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A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany
A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany
A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany
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A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

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This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By exploring the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe.

Elyada's analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 7, 2012
ISBN9780804782821
A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany
Author

Aya Elyada

Aya Elyada is Senior Lecturer of German and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2017 she serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and the editorial board of its journal Chidushim – Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry. Her book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, was published in 2012 by Stanford University Press

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    A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish - Aya Elyada

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

    All rights reserved.

    This book has been published with the assistance of the Research Committee, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

    Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Elyada, Aya, 1977- author.

    A goy who speaks Yiddish : Christians and the Jewish language in early modern Germany / Aya Elyada.

    pages cm.--(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8047-8193-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-0-8047-8282-1 (e-book)

    1. Yiddish language--Study and teaching--Germany--History. 2. Yiddish literature-Study and teaching--Germany--History. 3. Christian literature, German--History and criticism. 4. Yiddish language in literature. 5. Christianity and other religions--Judaism. 6. Judaism--Relations--Christianity. 7. Christian scholars--Germany--History. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

    PJ5112.E59 2012

    439'.10882743--dc23           2012014468

    Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

    A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish

    Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

    Aya Elyada

    STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

    STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

    STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

    EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

    To my beloved family

    Contents

    Copyright

    Title Page

    List of Illustrations

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    Note on Spelling and Translations

    Introduction: A Jewish Language in a Christian World

    Part I. Yiddish in the Service of Christian Theology

    Introduction: Christian Hebraism and the Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe

    1. Yiddish in the Judenmission

    2. From the Jews’ own books: Yiddish Literature, Christian Readers

    3. Blasphemy, Curses, and Insults: Yiddish and the Jews’ Hidden Transcript

    4. Ancilla theologiae: Yiddish as a Hilfsmittel for Theological Studies

    Conclusion: The Study of Yiddish and Christian-Jewish Relations in Early Modern Germany

    Part II. Yiddish in the Service of Jewish Deception

    Introduction: Yiddish in the Socioeconomic Sphere

    5. The Merchants’ Tongue: Yiddish and Jewish Commerce

    6. The Thieves’ Jargon: Yiddish and Jewish Criminality

    Conclusion: Yiddish as Antilanguage

    Part III. The Discourse on Yiddish in Early Modern Germany

    Introduction: Between Hebrew and German: The Depictions of Yiddish in Christian Writings

    7. German of the Jews: Linguistic Affinity and the Politics of Differentiation

    8. Yiddish and German in the Judenmission: The Limits of Linguistic Adaptation

    9. Christian Hebrew and Jewish Yiddish in Early Modern Germany

    Conclusion: Yiddish-Speaking Orientals: Language Shift and the "Verbesserung der Juden"

    Conclusion

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    List of Illustrations

    I.1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Anweisung zur teutsch-hebräischen Sprache (ca. 1760)

    1.1 Title page of Elias Schadeus’ Yiddish translation of five books of the New Testament (Strasbourg 1592)

    2.1 Title page of Johann Schudt’s Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten (Frankfurt 1714–18)

    4.1 First page of Paulus Fagius’ Prima quatuor capita Geneseos hebraice (Constance 1543)

    4.2 First page of the Biblia Pentapla (Wandsbeck and Schiffbeck 1710–12)

    5.1 Title page of J.W.’s Jüdischer Sprach-Meister (ca. 1714)

    5.2 Samples of Yiddish handwritten promissory notes: Gottfried Selig, Kurze und gründliche Anleitung zu einer leichten Erlernung der Jüdischdeutschen Sprache (Leipzig 1767)

    6.1 Title page of Paul Einert’s Entdeckter Jüdischer Baldober (Coburg 1758)

    7.1 Page from Johann Buxtorf’s tutorial chapter on Yiddish in his Thesaurus grammaticus linguae sanctae hebraeae (Basel 1609)

