The History of Yiddish Literature 1

The History of Yiddish Literature 1

The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, by Leo Wiener PREFACE A suggestion to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898. At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies, the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be constructed. A recital of my journey will serve as a means of orientation to the future investigator in this or related fields, and will at the same time indicate my obligations to the men and the books that made my sketch possible. From Liverpool, my place of landing, I proceeded at once to Oxford, where I familiarized myself with the superb Oppenheim collection of Judeo-German books of the older period, stored in the Bodleian Library; it does not contain, however, anything bearing on the nineteenth century. In London the British Museum furnished me with a few modern works which are now difficult to procure, especially the periodical _Kolmewasser_ and _Warschauer Judische Zeitung_. Unfortunately my time was limited, and I was unable to make thorough bibliographical notes from these rare publications; besides, I then hoped to be able to discover sets of them in Russia. In this I was disappointed--hence the meagreness of my references to them. The Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam and the Imperial Library in Berlin added nothing material to my information. Warsaw was my first objective point as regards facts and books. The latter I obtained in large numbers by rummaging the bookstores of Scheinfinkel and Morgenstern. In a dark and damp cellar, in which Morgenstern kept part of his store, many rare books were picked up. In Warsaw I received many valuable data from Perez, Dienesohn, Spektor, Freid, Levinsohn, both as to the activity which they themselves have developed and as to what they knew of some of their _confreres_. In Bialystok I called on the venerable poet, Gottlober; he is very advanced in years, being above ninety, is blind, and no longer in possession of his mental faculties, but his daughter gave me some interesting information about her father. Wilna presented nothing noteworthy, except that in a store a few early prints were found. In St. Petersburg I had hoped to spend usefully a week investigating the rich collections of Judeo-German in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial Library. The museum was, however, closed for the summer, and the restrictions placed on the investigator in the library made it impossible to inspect even one-tenth of the three or four thousand books contained there. When about to abandon that part of my work the assistant librarian, Professor Harkavy, under whose charge the collection is, most generously presented me with one thousand volumes out of his own private library. In Kiev I had a long conference with S. Rabinowitsch and with A. Schulmann; the latter informed me that he is now at work on a history of Judeo-German literature previous to the nineteenth century; the specimen of his work which he published a few years ago in the _Judische Volksbibliothēk_ gives hope that it will entirely supersede the feeble productions of M. Grunbaum. In Odessa I learned many important facts from conversations with S. J. Abramowitsch, J. J. Linetzki, J. J. Lerner, P. Samostschin, and depleted the bookstores, especially that of Rivkin, of their rarer books. Jassy in Roumania and Lemberg in Galicia offered little of interest, but in Cracow Faust's bookstore furnished some needed data by its excellent choice of modern works. Thus I succeeded in seeing nearly all the living writers of any note, and in purchasing or inspecting books in all the larger stores and libraries that contained such material. In spite of all that, the present work is of necessity fragmentary; it is to be hoped that by cooperation of several men it will be possible to save whatever matter there may still be in existence from oblivion ere it be too late. The greatest difficulty I encountered in the pursuit of my work was the identification of pseudonyms and the settlement of bibliographical data. As many of the first as could be ascertained, in one way or other, are given in an appendix; but the bibliography has remained quite imperfect in spite of my efforts to get at facts. A complete bibliography can probably never be written, on account of the peculiar conditions prevailing in the Imperial Library, from which by theft and otherwise many books have disappeared; but even under these conditions it would not be a hard matter to furnish four or five thousand names of works for this century. This task must be left to some one resident in St. Petersburg who can get access to the libraries. This history being intended for the general public, and not for the linguistic scholar, there was no choice left for the transliteration of Judeo-German words but to give it in the modified orthography of the German language; for uniformity's sake such words occurring in the body of the English text are left in their German form. All Hebrew and Slavic words are given phonetically as heard in the mouths of Lithuanian Jews; that dialect was chosen as being least distant from the literary German; for the same reason the texts in the Chrestomathy are normalized in the