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A Latin-Alphabet Inscription in a Hebrew Pentateuch

A Latin-Alphabet Inscription in a Hebrew Pentateuch

Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Cod. Levy 19 is a liturgical Pentateuch manuscript copied in Brussels in 1309. It was the fruit of a collaboration between three or four Jewish artisans: the scribe Itzḥak b. Eliahu Hazzan from Oxford, who copied (and probably also vocalised) the main text; an anonymous scribe, who copied part of the masorah parva and left the rest unfinished; the scribe-artist Yehudah haKohen, who copied and decorated the masorah magna; and a scribe-artist, who corrected the text, carried out most of the decorations and left a versified colophon in Hebrew where he referred to himself as ‘עקוד המור’ (aqud hamor, ‘the bound [person] of [Mount] Mor[ia]’; a circumlocution for the name Itzḥak).[1] It is not immediately clear whether the first and fourth, both named Itzḥak, were the same person, since the scripts that can be safely attributed to each of the two are at different registers and exhibit many similarities but also a few differences. Since these differences could potentially be explained by the different sizes and types of nibs used, it is at least possible that the scribe Itzḥak b. Eliahu from Oxford also decorated the manuscript. This would explain why in the artist’s colophon, he makes the claim that he completed the writing and the decoration together (ציור והכתיבה שילמתי יחד), a statement that would sound exaggerated if he added no other textual component than the corrections.

In this article, I focus on one particular marginal addition made by the artist (whom I will provisionally call ‘aqud hamor’ to distinguish him from the scribe Itzḥak, since it has not yet been proven that the two were the same person). This addition is situated near the end of the manuscript, at f. 529r, in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Levy 19, f. 529r. (© Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

At the bottom left of the folio, a dragon similar to those in the initial word panels is drawn in ink and touching the elongated descender of the nun sofit in Rashi’s Commentary above with its tongue. The dragon is clearly in the hand of aqud hamor and can be compared with a similar small dragon (drawn in ink but with red highlights) at the end of a quire at f. 252v, the only other instance of a marginal drawing that has no obvious connection to the text. But what sets the dragon on f. 529r apart is the writing underneath its feet; it is done in the same shade of ink and with the same nib as the dragon drawing, in what appears to be Latin script. This writing is the only instance of Latin script being used in this book, and there is very little evidence, in general, of Jewish scribes writing in Latin script during this period.[2]

The ductus of the script is unlike either of the main Latin script types used in northwestern Europe during this period: compared to Gothic textualis, the letters are significantly wider and rounder in shape, and the strokes lack shading altogether; compared to Gothic cursiva, the body of the letter is proportionally too large relative to the length of the descender, and the presence of serifs (not a feature of the cursiva script) is likewise surprising. Even within the word itself, the register of the script fluctuates: the four letters on the left have carefully detached strokes, with small serifs at the end of each stroke, while the other half of the word is written in a more current manner, with ligatures between the letters (in the case of the fifth and sixth letters, the ligature actually precludes a straightforward identification of the letters). Apart from confirming that the word was probably written in the usual Latin direction, from left to right, this change in currency confirms that the letters were written by someone who was relatively inexperienced in writing in Latin script, even though he clearly had great facility with the quill. The peculiar dimension and shape of the letters may have been influenced by Hebrew (aqud hamor’s Hebrew script also tends to be elongated horizontally, with pronounced serifs), though the superficial resemblance this script bears to Carolingian script (much more than to the Gothic scripts) might not have been a complete coincidence.

While in the absence of other examples of Latin letters written by the same scribe, any reading of the word cannot avoid some degree of uncertainty, it is possible to read the word tentatively as either ‘cropccon’ or ‘cropocon’—the fifth letter is the most ambiguous, since the main body of the letter resembles the letter c but there is an additional dot to the right, reminiscent of a dagesh, which is connected by a ligature to the next letter. This additional dot could either be an otiose stroke (in which case the fifth letter should be read as c) or a not-entirely-successful attempt to close off the letter o, as the scribe tries to form a ligature with the next letter.

The problem is that neither ‘cropccon’ nor ‘cropocon’ is immediately recognisable as a word from any language widely spoken or written in the vicinity of Brussels at the beginning of the 14th century.[3] This fact is significant in itself: the possibility should at least be considered that the form, rather than corresponding precisely to an existing word yet to be identified by me, might not have been a familiar word or phrase. It could have been a deliberate coinage by aqud hamor, or an unintentionally corrupted version of an existing word. Since the manuscript does not contain any other writing in Latin, or any inscription in Hebrew of a similar nature that accompanies a drawing, it seems to me that the only category of contextual information that could guide one’s interpretation of this inscription is the manuscript page itself.[4]

The bifolium (ff. 524, 529) where the annotation is found is situated at the fourth and ninth positions of a sexternion, which is the 43rd quire of the manuscript (ff. 521-532). Most of the quires are sexternions. The drawing of the dragon and the inscription are placed at the lower left corner of the recto, which means that it is easily visible when one leafs through the manuscript. The dragon’s tongue touches the final letter of the word ‘סופן’ (‘their end’) from Rashi’s commentary on Ecclesiastes 9:3: ‘וְאַחֲרָיו אֶל הַמֵּתִים. וְסוֹפָן יוֹרְדִין לְגֵיהִנֹּם’ (‘and then to the dead: and they ultimately [lit. their end] descend to Gehinnom’).[5] The end of the Targum for Ecclesiastes 9:3 coincides with the end of the second text column, and the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes 9:4 begins on the verso.

Considering the negative implications both of the biblical verse and Rashi’s interpretation, it is reasonable to rule out the hypothesis that the Latin-script word was an encoded signature by the scribe. If aqud hamor intended to leave a self-referential inscription, Ecclesiastes 9:3 is just about the least appropriate place that he could have chosen. On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that the dragon and the inscription were intended as a gloss on Rashi’s explanation, ‘and they ultimately descend to Gehinnom’, considering the fact that, in rabbinic literature, the presence of dragons or any other creature is never mentioned in relation to Gehinnom, which is characterised simply as a fiery furnace. Since the drawing and the inscription are placed towards the end of Ecclesiastes, well past the halfway point of the book, we may also rule out the possibility that the drawing and the inscription served to mark a numerically significant point in the text.

An examination of the dragon itself allows one to rule out a few more possibilities. First of all, it should be noted that the dragon is by far the most common figural motif employed by aqud hamor—I count a total of 62 complete dragons (excluding hybrids with dragon’s bodies and dragon’s heads attached to non-figural elements such as the feet of a menorah) drawn in his hand. Considering the ubiquity of dragons in this manuscript, it is improbable that the inscription accompanying one small monochrome dragon drawing near the end of the manuscript should read anything as generic and straightforward as ‘dragon’.

But it is possible that a more specific description was intended. While all of aqud hamor’s dragons have more or less the same protruding forehead, drop-shaped eye, stack of wrinkles between the brow ridge and the nose, wavy long ears and flame-like tongue, there is some variation in the anatomy of their bodies. All the dragons are bipedal, but some have wings and others do not; out of the flightless dragons, the majority have smooth backs, while a few others have humps (either spaced-out like a camel’s or pressed together like thick wrinkles) or spiky projections on their backs. In general, the winged dragons tend to be used to fill larger gaps, the flightless and smooth-backed dragons tend to be used for smaller, irregularly shaped gaps (including the strokes of the spare-ground letters, and the narrow strips of space around the initial words for the parashiyot), while the flightless dragons with humped or spiky backs are used indiscriminately for both purposes. Formally speaking, both of these latter types occupy a middle ground between the other two varieties, being bulkier and more structurally complex than the smooth-backed dragons but less time-consuming to draw and requiring less space than the winged dragons. The smooth-backed dragons, with their ability to fill small and irregular spaces, are the most common variety (32/62); the winged dragons are the second most common (17/62); the hump-backed and spiky-backed dragons are the least common, at 9/62 and 4/62 respectively.

The dragon that appears above the inscription is of the rarest, spiky-backed type, with two small, flat projections on its back and a short, pig-like tail. Its fangs (a feature possessed by less than half of aqud hamor’s dragons) and claws, on the other hand, are meticulously drawn. While medieval European dragon lore did not produce a crystallised and widely recognised typology, the flightless, non-threatening stature of the dragon in question in combination with the emphasis on its teeth and claws suggests that it is most likely of the creeping, poisonous variety, whereas to winged dragons were usually attributed the ability of breath fire.[6]

It is possible that the inscription was a comment on the specific physical characteristics of the dragon. The first part of the word, ‘cropo-’, could be related to the Middle Dutch crupen (‘to crawl’) or the Middle English crepen (also spelt cropen; ‘to crawl’).[7] The remaining part of the word, ‘-con’, does not make any sense on its own in this context, but it can be read as a conflation of the second syllables of the Latin draco (‘dragon’), the Old French dragon (‘dragon’) and the Middle English dragon/dragoun (‘dragon’)—in both of the latter cases, the variant dracon is occasionally attested, no doubt under the influence of the Latin spelling. Could it be the case that the scribe coined this word, ‘cropo-con’, as a playful description of the creeping dragon he had just drawn?

To assess the probability of such a coinage happening in Brussels in 1309, at the hand of a Jewish scribe-artist, several acknowledgements should be made. First of all, the phenomenon of lexical blending (known since the 19th century primarily as ‘portmanteaus’)—whereby a new word is fashioned from parts (rather than the entirety) of two source words, so that the resulting blend refers to both source words simultaneously—is not well-attested in the pre-modern period, though there have been some isolated attempts to identify and analyse potential examples of lexical blending in medieval texts.[8] But ‘crocopon’ differs from the other medieval examples of lexical blending in one key respect: more than simply mixing two words, it quite possibly also mixes two different languages (though there is the possibility that both parts come from Middle English). For this practice, we have the analogous case of macaronic compositions in both verse and prose dating from the 12th century onwards, although in such cases it is entire words or phrases, rather than parts of words, that are mixed with those from another language.[9] To state that ‘cropocon’ may have been a macaronic lexical blend, uniting two linguistics practices that have otherwise only been attested separately, requires a bold conceptual leap.

But there are several factors that justify such a leap. The inscription accompanies an informal, non-illustrative drawing at the bas-de-page, a site where other playful, experimental treatments of small pieces of text by the illuminator are known from the same period. For instance, one may cite the ‘tu es asinus’ caption written in mirror image in the Rutland Psalter (Salisbury and London [?], c1260-1270; London, British Library, MS Add 62925, f. 37r), or the onomatopoeic gloss ‘queck’ accompanying an image of a goose being carried away by a fox in the Gorleston Psalter (Suffolk, c1310-1324; London, British Library, MS Add 49622, f. 190v). By virtue of its being placed in such an informal codicological context, the word ‘cropocon’ invites an adventurous rather than plain reading, and it would have been odd if the scribe chose to write something more ordinary and self-explanatory.

