Jul 12, 2024
Glikl: Memoirs 1691 – 1719 (2006), critical edition with a Hebrew translation edited and translated by Chava Turniansky.
INTRODUCTION
Chava Turniansky, professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is without doubt one of the most important scholars working in the field of Yiddish language and literature today — and in recent generations, for that matter. She taught for many years in the Yiddish Department at the Hebrew University, where she also mentored graduate students and served as head of the department. She has received various awards and honors, including the Bialik Prize in 2006, election to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2007, and the Israel Prize in the field of Jewish languages and literatures and Jewish folkloristics in 2013. Turniansky specializes in Old Yiddish culture, which was the culture of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and in fact well into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In her research, Turniansky combines philological work and the production of critical editions with the study of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and social history of pre-modern Ashkenazi Jewry, with an emphasis on questions of literacy, gender, and education. She has published widely in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English, including the volumes Yiddish in Italia: Yiddish Manuscripts and Printed Books from the 15th to the 17th Century (2003), co-written with Erika Timm with the collaboration of Claudia Rosenzweig; Glikl: Memoirs 1691 – 1719 (2019), which was preceded by a critical edition with a Hebrew translation (2006); and Yiddish Letters: From the Seventeenth-Century World of Glikl Hamel (2020), co-edited with Arthur Arnheim.
The following interview was conducted live by Aya Elyada at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture and later transcribed. It has been slightly shortened and edited for clarity. We would like to thank the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and especially Dr. Sharon Livne for support in carrying out this interview and for the permission to publish it here.
This interview has been translated from Hebrew by Aya Elyada and Matthew Johnson.
Aya Elyada: Chava, good morning, and thank you for agreeing to this interview!
Chava Turniansky: Good morning! It’s an honor to be interviewed by you.
AE: Let’s start from the beginning. You were born in Mexico in 1937, where you were raised in a Jewish, secular, Yiddish-speaking home, with parents who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, and where you attended the elementary and high school “Di yidishe shul in Meksiko.” In 1957, you immigrated to Israel, and studied for your BA and MA degrees in the Departments of Yiddish and of Jewish History at the Hebrew University. You then went on to complete a doctorate in Yiddish and also served as an instructor in the department at an early stage. I wanted to ask if you could tell me a little about the Yiddish Department in those days, about your experience as a young student and then as a doctoral student and as a teacher in the department.
CT: I came to the Yiddish department in 1957, when it was only six years old. There was already a proposal to establish a Yiddish department when the Hebrew University was founded in 1924. American Jews sent a large donation requesting to establish such a department. The request was rejected, actually somewhat rudely rejected: “There is no Yiddish. Yiddish isn’t needed. We are in the State of Israel (medinat Yisrael). Yiddish is exile (galut). We need to forget the exile” – and there were big problems that arose from this decision. People couldn’t speak Yiddish freely. The Yiddish theater was forbidden. It was only in 1951, after Eastern European Jewry was no longer on the map, that a Yiddish department was founded. I arrived six years after its establishment. The head of the department was Professor Dov Sadan, who also suffered at the beginning, since during the first classes people came who objected to the department’s existence; they brought rotten eggs and tomatoes, and tried to throw them at him, but he won them over.
There were always very few students. But the students who came were very dedicated, as though they “married” the department. They came for a BA, went on to an MA, and then did a doctorate, and continued each in their own way in developing the field. My teacher par excellence was Professor Khone Shmeruk, who was a Holocaust survivor. He arrived in Israel in 1947. He was in the army and, whenever he had some free time, he would read something in Yiddish. In 1951, his commander saw in the newspaper that a Yiddish department had been established, called him and said, “Khone, now you’re going to go study Yiddish at the university.” Khone told him, “I don’t have any money,” so his commander said, “I’ll pay the tuition.” That’s how it actually started, and he was the greatest scholar who emerged after the Holocaust in this field. And no, he made no distinction between Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish. Everything interested him. He knew many languages, and he was an excellent researcher, and he mentored me – I was very lucky. In those years, very few women were admitted to the departments that centered on Jewish Studies. I had female friends who studied with me who were excellent, and none of them got a position at the university even though I thought, and even their professors thought, that they were excellent scholars. But I think that apart from Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, who was in the Hasidism and Kabbalah department, I was the only woman.