    8.1 Title page of Christian Moller’s Yiddish translation of the New Testament (Frankfurt/Oder 1700)

    8.2 Title pages of Caspar Calvör’s missionary tract Gloria Christi (Leipzig 1710)

    8.3 First page of Caspar Calvör’s Gloria Christi (Leipzig 1710)

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    "A hun vos kreyt un a goy vos shmuest yidish—zoln zayn kapore far mir" (A hen that crows, and a non-Jew who speaks Yiddish, they should be my atonement)¹; in this Yiddish saying, the speaker summons two figures from the world of the inconceivable to serve as his atonement. And to him, apparently, a goy who speaks the Jewish language is just as preposterous as a hen that crows like a rooster. But perhaps surprisingly, non-Jews did speak Yiddish, probably from the earliest stages of the existence of this language. And at least from the beginning of the sixteenth century, we also have written evidence for Christians reading, writing, and investigating the Yiddish language and literature.

    This book explores the unlikely phenomenon of Christian Yiddishism, namely the Christian engagement with the Yiddish language and literature during the early modern period. In this context of early modern Christian preoccupation with Yiddish, the term Yiddishists, which I will use, does not designate admirers or supporters of the Yiddish language, as was sometimes the case in later periods. The Christian authors in this story were persons who took interest in the Jewish language, studied it, and wrote about it for various reasons and motivations, some pragmatic and utilitarian but others nevertheless confrontational or even sinister.

    By investigating this unique phenomenon, hardly known in modern historical research, the book aims to contribute to our understanding of Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe, specifically in the German-speaking world. In recent years, growing attention has been given to the complex system of Christian perceptions of the Jew as the archetypical Other of early modern Europe. Some of the most interesting aspects of this topic, which still merit investigation, are the diverse and complicated ways in which the Christians of that period understood, defined, and constructed the Jew’s Otherness. Of no less importance are the various motivations that underlay Christian representations of Jewish Otherness, the factors and circumstances that influenced and shaped them, and the functions these representations served in intra-Christian debates.

    In addition to its contribution to the field of Christian-Jewish relations in early modern Europe, this book also seeks to illuminate various themes in the field of social and cultural history of language, including the role of language in shaping and defining group identities, images of languages and linguistic stereotypes, language and national consciousness, linguistic domination and social control, and attitudes of majorities toward linguistic minorities. Highly relevant also to our present-day experience, these issues are especially interesting within the scope of the early modern period, with the shifting sands of its complicated and constantly changing linguistic and national landscape. From the mid-fifteenth century, the gradual transition from a dominantly monolingual Latin culture to a multilingual one based on the various European vernaculars brought the linguistic diversity in Europe to the attention of contemporaries. This development evoked a wide spectrum of responses among scholars of the time, who engaged in evaluations and comparisons of the various languages, and debated the question of language and its place in culture and society.

    Our story on Christians and Yiddish in early modern Europe starts in 1514, with the publication of the first known Christian treatise on the language,² and spans the next two and a half centuries. In order to present the genre of early modern Christian literature on Yiddish in its full spectrum of richness and diversity, the book draws on a wide array of primary sources in German, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish, ranging from the scholarly to the popular, and from the theological to the secular. Addressing a broad spectrum of topics and using an interdisciplinary approach, including cultural, theological, and sociolinguistic themes, I hope the book will be of interest to anyone engaged in the fields of early modern European history, Jewish history, social and cultural history of language, Jewish-Christian relations, German studies, and Yiddish studies.

    .   .   .

    It is with great pleasure that I would like to thank both my doctoral advisors, Shulamit Volkov from Tel Aviv University and Michael Brenner from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, for their professional and personal support during my work on this project. Head of the Lehrstuhl für Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur at the University of Munich, Michael Brenner welcomed me to his group of scholars and students, and provided me with an excellent working environment for my research and academic development. My project has greatly profited from his input, advice, and guidance, and I deeply thank him for that. My great debt to Shula Volkov goes back to my very first steps at Tel Aviv University. In the years that have passed since then, I found in Shula not only a role model of academic excellence but also an inspiring and exemplary teacher. With her insightful criticism, excellent advice, and unlimited dedication she has significantly contributed to my scholarly and personal development, and to the successful completion of this book.

