- The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature, 2 vol., Leiden, 1957.
- In the course of this note, the codex will be referred to as MS. Fuks calls it C.Y.; the Library signature is T.—S. 10. K.22.
- Arthurian Legends, Leipsic, 1912, p. xxiii.—Marchand begrudges Fuks his recognition as discoverer of MS and would rather “speak of a re-discovery since the manuscript was known to E. Lévy” and, let me add, to J. Fourquet. If so, it may not be amiss to register that when Marchand says “I use the term Hebrew-German…” he is actually a “re-user”. Landau, in turn, was only a reviver of a term familiar in early Yiddish studies. “Hebräisch-teutsch” was used in the 16th c. by Schadäus, cf. my Shtaplen, Berlin, 1923, 132, and in the 18th c. by Haselbauer, cf. Shatski (Shatzky) in Yivo-bleter VIII (1935), 154; “lectio Hebraeo-Germanica” appeared in Buxtorf's Thesaurus in 1609.
- “A Hebrew-German (Judeo-German) Paraphrase of the Book of Esther of the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology XVIII (1919), 497–555.
- Even if there had been a comparable German-language treatment of the subject, the question of who was “first” could not be decided a priori, what with the well-known share of the Jews in transmitting folklore motifs from the Orient to Europe.
- From what little material is available it can be concluded that at least part of the Germans in the Middle Ages who wanted to become more proficient in the Old Testament had recourse to Jewish teachers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there was what may be called a Jewish school in German Bible translation, cf. for instance G. Eis, Frühneuhochdeutsche Bibelübersetzungen. Texte von 1400–1600, Frankfort on the Main, 1949, 74–77.
- This is the term used by Marchand in preference to “German-language Vorlagen” because, in his view, the language of the Hebrew-letter texts, too, is German.
- Steinschneider, in passing, did make an entirely unsupported Statement to the effect that the Kalila in Hebrew letters was simply a transcription of one of the versions of a German text; cf. Hebräische Bibliographie VII (1864), 42–44. Staerk, however, in Filo- logishe shriftn fun Yivo I (1926), 64, disagreed: “This cannot be said with such certainty. First, detailed research would have to establish which of the different recensions of the German translation of the Directorium [itself a translation from Hebrew] might have simply been copied here…” For Barlaam and Josaphat, only the testimony of Staerk is available, and this is what he had to say (I.c., 57–58): “The question of whether there is a relationship between the German renditions…on the one hand and the Judeo—German version on the other hand, to my knowledge has not been touched upon at all.”
- In two cases, the copyist of the Shmuel-bukh is said to have written German-component words according to the Hebrew spelling rules (which up to this day obtain in the writing of the Hebrew component). I wonder what the misspelling in is. But suppose there were two such slips of the pen; if they can be given meaning, the transfer of Hebrew-component spelling to other components should be taken as an indication of how far the fusion of the components had advanced in the language (a fact obscured by the relatively poor representation of the Hebrew component in the text of the Shmuel-bukh; for the reasons see §§12,13). The third writing error cited by Marchand concerns a faulty rime, which, it seems, could have occurred in the German component of an incontestable Yiddish text as well. The significance of these errors is further reduced by Marchand's failure to ascertain whether they also occur in the Hamburg manuscript and in any of the printed editions from 1544 to 1612, which do differ in many respects.
- M. Erik, Di geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur fun di eltste tsaytn biz der haskole-tkufe, Warsaw, 1928, 450 pp.; N. Süsskind, Das Šmuelbuch, Ph.D. dissertation (unpublished), N.Y.U., 1941, 307 + 63 pp. 4 **
- The intricate subject of Old-Testament names in the early Ashkenazic community requires extended discussion. Zalman, it appears, was not the equivalent of, but the substitute for Shelomo, and the same may be true for Moze vs. Moshe (Mozes again is a problem in itself).
- Bilder fun der yidisher literatur-geshikhte, Vilna, 1928, 99, 101.