Additionally, the relative novelty of the Latin script in the context of Hebrew manuscript production, as well as the complex mesh of linguistic situations aqud hamor had to navigate on a daily basis—living in a duchy where Dutch, French and Latin were spoken, and either working closely with another Jew from England or being of English origin himself—probably paved the way for irreverent interlingual experimentation much more readily than in the case of a Christian living in Brussels at the same time. Just as adding an inscription to a marginal drawing, far removed from the centre of the page, gave the scribe-artist a certain degree of freedom, so being at the fringes of Latin written culture, knowing the alphabet but rarely having to write it in a professional capacity, gave him a different kind of freedom. In this connection, it is worth asking who the target audience might have been—going back to the high visibility of the drawing and the inscription when one leafs through the manuscript, it is unlikely that aqud hamor intended the joke only for himself. Instead, we may imagine aqud hamor’s colleagues, or indeed the patron Ḥayyim b. Ḥayyim and his family, noticing the inscription and pondering over it. It is difficult to say whether they were all able to decode it easily, but one assumes that they were in a much better position to do so than any present-day scholar. Their shared amusement by the ‘riddle’, which required knowledge of several vernaculars including those not spoken locally, may have fostered, in however limited a way, a sense of solidarity among members of this highly heterogeneous community, made up of native Brabantian Jews as well as recent immigrants from England and France.[10]

I will finish by suggesting another possible interpretation that may well coexist with the one already proposed. The consonantal similarity (with a minor change in order) of ‘cropocon’ to the name of the zodiac sign Capricorn/Capricorne/Capricornus has been the first thought of many to whom I showed the inscription. While there is insufficient resemblance between the creeping dragon and common pictorial representations of Capricorn (in Christian calendars and Hebrew maḥzorim) during this period—either as a goat, or as a hybrid with the frontal port of a goat and a serpent-like tail—it is possible that the word ‘Capricorn’ provided aqud hamor with the necessary phonetic substrate on which to build his neologism. Since the copying of the manuscript was completed on 19 October 1309 in the Julian calendar, and the decoration could only have begun thereafter, it is possible that the drawing and the inscription were added during the month of December, when the sun moved into the sign of Capricorn. But the scribe would have been familiar with this word with or without the coincidence.


[1] The place name, spelt ‘אוכשונפורט’ (Okhsonfort), could either be Oxford (spelt ‘Oxenford’ in Middle English and ‘אושינפורט’ or ‘אושנפורט’ in Hebrew deeds) or Ochsenfurt in Franconia (spelt ‘אוחשנוורת’ in the Memorbuch of Nuremberg). These two towns are almost exactly equidistant (around 405km) from Brussels, and both have well-documented histories of Jewish settlement up to the late thirteenth century, as well as significant episodes of persecution during the 1290s. I consider Oxford to be the more likely solution of the two since the phenomenon of expelled English Jews settling in Brussels after crossing the channel is better known, while it would have been counterintuitive for persecuted Franconian Jews to travel so far northwards to join a relatively small community, rather than eastwards or southwards to Poland or northern Italy which were more common destinations.

[2] See Eva De Visscher, ‘Hebrew, Latin, French, English: Multilingualism in Jewish-Christian Encounters’, in Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter (eds.), Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520): Sources and Analysis, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 89-103 at p. 93.

[3] I have not been able to find a satisfactory reading of the inscription (either as a single word or as a phrase) in Hebrew or Medieval Latin. I thank Sandra Hajek, Henrike Lähnemann, Sjoerd Levelt, Eugenia Vorobeva and Daniel Wakelin for confirming that it does not correspond to any recognisable formulation in Old French, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, Old Norse and Middle English respectively, and also for their enthusiasm about this ‘riddle’. In addition, I thank Henry Baxter, Branton DeMoss, Mimi Eisenbruch and Alicia Vergara Steinmann for helpful discussions on the interpretation of the drawing and the inscription.

[4] The only other annotation of a similar format accompanies a framed drawing of Job covered with sores: ‘זה איוב השחון’ (‘this is the boil-covered Job’, f. 600v). Here, however, the correspondence between the text and the image, and between the image and its particular location in the manuscript (beginning of the book of Job), is straightforward.

[5] The whole verse (Ecclesiastes 9:3) is as follows: זֶ֣ה ׀ רָ֗ע בְּכֹ֤ל אֲשֶֽׁר־נַעֲשָׂה֙ תַּ֣חַת הַשֶּׁ֔מֶשׁ כִּֽי־מִקְרֶ֥ה אֶחָ֖ד לַכֹּ֑ל וְגַ֣ם לֵ֣ב בְּֽנֵי־הָ֠אָדָ֠ם מָלֵא־רָ֨ע וְהוֹלֵל֤וֹת בִּלְבָבָם֙ בְּחַיֵּיהֶ֔ם וְאַחֲרָ֖יו אֶל־הַמֵּתִֽים׃

That is the sad thing about all that goes on under the sun: that the same fate is in store for all. (Not only that, but men’s hearts are full of sadness, and their minds of madness, while they live; and then—to the dead!)

[6] See Martin Arnold, The Dragon: Fear and Power (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), p. 116.

[7] I am grateful to Sandra Hajek for suggesting this possible interpretation to me.

[8] See Britt Mize, ‘Did Deliberate Lexical Blending Occur in Old English?’, Peritia 27 (2016), pp. 99-120. My definition of lexical blending is borrowed from this article.

[9] See for example Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and more recently Herbert Schendl, ‘Code-Switching in Late Medieval Macaronic Sermons’, in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain, pp. 153-169.

[10] See Christoph Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsehe Buchhandlung, 2000), pp. 31-32.

Ms Celeste Pan
DPhil student at the OCHJS researching decorated manuscripts from medieval Ashkenaz
Categories
Yiddish

Crime and Detective Stories in Yiddish

In the first decade of the 20th century, the varied Yiddish book market included, among other genres and styles, crime and detective stories. At a certain stage, these publications, which were mostly adapted or translated from other languages, became bestsellers.[1] Yet, so far, they have attracted little scholarly attention.

The range of Yiddish crime stories included works of high literary quality, alongside trivial works devoid of any literary value. Generally, such works attempted to contend with the evil lurking around every corner and inspire confidence in the eventual triumph of the good and righteous. Their consumption traversed the boundaries of gender and social class.

The appearance of the word ‘mystery’ (Geheimnis) in the title of a work pointed out its sensational nature[2] and, indeed, from the mid-19th century, Yiddish writers used it to attract readers. By 1918, at least 35 books, booklets, and stories (most translated or adapted from foreign languages) serialized in the press featuring this word in their titles had been published. The Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia dismissed these stories, drawing a direct—albeit not always justified—connection between sensational works and shund literature.[3]

Following the 1905 Revolution and alongside the popular local tales of bandits and Cossacks, Russian translations and adaptations of European and American detective stories began to appear. These included stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, Nat Pinkerton and Nick Carter. Despite, and possibly due to, the foreignness of the heroes and the setting of events far from Russia’s borders, demand for these stories in booklets grew steadily. In 1907, the price of a booklet ranged from 15 to 20 kopeks with circulation figures of between 5,000 and 10,000 per booklet. By 1908, the peak of the so-called ‘plague of booklets’, the price had fallen to five kopeks or less per booklet, and circulation figures had increased, on occasion rising as high as 50,000 or even 60,000 copies.[4]  At the height of circulation in 1908, the number of booklets in each series reached 123 for Pinkerton stories and 218 for stories concerning Sherlock Holmes.[5]

Parallel to the upsurge of crime and detective stories in Russia, similar works appeared in Polish (largely in the years 1908–14). These stories were published in illustrated booklets with colorful bindings and sold at affordable prices. Four series of Sherlock Holmes stories were printed in Lvov (Lemberg), Kraków (both in Austrian Galicia) and Warsaw and circulated throughout the former Polish territory. The initial printing of 5,000 copies of each booklet apparently failed to meet demand; subsequently, dozens of these booklets were repeatedly reprinted. The series of booklets were bound together in thick volumes numbering thousands of pages.[6]  Aside from Sherlock Holmes, these stories featured Nick Carter, Nat Pinkerton, Harry Dickson, Ethel King (Holmes’ ‘partner’) and even Stefan Wenke, the ‘famous Warsaw detective’.[7]

Yiddish writers exploited the potential of attractive titles and, alongside wondrous events of various kinds, they deliberately utilized titles containing words from the vocabulary of mystery and crime, even though these do not always accurately reflect the content of the work; indeed, at times there is no link between the two.[8]

In the first years of the 20th century, the Warsaw publisher Yehude Leyb Morgenshtern published dozens of anonymous booklets containing serialized stories. Amongst these are those bearing appealing titles, including stories of crime and romance involving intricate plots of kidnapped children relocated after many years, usually in tragic circumstances; sons and daughters discovering that their mothers and fathers are not their biological parents; siblings reunited after being separated for many years or not knowing of the other’s existence; pairs of lovers unable to be together; violent kidnappings; property takeovers; inheritance theft; false testimonies; acts of robbery, murder and more. The names of the protagonists are generally international, with no definitive national identity (Peter, Adolf, Max, Franz, Anton, Charlotte, Margarita, Adela and so forth), and the geographic settings range from Galicia and France to as far away as New York. There is a noted lack of religious identification, and only seldom are the characters identified as Jews.

These are only some samples of the growing Yiddish popular publications between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I.

***

In 1907 the Warsaw educator and businessman Magnus Krinsky started publishing a weekly illustrated literary journal Roman-tsaytung (Novel Newspaper, Warsaw, 1907–8). From its beginning, the journal published three stories by Edgar Allan Poe[9] and four by Arthur Conan Doyle in Yiddish translation (clearly indicating the names of these writers but usually without the name of the translator[s]). The hero of Conan Doyle’s stories is Sherlock Holmes, but only the title of the last story is similar to that of the source text: ‘Di gut-bezitser fun Reyge’ (‘The Landowners of Reigate’; ‘The Reigate Squires’).[10] The other stories carry more enticing titles than the original texts.[11] Apart from the changes in titles, the translations, apparently the fruit of the editor’s pen, contain only minor alterations.

In 1907, the first and (apparently) last booklet in what was intended to be the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes was published: a precise translation of the story ‘Der shtendiker patsient’ (‘The Permanent Patient’, or ‘The Resident Patient’).[12] Soon after the appearance of a new daily newspaper, Haynt, in Warsaw, in January 1908, the title pages of the existing popular daily, Yidishes tageblat (1906–11), announced the intention to publish a new series of stories, ‘Di greste velt-geheymnisen’ (‘The Greatest World Mysteries’), from the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Nat Pinkerton and others. The first story, serialized in 13 installments, was a further translation of the story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, titled in Yiddish ‘A keniglikhe fotografishe karte’ (‘A Royal Photographic Card’), without the opening of the source story.[13] The decision to begin the series with this story appears to have been motivated by the fact that it does not feature an act of murder as well as by the Warsaw origins of the heroine, who succeeds in deceiving the acclaimed detective. For reasons unknown, this story was also the last in this promising series.