    Another debt of gratitude belongs to Chava Turniansky and Richard Cohen from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and to Marion Aptroot from the University of Düsseldorf, for their continuous support of my project and their unwavering confidence in its success. Their outstanding scholarly erudition and their commitment to helping young scholars played a crucial role in the advancement and refinement of my work. This book has greatly benefited from their comments and insights, as well as from those of Elisheva Carlebach from Columbia University and Helmut Zedelmaier from the University of Munich. The comments of my father-in-law, Dov Elyada, did much to improve the clarity of the book to a more general audience. Christian Ronning from the University of Munich delivered unfailing help in getting to the bottom of the more opaque and cryptic of the Latin texts I encountered, and Andrea Sinn proved helpful in every possible way. Her friendship and support, as those of my other fellow graduate students in Germany and Israel, have been indispensable in the process of creating this book. Other scholars from various universities and fields of study, including Hans Peter Althaus, Eli Bar-Chen, Ruth von Bernuth, Yaacov Deutsch, John Efron, Michael Heyd, Simon Neuberg, David Ruderman, Winfried Schulze, Erika Timm, and Cornel Zwierlein, have contributed from their experience and expertise at different stages of the project, encouraged me in my work, and were always willing to offer assistance. I thank them all.

    Several institutions and foundations, both in Israel and Germany, have provided the financial support for this project. My studies and research in Germany were possible thanks to the generous scholarships of the Hertie Foundation and the Minerva Fellowship Program of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. At Tel Aviv University I enjoyed the support of the Pedagogica Foundation, the Dan David Prize, the S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, and the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. The preparation of the manuscript was supported by a generous fellowship of the Yad Hanadiv Foundation. This final stage of the work was undertaken during my stay as a visiting scholar at Duke University; I would like to thank Malachi Hacohen from the History Department at Duke for his hospitality, and for making my time at Duke fruitful and gratifying.

    At Stanford University Press, I wish to thank the series editors Steven Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue for their interest in and support of my project. I am also grateful to Mariana Raykov and Emma Harper, who were very helpful in seeing the book through production, and to Jeff Wyneken for his skillful copyediting. Special thanks are extended to the editor, Norris Pope, for his efficient and highly professional handling of the book’s publication, and for his support and helpfulness along the way. Finally, I would like to thank the Research Committee of the Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for their assistance in the publication of the book.

    Chapters 1 and 8 were published in an earlier version in "Yiddish—Language of Conversion? Linguistic Adaptation and Its Limits in Early Modern Judenmission," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53 (2008), 3–29. The introduction to Part 1, as well as Chapters 2 and 9, were published in an earlier version in Protestant Scholars and Yiddish Studies in Early Modern Europe, Past and Present 203 (2009), 69–98. Portions of Chapter 7 were published in an earlier version in "‘Eigentlich Teutsch’? Depictions of Yiddish and Its Relations to German in Early Modern Christian Writings," European Journal of Jewish Studies 4, no. 1 (2010), 23–42. I thank the Leo Baeck Institute, Oxford University Press and the Past and Present Society, and Brill, respectively, for permission to reuse this material here.

    Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, Mike and Ahouva Lahav, for their unconditional love and support, and for backing me in every personal and professional decision I have ever made. The greatest thanks of all belong to Yishai Elyada, my partner and best friend in the past twelve years, for sharing with me the long and winding road of bringing a new book into the world. Although trained as a neuroscientist, Yishai nevertheless shared my enthusiasm for this project, and was emotionally and intellectually involved in every step of the way. His perceptive comments and suggestions on my work have challenged me to continuously strive for improvement, and his infinite encouragement has been a great comfort at difficult times. Without him, all this would not have been possible.

