Yiddish Literature’s Outliers: Early and Late, Italy and Poland, Rhetorical and Peripheral

In the academic landscape of what Jeffrey Shandler has so aptly termed the “postvernacular” period of secular Yiddish,¹ a method of scholarship has begun to appear in Yiddish studies that differs markedly from what had characterized the field in the post-Holocaust period, which was still to some degree defined on the one hand by a wide range of philological modes of scholarship, and on the other by nostalgia for a lost “golden age” of secular Yiddish literature, drama, and film, very directly by mourning for the largely destroyed Eastern European Yiddish-language culture, or more recently by a consciously distancing analysis of the phenomena of nostalgia and/or mourning itself. Now a new generation of Yiddish scholars has taken yet another step away from those participatory modes of looking back, and many now define their own scholarly work in terms of literary and cultural studies as practiced in a broad range of “post-philological” humanistic fields. The theoretically informed research that has characterized Anglophone and Francophone literary culture since the 1970s has not yet come to define contemporary Yiddish studies, but it is certainly no longer foreign to the field. Shandler’s work is of course a prime example, as are the books by Fram, Finkin, and Caplan, here under review, which take on such issues as gender, rhetorical analysis, and cultural marginality as their central concerns.

In the subdiscipline of early Yiddish studies (pre-1750), despite some recent scholarly forays beyond the realm of the philological,² that method still by and large reigns supreme, which is understandable since there is yet a great deal of basic philological spade work to be done in the editing and translating of texts not widely known—including even those revealed by actual spade work, as in the fragment of a mid-fourteenth-century epic etched on a slate tablet recently unearthed in a synagogue excavation in Cologne.³ For there is indeed still widespread misinformation about the earlier periods of Yiddish literature, which ranges—in manuscripts and print—through essentially the same literary genres found in cotemporal European traditions, including Renaissance satires and the women’s commandments discussed in this review.⁴ These last two genres represent more or less the two ideological poles of early Yiddish literature: on the one hand the quasi-secular world of the scholar, open to the world of cultural contact with the coterritorial Christian society, and on the other hand the introverted realms of Jewish custom and the rabbinical legislation of ritual female purity. Onto this subcultural positioning of these two genres, in sixteenth-century Ashkenazic culture, it is also necessary to overlay two further analytical grids, one geographical and one temporal. These plot the shift in the cultural center of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenaz from northern Italy to Poland that took place over the course of the sixteenth century, during which Yiddish as the primary vernacular of Italian Ashkenazim diminished and then disappeared by the early seventeenth century. As this chrono-topic shift took place, there was also a palpable transformation from the culturally extroverted culture of sixteenth-century Ashkenazic Italy to a profound cultural introversion in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland.

The two short poems translated by Claudia Rosenzweig were written by Elijah ben Asher ha-Levi Aškenazi/Elia(s) Levita/Elye Bokher/Elyahu Baḥur 1469–1549), famed mediator between Christian and Jewish...