At the same time, series of Yiddish booklets bearing the name of the famous detective appeared on newspaper stands. These booklets, which lacked the name of the author, included tales of various bizarre murders lacking any connection to Conan Doyle’s works. None of these booklets indicated the year of publication. One series of such booklets was published at the initiative of the Vigoda publishing house by Hatsefira printers in Warsaw (c. 1907–8). Each story was divided into three booklets, a total of 47 pages per story, sold for the minimal sum of three kopeks each.[14] Another series was published in Kraków and circulated across the Russian border. Here there was even a slight change in the name of the hero: the addition of a vowel indicates that the ‘e’ in Holmes should be pronounced. They appeared in single booklets of 21 pages each and were sold at the relatively high price of 10 kopeks per booklet.[15] These stories and their predecessors were probably translated from two similar series in Polish: one was published in Warsaw in the years 1907–9 (52 booklets) and the other in Kraków, 1908–9 (86 booklets). The latter series was, in turn, probably translated from a German counterpart titled ‘Aus den Geheimakten des Welt-detektivs’ (‘From the Mysteries of World-Detectives’), of which 230 booklets appeared from 1907. So, too, dozens of such booklets appeared in Russian from 1902, and mainly in the years 1908–10. The colorful cover pages of the Yiddish booklets were also copied from the German series, apparently via translation into Polish or Russian.[16]

Simultaneously, other booklets of a similar format circulated in Galicia and Congress Poland. These featured the hero Maks Shpitskop: Der kenig fun detektivs, der viner Sherlock Holmes (Max Shpitskop: The King of Detectives, the Viennese Sherlock Holmes). Shpitskop was an original Jewish response to the figure of the famous British detective, as well as to Russian and Polish imagined detective figures. Like his British counterpart, Shpitskop  also has an assistant, a Jew known by his last name Fuks (no first name); the two work from an office in Vienna named ‘Blits’ (Lightning). Shpitskop’s work is not connected in any way to his Jewishness, but when presented with the opportunity he immediately comes to the defense of his people.[17] An example of such a story is Aliles dam (Dos blut bilbl) (The Blood Libel) (see Fig. 1), in which the detective and his assistant expose the story of the murder and disappearance of a Christian child, an event that gave rise to a pogrom and engendered great fear among the Jews of a Galician town. The booklets, written in Germanized Yiddish, were published in Kraków by the Jüdischer Roman-Verlag and printed by Josef Fisher, also without any indication of the year.

Fig. 1. Booklet 3. Aliles dam (Dos blut bilbl) (The Blood Libel (© Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library)

Amongst his childhood memories, Isaac Bashevis Singer mentions these Max Shpitskop booklets together with the Sherlock Holmes ones that he read as a young boy in Warsaw.[18] The name of the author of the Shpitskop series does not appear on the booklets but, based on a recently published article, it is highly possible that they were penned by Yoyne Krepel (1874–1939), a Galician writer and editor, the son-in-law of the printer Yosef Fisher and later an activist closely associated with the Jewish Orthodox party Agudes Yisroel.[19] By contrast to the series discussed above, which, inspired by similar booklets in Polish, ‘adopted’ the character of Sherlock Holmes, it would seem that these stories about Detective Shpitskop were inspired by popular stories about the Viennese detectives Josef Müller (created by the writer Auguste Groner) and Dagobert Trostler (Balduin Groller); the latter is similar to Sherlock Holmes in terms of character and the plots in which he is involved.[20] Although Jewish content such as that found in the story about a blood libel or in Geroybt tsu der shmad (Kidnapped for Conversion) cannot be found in the writings of these authors, the possibility should not be ruled out that they served as inspiration.

***

In an angry letter, a reader of Roman-tsaytung complained that a serious newspaper should include within its pages shund, in the form of detective stories. In response, the acting editor and prominent translator A. L. Yakobovits seized the opportunity to acquaint readers with the writers Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, the character Sherlock Holmes and his contribution to society, specifying that these stories were considered belles lettres. Yakobovits warned readers against the widely circulating booklets translated from Russian and Polish bearing the name of the famous detective but not attributed to any specific author: in his opinion, these (and not the original detective stories) constituted a danger to the still relatively inadequate field of Yiddish literature and should be avoided as much as possible.[21]

A satirical review, in the form of a short story set in the office of a known London detective, portrayed Sherlock Holmes as nothing more than a good for nothing. The review ends with a wish, ‘Let us hope that he will no longer rule over minds’.[22] A similar conviction informs another satirical story by the writer Zalman Vendrof, who warns potential readers against the superficiality and worthlessness of reading unrealistic detective stories and newspaper reports about police stations and courts.[23]

In January 1909, a theater troupe starring Ester Rokhel Kaminsky staged a drama in four parts, titled ‘Sherlock Holms’, in the Muranuv theatre in Warsaw.[24] On the Sabbath, the day before Tisha B’Av 1910 (13 August), the play ‘Sherlock Holms’, a comedy in four acts staring Yulius Adler and translated from German by Anshl Shor, premiered at the Great Theater in Łódź which was managed by Y. G. Zandberg.[25] The editor of the Lodzer tageblat, Lazar Kahan, described the latter as a refreshing innovation within the dull landscape of Yiddish theatre. He added that the play could not be compared with the common shund booklets so detrimental to the literary value of both the hero and the author.[26]

Just as European belles lettres found their way to Yiddish readers through translations and adaptations even before the invention of the printing press, so, too, in the second half of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century, did the popular genre of crime literature. As newspapers in all languages became more readily available to growing readerships and provided up-to-date details on a variety of topics, including detailed reports from police stations and courts, such information contained therein—combined with the development of European crime stories and the popularity already enjoyed by folk tales concerning bandits and criminals—inspired writers, translators and publishers to adapt into Yiddish tales of suspense and drama from the wider world. Their circulation, in the form of detective booklets and stories serialized in Yiddish (and Polish) newspapers and journals, reached a peak in the years 1908–10 with Sherlock Holmes and Max Shpitskop at the top. After World War I, this literature was pushed to the sidelines of the Yiddish book market in Poland. It is possible that Jewish readers began to read such works in Polish. However, a more likely explanation for this change resides in the fact that silent movies became the main supplier of crime and detective stories for entertainment purposes among the general and Jewish publics.


[1] A first and expanded version of this chapter was published as ‘Sherlock Holmes in the Pale of Settlement: Yiddish Crime Stories 1860–1914’, in Leket: Yiddish Studies Today, ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2013), pp. 253–278. A revised version can be found in Nathan Cohen, Yiddish Transformed: Reading Habits in the Russian Empire, 1860-1914, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2023, chapter three, ‘New on the Shelf: Crime and Detective Stories’, pp. 222-247.

[2] Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What Is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1–28. The characteristics of the sensational story are similar to those of the gothic novel (which was widespread in 18th-century England, France, and Germany): they create an atmosphere of dread combined with elements of mystery. For general information on this literary genre, its characteristics, and circulation, see Jerrold E. Hogle ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Regarding sensation and crime literature (as well as westerns and war stories) in Great Britain see, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 142–165.

[3] This number is only partial and is based upon the catalogue of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem and the Historical Jewish Press project https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/newspapers/jpress  Undoubtedly a wider search would reveal additional titles. The source of the term shund, which played a crucial role in Yiddish cultural history, is the abattoir; the word originally designated the stench of a skinned animal’s arcass. In 19th-century Germany, Schund was used in a literary context to describe a work of low literary value that was considered morally harmful to its readers. By the end of the 19th century, the term was also used in the Yiddish literary sphere. See Chone Shmeruk, ‘Letoldot sifrut “hashund” beyidish’. Tarbiz 52 (1983), pp. 325–350 [in Hebrew]; Ellen Kellman, ‘Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt! Towards the History of Yiddish Reading in Inter-War Poland’. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 16 (2003), pp. 213–242.

[4] Between 1907 and 1915, 6.2 million copies of Nat Pinkerton booklets, 3.9 million copies of Sherlock Holmes booklets and 3.1 million copies of Nick Carter booklets were sold. See Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era’, In Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914, edited by William Mills Todd III, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 144–46; and idem, When Russia Learned to Read, Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 141–43, 148, 366–67.

[5] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, pp. 366, table 18.

[6] Anna Martuszewska, ‘Literatura obiegów popularnych’, In Słownik Literatury Polskiej XX Wieku, edited by Alina Brodzka et al. (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1992,) pp. 580–582, as well as Janusz Dunin, Papierowy Bandyata: Książka kramarska I brukowa w Polsce. (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1974), pp. 191–220. The wide scope of the printing of these booklets and their circulation is discussed in Janusz Dunin and Zdzisław Knorowski, Polskie Powieściowe serie zeszytowe: Materiały bibliograficzne. (Łódź: Universytet Łódzki, 1984).

[7] Martuszewska, ‘Literatura obiegów popularnych’, p. 581; Anna Martuszewska, ‘Kryminalna Powieść’, in Słownik Literatury Polskiej XX Wieku, ed. Alina Brodzka et al. (Wroclaw, Warszawa, Kraków: Ossolineum, 1992), pp. 481–482.

[8] Several examples: An early booklet by a female author, Frume Dereizin [?], Der retseyekh un di retseyekhte (The Murderer and the Murderess), Zhitomir 1875, indeed tells a story of two people who committed a terrible crime. However, the main purpose of the story was to criticize traditional matchmaking and the superficiality characteristic of interpersonal relationships. A story in installments titled ‘Der shreklikher merder’ (‘ The Terrible Murder’) by Khayim Molits (1861–1924) was published in issues 5, 6, and 7 of the Yudishes folks-blat (1888), yet before the suspenseful plot even began to be revealed, publication ceased, in all likelihood due to the writer’s migration. A booklet by the popular author Avrom Yitskhok Bukhbinder (186?–97), Der kinder merder (The Infanticide) (Vilna, 1891), is a tale of disappointed love and revenge that culminates in the tragic deaths of its heroes. Di geheyme libe order di shreklekhe merderay ( The Secret Love or the Terrible Murder) (Lublin, 1895) is a complex story by Shimen Voltsonek (1856–??). At the center of the story are attempts to take control of property and earn money through guile. The title of Di farshtelte merders, oder bal-tshuve (The Disguised Murders, or [the] Repenting Sinner) (Piotrków, 1905), ostensibly indicates that this is a crime story, although in fact it is a popular adaptation of a gothic novel with Jewish heroes.