AE: Unbelievable. And what was it really like to integrate as a graduate student instructor in the department, and then to acclimate as a faculty member?
CT: Look, the truth is, I think that Yiddish has a great power to attract people and connect them. I think that, in the Yiddish department, there was always a kind of commitment to a social environment of respect, goodwill, and friendship in a way that really benefited the department and its social and research structure, so that all kinds of things could be done, and we did them with the help of this language.
AE: And how did you end up in Old Yiddish? It’s not self-evident, right? Certainly, for someone like you who comes from [modern] Yiddish culture – what led you to this subject?
CT: Look, I also studied history, and in history we had to choose a time period – either the ancient period, or the Second Temple, or the Middle Ages and the modern era – and I chose the Middle Ages and the modern era. So it’s true that I came to Yiddish because of the home, because I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home, where my parents were very careful not to speak any other language. But Old Yiddish simply fascinated me: Shmeruk dealt with Sholem Aleichem and Bashevis Singer but also with the earliest texts in Yiddish, and with plays from the beginning of the modern era, such as the purim-shpil, and [through his teaching] I was simply drawn to [Old Yiddish] like a charm. But you couldn’t learn Old Yiddish because there wasn’t an instructor for it. We studied Middle German, what’s it called – Mittelhochdeutsch (Middle High German) – but we learned everything ourselves. I mean, it was self-taught. We just read a lot of texts, and everything attracted me more and more to this field. And the end of this period [of Old Yiddish] was also fascinating to me – the separation between the Jews of Germany and the Jews of Eastern Europe, the emergence of Hasidism and the Haskalah and all the extraordinary intellectual activity that was present in the eighteenth century – and I stayed with it. But I was always interested in modern literature as well, and above all, I always looked for the old foundations in the new. This is something that really fascinated me.
But the truth is, I came somewhat unexpectedly, without much intention, to the subject that I later dealt with a great deal, the matter of bilingualism [i.e., Hebrew and Yiddish in pre-modern Ashkenazi culture – AE], which I call two languages for one society. At first, I wanted to write my dissertation about tkhines. I was very interested in how women would pray from a book and ask for the most personal matters through something that’s written. Then I remember Professor Shmeruk saying to me, “Do you want to write your dissertation now, or in fifteen years?” What do you mean? “Until you find [all the texts]: not all the tkhines have a date, a printing place, you don’t know what came before and what came after. So if you want to do something anthropological, go ahead – but if you’re going to do literary-historical work, it’s impossible.” Well, then I went looking for another topic. I thought I’d investigate the role of Yiddish in the labor movements of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries; but without Polish, without Russian, without Ukrainian – without that, it’s impossible! Then I discovered a manuscript. I had been to Oxford many times, in the Bodleian Library, which has the largest collection of Old Yiddish manuscripts and books, and I found a bilingual manuscript, the existence of which I hadn’t known about, and which I found extremely fascinating. It was massive, thousands of stanzas written parallel in Yiddish and Hebrew, or rather in Hebrew and Yiddish. There was a debate between a rich Jew and a poor Jew, dealing with philosophical and moral issues, with remarkable descriptions of everyday life. How the poor lived and how the rich lived, and as is typical in this literary genre, the one who, in the end, silences the other is the winner. The person who wins is actually the poor man. The connection between Yiddish and Hebrew, and the author’s ability to express himself to two different audiences, was intriguing to me, and I’m very glad that I went in this direction, because it later gave me the tools to identify all kinds of bilingual phenomena, in Hasidic literature and in maskilic literature, which derived from this beginning.
"Look, the truth is, I think that Yiddish has a great power to attract people and connect them. I think that, in the Yiddish department, there was always a kind of commitment to a social environment of respect, goodwill, and friendship in a way that really benefited the department and its social and research structure, so that all kinds of things could be done, and we did them with the help of this language."
AE: So beyond the importance of Old Yiddish literature in and of itself, it is actually also important as a basis for our understanding of the later, modern Yiddish literature – to see the roots, the influences, where it grew from.
