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The field of early Yiddish studies has so far only been accessible to specialist scholars. This remarkable study opens up to a more general audience the cultural richness of that broad and deep corpus of literature that stretches from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century. The literature spans a wide spectrum of genres, from love lyric to kabbalistic treatises, and from travelogue to Renaissance adventure epic. The diverse world of Ashkenazic Jewry comes alive in this survey of its literature.
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Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature This page intentionally left blank Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature JEAN BAUMGARTEN JEROLD C. FRAKES 1 3 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 materia