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,[1] 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.[2] 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.
Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of
the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically
Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew
characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the
beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from
the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in
Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns
and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create
the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been
averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the
German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life;
and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their
Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority
obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in
those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their
mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the
intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their
relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in
the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its
literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only
turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after
stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of
leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the
legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of
Wigalois, of King Arthur, had begun to fade away even from the folk
books of Germany, it lived on in the Slavic countries and continued to
evoke pleasure and admiration.
These chapbooks, embodying the folklore of past generations, were almost
the first printed Judeo-German books, as they certainly were the most
popular. That the early Judeo-German literature was intended mainly for
readers in the east of Europe is amply evidenced by specific mention in
the works themselves, as for example in the 'Maasebuch,' where the
compiler, or author, urges the German women to buy quickly his book,
lest it be all too fast sold in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia.[3] In fact,
the patron of the 'Maasebuch,' or the author of the same, for it is not
quite clear whether they are not one and the same person, was himself a
native of Meseritz in Lithuania. Only after these story books had
created a taste for reading, and in order to counteract the effects of
the non-Jewish lore, the Rabbis began to substitute the more Jewish
legends of the 'Maasebuch' and the 'Zeena Ureena,' and the ethical
treatises which were intended to instruct the people in the tenets of
their fathers. In this manner the Judeo-German literature was made
possible. Its preservation for four centuries was mainly due to the
isolation of the German Jews in Russia and Poland, where the German
medievalism became ossified and was preserved intact to within half a
century ago, when under favorable conditions the Russianization of the
Jews began. Had these conditions prevailed but a short time longer,
Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past and of
interest only to the linguist and the historian. But very soon various
causes combined to resuscitate the dialect literature. In the short time
that the Jews had enjoyed the privileges of a Russian culture, then
German medievalism was completely dispelled, and the modern period
which, in its incipient stage, reaches back into the first quarter of
this century, presents a distinct phase which in no way resembles the
literature of the three hundred years that preceded it. It is not a
continuation of its older form, but has developed on an entirely new
basis.
The medieval period of Judeo-German literature was by no means confined
to the Slavic countries. It reacted on the Jews who had remained in
Germany, who, in their narrow Ghetto life, were excluded from an active
participation in the German literature of their country. This reaction
was not due alone to the fact that the specifically Jewish literature
appealed in an equal degree to those who had been left behind in their
old homes, but in a larger measure to the superior intellectual activity
of the emigrants and their descendants who kept alive the spark of
Jewish learning when it had become weakened at home and found no food
for its replenishment within its own communities. They had to turn to
the Slavic lands for their teachers and Rabbis, who brought with them
not only their Hebrew learning, but also their Judeo-German language and
literature. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no
division of the Jews of the west and the east of Europe; they took equal
part in the common Judeo-German literature, however scanty its scope.
What was produced in Russia was read with the same pleasure in Germany,
and _vice versa_, even though the spoken form of the vernacular in
Slavic countries was more and more departing from that of Germany.
Even Mendelssohn's teacher was a Galician Jew. But with Mendelssohn a
new era had dawned in the history of the German Jews. By his example the
dialect was at once abandoned for the literary language, and the Jews
were once more brought back into the fold of the German nation. The
separation of the two branches of the German Jews was complete, and the
inhabitants of the Slavic countries were left to shift for themselves.
For nearly one hundred years they had to miss the beneficent effects of
an intellectual intercourse with the West, and in the beginning of our
century the contrast between the two could not have been greater: the
German Jews were rapidly becoming identified with the spiritual pursuits
of their Gentile fellow-citizens, the Slavic Jews persevered in the
medievalism into which they had been thrown centuries before. Only by
slow degrees did the Mendelssohnian Reform find its way into Poland and
Russia; and even when its influence was at its highest, it was not
possible for it to affect those lands in the same way that it affected
the districts that were more or less under German influence. The German
language could not become the medium of instruction for the masses,
whose homely dialects had so far departed from their mother-tongue as to
make the latter unintelligible to them. In Russia it was a long time
before the native literature could make itself felt, or before Russian
education came to take the place of the German culture; so in the
meanwhile the Judeo-German language was left to its own evolution, and a
new literature had its rise.
