Jerold Frakes's new study of early Yiddish literature, The Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature, is not well served by its title, which is apt to be misleading. His new book is not a history of early Yiddish literature or its emergence. It is rather a collection of largely discrete essays or case studies, carefully selected to introduce the reader to three major genres of that literature, namely early Yiddish lyric poetry, drama, and epic poetry. As the subtitle implies, Frakes focuses on the relation of his chosen texts to parallel works in non-Jewish literatures. All of the works and the genres that he discusses were influenced greatly by European literature; indeed, Frakes purposefully stays away from Yiddish works that stand in too close a relation to Hebrew originals, precisely because his theme is what he calls “cultural translation,” that is, the adaptation and Judaization of elements of non-Jewish literature. The relation between the bodies of literature is asymmetric; Yiddish authors imitated non-Jewish literary works and genres of writing, but they wrote for and were read by an audience that was exclusively Jewish, indeed, exclusively Ashkenazic, or nearly so. With trivial exceptions, there were no non-Jews who read Yiddish, and so the literature is, as Frakes says, “centripetal,” that is, like translation itself, it is outer inspired but inner directed.

Literary influence is only a part of the complex relationship of Yiddish literature to non-Jewish literature. Frakes's third chapter, for example, focuses on a poetic satire by one of the most famous early Yiddish writers, Elia Levita (1469–1549), the “Ha-Mavdil Poem,” an attack on a hapless, possibly homosexual schoolteacher named Hillel Cohen. (In an appendix, Frakes helpfully provides an English translation of the poem, together with another poem that Levita wrote the same year, an event poem entitled “The Great Fire of Venice.”) Frakes demonstrates the close parallels between Levita's satire and the satirical pasquinades written by Levita's contemporary and fellow Venetian, the famous pornographer, poet, and playwright Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Aretino could not have influenced Levita, because Levita's poem, written in 1514, slightly predates any of Aretino's satires. Nor is it remotely likely that Levita influenced Aretino at all. Although it was written in a poetic genre that few if any Jewish poets had attempted before, Levita's satire is intensely Jewish. Even as it savages Levita's poetic victim, it burlesques a Hebrew song that is sung at the end of Sabbath.

Both Levita and Aretino participated in the universe of poets and versifiers of late Renaissance Italy, and Levita's audience understood and accepted, as did Aretino's, the notion of a poetic satire. The two poets, as Frakes demonstrates, were thus in one sense part of the same literary world, sharing many of the same assumptions and beliefs about the uses of poetry and its forms. In another sense, their literary worlds were quite separate. Although Levita was known to Christian humanists as a scholar of the Old Testament and Hebrew grammar, his Yiddish poetry was probably invisible and certainly illegible to them; it was part of another, wholly Jewish world of literature.

In his second chapter, Frakes discusses what he identifies as the earliest extant Yiddish love poem, a short, anonymous lyric written on the cover of a Hebrew Bible manuscript that belonged to another famous Italian poet of the sixteenth century, Lucretia Borgia's lover, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). The middle chapters of the book move us to the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and discuss the earliest extant Purim plays. The last two chapters return to the earlier centuries. They discuss two topics in Yiddish epic poetry: the theme of courtship and marriage, and the depiction of Muslim foes in Yiddish epic poems. The love poem that is on the Bembo manuscript, Frakes argues, is barely distinguishable, except by language, from many non-Jewish poems of the period. Not so the epics. Frakes argues that even those Yiddish epics that are most closely modeled on Christian sources treat courtship and depict Muslims differently than Christian epics did. Frakes shows that the essential enmity towards Muslims, which is a foundational element of medieval Christian epic poetry (think of Chanson de Roland), is missing from the Jewish works. The only exception, and it is only a partial exception, is Levita's own Bovo d'Antona. Cultural translation works partly by leaving certain things behind, by leaving them untranslated. By elision, by omission, the Yiddish epics transmute the epic genre into something quite new.

Frakes is the model of precision and scholarly scrupulousness in all of his work, but he has imagined this work with lightness and wit. It is similar in that respect to some other recent work on early Yiddish, for instance, recent books by Jeremy Dauber and Ruth von Bernuth.Footnote ¹ Although Frakes's knowledge of early Yiddish literature seems comprehensive, the books’ reach is limited. As Frakes writes, the chapters of the book do not combine to prove a thesis. Some chapters are connected through associative links; the first chapter on Purim plays, which discusses political satire, connects with the earlier discussion of Levita's satire; the next section discusses gender roles in the Purim plays, and connects with the later discussion of gender in the epics. The discussion of the depiction of Muslims returns us back to Levita.

Early Yiddish literature itself lacks readers. Apart from Glikl's famous memoir, there is hardly a single early Yiddish work that is read very much today, in translation, let alone in the original, even in classrooms. This volume follows Frakes's very important anthology, Early Yiddish Texts (an anthology of texts in Yiddish, not translations), his translation of Jean Baumgarten's introduction to early Yiddish literature, and Frakes's own excellent volume of translation of early Yiddish epic poems.Footnote ² The most important aspect of Frakes's essays here, therefore, may be to show simply that early Yiddish literature is worth studying; it is interesting and fun and worth reading. As literary criticism always should, Frakes's essays, intriguing and intelligent, invite us in to read the literature itself.