YIDDISH MANUSCRIPTS IN THE BRITISH

LIBRARY

LEONARD PRAGER and BRAD SABIN HILL

FEW Yiddish manuscripts predating the age of printing have survived the storms ofJewish and general history. The oldest extant dated Yiddish document is a rhymedinscription of a dozen words in the Worms Mahzor ('festival liturgy') of 1272, now inthe Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.^ By far the most importantYiddish manuscript is the dated 1382 Cambridge Codex from the famous Cairo Genizahin Fostat, Egypt.^ The Cambridge Codex has been the centre of a heated linguisticdebate, Yiddishists maintaining that the language is Old Yiddish and many Germanistsclaiming it is High German in Hebrew letters. The historiography of this more thanmerely terminological question is itself a gripping chapter of cultural history, and onelinguist has mounted what at present seems to be an unassailable defence of theYiddishist position.^ This question of language is fundamental to bibliographical as wellas linguistic investigation, and librarians have often been puzzled as to how to classifyYiddish materials. Today, librarians no longer describe Yiddish books as 'Judaeo-German', as was common practice in the British Museum Library and elsewhere untilabout fifty years ago.̂ Yiddish, quite rightly, is classified linguistically among theGermanic languages;^ but owing to the script in which Yiddish has almost always beenwritten - the Hebrew alphabet — Yiddish books and manuscripts are often found inHebrew or Oriental collections.

For centuries Ashkenazic Jewry enjoyed a diglossic harmony in which certainlinguistic functions were assigned to the vernacular, Yiddish, and others to thelanguage(s) of study and prayer, 'Hebrew-Aramaic', or loshn-koydesh ('the language ofholiness', henceforth 'Hebrew'). Most oral functions were filled by Yiddish - includingthe by no means inferior activities of teaching the Bible and the Talmud, preaching inthe synagogue, and explaining religious texts in informal settings. With some exceptions,prayer was in Hebrew;^ most books and legal and other documents were written inHebrew. However, this division of functions was never absolute.^ For example, Jewishmerchants from East and West would somehow clumsily employ Hebrew as a spokenJewish interlanguage;^ and some books - often on the pretext (rightfully or not) that theywere for women and the unlearned - were composed in Yiddish. Yet among the score ofdiasporan Jewish languages Yiddish is unique in the size and weight of its Hebrew-Aramaic component, a fact which emphasizes its close relationship to Hebrew and the

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floatmg nature of the boundary between the two languages. This 'floating boundary'between Hebrew and Yiddish is also reflected in many of the manuscripts containingYiddish text.

Hebrew manuscripts, being revered objects, were more likely to survive conflagrations,expulsions and pogroms than Yiddish ones. Moreover, many Hebrew manuscripts,though they may be partly or wholly in Yiddish, are often called simply * Hebrewmanuscripts'. No denigration is intended here. * Hebrew manuscripts' are often definedas including all manuscripts *in Hebrew characters'.^ Discussions of the Yiddishmanuscript as such have been few,̂ ° though much has been written about suchimportant volumes as the Cambridge Codex. The great bibliographer MoritzSteinschneider loathed Yiddish,^^ yet was able to deal seriously with the subject in hisJuedtsch-Deutsche Literatur, a compilation of extracts from the bibliographical journalSerapeum (Leipzig, 1848-69), in which he took note of about eighty Yiddish manuscriptsin a few Western libraries.^^ The Berlin Encyclopaedia Judaica in 1931 was the firstgeneral reference work to include a section on Yiddish manuscripts.^^ Subsequently, afew union catalogues of Yiddish manuscripts have been prepared,^^ as well as a fewcatalogues or handlists of Yiddish manuscripts in specific libraries or countries.^^ To dateonly a few publications have appeared dealing with the British Library's holdings in thisfield.^^ This is perhaps mainly to be explained by the relatively small number of suchmaterials in this Library, where, as elsewhere, they are overshadowed by the Hebrewmanuscript collections.^^

The best known Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library are those described in G.Margoliouth's magisterial Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in theBritish Museum,^^ some of them deriving from the famous Almanzi collection and fromthe earlier foundation collections of Harley and Sloane, and those in the GasterCollection. The dozen or more manuscripts described by Margoliouth span about twoand a half centuries, from the end of the fifteenth to the first third of the eighteenthcentury.^^ There are about a score of Yiddish manuscripts in the Gaster Collection,̂ **most of which are later than those described by Margoliouth, dating from theseventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and they cover a greater variety of subjects.̂ ^

It is both convenient and instructive to range the approximately fifteen subject areasof the British Library's Yiddish manuscripts within four main groups: religion andethics; grammar and lexicography; realia; and drama. This series roughly charts thegradual chronological progression from other-worldly to this-worldly concerns. Onecould, of course, most plausibly place virtually all the manuscripts under one rubric -religion - but for our purposes it is best to restrict that category to biblical, homiletic,liturgical, and ethical texts. Liturgy, of course, includes eighteenth-century decoratedhagodes [hagadot], which were artistic as well as ritual objects. The division hereemployed is essentially an organizing device, since all the categories overlap.

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BIBLE AND HOMILETICS

The earliest renditions of Bible texts into Yiddish followed the Hebrew word-order andconstituted a distinct translation lect known as ivre-taytsh. Bible translations are centralto Yiddish scholarship - not only because many early Yiddish texts were Bibletranslations and paraphrases, but also because the Yiddish language and Yiddishliterature developed in and through these Bible-centred works. ̂ ^ The British Library'smanuscripts provide good examples of both translation and paraphrase. The firstsubstantive Yiddish entry in Margohouth's catalogue, for Add. MS. 18694 (Margoliouthno. 102), is the only Yiddish manuscript translation of the Five Books of Moses in theBritish Library. Margohouth, as able to discriminate among language styles as amongscripts, dates the 'rather large German cursive hand' of this * Pentateuch in the Jewish-German dialect' as sixteenth-century, and the pages added 'to replace lost leaves' asseventeenth-century. The identity, however, of the translator and the scribes remainsunknown. It is interesting to compare this text̂ ^ with that of the early printedPentateuchs in Yiddish, such as the 1544 Constance or 1560 Cremona editions.

Among the bibhcal texts. Or. MS. 9911 (Gaster no. 584) is an early nineteenth-century paraphrase of Genesis and part of Exodus. It is attributed to a melamed (teacherin a kheyder, an elementary religious school), who used the work in teaching. It was a giftto Gaster from his father,^* who apparently knew the melamed in Bucharest. As Gasternoted, the compilation is 'full of legends', indicating it is close to the Tsenerene genre.The opening passage, based on the first verses of Genesis, gives a clear view of the methodof this work (the Hebrew text is here printed in small capitals):

BREYSHES in dem hershtin [note initial hey'] on hoyb ven got hot on gihoybin di velt tsu bishafinBORO er hot bishafin ELOYKIM dem mides hadin hot got givolt bishafin di velt mit dem mideshadin hot got gizehin az di velt vet mit dem mides hadin keyn kiyem nisht hobin hot got frirbishafin dem mides harakhamim mit dem mides hadin un mit di beyde EYS HASHOMAYIM VEEYS

HOORETS hot got bishafin himil un erd un bishefinishin oykh bishafin nor itlikhe zakh iz in eynandrin tog fartig givorin azo vi vayter vet shteyn dr parshe VEHOORETS un di erd beshas got hotzi... bishafin HOYSO zi iz given TOYE vist UVOYE un leydek es iz nokh keyn groz mit keyn beymernisht geven un keyn shum lebedig bishefenish nisht geven VEKHOYSHEKH AL PNEY SEHOM un afdem op grund iz geven fintstir VERUEKH un durkh di reyd ELOYKIM fun got MERAKHEFES zi hotgishvebt di shtil fin got AL PNEY HAMOYIM fin oben af dem vasir VAYOYMER ELOYKIM hot got gizogtYEHi OR es zol zayn likhtig VAYEHI OR un iz givorin likhtig VAYAR ELOYKIM ES HOOR KI TOV hot gotfr shtaen [sic} az dos likht iz gut az es zol aleyn nitsin nit mit dem finterish [sic] in eynem vorinven got hot bishafin di velt iz geven a bisl fintster un a bisl likhtig...

The various droshes [derashot] ('homilies') of Meir ben Samuel, Or. MSS. 9999-10003(Gaster nos. 512, 513, 514, ioio, 1064, respectively) draw from the same tradition.^^ Allare mainly Yiddish, with large sections of both text and commentary in Hebrew. Littleis known about Meir ben Samuel, to whom these kabbalistic, intricately numerologicalwritings are now attributed. It is of codicological interest that some pages of this work

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are on bluish paper. Far removed from kabbalah is another nineteenth-centurymanuscript. Or. MS. looio (Gaster no. 532), containing a Yiddish version of Rashi'scommentary on Deuteronomy 16:18 to 17:7. Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes,1040-1105) was for centuries - as he remains in traditional quarters - the most popularBible commentator, a voice of compelling clarity. (Several Yiddish biblical glossaries willbe discussed later, among the lexicographical works.)

LITURGY

In a discussion of Yiddish liturgical manuscripts, one must consider those manuscriptscontaining whole liturgical texts in Yiddish, or in a combination of Hebrew and Yiddish,as well as those manuscripts containing Hebrew liturgy with added vernacularinstructions in Yiddish. Liturgical works in both these categories have been described insome detail by Margohouth, albeit usually with antiquated linguistic terminology. It isperhaps salutary, here again, to give some attention to his terminology in a survey ofthese manuscripts.

Margoliouth, typically, refers to the vernacular instructions in the liturgical workdescribed in Add. MS. 17867 (Margoliouth no. 651), an illuminated prayer-book writtenin Vienna in 1720, as 'Judaeo-German'. The language which he quotes is indeedYiddish: Dos pitem haktoyres zogt men beshas hadover rakhmone Utslon, oder zonstn eyntsore sheloy sovoy. Di finf psukim zogt men itlikhes posek funf mol nokhanander.Margoliouth also uses the expression 'German (Hebrew character)* to identify thelanguage of some texts, particularly later ones, which he regarded as German except forthe alphabet. This is the case with another liturgical manuscript. Or. MS. 5834(Margoliouth no. 679), written at Mannheim in 1732: * Forms of devotion, in Hebrew andGerman (Hebrew character) for a person in sickness ...'. It is true that texts in 'German-in-Hebrew-letters' were indeed produced in the late eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, but even here one usually finds vestiges of Western Yiddish.̂ ®

Yet Margoliouth is linguistically perceptive, as we can see from his description of a latefifteenth-century or early sixteenth-century liturgical text. Add. MS. 18695 (Margoliouthno. 683), where he writes: *A volume containing a number of festival Services from theGerman Mahzor translated into a Judaeo-German dialect. The rendering is free andperiphrastic, and it is sometimes accompanied by z perush (e.g. fol. 82a sqq.), the objectof the translator being to explain the Piyyutim [hymns] to women. The main interest ofthe MS. lies in its exemplification of a Judaeo-German language as used at the beginningof the sixteenth century.' In the same vein, he pinpoints another Mahzor, Add. MS.27071 (Margoliouth no. 684), for *its exemplification of the Judaeo-German dialect ofthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as used by a scribe from Krakau ... '.̂ ^ Interestinglyenough, Margoliouth was aware of the name 'Yiddish' - his is one of the earliest usesof this glottonym in a scholarly work in English - and employed it in reference to thebilingual 1735 Amsterdam edition of Seyfer mides [Sefer midot] (Add. MS. 27204[Margoliouth no. 874]) as well as to letters dated 1713 (Harley MS. 7013 [Margoliouth

no. 1049]), to which attention will be drawn later. Thus, on some linguistic or otherground he distinguished between 'Judaeo-German' and 'Yiddish'. Even today a fewscholars for a variety of reasons continue to make some such distinctions.^^