CT: Exactly. There is a Yiddish saying – “fun vanen di fis vaksn”: you need to see from where the feet grow. And this is what I found. And not only bilingualism fascinated me, but everything that is dual. For example, already in the first manuscript that exists in Yiddish [the Cambridge Ms. from 1382], there is a story about Joseph the righteous, but this righteous Joseph is not the Joseph of the Bible. He is both the Joseph of the Bible and a medieval knight, who appears in the royal court and knows how to behave from a Jewish as well as a courtly perspective. This blending of our tradition with local [non-Jewish] phenomena, it’s just fascinating. This contact with the environment and the wonderful fruits that grew from this contact — this is also one of the things that has really intrigued me all these years.
AE: Apart from the contribution that the study of Old Yiddish makes to our understanding of the roots of modern Yiddish culture, it also contributes greatly to our understanding of Jewish society, namely the Ashkenazi communities of both the German lands and Eastern Europe of the early modern period.
CT: Definitely. And everywhere Yiddish did its thing. First of all, there was a special language in which regulations were written for community documents. It’s a very dense mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew. Without Yiddish it is impossible to understand what is written. For example, we have the Krakow regulations, which are the oldest regulations in Eastern Europe, from 1590. Those who do not know Yiddish cannot understand what is written there, because the proclamations to the public are in Yiddish. Or, for example, the wonderful system of correspondence among the rabbinical authorities of the communities: for example, when Jews in a certain city in Germany did not know how to solve a problem that was brought before them, what did they do? They wrote to a greater rabbi elsewhere. This writing was of course in Hebrew, this entire system of questions and answers was entirely in Hebrew; but if testimony was included, the testimony was written in the spoken language — and then you can also see what and how they spoke. This is one of the only places where you can learn how Old Yiddish was spoken, how this language developed and how it passed from being the language of the Jews of Germany and the entire German-speaking region, to being the language of the Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe. And it is not obvious that there were Jews who already had a language [that is, Jews in medieval Eastern Europe who spoke a Slavic language], and there was a wave of immigration [of Yiddish speakers from the German-speaking area], and the local people then replaced their language with the imported language. It’s a fascinating process! And now we can also understand the basics of the language we speak today. What happened to the old language in all these processes resulted in the new language. And then there are, at times, surprises: if we take, for example, a script, some written text, say in the sixteenth century, you will see that someone who speaks modern Yiddish will understand a significant part of it but another part will be completely incomprehensible to him. In this way, you can see how this language has developed from the West to the East, so that there is mutual understanding, but it is still impossible to understand everything.
AE: Tell me a little more about discoveries you had, breakthroughs like in the PhD, when you suddenly found this bilingual text, or other texts you came across and said, “Wow, that’s interesting.”
CT: Something that has attracted me very much is a unique literary genre, which we call “the historical poem.” Professor Shmeruk and I found almost fifty such poems, written between 1600 and 1800, throughout the region where Jews lived. These are poems that describe events that actually happened, and we call them “historical” in quotation marks, because there was no intention to make history out of them, or to leave a historical document, but they served, rather, as a sort of newspaper. As Jews, we call ourselves “people of the book.” We were people of the book, but we were not “people of the newspaper.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we lived in countries where there were newspapers, in Poland, Germany, and France, but we didn’t have a newspaper, except for a few minor cases, on the margins, like with the Spanish Jews of Amsterdam. So these “historical songs” described events – not events of the distant past, but events that happened in the present. I mean, an event had occurred, and as soon as it was over, a poem appeared describing it. It conveyed information like a newspaper, and that’s how the Jews in Germany read, for example, about something that happened in Ukraine, or read in Ukraine about something that happened in Frankfurt. And these poems are quite appealing as historical and literary sources. One of the many fascinating examples is a poem that describes events that transpired in Frankfurt: in 1612, there was a revolt in Frankfurt, a bourgeois rebellion. They say that if this rebellion had succeeded, we would no longer have needed the French Revolution. A group of craftsmen, led by a baker, revolted against the emperor and did not let him enter the city for four years. In these four years, the Jews were at first tolerated, but in 1614 they were expelled from Frankfurt, neither with sticks nor with a pogrom. A silent expulsion. They moved to the surrounding villages. When the emperor overcame the rebellion and took control of the city, he executed everyone he could in all kinds of ways, and brought the Jews back from all the villages to their street in the city in an extraordinary victory parade. This song is huge, written in both languages parallel; each stanza has a text in Yiddish and a text in Hebrew. There are 105 stanzas of eight lines each.
