., CB, no. 4397. 28

The Emergence of Yiddish Literature

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taking control of a disoriented Jewish populace, and to an effort toward vernacularization of the tradition’s canonical texts. A mechanism of religious instruction was established in which popular books played a significant role. On the other hand, this literature seemed to be the beginnings of a gradual emancipation of knowledge from the exclusive guardianship of the scholars, the talmidei khakhomim, who exercised a monopoly on the writing, the interpretation, and the reading of the texts. By means of the vernacular, the holy books began to circulate among new social strata, who could have a more direct access to religious culture and participate more actively in cultural life. Thus there developed an audience of new readers, which also entailed new ways of reading and a reconception of knowledge itself, which necessarily differed from the models and conceptions which had, up to that point, existed essentially in a world of scholars. The increase in the numbers of popular Yiddish books testifies to the beginning of a new relationship to knowledge during this period. The bearers of the tradition, however resistant to the idea of revealing the secrets of the Torah and the Law to the people, and not without contempt for a Yiddish deemed unfit for theological speculation and sophisticated argumentation, nonetheless were quite conscious of the urgency of drawing the people out of their ignorance. As for the ordinary Jews who demanded better instruction, they could thus slake their thirst for knowledge. In this manner vernacular literature contributed to healing the split that had appeared in the social body and to reestablishing communication between the litterati and the illitterati. The vernacular texts thus function as valuable vantage points from which to observe the long-term transformations which Jewish society experienced during the course of this transitional period.

 The Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

The rise of Yiddish literature coincides with the development of the Hebrew printing industry in Europe.1 The invention of printing was to have important consequences for cultural transmission and communication as it had been conceived up to that time in Jewish society. It was not simply a matter of technological change that offered the possibility of increasing the number of books in the vernacular, or the successive innovations in the presentation of the books themselves, that should be stressed, but also the repercussions that the distribution of Yiddish books was to have on reading habits.2 Not only did new ways of reading appear, but also a reading audience, which, even if it is difficult to claim it as a ‘new’ audience, nonetheless had expanded by a significant proportion. Henceforth those social classes that had up to that time been excluded from literate culture were to have access to the texts of the religious tradition, thanks to the translations and original texts in Yiddish, which constituted a substantial portion of the texts produced by the Jewish book industry. At the same time as humanists and theologians in the Christian community, rabbis and scholars in the Jewish community hailed the invention of printing, sensing how rich were the possibilities of this technological innovation.3 Thus there is evidence of a Jew in Avignon who, beginning in 1

Among the works on the history of Jewish printing in Europe, see Bernhard (Chaim Dov) Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim she-be-eyropah ha-tikhonah. . . . (Antwerp: n.p., 1935) and Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim she-be-eyropah. . . . (Antwerp: n.p., 1937); Moritz Steinscheider and D. Cassel, ‘Jüdische Typographie und jüdische Buchhandel’, 21–94 in Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. xxviii (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1850–1); I. Sonne, ‘Druckwesen’, in EJ (Berlin, 1931), iv 39–81. On the history of printing in the various places of publication mentioned in this chapter, one should refer to the bibliography by Shlomo Shunami, Bibliography of Jewish Bibliographies, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1965). 2 A. Berliner, Über den Einfluß des ersten hebräischen Buchdrucks auf den Cultus und Cultur der Juden (Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1896). 3 One could easily adduce a great many citations concerning the relations between printing and humanism and the Reformation. Let it suffice to note that in his Tischreden Luther affirms that ‘printing is the ultimate and the greatest gift, by means of which God wished to make known the charge and task of the true faith to all the world, even to the ends of the earth and to translate it into all languages’ (D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Tischreden, ed. Ernst Kroker, vol. i (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912), no. 1038; cf. also vol. iv (1916), no. 4697). During this same period Jewish printers remarked that due to printing, designated ‘the holy art’ (melekhes ha-koudesh), ‘the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the L’ (Isa. 11: 9).

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1444, learned the new ‘art of writing artificially’ (ars scribendi artificialiter).4 David Gans declares in the Tsemakh Dovid: Printing was invented in Mainz by the Christian, Johannes Gutenberg of Strasbourg. This was in the first year of the rule of Emperor Frederick the Pious [5200 by the Jewish calendar]. Blessed be He who grants intelligence to man and imparts knowledge to him. Blessed be He who in His kindness favours us with such an invention, of universal significance and unique in kind. No other invention, no other discovery can be compared to it since the day that God created man on earth. It is not just the metaphysical sciences and the seven fundamental fields of secular knowledge which will benefit from this invention, but all applied sciences will profit equally from it, goldsmithing, architecture, woodcut and lithographic engraving. Each day reveals a new facet of it, and books without number are printed, which benefit all professions of whatever kind.5

Beyond the euphoria displayed and the commonplaces expressed about the ‘revolution of printing’, it is necessary to keep in mind how gradual were the changes and how resistance to the printing of Yiddish books actually increased. Even so, it is impossible to understand the rise of Old Yiddish literature from the sixteenth century onward without studying the large-scale stages of the production and distribution of books in the vernacular and analysing the consequences that this literature had on Jewish reading and the Jewish reader. In order to define the scope of the specific territory into which Yiddish literature extended both in relation to book production in Hebrew and in non-Jewish languages, and in the general context of the history of printing in Renaissance Europe, it is necessary for us to insist at the outset on several essential facts. First, with respect to the cartography of the Yiddish book: the places where Yiddish books were published are in a well-defined zone which, with several qualifications, coincides with both the geography of the Hebrew publication centres and the areas of Yiddish language expansion, and was also consistent with the general topography of European book publishing. At the same time, books in Yiddish abound with information concerning their manufacture and distribution. A consideration of this issue supplies a wealth of information concerning the physical presentation of the books and the milieu of those who were responsible for producing and then marketing the books. Finally, it is necessary for us to become acquainted both with those whose position is most often ‘upstream’ of the actual manufacture of the book, that is: the authors––quite a modern conception, which it will be 4 Anatole Claudin, Histoire de l’imprimerie en France au XVe et au XVIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 1–10; Cecil Roth, ‘The Printed Book’, The Jews in the Renaissance (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959; rpt. 1984), 165–8. 5 André Neher, David Gans (1541–1613): disciple du Maharal, assistant de Tycho Brahe et de Jean Kepler (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 86 (Hebrew transl.: David gans (1541–1613) u-zemano (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1982)).

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

necessary to situate clearly in the social context of the Renaissance––and with those ‘downstream’ from the manufacturing process: the readers. Several traits are characteristic of the production of Yiddish books during the first century of their existence.6 First of all let us take note that the history of the Yiddish book reflects the developments of Jewish books in general in Ashkenazic culture. Production was concentrated in the principal European centres where the printing of Hebrew books was tolerated. Thus it is not surprising that the first books were published in cities or regions in which the right to print had been granted and to which Jews had immigrated and there formed communities and thus a market of potential readers. The impossibility of owning their own publishing house and the necessity to obtain a license explains why Jewish printers often settled in cities where a publishing tradition aready existed. Most found no solution except to offer their services to Christian publishers, or even to convert in order to practise their profession. Certain distinctive features are nonetheless to be noted, due primarily to the personal history of authors and individual printers, such as, for example, Chaim Shahor (Schwarz) and Joseph bar Yakar or Paulus Fagius and Elia Levita,7 who˙ set up their presses at the mercy of economic vicissitudes and 6 At present there exists no comprehensive statistical study of the production of Yiddish books from 1534 (the date of the first known printed book in Yiddish) up into the eighteenth century. There are several studies of parts of the period: Moshe N. Rosenfeld has made an inventory of forty-seven Yiddish books published in the principal European centres of Hebrew publishing in the years 1534–58; ‘The Origins of Yiddish Printing’, 111–26 in Dovid Katz, ed., Origins of the Yiddish Language (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987). Chone Shmeruk inventories thirtythree Yiddish books published in Italy in the years 1545–1609, and sixty-six published in Poland in the years 1534–1650; ‘Defusei yidish be-italyah’, Italia/Italyah 3 (Jerusalem, 1982), 112–75 and ‘Reshimah bibliografit shel defusei polin be-yidish ad gezirot tah ve-tat’, Kiryat sefer 52 (1977), ˙ 383–417; rpt. in Sifrut yidish be-polin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 75–116. In Basel, twenty titles were published between 1557 and 1612, principally by the printer Konrad Waldkirch; see Joseph Prijs, Die Basler hebräischen Drücke 1492–1866 (Olten: Urs Graf, 1952). The first Yiddish book to be published in Amsterdam, a rhymed adaptation of the Torah entitled Mizmour le-touro by David ben Menahem ha-Cohen, was printed in 1644 by Menasseh ben Israel. One can estimate ˙ the production of Yiddish books in Amsterdam from 1644 to the first decade of the eighteenth century at ninety-seven books. The principal publishers were Uri (Phoebus) ben Aaron Ha-Levi (eighteen books), Joseph Athias (thirteen books), and Moses Kosman ben Elijah Gomperz (twenty-one books); see Lajb Fuks and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands 1585–1815: Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1984–7). No statistical studies have yet been carried out for Yiddish publishing in Germany and in Prague, except for several centres such as Augsburg, where five Yiddish books were published in 1543–4; see Moshe N. Rosenfeld, Der jüdische Buchdruck in Augsburg in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (London: private, 1985). The number of Yiddish books published in the years 1534–1609 is estimated at around 120, and by 1650 it reached approximately 200; see Shmeruk, ‘Defusei yidish be-italyah’, p. 112, and ‘Reshimah bibliografit . . .’, 22–3; and Agnes Romer-Segal, ‘Sifrut yidish u-kehal korehah ba-meah ha-taz. Yetsirot be-yidish bi-reshimot “hazikkuk” mi-mantovah 1595’, Kiryat sefer 53 (1978), 779–90. An exhaustive inventory of Yiddish book publishing in the years 1534–1750 is currently being conducted by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 7 See below, ch. 7, p. 163.