    Note on Spelling and Translations

    Throughout this book, I transcribed Yiddish and Hebrew terms, phrases, and titles of works with Latin characters according to the standard YIVO transcription system and the guidelines set forth in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, respectively. However, when Yiddish or Hebrew words were quoted from Christian sources, they appear in the same transliteration as found in the source. When a certain word appeared in different forms in several sources, the most comprehensible form was selected.

    For readability’s sake, minor changes and modifications were made in the spelling of some transliterated words (in particular, by bringing Yiddish words closer to the pronunciation of modern standard Yiddish) as well as in the spelling of some of the German words quoted from the early modern sources. Primary sources with bilingual titles in the same edition—Yiddish or Hebrew on the one hand, and German or Latin on the other—are noted only by their German or Latin title.

    .   .   .

    Unless mentioned otherwise, all translations from German, Latin, Yiddish, and Hebrew are my own.

    Introduction

    A Jewish Language in a Christian World

    In a famous passage from his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recalls his impressions as a young boy from the Judengasse in his hometown, Frankfurt. Together with the crowdedness and filth of the Jewish quarter, it was the accent of an unpleasant language that attracted his attention, leaving a most displeasing impression on the young Goethe.¹ Despite this somewhat unfavorable reaction to Yiddish (or "das barocke Judendeutsch," as he called it), Goethe, not yet thirteen years old, decided to learn the language. He soon realized that deeper acquaintance with Hebrew was needed, and started taking Hebrew lessons from the rector of the Gymnasium—assuring his tutor that his sole intent was to read the Old Testament in its original language.² As for learning the Yiddish language itself, the young Goethe could of course take private lessons from a convert, as he in fact did in the summer of 1761. But he could also make use of the vast linguistic and philological corpus on Yiddish that had been consolidating in the German lands since the beginning of the sixteenth century and that consisted of works prepared by Christian authors for a Christian readership.³ These included theoretical depictions and analyses of the Yiddish language, grammars and textbooks, dictionaries, bibliographies of Yiddish writings, literary surveys, and translations from and to Yiddish.

    The Christian literature on Yiddish, written and published in the German-speaking world from the beginning of the sixteenth century and into the second half of the eighteenth century, stands as the focal point of this book. The Yiddish that was the subject of Christian works during that period is referred to today as Western Yiddish (also known as Jewish-German or Judeo-German), as opposed to the Eastern Yiddish of the east-European Jews.⁴ In the period under discussion, Western Yiddish served the Ashkenazi communities of Western and Central Europe as the spoken language, and together with loshn-koydesh (the language of sanctity, namely Hebrew-Aramaic), also as a written language. Unlike Eastern Yiddish, which contains a considerable Slavic component, Western Yiddish was composed almost entirely from German and Hebrew-Aramaic components. Linguistically speaking, therefore, Western Yiddish was much closer to German than modern Yiddish, which developed from the eastern dialects.

    Figure I.1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Anweisung zur teutsch-hebräischen Sprache (ca. 1760). Reprinted from Der junge Goethe: Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden besorgt von Max Morris, vol. 1, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1909.

    The significant lexical and structural similarity with German led to conflicting approaches to Western Yiddish in modern linguistic research. One approach, advocated especially by the German-Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century, saw Western Yiddish as essentially German in Hebrew letters, with the exception of lexical items derived from the Hebrew-Aramaic component. The other approach, promoted by Jewish Yiddishists at the beginning of the twentieth century, saw Western Yiddish as a language in its own right. According to this view, Yiddish was never identical to German, but already from its early, medieval stages constituted a distinct language. Although the view of Western Yiddish as a type of German can still be found among contemporary scholars, especially those who approach the Jewish language with the tools of German linguistics, it is the view that sees Western Yiddish as a language in its own right that is most widely accepted in present-day Yiddish linguistics.

