The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century
9781465684127
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The literatures of the early Middle Ages were bilingual. The Catholic religion had brought with it the use of the Latin language for religious and ethical purposes, and in proportion as the influence of the clergy was exerted on worldly matters, even profane learning found its expression through the foreign tongue. Only by degrees did the native dialects manage to establish themselves independently, and it has been but a few centuries since they succeeded in emancipating themselves entirely and in ousting the Latin from the domain of secular knowledge. As long as the Jews have not been arrested in their natural development by external pressure, they have fallen into line with the conditions prevalent in their permanent homes and have added their mite towards the evolution of the vernaculars of their respective countries. It would be idle to adduce here proofs of this; suffice it only to mention Spain, whose literature would be incomplete without including in the list of its early writers the names of some illustrious Jews active there before the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century. But the matter everywhere stood quite differently in regard to the Latin language. That being the language of the Catholic clergy, it could not be cultivated by the Jews without compromising their own faith; the example of the bilingualism was, however, too strong not to affect them, and hence they had recourse to the tongue of their own sacred scriptures for purposes corresponding to those of the Catholic Church. The stronger the influence of the latter was in the country, the more did the Jews cling to the Hebrew and the Jargon of the Talmud for literary purposes. It need not, then, surprise us to find the Jewish literature of the centuries preceding the invention of printing almost exclusively in the ancient tongue. As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction, issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny. On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like Süsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.
