Elia Levita's Bovo d'Antona is reckoned among the core texts of Old Yiddish literature. Written in 1507 and revised for print in the southern German city of Isny in 1541, this fictional text has been the object of scholarly attention for decades. Besides a series of articles and several dissertations, popular and scholarly translations into modern Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and Spanish have been published as well.Footnote ¹ However, there has been no critical edition; scholars who wished to use the original text in Old Yiddish had to either obtain a copy of the single extant print of the first edition from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich—unfortunately not yet digitized—or use Judah A. Yoffe's revised facsimile edition from 1949. Now, at last, Claudia Rosenzweig has provided the field with an edition of the Bovo d'Antona, which is based on her 2007 dissertation from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Rosenzweig's book consists of a lengthy introduction, an annotated and critical edition of the text, and an appendix with a brief overview of later transformations of the Bovo d'Antona from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Rosenzweig's introduction includes a brief biography of Elia Levita and a discussion of his Yiddish works (chap. 1). It places the Yiddish Bovo d'Antona within the European, Italian, and Yiddish literary traditions (chap. 2 and 3.1–3.3), and offers a substantial comparison of the printed edition with the two manuscript versions of the text and its source, a northern Italian edition of the Buovo d'Antona published by Caligola de’ Bazalieri in Bologna in 1497 (chap. 3.4 and 3.5). For the latter, Rosenzweig offers valuable details by juxtaposing a synopsis of the Italian and the Yiddish texts (chap. 3.5.1) and by comparing selected episodes of the different printed and manuscript versions (chap. 3.4 and 3.5.3), for which she provides both the Italian and the Yiddish stanzas together with an English translation. The discussion of the differences between manuscripts and printed editions, and between the Italian and Yiddish texts, can serve as a good starting point for future study of the Bovo d'Antona.

The Buovo d'Antona—the story of a knight's adventures—was widely disseminated in European literature from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The question of its genre has long haunted scholarly discussions; Domenica Legge's description of the text as a “class labelled romance … cast in the form of a chanson de geste”Footnote ² represents well the general uncertainty surrounding its categorization, which in turn sets up more uncertainty concerning its content, intended and real audiences, dissemination, and reception history. Regrettably, Rosenzweig's book adds to the confusion. For her, the Buovo d'Antona is “an epic-romantic legend, a pure roman d'aventures” (30), which became “part of the Reali di Francia cycle” only in Italy (32), and thus belongs to the genre of the chanson de geste, which, according to Rosenzweig, transformed “into the romance, that is, into a story where love becomes the core of the narration” (42). Rosenzweig therefore counts the Yiddish Bovo d'Antona as a Jewish romance (70, 187). This designation does not explain, however, why even Elia Levita's heavily revised Yiddish version still includes elements constitutive of chanson de geste, such as the battles with the heathens and Bovo's resistance to converting at the sultan's court, which is even more complicated in the Yiddish version given that the hero is depicted as a Jewish knight and the sultan “ceases to be a Muslim and takes on the character of a violent (Christian) Crusader” (174).

In her literary analysis, Rosenzweig summarizes aspects of the Judaization of the text that have been previously noted in scholarship (chap. 3.5.4 and 3.5.5). Building on the earlier scholarship, she proposes the new thesis that many changes in the text represent a shift from the “fictional world of warriors and nobility to the realm of ‘family, marriage, intimacy’” (181), which she interprets as adding a new level of realism to the text, appealing especially to an audience of Jewish women (182–83). The evidence Rosenzweig gives for this thesis consists of many detailed and comic episodes from Bovo d'Antona drawn from everyday life. The problem with this argument is that by the sixteenth century such episodes are a common feature in myriad prose novels of the day. Simply put, depicting ordinary life in a sixteenth-century novel does not make that novel a depiction of reality.

The most valuable part of this book is the edition of the Yiddish print from 1541 and its comparison with the variants of the two extant manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Ms. hébr. 750, fols. 123–157, and Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Ms. Heb. 8° 7565), which were presumably based on the lost manuscript from 1507 (196). Since Elia Levita had personally revised the Bovo d'Antona for print while working with the Reformed Hebraist Paulus Fagius at their printing press in Isny, the manuscript variants are crucial to understanding the changes the author made. Rosenzweig's book succeeds in usefully presenting the complicated textual history of the Bovo d'Antona. The editio princeps serves as Rosenzweig's main text, to which she adds the few additional stanzas of the manuscripts. Footnotes and apparatus are given at the bottom of the page. This complex layout makes it possible to easily read the main text, but also stop and make multiple line-by-line comparisons. All other variants are noted in the critical apparatus and many terms are translated and explained in more detail in the footnotes and listed in three separate glossaries. Especially useful is the glossary of Romanisms: Rosenzweig includes the list Elia Levita created himself at the end of his editio princeps, and adds all terms of Italian and Italian dialects found in the text and its variants. A second glossary includes the Hebrew-Aramaic component, and a third those Germanic terms “not directly understandable by the German reader” (477).

The helpful appendix includes an overview about later transformations of the Bovo d'Antona from the seventeenth to the twentieth century that were printed and disseminated in Europe and beyond. It could have been a separate chapter and will hopefully serve as a starting point for future scholarship. The list of all editions (504–6) is also useful, as is the discussion of the editions and how they have been studied and quoted in scholarship. Yet another section of the appendix collects valuable data on the material history of the prints of the Bovo d'Antona and its later editions, which were printed under the title Bove-mayse. A bobe-mayse is one of the basic entries in modern popular dictionaries of Yiddish expression as a synonym for a tall tale. The source for this idiom is a conflation with bobe, the Slavic-derived Yiddish term for grandmother, and the Jewish knight Bovo from Elia Levita's book.

Claudia Rosenzweig's critical edition of the Bovo d'Antona with its additional material will correct the false impression that this important work of Yiddish literature is nothing but a forgotten grandmother's story or a tall tale, and it provides an excellent basis for the study of this important Old Yiddish text in the future.