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their own peregrinations across the face of the European continent. From the beginning of Yiddish publishing, there were, on the one hand, centres established which exercised great influence over a long period of time, such as Prague or Basel. On the other hand, there were the more ephemeral phenomena of the temporary establishment of a printer’s shop or even of the activities of an itinerant bookseller/publisher. Thus there was a great mobility among publishers, which bears witness to the instability of Jewish life in this period and to the precarious nature of this profession. There were altogether more than twenty European cities in which Yiddish books were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 Between the first and last decades of the sixteenth century, the outlines of the map of Yiddish publishing in Europe took form. Several salient facts are to be noted: first, the appearance of the great publishing centres in Italy,9 Poland,10 and the city of Prague,11 which all played important roles in the history of Old Yiddish literature. The first traces of the Yiddish language in printed books are found in the Psokim u-ksovim (‘Decisions and Writings’) of Israel Isserlein ben Pethahiah (Venice: Bomberg, 1519),12 and in the Prague Haggadah of 1526, printed by Gershom ben Solomon and his son Gronem Kohen,13 illustrated with magnificent woodcuts by Chaim Shahor.14 This Haggadah includes a Yiddish version of the liturgical hymn Adir˙ hu (almekhtiger got). Chaim Shahor, itinerant printer and one of the first great Jewish ˙ publishers in Central Europe, led the life of a wanderer and settled wherever work and the possibilities of establishing a printing shop led him. After Prague, he went to Oels, in Silesia, where he established a press with David ben Jonathan; then to Augsburg, a city that fell to the Reformation, where he made use of the press of August Wind. After an unproductive stay in Ferrara, he settled in Ichenhausen (Bavaria) in 1553, where, with his son-in-law, Joseph bar Yakar, he printed the first complete prayer book in Yiddish: Tefilo 8 To these it is necessary to add the unidentified sites of publication of extant books, such as pseudo-Lublin, pseudo-Basel and pseudo-Hanau. 9 See Shmeruk, ‘Defusei yidish be-italyah’, 112–75. 10 Majer Balaban, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Druckereien in Polen’, Soncino Blätter 3 (1929), 1–50; idem, ‘Tsu der geshikhte fun yidishe drukerayen in poyln’, 180–224 in Yidn in poyln: shtudyes un shilderungen fun fargangene tkufes (Vilnius: Kletskin, 1930); Bernhard (Chaim Dov) Friedberg, Ha-defus ha-ivri be-krako (Cracow: Fisher, 1900); idem, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-polonyah, 2nd edn. (Tel Aviv: Barukh Fridberg, 1950); Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’. 11 The oldest publishing centre in central and eastern Europe, beginning in 1512, when four artisans and two bakers published a prayer book; see S. H. Lieben, ‘Der hebräische Buchdruck in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert’, 88–106 in S. Steinhertz, ed., Die Juden in Prag (Prague: B’nai B’rith, 1927). 12 Yitskhok Rivkind, ‘Yidish in hebreishe drukn bizn yor 1648’, Der pinkes 1 (1927–8), 30–1; Herbert C. Zafren, ‘Early Yiddish Typography’, Jewish Book Annual 44 (1986), 112. 13 One of the main families of printers in Prague and in central Europe. Gershom began printing in 1514. See Judaica Bohemiae 10 (1974), 13–41; 11 (1975), 29–53. 14 Abraham Meir Habermann, ‘Ha-madpis Hayyim Shahor, bno Itshak ve-hatano Yosef bar ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Yakar’, Kiryat sefer 31 (1955–6), 483–500.

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

fum gantsn yor (1544). In 1545 he left for Heddernheim, near Frankfurt am Main. But conditions there were quite precarious, and he moved on to Lublin, where he died in 1550. The first printed Yiddish book that has come down to us was printed in Cracow in 1534: a bilingual biblical concordance entitled Mirkeves hamishne by Rabbi Anshel ben Eliakim ha-Levi Tsion, printed by the brothers Samuel, Asher, and Eliakim, sons of Chaim Helicz.15 After having been forced to leave Prague, where they had learned the trade of printing, this family of printers set up the first Jewish press around the year 1530.16 In 1535 Samuel and Eliakim published a book of morals for women, Azhoras noshim by Rabbi David Cohen; then, in 1535–6, Eliakim alone published a Yiddish version of Orkhous khayim by Asher ben Jehiel (Rosh) entitled Der musor un hanhogo, an ethical treatise that recommends rules of conduct and virtue (arranged by the day of the week) that each Jew should implement in both private and community life, as well as in dealing with Christians.17 In 1536 Samuel moved to Oels in Silesia, where he collaborated with his brother-in-law, Eliezer ben Solomon, in printing a book of prayers, entitled Tefilous mi-kol ha-shono. At this time (c.1537) the brothers Helicz converted to Catholicism and took new given names, Johannes, Andreas, and Paulus.18 The last named brother became a missionary among the Jews and in 1540 published a Yiddish translation of the New Testament, and later a brief handbook on Yiddish grammar, written in German for Christians, the Elemental oder lesebüchlen (Hundesfeld, 1543), which constitutes one of the first studies of the vernacular language of the Ashkenazim.19 It is in fifteenth-century Italy that the first Jewish presses appeared.20 In 1475 the first Hebrew books were printed in Reggio di Calabria and in Piove 15

Spelled sometimes Halic(z), Haelic(z) or Helic; see Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri bepolonyah, ii. 1–4; and idem, Ha-defus ha-ivri be-krako. On Mirkeves ha-mishne, see below, ch. 5, p. 99. The same year (1534), the brothers Helicz published a halakhic tract, by Rabbi Isaac ben Meir Düren, entitled Shaarey dura/Shaarim/Isur veheter. 16 In 1527 Gershom Cohen was designated by royal decree as the only Jewish printer allowed in Bohemia. It named the brothers Helicz as representatives in Poland. 17 A moral treatise also known by the titles Hanhoges ho-rosh and Tsavoos ho-rosh. 18 Boycotted by the Jewish community, they were forced to abandon the printing business. But in 1537 King Sigismond I decreed that Jews were obliged to buy the products of the brothers Helicz and that no other Jewish books were to be allowed in Polish territory. In 1539 a new decree was promulgated which required the Jews of Cracow, Poznan, and Lemberg to purchase 3,350 volumes of the books printed by the brothers Helicz at a price of 1,600 florins. Samuel, who returned to the Jewish faith, later went to Breslau, then on to Constantinople, where he continued to practise his craft as a printer. In the colophon to his 1551 edition of the Torah, he repents of his earlier conversion to Christianity. 19 See above, ch. 1; Max Silberberg, ed., Elemental- oder Lesebüchlein des Paul Helicz (Breslau: Verein jüdisches Museum, 1929). 20 On the importance of Hebrew printing in Italy, see Giulio Busi, Edizioni ebraiche del XVI secolo nelle biblioteche dell’Emilia Romagna (Bologna: Analisi, 1987).

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di Sacco. With the founding of two prestigious presses, printing experienced an unprecedented development. First, the house of the family Soncino,21 which had come from Germany and settled in various cities in Italy.22 Gershom ben Moses was the most noteworthy representative of the family; from 1489 to 1534 he published a succession of books in Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Greek of a magnificent typographical craftsmanship. Also to be noted is Daniel Bomberg, a native of Antwerp, who opened a printing shop in Venice, where he published approximately two hundred Hebrew books, all of the very highest technical quality.23 While he did not publish any Yiddish books, he did surround himself with editors, printers, proofreaders, and overseers, such as Cornelius Adelkind and Elia Levita, who were associated with publishing in the vernacular. Northern Italy was an important religious and intellectual centre for Jews, a focus of both strong Jewish influence and a wealthy community, of which a part was of Ashkenazic origin and continued to speak Yiddish until the seventeenth century. Northern Italy also became one of the most important centres in the developing industry of Yiddish book publishing in Europe. From 1545 to 1609 thirty-three Yiddish titles were published, which constitutes about one-third of all Yiddish books published during the period and demonstrates the importance of Northern Italy in the history of Yiddish publishing during the Renaissance.24 Some of these books have not survived and are known only from the Mantuan censor’s list of 1595. This is particularly the case with respect to prose narratives and to the first edition of the romanzo cavalleresco, Pariz un Viene, published in Sabbioneta and sometimes attributed by modern scholars to Elia Levita.25 The first Yiddish book published in Italy appeared in Venice in 1545: a translation of the Psalms by Elia Levita, published by Israel Cornelius 21

