class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">XVII. Auf'n Busen vun Jam. On the Bosom of the Ocean. M. Rosenfeld

THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. INTRODUCTION

THE literatures of the early Middle Ages were bilingual. The Catholic religion had brought with it the use of the Latin language for religious and ethical purposes, and in proportion as the influence of the clergy was exerted on worldly matters, even profane learning found its expression through the foreign tongue. Only by degrees did the native dialects manage to establish themselves independently, and it has been but a few centuries since they succeeded in emancipating themselves entirely and in ousting the Latin from the domain of secular knowledge. As long as the Jews have not been arrested in their natural development by external pressure, they have fallen into line with the conditions prevalent in their permanent homes and have added their mite towards the evolution of the vernaculars of their respective countries. It would be idle to adduce here proofs of this; suffice it only to mention Spain, whose literature would be incomplete without including in the list of its early writers the names of some illustrious Jews active there before the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century. But the matter everywhere stood quite differently in regard to the Latin language. That being the language of the Catholic clergy, it could not be cultivated by the Jews without compromising their own faith; the example of the bilingualism was, however, too strong not to affect them, and hence they had recourse to the tongue of their own sacred scriptures for purposes corresponding to those of the Catholic Church. The stronger the influence of the latter was in the country, the more did the Jews cling to the Hebrew and the Jargon of the Talmud for literary purposes. It need not, then, surprise us to find the Jewish literature of the centuries preceding the invention of printing almost exclusively in the ancient tongue.

As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow-citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction,[1] issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny.[2] On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like Süsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.

Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life; and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of Wigalois, of King