- Just a few striking examples from among those that were cited in my book of 1928: When the prophet Samuel entertains Saul and his servant he treats them, in the best Jewish culinary tradition, to chicken and fish. Goliath defies the Jews twice a day, “in the morning and at night, when the Krishme prayer is said.” Joab (called hertsog all the time) is reluctant to admit to his captors that he is a Jew, but neither would he utter a lie. Thus he ventures to answer: Vos hot ir mikh tsu frogn, nun bin ikh dokh keyn yid. At face value, he chose the better part of valor: ‘Why do you have to ask me, I am no Jew.’ But by way of a sly mental reservation, keyn in the text is spelled the Hebrew way (with the letters kaf, nun instead of qof, yod, yod, nun) and is thereby made to mean the Hebrew ‘yes’. Can things like these conceivably have been taken from a German-language text?
- Vegli altyidishn roman un novele, Warsaw, 1926, 13–142; [Inventory of Yiddish Minstrelsy], Tsaytshrift II-III (1928), 545–588.—Valuable material on Jewish gleemen can also be found in I. Shiper (Schiper), Geshikhte fun yidisher teater-kunst un drame, 3 vol., Warsaw, 1923–1928, passim.
- Marchand could have found the necessary data in the very chapter of G. Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany, Chicago, 1949, 291–295, which he quotes in support of his own theory. “It is difficult to determine exactly the time when the original intention of protecting the Jews in settlements of voluntary seclusion was replaced by that of compulsion and discrimination. It certainly was a process which differed in detail in the various localities but which extended from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century.” (Kisch op. c., 293–294.) The TERM ghetto (outside of Italy, where it originated) was not known in pre-emancipation days. The Ashkenazim called their living quarters di yidishe gas ‘the Jewish street’; it was not until World War II that the Germans introduced Ghetto into their official language, to designate the town sections into which they crowded the Jews prior to putting them to death.
- The German formula singen und sagen, which since Lachmann's paper of 1833 is known to describe two species of recitation by gleemen, became obsolete during the sixteenth century; later, it seems, it is found only in historical folksongs or in deliberate archaizations. Cf. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch VIII, 1659; X, 1,1070, 1084–1085. On the contrary, Yiddish speakers around 1900 still used to distinguish between two categories of khazonim (cantors) whose performance was described as zingen ‘to sing’ or zogn ‘to tell’, respectively. The whole analogue of the above German formula, though in a somewhat twisted sense, is still preserved in contemporary colloquial Yiddish in sentences like: ikh hob fun im tsu zingen un Isu zogn ‘he causes me a good deal of trouble,’ literally ‘I have to sing and to tell of him.’
- The examples, among others, were quoted by J. Perles in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums XXV (1876), 351–361, from a Jewish version of the Sigenot, Cracow, 1597. Note that even this work, definitely a duplicate of a German-language text, was not, strictly speaking, copied from a German-letter exemplar (Vorlage) as has been demonstrated by A. C. Schoener, Der jüngere Sigenot, Heidelberg, 1928, XXXIX–XLI. Schoener assumes that the document was taken down from dictation (whether the reader, too, was a Jew is a moot question); but perhaps the manuscript which went to the Jewish printer had been written from recollection.
- Cf. I. Linn, Widwilt, Son of Gawain, New York, N.Y.U., 1946, 16.
- In a note which I wrote in Tsaytshrift II-III (1928), 700–701 and still consider valid, I indicated that in splitting OY into “Judeo-German” and “Hebrew-German” L. Landau failed to take cognizance of the identity of the AUDIENCE. NO matter which pieces of literature in the OY period we consider, they all are intended for the same community; occasionally the same writer would be active in minstrelsy as well as in other areas of literature; all these areas, therefore, must be placed within the same sociological framework. MS seems to be a case in point. While it is not as diversified in contents as, e.g., the Bodleian codex described by N. Shtif in Tsaytshrift I (1926), 141–158 and II-III (1928), 525–544, MS contains a revealing p. 40. There, apparently for the benefit of an elementary teacher, perhaps the copyist himself, the weekly portions of the Pentateuch are enumerated in their consecutive order and then the Hebrew and Yiddish names of the twelve gems on the breastplate of the high priest (Exodus XVIII) are written down. This latter list, seemingly trivial, is of real significance in establishing the Ashkenazic chain of tradition in translating the sacred texts: almost item for item, the Yiddish names are identical with those used in Eastern Europe in our time, cf. J. Opatoshu in Yidishe shprakh I (1941), 30.