Imperial Decree – Prosecution of Fettmilch Uprising Rioters Looting the Jews of Frankfurt – Nürnberg, 1614, via Kedem Auction House.
AE: And this is Megiles Vints?
CT: And this is the Vintz scroll, which has some resemblance to the Esther scroll, because it includes danger and rescue. Today I am not sure that it really belongs to the category of a “historical song,” because it was also used in the synagogue and at home, and because, since then, the Jews of Frankfurt have [used it in] a “Frankfurt Purim” in commemoration of this event — I am going to, I hope, publish about this soon. But what happened is that I found another song about the same event. Now, the person who wrote the Vintz scroll was actually there; he was an eyewitness to everything that happened. Whoever wrote the second song was sitting in Prague; he was a scribe of the community in Prague. He read in some description in German, in some chronicle, what had happened to the Jews of Frankfurt, and from that he made a song. It is also 102 stanzas long, but only in Yiddish. I mean, there were Jews who read German, read books in German, took an interest, and decided to mediate, through Yiddish, what most Jews could not read [in the original], so that they would be more aware of what was happening in the Jewish world, and not only in the Jewish world, because we have songs not only about expulsions and executions and blood libels, but also about a harsh winter, epidemics and fires, and about crazy inflation. We have all this in Yiddish, so that people would know what was happening in their surroundings.
AE: It is really interesting to think about the role of Yiddish as a “mediating language,” and there is a sentence in one of your articles that I really like, that the Jews read Hebrew, but did not understand it, and understood German, but did not read it. And Yiddish actually came to mediate between Hebrew and German as a language that the Jews could both read and understand, for example the various translations of the Bible, on which you have published a great deal.
CT: True, true. This is really a fascinating phenomenon. I mean, they learned one language [i.e. Hebrew] – and I think that women also learned to read precisely the “komets alef o” and so on, like the men, and I think that the majority of the public, both women and men, could read [Hebrew]. But they did not understand what they were reading. In the kheyder and yeshiva they were not taught the language itself – no language at all. Only what they could “catch.” But I have a problem insofar as I don’t know where those who did write in Hebrew – and there were some who wrote wonderful Hebrew – where did they learn it?
AE: Probably from the Sephardim?
CT: So there were some Sephardim who were amazed by a few Ashkenazim who wrote wonderful Hebrew, but in fact there were almost none. Others wrote Hebrew that seems ridiculous to us today. There are many influences from the Hebrew of the Gemara, etc., but it seems to us today like a big mess – no male, female, plural, singular... So where did they learn it? Did they have private tutors? We have many Yiddish books on [Hebrew] grammar, designed so that people could learn Hebrew grammar, but how well it really worked is still something I have to find out.
Excerpt of a letter from Rachel Zussman, an elderly widow who lived in Jerusalem, to her son Moshe, who settled with his family in Cairo for business reasons. The letters were written in Yiddish in the mid 1560’s, and eventually made their way to the Cairo Genizah. These letters were translated into Hebrew by Chava Turniansky in an article in volume 4 of the journal Shalem. The letter in the photograph is stored in the Cambridge University Library, TSMISC36.
AE: We talked about this important connection between Old Yiddish and the German environment, and you also mentioned, for example, the fact that you had to study Mittelhochdeutsch in order to understand the language properly, and this brings me to a question about your connection to German studies. Although you are in the field of Jewish studies, Yiddish of course, your natural partners to a large extent are actually the Germanisten [scholars of German studies], who deal with pre-modern German literature, and some of them also “infiltrated” the field of Old Yiddish. There is of course the center at Trier University, with Professor Erika Timm and others, and I wanted to ask about the professional, social, and personal connections you have with Germany.
CT: The truth is that the first time I met the German Germanisten – it was at some conference – I was in the middle of my PhD and I had a list of words that were not in Yiddish but in German, and I did not know their meaning. I had no idea how to decipher them. And the big surprise was that when I brought the list with me, and then I got to know the “Great Trier Sages,” with Erika Timm at the head and then Walter Röll and [Hans Peter] Althaus, and now Erika Timm’s student, [Simon] Neuberg, to my surprise and joy they also did not know how to interpret these words! So we started working together and talking and corresponding. Then, when I finished my doctorate, the first to comment on it was Professor Walter Röll, […] and he complimented me very much in an article he wrote.