same variety of the vernacular. The consonants are read as in German, and _ž_ is like French _j_. The vowels are nearly all short, so that _u_, _ie_, _i_ are equal to German _i_; similarly _a_, _o_, _eh_, _ee_ are like German short _e_. The German long _e_ is represented by _ē_, _oe_, _ae_, and in Slavic and Hebrew words also by _ee_. _Ei_ and _eu_ are pronounced like German _ei_ in _mein_, while _ēi_ is equal to German _ee_; _ā_ and _o_ are German short _o_; _au_ sounds more like German _ou_, and _au_ and _ō_ resemble German _oi_; _au_ is equal to German _ai_. The collection of data on the writers in America has been even more difficult than in Russia, and has been crowned with less success. Most of the periodicals published here have been of an ephemeral nature, and the newspapers, of which there have been more than forty at one time or other, can no longer be procured; and yet they have contained the bulk of the literary productions written in this country. It is to be hoped that those who have been active in creating a Judeo-German literature will set about to write down their reminiscences from which at a later day a just picture may be given of the ferment which preceded the absorption of the Russian Jews by the American nation. The purpose of this work will be attained if it throws some light on the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., December, 1898. CONTENTS                                                                     PAGE PREFACE                                                              vii I. INTRODUCTION                                                        1 II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE                                         12 III. FOLKLORE                                                         25 IV. THE FOLKSONG                                                      53 V. PRINTED POPULAR POETRY                                             72 VI. OTHER ASPECTS OF POETRY BEFORE THE EIGHTIES                       95 VII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN RUSSIA                             105 VIII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN AMERICA                           118 IX. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1817-1863                                     131 X. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: ABRAMOWITSCH                        148 XI. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: LINETZKI, DICK                     161 XII. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: SPEKTOR                               177 XIII. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: RABINOWITSCH, PEREZ                  194 XIV. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: IN AMERICA                            216 XV. THE JEWISCH THEATRE                                              231 XVI. OTHER ASPECTS OF LITERATURE                                     244 CHRESTOMATHY                                                                     PAGE I. SSEEFER KOHELES. ECCLESIASTES. M. M. Lefin                        258 II. DIE MALPE. THE MONKEY. S. Ettinger                               260 III. DAIGES NĀCH DEM TŌDT. WORRY AFTER DEATH. S. Ettinger            260 IV. DER ELENDER SUCHT DIE RUHE. THE FORLORN MAN LOOKING FOR REST. B. W. Ehrenkranz-Zbarżer                       261 V. DIWREE CHOCHMO. WORDS OF WISDOM. E. Z. Zweifel                    264 VI. DIE STIEFMUTTER. THE STEPMOTHER. M. Gordon                       264 VII. DIE MUME SOSJE. AUNT SOSIE. A. Goldfaden                        268 VIII. SEMER LE-SSIMCHAS TŌRE. SONG OF THE REJOICING OF THE LAW. J. L. Gordon                                             272 IX. DIE KLATSCHE. THE DOBBIN. S. J. Abramowitsch                     276 X. TUNEJADEWKE. PARASITEVILLE. S. J. Abramowitsch                    284 XI. A HARTER BISSEN. A TOUGH MORSEL. D. Frischmann                   294 XII. STEMPENJU'S FIEDELE. STEMPENJU'S VIOLIN. S. Rabinowitsch        300 XIII. DER TALMUD. THE TALMUD. S. Frug                                306 XIV. DĀS JUDISCHE KIND. THE JEWISH CHILD. S. Frug                    308 XV. DER ADELIGER KĀTER. THE NOBLE TOM-CAT. M. Winchevsky             312 XVI. JONKIPER. THE ATONEMENT DAY. J. Dienesohn                       314 XVII. AUF'N BUSEN VUN JAM. ON THE BOSOM OF THE OCEAN. M. Rosenfeld                                                  324 XVIII. BONZJE SCHWEIG. BONTSIE SILENT. J. L. Perez                   332        *       *       *       *       * I. APPENDIX. BIBLIOGRAPHY                                            355 II. APPENDIX. PSEUDONYMS                                             383 INDEX                                                                385 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 Susskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time. Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life; and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of Wigalois, of King Arthur, had begun to fade away even from the folk books of Germany, it lived on in the Slavic countries and continued to evoke pleasure and admiration. These chapbooks, embodying the folklore of past generations, were almost the first printed Judeo-German books, as they certainly were the most popular. That the early Judeo-German literature was intended mainly for readers in the east of Europe is amply evidenced by specific mention in the works themselves, as for example in the 'Maasebuch,' where the compiler, or author, urges the German women to buy quickly his book, lest it be all too fast sold in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia.[3] In fact, the patron of the 'Maasebuch,' or the author of the same, for it is not quite clear whether they are not one and the same person, was himself a native of Meseritz in Lithuania. Only after these story books had created a taste for reading, and in order to counteract the effects of the non-Jewish lore, the Rabbis began to substitute the more Jewish legends of the 'Maasebuch' and the 'Zeena Ureena,' and the ethical treatises which were intended to instruct the people in the tenets of their fathers. In this manner the Judeo-German literature was made possible. Its preservation for four centuries was mainly due to the isolation of the German Jews in Russia and Poland, where the German medievalism became ossified and was preserved intact to within half a century ago, when under favorable conditions the Russianization of the Jews began. Had these conditions prevailed but a short time longer, Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past and of interest only to the linguist and the historian. But very soon various causes combined to resuscitate the dialect literature. In the short time that the Jews had enjoyed the privileges of a Russian culture, then German medievalism was completely dispelled, and the modern period which, in its incipient stage, reaches back into the first quarter of this century, presents a distinct phase which in no way resembles the literature of the three hundred years that preceded it. It is not a continuation of its older form, but has developed on an entirely new basis. The medieval period of Judeo-German literature was by no means confined to the Slavic countries. It reacted on the Jews who had remained in Germany, who, in their narrow Ghetto life, were excluded from an active participation in the German literature of their country. This reaction was not due alone to the fact that the specifically Jewish literature appealed in an equal degree to those who had been left behind in their old homes, but in a larger measure to the superior intellectual activity of the emigrants and their descendants who kept alive the spark of Jewish learning when it had become weakened at home and found no food for its replenishment within its own communities. They had to turn to the Slavic lands for their teachers and Rabbis, who brought with them not only their Hebrew learning, but also their Judeo-German language and literature. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no division of the Jews of the west and the east of Europe; they took equal part in the common Judeo-German literature, however scanty its scope. What was produced in Russia was read with the same pleasure in Germany, and _vice versa_, even though the spoken form of the vernacular in Slavic countries was more and more departing from that of Germany. Even Mendelssohn's teacher was a Galician Jew. But with Mendelssohn a new era had dawned in the history of the German Jews. By his example the dialect was at once abandoned for the literary language, and the Jews were once more brought back into the fold of the German nation. The separation of the two branches of the German Jews was complete, and the inhabitants of the Slavic countries were left to shift for themselves. For nearly one hundred years they had to miss the beneficent effects of an intellectual intercourse with the West, and in the beginning of our century the contrast between the two could not have been greater: the German Jews were rapidly becoming identified with the spiritual pursuits of their Gentile fellow-citizens, the Slavic Jews persevered in the medievalism into which they had been thrown centuries before. Only by slow degrees did the Mendelssohnian Reform find its way into Poland and Russia; and even when its influence was at its highest, it was not possible for it to affect those lands in the same way that it affected the districts that were more or less under German influence. The German language could not become the medium of instruction for the masses, whose homely dialects had so far departed from their mother-tongue as to make the latter unintelligible to them. In Russia it was a long time before the native literature could make itself felt, or before Russian education came to take the place of the German culture; so in the meanwhile the Judeo-German language was left to its own evolution, and a new literature had its rise. In arriving at its present stage, Judeo-German literature of the nineteenth century has passed through several phases. At first, up to the sixties, it was used as a weapon by the few enlightened men who were anxious to extend the benefits of the Mendelssohnian Reform to the masses at large. It is an outgrowth of the Hebrew literature of the same period, which had its rise from the same causes, but which could appeal only to a small number of men who were well versed in Hebrew lore. Since these apostles of the new learning had themselves received their impetus