ILLUMINATED AND DECORATED MANUSCRIPTS

Among the Yiddish liturgical manuscripts are some which were prepared specially byscribes, and sometimes also by artists, either as family or communal heirlooms or simplyas demonstrations of the scribal art. The above-mentioned Yiddish Mahzor, Add. MS.27071 (Margoliouth no. 684), is the most beautiful Yiddish manuscript - it is virtuallyentirely in Yiddish - in the collections of the British Library, and certainly one of thegreat Yiddish manuscript treasures in the world (see plate III). Extensively decorated,it was written by the scribe Isaac bar Mordecai ha-Kohen, called 'Isaac Lankosh ofCracow', circa 1560.̂ ^ It is probable that the scribe also decorated the manuscript. Theinitial words of prayers, in Hebrew, are written in large unframed display characters,designed in illusionistic scrollwork and pleated ribbon patterns. Many letters sprout intogrotesque heads and animals. In layout and lettering, the manuscript follows medievaltradition, and several features, such as the roundels and rosettes on the first page, areparticularly reminiscent of earlier practice and even of earlier models: the manuscript'sdecoration thus forms a bridge between medieval and eighteenth-century GermanJewish manuscript decoration. It might also be mentioned that as a manuscript entirelyin Yiddish, it is one of a relatively small number of illuminated or decorated manuscriptsin Jewish or Hebrew-character languages, other than Hebrew, of which the BritishLibrary holds some outstanding examples.̂ **

The German bibliographer of Yiddish Karl Habersaat implicitly saw any manuscriptwith any Yiddish in it as a 'Yiddish manuscript', a practice which raises the visibilityof formerly half-hidden materials, and is justified from the perspective of the presentstudy.̂ ^ In this category are a number of manuscripts, of which only a few will beremarked here on account of their ornamentation. Add. MS. 18724 (Margoliouth no.611), a Passover Haggadah written and illuminated by Jacob of Berlin, on vellum, is avery fine example of the eighteenth-century revival of Hebrew manuscript decoration.^^Paradoxically, this most impressive 'Yiddish manuscript' (as it contains some Yiddishtext) is not only missing from Habersaat's list of Margoliouth items (in his YiddishManuscripts in England) but is slighted by Margoliouth as well. The latter describes thismanuscript in great detail, noting that' the rubrical directions are given in both Germanand Spanish [sic]' and that two of the Passover songs at the end of the haggadah, Ehadmi yode'a and Had gadya 'are accompanied by a German rendering in the Rabbiniccharacter'. But he does not note the Yiddish translation, Almekhtiger got (on f. 48), ofthe equally famous Passover song Adir hu,^^ and he continues to avoid the term'Yiddish' in recording the owner's dedicatory inscription: 'on fol. 55a (paper fly-leaf) isan entry in the German cursive character, showing that the MS. was presented by IsaacZelig to his daughter Tsirl.'

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Another Passover Haggadah on vellum, Sloane MS. 3173 (Margoliouth no. 612)dated 1740 (as was Add. MS. 18724) and known as the Leipnik Haggadah, is one of themost beautifully written and decorated Hebrew manuscripts of the eighteenth century ''1 he text proper of this liturgy is, of course, in Hebrew and Aramaic, but the 'rubricaldirections as Margoliouth calls them are in Yiddish and Ladino (and occasionally alsoin Hebrew). On the second folio we are specifically told that minhag shel ha-'ashkenazmmi-tsadyamin ('the Ashkenazic rite is on the right side') and minhag sefaradt mi-tsadsenwl ('the Sefardic rite is on the left side'). As in Add. MS. 18724 (Margoliouth no611), we have the Yiddish translations of the Passover songs Adir hu, Ehad miyode'a andHadgadya (see plate IV).' ' The illumination is the work of Joseph ben David of Leipnik,a native of Moravia, who is regarded as the leading figure among the Hamburg circle ofilluminators, a branch of the dominant eighteenth-century Bohemian-Moravian school.Joseph of Leipnik produced his beautiful illuminated manuscripts for the wealthy few,

and few today see these rare artifacts. It is to be hoped that a facsimile of this exceptionalexample of eighteenth-century illumination will be prepared in the not-too-distantfuture, such as has already been done for its 'sister' Haggadah held in the BibliothecaRosenthaliana, Amsterdam.^^

Another very charming eighteenth-century decorated Hebrew manuscript, containingsome Yiddish text, is Or. MS. 12983, at present on display in the King's Library. Knownas Perek Shirah ('Chapter of Song'), this early medieval tract is 'a hymn to the Creator,in which all beings express their praise in appropriate Biblical phrases. The Hebrew textin square characters is accompanied by a Yiddish translation, in the so-calledvaybertaytsh characters, all in an anonymous hand. Written on vellum, this manuscriptof the work is divided into fv\t sections, each containing a water-colour illustration of thecreatures mentioned, probably by an artist of the Moravian school. '^'

Among the Yiddish manuscripts notable for their calligraphy, one should also mentionOr. MS. 10330 (Gaster no. 1061), Kitser likute tsvi beloshn taytsh [Kitsur likute Jsevi bi-leshon taytsh], a digest of liturgical readings dated 1833 at Leeuwarden (Friesland),^^ andthe sixteenth-century (or earlier) Yiddish translation of the Mahzor, Or. MS. 10735(Gaster no. 722), written by two hands.

ETHICS

One of the oldest Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library is Add. MS. 27204(Margoliouth no. 874), an early sixteenth-century recension of the anonymous ethicaltract Seyfer mides [Sefer midot], otherwise known as Orkhes tsadikim [Orhot tsadikim].Probably composed in Germany in the fifteenth century, this work became a popularclassic of traditional Jewish literature in both Yiddish and Hebrew versions: the shorterversion in Yiddish was first printed in Isny in 1542 (this edition is not held in the BritishLibrary), and the longer version in Hebrew was first printed in Prague in 1581.̂ ® Thequestion of the possible priority of the Yiddish recension, especially in light of a sentencein the introduction to the manuscript (drum hobin mir doz seyfer mides in taytsh gimakht\

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;̂ . /. Decorated title-page of the Yiddish ethical tract known as Libes hrif Germany, copied1777; ink on paper. Or. MS. 10668

IS given some attention by Margoliouth. The British Library manuscript is slightlyornamented, with headings and initial phrases appearing in red ink.̂ « Thus themanuscript is significant both for textual history and as an example of early Yiddishmanuscript decoration.

The most popular of all Jewish ethical works, one studied by almost all levels of themale population for generations, the Mishnaic tract Pirkey oves [Pirke Avot] ('Ethics ofthe Fathers') is represented in a number of Yiddish manuscripts, singly in Or. MS10009 (Gaster no. 533), subtitled Shprtkhe derfetr, and as the first of four sections in Or.MS. looio (Gaster no. 532), both of the nineteenth century and essentially German inHebrew characters. A much less known ethical tract is the eighteenth-century Amudeyoylem ['Amude 'olam], also known as Libes brif represented singly in Or. MS. 10668(Gaster no. 117; see fig. i), and as the middle section of a tri-partite volume. Or. MS.10086 (Gaster no. 509). The manuscripts of the work in the British Library's GasterCollection are not entitled 'Libes brif (hterally 'Love Letter ')-at first glance amisleading name for a sober tract of social and moral criticism - but rather 'Amude 'olam('Eternal Pillars', or 'Pillars of the World').'*^ The author of Libes brif, Isaac Wetzlar(Itsik Vetslar),^^ is a transitional figure who bridges the old moralistic musar tradition andMendelssohnian rationahsm. Given the multiple manuscripts of the work, and therelative obscurity of both the work and its author, it will not be out of place to summarizehere the tract's argument. Wetzlar attributes the cultural and economic impoverishmentof mid-eighteenth-century German Jewry to defective education and to the low culturaland spiritual level of the community leaders, the rabbis and the rich, who oppress themasses and keep them ignorant. He decries the ineffective system of learning Hebrewamong the Ashkenazim: it would be better for the uneducated to say their prayers inYiddish, just as Sefardic women and simple folk pray in Spanish and Portuguese.Synagogal mayhem results from congregants not knowing enough Hebrew to understandthe service. Hebrew grammar should be studied at an early age and the curriculumshould move from Hebrew to the Mishnah rather than to agadic works such as ''Eynya^akov, which are full of legends and myths. Women, too, must be taught Hebrew, sothat they can read the Bible. Studying the Bible (rather than such works of superstitionas the Tsenerene) with a critical mind is good for men and women, and will keep the latterfrom being alienated from Judaism.

Another ethical work in the Gaster Collection, Or. MS. 10347 (Gaster no. 120), is thehr'itf Seyder vehanhdge lebaltshuve [Seder ve-hanhagah le-ba''al teshuvah] ('Manual for thePenitent') directed towards those who change their worldly ways. This undated tract, aproduct of so-called 'Habad' Hasidism, was probably prepared circa 1800 in WhiteRussia or Lithuania on tinted paper typical of the region. Lastly, one may mention in thecategory of ethical tracts the fanciful Lebensloyf des foter Rhayns ('Biography of the RiverRhine'), and a cautionary fable about the rich Croesus in a cemetery, all rather stiltedreading, which are to be found together in one manuscript with the Yiddish version ofPirke Avot, Or. MS. iooio (Gaster no. 532), mentioned above.^^

GRAMMAR AND LEXICOGRAPHY

The Gaster Collection also includes a work derived, albeit indirectly, from the great poetElye Bokher (Elijah ben Asher Levita), author of the Old Yiddish epic Bove Bukh (aboutBuovo, the Italianate version of Bevis of Hampton).*^ Levita was an outstandinggrammarian as well as man of letters, and his grammatical works went through manyeditions and were widely disseminated. Or. MS. 10348 (Gaster no. 109) is an eighteenth-century extract, or abridgement, of Levita's Hebrew grammar, entitled Toytsoes khayim[Tots'ot hayim] ('Consequences of Life'), with Yiddish glosses or explanations. Thisabridgment and translation, prepared by the kabbaUst Hayim b. Benjamin Ze'ev Bochnerof Cracow, was published in Hamburg in 1710.̂ ^

In a chronologically arranged bibhography of Yiddish lexicography,^^ no item in theBritish Library and few items elsewhere could claim precedence over Add. MS. 18688(Margoliouth no. 981). This fifteenth-century lexicon of difficult words in the HebrewBible has many Yiddish glosses, or as Margoliouth puts it, 'with frequent renderings inGerman, but written in Hebrew characters'. Similarly, the seventeenth-centurymanuscript of the Hebrew Pentateuch, Arundel MS. 27 (Margoliouth no. 244), isdescribed as 'Notes on passages in the Pentateuch, with many German words in theHebrew character'. (Karl Habersaat, of course, cites these as Yiddish manuscripts.) Athird manuscript of lexicographic interest. Add. MS. 39561, of much later date, isassociated with the American writer and folklorist C. G. Leland (i 824-1903), whosemanuscripts are held in the British Library. An avid collector of, among other things,vocabularies of exotic tongues, Leland himself recorded isolated words and phrases (witha few examples of use in sentences) heard from the lips of one or more Yiddish speakersin the mid-nineteenth century.*^ In Add. MS. 39561 he dubbed them variously as' German Hebrew',' Schmussen',' Mauscheln',' the Jewish-German Dialect',' Schmus-sen-Deutsch', 'Juedisch-Deutsch'.^^ It is, of course, Yiddish, but the hsts are mainlywords of Hebrew-Aramaic origin,*^ many of which entered German rotwelsch and werestudied by Ave-Lallemant and others ;̂ ° such words also entered German dialect throughthe speech of Jewish horse and cow dealers. Leland, who seems to have known Germanand some Hebrew, gives us both a scattered list and an alphabetically ordered glossary.Attention to his naive spellings tells us something about the pronunciation of hisinformants.^^

REALIA: LETTERS

The first British Library Yiddish manuscript to appear in print, Harley MS. 7013(Margoliouth no. 1049), was a series of early eighteenth-century letters described byMargoliouth as partly in Hebrew, 'partly in Yiddish, and partly in a mixture of both'.Jacob J. Maitlis edited and published nine Yiddish letters and corrected Margoliouth'sunchronological numbering, two of his datings, and the decipherment of a name. Thethird of the letters (Judah ben Menahem from Rotterdam to R. Aaron Moses Sofer in