In any case, I think it was then that a great love was born between me and Erika Timm, who I think is the greatest Yiddish linguist of recent generations. But I had a problem, because I grew up in Mexico after the war, and in my house it was not allowed to have anything made in Germany. All the girls in the class had beautiful [German] crayons and I didn’t; I remember that for years we didn’t take care of our nails, because all the nail scissors were “Solingen,” and I also didn’t have any toys that came from Germany. I did not go to Germany. But later, my husband, peace be upon him, told me, “You can’t work together with Erika and not go there.” So I went. It’s hard to describe the friendship we have. The collaboration is also really amazing. My second love is Glikl, the [seventeenth-century] woman whose memoirs I translated. I knew I wasn’t able to write a chapter about her language, so I invited Erika to write a chapter – the chapter on language in my book, in my introduction to Glikl. She did a wonderful job. I’m constantly learning from her, and we have the bonds of true friendship, we’re extremely close. That’s it – to this day we talk on the phone, correspond. We also have an excellent working relationship – we wrote catalogs of everything that was written in Yiddish in Italy, between 1400 and 1600, in a book that I still see quoted in all kinds of places and that is a source of information about everything that was written there. My [former] student Claudia Rosenzweig also participated in this project; she worked together with us and is now preparing a new edition of the book, because she has found several more texts that were not included in the first edition. The cooperation with the Germans is wonderful. I get an answer to every question. An excellent answer, scholarly and thorough. Let’s hope that it will be like this until we’re 120.
AE: You mentioned the joint book with Erika Timm about Yiddish literature in Italy, which may sound a bit surprising, because you usually don’t associate Yiddish with the Italian world. “Yiddish and Germany” already sounds a bit strange, so “Yiddish and Italy” sounds even more disconnected.
CT: True, people are always surprised by this. I will tell you, another colleague and a good friend is Maria Mayer Modena, who is a scholar of Judeo-Italian, and she invited me to lecture in Milan and gave me the freedom to choose what I wanted to lecture on. She only requested that the first and last lecture – there were eight lectures I think – be open to the general public. So the name of the first lecture was “Yiddish Literature in Italy during the Renaissance.” It sounds very exotic. And I thought, “Who in Italy would come to hear such a lecture?” But when I arrived in Milan, I started walking around the city and saw that all the bookstores had the poster of my lecture, and for the first time in my life, I had an audience of more than two hundred people, which was an unusual experience, and I also immediately had several students who stuck with me. Among them was Claudia [Rosenzweig], and it is great luck that she came here [that is, to Israel] and she works here. And from that series of lectures, the book Yiddish in Italy emerged. First of all, you have to remember that, originally, Ashkenazi Jews came mainly from Italy and France. Not long thereafter [from the late Middle Ages] they returned there because of the Black Death, the expulsions, all kinds of pogroms and riots – so they moved to Italy, settled in northern Italy, and for 200 years continued to write, read, and publish books in Yiddish. The most beautiful books from this period are Italian, and it is enough to mention the Venetian legends, which are simply amazing. This was also a diverse but united community, as you can see, for example, in the Passover Haggadah of Venice, in which you have a Passover Haggadah with a Yiddish commentary, a Passover Haggadah with a Judeo-Italian commentary, and a Passover Haggadah with a Ladino commentary, and there is one Haggadah for all three. The publisher was very frugal, and published one Haggadah for all of them. Following the success of these lectures, Maria Modena decided to make an exhibition of Yiddish literature in Italy and host it in Milan. I can’t express to you the good will we encountered in her university’s library. It’s a wonderful library, and when I talked to them about the materials, they didn’t want to rely on photocopies, they wanted everything in the original. They had everything we asked for flown in from America and France and England and Germany and gave it to us in Italy. And there had to be a certain kind of air conditioning and special closed tables with air conditioning inside, which were not in the library. And the library bought them for us.
AE: And everything was dedicated to Old Yiddish?
CT: Everything was dedicated to Old Yiddish, except for the last lecture, which was also public, and then I gave a lecture about the shtetl and brought An-sky’s film The Dybbuk. It was in a large cinema and there were once again about 200 people and the group of students.
AE: Well, I think we won’t be able to avoid Glikl. You mentioned her before.