[9] Eight additional stories by Poe were published slightly later (1910) in the monthly journal Eyropayishe literatur, edited by Avrom Reyzen.

[10] Issues no. 5–7 (1908), 139–46, 177–82, 207–12.

[11] Di shkrelikhe geheymnis (The Terrible Mystery; ‘The Adventure of the “Gloria Scott”’), issues no. 1–5 (1907), 21–26, 57–60, 85–90, 119–24 ; ‘Di froy miten revolver’ (‘The Woman with a Revolver’; ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’), issues no. 26–27 (1907), 821–26, 849–58; and ‘Mis Irene Adler’ (‘Miss Irene Adler’; ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’), issues no. 29–32 (1907), 919–923, 941–46, 967–76, 999–1,004. It should be noted that as in the following publication of this story (see below) the editors almost completely avoided the explicit use of the term ‘Bohemia’ in the title and body of the story, apparently for political reasons.

[12] Sherlok Holms der berimter sishtsik: zayne ksovim fun Conan Doyl—Der shtendiker patsient (Sherlock Holmes the Famous Detective: The Writings of Conan Doyle—The Permanent Patient) (Warsaw, Edelsteyn), 1907.

[13] The announcement was published almost daily in the second and third weeks of May 1908. The story was published between 4 June and 2 July 1908.

[14] The whole series is titled: Sherlok Holms: Hekhst interesante vunderlikhe ertsehlungen fun velt berimten geheym-agent Sherlok Holms (Sherlock Holmes: A Highly Interesting, Wonderful Tale of the World-Famous Secret Agent Sherlock Holmes). The title page of the booklet includes a portrait of Holmes and next to him portraits of Nat Pinkerton and Nick Carter (although I am not aware of translations of any of the stories concerning Pinkerton and Carter into Yiddish) and also an illustration characteristic of the title of the story. In the National Library in Jerusalem and in the YIVO Library in New York, I was able to find three series (totaling seven booklets) bearing the titles: Der froyen-merder (The Woman-Murderer) (nos. 1–3); Der aristokratisher bandit (The Noble Bandit) (nos. 4–6); and Der mord fun firshtin Malkolm (The Murder of Duchess Malkolm) (nos. 7–[9]).

[15] This series is titled Sherlok Holmes: Der berimter veltdetektiv (Sherlock Holmes: The Famous World-Detective). The title page resembles the Warsaw publications. The price is noted in heller and in kopeks. It would seem likely that the relatively high price resulted from the distance between the place of printing and the places of marketing. It is possible that this is a slightly later publication than that discussed above (c. 1909). The titles that I have been able to see are: Sherlok Holmes in Vin (Sherlock Holmes in Vienna) (no. 1); Sherlok Holmes un dos tsirkus Angelo (Sherlock Holmes and the Angelo Circus) (no. 2); Tsvishen himel un erd (Between Heaven and Earth) (no. 3); Der farloyrener kapitan (The Lost Captain) (no. 4); Der masenmerder (The Mass-Murderer) (no. 9), in which Sherlock Holmes is studying medicine in Brooklyn, New York; and Di mapole funem prof. Flaks (The Overthrow of Prof. Flaks) (no. 10).

[16] On the German series, see: https://bit/ly/2mcHt4U. On the Polish and Russian series, see Dunin, Papierowy Bandyata, 84–86, 89–91; George Piliev, ‘Introduction’, In Sherlock Holmes in Russia. Edited and translated by Alex Auswaks. (London: Robert Hale, 2010), pp. 16–19.

[17] 15 booklets were published in the series: (1) Geroybt tsu der shmad (Kidnapped for Conversion); (2) Banknotn felsher (Banknote Forgers); (3) Aliles dam (Dos blut bilbul) (The Blood Libel); (4) A rethzelhafter mord (A Mysterious Murder); (5) Der shmugler (The Smuggler); (6) Der gefelshter testament (The Forged Will); (7) Der shpion (The Spy); (8) Der medkhen handler (The Maiden Merchant); (9) Der bank-aynbrekher (The Bank Robber); (10) Di kinder-merderin (The Child Killer); (11) Der toydten-greber (The Dead Digger); (12) Dos geheymnis fun a milyoner (The Mystery of a Millionaire); (13) Di dertrunkene kale (The Drowned Bride); (14) Der misyoner (The Missionary); (15) Di nakhtvandlerin (The Night Wanderer). All these booklets are found in the Vladimir Medem Library in Paris, and I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Ms Natalia Krinitska for her help in obtaining them. Two booklets, numbers 4 and 12, are found in the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. The year of publication is not noted on the booklets. In the years 1909–11, these stories were printed in installments in the New York paper Di varhayt, and there Shpitskop was called ‘the Galician detective’. In the 1920s, these booklets appear to be the source for a series titled Viliamson: Der kenig fun detektivs, der Parizer Sherlok Holmes (Williamson: The King of Detectives, the Parisian Sherlock Holmes) (Warsaw).

[18] Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘Fun der alter un nayer heim’, Forverts, 15 November 1963.

[19] Dovid Sheynberg, ‘Yoyne Krepel un zayne yestires’, Afn shvel 374–75 (2017): 41–48. I am grateful to Mr Sheynberg for bringing his findings to my attention.

[20] On these writers and their heroes, see Mary W. Tannert and Henry Kratz (trans. and eds.), Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 1999).

[21] Noel [A. L. Yakobovits], ‘Vegen der Sherlok Holms Literatur’, Roman-tsaytung,29 (1907), pp. 923–26. Notably Yakobovits himself, a known translator, was forced to translate shund novels for the daily popular press as a source of income. See also A yidishe tokhter, ‘Lebedike shotens’ (Living Shadows), Gut morgen, 26 May 1910 and 15 June 1910, p. 2 (in both issues). I would like to thank Dr Nurit Orchan for bringing this review and others mentioned here to my attention.

[22] Etienne Zshaliklerk [?], ‘Der sof fun Sherlok Holms’ (‘The Demise of Sherlock Holmes’), Vokhen-zshurnal ‘di naye velt’ 158 (1910), pp. 481–486.

[23] L.B., ‘Vi azoy der izvotshtishik hot derkent dem groysen sistshik’, Gut morgen, 26 June 1911, p. 3.

[24] According to announcements in the newspaper Undzer leben (Warsaw) from 22 January.

[25] Lodzer tageblat, 13 August and 25 August 1910.

[26] Y. Lazar [Kahan], ‘Teater un muzik: “Sherlock Kholms…,”’ Lodzer tageblat, 17 August 1910.

Professor Nathan Cohen
Associate Professor, and director of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish
Studies at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University
Categories
Judeo-Italian

On a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical and Scientific Glossary in Hebrew and Judeo-Italian (Bodleian Library, Ms. Mich. Add. 39) 

This post is based on research undertaken during Dr Ilana Wartenberg’s stay at the OCHJS as an Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages Visiting Fellow in Trinity Term 2024.

***

Ms. Mich. Add. 39 from the Bodleian Library is a fascinating testimony to intellectual and linguistic aspects of Jewish life in seventeenth-century northern Italy. Its core is a Hebrew/Judeo-Italian glossary, featuring many philosophical and scientific terms. This glossary contains both sections from earlier glossaries and lexemes directly derived from various literary works. The codex also contains Hebrew astronomical and astrological lexemes translated into the vernacular, a Latin translation (in the Latin alphabet) of the books of the Hebrew Bible, as well as various philosophical and other terms  together with comments and memoranda added by the owner of the codex.[1]

MS. Mich. Add. 39, fol. 1r (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

In the age of print, codex Ms. Mich. Add. 39 stands out as an eloquent, handwritten document bearing witness to the diffusion of knowledge and its lexicon into seventeenth-century northern Italy across a variety of domains: philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, Kabbalah, the Jewish calendar, Halakha, ethics, grammar, and medicine. That being said, it also contains everyday, non-technical, terms. The compiler of the glossary clearly invested much thought in selecting and putting together approximately 1,000 Hebrew terms whose vernacular translations he believed were necessary to learn. The rich choice of textual sources by earlier and contemporary authors from different geographical and cultural settings not only reflects contemporary intellectual interests but also sheds light on the content of Jewish scholarly libraries during the Italian Renaissance.

A small and lightweight paper codex, Ms. Mich. Add. 39 was clearly intended as a pocket book, a notebook that one could carry around easily. It is approximately 13cm long and 10cm wide, and contains 23 folios. Despite its modest size and several empty folios, the codex’s extremely small—at times almost micrographic—handwriting made it possible for some of the densely written folios in the Hebrew/Judeo-Italian glossary to contain close to 100 terms. They are written in Hebrew script almost entirely, with some vernacular or Latin words written in the Latin alphabet—a phenomenon well-accounted for in the seventeenth century, when Jews were gradually shifting from the Hebrew to the Latin alphabet. 

Two very similar handwritings, both in a typical central-northern cursive Italian script common in the seventeenth century, are discernible in the codex. One of them belongs to the anonymous compiler of the glossary while the second belongs to an early owner who was one of the most important manuscript and book collectors in seventeenth-century Italy, Abraham Joseph Solomon Graziano. Originally from Pesaro, Graziano eventually became a rabbi in Modena and was known for his lenient rulings. He often referred to himself in the colophons as איש גר (‘a foreigner’), which is an abbreviation of his first names and surname but also alludes to his feeling that he was a stranger in Modena.[2] The copy was marked as censored (מזוקק), but the identity of the censor is unknown. Furthermore, no censorship erasures are visible; this phenomenon is probably due to the absence of heretical contents rather than the (not unusual) sloppy work of the censor. On Folio 1r, we find two colophons: one by the compiler in the bottom half and another by Graziano above it. 

Graziano’s colophon reads:

בהא”נו

זה הוא ספר שפותר המלות של הפלוסופיא וההגיון, היינו מלות הזרות שבחכמות הללו, והוא כמו ע”ד אור לוסטרו והפתרון הנ”ל הוא בלשון לעז ואיטאליאנו, והוא שלי זעירא וכישא דירקא אברהם יוסף שלמה ב”כמה”ר מרדכי גראציאנו זצו”ל, אשר קניתי אותו מכל יורשי הזקן כמה”ר גרשון פורמיזיני בכ”ר מנחם ז”ל ביום א’ ג’ סיון, שנת תי”ט לפ”ק, פ’ נשוא, היא שנת אלף תרנט לחשבונם, פה מודונא, ו”לוי”א [=ולברכה ולשלום יהיה אמן] ]…[ החכם השלם החסיד כמו”הר”ר שמואל אבוהב נר”ו

איש גר אנכי בארץ

‘With the help of God, Amen, we shall do, and we shall succeed.