through the Hebrew, it was natural for them to be active both in the Hebrew and the Judeo-German field. We consequently find here the names of Gottlober and J. L. Gordon, who belong equally to both literatures. Those who devoted themselves exclusively to creating a Judeo-German literature, like the other Mendelssohnian disciples, took the German literature as the guide for their efforts, and even dreamed of approaching the literary language of Germany in the final amalgamation with the Mendelssohnian Reform. In the meanwhile, in the sixties and still more in the seventies, the Jews were becoming Russianized in the schools which had been thrown open to their youths. In the sixties, the Judeo-German literature, having received its impetus in the preceding generation, reached its highest development as a literature of Reform, but it appealed only to those who had not had the benefits of the Russian schools. In the seventies it became reminiscent, and was in danger of rapid extinction. In the eighties, the persecutions and riots against the Jews led many of those who had availed themselves of the Russian culture to devote themselves to the service of their less fortunate brethren; and many new forces, that otherwise would have found their way into Russian letters, were exerted entirely in the evolution of Judeo-German. In this new stage, the Mendelssohnian Reform, with its concomitant German language, was lost sight of. The element of instruction was still an important one in this late period, but this instruction was along universal lines, and no longer purely Jewish; above all else, this literature became an art. Poetry was the first to be developed, as it lent itself more readily to didactic purposes; it has also, until lately, remained in closer contact with the popular poetry, which, in its turn, is an evolution of the poetry of the preceding centuries. The theatre was the latest to detach itself from prose, to which it is organically related. These facts have influenced the separate treatment of the three divisions of literature in the present work. It was deemed indispensable to add to these a chapter on the Judeo-German folklore, as the reading of Judeo-German works would frequently be unintelligible without some knowledge of the creations of the popular mind. Here the relation to medievalism is even more apparent than in the popular poetry; in fact, the greater part of the printed books of that class owe their origin to past ages; they are frequently nothing more than modernizations of old books, as is, for example, the case with 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' which, but for the language, is identical with its prototype in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In its popular form, Judeo-German is certainly not inferior to many of the literary languages which have been fortunate enough to attract the attention of the linguist and student of comparative literature. In its _belleslettres_ it compares favorably with those of countries like Bulgaria, which had their regeneration at about the same time; nay, it may appear to the unbiassed observer that it even surpasses them in that respect. And yet, in spite of it all, Judeo-German has remained practically a sealed book to the world. The few who have given reports of it display an astounding amount of ignorance on the subject. Karpeles devotes, in his history of Jewish literature, almost thirty pages to the medieval form of it, but to the rich modern development of it only _two lines_![4] Steinschneider knows by hearsay only Dick, and denies the practical value of modern Judeo-German.[5] But the acme of complacent ignorance, not to use a stronger word, is reached by Grunbaum,[6] who dishes up, as specimens of literature, newspaper advertisements and extracts of Schaikewitsch, not mentioning even by name a single one of the first-class writers. It is painful to look into the pages of his work, which, apart from endless linguistic blunders of a most senseless character, has probably done more than anything else to divert attention from this interesting literature. Much more sympathetic are the few pages which Berenson devotes to it in an article in the _Andover Review_;[7] though abounding in errors, it is fair and unbiassed, and at least displays a familiarity with the originals. Still better are the remarks of the Polish author Klemens Junosza in the introductions to his translations of the works of Abramowitsch into Polish; the translations themselves are masterpieces, considering the extreme quaintness of Abramowitsch's style. There are, indeed, a few sketches on the Judeo-German literature written in the dialect itself,[8] but none of them attest a philosophical grasp of the subject, or even betray a thorough familiarity with the literature. A number of good reviews on various productions have appeared in the Russian periodical _Voschod_, from the pen of one signing himself "Criticus."[9] To one of these reviews he has attached a discussion of the literature in general; this, however short, is the best that has yet been written on the subject. It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to extinction.[10] Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.