UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Exegetical Poetics: Tanakh and Textuality in Early Modern Yiddish Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vc00775 Author Wamsley, Rachel Alexandra Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Exegetical Poetics: Tanakh and Textuality in Early Modern Yiddish Literature By Rachel Alexandra Wamsley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair Professor Robert Alter Professor Naomi Seidman Professor Simon Neuberg Professor Elaine Tennant Spring 2015 Exegetical Poetics: Tanakh and Textuality in Early Modern Yiddish Literature © 2015 by Rachel Alexandra Wamsley Abstract Exegetical Poetics: Tanakh and Textuality in Early Modern Yiddish Literature by Rachel Alexandra Wamsley Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair 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 1 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 Eastern Europe. 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 zenith of 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. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Preface iii Chapter One 1 Shmuel Bukh and Early Modern Mouvance Chapter Two 67 Dialogue, Drama and the Survival of Midrash Chapter Three 108 Itzik Manger and the Historical Imagination Bibliography 159 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the result of a long, arduous process, and has taken shape during some of the most formative moments in my personal and professional life. I would not have been able to arrive at this point without the strength, clarity, and good sense given me by my friends, teachers, and family. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, whose careful reading and remarkable insights never ceased to push the manuscript toward a deeper and more rigorous standard of scholarship. Chana Kronfeld has known me since I was very young, and for that reason among many others, has decisively shaped my literary and critical sensibilities. It has been through engaging with the vigor and acuity of her ideas that I was emboldened to pursue this ambitious and often overwhelming project. Her incisive commentary and generous good humor is embedded in every page. Robert Alter has been nothing less than a role model throughout my graduate career, and much of the dissertation's theoretical work emerged either directly or indirectly from his seminars. His easy manner, even keel, and astonishing intellectual breadth has inspired and sustained me. Naomi Seidman has, from my undergraduate honors thesis to this dissertation, read with unfailing critical rigor and a keen eye for detail. Elaine Tennant's commitment to historical and cross-cultural perspectives has greatly enriched my approach to these primary sources. And lastly, I want to thank Simon Neuberg for introducing me to material bibliography and giving me my first glimpse of the immeasurable riches of the early Yiddish book. I offer my sincerest thanks to the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, whose generous Harold Hyam Wingate Fellowship supported my research for the first chapter of the dissertation at the Bodleian Library. As a Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography, I would like to thank the Mellon Foundation, the faculty and staff of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and my fellow Fellows for nurturing my love of book history and material textuality. Finally, Yitskhok Niborski has been a mentor to me like no other. It is due to his absolute devotion to the Yiddish language—its beauty, subtlety, and inextinguishable genius—that my own passion has never flickered. My parents, Rebecca Wamsley and Arthur Schwartz, have made all this possible, each in their own way. My mother is brave, principled, and unflinchingly honest. As an artist she brought me up to see unfettered imagination and rigorous discipline as essential complements in all creative work. I have tried to bring some small part of her remarkable spirit to my own life and writing. My father, from my earliest childhood, has been giving me gifts: love of language, literature, di yidishe shprakh, un dos yidishe folk. I would never have succeeded in this effort without his breythartsikayt, inexhaustible patience, and truly humbling intellect. He is and always will be my first and best teacher. Finally, how can I begin to thank Brian? It is not only that without him I would not be who I am, nor even that his unwavering esteem has daily given me faith and courage. I can't help but see these years as a sacrifice he offered without thought for himself, instead thinking always of our future, our children, and our life together. He has my undying gratitude, and love. פּערל ברכה, בכורה מײַנע, דיר װידמע איך דאָס דאָזיקע