This is a book which translates the words of philosophy and logic, i.e., the uncommon [lit. unknown, foreign] words in these sciences, and it is in the way [i.e. format] of ʼOr-Lustro,[3] and the translation mentioned above is in la‘az, i.e., italiano, and it belongs to me, the young and the insignificant[4] Abraham Joseph Solomon, the son of the honourable righteous teacher Rabbi Mordecai Graziano of blessed and pious memory, which I purchased from all the heirs of the elder, the honourable teacher Rabbi Gerson Formiggini,[5] the son of the honourable Rabbi Menachem, in blessed memory, on Sunday, 3 Sivan, in the Jewish year [5]419, Torah portion Naso, which is the year 1659 according to their calendar [lit. calculation, and the equivalent Gregorian date is 25 May 1659], here, Modena, may it be in blessing and in peace, Amen […] the grand sage, the pious, our honourable teacher, Rabbi Samuel Aboab,[6] may God protect and redeem himʼ.

I am a foreign man in this country

The compiler’s colophon reads:

עירוך וסדור <קטן והוא> פי’ מילות זרות הנמצאות כתובות בחכמת הפילוסופיא, מהפלוסופים <ובעלי ההגיון> האלקיים[7] היינו בעל עקידת יצחק, עולת שבת, עולת תמיד, ס’ העקרים, נוה שלום, דברי שלמה, אור עמים וספרי’ אחרים, מפלוסופי עמנו, נפשם בטוב תלין, אשר פירושן וביאורן ופתרונן, הוא מלשון הקודש, ללשון לעז, היינו איטאליאנו, ולקטתי הפי’ והפתרון הנ”ל, מהרבה מקומות וחבורים, היינו מביאור מלות זרות הרבה, מס’ מורה הנבוכים, שחבר החכם הכולל כמוהר”ר                 זצ”ל, והחבור קטן מכמו”הר’ שמואל אבואב נר”ו מויניציאה, ומס’ פי אריה מכמוהר”ר יהודא אריה ממודונא, היינו התוספת מהביאור שהוספנו אחרי כותבי ביאור הרבה מלות אחרות, וכתבנו קו אחד אחריהן, הכלל הזה יהיה בידיך <קורא אהוב וחביב ונחמד> בעירוך וסדור קטן הלן, כדי שתדע מוצאו ומובאו של הפי’ […] מלות זרות מהפלוסופיא וההגיון הנ”ל – והפי’ הזה הוא כגון דִִיצְייוׄנַא”רְיוׄ בלעז.  

‘A small glossary and arrangement––it is an explanation of uncommon words which are found written in [books pertaining to] the science of philosophy, from the divine philosophers and the logicians, i.e., the author of ‘Aqedat Iṣḥaq [The Binding of Isaac],[8] ‘Olat Shabbat [Sacrifice of the Sabbath],[9] ‘Olat Tamid [Daily Burnt Offering],[10] Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim [Book of Principles],[11] Neve Shalom [Abode of Peace],[12] Divrey Shlomo [The Sayings of Solomon],[13] ʼOr ‘Amim [The Light of Peoples][14] and other books, by philosophers of our people, their soul shall abide in prosperity [cf. Ps. 25:13], whose explanation, elucidation, and translation are from the Holy Tongue into la‘az, i.e., Italian. And I have gathered the above-mentioned explanation and translation from many places and compositions, i.e., from the elucidation of many uncommon words from the book Guide for the Perplexed, which the grand sage, our honourable teacher, Rabbi [Maimonides],[15] may the memory of the pious be blessed, composed, and a small composition by our honourable teacher, Rabbi Samuel Aboab from Venice,[16] may God protect and redeem him, and from the book Pi ʼAryeh [The Mouth of a Lion] by our honourable teacher, Rabbi Aryeh [Leon] of Modena,[17] i.e., the addition to the explanation we have added after the composers of the explanation of many other words, and we wrote a hyphen [lit. one line] after them. This rule [or: order] will be given to you [lit. in your hands], beloved, lovely and pleasant reader, in this edition and small arrangement mentioned above so you will know the origin and the aim [cf. Ezek. 43:11] of the explanation of the uncommon words from [the fields of] philosophy and logic––and it is as a dictionary, dizionario [in Hebrew letters] in la‘azʼ.

In addition to the authors and texts cited in the colophons, many other authors and texts are mentioned throughout the glossary including: the famous trilingual encyclopaedic dictionary (in Hebrew, Latin, and Italian) Ṣemaḥ David (The Plant of David)—composed by the linguist, philosopher, and physician David de Pomis (ca. 1524 – ca. 1594)—which is primarily a biblical and rabbinic dictionary of impressive scope widely known among Jewish scholars as well as Christian Hebraists; a scientific-philosophical glossary (Ms. 479 in the Montefiore Library) compiled by Kabbalists Aharon Berachia of Modena (1549–1639) and his contemporary Samuel Shaʿar Aryeh (or Portaleone); numerous works related to Maimonides—apart from The Guide for the Perplexed itself, there are explicit references to Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s explanation of uncommon words usually included at the end of the Guide, as well as Maimonides’s Mishne Torah, Shmoneh Prakim (Eight Chapters) and Hilkhot Yesodey ha-Torah (The Laws which are the Foundations of the Torah); Sefer ha-Gdarim (The Book of Definitions, also known as Mikhlol Yofi, i.e., Perfection of Beauty) by the philosopher Menaḥem ben Abraham Bonafoux of Perpignan, which is a dictionary of philosophical, ethical, and medical terms, many of which are derived from the GuideDialoghi di Amore by Leone Ebreo (Medico), Judah Abravanel (ca. 1465–ca. 1525), a philosophical treatise on love which enjoyed a widespread reception in the Christian world; Fiore di virtù, an extremely popular, anonymous fourteenth-century book, translated into several languages and intended for the moral education of youth; as well as references to Ovid and Aristotle. Furthermore, Graziano added philosophical terms translated into the vernacular from a dictionary by the preacher Isaac Alatrino (or Alatrini) ben Abraham of Cingoli.[18]

The three memoranda in Ms. Mich. Add. 39 emphasize the importance of the study of Hebrew and vernacular scientific, philosophical, and lexicographical sources for preachers (דרשנים, active in synagogues or in Jewish accademie) for the sake of increasing their intellectual Italian vocabulary, embellishing their sermons, impressing their more-or-less educated listeners, and thus enhancing their authority. The mentioned sources are Calepino,[19] Mattioli,[20] Nofet Ṣufim (The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow),[21] Divrey Shlomo (which, according to Graziano’s acquaintances, was cited from by Judah Aryeh [Leon] of Modena during his sermons in Venice), ‘Aqedat IṣḥaqSefer ha-‘Iqqarim, Judah ha-Levi’s Sefer ha-Kuzari, and Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed.

It is important to remember that for Jews in Italy, the vernacular—Italian—was their native tongue used on a day-to-day basis. However, as we know all too well from our own mother tongue(s), being a native speaker of a language does not entail knowledge of its highly specialized terminology, which needs to be studied separately and often over a prolonged period. Unlike other Judeo-Italian sources, e.g., Siddurim (prayer books), which were written entirely in Judeo-Italian in order to help the readers understand the Hebrew sources, such philosophical glossaries tell a different story. My research of Ms. Mich. Add. 39 shows that the translation of philosophical terms into Judeo-Italian did not serve as a linguistic bridge to the Hebrew terms, but instead was intended to teach readers to express known Hebrew terms in the vernacular, help them integrate intellectually into the surrounding society and access its literature, and, as reflected from the memoranda, also help preachers embellish their language. The multiple references to Hebrew sources, such as Maimonides’s Guide among many others, together with the Hebrew colophons suggest that the immediate users of the glossary were well-versed in Hebrew philosophical literature. 

A future publication of the entire lexicon of this codex will be of great scholarly value, since it will reveal numerous scientific-philosophical vernacular terms and ideas taught among Jewish circles in seventeenth-century northern Italy. Given that most Hebrew and vernacular terms have been vocalized, the lexicon also possesses valuable phonological information, providing rare insight into contemporary pronunciation of these words, at least in theory.[22] The Judeo-Italian elements of the lexicon also reflect emulations of written Italian just before the Hebrew script was replaced by the Latin script, for example the doubling the consonants and rendering l’ as ל’.

To give one lexical example, consider the Judeo-Italian evolution of the medieval Hebrew term for geometry, תשבורת(tishboret), as reflected in the glossary, a term which was coined in the twelfth century by Abraham bar Ḥayya via a calque from the Arabic تكسير (taksir). Both etymological roots originally denote ‘break’. The Hebrew term is usually pronounced tishboret but is vocalized as tashboret in Ms. Mich. Add. 39, reflecting its immediate source, Pi ʼAryeh. This is one of the terms Rabbi Aryeh Judah Leon Modena had silently ‘borrowed’ from a sixteenth-century glossary preserved in Ms. Or. Fol. 1618 at the State Library in Berlin in which we find the translations: פרטי די גיאומטריאה, דיספארטירי (‘divide’, ‘part related to [lit. of] geometry’). Modena did not include the translation ‘divide’, and one reads only parte di geometria in the printed edition of Pi ʼAryeh, but with the addition per l’algebra, which also found its way into Ms. Mich. Add. 39.[23] If this is indeed Modena’s addition, then perhaps he deserves at least partial forgiveness for his inclusion of the term (along with many others) from the earlier glossary, because his updated vernacular translation mirrors the contemporary mathematical trend. The sixteenth century was a time in which algebra was flourishing in Italy owing to the efforts of mathematicians such as Tartaglia, Cardano, and Ferrari, and geometry played a vital role in the history of algebra (and vice versa), as is beautifully reflected in this translation.[24]

Finally, I shall briefly mention that there is an abundance of scientific-philosophical Hebrew/Judeo-Italian glossaries produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It seems to me that this profusion is directly related to the conspicuous absence of entire scientific-philosophical treatises in Judeo-Italian, which is not accidental given that many educated Italian Jews were able to read original vernacular (and Latin) sources. Therefore, the need for this type of glossaries seems to have been solely for the study of specialized vernacular vocabulary through the Hebrew.  


[1] For previous mentions of Ms. Mich. Add. 39, see Giuseppe, Sermoneta, Un glossario filosofico ebraico-italiano del XIII secolo (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, Roma, 1969), Alessandro, Guetta, An Ancient Psalm, a Modern Song: Italian Translations of Hebrew Literature in the Early Modern Period, (Boston: Brill, 2022), 116, and idem, ‘Traduzioni e lessici filosofici manoscritti nell’Italia ebraica, tra fine Cinquecento e inizio Seicento’, in Philosophical Translations in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. In Memory of Mauro Zonta, eds. Irene Kajon, Luisa Valente, and Francesca Gorgoni (Rome: Aracana Edizioni (Genzano di Roma), 2022), 203, 207. An article of mine which presents the codex in great detail is due to appear in a book deriving from the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies on Books in Judeo Languages: Popular Reading and Scholarship

[2] For details on Graziano’s life, oeuvre and collection, see S. Jona, ‘Abraham Joseph Salomon Graziani, poète hébreu du ΧVIIe siècle,’ Revue des études juives vol. 4–7 (1882): 113–126; Yael Okun (Mayer), The Library of the manuscripts of Abraham Joseph Graziano (ca. 1620 1685)(Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1991) [M.A. thesis, in Hebrew].