[11] It would be idle to speculate when these persecutions will cease. II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE There is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on the Judeo-German.[12] Philologists have neglected its study, Germanic scholars have until lately been loath to admit it as a branch of the German language, and even now it has to beg for recognition. German writers look upon it with contempt and as something to be shunned; and for over half a century the Russian and Polish Jews, whose mother-tongue it is, have been replete with apologies whenever they have had recourse to it for literary purposes.[13] Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish, for passions have been at play to such an extent as to blind the scientific vision to the most obvious and common linguistic phenomena. Unfortunately, this interesting evolution of a German dialect has found its most violent opponents in the German Jews, who, since the day of Mendelssohn, have come to look upon it as an arbitrary and vicious corruption of the language of their country.[14] This attack upon it, while justifiable in so far as it affects its survival in Germany, loses all reasonableness when transferred to the Jews of Russia, former Poland and Roumania, where it forms a comparatively uniform medium of intercourse of between five and six millions of people, of whom the majority know no other language. It cannot be maintained that it is desirable to preserve the Judeo-German, and to give it a place of honor among the sisterhood of languages; but that has nothing to do with the historic fact of its existence. The many millions of people who use it from the day of their birth cannot be held responsible for any intentional neglect of grammatical rules, and its widespread dissemination is sufficient reason for subjecting it to a thorough investigation. A few timid attempts have been made in that direction, but they are far from being exhaustive, and touch but a small part of the very rich material at hand. Nor is this the place in which a complete discussion of the matter is to be looked for. This chapter presents only such of the data as must be well understood for a correct appreciation of the dialectic varieties current in the extensive Judeo-German literature of the last fifty years. All languages are subject to a continuous change, not only from within, through natural growth and decay, but also from without, through the influence of foreign languages as carriers of new ideas. The languages of Europe, one and all, owe their Latin elements to the universality of the Roman dominion, and, later, of the Catholic Church. With the Renaissance, and lately through the sciences, much Greek has been added to their vocabularies. When two nations have come into a close intellectual contact, the result has always been a mixture of languages. In the case of English, the original Germanic tongue has become almost unrecognizable under the heavy burden of foreign words. But more interesting than these cases, and more resembling the formation of the Judeo-German, are those non-Semitic languages that have come under the sway of Mohammedanism. Their religious literature being always written in the Arabic of the Koran, they were continually, for a long period of centuries, brought under the same influences, and these have caused them to borrow, not only many words, but even whole turns and sentences, from their religious lore. The Arabic has frequently become completely transformed under the pronunciation and grammatical treatment of the borrowing language, but nevertheless a thorough knowledge of such tongues as Turkish and Persian is not possible without a fair understanding of Arabic. The case is still more interesting with Hindustani, spoken by more than one hundred millions of people, where more than five-eighths of the language is not of Indian origin, but Persian and Arabic. With these preliminary facts it will not be difficult to see what has taken place in Judeo-German. Previous to the sixteenth century the Jews in Germany spoke the dialects of their immediate surroundings; there is no evidence to prove any introduction of Hebrew words at that early period, although it must be supposed that words relating purely to the Mosaic ritual may have found their way into the spoken language even then. The sixteenth century finds a large number of German Jews resident in Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. As is frequently the case with immigrants, the Jews in those distant countries developed a greater intellectual activity than their brethren at home, and this is indicated by the prominence of the printing offices at Prague and Cracow, and the large number of natives of those countries who figure as authors of Judeo-German works up to the nineteenth century. But torn away from a vivifying intercourse with their mother-country, their vocabulary could not be increased from the living source of the language alone, for their interests began to diverge. Religious instruction being given entirely in Hebrew, it was natural for them to make use of all such Hebrew words as they thus became familiar with. Their close study of the Talmud furnished them from that source with a large number of words of argumentation, while the native Slavic languages naturally added their mite toward