    Until the Jewish eastward migration during the late Middle Ages, Western Yiddish was basically the only existing Yiddish. The eastern dialect that emerged in the new settlements developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as a fundamentally new variety of Yiddish. Subsequently, this period is characterized by the coexistence of two major Yiddish dialects. The literary language, however, which served both west and east-European Yiddish readers, remained on a Western Yiddish basis well into the eighteenth century. It was only in the later decades of the century that this language was gradually replaced with a literary Yiddish based on the eastern dialects, which eventually developed into Modern Literary Yiddish.

    The transition from the western to the eastern dialect as the linguistic infrastructure of literary Yiddish was part of a more profound transformation in the history of German Jewry: the linguistic shift from Yiddish to German from the late eighteenth century onwards. Resulting in the gradual decline of Western Yiddish and its eventual demise as the main language of the German Jews, this linguistic transformation was engendered by the two interrelated processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation. As a prerequisite for full emancipation, Jews were required to abandon their unique language and replace it with German. This demand was also promoted inside the Jewish community, most notably among the maskilim and the economic elite, who supported a certain degree of Jewish integration into German culture and society. For many of the maskilim, the transition from Yiddish to German was also a means for reforming and regenerating Jewish culture from within.⁷ At the same time, profound and fundamental changes in the intellectual and cultural climate of the German world were being brought about by the Enlightenment, exerting considerable influence on the Christian discourse on Yiddish as well. These changes included the rise of new theories and ideologies regarding language, culture, Volk, and nation; the process of secularization and the decline of theology as a dominant component of European thought; and the emergence of new perceptions of the Jew and his place in German society.⁸ All these developments in both the German and German-Jewish contexts brought about a new chapter in the Christian preoccupation with Yiddish. The late decades of the eighteenth century thus mark the concluding point of this book.

    Christian Interest in Yiddish in Early Modern Germany

    Christian concern with Yiddish should be seen on the one hand as part of a wider interest in Jews and Judaism in early modern Germany, and on the other hand as part of a general interest in questions relating to language and linguistics at the time. Although the Jews constituted only a very small part of the total German population, they attracted attention well beyond their actual number and prominence. From the mid-fifteenth century, Renaissance Humanist scholarship, and later on the Reformation and the Protestant imperative to read the Bible in its original languages, gave rise to what came to be known as Christian Hebraism, the preoccupation of Christian scholars with Hebrew and Jewish studies. In addition to biblical Hebrew, Christian enterprises in Jewish studies also included postbiblical Hebrew, Aramaic, rabbinical literature, and the Cabbala. Another offshoot of Christian Hebraism was the growing interest of Christians in contemporary Jews, their customs, rituals, and way of life, noticeable in the German lands from the turn of the sixteenth century. Driven mainly by curiosity, but not without strong polemical overtones, the most explicit manifestation of this interest was the new genre of Christian ethnographic writing on Jewish ceremonies and everyday life. Anti-Jewish polemics and missionary impulses, which underlay Christian-Jewish relations from the very beginning, continued to play a major role in shaping Christian attitudes toward the Jewish minority throughout the early modern period. With the Reformation, the newly founded Protestant Church reemphasized the importance of winning over converts from Judaism as part of its rivalry with Catholicism and the wish to present itself as the true confession. Reaching an unprecedented scale with the rise of Pietism in the late seventeenth century, the revival of the Judenmission in the German territories further enhanced the attention of broader circles in the Christian population to the Jewish minority living in their midst.

