Exegetical Poetics: Tanakh and Textuality in Early Modern Yiddish Literature

This dissertation examines Yiddish literature (1500-1950) as an alternative, even transgressive, vehicle for the transmission of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic interpretation. In biblical works for popular audiences—which included women, children, and even non-Jews—Yiddish enjoyed a relative freedom from literary and doctrinal regulation. Through this freedom to improvise on the biblical canon, I argue, early Yiddish literature discloses hermeneutic and poetic practices inadmissible in contemporary Hebrew literature: humanist textual criticism, ambiguous or subversive midrash, the vivid portrayal of non-Jewish subjectivities. By reading this cultural palimpsest as a single multilingual and transnational history, I access those unsanctioned and clandestine practices in Jewish biblical transmission suppressed in the Hebrew sources. At the same time, the material evidence offered by my work with early Yiddish and Hebrew books sheds light on the entanglement of religious authority and textual transmission. Recent scholarly attention has focused on the social history of the printing house (in contrast to the printing press) as the site of an evolving textual culture in the early modern period. With the emergence of this industry, Jewish exegetes relied, perhaps for the first time, on a professional class of textual stewards—printers, correctors, pressmen and censors—for the reproduction and dissemination of their work. These print professionals often represented a diverse (and at times ambiguous) range of religious confessions: rabbis thus entrusted their religious writings to humanist master-printers, and baptized Jews worked as copyists, correctors, and censors of Hebrew books. Rather than segregating material practices of print from the religious stakes of textual transmission, the dissertation interprets early modern Yiddish literature as the dynamic confluence of rabbinic exegetical poetics and emergent cultures of print. In three textual case studies, I investigate this encounter and its literary incarnations in Yiddish over the course of the modern period. In the first chapter, “Shmuel Bukh and Early Modern Mouvance,” I excavate an exemplary instance of the interaction of rabbinic intertextuality and humanist print in the Old Yiddish biblical epic, Shmuel Bukh, as it was textually destabilized in the collaborative, culturally diverse printing houses of the Italian Renaissance. I argue that those houses and their competitive marketing of humanist textual practice were the model for the dominant Jewish printing house in sixteenth century Poland, Cracow's Prostitz press. The Cracow editions of Shmuel Bukh (1578, 1593) reflect a revision of rabbinic exegetical tradition in favor of humanist textual criticism. The introduction of these secular editorial practices came to reshape the transmission of Yiddish biblical genres in EasternEurope. The second chapter, “Dialogue, Drama and the Survival of Midrash,” continues this line of inquiry by tracing the descent of vernacular renderings of the Scroll of Esther in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the Prostitz press and its experiments in Yiddish prose genres, such as Di Lange Megile (1589), vernacular prose reiterations of the Scroll of Esther depart from the protocols of midrashic transmission employed by their historical predecessors, medieval compendia. As editorial practices modernize over the course of the seventeenth century, Yiddish renditions of the Esther story reclaim a classical midrashic hermeneutics as a means of declaring their own intertextuality. As a result, retelling Scroll of Esther becomes an ambiguous ritual opportunity, permitting for experimental oral and textual exercises such as the Purim play. The Akhashveyrosh-shpil (1697) represents the zenithof this proliferation of textual, dramatic, and liturgical re-imaginings of the Esther story. The third chapter, “Itzik Manger and the Historical Imagination,” examines the ways in which modernist poet Itzik Manger crafted his claims to poetic and exegetical authority based on surviving witnesses to these early modern Yiddish genres. In his poetry, balladic retellings of biblical narrative occasion the use of traditional editorial and paratextual gestures, drawn from Yiddish early print. Similarly, Manger's literary-historiographical essays retrieve and romanticize early modern textual stewardship as the guarantor of literary and historical continuity with the biblical, rabbinic and folk-cultural past. The legacy of early modern textual transformation thus surfaces in literary modernism as a formal and intellectual opportunity to lay claim to the authority and autonomy of the early modern editor