Abraham Meir Habermann, ‘Ha-madpisim bnei Soncino’, Perakim be-toldot ha-madpisim ha-ivrim ve-inyene sefarim (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1978), 13–94; David Werner Amram, The Makers of Hebrew Books in Italy (Philadelphia: Greenstone, 1909; rpt. London: Holland Press, 1909), index. 22 Soncino, Casalmaggiore, Brescia, Barco, Fano, Pesaro, Ortona, Rimini, Ancona, and Cesena. 23 Aron Freimann, ‘Daniel Bomberg und seine hebräische Druckerei in Venedig’, Zeitschrift für hebræische Bibliographie 10 (1906), 32–6, 79–88; Amram, Makers of Hebrew Books, 146–224; Joshua Bloch, ‘Venetian Printers of Hebrew Books’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 36 (1932), 71–92. 24 Shmeruk, ‘Defusei yidish be-italya’. 25 See the exhaustive study of the Mantua censor’s list and its cultural context by Shifra Baruchson-Arbib, Sefarim ve-korim: tarbut ha-keriah shel yehude italyah ba-shilhei ha-renesans (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1993); French: La Culture livresque des juifs d’Italie à la fin de la Renaissance, trans. Gabriel Roth (Paris: CNRS, 2001); cf. also A. Romer-Segal, ‘Sifrut yidish u-kehal koreha ba-meah ha-taz. Yetsirot be-yidish bi-reshimot ha-“zikkuk”, beMantowah 1595’, Kiryat sepher 53 (1978), 779–90; Shmeruk, ‘Defusei yidish be-italyah’, nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 32, 33; Erika Timm, Paris un Wiene: Ein jiddischer Stanzenroman des 16. Jahrhunderts von (oder aus dem Umkreis von) Elia Levita (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996).

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

Adelkind in the printing shop of Meir ben Jacob Parenzo.26 Son of a German immigrant who settled in Padua, Adelkind worked in Venice in the printing shops of Daniel Bomberg, Giovanni Dei Farri (1544), Marco Antonio Giustiniani (1545–52), and in Sabbioneta in the shop of Tobias Foa (1553–5). Some of the books that he published were bilingual, such as the Sidur ashkenazi (1549); or, as in the Passover Haggadot, only the instructions and the rules are printed in Yiddish, while the rest of the ritual, that is, the prayers and the benedictions, are in Hebrew. His son, Daniel Adelkind, was himself also a publisher, notably of two books in the vernacular: a collection of stories, Maasim di zaynen gesheyn itlekhe khsidim (1552), and a book of morals for women, Mitsvous ha-noshim (1552). Venice, which, along with Constantinople and Basel, was the most important centre of Jewish publishing in the sixteenth century, remained the principal Italian city in which Yiddish books were published up until the beginning of the seventeenth century. These books were produced mainly in the printing house of Giovanni di Gara, whose publishing activity continued over the course of a half-century (1564–1616) and produced a hundred texts, comprising the most varied types of Jewish literature.27 The Yiddish books which he published constituted a representative sample of the principle genres characteristic of vernacular literature. One finds thus a bilingual book of prayers, Tefilo mi-kol ha-shono (1599); books of Ashkenazic traditions and customs, Minhogim (1586, 1593, 1600–1); a brief brochure that explains the method of koshering, salting, and cleansing meat, Dinim vo-seyder (without date); books of morals, among them one ethical treatise for women, Mitsvous ha-noshim (1588); a translation of a book by Samuel Benveniste, Orah hayyim (Ourakh khayim) (1598); a ˙ prose narrative, Maase Briyo ve-Zimro;˙ and, finally, a translation of a book of philosophical poetry by Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol, Keter malkhut (Keser malkhus) (1600). In the seventeenth century, in the printing house of the patrician family Bragadini, two Haggadot (1629, 1663) were published which had the distinction of being in Hebrew, Yiddish, Judaeo-Italian, and Ladino, so that they could be used by the three sectors of the Jewish community in Italy, as well as be exported.28 In 1550 Avise Bragadini published the Mishne touro (Mishneh Torah) of Maimonides with the annotations by Meir Katzenellenbogen of Padua.29 The 26 Habermann, Ha-madpis Kornelio Adel Kind u-veno Daniel u-reshimat ha-sefarim she-nidpesu al yedehem (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1980); Amram, Makers of Hebrew Books, 181–2; Habermann, ‘Ha-madpisim bnei R’ Yaakov Frantsoni be-venitsiya’, Areshet 1 (1958–9), 61–90. 27 Jean Baumgarten, ‘Giovanni di Gara, imprimeur de livres yiddish a Venise (milieu du XVe–début du XVIe siècle) et la culture juive de la Renaissance’, Revue des Études Juives 159 (2000), 587–98; Bernhard (Chaim Dov) Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-medinot italyah (Tel Aviv: Bar Yuda, 1956), 72–3. 28 Friedberg, ibid., 53–5; Bloch, ‘Venetian Printers’, 17 f. 29 Known by the name of Maharam of Padua, one of the greatest rabbinical and halakhic authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy.

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same year, their rival, Marco Antonio Giustiniani, published a version of the same text.30 A quarrel ensued which was decided by Moses Isserles in favour of the Bragadini family. The dispute was brought before the papal court, where Julius III concluded the proceedings in 1553 by decreeing the confiscation of all copies of the Talmud, which were burned. The printing of Jewish books was prohibited for ten years in Venice. In the years 1550–68, during which Venice lost its quasi-monopoly on Jewish publishing, other centres emerged in which Jewish books in particular were printed. When this era had passed, the Serenissima Republica again became the undisputed centre of the European market in Jewish books until the eighteenth century. The printing of Jewish books, among them books in Yiddish, was then dominated in particular by the shop of Giovanni di Gara. Among other cities of northern Italy, it is necessary to mention first of all Mantua,31 the second centre of Hebrew printing after Venice, where two books were published in 1562: the third edition of the Psalms by Elia Levita in the printing house of Joseph ben Jacob Shalit of Padua;32 a bilingual prayer book whose printer is not identified; and in 1564 a rhymed version of the book of Judges, also published with no identification of the printer. A certain number of books are unknown except for the mention of their titles,33 or by references in the censor’s list from 1595, in which two books published in Mantua in 1558 are mentioned.34 Finally, it is necessary to note the printing activity in Verona of Abraham ben Mattitya Bat-Sheva in the shop of Francesco dalle Donne.35 He learned the printer’s trade from his father, a printer in Salonica, and then settled in Verona at the end of the sixteenth century. There he printed three books in Yiddish: a courtly romance, Pariz un Viene (1594), which some scholars have attributed to Elia Levita; a book of prayer, Maamodous (1594); and a collection of animal fables, Ki-bukh (1595).36 30

See Amram, Makers of Hebrew Books, index. On printing in Mantua, see Amram, Makers of Hebrew Books, 30 f., 323 f.; Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-medinot italyah, 15–19. 32 The first edition appeared in Venice in 1545, the second in Zurich in 1558. 33 Chone Shmeruk, ‘Shishah defusei Mantovah be-yidish shelo hayu velo nibrau’, Alei sefer 8 (1980), 74–8. 34 Shmeruk, ‘Defusei yidish be-italyah’, nos. 10, 11; Romer-Segal, ‘Sifrut yidish’, nos. 187, 378, and 57, 307, 369. 35 Moses Marx, ‘Verona: Francesco dalle Donne’, Annalen des hebraeischen Buchdruckes in Italien (1501–1600) (s.l., s.d.). 36 On the Pariz un Viene, see Valerio Marchetti, Jean Baumgarten, and Antonella Salomoni, eds., Elia Bahur Levita, Paris un Viene, Francesco dalle Donne, Verona 1594 (Bologna: Università degli studi di Bologna, Dipartimento di discipline storiche; Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1988); Chone Shmeruk, ed., Pariz un’ Viene (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996); Erika Timm and Gustav Adolf Beckmann, eds., Paris un Wiene: Ein jiddischer Stanzenroman des 16. Jahrhunderts von (oder aus dem Umkreis von) Elia Levita (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996). On the Maamodous, see A. Cohen, ‘Über einige alte Drucke’, Festschrift . . . D. Hoffmans (Berlin, 1914), 53–4. On the Ki-bukh, see The Book of Cows: A Facsimile Edition of the Famed Kuhbuch, ed. Moshe N. Rosenfeld (London: Hebraica Books, 1984). 31

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

In Cremona only one Yiddish book was published, a translation of the Bible, by Vincenzo Conti (1560).37 Some Yiddish books were also printed in places in western European that were some distance from centres of Jewish learning but where itinerant printers were active. Chaim Shahor, mentioned above, worked in Ichenhausen. One could add the name ˙of the pastor Paulus Fagius, who set up a press in Isny in Bavaria.38 There, with his Hebrew teacher, Elia Levita, he published Latin translations of Levita’s major works: Tishbi (1541) and Meturgemon (1542), as well as sacred texts such as the talmudic treatise Avot (1541), the book of Tobit with a Latin translation (1542), the Alphabet of Ben Sira (1542), and also a commentary on the first four chapters of Genesis, Exegesis sive expositio dictionum hebraicarum literalis in quatuor capitula Geneseos (1542). Fagius published numerous Yiddish books: a courtly romance, Elia Levita’s Bovo bukh (1541), which was typeset with the aid of the author’s nephews,39 and the first German–Hebrew–Latin–Yiddish dictionary, Shmous devorim (1542).40 This work of lexicography, designed for the use of Christian students of Hebrew, included a Latin preface by Fagius. Finally, let us note a book of morals, Seyfer midous, that was published by Fagius in 1542.41 After a period in Strasbourg, Fagius moved to Constance, where in 1543 he published an edition in Yiddish and Hebrew of the first four chapters of Genesis, Prima Quatuor Capita Geneseos hebraice, cum versione germanica. It is also necessary to acknowledge the influence of non-Jewish humanists on the development of Yiddish printing. Numerous European centres, especially certain cities where the Reformation triumphed, became sites of Yiddish book publishing. In the Holy Roman Empire these cities included Basel, Zurich, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Constance, and Augsburg, where Jewish books began to be printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century.42 It was 37