In arriving at its present stage, Judeo-German literature of the
nineteenth century has passed through several phases. At first, up to
the sixties, it was used as a weapon by the few enlightened men who were
anxious to extend the benefits of the Mendelssohnian Reform to the
masses at large. It is an outgrowth of the Hebrew literature of the same
period, which had its rise from the same causes, but which could appeal
only to a small number of men who were well versed in Hebrew lore. Since
these apostles of the new learning had themselves received their impetus
through the Hebrew, it was natural for them to be active both in the
Hebrew and the Judeo-German field. We consequently find here the names
of Gottlober and J. L. Gordon, who belong equally to both literatures.
Those who devoted themselves exclusively to creating a Judeo-German
literature, like the other Mendelssohnian disciples, took the German
literature as the guide for their efforts, and even dreamed of
approaching the literary language of Germany in the final amalgamation
with the Mendelssohnian Reform. In the meanwhile, in the sixties and
still more in the seventies, the Jews were becoming Russianized in the
schools which had been thrown open to their youths. In the sixties, the
Judeo-German literature, having received its impetus in the preceding
generation, reached its highest development as a literature of Reform,
but it appealed only to those who had not had the benefits of the
Russian schools. In the seventies it became reminiscent, and was in
danger of rapid extinction. In the eighties, the persecutions and riots
against the Jews led many of those who had availed themselves of the
Russian culture to devote themselves to the service of their less
fortunate brethren; and many new forces, that otherwise would have found
their way into Russian letters, were exerted entirely in the evolution
of Judeo-German. In this new stage, the Mendelssohnian Reform, with its
concomitant German language, was lost sight of. The element of
instruction was still an important one in this late period, but this
instruction was along universal lines, and no longer purely Jewish;
above all else, this literature became an art.
Poetry was the first to be developed, as it lent itself more readily to
didactic purposes; it has also, until lately, remained in closer contact
with the popular poetry, which, in its turn, is an evolution of the
poetry of the preceding centuries. The theatre was the latest to detach
itself from prose, to which it is organically related. These facts have
influenced the separate treatment of the three divisions of literature
in the present work. It was deemed indispensable to add to these a
chapter on the Judeo-German folklore, as the reading of Judeo-German
works would frequently be unintelligible without some knowledge of the
creations of the popular mind. Here the relation to medievalism is even
more apparent than in the popular poetry; in fact, the greater part of
the printed books of that class owe their origin to past ages; they are
frequently nothing more than modernizations of old books, as is, for
example, the case with 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' which, but for the
language, is identical with its prototype in the beginning of the
sixteenth century.
In its popular form, Judeo-German is certainly not inferior to many of
the literary languages which have been fortunate enough to attract the
attention of the linguist and student of comparative literature. In its
_belleslettres_ it compares favorably with those of countries like
Bulgaria, which had their regeneration at about the same time; nay, it
may appear to the unbiassed observer that it even surpasses them in that
respect. And yet, in spite of it all, Judeo-German has remained
practically a sealed book to the world. The few who have given reports
of it display an astounding amount of ignorance on the subject. Karpeles
devotes, in his history of Jewish literature, almost thirty pages to the
medieval form of it, but to the rich modern development of it only _two
lines_![4] Steinschneider knows by hearsay only Dick, and denies the
practical value of modern Judeo-German.[5] But the acme of complacent
ignorance, not to use a stronger word, is reached by Grünbaum,[6] who
dishes up, as specimens of literature, newspaper advertisements and
extracts of Schaikewitsch, not mentioning even by name a single one of
the first-class writers. It is painful to look into the pages of his
work, which, apart from endless linguistic blunders of a most senseless
character, has probably done more than anything else to divert
attention from this interesting literature.
Much more sympathetic are the few pages which Berenson devotes to it in
an article in the _Andover Review_;[7] though abounding in errors, it is
fair and unbiassed, and at least displays a familiarity with the
originals. Still better are the remarks of the Polish author Klemens
Junosza in the introductions to his translations of the works of
Abramowitsch into Polish; the translations themselves are masterpieces,
considering the extreme quaintness of Abramowitsch's style. There are,
indeed, a few sketches on the Judeo-German literature written in the
dialect itself,[8] but none of them attest a philosophical grasp of the
subject, or even betray a thorough familiarity with the literature. A
number of good reviews on various productions have appeared in the
Russian periodical _Voschod_, from the pen of one signing himself
"Criticus."[9] To one of these reviews he has attached a discussion of
the literature in general; this, however short, is the best that has yet
been written on the subject.
It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is
certainly doomed to extinction.[10] Its lease of life is commensurate
with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of
Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews,
as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.[11] It
would be idle to speculate when these persecutions will cease.