making the Judeo-German more and more unlike the mother-tongue. Since books printed in Bohemia were equally current in Poland, and _vice versa_, and Jews perused a great number of books, there was always a lively interchange of thoughts going on in these countries, causing some Bohemian words to migrate to Poland, and Polish words back to Bohemia. These books printed in Slavic countries were received with open hands also in Germany, and their preponderance over similar books at home was so great that the foreign corruption affected the spoken language of the German Jews, and they accepted also a number of Slavic words together with the Semitic infection. This was still further aided by the many Polish teachers who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were almost the only instructors of Hebrew in Germany.[15] We have, then, here an analogous case to the formation of Osmanli out of the Turkish, and Modern Persian out of the Old by means of the Arabic, and if the word Jargon is used to describe the condition of Judeo-German in the past three centuries, then Gibberish would be the only word that would fit as a designation of the corresponding compounds of the beautiful languages of Turkey, Persia, and India. A Jargon is the chaotic state of a speech-mixture at the moment when the foreign elements first enter into it. That mixture can never be entirely arbitrary, for it is subject to the spirit of one fundamental language which does not lose its identity. All the Romance elements in English have not stifled its Germanic basis, and Hindustani is neither Persian nor Arabic, in spite of the overwhelming foreign element in it, but an Indian language. Similarly Judeo-German has remained essentially a German dialect group. Had the Judeo-German had for its basis some dialect which widely differs from the literary norm, such as Low German or Swiss, it would have long ago been claimed as a precious survival by German philologists. But it happens to follow so closely the structure of High German that its deviations have struck the superficial observer as a kind of careless corruption of the German. A closer scrutiny, however, convinces one that in its many dialectic variations it closely follows the High German dialects of the Middle Rhine with Frankfurt for its centre. There is not a peculiarity in its grammatical forms, in the changes of its vocalism, for which exact parallels are not found within a small radius of the old imperial city, the great centre of Jewish learning and life in the Middle Ages. No doubt, the emigration into Russia came mainly from the region of the Rhine. At any rate those who arrived from there brought with them traditions which were laid as the foundation of their written literature, whose influence has been very great on the Jews of the later Middle Ages. While men received their religious literature directly through the Hebrew, women could get their ethical instruction only by means of Judeo-German books. No house was without them, and through them a certain contact was kept up with the literary German towards which the authors have never ceased to lean. In the meanwhile the language could not remain uniform over the wide extent of the Slavic countries, and many distinct groups have developed there. The various subdialects of Poland differ considerably from the group which includes the northwest of Russia, while they resemble somewhat more closely the southern variety. But nothing of that appears in the printed literature previous to the beginning of this century. There a great uniformity prevails, and by giving the Hebrew vowels, or the consonants that are used as such, the values that they have in the mouths of German Jews, we obtain, in fact, what appears to be an apocopated, corrupted form of literary German. The spelling has remained more or less traditional, and though it becomes finally phonetic, it seems to ascribe to the vowels the values nearest to those of the mother-language and current in certain varieties of the Lithuanian group. From this it may be assumed that the Polish and southern Russian varieties have developed from the Lithuanian, which probably bears some relation to the historical migrations into those parts of the quondam Polish kingdom, and this is made the more plausible from the fact that the vowel changes are frequently in exact correspondence with the changes in the White Russian, Polish, and Little Russian. Such a phenomenon of parallelism is found also in other languages, and in our case may be explained by the unconscious changes of the Germanic vowels simultaneously with those in the Slavic words which, having been naturalized in Judeo-German, were heard and used differently in the new surroundings. However it may be, the language of the Judeo-German books in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is subject to but slight variations. It is true, the Blitz Bible printed in Amsterdam in 1676 seems to deviate greatly from other similar works, and the uncouth compound which is found there does, indeed, have all appearances of a Jargon. It owes its origin to the Polish Jews who but a few years before had been exiled from more than two hundred and fifty towns[16] and who, having settled in Holland, began to modify their Judeo-German by introducing