Of Yiddish Dogs and Dragons I

I’m currently working on a Yiddish Romance called Bovo D’Antona written in Middle Yiddish. But why is someone in the Medieval English department studying Middle Yiddish texts? Popular texts in the Middle Ages were often adapted into different languages. The story was re-told all across Europe by different people, each time told slightly differently, and in this way each story has an ongoing life of its own. Bovo D’Antona is an adaption of an Italian text of the same name and the Italian narrative can be traced back to an earlier Middle English version: Bevis of Hampton. (Dr Mary Bateman in Ang1 works on Bevis of Hampton. Watch the interview with her for more information.) So, to understand the English Bevis, we need to understand how it was retold and reimagined in cultures across Europe.

The Yiddish Bovo was just as successful and the version can tell us a lot about Medieval Jewish society: its values, tastes, and humor! For example, when our Jewish hero Bovo is insulted as a “pig”, the insult contains many layers since pigs are not kosher: Jews are not allowed to eat pork. Not only is he being called a dirty animal, his religious identity is also being attacked.

Yiddish was an important language in Medieval Europe spoken and written by European Jews. You can imagine Older Yiddish as sounding a bit like old-fashioned German with words that sound Italian or French thrown into the mix, sprinkled with words (and grammar) you have no way of understanding unless you already speak a Semitic language like Arabic or Hebrew. Plus, each text is written in the Hebrew alphabet. You can imagine that some Christians in the medieval period were very suspicious of Yiddish texts that they could not understand or read, and so at times it was very difficult to get printing permissions. Still, Yiddish thrived.

Because the Jewish population moved around Europe a lot, sometimes involuntarily as you can imagine, Yiddish spread across different European countries. Another reason for the success of Yiddish was that Jews not only spoke Yiddish but every member of the Jewish community was also able to write and read it: we have literary texts, letters, housekeeping notes, and many more texts that were written or copied by regular people. In the medieval period, the Jewish population was literate, meaning that both Jewish men and women (!) could read and write, by contrast with overwhelmingly illiterate Christian communities.

Jewish women learned to read and write in Yiddish while the men learned to read and write in both Yiddish and Hebrew, the “high cultural” and sacred language of Judaism. While Hebrew was a language used for religious discussion, study, and research, and “highbrow literature”, Yiddish was an everyday language and some books in Yiddish were explicitly written for entertainment. Many Yiddish books from the Middle Ages address women specifically, although we are pretty much certain that those books were also enjoyed by men. Just don’t admit it in public, ok?   

In my next blog entry, I will write specifically about the Yiddish Bovo D’Antona, a story that has everything we could possibly desire from a medieval text: a cunning princess; a handsome (but often witless) noble man; a supernatural being that is half man and half dog (hello werewolf!); beautiful insults; and of course lots of fun and drama.