An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650-1800

A book without preface is like a body without soul.

—Rabbi Meir Crescas, The Book of the Tashbets (Amsterdam, 1741)

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Much can be gleaned from an introduction or preface about the book to which it is prelude, the author, his ideas, and their context.¹ These texts have a distinctive structure and a specific logic, however, and they enable students of book history to propose another angle of research that aims at showing the place and position of the printed matter within a cultural setting. This can be an especially fruitful terrain in the world of Yiddish:a vernacular of the Ashkenazi Diaspora of Europe, a language that Jews spoke throughout the continent regardless of frontiers, a language that formed and united a people and helped forge its unique cultural blend. This was not the Jewish Latin—a fate that befell the scholarly, highbrow Hebrew—Yiddish was a vibrant, living vernacular. Yiddish paratexts of the early modern era can therefore shed light on books, their status and role in Ashkenazi society, and their importance to Jewish culture in Europe.

The theory of paratexts, as outlined by Gerard Genette, focuses on works of fiction and describes them as a "threshold of interpretation."² Paratexts, whether written or devised by authors, publishers, or any other promoter, are designed to persuade people to buy and read the book and to encourage them to receive the volume in the way they consider appropriate. Paratexts entice the reader to delve into the book and provide clues about how it is constructed, how it was conceived, and its object. The study of paratexts therefore deals with the sociology of literature, the intellectual background of authors, texts and their environment, and their impact on literary criticism. Paratexts enable us to reach beyond a "naïve" approach to literature and reveal an interim stage in book production usually considered to be a merely technical phase but in fact of much greater importance. Paratexts are not external but internal, ulterior literary devices that represent a legitimate section of literary criticism and booklore.

Despite Genette's theory, however, paratexts do not operate in one direction only into the text; often the text dictates the structure and content of its paratexts, taking the reader beyond the confines of the text.³ While an author may seek acclaim as an artist and while the publisher may hope for financial success, paratexts operate within a web of considerations. Their object is to support the book while placing it within a wider cultural setting—dominant literary circles of the day, the potential audience among religious and other sections of society, financial considerations, and matters relating to form and content and their interrelation. Authors may not always be interested in these questions, but publishers definitely are. Their concern is to support the author and his book, and their strategy includes paratexts that place the book within a context.

Although most of the paratexts discussed here relate to nonfiction, this is no reason not to employ Genette's theory. Their basic function is no different from paratexts in fiction: namely, to persuade people to buy and read the book and to try to influence the way it is received. Clearly, readers view the text of a novel or poem from a specific perspective and exercise a certain freedom in forming an interpretation, so these paratexts may focus on intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic areas not touched on in nonfiction. After all, there is a world of difference between buying an anthology of short stories and buying a grammar or mathematics textbook. Yet this is more a question of content than of form or structure. Nonfiction has its own concerns, and these are reflected in its paratexts, too. As will be seen, publishers of nonfiction were just as keen to control the process of book production, maybe even more so.

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From its earliest days, the market for Yiddish...