THE literatures of the early Middle Ages were bilingual. The Catholic religion had brought with it the use of the Latin language for religious and ethical purposes, and in proportion as the influence of the clergy was exerted on worldly matters, even profane learning found its expression through the foreign tongue. Only by degrees did the native dialects manage to establish themselves independently, and it has been but a few centuries since they succeeded in emancipating themselves entirely and in ousting the Latin from the domain of secular knowledge. As long as the Jews have not been arrested in their natural development by external pressure, they have fallen into line with the conditions prevalent in their permanent homes and have added their mite towards the evolution of the vernaculars of their respective countries. It would be idle to adduce here proofs of this; suffice it only to mention Spain, whose literature would be incomplete without including in the list of its early writers the names of some illustrious Jews active there before the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century. But the matter everywhere stood quite differently in regard to the Latin language. That being the language of the Catholic clergy, it could not be cultivated by the Jews without compromising their own faith; the example of the bilingualism was, however, too strong not to affect them, and hence they had recourse to the tongue of their own sacred scriptures for purposes corresponding to those of the Catholic Church. The stronger the influence of the latter was in the country, the more did the Jews cling to the Hebrew and the Jargon of the Talmud for literary purposes. It need not, then, surprise us to find the Jewish literature of the centuries preceding the invention of printing almost exclusively in the ancient tongue.

As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow-citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction,[1] issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny.[2] On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like SÜsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.

Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life; and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of Wigalois, of King Arthur, had begun to fade away even from the folk books of Germany, it lived on in the Slavic countries and continued to evoke pleasure and admiration.

These chapbooks, embodying the folklore of past generations, were almost the first printed Judeo-German books, as they certainly were the most popular. That the early Judeo-German literature was intended mainly for readers in the east of Europe is amply evidenced by specific mention in the works themselves, as for example in the 'Maasebuch,' where the compiler, or author, urges the German women to buy quickly his book, lest it be all too fast sold in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia.[3] In fact, the patron of the 'Maasebuch,' or the author of the same, for it is not quite clear whether they are not one and the same person, was himself a native of Meseritz in Lithuania. Only after these story books had created a taste for reading, and in order to counteract the effects of the non-Jewish lore, the Rabbis began to substitute the more Jewish legends of the 'Maasebuch' and the 'Zeena Ureena,' and the ethical treatises which were intended to instruct the people in the tenets of their fathers. In this manner the Judeo-German literature was made possible. Its preservation for four centuries was mainly due to the isolation of the German Jews in Russia and Poland, where the German medievalism became ossified and was preserved intact to within half a century ago, when under favorable conditions the Russianization of the Jews began. Had these conditions prevailed but a short time longer, Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past and of interest only to the linguist and the historian. But very soon various causes combined to resuscitate the dialect literature. In the short time that the Jews had enjoyed the privileges of a Russian culture, then German medievalism was completely dispelled, and the modern period which, in its incipient stage, reaches back into the first quarter of this century, presents a distinct phase which in no way resembles the literature of the three hundred years that preceded it. It is not a continuation of its older form, but has developed on an entirely new basis.

The medieval period of Judeo-German literature was by no means confined to the Slavic countries. It reacted on the Jews who had remained in Germany, who, in their narrow Ghetto life, were excluded from an active participation in the German literature of their country. This reaction was not due alone to the fact that the specifically Jewish literature appealed in an equal degree to those who had been left behind in their old homes, but in a larger measure to the superior intellectual activity of the emigrants and their descendants who kept alive the spark of Jewish learning when it had become weakened at home and found no food for its replenishment within its own communities. They had to turn to the Slavic lands for their teachers and Rabbis, who brought with them not only their Hebrew learning, but also their Judeo-German language and literature. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no division of the Jews of the west and the east of Europe; they took equal part in the common Judeo-German literature, however scanty its scope. What was produced in Russia was read with the same pleasure in Germany, and vice versa, even though the spoken form of the vernacular in Slavic countries was more and more departing from that of Germany.

Even Mendelssohn's teacher was a Galician Jew. But with Mendelssohn a new era had dawned in the history of the German Jews. By his example the dialect was at once abandoned for the literary language, and the Jews were once more brought back into the fold of the German nation. The separation of the two branches of the German Jews was complete, and the inhabitants of the Slavic countries were left to shift for themselves. For nearly one hundred years they had to miss the beneficent effects of an intellectual intercourse with the West, and in the beginning of our century the contrast between the two could not have been greater: the German Jews were rapidly becoming identified with the spiritual pursuits of their Gentile fellow-citizens, the Slavic Jews persevered in the medievalism into which they had been thrown centuries before. Only by slow degrees did the Mendelssohnian Reform find its way into Poland and Russia; and even when its influence was at its highest, it was not possible for it to affect those lands in the same way that it affected the districts that were more or less under German influence. The German language could not become the medium of instruction for the masses, whose homely dialects had so far departed from their mother-tongue as to make the latter unintelligible to them. In Russia it was a long time before the native literature could make itself felt, or before Russian education came to take the place of the German culture; so in the meanwhile the Judeo-German language was left to its own evolution, and a new literature had its rise.