[3] ʼOr-Lustro (אור לוסטרו) by David ben Abraham Modena, a dictionary for young pupils, was published at the end of the sixteenth century. It was named after its first entry (אור, Heb. light) and its adjacent vernacular translation (לוסטרו, Ital. light), and it is also referred to as Dabber Tov (Speak Well). It is comprised of approximately 400 words, divided into semantic categories such as foods, body parts, animals, astrological signs, etc. Versions of this dictionary were also published in Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Portuguese. 

[4] Lit., ‘a bundle of vegetables’, cf. BT Bava Batra, 146b.

[5] For further details on the purchase, see Okun (Mayer), The Library of the manuscripts of Abraham Joseph Graziano, 112. Formiggini is a prominent Jewish Italian family surname. Graziano wrote a wedding poem on the occasion of the marriage of another member of the Formiggini family, Joseph Eliezer, the son of Elijah Formiggini, to Clara, the daughter of Michael Ṣemaḥ from Verona, which was signed on 6 Kislev 5435 (4/5 December, 1674). This is part of the collection of the National Library of Israel: ARC. 4* 1537 1 12: https://www.nli.org.il/he/manuscripts/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990034440710205171/NLI. See also Jona, ‘Abraham Joseph Salomon Graziani’, 119.

[6] Samuel Aboab (1610–1694) was born in Hamburg to a family of Portuguese Marranos who returned to Judaism. He became one of the greatest rabbinic authorities in seventeenth-century Italy. Besides his rabbinic education in Venice, Aboab was also learned in the sciences and mastered several languages. 

[7] A Hebrew rendition of the Renaissance term filosofo divino.

[8] By the Sephardic rabbi, head of rabbinic academies and philosopher, Isaac ben Moses ‘Arama (ca. 1420–1494), who wrote philosophical sermons on the weekly portions which served as a model for many preachers in subsequent generations. 

[9] Weekly Sabbath sermons written by Joel Ibn Shu‘eib, a Sephardic rabbi, a biblical commentator and an important preacher from the fifteenth century whose extant works reveal both an extensive rabbinic knowledge as well as a broad cultural and scientific education.

[10] An exegetical work by the Sephardic preacher, rabbi and philosopher, Moses ben Jacob Albelda (1500–1583), active in Arta (Greece) and Valona (Albania).

[11] Completed in 1425 by the Sephardic philosopher and rabbi, Joseph Albo, who discusses the fundamental principles of Judaism and Jewish philosophy. This work is one of the most important philosophical-theological books written between the 1391 persecutions and the 1492 expulsion.

[12] A series of homilies on aggadic passages from tractate Berakhot intertwined with philosophical interpretations. It was composed by Abraham ben Isaac Shalom, a rabbi and philosopher from Catalunya, who died in 1492. He was also a translator from Latin into Hebrew and a defender of Maimonidean philosophy.

[13] A book of sermons by Solomon ben Isaac ha-Levi (1532–1600), who was a rabbi and preacher in Salonika in the sixteenth century and well-versed in Greek and Arabic grammar, as well as in philosophy and the Kabbalah. 

[14] A treatise on religious philosophy by ‘Ovadyah Sforno, the famous Italian rabbi, physician, philosopher, and biblical exegete (ca. 1475–1550).  

[15] It is unclear why Maimonides’s name is omitted despite the fact that a space was left for it—perhaps there was an intention to add his name in colour.

[16] According to my lexical research, the ‘short treatise’ seems to be Aboab’s work on ethical conduct, entitled Sefer ha-Zikhronot (Book of Memoranda).

[17] Pi ʼAryeh was compiled by the famous and rather complex figure of Rabbi Aryeh Judah Leon Modena (1571–1648), the rabbi of Venice, a preacher, a vehement attacker of Kabbalah, and a gambler in his free time. In his dictionary, Modena also included an earlier sixteenth-century lexicon, found in Ms. 1618 at the State Library in Berlin, without any accreditation to its author.

[18] Active in Modena, in 1621, he was allowed by the duke to teach Hebrew to Christians. It is important to note that authors of Hebrew/Judeo-Italian philosophical glossaries were prominent scholars who possessed the technical knowledge, linguistic sensitivity, and intellectual skills to effectively transfer notions from the Arabic-Hebrew philosophical world into the Latin-Christian realm.  

[19] The reference is to the dictionary by Ambrogio Calepino (1435–1511), the famous Italian lexicographer, who composed a Latin dictionary in 1502 with translations into various languages. 

[20] Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500–1577) was an Italian physician and naturalist who translated Dioscorides’s Materia Medica from Latin into the vernacular (and was the first person to describe cat allergy!). The reference here is probably to the medical lexicon within Mattioli’s work. 

[21] A highly praised book by Rabbi Messer Leon on rhetoric, discussing the possibility of Hebrew becoming a rhetorical language and aiming to sharpen the persuasive power of the speaker. Messer Leon, the fifteenth-century physician and philosopher, established a yeshiva academy in Ancona, where he combined the traditional study of Jewish texts with lectures adhering to the medieval secular curriculum.

[22] Albeit with some inconsistencies, as in the case of תשבורת.

[23]תַשְבּוֹרֶת, פַּארְטֵי דּי גִיִאיאוׄמֶיטְרִיאָה, פֵּיר לֵ’אלְגֶיבְּרָא  (fol. 14v), and on fol.14r, where we find another vernacular translation––a more basic one––in two forms of transliteration: תשבורת, יִיִאוׄמֶיטְרִיאָה <גִיִיִאיאוׄמֶיטְרִיאָה> . Note that in this case תשבורת is not vocalized, as was probably the case in the (unidentified) source used by the compiler.

[24] In Salerno’s glossary we find the term תשבורת but its translation is ריטוליקא, a corruption of ריגוליקו or ריגוליקא, i.e., [the science of] measurement [lit., the ruler]; see Sermoneta, Glossario filosofico, 351. The terms rigolica and rigolico reflect the medieval vernacular perception of geometry. 

Dr Ilana Wartenberg
OSRJL Visiting Fellow,
Trinity Term 2024, OCHJS;
Senior Researcher and Head of
Italia Judaica, Goldstein-Goren
Diaspora Research Centre,
Tel Aviv University

Categories
Yiddish

Translating, Editing and Printing Tikkunim in Old Yiddish 

This post is based on research undertaken during Professor Jean Baumgarten’s stay at the OCHJS as an Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages Visiting Fellow in Hilary Term 2024.

***

Old Yiddish texts produced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contain numerous references to Jewish mystics. During this period, the Kabbalah became a major component of the literature read and studied by less-educated readers. Through numerous fragments taken from the Sefer ha-Zohar and the Lurianic Kabbalah, it occupied a special place within the corpus of Old Yiddish ethical literature. The popularization and vernacularization of kabbalistic ideas and texts testify to the transformation undergone by traditional Ashkenazi rabbinical culture during the early modern period. 

Take one example: the bilingual (Hebrew/Yiddish) or monolingual (Yiddish) prayer books called Tikkunim, which contain various liturgical components (pizmonim, bakashot, tehinot, zmirot, mizmorim); excerpts from biblical, rabbinical and kabbalistic texts; pieces of ethical advice taken from ha-sifrut ha-musar, especially those on repentance (teshuva); and stories (mayses, sippurim). It may be said that the Tikkunim combine three different types of texts: those intended for reading (leyenen), prayer (betnoren) and study (lernen).

Some Old Yiddish Tikkunim are connected to specific feasts. One such example is the Tikkun Leyl Shavuot (Layla de-kala) (Frankfurt am Main, 1728). Kabbalists were inspired by the midrashic imagery of Shavuot as a mystical ‘marriage’ between God and Israel. The Tikkun Leyl Shavuot is often printed alongside the Tikkun Leyl Hoshana Rabbah(Amsterdam, 1708; Frankfurt am Main, 1725). The last day of Sukkot is called leyl ha-hotam, ‘night of the seal’, when heavenly edicts signed on Rosh ha-Shanah and sealed on Yom Kippur are executed by angelic forces. This day, also known as Hoshana Rabbah, is the last possible moment to repent one’s sins. Another example of an Old Yiddish Tikkun linked to a particular feast is the Tikkun le-Erev Rosh Hodesh, also known as Tikkun Yom Kippur Katan (‘the minor Yom Kippur’), first discovered in sixteenth-century Safed. The intention of the text was to make the day before Rosh Hodesh a day of fasting, prayer and penance for wrongdoing—similar, in many ways, to Yom Kippur. The night was to have two dimensions: the ritual of studying in the synagogue and the popular custom or ritual, as mentioned in the Sefer Hasidim, of checking one’s shadow (when standing in front of the moon, one’s shadow foretells one’s life story for the coming year).

Opp. Add. 8° I 195, fol. 1r (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

We also find manuals of penitential prayers for repairing a transgression or a sin (refue tsu di neshome), such as Tikkun Teshuva (Amsterdam 1701) and Tikkun Shabbat (Prague, 1650 and 1660), a spiritual and physical preparation for the entry into Shabbat. Additionally, there is Tikkun Shlomo or Tikkunei Shabbat (Amsterdam, 1731), based on Lurianic traditions with rules and customs (Dinim, hanhagot and minhagim). Furthermore, Tikkun Seder ha-Tevila (Prague, circa 1600) contains prayers in Hebrew, sometimes accompanied by interlinear translations and explanations in Yiddish, for purification after niddah and keri, along with ritual immersion the day before Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur.

There are Tikkunim recited by men and women before bed and first thing in the morning. Chapbooks were created to be read before going to sleep (Kriyat Shema ‘al ha-mita) and included a confession (vidui) to repent, praise God and ask for protection against yetser ha-ra’, bad dreams, demons, and also for a good awakening and the rebuilding of the Temple. Examples include the Ovn zegn (Amsterdam, 1676), Nakht leynen (date and place of publication unknown), Seder kriyat shel layla (Frankfurt am Main, 1710), Taytsh nakht krishme [kriyat Shema] (Prague,1719) and booklets related to the ritual of Tikkun hatsot, performed at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple and to pray for the coming of the Messiah (bilingual, n. p.,1790). Then there are the prayers for when one wakes up, such as the Seder Shomerim la-Boker. (‘morning watchers’). Of additional note is the Tikkun Shalosh Mishmarot (1692; ‘Prayers for the Three Night Vigils’), lamentations in remembrance of the order of the service (mishmarot ve-ma’amadot) in the Temple which express hope for its restoration with the coming of the Messiah. This booklet was written in the style of supplications (Tekhines and bakoshes) by a learned woman and translator, Laza of Frankfurt, based on the Hebrew edition compiled by her husband, Yaakov ben Mordekhay of Schwerin (1691).