Between 1556 and 1567 Vincenzo Conti published some forty Jewish books. See Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, Annali ebreo-tipografici di Cremona 1556–1586 (Parma: Stamperia imperiale, 1808); Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-medinot italyah, 80 f.; Meir Benayahu, Ha-defus haivri be-kremonah (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zwi, Mosad ha-rav Kuk, 1971). 38 Abraham Meir Habermann, ‘Ha-madpis Paulus Fagius ve-sifrei beit defuso’, Alei Sefer 2 (1976), 97–104; Richard Raubenheimer, Paul Fagius aus Rheinzabern: Sein Leben und Wirken als Reformator und Gelehrter (Grünstadt: Verlag des Vereins für pfälzische Kirchengeschichte, 1957). Fagius made use of the same fonts as those used by Chaim Shahor in Augsburg. On Isny, ˙ see Mordechai Wolf Bernstein, ‘In Elye Bokhers drukeray’, in Nisht derbrente shaytn (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1956), 231–40. 39 Joseph and Elijah, sons of Rabbi Isaac Böhmen of Rome and his wife Hannah, Elia Levita’s sister. Levita’s two nephews converted to Christianity. 40 The subtitle is: Nomenclatura Hebraica Autore Helia Levita Germano Grammatico, in gratiam omnium tyronum ac studiosorum linguae sanctae Impressum Isne anno M.D.XLII. 41 One might also note Shir ha-yikhud (1542 ?), whose place of publication is difficult to determine exactly (Isny or Lublin ?). 42 Moritz Steinschneider, ‘Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland’, ZGJD 1 (1887), 282–7; Moshe N. Rosenfeld, Der jüdische Buchdruck in Augsburg in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (London: private printing, 1985).

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in Augsburg that the quarrel took place between Johannes Pfefferkorn, the converted Jew who attacked his former co-religionists, particularly with his anti-Jewish pamphlet, Der Juden veindt (1509), and Johannes Reuchlin, humanist and defender of the Jews and of the Hebrew language.43 Most of the Jewish books published in Augsburg are linked with the activity of Chaim Shahor and Johannes Boeschenstein, whose book Elementale introductorium ˙ in hebraeas litteras teutonice et hebraice legendas (1514) comprises the first published study of the Yiddish language.44 Mention should also be made of Paulus Aemilius, who published two epic poems, Seyfer melokhim (Melokhim-bukh 1543)45 and Seyfer Shmuel (Shmuel-bukh 1544) and a translation of the Pentateuch, the five Megillot, and the Haftorot (1544), of which there exist two editions, one intended for Jews and one for Christians. Basel was another great international publishing centre, a university town where a strong publishing tradition developed in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German books,46 associated with the presence of humanists, professors, and students from all nations of Europe. Its geographical position in the heart of Europe, the presence of renowned scholars (among others, Sebastian Münster), the excellent quality of printing equipment, and the arrival of refugees from religious persecution, especially of the Reformation, made Basel one of the major centres of European publishing. Hebrew books began to be printed there in 1516, which continued for more than a century.47 The first Yiddish books were not printed there until 1557: a translation of the Five Scrolls entitled, Di megilo in taytsher shprakh and a translation of the book of Daniel, Seyfer Donieyl, both published by the printer Jacob Kündig.48 It was especially the presses of Adam Petri and Ambrosius Froben, who excelled in the printing of Jewish books, among which were Yiddish books of quite a number of types, for one finds among them both religious books, such as translations of the Bible,49 and secular works, such as, for example, collections of prose narrative like the Mayse-bukh (1602).50 Among the most 43 Isidor Kracauer, Geschichte der Juden in Frankfurt-am-Main (1150–1824) (Frankfurt: Kauffmann, 1925), i. 247 f. 44 A list of the Hebrew books which he published in Augsburg after 1532 is found in Rosenfeld, Das jüdische Buchdruck, pp. 32–9. 45 Steinschneider (St. CB, no. 1243) claims that Chaim Shahor printed the book. ˙ 46 In 1550 the city council decided that no religious book could be published in any language other than the four mentioned. See P. G. Bietenholz, ‘Édition et Réforme à Bâle (1517–1565)’, in La Réforme et le Livre: l’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v.1570), ed. J. F. Gilmont (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 239–68. 47 C. C. Bernoulli, Basler Büchermarkt bis zum Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Paul Heitz (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1895; rpt. Naarden: A. W. van Bekhoven, 1984); Prijs, Die Basler hebräischen Drucke. 48 Prijs, Die Basler hebräischen Drucke, nos. 97, 101. 49 Such as morality books like Seyfer khayey oulom (1583); Pris, Die Basler hebräischen Drucke, no. 138. 50 Ibid., no. 178; see below, ch. 6, p. 298.

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

famous Basel printers, Israel ben Daniel Zifroni should be mentioned, a native of Guastalla, near Padua, who worked as a proofreader for Vicenzo Conti in Sabbioneta before moving to Basel.51 Between 1578 and 1583, he was associated with Ambrosius Froben and printed most notably an edition of the Talmud (1578–80); then, in the years that followed, he worked with T. Guarin, with whom in 1583 he printed a new edition of the translation of the Bible first published in Cremona in 1560. Because of difficulties with members of the city council, he was forced to leave Basel. He went to Freiburg in Breisgau and there published a Yiddish edition of the collection of animal fables by Berekhiah ben Natronay ha-Nakdan, Mishley shualim (Mishley shuolim) (1583–4, translated by Jacob ben Samuel Koppelmann), and a translation of the Targum of the Five Scrolls (1584). In addition to these great publishing centres one must also mention others that were not only important in the intellectual history of the Renaissance, but also functioned as minor centres of Yiddish book publishing: first of all, Strasbourg, where several representatives of the Reformation lived and where printing houses flourished that were notable for publishing polemical and doctrinal tracts, biblical texts, and Lutheran propagandistic literature.52 It was in this city that a missionary pastor, professor of Hebrew language, and printer, Elias Schadeus, published a book intended to convert the Jews to Christianity. The book was entitled Mysterium (Jost Martin, 1592) and included a translation of the gospels into Yiddish and a treatment of Yiddish grammar, Ein gewisser Bericht von der teutsch-hebreischen Schrifft, one of many early treatments of the vernacular.53 Likewise relevant in this context is the city of Zurich, where in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant printers published books in which Hebrew letters appeared, in addition to publishing Jewish books per se. The principal shop was that of Christopher Froschauer, who published a translation of Seyfer Yousifoun (1546), as well as an edition of Seyfer ha-yiro, a book of morals written by Rabbi Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi, both translated by the converted Jew Michael Adam.54 In 1558 there was also a new edition of the Psalms translated by Elia Levita and printed by Eliezer ben Naphtali Herz of Trier and Joseph ben Naphtali.55 51

Amram, Makers of Hebrew Books, index. Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg (1480–1599) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 53 His name was spelled Schadeus/Schadaeus/Schadäus; see W. Horning, ed., Magister Elias Schadäus, Pfarrer an der Alt St. Peterskirche, Professor der Theologie und Münsterprediger zu Strassburg. Beiträge zur Geschichte der lutherischen Judenmission in Strassburg (XIV J.). Judenmissionstractate des M. Elias Schadäus, Schriften des Institutum judaicum 33 (Leipzig: Akademische Buchhandlung W. Faber, 1892). 54 On Adam, see Nokhem Shtif, ‘Mikhael Adams dray yidishe bikher’, Filologishe Shriftn 2 (1928), 135–68. 55 The editio princeps appeared in Venice, printed by Cornelius Adelkind in 1545, and again in Mantua in 1562. 52

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In the sixteenth century, publishing in both Yiddish and Hebrew spread into clearly defined regions and cities of Europe. This was particularly the case for those areas where, for specific cultural, linguistic, and religious reasons, Jewish communities had developed and prospered for several centuries, such as Poland, Bohemia, and Italy. In these regions of medium to high density Jewish settlement, the existence of a potential Yiddish-reading audience could not but encourage printers and booksellers to increase publication in the vernacular. Yiddish printing likewise benefited from a general climate of intellectual agitation, which, among other factors, was tied to the spread of the Reformation which came to define certain cities of the Holy Roman Empire, such as Augsburg and Basel. The interest in Semitic languages, among them Hebrew, and in theological questions relating to the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition, could not but stimulate the publication of Jewish books, in both Hebrew and the vernacular. Finally, there appeared peripheral establishments which itinerant printers generally operated for quite brief periods, the most famous example of which is Paulus Fagius, who brought the Jewish humanist Elia Bahur Levita to the Bavarian town of Isny. ˙ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cartography of Jewish publishing is marked both by obvious stability and by the establishment of new publishing centres, linked especially to the tribulations of the Jews throughout Europe, which has always lent an itinerant aspect to the geography of the Jewish book. The fluctuations in the geographical zones in which Yiddish was spoken also brought about changes in the distribution of printers of Yiddish books. Thus one notes from the seventeenth century onwards, a decline in northern Italy, which lost its role as one of the important centres of Yiddish publishing. On the other hand, even if printing declined in certain cities and increased in others, Yiddish publishing continued to be concentrated in Germany, Bohemia, and Poland, where there existed a vibrant Jewish vernacular culture. Between 1534 and 1648 around seventy Yiddish books were published in Poland, a number which bears witness to the importance of the market for the vernacular books distributed throughout central and eastern Europe.56 This activity was exclusively focused in two cities, Cracow and Lublin, and was divided up among those few rare printers who had obtained royal privileges.57 First of all, Isaac ben Aaron Prostitz who had studied printing in Venice before coming with the proofreader Samuel Boehm to settle in Cracow, where he opened his shop in 1569.58 He was able to open his printing shop thanks to the typographical material, such as frontispieces and other decorations, that he had brought from the Venetian printers Giorgio Cavalli 56