CT: Definitely not! [We can’t avoid Glikl.]
AE: So I will just say – and you will elaborate – that we are talking here about the memoirs of a Jewish woman from northern Germany in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The manuscript has been preserved, and you produced a critical edition with notes, an introduction, and a translation into Hebrew. For this edition, you won the Bialik Prize, and in fact the book has already been translated into English and has already made waves, and today it doesn’t seem like anyone can even approach the field without first encountering Glikl. So tell me a little bit about your work on this book.
Copy of Glückel of Hameln’s memoirs, copied out by her brother-in-law in 1743, E. Roth & L. Prijs, Hebraeische Handschriften, Universitatsbibliothek J.C Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main, “Ktiv” Project, the National Library of Israel.
CT: The truth is that it’s embarrassing to tell, but I didn’t come to Glikl voluntarily. Look, when we came to the university and to the Yiddish department, Professor Shmeruk was very strict and very organized. On the first day, we received a bibliographic list of everything we needed to read: five books of poetry like this and poetry like that, and Glikl was also on the list. I read a version [of the memoirs] in modern Yiddish and I was very enthusiastic, but I didn’t do anything with it. But at that time there was a Dinur Center at the Hebrew University, where they were engaged in publishing compilations of source texts for courses at the university. Professor [Haim Hillel] Ben-Sasson, peace be upon him, said to me, “Do you know Yiddish? Sit down, take the Hebrew translation of Glikl, written in 1927 by Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz (Azar), and correct it.” I began to correct it, and that was for some kind of payment.
AE: Were there many corrections?
CT: There were so many corrections. There were things the man did not understand at all.
AE: Oh!
CT: Because not everyone who understands modern Yiddish understands this Yiddish, right? There are many words that were completely foreign to him, many sentence structures, the syntax; and you can think you understand but that is not what is written, so I started correcting. And I corrected and corrected, and a problem emerged, because in Glikl’s Yiddish there is a lot of Hebrew, like in everyone’s Yiddish, but with her maybe even more, because she would quote verses and sayings of the great sages [Hazal] and Hebrew proverbs; and so I had to do something that connects the Hebrew into which I was translating with her Hebrew. And it was very difficult, and I cried and hesitated and didn’t know what to do, until one of my friends heard me and said to me, “Chava, leave it. Translate from the beginning all by yourself. Don’t follow the existing translation.” So I did, and it started to flow, and then I got really excited. Look, it’s an almost unbelievable book, yes? There’s nothing else like it! Not before her, not during her time and not for a long time after her. Her ability... she writes that she couldn’t sleep at night after her husband’s death; she was in great sorrow and knew that if she would fall into melancholy, it would be her end. So she started writing. But she didn’t write a diary. She did not write in a chronological order. She wrote memoirs from different periods. What’s interesting is that she only wrote when she wasn’t married. That is, she was married twice, and everything she wrote was after the death of her first husband or after the death of her second husband. She divided the book into seven parts, and she says that in the fifth part she will tell about her husband’s death, and each time she leads us to the death of her husband. But she finishes the fifth book with her husband’s death and all the details, but she continues to write. She realizes that what she is doing is good. Now, on the one hand, we were very lucky to have found the manuscript, for then the question comes up: Was she a woman one of her kind, or were there other women [who wrote], the ones she herself tells us about. Or, for example, she keeps saying “I received a letter from my husband,” “I wrote a letter to my husband.” Where are these letters?! And the truth is that something very interesting happened to me. A Jew came to us from Denmark, and he brought two packages of letters from Glikl’s time. One package of five letters does not relate to Glikl, but the other package was of 18 letters that traveled from Hamburg-Altona to Copenhagen and back. And in these letters the correspondents are relatives of Glikl, or people she knows, so we have here the possibility of comparison. It is a truly endearing and very impressive supplement to this [Glikl’s] book. Then my good friend Galit [Hasan-Rokem] said to me, “I wish you could find a picture of a mail cart for the cover.” And I was very lucky, because I found a picture with two carts. One goes this way and one goes that way.
AE: And this is in fact the cover of the book.
CT: This is the cover of the book, called Yiddish Letters: From the Seventeenth-Century World of Glikl Hamel.
AE: That’s great.
