Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750, and: Un beau livre d’histoires: Eyn shön mayse bukh; Fac-similé de l’editio princeps de Bâle (1602) (review)

For the better part of a thousand years, the majority of European Jews dreamed, thought, worked, and loved in Yiddish; and though the multilingualism that characterized European Jewish life generated a correspondingly complex literary system, it seems fair to suggest that when fables, epics, wonder tales, and other stories reached the vast majority of Jewish eyes and ears, they did so in the culture’s working vernacular, not the high-status Hebrew that was the lingua franca of all elite, sacred productions.

The critical study of Yiddish life and literature in general, and particularly in the premodern period (roughly before 1750), was tragically interrupted in the twentieth century by the Holocaust and by Stalinist repression; among the vast roll of victims to Nazism and Communism were many of the brightest lights of Yiddish scholarship. In recent years, the field has only just begun to recover some of its momentum—aided immeasurably by the widespread acceptance of Jewish studies on campuses in North America, Europe, and of course Israel—though with certain notable exceptions, the vast majority of that scholarship has focused on either linguistic matters of the elite productions of a newly secularized, cosmopolitan, engaged group of writers who flourished from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Second World War. As a result, some of the most basic research in the field of early modern Yiddish literature (critical editions, bibliographic spadework, basic analysis) remains a desideratum.

This is beginning to change, thanks in no small part to the scholars whose work is reviewed here. Jerold Frakes’s earlier work on alterity and ideology in Old Yiddish studies showed him to be a subtle and theoretically sophisticated detective of the dizzyingly and dazzlingly complex agendas behind the scholarship on premodern Yiddish over the last several centuries. In recent years, however, he has turned to immeasurably assisting the work of others in studying the period’s literary output. With this mammoth anthology of early Yiddish texts, along with his careful translation and revision of Jean Baumgarten’s seminal Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, Frakes has done more to revitalize the study of Yiddish before the modern period in English-speaking countries than any other scholar.

Frakes’s purpose in compiling Early Yiddish Texts is not, primarily, for the uninitiated; the texts themselves remain untranslated (though the herculean efforts in rendering difficult-to-read manuscripts and no-longer-familiar typographies should not go unnoted), and many of the entries are excerpts from longer works. Surrounded as they are, however, by introductory notes, substantive bibliographies of extant criticism and research, and a useful index that categorizes the works by genre as well as by chronology, the anthology will remain the essential starting point for all research in the field for decades, if not indeed longer.

Frakes’s careful choices remind readers, scholars, and casual skimmers of some of the cornerstones of new (and, in some cases, old) research on pre-modern Yiddish literature; space allows us to focus primarily on three here. First and foremost is the wide variety of genres that composed that literature, which allow it to speak to scholars in as many fields as there are disciplines that study the age. Frakes includes (among other genres) Bible translations and paraphrases, private letters, books of customs, dramas, medical texts, epics, morality books, travel guides, legal texts, fables, glossaries, and newspapers. Almost all of these works (and others like them; Frakes makes no claims for the exhaustiveness of the anthology) are grossly understudied and have much to offer the scholar of Jewish studies.

They are also of value to scholars of non-Jewish studies, which is the second point. Yiddish texts, sacred and secular...