See the bibliography in Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, 75–116. On Jewish publishing in Cracow, see Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-polonyah, 1–41; Balaban, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Druckerei in Polen’, 1–14, 31–4, 36–50. 58 His name could also have been Prossnitz, a town in Moravia. 57

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Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books

and Sebastianus Gryphius, and a licence from King Sigismond II Augustus, granted in 1567 for a period of fifty years. Isaac Prostitz, his sons, Aaron and Issachar, and thereafter his nephews, produced a rich collection of Hebrew and Yiddish books over the course of almost a century.59 These texts well represent the spectrum of possibilities in Old Yiddish literature. One finds almost exclusively religious literature: prayer books (mahzorim, siddurim), translations of biblical books,60 homiletic prose, and epic ˙poems inspired by biblical sources,61 a concordance to the Tanakh,62 but no translation of the entire Torah, such as had been printed in Germany. Also to be mentioned are musor sforim (books of morality), an historical text, the translation of Solomon ibn Verga’s Sheyvet Yehudo, and a single secular book, an adaptation of the Germanic epic Ditrikh of Bern (1597).63 Unlike in Germany and Italy, where books based on non-Jewish epic and courtly literature circulated throughout the sixteenth century, this type of literary text did not make its appearance in Poland until the end of the century. From 1630 to 1670 Menahem Nahum Meisels, assisted by his family, his daughter Czerna, and ˙ Kohen ˙ of Prague, became one of the major printers in Cracow. He by Judah bought out and improved the equipment of Isaac ben Aaron Prostitz, particularly so that he could publish several Yiddish books, among them a mahzor, the Kerouvos (1642), as well as a religious poem, the Touro lid (without˙ date). Lublin was another Polish town in which Yiddish books were published; the Yaffe family settled there and published books until the eighteenth century.64 Kalonymus ben Mordecai collaborated both with Chaim Shahor of Prague, who had obtained several privileges from King Sigismond ˙ II which granted him the right to print books (1550, 1559, 1578), and with Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi, with whom he published a Pentateuch in 1557 and an edition of the Talmud (1559–77). He was assisted by his sons, Joseph, Chaim, and Zevi, who printed various books in Yiddish, among them the celebrated˙ homiletic commentary on the Prophetic books, the Seyfer ha-magid (1623).65 Among the books produced in Cracow and Lublin, one finds some pedlars’ wares. In general such books were in a small format, had a limited number of pages (often without identification of either publisher or date), and were sold 59

There are some thirty books inventoried for the period 1569–1648 in Shmeruk’s bibliography, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, 75–116. 60 In addition to the Pentateuch, mainly the Prophets and the Five Scrolls. 61 Such as the verse adaptation of the books of Samuel (1578 and 1593), of Kings (1582), and of Joshua (1594). 62 The second edition of the Mirkeves ha-mishne or Seyfer shel Rabbi Anshel (1584). 63 Cf. Solomon ibn Verga, Sheyvet Yehudo (EYT 71) and Dietrich of Bern (EYT 78). 64 Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-polonyah, 45–60; and Habermann, ‘Ha-madpis Hayim Shahor beno Itshak ve-hatano Yosef bar Yakar’. ˙ 65 ˙ ˙ Zevi Kalonymus Yaffe published two other editions of Seyfer ha-magid in 1624–6 (the ˙ Latter Prophets) and in 1627 (the Hagiographa).

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by itinerant booksellers or pakntregers (‘pedlars’) who criss-crossed the communities of central and eastern Europe. Pedlars’ wares included religious literature, such as collections of prayers, or tkhinous (‘supplications’),66 books of morality,67 talmudic Aggadot (Agodous),68 manuals of instruction for children,69 and historical texts.70 Only a very few such booklets of inferior status and fragile physical condition have survived, whence the interest in the few remaining traces of published examples of pedlars’ wares, particularly from Poland. In the Mantuan censor’s list of 1595, Yiddish books published in Poland are mentioned, which is proof enough that such products could be both sold to a local market and also exported to bookshops and pedlars and thus read by a Yiddish-reading audience in the major centres of the European diaspora.71 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Yiddish publishing continued to follow the migrations of the Jews through Europe and to accompany their history, marked by frequent wars, expulsions, and pogroms which brought about disruptions in the cartography of European Judaism. Of course certain centres continued to hold an obviously privileged status, such as Prague,72 whose influence extended to Cracow and Lublin.73 From the seventeenth century onward, two families dominated printing in the Bohemian capital, the Kohens and the Baks, who from 1585 to 1789 printed and published numerous liturgical works, books of morals, and biblical translations in Yiddish.74 But in particular it is necessary to note that during this period two 66

This is the case with Seyfer matsil mimoves, a brochure of eight pages comprising tkhinous; St. CB, no. 3952; Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, no. 62. 67 Such as the bilingual morality poem by Elhanan Helin ben Abraham of Frankfurt, Shir ˙ ve-zemer noe al ourekh ha-golus, ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1968); see Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, no. 50. 68 For example, the booklet Shoushano ve-yehudis (16 pp., Cracow, 1543), the Seyfer mogeyn Avrohom (4 pp., Lublin, 1624), and the midrashic text, Seyfer yeytsiras odom (4 pp., Lublin, 1624). See Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, nos. 8, 48, 49, and Baumgarten, ‘ “Le Livre de la Création de l’Homme” ’. 69 Such as Khinukh koton, by Israel ben Abraham (12 pp., Cracow, 1649); see Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, no. 54. 70 Among them the booklet entitled Dos iz di viner gezeyre in taytsh (6 pp. 1609), which relates the persecution of the Jews in Vienna in 1421; see Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, no. 41. 71 Romer-Segal, ‘Sifrut yidish’, and Shmeruk, ‘Reshimah bibliografit’, nos. 6, 16, 26, 28. 72 See particularly, Lieben, ‘Der hebräische Buchdruck in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert’, 88–106. 73 Most of the great printers of Poland either imitated the typographical style of Prague, as did, for example, Menahem Nahum Meisels and his associate Judah Kohen of Prague, or were ˙ ˙ themselves from Prague, as was Chaim Shahor. The books printed by Isaac ben Aaron of ˙ Prostitz were more influenced by the Venetian typographical tradition. 74 See Leopold Zunz, ‘Druckereien in Prag’, Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin, 1845), 261–8. There is a bibliography of Yiddish books published in Prague in Leopold Zunz, ‘Annalen der hebräischen Typographie von Prag vom Jahre 1513 bis zum Jahre 1657’, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 268–303. Zunz inventories almost fifty Yiddish texts from 1526, the date of the first printed text in Yiddish (a prayer in the Haggadah printed by Gershom Kohen), to 1629, the date of the publication of Seyder mitsvous ha-noshim.

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important new centres developed in Amsterdam and in a cluster of German cities. The entire period between the first decades of the seventeenth century and those of the eighteenth century is dominated by the printing houses of Amsterdam.75 Several factors favoured an unprecedented development in printing and marketing Jewish books: less precarious living conditions than in central and eastern Europe (where Jewish life was disrupted by numerous dramatic and catastrophic events such as the Chmielnicki massacres), a much greater intellectual tolerance than in neighbouring countries, the relative prosperity of Jewish merchants who traded with numerous countries throughout the world, and the existence of a strong Jewish community made up of long-time Marrano residents and more recent Ashkenazic refugees. On the other hand it is clear that the catastrophes and crises that disrupted central and eastern European Jewish life could not but increase the need–– especially among ‘women and the unlearned’––for religious booklets and the Scriptures in the vernacular. Amsterdam was one of the principal suppliers of Yiddish books intended for the study by, and consolation and edification of, the Jewish masses. During the course of an entire century, printers in Amsterdam published books of a rare technical quality, improved and updated fonts and typographical techniques, and supported the work of noteworthy booksellers who marketed their products––a great many of which were in Yiddish––in the Holy Roman Empire and eastern Europe. The printing style of Amsterdam attained an exceptionally high level of typographical excellence, and thus came to exert a great influence on Jewish printing throughout Europe. The first printer who gained fame in the printing of Yiddish books in Amsterdam was Uri Phoebus ben Aaron ha-Levi, who was active from 1658 to 1689. His continued reputation was due to his printing, among other vernacular books,76 the first complete translation of the Bible without an accompanying Hebrew text or commentaries (by Jekuthiel Blitz in 1676–79 75

Lajb Fuks and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands (1585–1815): Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1984–7); Lajb and R. G. Fuks, ‘Hebreeuwse Boekdrukkunst in Nederland’, Studia Rosenthaliana 14 (1980), 191–204; Marion Aptroot, ‘Dutch Impact on Amsterdam Yiddish Prints’, in Dialects of the Yiddish Language, Winter Studies in Yiddish 2, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 7– 11; and Marion Aptroot et al., eds., Jiddische Bücher und Handschriften aus den Niederlanden (Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Instituut; Düsseldorf: Heinrich Heine Universität, 2000). 76 Among the books published by Uri Phoebus ha-Levi, Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld list twentysix bilingual or exclusively Yiddish books, primarily prayer books (Mahzorim, Haggadot), bib˙ lical commentaries and translations, books of morality, and also books for recreational reading such as the Bovo-bukh (1661) (Hebrew Typography, 252). These books, all printed according to the highest standards, were sold especially in the vast Eastern European markets, such as in Poland, which resulted in consistently large print runs during the entire period. Thus there were 6,300 copies printed of his translation of the Bible and 4,000 of his translation of Yousifoun (1661), at a price of 16 Stuyvers each.