London, 1713) is clearly Hebrew-and Maitlis implies as much in discussing itsYiddishisms. Maitlis explicitly comments on the Hebrew epistolary formulas with whichalmost all the letters begin, conventions of what he calls the 'rhetorical style'. In his briefdiscussion of the language and contents of the letters, he passes over the qualitativedifference between the first two letters from Judah ben Menahem. What is especiallystriking is that Judah ben Menahem himself, at the beginning of his second letter, writesthat he has no time to write be-lashon ha-ramah, leshon ha-kodesh ('in the high style, inthe Holy Tongue'), as he did previously, and he moves into Yiddish (which he here callsleshon kelila [< Aramaic, 'light language']) for most of the remainder of the letter,shifting back to Hebrew for the close. Maitlis did a great deal in presenting and editingthese letters, but there is much to add to his analysis, particularly as regards the highlyfluid but not altogether indefinable borders between Hebrew and Yiddish.^^

It seems pure chance that some Yiddish letters have been acquired and preserved inthe British Library, as elsewhere.^^ One such, a letter of historical interest from the Jewsof Diisseldorf to their coreligionists in Essen, dated 1768, is prefixed to an early Hebrewbiblical manuscript. Add. MS. 10455 (Margoliouth no. 79), from the collection of C. D.Ginsburg. (This Bible, written in Germany in the fourteenth century, is one of thelargest and heaviest manuscripts in the Hebrew collections.) Another letter preserved isOr. MS. 12069, iri two folios, received by Yule Fadl Zusman (Sussmann) from her fatherand dated i March 1854, in Rogasen (Poznan, Prussia), another corner of Yiddishgeography in the German lands.^^ But preservation is not enough. Through an oversightin cataloguing, another Yiddish letter, an especially pathetic one dated 5 February 1790from Mrs Anna Levinstreit, who 'lodges in the town in Krebsen Street the 3rd Row upTwo pairs of Stairs, No. 461 at Vienna', is not mentioned in the British Library'scatalogue description of Add. MS. 11038, and can now be rediscovered.^^ Addressed toher late husband's business associate in London, the letter claims that according to thewill of the deceased, Salomon of Neuvil (Swiss Neuwilen near Constance ?]̂ goodsbelonging to him were in the possession of the addressee, Isaac Herschel, who wasrequested to return these goods to the widow, who had now left Dresden and settled inVienna with her three sons. They were in dire straits and urged the family friend torespond forthwith. The goods whose return was requested were two bundles of pearls,two diamond rings and two large books. Perhaps the books were valuable ones, evendecorated manuscript books of the kind discussed above. The vocabulary of the letter isprincipally New High German, but also has some Hebrew-Aramaic component termsand formulaic expressions, as well as the date and place. It is significant only as areflection of the use of Yiddish in London, or in correspondence with London, in the lateeighteenth century.

PUBLIC RECORDS

Or. MS. 12333 (Gaster no. 1223) contains a pot-pourri of materials from the earlyeighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, mainly documents and letters from theJewish community of Haguenau in Alsace (see fig. 2).̂ ^ This community takes on a

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P L A T E I I I

Opening of the penitential liturgy, from a Mahzor in Yiddish, circa 1560. Add. MS. 27071, f. 2r

PLATE IV

The Passover table-song Had Gadya in Yiddish and Aramaic, from the Haggadah copied andIlluminated by Joseph Le.pnik, Hamburg, dated 1740, on vellum. Sloane MS 3173 f 38V

certain importance in the Gaster Collection owing to another manuscript. Or. MS. 10755(Gaster no. 1200), sixty-three pages long and partly on bluish paper, with autographreports of a delegate from Haguenau to the Sanhedrin of Paris. The Yiddish dialect ofAlsace, sometimes referred to as Judaeo-Alsatian, has been the subject of considerablelinguistic and even literary attention for over a century. These two Gaster manuscriptsmust be added to the bibliography of documentation on this longest-surviving dialect ofWestern Yiddish."

MEDICINE

The secular and the sacral worlds meet in the curious genre of medical and kabbalisticprescriptions known as Sgules urefues [segulot u-refu'ot] in which the Gaster collection isparticularly rich. Among the manuscripts containing such texts are the eighteenth- ornineteenth-century Or. MS. 10343 (Gaster no. 103), with some Yiddish glosses (e.g. forinfusions such as sasefras and sasiparilye), and the more 'scientific' fifteenth-centurySeyfer refues [Sefer refu'ot], in Or. MS. 10396 (Gaster no. 676). The seventeenth-centurySgules urefues bukh ('Book of Charms and Remedies'), Or. MS. 10568 (Gaster no. 932),also partly in Yiddish, is both full and fascinating. One eighteenth-century manuscript,Or. MS. 10790 (Gaster no. 1203), curiously contains remedies in Yiddish, English andLatin. One might also mention in this context a microfilm held at the British Library ofa manuscript located elsewhere:̂ ® Or. Mic. 4914 contains an early collection in Hebrewand Yiddish (55 leaves, 71 items) of about five hundred prescriptions of folk-medicineand recipes for dyeing and other domestic arts, laws of kashrut, and charms andincantations.^^ Among its sundry contents, for example, are remedies or recipes for^trembling of the hands,' 'urinary ailments', 'virginity' and 'writing (in colour of gold)'.The Hebrew and Yiddish literature of'charms and cures' is of increasing interest today,both from the perspective of folk-medicine and from that of popular mysticism andalchemy. ̂ ^

DRAMA

The manuscript whose text looks forward most poignantly to the present age, naivelypitting assimilationist universalism against obscurantist ethnicity, is Or. MS. 12283(Gaster no. 133), Isaac Abraham Euchel's Reb Henikh, oder vos tut man damit}, writtenat the end of the eighteenth century. The irony of an anti-Yiddish play in Yiddish, ofspecial importance in the history of Yiddish drama, has been much discussed since 1930,when Zalmen Rejzen published the text of the play in Yiddish for the first time, on thebasis of a manuscript in Amsterdam.^^ It would be interesting to compare the Rejzenedition with the Gaster manuscript, which is a nineteenth-century copy of theeighteenth-century original.

Of considerably less significance is a drama by the London immigrant NathanHorowitz, who was, however, one of the first translators of Byron into Yiddish.

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GUCONSCRXmONCOh'SlSTOHIALI

SYNAGOGIE DE HAGUENAII.

C

r c \

. 2. Deliberations in Yiddish of the administrative committee of the Jewish congregation atHaguenau (Alsace), 22 March 1840. Or. MS. 12333

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Horowitz's Shol hameylekh: a biblishe drame in 7 akten [King Saul: Biblical Play in 7Acts] (London, 1933) is described by the author on the title-page as 'Copy T and'Manuscript Print by the Author'. Although sometimes perceived as a lithograph andrecorded as such among the library's Hebrew printed books/^ this is simply a manuscriptprepared by the author and presented to the British Museum Library as if a book. Awork of dogged application, it is graphically curious, but poetically deficient.^^

THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S PLAYS

The Licensing Act of 1737 required the Lord Chamberlain to license a new play beforeit could be publicly performed on the stage. This practice continued until 1968. It willbe news to many that Yiddish plays and play synopses were similarly presented fordecades to the Lord Chamberlain's Office [LCO] for licensing. ̂ ^ Yiddish troupes inBritain have since 1880 staged at least a thousand different works,̂ '̂ but they do not seemto have applied for permission to perform as many as a quarter of them. From the late1890s until the 1940s the practice appears to have been for a Yiddish theatre manager- if he bothered at all - to submit an English synopsis of the Yiddish play, together withtwo guineas for the registration fee. Sometimes a printed or manuscript text accompaniedthe synopsis, which was generally poorly written and sloppily presented. The examinershad additional cause for irritation when the fee was late in arriving. The examinersregarded careful attention to a play's contents as superfluous if the play were in Yiddish;this indifference bred ignorance and a certain contempt. At least one Yiddish play,Shalom Asch's Got fun nekome ('God of Vengeance'), was banned in Britain as late as1946.

Copies of all plays licensed between 1824 and 1968, formerly held in the LordChamberlain's Office, are now in the British Library, together with all correspondenceand examiners' reports, where these survive. All of this material is now accessible andmay be seen in the Department of [Western] Manuscripts.^^ Plays can be searchedthrough a card catalogue of titles and through bound volumes in which plays wererecorded by the LCO as received. Yiddish plays can be found only through theirtranslated English titles, a formidable obstacle unless one knows the material intimately.For most of the Yiddish plays licensed there are only poor English plot abstracts, butthere is also Yiddish language material, printed and manuscript. The plays run thegamut between raucous musicals, sentimental operettas and tear-jerking melodramas onthe one hand, and serious art theatre on the other. Spanning the years 1880 to 1961, theLCO plays are an important source for the study of Yiddish theatre in Britain.^^

MS. NOTES IN PRINTED BOOKS

A comprehensive list of Yiddish manuscripts would also include Yiddish marginalglosses in Hebrew printed books such as we find, apparently in a contemporary hand, inthe British Library copy (pressmark C.5o.d.2o) of the incunable Makre Dardeke

93

([Naples], 1488).̂ ^ These Yiddish glosses deserve attention not only in the context of thebroad history of the Makre Dardeke,^^ but also in relation to other multilingual Hebrewand Yiddish lexicons.'® Another instance of Yiddish handwritten notes in an earlyHebrew book was recently uncovered in the course of bibhographic research on Hebrewincunabula in the British Library. 'An old hand-written Hebrew list of manuscripts,printed books and other properties', bound up with the editio princeps (pressmarkC.5O.d.7) of Jacob b. Asher's code, Arba'ah Turim (Piove di Sacco, 1475), was found toinclude Yiddish text, of no little period interest."^^ The significance squeezed out of thislist demonstrates what seemingly fragmentary items can become when knowingly read.

The above survey gives a brief and only preliminary account of some fifty Yiddishmanuscript texts in the collections of the British Library.'^ In the absence of a definitivestudy of Yiddish palaeography and codicology, still a desideratum of Hebraicbibliography,^^ the dating and more precise provenance within Eastern and CentralEurope of some Yiddish manuscripts will necessarily remain tentative. Given the currentupsurge of academic and general interest in Yiddish in Britain and abroad, the BritishLibrary's Yiddish manuscript collections will continue to attract attention. Muchremains to be learned from them.

A P P E N D I XCONCORDANCE OF YIDDISH MS. NUMBERS

(manuscripts discussed in this survey)

BL MS. no.

Arundel 27Harley 7013Sloane 3173Add. 10455Add. 11038Add. 17867Add. 18688Add. 18694Add. 18695Add. 18724Add. 27O45(B)Add. 27071Add. 27204Add. 39561

Or. 5834Or. 9911

British Library MS. numbersMargoliouth cat. no.

Margoliouth 244Margoliouth 1049Margoliouth 612Margoliouth 79 [Ginsburg 19]

Margoliouth 651Margoliouth 981Margoliouth 102Margoliouth 683Margohouth 611Margoliouth 925 [Almanzi 151]Margoliouth 684 [Almanzi 176]Margoliouth 874 [Almanzi 318]

Margoliouth 679Gaster 584

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Or. 9999 Gaster ^Or. ioooo Gaster 513Or. ioooi Gaster 514Or. 10002 Gaster ioioOr. 10003 Gaster 1064Or. 10009 Gaster 533Or. iooio Gaster 532Or. 10086 Gaster 509Or. 10330 Gaster 1061Or. 10343 Gaster 103Or. 10347 Gaster 120Or. 10348 Gaster 109Or. 10396 Gaster 676Or. 10568 Gaster 932Or. 10668 Gaster 117Or. 10735 Gaster 722Or. 10755 Gaster 1200Or. 10790 Gaster 1203Or. 12069 -Or. 12283 Gaster 133Or. 12333 Gaster 1223Or. 12983 —

11745.aaaa.27 [catalogued as printed book]C.5O.d.7 [printed book with MS. notes]C.5O.d.2o [printed book with MS. notes]

Margoliouth numbers

Margoliouth cat. no. BL MS. nO.