Some collections of Tikkunim, such as the Tikkun Kriyah le-Yom ve-Layla [in Hebrew] (Amsterdam, 1666), are connected to Nathan of Gaza’s and Shabbatai Tsevi’s penitential prayers and practices. There is also a Yiddish edition of Sabbatean penitential practices, Tikune teshuve erets tsvi (two editions in Krakow (1666), three editions of which are in Amsterdam (c. 1680; 17th century; 1687-1701), with an Haskama from Aryeh Leyb ben Zekhariah Mendel, who disseminated Nathan of Gaza’s doctrines in Poland. This booklet contains a list of sins and transgressions with their respective corrections and punishments preceding the messianic liberation.

There are a few treatises summarizing and combining these different textual traditions. These include the Seder Tefila le-Olam ha-Ba by Yehiel Mikhael Epstein (Frankfurt am Main, 1697), the Kohelet Shlomo by Solomon Zalman ben Moshe Raphael London (Amsterdam, 1744) and the Tikkunei ha-Moadim by Aryeh ben Yehuda Seligman of Binswangen (two volumes: Fuerth, 1725, and Fuerth, 1729). The originality of this type of chapbook lies in its ability to incorporate a large number of kabbalistic prayers and commentaries in Old Yiddish. The Tikkunei ha-Moadim, for example, contains, without doubt, the largest and most diverse collection of ‘vernacular kabbalah’ in Old Yiddish literature. The most important part includes prayers connected to rituals: Sefirat ha-omer(25b); Seder tevila (38b); Seder leyl shavuot (40b); Seder teshuva le-rosh ha-shana (60a); Tikkun teshuva (62b); Seder teshuva le-yom kippur (66b); Tikkun le-sukkot (68a); Seder tikkun le-hoshana rabbah (82a); and Leyl hoshana rabbah (91a).

Another interesting aspect of the Tikkunei ha-Moadim concerns the translation of ‘classical’ mystical texts. For instance, we find in it adaptations of the Idra Rabba (57a-58b) and Idra Zutta (96b-98a) from the Zohar (III, 127b-145a, 287b-296b) which illustrate how kabbalistic textual traditions were embedded in a popular text. Before the translation of the Idrot into Yiddish, there are two texts. The first is an Old Yiddish translation of the Sefer Yetsira (51a)an important text of ancient Jewish mysticism and the reading of which is included in the ritual. The second is a testimony on the origin of the minhag to stay awake for studying and praying during the night of Shavuot. Mystical narrations (maysessippurim and shevahim) are an essential channel of transmission of kabbalistic doctrines and moral lessons. These stories migrated from the Zohar and hagiographical narratives to popular literature, from Aramaic and Hebrew to Yiddish. We find in the Tikkunei ha-Moadim (45a) a story, Mayse godl ve-nore oyf taytsh, taken from the Iggeret Alkabetz, a letter by Shlomo Alkabetz transcribed in Yosef Caro and entitled Maggid Mesharim: Eleh divrei hakham ha-shalem ha-mekubal ha-elohi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz (Lublin, 1646; Amsterdam, 1704 and 1708, 2a-4a), and later disseminated in many texts. This letter appears also in the Hebrew edition of the Tikkun leyl shavuot ve-leyl hoshana rabbah(Frankfurt am Main, 1725). At the end of the letter, we find a Yiddish version of the story in question, referred to as eyn vunderlekhe mayse (‘a wonderful story’). One day in 1534 in Adrianople, Shlomo Alkabetz and Yosef Caro were seated in their circle (havruta) and decided to stay awake the whole night to study. At midnight, a heavenly voice, the Maggid—in the Yiddish texts, the Shekhina—was heard from the throat of Yosef Caro saying that they must gather a minyan to pray and study Torah and Mishna. Here is part of the story translated from the Yiddish original:

A wonderful tale that happened during the night of Shavuot. There was a great sage, Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, who created the Lekha dodi [religious hymn recited at the entry of Shabbat] and was among Yosef Caro’s circle. He wrote the Beith Yosef founded on the Arba‘a Turim. These two sages with five students were together during the first night of Shavuot. Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz said: We have learnt verses from the Torah, Prophets and Hagiography with great concentration (kavone) and melody. We started to study the Mishnayot, so we merit that the Shekhina rest on the Pious Rabbi Yosef Caro. The Divine presence spoke with a strong and sweet voice and all the students seated around Caro heard the voice but without understanding. The voice was amplified, deeper and stronger, so we all fell on our faces and our souls were shaken from great fear and anguish. The voice told us: ‘My dear and loved ones, peace and respect on you, the best to you, and to your parents in this world and the world to come, because you have your heart set on crowning me during this night, which did not happen for years. You put again this crown as it was a long time ago. Strengthen yourselves, my beloved friends, know that you are among the praised sons in the palace of the Holy King, Blessed be He, and the voices of the Torah and the steam that comes out of your mouths have passed through many skies. And the angels and seraphim and holy hayyot stayed silent and the Holy One, Blessed be He, has heard your voices. And I am the Second One [after the Creator], as a mother who punishes her sons and I came to speak to you. And when you will be ten, a minyan to pray, you will be more praised. Blessed are you who avoided the sleep and erased it from your eyes. You are not like those who are drinking and sleeping in their bed. You are united to God who rejoices with you. Be strong my sons and be happy with my love, my Torah and my devotion. And do not stop studying because a thread of grace is stretched between you. And the Torah you study is heard and taken by the Holy Name, Blessed be He. Raise my sons and recite in a loud voice: Blessed be the Name of Honor and His kingdom forever and ever as in Yom Kippur.’ And we stood up trembling and did what He asked. And then He told us again: ‘Praised are you my beloved sons and go back to your study.’ We didn’t stop [to study] for a short while. It is what we heard and even more that we can’t describe. And we all cried with tears of joy. And we didn’t stop studying with great joy until the light of the day shone.               

These Jewish chapbooks show how Kabbalah began to be disseminated, albeit very partially, among ‘simple’ readers (hediot, hamon ‘am, gemeyne layt, proste yidn) in Old Yiddish (taytsh) throughout early modern Ashkenazi society. Although these sources constitute only a minor and limited corpus, they nonetheless enable us to broaden our understanding of the transmission of the Kabbalah; study the dynamics of dissemination of texts from Aramaic (loshn targem) and Hebrew (loshn koydesh) to Old Yiddish (loshn ashkenaz), as well as from learned culture to popular culture; and uncover some previously unknown facts concerning the piety, spirituality and religious practices of the Jewish people. Above all, these sources allow us to recognize the inventiveness, technical skill and creativity of a remarkable group of often-anonymous cultural agents (patrons, authors, printers, translators, editors and peddlers) who participated in the uninterrupted transmission of traditional Jewish sources. Long underestimated, Jewish popular literature, especially Old Yiddish mystical texts, of the early modern period now can be seen as having paved the way for Sabbateanism and later Hasidism.

Dr Jean Baumgarten
OSRJL Visiting Fellow,
Hilary Term 2024, OCHJS; Directeur de Recherche Emeritus,
Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS, Paris)
Categories
Announcements Haketia Judeo-Arabic Judeo-Italian Judeo-Moroccan Judeo-Neo-Aramaic Judeo-Persian Judeo-Spanish Ladino Old Yiddish Yiddish

Michaelmas Term 2024 Applications

We are delighted to announce that applications for Oxford School of Rare Jewish Language’s classes beginning in Michaelmas Term 2024 are now open! These classes include those on the following languages:

  • Haketia
  • Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic
  • Classical Judeo-Arabic
  • Judeo-Italian
  • Judeo-Moroccan
  • Judeo-Neo-Aramaic
  • Judeo-Persian
  • Ladino
  • Old Yiddish
  • Yiddish

The deadline to apply is 16 September at 12 noon UK time.

For more information and to apply, check out the programme’s page on the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies’ website. If you have any questions, please email us at osrjl@ochjs.ac.uk.

Categories
Ladino Yiddish

Jewish Languages as a Bridge: The Case of Avram Davidson

?ווי גייט עס יעצט אין יפו (How are things now in Jaffa?) These were the first words spoken in Yiddish that Avram Davidson (1923-1993), a young Jewish American writer at the beginning of a brilliant literary career, heard in Nicosia when he visited Cyprus in the early 1950s. This island in the southeastern Mediterranean is not necessarily a setting where you expect to conduct conversations in the language of Sholem Aleichem. Even more surprising was the fact that Davidson’s interlocutor was a Turkish banana peddler who previously had lived for some time in the ancient Israeli port city of Jaffa. 

Having served as a medical corpsman during Israel’s War of Independence when he made ample use of the experiences he had gathered while serving in the US army in the Pacific during World War II, Davidson was travelling by boat via Cyprus and Izmir, the large Turkish city on the Aegean Sea, to Europe before returning to the United States. He returned to Israel in the summer of 1951 to pursue a career in shepherding which, thankfully for the history of American genre fiction, failed. He then went back to the US in 1952 and became one of the great masters of speculative and crime fiction. (1)

Fig. 1. A. A. Davidson, ‘Caphtor & Other Places’, 
Orthodox Jewish Life, vol. IX, no. 6 (July-August 1952), p. 24.