In arriving at its present stage, Judeo-German literature of the nineteenth century has passed through several phases. At first, up to the sixties, it was used as a weapon by the few enlightened men who were anxious to extend the benefits of the Mendelssohnian Reform to the masses at large. It is an outgrowth of the Hebrew literature of the same period, which had its rise from the same causes, but which could appeal only to a small number of men who were well versed in Hebrew lore. Since these apostles of the new learning had themselves received their impetus through the Hebrew, it was natural for them to be active both in the Hebrew and the Judeo-German field. We consequently find here the names of Gottlober and J. L. Gordon, who belong equally to both literatures. Those who devoted themselves exclusively to creating a Judeo-German literature, like the other Mendelssohnian disciples, took the German literature as the guide for their efforts, and even dreamed of approaching the literary language of Germany in the final amalgamation with the Mendelssohnian Reform. In the meanwhile, in the sixties and still more in the seventies, the Jews were becoming Russianized in the schools which had been thrown open to their youths. In the sixties, the Judeo-German literature, having received its impetus in the preceding generation, reached its highest development as a literature of Reform, but it appealed only to those who had not had the benefits of the Russian schools. In the seventies it became reminiscent, and was in danger of rapid extinction. In the eighties, the persecutions and riots against the Jews led many of those who had availed themselves of the Russian culture to devote themselves to the service of their less fortunate brethren; and many new forces, that otherwise would have found their way into Russian letters, were exerted entirely in the evolution of Judeo-German. In this new stage, the Mendelssohnian Reform, with its concomitant German language, was lost sight of. The element of instruction was still an important one in this late period, but this instruction was along universal lines, and no longer purely Jewish; above all else, this literature became an art.

Poetry was the first to be developed, as it lent itself more readily to didactic purposes; it has also, until lately, remained in closer contact with the popular poetry, which, in its turn, is an evolution of the poetry of the preceding centuries. The theatre was the latest to detach itself from prose, to which it is organically related. These facts have influenced the separate treatment of the three divisions of literature in the present work. It was deemed indispensable to add to these a chapter on the Judeo-German folklore, as the reading of Judeo-German works would frequently be unintelligible without some knowledge of the creations of the popular mind. Here the relation to medievalism is even more apparent than in the popular poetry; in fact, the greater part of the printed books of that class owe their origin to past ages; they are frequently nothing more than modernizations of old books, as is, for example, the case with 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' which, but for the language, is identical with its prototype in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

In its popular form, Judeo-German is certainly not inferior to many of the literary languages which have been fortunate enough to attract the attention of the linguist and student of comparative literature. In its belleslettres it compares favorably with those of countries like Bulgaria, which had their regeneration at about the same time; nay, it may appear to the unbiassed observer that it even surpasses them in that respect. And yet, in spite of it all, Judeo-German has remained practically a sealed book to the world. The few who have given reports of it display an astounding amount of ignorance on the subject. Karpeles devotes, in his history of Jewish literature, almost thirty pages to the medieval form of it, but to the rich modern development of it only two lines![4] Steinschneider knows by hearsay only Dick, and denies the practical value of modern Judeo-German.[5] But the acme of complacent ignorance, not to use a stronger word, is reached by GrÜnbaum,[6] who dishes up, as specimens of literature, newspaper advertisements and extracts of Schaikewitsch, not mentioning even by name a single one of the first-class writers. It is painful to look into the pages of his work, which, apart from endless linguistic blunders of a most senseless character, has probably done more than anything else to divert attention from this interesting literature.

Much more sympathetic are the few pages which Berenson devotes to it in an article in the Andover Review;[7] though abounding in errors, it is fair and unbiassed, and at least displays a familiarity with the originals. Still better are the remarks of the Polish author Klemens Junosza in the introductions to his translations of the works of Abramowitsch into Polish; the translations themselves are masterpieces, considering the extreme quaintness of Abramowitsch's style. There are, indeed, a few sketches on the Judeo-German literature written in the dialect itself,[8] but none of them attest a philosophical grasp of the subject, or even betray a thorough familiarity with the literature. A number of good reviews on various productions have appeared in the Russian periodical Voschod, from the pen of one signing himself "Criticus."[9] To one of these reviews he has attached a discussion of the literature in general; this, however short, is the best that has yet been written on the subject.

It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to extinction.[10] Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.[11] It would be idle to speculate when these persecutions will cease.