Margoliouth 79 [Ginsburg 19] Add. 10455Margoliouth 102 Add. 18694Margoliouth 244 Arundel 27Margoliouth 611 Add. 18724Margoliouth 612 Sloane 3173Margoliouth 651 Add. 17867Margoliouth 679 Or. 5834Margoliouth 683 Add. 18695Margoliouth 684 [Almanzi 176] Add. 27071Margoliouth 874 [Almanzi 318] Add. 27204Margoliouth 925 [Almanzi 151] Add. 27O45Margoliouth 981 Add. 18688Margoliouth 1049 Harley 7013

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Gaster numbers

Gaster handlist no.

Gaster 103Gaster 109Gaster 117Gaster 120Gaster 133Gaster 509Gaster 512Gaster 513Gaster 514Gaster 532Gaster 533Gaster 584Gaster 676Gaster 722Gaster 932Gaster ioioGaster 1061Gaster 1064Gaster 1200Gaster 1203Gaster 1223

BL MS. no.

Or. 10343Or. 10348Or. 10668Or. 10347Or. 12283Or. 10086Or. 9999Or. 10000

Or. 10001

Or. iooio

Or. 10009

Or. 9911

Or. 10396Or. 10735Or. 10568Or. 10002

Or. 10330Or. 10003Or. 10755Or. 10790Or. 12333

I The manuscript has been reproduced in afacsimile edition. On the Yiddish inscription, seethe study by Ch. Shmeruk in the companionvoiume to the facsimile, 'The versified OldYiddish blessing in the Worms Mahzor', in M.Beit-Arie {ed.). Worms Mahzor, MS. JewishNational and University Library Heb. 4°j8i/1:Introductory Volume (Vaduz, 1985), pp. 100-3,and the earlier study by W. Roll, 'Das altestedatierte judisch-deutsche Sprachdenkmal; einVerspaar im Wormser Machsor von 1272/73',Zeitschrift fiir Alundartenforschung, xxxiii (Wies-baden, 1966), pp. 127-38; see also Shmeruk'sSifrut yidish: perakim le-toldotehah [ YiddishLiterature: aspects of its history] (Tel-Aviv,1978), pp. 9-11 (with reproduction from themanuscript, and reference to other studies by D.Sadan), and his Prokimfun deryidisher titeratur-geshikhte [Yiddish Literature: aspects of itshistory] (Tel Aviv, 1988), pp. 11-14.

2 See Shmeruk, Prokim, pp. 33-5. Helmut Dinse,

in Die Entwicklung des jiddischen Schrifttums imdeutschen Sprachgebiet (Stuttgart, 1974), pp.280-1, lists 45 items from 1953 to 19^7, whenthe debate was most fierce. For an account andan analysis of this debate, and a comprehensivebibliography as well, see Jerold C. Frakes, ThePolitics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology inOld Yiddish Studies (Albany, 1989); there is alsoa study by Gabriele Strauch, Dukus Horant:Wanderer zmischen zwei Welten (Amsterdam,1990). Research on the Cambridge Codex is alsorecorded in Stefan C. Kei(et al. (eds.). PublishedMaterial from the Cambridge Genizah Collection:A Bibliography i8g6-ig8o (Cambridge, 1988), p.148. For a lengthy palaeographical account of themanuscript, with a facsimile of its character set(i.e. the Hebrew alphabet), see S. Birnbaum, TheHebrew Scripts (London and Leiden, 1954-71),2 parts (plates and text), no. 356*. On thediscovery of the manuscript, see C. Gininger, 'ANote on the Yiddish Horant', in U. Weinreich

(ed.), The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddishlanguage, folklore, and literature (New York,i954)> PP- 275-7-

3 Frakes, ibid., passim. In the nineteenth centurythere were Jewish scholars in Germany whomaintained that the Jews in medieval and earlymodern Germany had spoken the same Germanas their Christian neighbours; isolation andEastern influence had corrupted this speech, theresult being the ghastly 'jargon', Yiddish.Convinced that full social and civic acceptancedepended on their ridding themselves of thislinguistic abomination, the German-Jewish es-tablishment waged a harsh campaign againstYiddish. In the twentieth century — a tragicperiod in which a majority of native Yiddish-speakers have perished - linguistic science andhistory have rescued Yiddish from this op-probrium. In the long debate as to whether suchworks as Dukus Hurnt (or Dukus Horant) arewritten in 'Old Yiddish' or in 'High German inHebrew letters', the reigning opinion, held evenby some distinguished Germanists, is that a textwritten in Hebrew characters and designed for aJewish audience is Yiddish even when thevocabulary is overwhelmingly German.

4 Through the nineteenth century and well intothe twentieth, Yiddish books and manuscripts inthe British Museum Library, as elsewhere, wereincluded in the catalogues of Hebrew (Zedner1867; Van Straalen 1892, 1901; Margoliouth1899, 1905, 1915; Leveen 1935) and were called'Judaeo-German', 'Jewish German', etc. Theglottonym 'Judaeo-German', commonly usedeven for East European Yiddish, fell graduallyinto disuse in this century, when the movementfor an indigenous and unhyphenated name beganto make headway, first in North America andlater in Western Europe. Modern terminology isreflected in more recent subject headings; cf.R. C. Alston, A Topical Index to Pressmarks in usein The British Museum Library (i82j-ig^j) andThe British Library (ig/j—ig8s), including press-marks in... The Department of Oriental Manu-scripts and Printed Books (London, 1987), s.v.'Yiddish'(3 pp.).

Esdaile in his The British Museum Library: aShort History and Survey (London, 1946), p.299, wrote: ' With Hebrew is often classedYiddish. But this, though written and printed inHebrew characters, is not Semitic, but Euro-pean, being the dialect (Juedisch) of the Jews in

Germany. Yiddish books reaching the Museumare for convenience catalogued in the OrientalLibrary, but are preserved in the Printed Booksand read in the Reading Room.' The flaweddefinition given here of Yiddish, 'the dialect ofthe Jews in Germany', is surprising. At the verymoment Esdaile wrote and only a few miles fromwhere he wrote a vibrant Yiddish cultureflourished in the East End of London. In his daya significant world-class literature existed inYiddish, which was the language of the majorityof Eastern European Jews and of hardly aremnant in Germany proper.

Records for the British Library's holdings ofYiddish books printed before 1800, includingmuch printing from the German lands, werecompiled by M. Lutzki in his unpublishedReshime fun yidishe gidrukte sforim biz dem yor1800 velkhe gefinen zikh in der bodliana in oksfordun m britishen muzeum in london [Catalogue ofYiddish printed books (until the year 1800) heldin the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in theBritish Museum (later British Library), London](MS. New York, 1954, deposited in the YIVOInstitute, New York), a copy of which is held inthe Hebrew Section of the British Library.Records for a major portion of the Yiddish booksacquired by the British Library before 1975, andwhich were included in the printed (and nowautomated) General Catalogue, have been com-piled in Yiddish Printed Books in the BritishLibrary, preface by B. S. Hill (London: HebrewSection, The British Library, 1992); due to long-standing automation difficulties, the Hebrewcharacters in this computer-generated compi-lation run in the proper direction within words,but the words themselves run backwards.

Records for Yiddish books printed in thenineteenth century are to be found in thecatalogues by J. Zedner, Catalogue of the HebrewBooks in the Library of the British Museum(London, 1867; reprinted 1964), S. vanStraalen, Catalogue of Hebrew Books in the BritishMuseum acquired during the years i868-i8g2(London, 1894; reprinted 1977), and idem.Supplementary Catalogue of Hebrew Books in theBritish Museum, acquired during the yearsT8gj-i8gg (London, 1991; limited distribution).See also the entries in the unpublished (andincomplete) galley-proofs of Van Straalen'sSubject Catalogue of the Hebrew Printed Books(ca. 14JS - ca. igoo) held in the Library of the

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British Museum {now British Library), under theheadings ' Belles-lettres: Drama: Judaeo-German' and 'Belles-Lettres: Novels: Judaeo-German', and also the indexes to Van Straalen'sunpublished Gatalogue of Hebrew Printers {ca.1500 ~ ca. igoo) as represented in the holdings ofthe British Museum [now British Library), index5: 'Printers of languages other than Hebrew:Jewish languages: Yiddish', listing some fortyprinters.

5 On the history of the Yiddish language, see MaxWeinreich, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh[History of the Yiddish Language], 4 vols. {NewYork, 1973), and the partial English versionwhich excludes the notes, History of the YiddishLanguage, trans. S. Noble and J. A. Fishman(Chicago and London, 1980). Much Yiddishlinguistic literature has been recorded in B.Borochov, 'Di Bibliotek funem yidishn filolog:fir hundert yor yidishe shprakh forshung',reprinted in his Shprakh-forshung un literatur-geshikhte, ed. N. Meisel [Mayzel] {Tel Aviv,1966), pp. 76-136 (a second, unpublished, partof the 'Bibliotek' is said to be preserved inmanuscript at the YIVO Institute in New York);K. Habersaat, 'Materialien zur Geschichte derjiddischen Grammatik', Orbis, xi {1962), pp.352-68; idem, 'Zur Geschichte der jiddischenGrammatik: eine Bibliographische Studie', Zeit-schrift fur Deutsche Philologie, lxxxiv {1965), pp.419-35, and lxxxvi (1966), p. 156; S. Birnbaum,Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (Toronto,1979)1 PP- 309-88 ('Bibliography'); J. G. Brat-kowski, Yiddish Linguistics: a Multilingual Bib-liography (New York and London, 1988); andD. M. Bunis and A. Sunshine, Yiddish Lin-guistics: A Glasstfied Bilingual Inde.x of YiddishSerials and Gollections, igij-ig^S {New Yorkand London, 1994).

For surveys of Yiddish linguistic research, seeH. P. Althaus, 'Yiddish', in Gurrent Trends inLinguistics, vol. ix (The Hague, 1972), pp.1345-82, and Dovid Katz, 'On Yiddish, inYiddish, and for Yiddish: 500 years of YiddishScholarship', in M. H. Gelber (ed.). Identity andEthos: A Festschrift for Sol Liptzin on theOccasion of His 8s th Birthday (New York, 1986),pp. 23-36. The generally accepted view thatYiddish is a variety of High German withsignificant Slavic and Hebrew-Aramaic com-ponents has recently been challenged by PaulWexler's theory that Yiddish is a Slavic language.

'Judaeo-Sorbian', which has been relexifiedfrom High German. See his 'Yiddish-theFifteenth Slavic Language: A Study of PartialLanguage Shift from Judeo-Sorbian to Ger-man', International Journal of the Sociology ofLanguage, xci {1991), pp. 9-150, and Ms morerecent - and more controversial - The Ash-kenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in search ofa Jewish Identity {Columbus, Ohio, 1993).

6 The Got fun avrom ('God of Abraham') prayerrecited at home by women at the close of theSabbath is one striking exception, as is indeedthe entire tkhines genre, a personal rather than acommunal prayer form. The Yiddish sidur{* prayer book'), such as that translated by Josephben Yakar (Ichenhausen, 1544), and mahzor{*holiday prayer book'), such as the BritishLibrary's Add. MS. 27071, seem to have beenprimarily for home use. On women's liturgies inYiddish, see Solomon Freehof, 'DevotionalLiterature in the Vernacular', GGAR Yearbook,xxxiii (1923), pp. 375-424; Dinse, op. cit., pp.84-91 and 190-3; Devra Kay, 'An AlternativePrayer Canon for women: the Yiddish SeyderTkhines', in Julius Carlebach (ed.), Zur Ges-chichte der jiidischen Frau in Deutschland (Berlin,1993), pp. 49-96 (with bibliography of editions);and Jennifer Breger, 'Women's DevotionalLiterature: An Essay in Jewish Bibliography'^Jewish Book Annual, Hi (New York, 1994-1995),pp. 73-98. On prayer in Yiddish, see David E.Fishman, 'Mikoyekh davenen af yidish: a bintlmetodologishe bamerkungen un naye mekoyrim'[' Concerning Prayer in Yiddish: MethodblogicalComments and New Sources'], Yivo Bleter,N.S., i {New York, 1991), pp. 69-92 (in Yiddish);and J. Baumgarten, Introduction a la litteratureyiddish ancienne {Paris, 1993), pp. 319-62 {'Prieren langue vulgaire').

