A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish

Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

Aya Elyada

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By exploring the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe.

Elyada's analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.

Part I
Yiddish in the Service of Christian Theology

Introduction

Christian Hebraism and the Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe

A major aspect of the new intellectual climate engendered by the Renaissance and later on by the Reformation was the growing preoccupation of Christian scholars with the interrelationship between language and religion, philology and theology. This concern was clearly manifested in the emergence of the so-called Christian Hebraism, a branch of Christian scholarship dedicated to Hebraica and Judaica from the late fifteenth century onwards. Born out of a commitment to the Humanist ideals of a return to the sources (ad fontes) and to trilingual education, Christian Hebraism was further stimulated by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation and its theological doctrine of Scripture as the sole source of religious truth (sola Scriptura). Searching for the Hebraica veritas, the truth inherent in the Hebrew Bible, Protestant scholars devoted much attention to the study of Hebrew, not only for its own sake but mainly for the light it could shed on theological issues, especially on the correct reading and interpretation of the Old Testament.¹

In this sense, the assertion made in 1750 by the German scholar Wilhelm Justus Chrysander, “It is, after all, agreed that a rigorous theologian must be a philologist,”² would not have been exceptional were it not for the interesting fact that these words referred not to the importance of learning Hebrew for theological purposes, but to the importance of learning Yiddish, the Jewish-German vernacular of the time. Moreover, this call to learn Yiddish, made by a Christian scholar and directed at a Christian audience, was not a novelty. Rather, it represented the peak of a continuing interest in Yiddish among Christian, especially Protestant, scholars in early modern Europe, from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards.

Although the study of Yiddish was secondary to other fields within Christian Jewish studies, such as Hebrew or rabbinical literature, it attracted the attention of some of the most renowned and influential Hebraists and Orientalists in the Germanic world throughout the early modern period. Among the most prominent ones were Paulus Fagius and Sebastian Münster in the sixteenth century; Johann Buxtorf, August Pfeiffer, and Andreas Sennert in the seventeenth century; and Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Johann Christoph Wolf, and Johann Heinrich Callenberg in the eighteenth century. Many of the works published by these and other scholars, either specifically on Yiddish or in which a chapter or appendix on Yiddish was included, saw several editions and were often referred to by other authors. This is true for works which circulated mainly among scholars and also, especially from the late seventeenth century, for works with a more popular orientation. In addition, there were many scholars who did not publish specifically on Yiddish but learned the Jewish language, used it in their works, and commented on it on different occasions. Among these scholars were Christoph Helwig (Helvicus), Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, and Johann Gottlob Carpzov. With the growing attention given in recent research to the reconstruction of the actual learning and working methods of early modern Christian Hebraists, including the inventory of their libraries, their sources of influence, and the various ways in which they acquired knowledge in Hebrew and Jewish literature, one might certainly expect that more cases would come to light of Christian scholars, whose ventures into the fields of Hebraica and Judaica led them to an encounter with Jewish texts in Yiddish as well as with the writings of Christian Yiddishists.³

Although closely linked to Christian Hebraism, “Christian Yiddishism” constituted a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Unlike Hebrew, Yiddish was considered neither holy nor ancient by Jews and non-Jews alike. Composed of German and Hebrew-Aramaic elements, it was perceived by non-Jews as a distorted and corrupted kind of German; and as the language of contemporary Jews, it was imbued in the German popular imagination with many of the prevalent Jewish stereotypes of the time, most notably the image of the Jew as a thief and a liar. Consequently, Yiddish was seen mainly as a degenerate language, that of outsiders and thieves. The fact that Rotwelsch, the language of the German underworld in that period, contained words adopted from Yiddish nourished the stereotype linking Jews and their language with moral and social corruption.⁴

Among the Jews, too, Yiddish was always considered inferior. While Hebrew was the language of religion and the educated elite, Yiddish was the language of everyday life. Its literature was written mainly for women and children, and also, as the popular Yiddish book Seyfer brantshpigl (Basel 1602) put it in its introduction, “for men who are like women and cannot study much.”⁵ However, neither the low status of Yiddish inside the Jewish communities nor its negative image in non-Jewish eyes deterred Christian scholars, most of them theologians, Hebraists, and Orientalists, from involving themselves with the language and its literature. In fact, Yiddish attracted the attention of German, mainly Protestant, scholars precisely because of these two attributes: that it was a Jewish language, and that it included a significant Hebrew component. Accordingly, proficiency in Yiddish was promoted among Christians, especially among theologians, for three main reasons: to missionize among the Jews, to read Jewish literature in this language, and to use Yiddish as an aid in the study of Hebrew and the biblical text. Each of these reasons presents a different aspect of the relation between philology and theology, and of the attempt of Protestant scholars to use the philological knowledge of Yiddish for their own theological purposes.