CT: Yes. It really gave me a lot of pleasure and countless anecdotes. I can tell you, for example, about what happened after Glikl, when her relatives called me, or when a Jew called me and said: “Can I speak with Glikl Turniansky?” I came to my senses and told him “speaking,” and he told me, “What a beautiful book you wrote! Well done!” And then he hung up the phone, so I don’t even know who he was. But Glikl’s descendants taught me many things that relate to her – there is one, for example, who is really a descendant of her husband’s father. He once read all of Glikl’s memoirs and then called me and told me that he had read all of the notes. He learned a lot and was very excited, because, for example, I write there that rishes, the word “evil” or “wickedness” in Yiddish, means, for Glikl, the hatred of Jews – antisemitism. He then said that his mother had told him about when she would go out in the 1930s, she’d be told, “Behave nicely on the street, so that you don’t arouse [or provoke] rishes.” And another wonderful thing: during Glikl’s wedding with her second husband, they received, in the “privacy room” (kheyder yikhud), something that they called “sholent,” and it turns out that it was something sweet and warm. So this Jew took and sent me a photocopy of a Jewish cookbook from Alsace, which has a recipe for “sholent” in it, which is a kind of kugel with noodles, or with potatoes, or with apples, if you want...
AE: Before we conclude, how do you see the field of Old Yiddish studies nowadays, and into the future? In what directions is it going? What is missing, in your opinion, and what would you like to continue to promote?
Entry in a pinkas from Prague in 1713, in which Anshel Wiener, fleeing the plague, arranged for the transfer of his property to his wife, Mirel. Discussed by Joshua Teplitsky in a blog post for the Jewish Quarterly Review, March 25, 2020. Jewish Museum in Prague Ms. 120097 (“Judicial Protocoll 1713 – 14”), f. 184r.
CT: [Sighs]. Look, my heart aches. Because there was a time when Yiddish was the center. The study of Yiddish. Jerusalem was the center of Yiddish research, and the center of the study of Old Yiddish. Shmeruk’s research opened this world to many. He published a great deal, both books and articles. All that is gone today. I mean, I don’t see it. There is no longer a Yiddish department. The university has some kind of a program, but the truth is that I still don’t understand how it is structured, even though I tried very hard. But I see that there are private individuals – I don’t know where they are affiliated if at all – who are engaged in research and do it well. I learn from them. I only have a small complaint on this matter, namely that many choose to engage with very esoteric subjects – with all kinds of strange and wild animals, and I am less comfortable with these things. There are many more things to be done. I hope there will be people who will continue this work.
AE: What topics for example, or research areas, would you like to see more? What do you think should be promoted?
CT: One of the things that is very interesting to me is what you wrote about, namely the attitudes towards Yiddish among the [Christian] Yiddishists. How did it affect the maskilic Jews, step by step, and what did they do? Because I know that Mendelssohn was one of them, and he wrote the Bible in German, at the beginning with Hebrew letters. And his friends, Euchel and Wolfssohn and Homberg translated the other parts and translated all the books that were previously in Yiddish into good German, even though many Jews could not read Latin letters, right? And it took them time to get used to it and to get over it. How did it happen? What was the connection and what were the stages of this process, which replaced Yiddish with German, and how did this affect the separation between Western and Eastern European Jewry? Even in the [maskilic] comedies, the idealized character of Mordechai is not called by that name but by Marcus. How did all these phenomena affect this separation, which I feel is painful even today, the disconnection with Eastern European Jewry, and how is it even possible to bridge this gap? I find it intriguing. I would also like to know, as I told you, where the Jews in Western and Eastern Europe learned Hebrew from? I don’t exactly understand it. They knew quite a lot. They knew commentaries, they knew Gemara, they knew Mishnah. Even Glikl knew quite a bit, knew where to say the right things; sometimes she also corrected them. And there are many other areas. I would really like someone to continue the work on the “historical songs.” There are a lot of really compelling issues there. Not long ago I published an article about the fact that the earliest documentation about the pogroms of 1648/49 is actually a Yiddish song, and not all the chronicles we know, which are all much later. We also have outstanding material on plagues, God forbid.
AE: Which received much attention during Covid.
CT: Very true. And yes, I strongly believe in critical editions of texts, which is a field that is not so popular today. I still think you can learn a lot from these things. I hope that heaven will let me continue as long as possible.