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(EYT 113)). He also published the first Yiddish periodical, Dinstagishe un fraytagishe Kurantn ‘Tuesday and Friday Courier’ (1680–1687 (EYT 115)).77 His local rival, Joseph Athias, also decided to print a complete Bible in Yiddish, which was edited by Joseph ben Alexander Witzenhausen and published in 1679 in a run of six thousand copies (EYT 114).78 This rivalry led both to the ruin of Uri Phoebus, who was forced to move to Zolkiew, and to significant financial losses for Joseph Athias.79 This failure should also be understood in the context of the lack of success such translations had in Poland, where Jewish readers preferred Bibles that included commentaries, such as the Tsene-Rene, to simple and straightforward translations of the biblical text based on the Protestant model. Among other printers who gained renown through the production of vernacular books, one should mention David de Castro Tartas,80 Moses Kosman ben Elijah Gomperz and his successors,81 77

Shlomo Berger, ‘Reshot ha-itonot be-yidish’, Khuliyot 6 (Spring 2000), 363–71. Between 1667 and 1686, Athias published thirteen bilingual or exclusively Yiddish books. See Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography, 286–338; Lajb Fuks ‘De drukers familie Athias’, in Amor Librorum: Bibliographic and Other Essays. A Tribute to Abraham Horodisch on his Sixtieth Birthday (Amsterdam: Erasmus Antiquariat; Zurich: Zafafo Foundation, 1958), 65– 9; J. S. Da Silva Rosa, ‘Joseph Athias (1635–1700). Ein berühmter jüdischer Drucker’, Soncino Blätter 3 (1930), 107–12; Herbert Ivan Bloom, Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Williamsport: Bayard Press, 1937), 48–52. 79 On the details of this conflict, rich in information concerning the activities of Jewish printers in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, see Lajb Fuks, ‘De twee gelijktijdig te Amsterdam in de 17e eeuw verschenen Jiddische Bijbelvertalingen’, Het Boek 32 (1955–7), 146–65; idem, ‘Ha-reka ha-hevrati ve-ha-kalkali le-hadpasat shnei targumei tanakh be-yidish ˙ be-Amsterdam, samukh li-shnat 1680’, Gal-ed 1 (1973), 31–50; and Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography, 237–40, 296–9. Uri Phoebus went to Zolkiew (or Zholkva) in 1692 at the invitation of the the Polish King Jan Sobieski, who wanted him to set up a Hebrew press in the city. Up to that time Jewish books had been imported from abroad, especially from the Netherlands and its capital Amsterdam. The settlement of Uri Phoebus ha-Levi in Zolkiew inaugurated a new era in the history of printing in eastern Europe. See Balaban, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Druckerei in Polen’, 14–15; Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-polonyah, 62–4. 80 He was trained as a printer by Menasseh ben Israel, the first printer to settle in Amsterdam (1626). His printing shop was active from 1660 to 1696; he published four Yiddish books, among them the Seyfer ha-magid (1676) in a run of 3,000 copies. 81 Between 1687 and 1711 they published twenty-one Yiddish books. In addition to liturgical texts, books of edification, and biblical translations, there is also a book of mathematics and computation (Arye (Löb/Leyb) Levi, Seyfer yedios ha-kheshbon, 1699 (EYT 122)), books to be used in disputations with Christians (Isaac (Jacob) ben Saul Abraham, Bukh der fartseykhnung, 1696), and moral guides for travellers (Moses ben Meir Kohen, Seyfer derekh Moushe, 1699 (EYT 121), and Gershon ben Eliezer ha-Levi, Seyfer gelilous erets yisroel, 1624, Fürth, 1691); see also Jean Baumgarten, ‘Jerusalem in Seventeenth-Century Travellers’ Accounts in Yiddish’, Mediterranean Historical Review 7 (1992), 219–26; idem, ‘Image du monde séfarade dans des récit de voyage vers la Terre Sainte en langue yiddish (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)’, in Esther Benbassa, ed., Mémoires juives d’Espagne et du Portugal (Paris: Publisud, 1996), 223–37; idem, ‘Sur les traces des dix tribus disparues: le récit de voyage de David D’Beth Hillel’, Les Cahiers du Judaisme 10 (Summer–Autumn 2001), 4–15. 78

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and Caspar Pietersen Steen.82 The typographical quality, the variety of the products of these printing dynasties, the quantitative significance of the production directed less toward an interior market than the vast market of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe––all these factors explain why the Yiddish books published in Amsterdam assumed such a hegemonic position in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. As already noted, the conditions of life were often quite precarious in eastern Europe; wars, expulsions, and massacres forced many Jews to leave the communities of Poland and immigrate to cities in Germany.83 After the disasters of the Thirty Years War, many rulers of German cities, wishing to reconstruct the country and develop industry, permitted Jews to settle in their principalities, where they were allowed in particular to set up printing shops.84 On the other hand, despite the growing demand for books, the difficulty in obtaining the necessary permissions from the ruling authorities impeded the expansion of Jewish printing, especially in Poland. Jewish printers had no choice but to work in Christian shops or to search for cities where they were welcomed by the ruling nobility. Such obstacles had profound repercussions, not only for the book trade in eastern Europe, but also in the Germanspeaking lands, which as a result became the place of publication for many Hebrew and Yiddish books. The printing of Jewish books clearly became important in many German cities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.85 In Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, where there was no possibility for Jews to obtain permission to print books themselves, they had recourse to the services of Christian establishments.86 Thus it came about that Johann Koellner and Balthasar Christian Wust employed Jewish printers and published liturgical books (Seyder tefilous, makhzourim) and bilingual Bibles, as well as the edition of the Ki-bukh (1697) by Moses ben Eliezer Wallich.87 Some of the Jewish 82 This Christian publisher who employed Jewish printers from Poland printed seven books in Yiddish. The edition of Seyfer ha-magid (1699) was printed in a run of 5,000 copies. See Isabelle H. Van Eeghen, ‘Caspar Pietersen Steen, een drukker van Hebreeuwse boeken in Amsterdam (1692–1703)’, Studia Rosenthaliana 1 (1967), 51–65. 83 Cf., for example, the fate of the Jews of Buda during the 1686 reconquest of the city occupied by the Turks; the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1670; and the massacres that accompanied the Chmielnicki uprising in 1648. 84 Moritz Steinschneider, ‘Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland’, ZGJD 1 (1887), 103–5, 281–7, 377–82; 2 (1888), 200–3; 3 (1889), 84–6, 262–74; 5 (1892), 154–86. 85 See Menahem Schmetzer, ‘Hebrew Printing and Publishing in Germany (1650–1750): On Jewish Book Culture and the Emergence of Modern Jewry’, Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 33 (1988), 369–83. 86 Since Jews were not allowed to open a printing shop in Berlin, the first printers of Jewish books there were the pastor D. E. Jablonsky (who published Yiddish books) and later Barukh Buchbinder (Tsene-rene, 1709). See Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim . . . she-beeyropah, 87 f. From 1535 on, the book fair in Frankfurt am Main attracted Jewish printers and booksellers; see Friedberg, ibid., 62 f. 87 Daniel J. Cohen, ‘An Autographic Letter by Moshe Wallich, Author of the KUH-BUCH:

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printing shops in Germany were influenced by the styles of Prague printers. One might thus take note of Wilhermsdorf, where from 1670 to 1743, Isaac ben Judah Löb Yüdels and Hirsch ben Chaim published some thirty bilingual books, and in Yiddish, an edition of Kinig Artus hoyf (1718) and Bovo-bukh (1724).88 Also to be mentioned is Sulzbach, in northern Bavaria.89 In 1669, Prince Christian August, who was greatly attracted to mysticism and theosophy, authorized Isaac ben Judah Löb Yüdels, the son of the Prague typographer, to set up a press. His successor was Moses ben Uri Schraga Bloch, who published a noteworthy edition of the Zohar (1684). This town rapidly became an important centre of book publishing in Europe; from 1685 until the mid-nineteenth century, around seven hundred Hebrew and Yiddish books were published there, particularly musor sforim, sidurim, and makhzourim, which were much utilized in the many communities of the Ashkenazic rite. Finally let us mention Fürth, where the presses of the Schneur family and of Hirsch Frankfurter opened in 1691. In this city there was a succession of printers up to the end of the eighteenth century, during which period they printed nearly ninety books in Yiddish.90 Another important centre, influenced by the typographical tradition of

the Key to his Biography and Family Connections in Worms, Frankfort and Hamburg’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 14 (1982), 4–16. 88