One
Yiddish in the Judenmission

Dating back to the days of the apostles, the long-standing Christian ambition to convert the Jews to Christianity received a new impetus with the Reformation and the beginning of the Protestant movement. In his work Daß Jesus Christus ein geborner Jude sei (That Jesus Christ was born a Jew; 1523), Martin Luther presented an optimistic view regarding the possible conversion of Jews to his version of Christianity. Rejecting coercive measures as means for conversion, Luther expressed his hope that “if one treated the Jews kindly and instructed them carefully from the Holy Scriptures, many would become true Christians.”¹

The expected Jewish mass conversion failed to materialize, and in his later years Luther abandoned his optimism and pronounced the Jews severely stubborn and “hard to win over.”² The hope for Jewish conversion remained nevertheless a constant feature in Protestant thought and practice in the German lands throughout the early modern period. The search for effective albeit non-violent ways to conduct successful missionary work presented Protestant theologians and missionaries with a challenging dilemma: which language would be most suitable and effective when trying to convert the Jews? After realizing that anti-Jewish polemics in Latin, German, or even Hebrew were not useful for missionary work among the common Jewish populace, missionary circles decided to turn to Yiddish, the colloquial language of the German Jews.

Underlying the use of Yiddish in the early modern Judenmission was the principle of “linguistic adaptation,” alluding to the efforts of missionaries to adapt, or accommodate, the Christian message to the language of the people they hoped to convert. The first example of linguistic adaptation in the history of Christian mission goes back to the miracle of Pentecost as described in Acts 2, in which the Holy Ghost descended upon the apostles, who then began to speak in different languages, approaching each listener in his own tongue. With this story as a guiding paradigm, the principle of linguistic adaptation persisted in missionary thought and practice throughout the centuries as a crucial means for alleviating the difficulties inherent in the process of mission and conversion. This was manifested in the requirement that both the missionary himself and the message he conveyed be adapted to the language of the target audience. Missionaries learned the languages of the peoples among whom they worked in order to enable communication between the missionary and the missionized; they produced translations of the Scripture and various missionary writings in the target languages in order to enable the communication of the Christian message.³

Among the many different forms of adaptation for missionary purposes, such as adaptation in clothing, customs, way of living, social behavior, aesthetics, or art, the linguistic form has always been considered especially powerful and therefore much desired. In the case of Protestant mission among the Jews,⁴ this form of adaptation played a particularly important role, for two main reasons. The first reason is that the mission was a Protestant mission. With their emphasis on “the Word,” on reading and preaching, as the exclusive means to communicate the Christian message, Protestants were confined to using verbal communication in their missionary endeavors, while being excluded from other means of communication such as rituals or visual representations, means used by Catholic missionaries.⁵ Therefore, Protestant missionaries were more dependent on language, and hence on linguistic adaptation, than their Catholic counterparts. The second reason for the enhanced importance of linguistic adaptation in the case before us is that this mission was directed at Jews. The far-reaching adaptation of missionaries to the rituals and customs of the peoples they wished to convert, as was the case for example with the Jesuit mission in China and India during the seventeenth century,⁶ was unthinkable in mission among the Jews. Whereas some pagan customs and rituals could be considered theologically neutral, at least to the extent that they allowed the missionaries to reconcile them with Christian practice, Jewish customs and rituals were overtly rejected by Christian dogma. Any adaptation in this field, therefore, was forbidden, leaving linguistic adaptation by and large the only useful option.

Early Beginnings and Pietist Revival

The high point of mission in Yiddish in the German lands was between the end of the seventeenth century and the second half of the eighteenth century. Already in the sixteenth century, however, first attempts had been made to offer the New Testament to the Jews “in Jewish clothing” (veste judaica). In 1540 the convert Paul Helic (also: Helicz) published in Cracow the first known Yiddish translation of the New Testament, probably translated by the convert Johann Harzuge.⁷ The first Jewish printers in Poland, Helic and his two brothers opened their business in 1534, just a few years before the conversion of the three brothers to Catholicism.⁸ The titles they produced included the first Yiddish books ever printed, and they continued to publish in Hebrew and Yiddish after their conversion.⁹ In the Latin dedication to his Yiddish New Testament, Helic outlined the missionary intentions underlying his translation. Accusing the rabbis of keeping the Jews blind to the Christian truth, the recently converted Helic expressed the hope that his translation of the New Testament into “the vernacular language, that is Theutonic”¹⁰ would reveal the truth of Christianity to his former coreligionists, and would thus help to bring about their conversion. Although Helic dedicated the work to Piotr Gamrat, the Bishop of Cracow and an ardent Catholic, this Yiddish New Testament was, ironically, a translation of Luther’s Bible rather than of a Catholic one.¹¹

Half a century later the Protestant reformer and professor of Hebrew and theology at Strasbourg, Magister Elias Schadeus, published another Yiddish translation of Luther’s New Testament. This translation comprised a selection of five books (the Gospels of Luke and John, Acts, and the Epistles to the Romans and to the Hebrews), which the reformer considered “the best and most useful” for Jewish readers.¹² Schadeus elaborates on the decision to publish this translation in the introduction to another of his works, Mysterium (1592), where he explicitly promotes the use of Yiddish as part of a “friendly” missionary approach and adds an appendix instructing Christians how to read and write the “German-Hebrew script.”¹³ Apart from the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible too was translated into Yiddish for missionary purposes. In 1544 two Yiddish Bibles were published: one by the convert Paulus Aemilius in Augsburg, and the other by the Protestant reformer and Hebraist Paulus Fagius in Constance. Fagius’ Bible was probably translated by the convert Michael Adam, who was also the Yiddish translator of the historical book Yosifon, published by Christoph Froschauer in Zurich in 1546.¹⁴ This Bible was published in two editions, with two different titles and introductions: one in German, written by Fagius and addressed to the Christian reader; the other in Yiddish, probably written by Adam and addressed to the J...