7 See in this respect Lewis Glinert's 'Hebrew-Yiddish Diglossia: Type and Stereotype Impli-cations of the Language of Ganzfried's Kitzur\International Journal of the Sociology of Lang-uage, lxvii {1987), pp. 39-55- On the knowledgeof Hebrew in Eastern Europe, cf. S. Stampfer,'What did it mean to know Hebrew in EasternEurope.^', in L. Glinert {ed.}, Hebrew in Ash-kenaz {Oxford, 1993).

8 An exemplary conversation in AshkenazicHebrew between two Yiddish-speaking {!) mer-chants ('Drittes Gesprach, Zwischen zweyenHandels-Juden') is reproduced in Bibliophilus'

Judischer Sprach-Meister, oder Hebrdisch-Teut-sches Worter-Buch (Frankfurt and Leipzig,1742), pp. 92 ff.

9 The entry, 'Manuscripts, Hebrew', by D. S.Loewinger and E. Kupfer, in the EncyclopaediaJudaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. xi, cols. 899-900,defines 'Hebrew manuscripts' as a 'term whichincludes religious and secular books, as well asletters and documents written on papyrus,parchment, hides and paper in Hebrew charac-ters, sometimes using them for the writing oflanguages other than Hebrew, e.g. Aramaic,Yiddish, Ladino, e t c '

10 Great twentieth-century Yiddish scholars likeMax Erik, Nahum Shtif, Noah Prylucki, MaxWeinreich and others were of course interestedin and studied Yiddish manuscripts. Cataloguersof major sales catalogues {e.g., Chimen Abram-sky), who often remain anonymous, did giveexpert attention to Yiddish manuscripts, butother than Karl Habersaat, the most importantbibliographer of Yiddish manuscripts afterSteinschneider, no twentieth-century scholar hasmade bibliographical study of Yiddish manu-scripts his major concern. The philologist BerBorochov's pioneering bibliographical essay onresearch on Yiddish was not focused on Yiddishmanuscripts, and Chone Shmeruk's survey ofYiddish literature in the Encyclopaedia Judaica(Jerusalem, 1972), vol. xvi, cols. 798-833, dealsprincipally with printed works.

11 This has been widely documented. The firstmodern historian of Yiddish literature, LeoWiener {himself a trained Slavist), wrote in hisThe History of Yiddish Literature in the Nine-teenth Gentury (London, 1899; reprinted NewYork, 1972), p. 13: 'Even Steinschneider has nolove for it; although he has written so much andso well on its literature, he knows nothing of itsnineteenth-century development, and nearly allhis quotations of Judeo-German words that inany way differ from the German form arepreposterously wrong.' Steinschneider's lastviews are expressed in his Allgememe Einleitungin die judische Literatur des Mittelalters: Vor-lesungen... (Amsterdam, 1966; reprinted fromJewish Quarterly Review, xvi [1904], pp. 759-64).

12 Steinschneider's detailed list of Yiddish manu-scripts is found in his 'Juedische [lege Juedisch-Deutsche] Litteratur und Juedisch-Deutsch',Serapeum (1864), pp. 33-104, and (1866), pp.129-40, 145-59 CJuedisch-deutsche Hand-

schriften', nos. 386-451); see also the 'Nach-trage' in (1869), pp. 129-59. This list ofmanuscripts was unfortunately not included inthe reprint of the earlier part {on printed books)ot Juedisch-Deutsche Literatur, which was issuedby the Hebrew University {Jerusalem, 1961). Itmay be noted here that Steinschneider's ownhand-annotated copy oi Juedisch-Deutsche Lit-eratur, with extensive additional material notincluded anywhere else, is held in the library ofthe Jewish Theological Seminary, New York,and is available on microfilm from UMIMicrofilms; see A Reel Guide to the Stein-schneider Gollection, Reels 1-20, from the libraryof the Jewish Theological Seminary of America{Ann Arbor: University Microfilms), reel 13, no.107 (173 exp.). A copy of this is held in theBritish Library.

13 B. Weinryb, 'Handschriften. II. Jiddisch',Encyclopaedia Judaica (Berlin, 1931), vol. vii,cols. 944—7 (with bibliography).

14 See Karl (Carlo) Habersaat, 'Beitrage zurBibliographie der jiidisch-deutschen Hand-schriften, nebst Nachtrag zu Shunami, Bib-liography', Le Muse'on: revue d'e'tudes orientals,liv (Louvain, 1941), pp. 187-95; idem, 'Pro-legomena zum Repertorium der JiddischenHandschriften', Zeitschrift fur deutsche Phil-ologie, lxxxi {1962), pp. 338-48; idem, 'Repert-orium der Jiddischen Handschriften', Rivistadegli studi orientali, xxix {1954), pp. 53-70; xxx(1955)1 PP- 235-49; and xxxi {1956), pp. 41-9;and idem, 'Beitrag zur Chronologie der datiertenjiddischen Handschriften {1307-1619)', Mittetl-ungen aus dem Arbeitskreis fur Jiddistlk^ ii, no.r8 (1963), pp. 117-18. (A bound volume ofphotocopies of most of Habersaat's numerouspublications, entitled Studies in Yiddish, Hebrew,Judaeo-Spanish and Biblical Bibliography [1933-ig66], is held in the Hebrew Section of theBritish Library.)

M. Lutzki's unpublished Reshime fun yidishegidrukte sfortm, cited above, apparently includedan appendix {'Hesofe i') comprising a union listof Yiddish manuscripts {'algemeyne reshime funidishe manuskripten'), but this is missing in thereproduction held at the British Library (is it tobe found with the original manuscript depositedin the YIVO Institute in New York.''); a secondappendix {'Hesofe 2') lists Yiddish manuscriptsin Germany and Austria, of which microfilms areheld at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew

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Manuscripts, Jerusalem. The compendiousunion catalogue of the Hebrew-character manu-scripts reproduced on microfilm for this In-stitute, The Collective Catalogue of HebrewManuscripts (Paris: Chadwyck-Healey, 1989, onmicrofiche) includes a 'language' file listingYiddish and other Jewish languages (each in aseparate sequence) as well as a 'library' fileaccording to the respective institutions' press-marks. Unfortunately, there is no entry under'Yiddish' (or, indeed, under any other Jewishlanguage) in the otherwise helpful bibliographiccompendium by B. Richler, Guide to HebrewManuscript Collections (Jerusalem, 1994).

15 For example, K. Habersaat, 'Die jiddischenHandschriften in der Schweiz', Phonetica, x(1963), p. 128, also published in Archiv fur dasStudium der neueren Sprachen und Ltteraturen,cxvii (1965/6), pp. 114-15; idem,' Die jiddischenHandschriften in Italien', Archiv Braunschweig,cci (1965), pp. 48-50; M. Weinreich, 'VosKeymbridzsh farmogt' [Yiddish in Cambridgecollections], in his Bilder fun der yidtsherliteraturgeshikhte (Wilno, 1928), pp. 140-8; S.Loewinger and B. Weinryb, Jiddische Hand-schriften in Breslau (Budapest, 1936; reprintedfrom Magyar Zsidd Szemle, liii); J. Baumgarten,'Les manuscrits Yidich de la BibliothequeNationale de Paris', in David Goldberg (ed.).The Eield of Yiddish: Studies in language, folkloreand literature: Fifth Collection (Evanston/NewYork, 1993), pp. 121-51; and the typescript'Jiddische Hss. bzw. Hss. mit jidd. Bestandteilenan der BSB [List of Yiddish mss.]', 2 pp.,available in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek inMunich. On collections of Yiddish letters morewill be said later.

16 For example, J. Maitlis, ' London YiddishLetters of the Early Eighteenth Century', TheJournal of Jewish Studies, vi (1955), pp. 153-65and 237-52. Cecil Roth translated one of theseletters in 'An Irish Marriage', in his edition ofAnglo-Jewish Letters, 1158-1 gij (London,1938), p. 87. Prof Walter Roll of Trier ispreparing a study of British Library manuscriptscontaining Yiddish biblical glosses.

17 On the quantity of the surviving Hebrewmanuscript material, ' I t has been estimated thatthere are about 60,000 [Hebrew-character]manuscripts (codices) and about 200,000 frag-ments, most of which have come from the CairoGenizah... ' . Needless to say, only a very tiny

portion of these manuscripts and fragments arein Yiddish; cf. Loewinger and Kupfer in theEncyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. xi,col. 900.

18 Part i (London, 1899; reprinted 1965), Part ii(London, 1905; reprinted 1965), Part iii(London, 1915; reprinted 1965), covering theBritish Library's acquisitions of Hebrew manu-scripts to 1915; Part iv: Introduction, Indexes,Brief Descriptions of Accessions, and Addendaand Corrigenda by J. Leveen (London, 1935;reprinted 1977). Yiddish material is scatteredthroughout these volumes. The Yiddish manu-scripts in the British Library, together with allother Hebrew-character manuscripts, have beenmicrofilmed for the Institute of MicrofilmedHebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National andUniversity Library, Jerusalem. The union cata-logue prepared by the Institute was noted above(n. 14).

19 There is an early nineteenth-century inscriptioninserted in Add. MS. 17867 (Margoliouth no.651), a manuscript dated 1720 on the title-page;see Margoliouth, vol. ii, p. 267.

20 A number of catalogues and handlists areavailable for the collection, among them:

(1) The original handlist of all Gaster'smanuscripts (headed ' Gaster Manuscript Cata-logue'), indicating those acquired by the BritishMuseum (now British Library) in 1925 andthose acquired by the John Rylands Library inManchester in 1955. It may be noted that nos.1-2094 3^^ the original catalogue entries, nos.2095-9 w^^^ added by Dr Ettinghauserj-when heevaluated the manuscripts, and nos. 2100-17 ^"^pp. 173 (right-hand page) to 175 were added byGaster's son, V. I. Gaster. A reproduction of thislarge folio volume is kept in the Hebrew Section,Oriental and India Office Collections; this hasnow been reproduced in reduced format as theHandlist of Gaster Manuscripts (London, 1995;limited distribution).

(2) A handlist of the Gaster manuscriptsacquired by the British Museum Library,extracted (photographically) from the originalhandlist, and thus containing identical data. Thishandlist is entitled Catalogue of Hebrew andSamaritan Manuscripts: Gaster Collection, andkept in the Oriental Reading Room (classified

B3).(3) The 'Blue Slip Catalogue' of the Gaster

Collection, containing descriptive notes by a

IOO

succession of Museum and Library curators(Jacob Leveen, Joseph Rosenwasser, DavidGoldstein, c. 1925-85).

{4) A typescript catalogue in Hebrew of theGaster Collection in the British Museum (nowBritish Library), prepared by N. AUony andD. S. Loewinger (Jerusalem, i960), with a usefulindex to languages, including Yiddish and'Ashkenazit' [sic]. Copies of this typescript arekept in the Oriental Reading Room of the BritishLibrary, as well as at the Jewish National andUniversity Library, Jerusalem. To use thiscatalogue, it is helpful to know that the right-hand number within each entry is the Gastermanuscript number; the left-hand number is theBritish Library 'Or. MS. ' number, and the thirdnumber, in the left margin, is the Institute'smicrofilm number. There are typographicalerrors in the index to languages: 576 should be516; 695 and 970 do not appear to be Yiddishitems.

