Early Yiddish Epic

Introduction

ix Introduction Although it is rather rare in the field of medieval studies to experience “late-breaking news,” it does occasionally happen, even in the subdiscipline of Yiddish epic. In 1957 L. Fuks, the librarian of the Rosenthaliana collection at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, published a sumptuous two-volume documentation of a fourteenth-century anthology of eight Yiddish texts (eighty-four pages in its surviving format), five of which belong to the genre of heroic verse/epic. The manuscript was one among the thousands of documents brought by Solomon Schechter in 1896 to Cambridge University Library from the geniza of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo).1 The publication was a thunderclap in the field of Yiddish studies, spawning scores of text editions, commentaries, linguistic and cultural analyses, book reviews, and conference papers over the course of the ensuing decades, quite transforming the subdiscipline of early Yiddish studies in the process. Perhaps less dramatically, but in the long term perhaps no less significantly , in 1986 Anna Maria Babbi, a young scholar attempting to reconstruct the complex northern Italian publishing history of Paris e Viena (Paris and Viena), an Italian reflex of the Pan-European epic of the Renaissance period, inadvertently discovered a complete copy of the Yiddish adaptation of that narrative, ‫װיענה‬ ‘‫אונ‬ ‫פאריז‬ Pariz un Viene (Pariz and Viene),2 published by Francesco dalle Donne in Verona in 1594, which at that time was otherwise extant and thus known to scholars only in fragments.3 The anonymous Yiddish text—a magnificent Renaissance epic on an aesthetic par with the works of Boiardo, Tasso, and Ariosto—is still in the process of transforming the conception of the literary landscape of sixteenth-century Yiddish. And again quite recently (2011) and more quietly still, there was a spectacular find in the realm of early Yiddish epic: a text dated to 1349 (at the latest) was unearthed by an archaeological team excavating a medieval synagogue in the city of Cologne.4 A somewhat more detailed description of this find and its significance may be in order here, since it is still not widely known. The synagogue on that site had first been destroyed in the wave of anti-Jewish violence x  Introduction coincident with the onset of the First Crusade in 1096, then rebuilt, and again burned in the so-called Plague Pogrom on the night of August 23–24, 1349 (the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day), when most Jewish inhabitants of the city were systematically slaughtered and those individuals who had taken refuge in the synagogue were then burned alive in the arson of the synagogue. Much of the rubble and other remains of the synagogue were then dumped into pits, from which archaeologists have since 2007 recovered thousands of artifacts. Among these artifacts (including book bindings and parchment fragments) recovered from beneath the women’s synagogue area are some seventy thousand slate fragments, of which approximately one hundred and fifty are marked with script or designs; the slate fragments probably originated from the upper floor and may date from a period just before the fire.5 Many of the slate tablets are inscribed with lists of names, a few with Hebrew texts (a biblical verse, two brief halakhic texts), a description of a building (bill of sale, will?), and a game-board design, while several slates bear clear examples of pen (?) trials and the writing practice of beginners; some of the tablets bear more than one layer of inscription.6 In addition to the Hebrew-alphabet texts, several of the texts are written in the Roman alphabet (German). Much of the writing is indecipherable without diagonal lighting (to highlight the depth of incised letters) and computer magnification. In January–February 2011, three fragments of a single slate tablet were recovered from the site on which is written a fragment of what Hollender initially calls “eine[] alt-jiddische[] Rittererzählung” (an Old Yiddish knightly tale), but then immediately thereafter designates a Middle High German, that is, apparently not an Old Yiddish, text. Timm designates the language “deutsch oder frühestes Jiddisch” (German or earliest Yiddish). When reassembled , the three fragments constitute a single tablet with nineteen lines of texts per side.7 The tablet is approximately twelve by ten centimeters but has lost approximately 20 percent of its surface, broken away from one (vertical) edge, resulting in substantial loss of text, while further text is lost in broken segments in the center portions; the entire tablet has...