Dutch into it. Although the Bible was intended for Polish Jews, as is evident by the letters-patent granted by John the Third of Poland, yet it has never exerted any influence on the dialects in Russia and Poland, for not one word of Dutch origin can be found in them. This older stage of the language is even now familiar to the Russian Jewish women through the 'Zeena Ureena,' the prayer book, and the special prayers which they recite in Judeo-German, and Jewish writers have recourse to it whenever they wish to express a prayer, as, for example, in Abramowitsch's 'Hymns' and 'Saturday Prayers.' This older stage is known under the name of _Iwre-teutsch_, _Korben-ssider-teutsch_, _Tchines-teutsch_, thus indicating its proper sphere in lithurgical works. This form of the language is comparatively free from Hebrew words.[17] On the other hand, Cabbalistic works become almost unreadable on account of the prevalence of Semitic over German words.[18] In the beginning of the nineteenth century a Galician, Minchas Mendel Lefin, laid the foundation for the use of the vernacular for literary purposes.[19] This example was soon followed by the writers in Russia who became acquainted with German culture through the followers of the Mendelssohnian School at Lemberg, who comprise nearly all the authors from Ettinger to Abramowitsch, most of whom wrote in some southern dialect. The language of these abounds in a large number of idiomatic expressions for which one would in vain look in the older writings; words of Slavic origin that were familiar in everyday life were freely introduced, and an entirely new diction superseded that of the past century. At first their spelling was quite phonetic. But soon their leaning towards German literature led them into the unfortunate mistake of introducing German orthography for their dialect, so that it now is frequently impossible to tell from the form of a word how it may have been pronounced. Add to this the historical spelling of the Hebrew and the phonetic of the Slavic words, and one can easily imagine the chaos that prevails in the written language. And yet it must not be supposed that Judeo-German stands alone in this. The same difficulty and confusion arises in all those tongues in which the historical continuity has been broken. Thus Modern Greek is spelled as though it were Ancient Greek, with which it has hardly any resemblance in sound, while Bulgarian is still wavering between a phonetic, a Russian, and an Old Slavic orthography. Similar causes have produced similar results in Judeo-German. There is no linguistic norm in the language as now used for literary purposes. The greater number of the best authors write in slightly varying dialects of Volhynia; but the Lithuanian variety is also well represented, and of late Perez has begun to write in his Polish vernacular.[20] German influence began to show itself early, and it affected not only the spelling, but also the vocabulary of the early writers in Lithuania. Dick looked upon Judeo-German only as a means to lead his people to German culture, and his stories are written in a curious mixture in which German at times predominates. This evil practice, which in Dick may be excused on the ground that it served him only as a means to an end, has come to be a mannerism in writers of the lower kind, such as Schaikewitsch, Seiffert, and their like. The scribblers of that class have not only corrupted the literature but also the language of the Jews. Various means have been suggested by the writers for the enrichment of the Judeo-German vocabulary. Some lovers of Hebrew have had the bad taste to propose the formation of all new words on a Semitic basis, and have actually brought forth literary productions in that hybrid language. Others again have advised the introduction of all foreign words commonly in use among other nations. But the classical writers, among whom Abramowitsch is foremost, have not stopped to consider what would be the best expedient, but have coined words in conformity with the spirit of their dialect, steering a middle course between the extremes suggested by others. In America, where the majority of the writers knew more of German than their native vernacular, the literary dialect has come to resemble the literary German, and the English environment has caused the infusion of a number of English terms for familiar objects. But on the whole the language of the better writers differs in America but little from that of their former home. There is, naturally, a large divergence to be found in the language, which ranges from the almost pure German of the prayers and, in modern times, of the poems of Winchevsky, to the language abounding in Russicisms of Dlugatsch, and in Hebraisms of Linetzki, from the pure dialects of the best writers to the corrupt forms of Dick and Meisach, and the even worse Jargon of Seiffert, but in all these there is no greater variety than is to be found in all newly formed languages.