(5) A revision of Allony and Loewinger isincorporated in the Collective Catalogue ofHebrew Manuscripts cited above. A whole sectionof the Collective Catalogue is devoted to theGaster Collection (see the 'Libraries' file).

(6) Gaster's manuscripts are also recorded inthe compilation by Aron Freimann, UnionCatalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts and TheirLocation, index volume by M. Schmelzer (NewYork, 1964-1973), which provides a wealth ofbibliographic documentation.

One may also mention Gaster's typescript'Notes on my library (and earlier drafts withcorrections) [1924]', in which he briefly surveyshis Yiddish (and also his ' Spanish') manuscripts.

21 Karl Habersaat's knowledge of manuscript cata-logues and secondary sources was impressive,but his reference to Gaster manuscripts in his'Repertorium der Jiddischen Handschriften',Rivista degli studi orientali, xxix (1954), p. 58,does not go beyond mention of 'Enc. Jud. IX,128, 130 d'. He cited no Gaster items in hisunpublished typescript Yiddish Manuscripts inEngland (c. 1964; held at the British Library),the early handlists and catalogues of the col-lection apparently being unknown to him.

22 On Yiddish translations of the Bible, seeShmeruk, Sifrut yidish: perakim le-toldotehah,pp. 105-46; idem, Prokim fun der yidisherliteratur-geshikhte, ch. 5 ('Arum dem tanakh'),pp. 157-210; W. Staerk and A. Leitzmann, Die

judisch-deutschen Bibelubersetzungen von denAnfdngen bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts(Frankfurt, 1923); N. Leibowitz, Die Uber-setzungstechnik der judisch-deutschen Bibeluber-setzungen des IS- und 16. Jahrhunderts, Ph.D.thesis, Marburg, 1931; J. Baumgarten, 'Lestraductions de la Bible en yiddish (XVIP-XVIir ' siecle) et la Zeenah ureenah (Bale, 1622)de Yaakov ben Itsak Achkenazi de Janow',Revue des etudesjuives (1985), pp. 305-10; idem.Introduction a la litte'rature yiddish ancienne, pp.109-62 ('les bibles yiddish'); and M. Aptroot,'Blits un Vitsnhoyzn; naye penimer fun an altermakhloykes' ['Blitz and Witzenhausen; newaspects of an old conflict'], Oksfor der yidish [AYearbook of Yiddish Studies], i (Oxford, 1990),PP- 3-38.

23 As 'a specimen of the style' of this manuscript,Margoliouth gives the opening of Leviticus,which amply illustrates the literalistic translationtradition.

24 Pencilled in at top off ir in English: 'M. Gastera present from my father vii 1903'. Rosenwasserand Leveen date the manuscript as eighteenthcentury, but Gaster dates it 1816 and attributesit to a specific melamed. Allony and Loewingerquestion both the author's name and the dategiven by Gaster. Gaster calls the author a'melamed' and names him as Schmuel Moscheb. Aron Lazar; Allony-Loewinger ascribe it to'Moshe ben Aharon Lazar melamed (?), 1810

25 All the cataloguers prior to Allony and Loe-winger gave the author's name as Meir benAnshel. Allony and Loewinger offer the mostreliable descriptions, but cali one group'Yiddish' and the others, which are linguisticallyidentical, 'Yiddish and Hebrew'. Gaster oftenclaims his manuscripts are older than Allony andLoewinger think they are. Gaster's eighteenthcentury is here revised to the nineteenth century.(It is worth noting, and not simply out ofbibliographic pedantry, that not one of the fourelements of the title stamped on the spines ofthese volumes - 'Meir b. Anshel / Judaeo-German / Brit. Mus. / Oriental' - goes un-changed or unchallenged today!) Curiously,Gaster found the handwriting of this quitelegible manuscript to be 'strange'.

26 Adolph Neubauer, in A Catalogue of the HebrewManuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford,1886-1906; vol. i repr. 1994), and others, also

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used the term 'Hebrew-German'. On thetransition from Yiddish to German amongGerman Jewry, see Paul Wexler, 'AshkenazicGerman, 1760-1895', International Journal ofthe Sociology! of Language, xxx (1981), pp.ii9-3O> and Steven M. Lowenstein, 'TheYiddish Written Word in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany', in his The Mechanics of Ghange:Essays in the Social History of German Jewry(Atlanta, 1992), pp. 183-99.

27 The first reference work to mention a BritishLibrary Yiddish manuscript, the 1931 BerlinEncyclopaedia Judaica, vol. vii, col. 946, cites thiswork as an example of the 'gemischte hebr.-jidd.H. ' (mixed Hebrew-Yiddish manuscripts),noting that Yiddish manuscripts are listed amongHebrew ones in the various catalogues, thoughNeubauer provides a separate index.

28 Most notably Werner Weinberg, who makes adistinction between 'Juedisch-Deutsch' { ='Judaeo-German') and Yiddish; see his DieReste des Juedisch-Deutschen (Stuttgart, 1969;

1973)-29 The undated colophon is quoted in full by

Margoliouth. The date 1590 given by Habersaat,in his ' Repertorium der Jiddischen Hand-schriften: i r , Rivista degli studi orientali, xxx(1955), p. 248, and in his 'Beitrag zur Chron-ologie der datierten jiddischen Handschriften',Mitteilungen aus dem Arbeitskreisfur Jiddisttk, ii,no. 18 {1963), p. 118, is part of an owner's noteon f. 2, not of the text. The manuscript'swatermark is an armillary sphere with a counter-mark consisting of the letters SRP; cf. Briquetno. 13989, a Venetian paper dated 1558. Thiswatermark was produced only during the 1550s.{For our account of this manuscript, the writersare indebted entirely to Dr Eva Frojmovic of theWarburg Institute, London, who is currentlypreparing a detailed study of the manuscript andits decoration.)

30 Among the known illuminated, decorated, orillustrated manuscripts in Jewish languages,other than Yiddish, are texts in Aramaic, Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Proven^al, Judaeo-Italian,Judaeo-Spanish, and Judaeo-Greek. A very earlydecorated manuscript in Judaeo-Arabic, held inthe India Office Library in the British Library, isdescribed by Y. T. Langermann in this issue ofthe British Library Journal. Judaeo-Persianmanuscript art, including miniatures in theBritish Library, has been studied by Vera Basch

Moreen, Miniature Paintings in Judaeo-PersianManuscripts (Cincinnati, 1985). A unique colour-illustrated manuscript in Urdu in Hebrewcharacters is held in the British Library, Or. MS.13287. An illustrated magical text partly in Latinin Hebrew characters, held in the AustrianNationalbibliothek in Vienna, has been describedby Raphael Loewe,' A Mediaeval Latin-GermanMagical Text in Hebrew Characters', in A.Rapoport-Albert and S. J. Zipperstein {eds.),Jewish History: essays in honour of GhimenAbramsky {London, 1988), pp. 345-68.

31 In his unpublished typescript Yiddish Manu-scripts m England, Habersaat cites only nineitems from Margoliouth's catalogue, somehowomitting two extraordinary hagadot where theYiddish may be quantitatively minor, but isnonetheless most significant. Habersaat citesMargoliouth nos. 102, 244, 651, 679, 683, 684,874, 981 and 1049, overlooking nos. 6 n (Add.MS. 18724) and 612 (Sloane MS. 3173), as wellas the Yiddish satirical verses in no. 925 (Add.MS. 27045B).

32 On this manuscript, see Iris Fishof, 'YakobSofer mi-Berlin: A Portrait of a Jewish Scribe',Israel Museum Journal, vi {1987), pp. 83-94, a^dE. G. L. Schrijver, 'Be-6tiyy6t Amsterdam:Eighteenth-century Hebrew manuscript pro-duction in Central Europe: the case of Jacob benJudah Leib Shamas', Quaerendo, xx (Leiden,1990), pp. 24-62. On eighteenth-centuryHebrew manuscript decoration, see Cecil Roth,'Illuminated Manuscripts, Hebrew: Post-Medi-eval Illumination', Encyclopaedia Judaicd {Jerus-alem, 1972), vol. viii, col. 1287; Ernest M.Namenyi, 'La Miniature juive au XVIIe et auXVIIIe siecle'. Revue des etudes juives, cxvi(Paris, 1957), pp. 29-71; idem, *The Illumi-nation of Hebrew Manuscripts after the In-vention of Printing', in Cecil Roth {td.), JewishArt, revised edn., ed. B. Narkiss {London, 1971),pp. 149-62; M. Schmelzer, 'Decorated HebrewManuscripts of the Eighteenth Century in theLibrary of the Jewish Theological Seminary ofAmerica', in R. Dan (ed.), Occident and Orient:A Tribute to the memory of A. Scheiber(Budapest/Leiden, 1988), pp. 331-51; [H.Peled-Carmeli], Illustrated Haggadot of theEighteenth Gentury, ed. Y. Fischer (Jerusalem,1983); and I. Fishof, The Hamburg-AltonaSchool of Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts of theFirst Half of the Eighteenth Gentury, Ph.D.

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thesis. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1992.A comprehensive bibliographic survey of thismaterial by E. G. L. Schrijver, Repertorium ofDecorated Hebrew Manuscripts of the EighteenthCentury, is now in preparation in collaborationwith the Dutch Academy.

33 For brief palaeographic notes on this manuscript,and a facsimile of the folio containing Almekh-tiger got in Yiddish, see S. Birnbaum, TheHebrew Scripts, no. 382.

34 Strangely, the generally observant Margoliouthmerely writes that the Leipnik Haggadah is verymuch on the same principle as that executed byJacob of Berlin, excepting that it is 'on a muchlarger scale, and... contains different and moreilluminations'. It is curious that Margoliouthdevotes over one and a half folio columns to Add.MS. 18724 (Margoliouth no. 611), and less thanhalf a folio column to Sloane MS. 3173(Margohouth no. 612), both of them written inthe same year, 1740. Ironically, someone haslightly pencilled on the frontispiece of Add. MS.18724: 'See another and finer copy of this workin MS. Sloane 3173.'

35 On the Yiddish versions of these songs, see J.Baumgarten, Introduction a la litterature yiddishancienne, pp. 323-7, and further literature citedthere. See in particular Ch. Shmeruk, 'TheEarliest Aramaic and Yiddish version of theSong of the Kid (Khad Gadye)', in U. Weinreich(ed.). The Field of Yiddish (New York, 1954), pp.214-18; D. Sadan, 'Boy dayn tempi shiroh', inhis Kheyn-gribelekh (tsu der biografye fun vort unufr^/) (Buenos Aires, I97i),pp. 115-20; and nowH. Troger, 'Ein Siddur der Universitatsbiblio-thek Rostock und Varianten des Liedes Almech-tiger Got im Italien des 16. Jahrhunderts',Jiddistik-Mitteilungen, no. 13 (Trier, Apr. 1995),pp. i-ii.

36 On the Leipnik Haggadah in the BibliothecaRosenthaliana, Amsterdam, see L. Fuks andR. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew and Judaic Manu-scripts in Amsterdam Public Collections, vol. i(Leiden, 1973), p. 65, no. 130; E. G. L.Schrijver, 'The Rosenthaliana Leipnik Hagad-dah', in Passover Haggadah, Altona, Germany,1738, Scribe/Illustrator: Joseph ben David ofLeipnik: Collection of the Bibliotheca Rosen-thaliana, Amsterdam, Hs. Ros. ^82, FacsimileEdition (Tel Aviv: Turnowsky, 1987); and I.Fishof, 'The Rosenthaliana Leipnik Haggadah',in A. K. Offenberg et al. (eds.), Bibliotheca

Rosenthaliana: Treasures of Jewish Booklore(Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 72-3, no. 31.