- This is why Fuks and Marchand are both right in defining the term loshn ashkenaz in Jewish sources. Like its equivalent taytsh, it usually meant (and did so almost up to the twentieth century) the language of the Ashkenazic Jews, since this is the language the sources most frequently referred to. But the term could also be applied to the language of the Germans. Where a writer wanted to be specific, he would add something like “the loshn Ashkenaz which is customary among us Ashkenazim.”
- Another seeming anomaly, the existence of a vast Ashkenazic literature in Hebrew, is quite explicable on cultural grounds. Cf. my article [Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz Before the Period of Enlightenment], in Di goldene keyt no. 35 (1960), 80–88.
- Cf. my article “History of the Yiddish Language: The Problems and Their Implications,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society CIII (1959), 563–570.
- As late as in the nineteenth century we see the component device applied by Nakh-men Bratslever on the one hand, by Dik and Shomer on the other.
- B. Axelson, Unpoetische Wörter. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der lateinischen Dichtersprache, Lund, 1945, 150 pp.
- The Yiddish-German situation as depicted here is peculiar in many respects, but not unique. In medieval Silesia, Poles aspired to writing Czech, and the Polish provenience of a document frequently shows only in the involuntary slips of the author. Cf. R. Jakobson [A Silesian-Polish Cantilena Inhonesta of the Beginning of the 15th Century], Narodopisny Věstnik Československý, XXVII-XXVIII (1934–1935); R. Jakobson [Polish Medieval Literature and the Czechs], Kultura N.6/68 (1955), 27–42—The problem of Henric van Veldeke who appears on the threshold of Dutch and German perhaps can be stated in comparable terms, cf. P. C. Boeren's review of Frings-Schieb, Die epischen Werke des Henric van Veldeke, Halle, 1956, in Museum LXIII (1958), 131.
- A more detailed discussion of componental statistics will be found in the postscript to my article quoted in fn. 22.
- Perhaps the list should be augmented by the addition of trvtjrn (p. 67, 646). Forster (see fn. 41), 285 writes: “This is quite clear in the photograph, but the word is not in Lexer. I would suggest trufieren ‘deceive’.” But neither ‘deceive’ nor ‘gehen’ proposed in Fuks' translation makes sense; the context requires something like ‘to give in’. I wish I knew how to place the word, but it may be an item of Laaz (“Judeo-Romance”) origin.—On tolme cf. D. S. Blondheim, Les parlers judéo-romans et la Vetus Latina, Paris, 1925, 124–125; J. Perles, Beiträge zur Geschichte der hebräischen und aramäischen Studien, Munich, 1885, 62; M. Grünbaum, Jüdischdeutsche Chrestomathie, Leipsic, 1882, 35.—Transliteration (signified by a preceding ) in this paper follows the system of The Field of Yiddish, ed. U. Weinreich, New York, 1954.
- In the Shmuel-bukh we find a similar doublet. When Joab blows his horn to announce his victory, this is first expressed by blozn and horn, but in the very next line tetshn and shofer appear. Such relapses into Yiddish idioms should be studied systematically.
- The spelling in various sources is not completely uniform, sometimes the second v in dvkva is omitted. It may well be that the vowel in the unstressed second syllable was blurred from the very outset just as in present-day Yiddish, i.e. that Horant, too, was spoken of as dukes and that -vo was chosen in deference to the many loan words in Greek -os and Latin -us.
