Tales from Early Yiddish Literature

Tuition: $400 | YIVO members: $325**
Students: $215 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online seminar held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Claudia Rosenzweig

Course Description:
The tale has been a prominent genre throughout the history of Yiddish literature, from the brief fable found in a 14th-century manuscript, through compositions influenced by the medieval exemplum and the novella of the Italian Renaissance, to the Hassidic tale and later rewritings of the genre in Modern Yiddish literature.

With an emphasis on this rich tradition of narrative prose, this course will offer a general introduction to Yiddish literature in the Early Modern period, notably in Germany, Italy, Holland, and Central Europe. Referring to the major collections in manuscript and print form, such as Kü-bukh, Mayse-bukh and Mayse nisim, we will consider the mayses from a literary point of view and at the same time investigate the integration of historical references, such as elements of social criticism, discontent with the communal authorities, and anti-Christian polemics.

The course will highlight the continuity between Old and Early Modern Yiddish Literature and the Modern Yiddish corpus, reading excerpts from literary rewritings of older sources and introducing key issues concerning their intended readership. Primary sources as well as scholarly articles will be read and discussed.

Who should take this course?
Those with an intermediate level of Yiddish are encouraged to register, as are those with both a beginner level of Yiddish and a basic knowledge of German. The class discussion will be conducted in Yiddish and English, and all course materials will be provided in Yiddish and in English translation.

Course Materials:
Please purchase the following book before class begins. The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

• Glikl: Memoirs 1691-1719, edited and annotated with an introduction by Chava Turniansky, translated by Sara Friedman (Purchase)

Purchasing the following texts is optional:

• Book of Fables: The Yiddish Collection of Reb Moshe Wallich Frankfurt am Main, 1697, translated and edited by Eli Katz (Out of print: purchase used or find at a local library)
• History of the Yiddish Language by Max Weinreich, edited by Paul Glasser, translated by Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman (Out of print: purchase used or find at a local library)

Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts. In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Rosenzweig is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).

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