Davidson, at the time signing under the name A. A. Davidson, published a short travelogue about his journey to Cyprus and Turkey in Orthodox Jewish Life, a periodical magazine for laymen brought out by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Published in July 1952, the article was titled ‘Caphtor and Other Places’, (2) Cyprus being in Davidson’s eyes ‘the Capthor of the Bible’. Most scholars would disagree, but Davidson’s Caphtor, too, comes with a twist revealing his love of alternative history that would mark some of his most popular books in later years:

First impression of Cyprus: Imagine—or shall we say, now con­jecture a vision of a time—when by a twist of unoccurred history, the Arab conquerors had been early repulsed from Eretz Israel and the Jews had not returned. The Greeks had stayed on, the Turks had con­quered and remained, and the Brit­ish had come and stayed: This is Cyprus, the ‘Caphtor’ of the Bible.’ (3)

A striking feature of his travelogue is the role Jewish languages seem to play in enabling communication between people, Jews and non-Jews alike, during his journey. There is the case of the Turkish costermonger in Nicosia mentioned above who seemed to have known at least some Yiddish, but there are other such instances as well. Having arrived in Izmir, Davidson went in search of the cousin of a friend from Haifa. According to the traveller, the cousin was a resident of the ‘Yemnis Tcheshar’, which Davidson translated as the ‘fig market’. It is more than probable that this place must have been the Yemişçi Çarşısı. With the help of an Englishman, the second mate of the S. S. Campodoglio that had taken Davidson from Cyprus to Izmir, he was able to locate the place: 

I approached a passing Turk and said ‘Yemnis Tcheshar?’ (fig market). He very kindly went blocks out of his way to show me the district. Once there, the second mate and I reconnoitred and, over a shop with an open front, saw ‘in red letters’ the good Turkish name of Avram Kohn. Mr. Kohn was a young iron-monger and spoke French. The sec­ond mate knew some Spanish, and—the Jews of western Turkey being of Spanish stock—with his bad Spanish and my poor French, we made our wants known.’ (4)

So, it is ultimately Mr Kohn’s knowledge of Ladino that allowed the traveller to find the person he was looking for and explain his needs—namely, kosher food, as the ship did not have a kosher kitchen. Avram Davidson’s short, humorous travel report shows that Jewish languages had significance beyond the communities in which they were spoken at home. Those languages could indeed build bridges between members of different ethno-religious communities, as they did in the case of Davidson in Nicosia and Izmir. It is true that they were not the only languages that were used. In Turkey, the lingua franca was often French—in Cyprus, mostly a hybrid mixture of languages that often miraculously ended up being intelligible to all people involved. Nevertheless, that Davidson should have mentioned the role of Yiddish and Ladino is significant. 

Language and translation as a means of transmission of knowledge mattered greatly to the American writer. In a rather critical piece entitled ‘A “Modern” Bible Translation’, written in 1957 about the ongoing Tanakh translation project of the Jewish Publication Society, (5) he reflected on the significance of translation as a creative process and noted that:

‘[E]very translation is in a sense an original creation. It is not the mechanical replacement of one word by another. It is marked evidently and strongly by the nature and opinions and background of the translator. Pope’s Homer is not Chapman’s Homer’. (6)

Davidson’s love of Yiddish could also be felt in this article where, when mentioning historical translations of the Hebrew Bible including the translation into Yiddish that he calls ‘teitsh-chumosh’, he regretted that ‘so many grandmothers, including [his] had never been taught to read their mother-tongue’. (7)

In later years, Davidson would go on an intricate spiritual journey. Ultimately, he embraced the tenets of Tenrikyo, a Japanese new religion teaching that mutual help leads to the ‘joyous life’ desired by God for humankind. In an interview he gave the Tenri Jiho (Tenri Times) newspaper on 16 August 1981 about his religious conversion, Davidson’s love of language and translation remained at the forefront of his mind. Noting that he very much hoped to be able to pursue his career as a writer while making use of his literary skills to promote his new faith, he noted his desire contribute to the translation of Tenrikyo literature into English. (8) He would indeed contribute to the translation of Tenrikyo literature, but this is a story that has little to do with Jewish languages. 


(1) For Avram Davidson’s biography, see Eileen Gunn, ‘A Biography of Avram Davidson: Water From a Deep Well’ in Avram Davidson, Everybody Has Someone in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, edited by Jack Dann and Grania Davidson Davis (New York: Devora Publishing, 2001), 271-285.

(2) A. A. Davidson, ‘Caphtor & Other Places’, Orthodox Jewish Life, vol. IX, no. 6 (July-August 1952), 24-31. The article is included in Avram Davidson, Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, edited by Jack Dann and Grania Davidson Davis (New York: Devora Publishing, 2001), 77-85. Quotations in this blog refer to the original article in the magazine.

(3) Davidson, ‘Caphtor & Other Places’, 24.

(4) Davidson, ‘Caphtor & Other Places’, 28-29. 

(5) A. A. Davidson, ‘A “Modern” Bible Translation’, Orthodox Jewish Life, vol. XXIV, no. 5 (May-June 1957), 7-10.

(6) Davidson, ‘A “Modern” Bible Translation’, 8.

(7) Davidson, ‘A “Modern” Bible Translation’, 7.

(8) ‘Amerika no SF sakka Jeimisu A, Debiddoson-san’ [The American Science Fiction Writer Mr James A. Davidson], Tenri Jiho (16 August 1981), 6. When involved in Tenrikyo matters, he used the name James A. Davidson. See, Henry Wessells, ‘A Preliminary Annotated Checklist of the Writings of Avram Davidson (Part I)’, Bulletin of Bibliography 53.1 (March 1996), 23-37, here 24.

Prof Laurent Mignon
OSRJL Judeo-Turkish Teacher;
Professor of Turkish Literature; Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
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Judeo-Arabic

The Oran Maḥzor as a Source for the Study of Multiple Histories

This post is based on research undertaken during Professor Jonathan Glasser and Dr Amina Boukail’s stay at the OCHJS as Visiting Scholars in June 2023.

***

The Oran Maḥzor is a set of five manuscripts found at the Bodleian Library that brings together liturgical and paraliturgical texts associated with the Jewish community of Oran, Algeria, during the first period of this port city’s rule by Spain up until the community’s expulsion in 1669.[1] These manuscripts appear to have emerged from the Cansino family, prominent Jewish figures in Oran who for generations served as Arabic translators and intermediaries for the Spanish authorities.[2] The maḥzor joined the Bodleian Library in 1869 through the intermediary of Isaia Luzzatto, son of the renowned Italian Jewish scholar S. D. Luzzatto, who himself had acquired the manuscripts around 1834.[3] Most of the maḥzor features texts in Hebrew, but one of the manuscripts ends with a long section of poems written in Judeo-Arabic.

Our collaborative work on the Judeo-Arabic components of the maḥzor dates back to 2018. As an Algerian scholar of medieval Arabic literature and an American ethnographer and historian of North African expressive practices, we found in the maḥzor a fascinating testament to everyday life in western Algeria during the early modern period. Professor Paul B. Fenton has published a study of the final long Judeo-Arabic poem narrating the expulsion of the Oran Jewish community by the port city’s Spanish rulers in 1669, but we were pleasantly surprised to discover that this fascinating poem is only the last in a series of more than one hundred texts in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew that end this volume of the maḥzor.[4]A recent visit to Oxford as Visiting Scholars of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies allowed us to finalize our Arabic-letter transcription of the texts which we plan to make available online through the website of one of our home institutions, The College of William & Mary, USA. 

Studying this collection of texts enriches our understanding of cultural production in western Algeria during the period in question in several ways. Most immediately, it gives us a rich sense of poetic and musical life among one of the leading Jewish families of Oran in this period. The texts are sung poems which, with the exception of the narrative of the expulsion, are arranged into a compound form called ṭarīq (path). Nearly every ṭarīq brings together multiple texts in Hebrew and Arabic under the rubric of a particular melodic mode. Professor Edwin Seroussi has suggested that this manuscript is the earliest known example of the notion of ṭarīq in a Maghribi Hebrew-letter manuscript.[5] Coming at the end of a larger manuscript that is mainly devoted to liturgical and paraliturgical poems associated with formal worship, the ṭarīq texts point to a rich musical practice that stood alongside these more canonical practices and integrated Arabic texts and musical concepts, including through the use of melodies associated with Arabic texts to sing Hebrew texts found in other parts of the manuscript. If this document indeed reflects the everyday practice of the Cansino family, then it shows that for them, Arabic was a language not simply of commerce and politics but also of intimacy, entertainment, creativity and worship. It is thus a testament to the intimate ties between the Jews of Spanish-ruled Oran and the wider Arab-Islamic culture of the region.

Fig. 1. MS. Opp. Add. 4° 85, ff. 105v, 106r.
(© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

In addition, the nearly one hundred Arabic texts included in the ṭarīq section of the manuscript are a rich contribution to our understanding of early modern poetic and musical practice in this part of the Maghrib. These texts reflect a wide range of linguistic registers, including classical Arabic and colloquial Arabic. A few have obvious religious themes, often with strong Sufi inflections, but most of them read at the surface level as profane love songs, some of them of a homoerotic nature. The poetic voice in some instances evokes a Muslim speaker and, in some cases, a female or an enslaved speaker (or, in several instances, both). Formally speaking, the poems, nearly all of them strophic, are marked as kharjazajalabarwāl or are left unmarked.[6] In a few instances, we can find sung texts that circulated in medieval Iberia, which suggests centuries-long continuity in repertoire. Intriguingly, a few of them are versions of texts that continue to be performed in the modern Andalusian music tradition of the Maghrib, making this manuscript an important point of comparison for later songbook collections. However, many of them are poems that have not been previously attested in print or in manuscript form. This fact makes the manuscript particularly exciting for scholars of Maghribi popular poetry. Making the texts available in Hebrew and Arabic orthography—as our project aims to do—will allow for wider access to this understudied source. In addition, like several recent publications from Morocco and Tunisia, it will provide practical tools for speakers of Arabic who are seeking to learn how to access Judeo-Arabic texts.[7]


[1] The manuscript we explore here is Opp. Add. 4to 85 (Neubauer 1191), marked as Vol II. The connected volumes are Neubauer 1987 (Vol I), 1190 (Vol III), 1089 (Vol IV), and 1163 (Vol V).

[2] On Jews in Spanish-ruled Oran, see the pioneering work of Jonathan Israel, ‘The Jews of Spanish North Africa, 1600-1669’. Transactions and Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 26 (1974-1978): 71-86. On the Cansino family, see Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Les juifs du roi d’Espagne: Oran 1509-1669. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1999.  

[3]We thank Dr César Merchán-Hamann for the information regarding the circumstances of the acquisition.

[4] Paul B. Fenton, ‘Une qaṣîda historique sur l’expulsion des Juifs d’Oran en 1669’. In Présence juive au Maghreb: Hommage à Haïm Zafrani, edited by Joseph Tedghi and Nicole S. Serfaty, 451-455. Paris: Editions Bouchene, 2004.

[5] Edwin Seroussi, ‘Music of the Maghrebi Jews in North-Africa and Israel’. In Perceptions et Réalités au Maroc: Relations Judéo-Musulmanes, Actes du Congrès Marrakech-Paris, 14-22 octobre 1995, edited by Robert Assaraf and Michel Abitbol. Casablanca: CRJM Maroc, 1998.

[6] The use of kharja as a textual heading is unusual—kharja usually refers to the final refrain in a muwashshaḥ. A zajal is a more colloquial version of the strophic muwashshaḥ form, and abarwāl (more usually barwāl or barwāla) usually refers to a short colloquial song text in urban musical traditions in the Maghrib.  

[7] See Abdelaziz Chahbar, Dīwān Al-malḥūn bi-‘arabiyyat yahūd al-maghrib. Tétouan, 2014; Leila Habbachi, Safīnat al-ma’lūf bil-khaṭṭ al-‘ibrī. Tunis: Dār Suḥnūn, 2018.