Aron Freimann, ‘Annalen der hebräischen Druckerei in Wilhermsdorf’, 100–15 in vol. ii of Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage A. Berliner’s, ed. Aron Freimann and Meier Hildesheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Kaufmann, 1903; rpt. New York: Arno, 1980). In 1669 Isaac ben Judah Löb Yüdels, originally from Prague and a descendant of the famous Gersonide (Kohen) printing dynasty, was authorized to open a printing shop. He was assisted by his daughters Rebecca and Rachel, while his son-in-law Menahem Mana ben Isaac Jacob was the ˙ proofreader. 89 In 1667, Abraham Lichtenthaler (a Lutheran) established a press there. He was assisted by Isaac ben Judah Löb Yüdels, who settled in Wilhermsdorf. See M. Weinberg, ‘Die hebräischen Druckereien in Sulzbach: ihre Geschichte; ihre Drucke; ihr Personal’, Jahrbuch der JüdischLiterarischen Gesellschaft 1 (1903), 19–202; 15 (1923), 125–55; 21 (1930), 319–70; Joseph Prijs, ‘Die ersten Sulzbacher hebräischen Drücke (1669–70)’, Mitteilungen der Soncino Gesellschaft 7– 10 (1931), 26–33. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, author of Kabbala denudata (1677–84), was also a resident of Sulzbach. 90 There is an inventory of the books in Leopold Löwenstein, ‘Zur Geschichte der Juden in Fürth: Dritter Teil: Die hebräischen Druckereien in Fürth’, Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft 10 (1912), 49–192; Joseph Prijs, Nachträge zur L. Löwenstein Bibliographie der Fürther hebräischen Drucke im Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft X (Frankfurt am Main: privately printed, 1938); Moritz Steinschneider, ‘Miscellen’ (Fürther Drucke, 1691–1730), Hamazkir Hebræische Bibliographie 18 (1878), 114–15; see also the series of publications on early printed texts from Fürth by Hermann Süß in the journal, Nachrichten für den jüdischen Bürger Fürths: ‘Die “Fürther Megille” von Josef Herz’ (September 1984), 13–17; ‘ “Esther”––Die “Fürther Megille” von Josef Herz’ (September 1985), 9–12; ‘Ein “Projekt” Ansbach-Fürth 1745’ (September 1985), 31–3; ‘ “Esther”––Die “Fürther Megille” von Josef Herz’ (September 1986), 16–18.

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Amsterdam, was in the small city of Dyhernfurth in Lower Silesia (Pol. Brzeg Dolny) near Wrocław.91 In 1689 local authorities who wished to promote the publishing industry authorized thirteen Jewish families of printers, in addition to Sabbatai Bass, to settle and establish presses, who––along with other printers who followed them––published numerous texts in the vernacular over the course of almost a century.92 Dyhernfurth had a competitor in the town of Breslau, where books were published in Hebrew and Yiddish, beginning in 1719.93 Among the other German cities that distinguished themselves in the printing of Yiddish books, several towns in the vicinity and domain of Frankfurt am Main should be mentioned: Offenbach,94 Hanau,95 Homburg,96 Neuwied,97 then, after 1750, Roedelheim,98 Jessnitz,99 and in the north, Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck,100 Dessau and 91

Located on major trade routes, Wrocław was the site of a fair. On Hebrew printing in Wrocław, see. Markus Brann, ‘Der hebräische Buchdruck in Breslau’, Jahrbuch zur Belehrung und Unterhaltung 30 (1891), 75–81. 92 Previously, books had been exported especially from Amsterdam, Frankfurt an der Oder, and Breslau. Sabbatai ben Joseph Bass was the compiler of the first bibliography of 2,200 Jewish texts, the Seyfer sifsey yesheynim (Amsterdam: Uri Phoebus ha-Levi, 1680; Dyhernfurth: Sabbatai Bass, 1693). He learned the printer’s art from Uri Phoebus ha-Levi in Amsterdam. See Herbert C. Zafren, ‘Dyhernfurth and Sabbatai Bass: A Typographical Profile’, 543–80a in Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History, and Literature in Honour of I. Edward Kiev (New York: Ktav, 1971); and ‘More on Dyhernfurth’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 10 (1971–72), 62–8; M. Marx, ‘A Bibliography of Hebrew Printing in Dyhernfurth (1689–1718)’, 217–36 in Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History, and Literature in Honour of I. Edward Kiev (New York: Ktav, 1971). Marx inventories some thirty Yiddish books (among approximately 130) from this period, primarily religious and edifying texts. Sabbatai Bass, who was open to secular knowledge, printed popular medical, computational, and mathematical texts. 93 Markus Brann, ‘Geschichte und Annalen der Dyhernfurther Druckerei’, MGWJ 40 (1896), 474–80, 515–26, 560–74; Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim she-be-eyropah, 55–64. 94 Seligmann ben Hirtz-Reis published several adaptations of Germanic romance and epic there, such as Kinig Artus hoyf, Floris un blancheflor, Zibn vayzn maynster. 95 It was there that the first edition of the Tsene-rene was published in 1622. In the eighteenth century, the Calvinist theologian Henricus Jacobus van Bashuysen opened a press (1709–12) in which he published Hebrew books. See Ernst J. Zimmermann, ‘Die Hanauer hebräischen Drucke (1610–1744)’, Hanauisches Magazin (Supplement to Hanauischer Anzeiger) 3/7 (1 June 1924). 96 See Aron Freimann, ‘Die hebräischen Druckereien in Homburg v. d. H. und Rödelheim in den Jahren 1711–57’, Zeitschrift für hebræische Bibliographie 21 (1918), 14–19. 97 While working in the establishment of Bernhardt Grat (a Christian) in 1735, Israel ben Moses printed a bilingual makhzour. The Yiddish section was typeset by his daughter Rebecca. 98 Beginning in 1798, Wolf Benjamin Ze’ev Heidenheim was licensed to print books there. From 1800 to 1802, he published the nine volumes of his Seyfer kerouvos u-makhzour in Hebrew, with a German translation printed in the Hebrew alphabet. These books of prayers went through multiple editions and were distributed throughout the Jewish communities of the Germanspeaking territories. 99 See Max Freudenthal, Aus der Heimat Mendelssohns. Moses Benjamin Wulff und seine Familie, die Nachkommen des Moses Isserles (Berlin: F. E. Lederer, 1900), 251–70. 100 These three communities were reunited in 1671. From 1688 to 1722, one printing shop operated in Wandsbeck. In 1727, Samuel S. Popert opened a shop in Altona, where he printed Yiddish books, assisted by Joseph ben Jacob Maarsen, an itinerant printer-bookseller from

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Köthen,101 and finally, Frankfurt an der Oder.102 Let us end this inventory by mentioning the Austrian town of Brünn103 and the city of Vienna,104 where some prayer books and ethical books in Yiddish were published for a local readership. A combination of various factors led to Germany’s playing an important role in the publication and distribution of Jewish books during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were numerous factors that stimulated the development of Jewish printing in Germany: the interest of the princes in promoting the printing industry as a source of commercial prosperity for the cities, the financial commitment of court Jews, the existence both of a vast domestic market, composed of avid readers of religious and secular literature in the vernacular, and of markets in eastern Europe, where no Jewish press existed before the end of the seventeenth century.105 The convergence of these diverse factors made the Germanic lands a focal point in the production and distribution of Jewish books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the history of the Yiddish book entered a new era, marked on the one hand by a slight decline in the number of printers in western Europe, where the vernacular language played a progressively smaller social and cultural role, giving way to majority languages or Hebrew, and on the other hand by the expansion of publishing in eastern Europe, where the majority of Yiddish speakers were concentrated until the Second World War. In considering the restructuring of the Jewish book network in Europe, it is also necessary to investigate the authors, production, and distribution, as well as the readers and the types of books that could be produced in the vernacular. Although surviving information is necessarily fragmentary, especially due Amsterdam. In 1723, the celebrated rabbi Jacob ben Zevi Emden obtained a licence authorizing ˙ him to print Hebrew books. See Bernhard Brilling, ‘Privilegien der hebräischen Buchdruckereien in Altona (1726–1836): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des hebräischen Buchdruckes in Altona’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 9 (1969–71), 153–66; idem, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebräischen Buchdruckereien in Altona. II. Der Kampf der Buchdrucker Gebrüder Bonn in Altona gegen die rabbinische Zensur (1805)’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 13 (1980), 26–35; Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim . . . she-be-eyropah, 104–8. 101

Dessau and Köthen are towns in Anhalt, a principality formed of several enclaves in Saxony. There were functioning presses in Köthen in 1621 and in Dessau in 1694, where the court Jew, Moses Benjamin Wulff, worked. Between 1696 and 1704 some thirty books were published. 102 Beginning in 1595 a Jewish press operated there. In the eighteenth century, it was Michael Gottschalk, a Christian printer, who printed Yiddish books. See Bernhard Brilling, ‘Zur Geschichte der hebraeischen Buchdruckereien in Frankfurt a. d. Oder: Urkundliche Beiträge’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 1 (1953), 84–94, 145–56, 183–96; 2 (1955–6), 79–96, 102–6. 103 In 1753 a press was established here, directed by Franz Joseph Neumann. 104 On Austria, see G. Wolf, ‘Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Buchdruckereien in Österreich’, Hamazkir Hebræische Bibliographie 8 (1865), 55–60. On Vienna, see Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-arim . . . she-be-eyropah, 94–104. 105 After his financial setbacks in Amsterdam, Uri Phoebus ha-Levi settled in Zolkiew in 1692; see Friedberg, Toledot ha-defus ha-ivri be-polonyah, 41, 59–63.