37 See the handwritten notes by Dr JosephRosenwasser, in the bound volume Register ofOriental MSS. and Hebrew MSS. Acquisitions,^945^^990 [with indications of provenance],maintained in the Hebrew Section. The manu-script was purchased at the Christie's sale, 9Dec. 1965. There are at least a dozen illustratedmanuscripts ofPerek Shirah, all of the eighteenthcentury. One of these (Jewish National andUniversity Library, Jerusalem, Heb 8''4295) hasbeen reproduced in facsimile with introductorynotes by Malachi Beit-Arie (Tel Aviv: Turn-owsky). More recently, another manuscript wasdescribed, with accompanying plates, in theSotheby's sale catalogue of Western Manuscriptsand Miniatures (London, 5 Dec. 1994), lot no.72. On the Perek Shirah and its manuscripts, seethe doctoral dissertation by M. Beit-Arie(Hebrew University, Jerusalem), and his forth-coming study on this subject.

38 The original collection of prayers, entitled LikuteTsevi, compiled by the printer Tsevi Hirsh b.Hayim of Flirth, was first published in Wil-hermsdorf in 1738, and reprinted many times.See Ch. B. Friedberg, Bet Eked Sefarim [Biblio-graphical Lexicon of the rphole Hebrew andJewish-German literature'] (Tel Aviv, 1951), vol.i, p. 515, no. 645, and the more definitivebibliography by M. N. Rosenfeld, in 'ZebiHirsch ben Chaim aus Fiirth: Autor undBuchdrucker', Nachrichten fiir den judischenBurger Furths (Sept. 1991), pp. 34-40. A Yiddishedition of Likute Tsevi was published in Warsawin 1872.

39 On this work, see the entry ' Orhot Zaddikim', inEncyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. xii,cols. 1458-60. On the Yiddish version, seeBaumgarten, Introduction a la litterature yiddishanctenne, pp. 264-71, and index (s.v. ''Seyfermides'), and Weinreich, Shtaplen: fir etyudn tsuder yidisher shprakh-visnshaft un literatur-ges~hikhte (Berlin, 1923), p. 104.

40 See Margoliouth, vol. iii, pp. 169-70. Margo-ljouth noted that another early manuscript of theYiddish text is in Cambridge University Library,from the collection formerly belonging to DrCharles Taylor.

41 It is not unusual for a work to be known byseveral names. In Or. MS. 10086 the title is'Amude ha-'olam and in Or. MS. 10668 it is

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Sefer 'amude 'olam. Jacob Maitlis, in his essentialstudy, 'Der bodleyaner ksav-yad Libes-briv: afar-haskoledike reform-shrift', in Yivo-bleter, ii(Vilna, 1931), pp. 308-33, regards tbe Bodleian'Libes briv' manuscript (Mich. Nr. 364 = NewNo. 297 = Neubauer no. 743) as rare (originallyowned by H. J. Michael in Hamburg anddescribed in the catalogue by Steinschneider,Otsrot Hayim [Hamburg, 1848], it was sold tothe Bodleian), but he is aware of a second andeven a third manuscript in England, copy ororiginal, owned by Sassoon and Porges re-spectively. See David Solomon Sassoon, OhelDavid {Ohel Dawid): Descriptive Catalogue of theHebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the SassoonLibrary, London (Oxford, 1932), vol. ii, p. 995,no. 930, 'Liebes brief, of which the BritishLibrary has a microfilm copy. Or. Mic. 2811.The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York,also has two manuscripts of this work; see J.Rovner (ed.), A Guide to the Hebrew ManuscriptCollection of the Library of the Jewish TheologicalSeminary of America, vol. i (New York, 1991),vol. i, nos. 2256 and 2333. Maitlis claims thereare sixteen chapters in the Bodleian 'Libes-briv', as opposed to Neubauer, Catalogue of theHebrew Manuscripts m the Bodleian Library,vol. i, p. 146, no. 743, who counted seventeen.Comparison of the Bodleian and British Librarytexts might prove instructive. One of the latter(Or. MS. 10668) is a copy, made in 1777 bySolomon Zalman ben Jacob Eschau, of the 1749original attributed (by Maitlis, Porges andothers) to Isaac Wetzlar. The second BritishLibrary copy (Or. MS. 10086) is apparently alsoan eighteenth-century one.

42 Isaac Wetzlar is not to be confused with twoother early Yiddish authors bearing the nameWetzlar, of the sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies respectively. On the latter two, see Z.Rejzen, Leksikon fun der yudisher literatur un;)rf5f, ed. Sh. Niger (Warsaw, 1913), cols. 256-7;cf. also A. Lewinsky's entry 'Wetzlar', in TheJewish Encyclopedia, vol. xii (New York andLondon, 1905), p. 511. Rejzen records the Libeshrif not under any 'Wetzlar', but rather (fol-lowing Steinschneider, op. cit.) under 'Hekshir,Itsik', col. 220.

43 One might also mention here the satirical versesin Hebrew and Yiddish which are appended(on f. 6ib) to Add. MS. 27O45(B) (Margoliouthno. 925), a fifteenth-century miscellany of

Hebrew poetry, comprised of ethics and (mostly)satire.

44 On Levita, see G. E. Weil, EUe Levita^ humanisteet massorete {i46g-iS49) (Leiden, 1963), and J.Baumgarten, Introduction a la Utterature yiddishancienne, pp. 201-51. On the Bove bukh and itsearly printing, see also Baumgarten, ' UneChanson de geste en yidich ancien: le Bove bukh(Isny 1541) d'EIie Bahur Levita', Revue de laBibliotheque Nationale, xxv (Paris, 1987), pp.14-31. Ironically, it has been universally for-gotten by Yiddish scholarship in England thatthis classic work of Yiddish literature is basedultimately on an Anglo-Norman epic inspired bya figure from (South) Hampton; a student ofYiddish literature cannot but smile when en-countering a pub named ' Sir Bevis of Hampton'in this Hampshire port town. On the earlyeditions of this work, see M. Marx, History andAnnals of Hebrew Printing in the Fifteenth andSixteenth Centuries (microfilm, Cincinnati,1982), under Isny, 1541.

45 On Bochner, see the entry by S. Roubin in TheJewish Encyclopedia, vol. iii (New York andLondon, 1903), p. 280. For the editions andabridgements of Levita's grammar, see Zedner,p. 227; A. E. Cowley, A Concise Catalogue of theHebrew Printed Books in the Bodleian Library(Oxford, 1929; reprinted 1971), pp. 172-3; I-Benjacob, Otsar ha-sefarim [Thesaurus LibrorumHebraicorum] (Wilna, 1880), pp. 497-8; M. M.Slatkine, Otsar ha-sefarim, helek sheni (Jerus-alem, 1965), p. 316, no. 228; and Steinschneider,Juedisch-Deutsche Literatur, no. 384. *"

46 As noted earlier, Borochov recorded only printedworks in the field of Yiddish philology, notmanuscripts.

47 See Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscriptsigi6-ig20 (London, 1933), p. 45- C. G. LelandCollection, Vol. X. Vocabularies in variouslanguages compiled by C. G. Leland [including]Schmussen, or the Jewish-German dialect, with(f. 46) a few Romany-English words and notesdated Sept. 1879. f. i. A Vocabulary ofSchmussen, or the Jewish-German Dialect [ff.ia-3oa, arranged by roman alphabet]; OurFather-in-Heaven prayer in Juedisch-Deutsch atthe end.

48 At a later period the term 'Mauschein' (whichcarries the root name of 'Mausche', i.e. Moses)was used by antisemites to imply that Jews werecorrupters of German language and culture. It

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appears to have been widely perceived as a comicterm; it is coupled with 'Schmussen', which inmodern German {Schmuseji) is slang and/orpejorative.

49 On the Hebrew-Aramaic component in Yiddish,see the dissertation by Dovid Katz, 'Explora-tions in the History of the Semitic Component inYiddish', Ph.D. thesis. University of London,1982 (with extensive bibliography), and therecent lexicon by Steven A. Jacobson, A Guide tothe More Common Hebraic Words in Yiddish., 5thedn. (Fairbanks, Alaska, 1995).

50 On the lexicographical research of Ave-Lalle-mant, and the linguistic studies by other earlyChristian Yiddishists, see M. Weinreich,Shtaplen; Borochov, op. cit.; K. Habersaat,'Materialien zu der Geschichte der jiddischenGrammatik'; idem, 'Zur Geschichte der jid-dischen Grammacik'; H. P. Althaus, op. cit.,and also his edition of J. H. Callenberg andW. C. J. Chrysander, Schriften zur jiddi-schen Sprache / Quellen zur Geschichte derjiddischen Sprache (Marburg/Lahn, 1966);S. A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and aGrammar (Toronto, 1979), pp. 309-88 (bibli-ography), passim, esp. pp. 353-4; and J.Baumgarten, 'L'etude de la langue yiddishchez quelques auteurs Chretiens (XVP-XVIIPsiecle)', in Italia ed Europa nella linguisticadel Rinascimento: confronti e relazioni (Ferrara,1994). Leiand's vocabulary is of course onlyone of a number of unpublished contributionsto Yiddish philology prepared by Christianscholars or amateurs, Hebraists or not. Someof these (such as Tychsen's Introductio inLinguam Judaeo-Teutonicam, Rostock, 1775),have been recorded by Habersaat or others.Some more recent instances of ChristianYiddishists in England and America have beencited by A. A. Roback, 'Der tsutsi fun yidishfar goyim' ['The attraction of Yiddish forGentiles'], in his Di Imperye Yidish (Mexico,1958), pp. 157-62. A monograph on earlyChristian studies of Yiddish is in preparation byDr Dovid Katz of the Oxford Institute forYiddish Studies.

51 His illustrative sentence for Pleite 'Mahn neierHut is pleite' suggests Central Yiddish pro-nunciation and slang usage (cf. Standard Yiddishmayn nayer hut iz farloyrn/farshvundn/farfain).Leiand's spellings of Brauches 'angry* (cf. mod-ern Eastern Yiddish broygez) and Ullem 'crowd'

(cf. modern Eastern Yiddish oytem) requireexplanation.

52 See J. Maitlis, 'London Yiddish Letters of theEarly Eighteenth Century', Journal of JewishStudies, vi (1955), pp. 153-65. 237-52. Forpalaeographical notes on these letters, with afacsimile plate, see S. Birnbaum, The HebrewScripts, no. 351.

53 It is often by serendipity that Yiddish lettershave survived in various libraries and archives,in some of which whole collections of Yiddishletters are to be found. Of these, one may callattention here to the Tychsen collection ofYiddish correspondence, dating from the 1760s,in the University Library, Rostock, the VonHumboldt-Henriette Herz correspondence (infact, German in Hebrew characters) preserved inBerlin, the Heine Yiddish letters held at theHeinrich-Heine-Institut, Diisseldorf, and theRothschild Yiddish correspondence held in theRothschild Archive, London. On the Tychsencollection, see now L. L. Goldstein, 'JewishCommunal Life in the Duchy of Mecklenburg asreflected in correspondence, 1760—1769', rab-binic thesis, Hebrew Union College-JewishInstitute of Religion, New York, 1993. Thewide-ranging corpus of surviving Yiddish letters,as well as ' letter-writers' and relevant secondaryliterature, now merit a comprehensive catalogueand bibliography.

54 Mrs K. Alexander (whose address is listed on thecatalogue slip as 'c /o Miss H. Berger Benny,MBE') presented it to the British Library.

55 'A Collection of Philological papers ... Presentedby William Marsden, Esq.' [corrected to: Mrs.Marsden] is recorded in List of Additions to theManuscripts in the British Museum in the YearsMDCCCXXXVI-AIDCCCXL (London, 1843;reprinted 1964), 1837, second sequence, p. i.What is here recorded (together with otherexotic specimens, such as the writing of thenative Indians of Newfoundland, and impres-sions of tablets supposedly engraved in Egypt) isan ^Alphabetum fudaico-Teutomcum\ ignoringthe Yiddish letter from 1790. There are actuallytwo items, each with a large folio title-page. Thefirst is: ''Alphabetum Judaico~Teutonicum\ Thesecond large folio title-page, which the List ofAdditions omitted, is: 'Epistola Judaico-Teu-tonica cum Alphabeto inde concinnato' ['Judaeo-German Letter with Alphabet...']. Here we Endthe Yiddish letter, complete with outside cover.