- I wish Marchand would undertake to compile a book that he himself, on another occasion, declared to be a desideratum; a presentation of German-language facts, historical, dialectological, etc., from the specifically Yiddish point of view.
- Cf. my article referred to in fn. 22, §§3–4.
- Cf. my Shtaplen (see fn. 3), 136.
- This is not to imply that the German surrounding ceased to influence Yiddish speakers; but the additions in any particular area were complementary, not structural.
- On a number of counts (closed vs. open vowels, rounded vs. unrounded vowels, hissing and hushing consonants, etc.) I am inclined to think that Marchand leans too heavily on the necessarily tentative statements of Paul, Michels, and Moser. Categorical judgments are even less warranted in the case of a document like MS which, if nothing else, reflects the “differential phonetics” of a Yiddish speaker.
- Cf. Michels, Mhd. Elementarbuch, Heidelbergs 1921, §283 fn. and map 36 in Th. Frings, Grundlegung einer Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Halle, 1948.
- Cf. my article [Yiddish Phonology as a Clue to Medieval Hebrew: The Aspirate and the Velar and Palatal Spirants], Yivo-bleter XLI (1957–1958), 101–123.
- Cf. Paul-Schmitt, Mhd. Grammatik,16 Tübingen, 1953, §§74, 161.
- Cf. K. Weinhold, Bairische Grammatik, Berlin, 1867, §327; K. Weinhold, Mhd. Grammatik,2 Paderborn, 1883, §411. The latter source also mentions the occurrence of sch- in Thuringian and neighboring Eastern German, but nobody would think of assigning the author(s) of MS to those regions. Should the /š-/ be taken as a reflection of Low-German conditions, this would raise a new set of problems.
- I see my apprehensions justified when confronting the passage in MS p. 50, 205–219 with its rendering communicated by Ch. Gininger in The Field of Yiddish, New York, 1954, 277.
- who is infallible? In his fn. 6 Marchand, in support of the Egyptian provenience of MS, adduces “a Pentateuch glossary in a Central German dialect, but in Hebrew characters,… written in Alexandria in 1513.” Actually the glossary was written in Alessandria, north of Genoa; a reproduction of the last page of the manuscript, where the name of the town appears, can be found in my Bilder (see fn. 14), between pp. 8 and 9. (Incidentally, I am not sure that the analysis of the paper of MS as reported by Fuks was done with adequate thoroughness. There is no doubt in my mind that MS was copied in 1382, but it might have been written somewhere else and brought to Egypt at some later date.) In fn. 10, hegmon is translated ‘official’ and two lines further ‘archbishop’. The customary translation is ‘bishop’. In fn. 18 the volume of Moser is not 111,3 but 1,3. In fn. 22, the quotation from Michels is from §10, not p. 10. In fn. 28, the first word in the Hebrew title should read Leket, not Lekat. In fn. 39, the correct name is Samson (not: Simon) Pine.
- May I add the following items to those enumerated by Marchand in his fn. 4: A. M. Haberman in Hapoelhasa ir XXIX (1957), n. 13, 20–21; D. Sedan in Mahanaim XXXIII (1957), 25–28; P. F. Ganz in Journal of Jewish Studies IX (1958), 47–62; L. Forster in German Life and Letters XI (1958), 276–285; G. Schramm in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen CXII (1958), 211–221; W. Schwarz in Neophilologus XLII (1958), 326–332; J. Carles in Études germaniques XIII (1958), 348–351; J. Fourquet, ibid. XIV (1959), 50–56; S. A. Birnbaum in Bibliotheca Orientalis XVI (1959), 50–52; I. Schröbler in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur LXXXIX (1959), 135–162; H. W. J. Kroes in Duitse Kroniek 1959, 89–93; H. Beem in Yidishe shprakh XX (1960) [in press]. This is certainly not the end; as time goes on, MS will be increasingly used by students of Yiddish and German.
- J. W. Marchand in his review of F. Mossé, Manuel de la langue gotique in Language XXXIII (1957), 232.
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