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to the loss of a portion of the Yiddish books because of their physical fragility and their inferior social status (in comparison to Hebrew books), complete books and especially prefaces and colophons survive which provide a wealth of information concerning the authors, printers, and readers. At the same time, there are characteristic features of the presentation and constitution of the Yiddish books which must be taken into account in their relations to the Jewish book in general. The authors of Yiddish books generally belonged to the class of the moderately well educated, who, although they were not members of the scholarly elite (talmidei khakhomim), had at least received a traditional education and knew the Jewish source texts. Nonetheless, since they recognized the need to reach the Jewish masses who were often neglected by, or strangers to, the world of religious literature in Hebrew, they wrote or adapted classic texts in the vernacular, a completely new practice in Jewish society of the Renaissance. The most common phrase found in the prefaces clearly addresses this particular situation: the author is identified as ‘writer’ or ‘servant of all pious women’.106 This female audience could have been made up as much of the anonymous masses of those who read Yiddish books (or had someone read the books to them), as it was of the patronesses (generins) to whom the authors dedicated their books or for whom the copyists transcribed vernacular texts. Thus one finds this final stanza in the Hamburg manuscript of the Shmuel-bukh:107 I have written this book with my own hand, My name is Liva of Regensburg, Freydlin is the name of my dear patroness, I hope that she will be able to read this book with pleasure.

The term shrayber implies various levels of the creation of, and relations to, the written text. It can designate a simple copyist (soufer) who transcribes a text which he did not himself compose. It can likewise designate an adapter who translates a text written in Hebrew or a non-Jewish language. He is sometimes content simply to transcribe or translate the text, but he could also make specific adaptions of it for a Jewish audience, which presupposes a rewriting of the original text, and thus in fact results in a new creation. In such cases the distinction between an adapter and an author is blurred, in so far as the task of reformulating the text assumes both revisions and a 106 Leyb (Leo Judah) Bresh (Brzes´c´), translator of the Pentateuch (Cremona, 1560), so desigi RP IW i A · RB ie YL ie YWx YL ie YRx$o RED x OW aA x · REB e VYA i (‘I the nates himself in the verse preface to his work: REB writer | [for] all women | and pious people’). The same designation is found in the works of Elia Levita and Anshel Levi, the author of a midrashic commentary on Pirkei Avot (Pirkey ovous), who identify themselves as ‘servants of pious women’. 107 Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. 313 (1st quarter of 16th century, Northern Italy), fragmentary, contains 5,745 lines (cf. Steinschneider, Catalog . . . Hamburg, no. 33).

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knowledge of the religious textual tradition. Finally, there exist authors in the fullest sense. Among the shraybers, one could thus find some well-read scholars, such as was the case with Moses Esrim Vearba, whose name in itself indicates the author’s familiarity with the texts of the religious tradition, especially the Bible, since esrim ve-arba means the ‘twenty-four’ books of the Hebrew Bible (according to the traditional count). In the Paris manuscript of the Seyfer Shmuel (Shmuel-bukh) one reads: ‘My name is Moses Esrim Vearba | I made this book with my own hands’ (EYT 47). Elia Levita is the perfect example of an author-adapter-creator, especially in his chivalric romance, the Bovo-bukh (Isny, 1541; EYT 33), a free reworking of an Italian original, which is full of inventiveness and subtle literary brilliance. Levita himself was a veritable prototype of the Renaissance Jewish intellectual: the intimate of Christian humanists and author of scholarly treatises on the Massorah in Hebrew and of satirical poems and courtly romances in Yiddish. His genius made of him far more than a mere adaptor. Nonetheless, the basic profile of the author of Old Yiddish literature is especially characteristic of the moderately well educated class. Thus one finds minor religious functionaries of the community (kley koudesh), who might be elementary school teachers (melamdim), cantors (khazonim), beadles (shamosim), scribes (soufrim), or intinerant preachers (magidim). One also finds authors who combined the roles of adaptor, publisher, and bookseller. It also happened––although it may have functioned primarily as a literary convention intended to forge a closer relationship with the reader––that the author claimed that he was a simple copyist (ha-soufer hediout) or an uneducated boor (amorets) and so identified himself to his audience. In a prayer book published in Ichenhausen in 1544 (EYT 48), the adaptor, Joseph bar Yakar, identifies himself: · AP½P½oWRU IYYA JRAH OE x IYYA IYB VYA IED ‘for I am an ignoramus, a wretch’ (fol. 2r). Even Abraham Aptheker Ashkenazi, a pharmacist (apteyker) and author of a book of edification Sam khayim (Prague, 1590), remarks in the preface, that he had not studied Halakhah, and was in general not well versed in studying the sacred texts.108 Thus it is that sometimes a Yiddish author is somewhat ashamed to go up against scholars in what is deemed an immodest manner and encroach on their specific domain, as is demonstrated in this excerpt from the preface to the translation of the Song of Songs by Isaac Sulkes (Cracow, 1579, fol. 3r):109

108 There is even humility in the declaration by Elhanan Hendel ben Benjamin Wolf Kirch˙ hahn, the author of Seyfer simkhas ha-nefesh (pt. i, Frankfurt am Main, 1707): ‘Do not imagine that I invented anything new, but everything that I say is found in our dear Torah. . . . Also do not imagine that I would wish to punish anyone or that I am the one writing rules and morals that come from my thoughts. I am much too simple for that. I am nothing but an ordinary man (eyn shlekhter man). The task of writing is for me a job (melokho) in which there is very little wisdom.’ 109 See Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin, 36; Zinberg, Geshikhte, vi. 141–2.

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Dear masters, I see that I have failed, and that my folly has led me to enter into your domain, great masters who are filled with Torah and sit day and night before their holy books. But I, poor man [evyoun], only occasionally look into them. They [the scholars] can write books from which come great results. I, on the other hand, can scarcely recite the benediction over bread. I then ought to be ashamed of undertaking such tasks. But truly it is certain, you must believe me, there need to be such books in the world also, for not everyone can run to the finest shops, to buy gold and silver and velvet and silk. One also needs many other things in the house. The peasants are more numerous than the nobles, which allows me to think that I can make this book. Thus we also need to have small shops which offer merchandise to the ordinary person in exchange for his money. The small shopkeepers have everything that one can ask of them. Elijah the storekeeper can confirm for me: they sell everyone what they need. And if indeed a noble comes shopping, there he can find a mirror for his wife or a whistle for his child. He can buy what he wants in the shop. The ordinary person cannot do that. When he goes to the rich merchant’s shop, he cannot get anything for his money, even if he happens to find something that he likes. Everything is too expensive for him and beyond his means. However, in the small merchant’s shop, he finds everything that he needs. Therefore I, too, have risked doing the same thing and opened my own small shop for the simple folk and for women. Let them come and have a look at the shop. They will find there all kinds of things that are written in our holy books. These things I have collected together into the Song of Songs.

Beyond the literary convention which is characteristic of the style of these prefaces and consists––with a touch of irony and an intent to stoop to a lower level––of defining the author as ‘ignorant’, it remains clear that many of the authors came from the stratum of the moderately well educated in Jewish society. These authors did no more than express the aspirations of many middle-class Jews, especially shopkeepers, craftsmen, and Jewish villagers, who either suffered from not being able to study as much as they might wish, or demanded increased participation in religious life. Ignorance was not to have as its fateful consequence their exclusion from study and religious culture. Yiddish books served as palliatives for all those who did not know enough Hebrew to have access to the traditional texts, but who did not necessarily demand a leading role in religious life nor the right to know and study the tradition. This aspiration is well expressed by Isaac Sulkes, who explains in this same translation of the Song of Songs (Cracow, 1579): For most of the people who live in large cities are merchants, and whoever is not a shopkeeper has to find a way to feed himself however he can, whether by petty thievery or robbery. . . . So he supports himself by committing sins, and thus he cannot fully keep the mitsvous [commandments] nor study Torah, because he has to search for a way to make a living. And the shopkeeper manages to make a good living and earn his income legally when he wants to do so and when his dealings are honest. But he cannot keep the mitsvous well; for many of them have to be deferred, even when he wants to fulfil them. (fol. 117r)

Thus one can certainly explain the use of this kind of book, intended primar-

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ily for all those whose occupation or lack of time obstructed their diligent keeping of the Torah’s commandments. Yiddish literature of the period is further characterized by the fact that women were directly linked with the world of books, either in their production or their composition. There is, for instance, evidence of women working in printing shops. Generally they were the daughters or wives of the printers. Thus in 1586 a translation of the Psalms by Moses Stendel was printed in Cracow in the shop of Isaac ben Aaron Prostitz.110 On the last page one finds that the book was typeset by the widow Royzl Fishl, daughter of R. Joseph ha-Levi. In the preface, she explains that she found Moses Stendel’s translation of the Psalms while she was in Hanover: ‘I transcribed it with my own hand, so that it would not be lost; then I thought it over and had it printed’ (fol. 2r). Israel Zinberg