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an additional sheet with parallel text, roman-ization and translation, and another sheet with afair copy of the translation.

56 Cf. E. Scheid, 'Histoire des Juifs de Haguenaupendant la periode fran^aise'. Revue des etudesjuives, X (Paris, 1885), pp. 204-31.

57 For the literature on Alsatian Yiddish, see B.Blumenkranz and M. Levy, Bibliographie desJuifs en France (Toulouse, 1974), pp. 255-6(under 'Yiddish'); Astrid Starck, 'Bibliographiedu yidich alsacien', in her Le Yiddisch occidental(Aarau, 1994), pp. 173-84; and the summarybibliography appended to Les Cahiers duCREDYO [Centre de Recherche d'etudes et dedocumentation du yidich occidental], no. i(Mulhouse, 1995), pp. 101-3. See also thedissertation by Johannes Brosi, 'SouthwesternYiddish: A Study in Dialectology, Folklore andLiterature', M. Litt. thesis. University ofOxford. 1990, and his 'Bamerkungen tsu dorem-mayrev yidish [Comments on SouthwesternYiddish]'', in Oksforderyidish [Oxford Yiddish:Studies in Yiddish Language, Literature andFolklore], iii (Oxford, 1995), cols. 369-88 (withbibliographies).

58 See Ernest Anderson's typescript checklist['Microfilms of Manuscripts not in the BritishLibrary: Hebrew, Judaeo-Persian and Yiddish'],c. 1975.

59 An export licence was granted for the originalmanuscript ('lot 299', late 1972); its presentlocation has not been recorded. It deservesstudy, which can sometimes be very difficultfrom a microfilm alone. It may be noted thatmicrofilms of the entire Sassoon collection (nowlargely dispersed) are held in the British Library,as are microfilms (issued by University Micro-films, Ann Arbor, Michigan) of various col-lections held at the Jewish Theological Seminary,New York; the Sassoon and Seminary collectionsinclude, of course, Yiddish manuscripts.

60 A bibliographic and literary history of this genreis currently being prepared by Hagit Matras ofthe Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On thisliterature in Yiddish, see Steinschneider,Juedisch-Deutsche Literatur, entries for printedbooks nos. 219-222 and 279, and the lengthyentry for MS. no. 421; J. Baumgarten, 'Textesmedicaux en langue yiddish (XVI'^-XVIPsiecle)', in G. Sed-Rajna (ed.), Rashi{1040-iggo): Hommage a Ephraim E. Urbach(Paris, 1993), pp. 723-40; and idem. Introduction

a la Utterature yiddish ancienne, pp. 421-43.Another example, not cited by Baumgarten, is tobe found in H. Siiss, Raritaten der JiddischenLiteratur des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahr-hunderts in der Universitatsbibliothek: Eine Aus-stellung zur Woche der Bruderlichkeit im Hand-schriftenlesesaal (Erlangen, 1980; reprinted in hisCollected Studies in Yiddish and Hebrew Bib-liography, s.l.e.a., privately distributed), under* Vitrine VII ' . For relevant secondary literature,see the entries in E. Yzss\{, Jewish Folklore: AnAnnotated Bibliography (New York and London,1986), index, pp. 299 and 307-8, s.v. 'charms'and ' folk-medicine'. On Jewish alchemistictracts, see the recent study by R. Patai, TheJewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book(Princeton, 1994).

61 An edition of the play in Gothic characters, RebHenoch oder was thut me dermit: Ein Famili-engemdlde in drei Abtheilungen, transliterated byM. Allenstein, was published in Berlin in 1847.See Zalmen Rejzen, 'Di manuskriptn un druknfun Itsik Eykhls Reb Henokh\ Arkhiv far dergeshikhte fun yidishn teater un drame [Archiv furdie Geschichte desjudischen Theaters und Dramas],ed. J. Shatzky (Wilno/New York, 1930), pp.85-146, and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, 'LeeserRosenthal's only Yiddish manuscript', in A. K.Offenberg et al. (eds.), Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana,pp. 88-9; Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 156-8,163. See also Max Erik [i.e. Z. Merkin], DiKomedyes fun der berliner ufklerung (Kiev/Kharkov, 1933), pp. 42-61, and his 'Di ershteyidishe komedye', Filologishe shriftnfuft YIVO,iii (Vilna, 1939). Some characterizations of thework may be quoted here. Charles A. Madison,in Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and MajorWriters (New York, 1968), p. 15, writes:' Influenced by Moliere's Tartuffe, I. A. Eichel, astudent of Kant, wrote Reb Hennoch (1793), arefinement on the Purim play in which Hasidiccharacters appear as hypocritical and lecherousand the enlightened protagonists as forthrightand honest.' Emanuel S. Goldsmith, in Archi-tects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of theTwentieth Century (London, 1976), p. 37,writes: 'Isaac Eichel... (i756-1804), a disting-uished biblical scholar who edited the Haskalahjournal Hameasef turned to Yiddish out ofdespair at the sight of young German Jews at thebaptismal font and the sacred Hebrew tongueabandoned. His satire Reb Henokh could not be

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written either in Hebrew, which people nolonger understood, or in German, which theenemies of the Jews might read.'

62 Cf. the entry in the Second SupplementaryCatalogue of Hebrew Printed Books (London,1994), under 'Horowitz'. The BL pressmark ofthe Horowitz volume is 11745.aaaa.27.

63 On this author, see L. Prager, Yiddish Culture inBritain: A Guide (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), p.322 ("Hurvitsh, Nosn'), and Leksikon fun dernayer yidisher literatur [Biographical Dictionaryof Modern Yiddish Literature}., vol. iii (NewYork, i960), cols. 68-9 ('Horovits, Nosn', butwithout reference to this play). On Byron inYiddish, see Prager, pp. 182-3, s.v. 'Byron'(with reference also to numerous other entries).

64 Cf. John Johnston, The Lord Chamberlain^s BluePencil (London, 1990). He mentions a Welshreader, but there is not a single mention ofYiddish.

65 On Yiddish theatre in Britain, see the generalsurvey and numerous specific entries in L.Prager, Yiddish Culture in Britain.^ pp. 42-54 and519-23-

66 Thanks are due to Kathryn Johnson and JulianConway of the Department of Manuscripts fortheir expert assistance in researching the LordChamberlain's plays. The Yiddish material willbe the subject of a detailed bibliographicalaccount now in preparation by L. Prager.

67 A bibliography of the analogous collection ofsome 1,100 Yiddish plays deposited on copyrightat the Library of Congress in Washington is nowbeing prepared by Zachary Baker. (We aregrateful to Dr M. Grunberger for drawing thisparallel American material to our attention.) Onthe similar phenomenon of the copyright-receiptmusic of American Yiddish theatricals held atthe Library of Congress, see L Heskes, YiddishAmerican Popular Songs, i8gs to 1950: ACatalog based on the Lawrence Marwick Roster ofCopyright Entries (Washington, 1992).

68 Concerning manuscript notes (not lexicalglosses) found on a guard leaf of another copy(not in the British Library) of the MakreDardeke, see M. Schwab, ' Une page de compt-abilite datee de 1525 a 1528', Revue des e'tudesjuives, xii (Paris, 1886), p. 116; see also G. E.Weil, Elie Le'vita, humaniste et massorete, pp. 36,192-3.

69 Brunet described the Naples Makre Dardeke as'le premier lexique polyglotte que Ton ait

imprime'. Aside from the incunabulistic litera-ture (see especially the bibliographies andcatalogues by E. D. Goldschmidt, A. M. Haber-mann, M. Marx, and A. K. Offenberg), there arenow a number of monographs on the MakreDardeke, beginning with H. Bodek, 'Das BuchMakre Dardeke oder ein altes hebraisch-ara-bisch-italienisches Glossar', Orientalisches Liter-aturblatt, viii, no. 39 (Leipzig, 1847); see alsoSteinschneider, Bibliographisches Handbuch iiberdie theoretische und praktische Literatur furhebraische Sprachkunde (Leipzig, 1859), no. 71,and his Letteratura Italiana dei Giudei: Cenni(Rome, 1884), pp. 56-7 (this passage on MakreDardeke seems to be missing in the Germanversion). Prof. L. Cuomo of the HebrewUniversity has also prepared a study of theprinting history of the Aiakre Dardeke.

On the romance and Arabic glosses in theprinted edition, see L. Cuomo, ' Preliminari peruna rivalutazione linguistica del Maqre Dar-deqe\ Actes du XVHIe Congres international delinguistique et de philologie romanes (Tubingen,1988), pp. 159-67, and O. Tirosh-Becker, 'Ha-glosot ha-'araviyot she-be-"Makre Dardeke"be-nusah ha-'italki: mah tivan.^' [Le glosse arabedella stesura italiana del Maqre Dardeqe'], Italia:Studi e ricerche sulk storia, la cultura e laletteratura degli ebrei di Italia, ix (Jerusalem,1990), pp. 37-77- According to D. Chwolson, inhis Reshit ma'aseh defus be-yisra'el (Warsaw,1897; reprinted Tel Aviv), p. 34, the 1488 MakreDardeke also contains in the printed text glossesin Yiddish [Ashkenazit] [!].

70 On Yiddish versions of Makre Dardeke, see M.Steinschneider, Juedisch-Deutsche Literatur,under 'Judisch-Deutsche Literatur' [re printedbooks], no. 375, and 'Judisch-Deutsche Liter-atur und Judisch-Deutsch' [re manuscripts], no.439, and also the 'Nachtrage'; and more recentlyDovid Katz, 'Di eltere yidishe leksikografye:mekoyres un metodn [Older Yiddish lexico-graphy: Sources and Methods]', Oksfor der yidish[A Yearbook of Yiddish Studies],' i (Oxford,1990), pp. 171-2. There are a number ofmanuscripts of Makre Dardeke with glosses inJudaeo-Italian and Yiddish, or in Judaeo-Italianand Judaeo-Spanish. On other multilingualglossaries containing Hebrew, Judaeo-Italianand Yiddish, see Ch. Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin [Yiddish Literature in Poland: HistoricalStudies and Perspectives] (Jerusalem, 1981), pp.

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73> 89-91 (concerning Diber Tov, Venice, 1596);Steinschneider, Bibliographisches Handbuch, nos.56 [Diber Tov) and 801 {Safah berurah); andKatz, op. cit.

71 See the published account of this discovery by A.K. Offenberg, ' How to define printing inHebrew: a fifteenth-century list on [sic\ thegoods of a Jewish traveller and his wife', TheLibrary, 6th ser., xvi {Oxford, 1994), pp. 43-9.

72 A comprehensive inventory of Yiddish manu-scripts in the British Isles, including those in theBritish Library, and with reference also toarchival material, is now in preparation by L.Prager.

73 S. Birnbaum makes a preliminary survey ofearlier manuscripts in 'Palaeography: Manu-scripts in Old Yiddish', in Dovid Katz (ed.).

Origins of the Yiddish Language, Winter Studiesin Yiddish, vol. i, = Language and Gommuni-cation, vol. vii. Supplement (Oxford, 1987), pp.7-11, and in 'Alte ksav-yadn oyf yidish [Oldmanuscripts in Yiddish]', in Oksforder yidish[Oxford Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language,Literature and Folklore^ iii (Oxford, 1995), pp.925-36. Cf. also Birnbaum's notes on Yiddishmanuscripts, with accompanying plates, in hisThe Hebrew Scripts, nos. 350-2, 368, 382. SeveralYiddish manuscripts are described in detail byE. G. L. Schrijver in his exemplary Towards aSupplementary Gatalogue of Hebrew Manuscriptsin the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana: Theory andPractice, Ph.D. thesis. University of Amsterdam,1993, pp. 87-9, nos. 12-13 (with plates).

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