    The engagement of Christians with the Hebrew language and Jewish texts, their interest in contemporary Jewish culture, and the ever-present ambition to bring about Jewish conversion—these interrelated factors directly contributed to the rise of Christian Yiddish scholarship in early modern Germany, and exerted considerable influence on its main characteristics and on the course of its development. Another driving force that stood behind this new interest was the early modern concern with language, linguistics, and philology in general, and with questions regarding vernaculars, dialects, and foreign languages in particular. Early modern Europe experienced an unprecedented degree of what may be termed linguistic awareness, leading modern historians to refer to the period from the mid-fifteenth century onwards as the age of the discovery of language.⁹ This period saw a dramatic increase in the study of languages, their structure, history, and the relations between them, as well as in the dealings with issues we would classify today as sociolinguistics, such as the functions of language in the social and religious domains, and the role of language as a marker and definer of group identities. In addition to the pronounced concern of Humanists with the study of the classical languages—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—an exceptional and hitherto uncommon attention was given to the different European vernaculars. The medieval perception of the spoken languages as lacking grammatical rules and as being inadequate for the realms of scholarship and high culture gradually gave way to a new appreciation of the vernacular. The various European languages became the object of theoretical reflection and linguistic treatment. They underwent a process of codification and standardization, and with the aid of the newly invented printing industry infiltrated new domains, which until then had been under the exclusive reign of the omnipotent Latin. These included the large-scale production of literature in the European vernaculars, their increasing use as vehicles of scholarship and pedagogical instruction, and even the acceptance of vernaculars as languages of administration and international relations. Of special importance, in the Protestant territories, was the penetration of the vernacular into the religious domain, replacing Latin as the language of Scripture, prayer, and the transmission of religious knowledge.

    Emerging at the beginning of the sixteenth century among Jewish as well as Christian scholars, the first linguistic treatments of Yiddish appeared at about the same time as those of other European vernaculars. Indeed, it is in this context of the growing attention to vernacular languages, their codification, and their potential as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge that the linguistic and philological interest in Yiddish must be appreciated.¹⁰ Above all, however, the interest in Yiddish should be examined in the light of the specific form that the early modern linguistic awareness took in the German lands, where practically all the linguistic treatises on Yiddish known to us were published. During this period, a significant gap existed between the unsatisfactory state of the German language and its inferior position among the European vernaculars, on the one hand¹¹; and on the other, the rising importance of the language in the eyes of many German scholars, especially Protestants, both as the language of Luther’s Bible and as a means for defining German identity in the face of political and religious divisions. This unfavorable situation initiated an intensive enterprise of language cultivation in German academic and literary circles; it also exerted considerable influence on the way German scholars perceived and evaluated other languages, including the language of their Jewish neighbors.

    Christian Yiddishists and Their Texts

    Within the German lands, Christian interest in Hebrew and Judaism, as well as in the rising vernacular, was predominantly Protestant. It is therefore not surprising that early modern Christian involvement with Yiddish, too, was first and foremost a Protestant phenomenon. It had its roots in the Reformation era and in the work of reformers, and during the ensuing two and a half centuries was dominated by Protestant scholars.¹² It was also, as noted above, essentially a German phenomenon. Although large communities of Yiddish-speaking Jews and Yiddish publishing centers existed in different parts of Europe (such as Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands), Christian interest in Yiddish was almost exclusively confined to the German-speaking world. With very few exceptions, the Christian writings on Yiddish were written by German scholars, and were published in the German-speaking lands (especially in Leipzig, Halle, Basel, Nürnberg, Wittenberg, and Frankfurt am Main). Accordingly, the language that dominates these writings, besides Latin, is German. That the Christian literature on Yiddish was mainly a German phenomenon might be explained by the German roots of the Jewish language. Yiddish originated in the German lands as a result of the encounter of Jews with the medieval German dialects; from its beginning it contained a major German component and was for centuries the spoken language and one of the written languages of the German Jews.¹³ The linguistic and territorial proximity of Yiddish and German in the early modern period was well acknowledged by the German Christian authors and played a significant role in their writings on Yiddish. Moreover, the similarity of Yiddish to their own language, and the implications of this similarity from a cultural, social, and national perspective, was probably responsible for the Jewish language attracting the attention of predominantly German-speaking authors.

    Most of the Christian authors discussed in this book came from the heart of the academic and

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