[21] The most recent example of such variety is furnished by the Bulgarian, where the writers of the last fifty years have wavered between the native dialects with their large elements of Turkish and Greek origin, a purified form of the same, from which the foreign infection has been eliminated, approaches to the Old Slavic of a thousand years ago, and, within the last few years, a curious mixture with the literary Russian. Judeo-German not only does not suffer by such a comparison, but really gains by it, for all the best writers have uniformly based their diction on their native dialects. In former days Judeo-German was known only by the name of _Iwre-teutsch_, or _Judisch-teutsch_. Frequently such words were used as _Mame-loschen_ (Mother-tongue), or _Prost-judisch_ (Simple Yiddish), but through the efforts of the disciples of the Haskala (Reform), the designation of _Jargon_ has been forced upon it; and that appellation has been adopted by later writers in Russia, so that now one generally finds only this latter form as the name of the language used by the writers in Russia. The people, however, speak of their vernacular as _Judisch_, and this has given rise in England and America to the word _Yiddish_ for both the spoken and written form. It is interesting to note that originally the name had been merely _Teutsch_ for the language of the Jews, for they were conscious of their participation with the Germans in a common inheritance. Reminiscences of that old designation are left in such words as _verteutschen_, 'to translate,' _i.e._ to do into German, and _steutsch_, 'how do you mean it?' contracted from _is teutsch?_ 'how is that in German?' The main differences between Judeo-German[22] and the mother-tongue are these: its vocalism has undergone considerable change, varying from locality to locality; the German unaccented final _e_ has, as in other dialects of German, disappeared; in declensional forms, the genitive has almost entirely disappeared, while in the Lithuanian group the dative has also coincided with the accusative; in the verb, Judeo-German has lost almost entirely the imperfect tense; the order of words is more like the English than the German. These are all developments for which parallels can be adduced from the region of Frankfurt. Judeo-German is, consequently, not an anomaly, but a natural development. III. FOLKLORE There can be no doubt that the Jews were the most potent factors in the dissemination of folk-literature in the Middle Ages.[23] Various causes united to make them the natural carriers of folklore from the East to the West, and from the West back again to the East. They never became so completely localized as to break away from the community of their brethren in distant lands, and to develop distinct national characteristics. The Jews of Spain stood in direct relations with the Khazars of Russia, and it was a Jew whom Charlemagne sent as ambassador to Bagdad. The Jewish merchant did not limit his sphere of action by geographical lines of demarkation, and the Jewish scholar was as much at home in Italy and Germany as he was in Russia or Egypt. Again and again, in reading the biographies of Jewish worthies, we are confronted with men who have had their temporary homes in three continents. In fact, the stay-at-homes were the exception rather than the rule in the Middle Ages. In this manner not only a lively intercourse was kept up among the Jews of the diaspora, but they unwittingly became also the mediators of the intellectual life of the most remote lands: they not only enriched the literatures of the various nations by new kinds of compositions, but also brought with them the substratum of that intellectual life which finds its expression in the creations of the popular literature. The Jews have always possessed an innate love for story telling which was only sharpened by their travels. The religious and semi-religious stories were far from sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, and in spite of the discussions by the Rabbis of the permissibility of reading foreign books of adventure, they proceeded to create and multiply an apocryphal and profane folk-literature which baffles the investigator with its variety. Most addicted to these stories were the women, who received but little learning in the language of their religious lore, and who knew just enough of their Hebrew characters to read in the vernacular books specially prepared for them. Times changed, and the education of the men varied with the progress of the Hebrew and the native literatures; but the times hardly made an impression on the female sex. The same minimum of ethical instruction was given them in the eighteenth century that they had received in the fourteenth, and they were left to shift for themselves in the selection of their profane reading matter. The men who condescended to write stories for them had no special interest to direct the taste of their public, and preferred to supply the demand rather than create it; nor did the publishers have any more urgent reason why they should trouble themselves about the production of new works as long as the old ones satisfied the women. Consequently, although now and then a 'new' story book saw daylight, the old ones were just as eagerly received by the feminine readers. And thus it happens that what was read with pleasure at its first appearance is accepted as eagerly to-day, and the books that were issued from the printing presses of the sixteenth century may be found in almost unchanged hundredth editions, except as to the language, printed in 1898 in Wilna or Warsaw.