Of Yiddish Dogs and Dragons II

Last time I told you a bit about the popularity of Yiddish in Medieval Europe. But reading and translating Middle Yiddish today goes beyond the exchange of older words for modern expressions. Older Yiddish carries a culture that differed from the surrounding majority culture: it was the language of a religious and ethnic minority group. In many Yiddish texts, I find descriptions of otherness (you might even say queerness) that are multi-layered and show kindness towards literary monsters.

What do I mean by that? In my last blog I told you about the Yiddish adaption of Bovo D’Antona. Bovo is the titular hero – or so we are to believe. But when he fights dragons in foreign lands, the text gives us nothing but single sentences: Bovo is fighting dragons. There you go: no battle scenes with repulsive beasts. Can you imagine a heroic tale passing up a chance for a good battle scene? Well, in Yiddish it happens. The author just left out several gruesome adventures that are part of the earlier Italian version of Bovo and tells the audience that all those stories were simply unbelievable.

But our Yiddish version still contains episodes of conflict and violence. When a Christian abbot refuses to give a beggar food for a woman who has just given birth in the woods, we are told in detail about how the beggar wrecks the monastery. Too bad the beggar was a supernatural being, half-dog, half-man, who empties the monastery’s full pantries and cellars. We are told the story in great detail, down to the monks shitting their pants in fear: “for he had struck them on their tonsured pates so that they sang vespers out their asses” (Frakes: stanza 451). So, while killing dragons is boring and unbelievable, taking revenge on greedy and heartless monks is great fun. And the dog-man that the monks find so repulsive is the only kind and caring person around. In this episode, the text clearly cheers for the under-dog.

There are of course other Medieval texts in other languages that value kindness over heroism in battle. And of course it is not very kind to steal food and scare monks. But when reading Older Yiddish, we always have to keep in mind that the perspectives of both author and audience are shaped by the experience of being vulnerable because they were considered different from the majority culture around them. Jewish people often lived on the margins of society and yet they were immensely productive in Europe’s important cultural centers. So Yiddish texts also hold up a mirror to the Christian majority culture and show flaws, hypocrisy, and contradictions in the stories that Christians told about themselves, for themselves. What is the point of being a monk if you are greedy and heartless instead of kind and charitable? Why do people assume that they stand above those who happen to be born different?

Yiddish stories of knighthood and battle are fantasies, even more than Christian ones. Outside of the world of stories, violent conflicts between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages were never battles of equals. Jewish knights and princesses and kingdoms did not exist in Europe. So, the Yiddish Bovo D’Antona asks us: but what would it be like if they did?

References:

Frakes, Jerold C. „Bovo d’Antona“. Early Yiddish Epic, Syracuse University Press, 2014.

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