The great literary flowering that began in France in the twelfth century and spread throughout western Europe made inroads among Jews as well. Current scholarship in the fields of historical and literary studies indicates that Jews in France were aware of and fascinated by heroic epic poems (chansons de geste), such as Roman d'Alexandre and La Chanson de Roland, romances, such as Tristan and Iseult, and exempla, hagiographies, and legends of saints.Footnote 1 They heard these stories told and read them in texts, and then reworked them into stories of their own in Hebrew. The stories were adapted to suit the values of Jewish society, and in the process were often transformed to the point that they became virtually unrecognizable. This French literature had great appeal as a source of enjoyment and interest. At the same time, it was not embraced wholeheartedly, but read with a critical eye and mechanisms that sought to filter and control its reception. As such, it invites us to follow these expressions of the complex cultural dialogues that took place between Jewish and non-Jewish readers, as well as the rhetorical strategies that accompanied them.
This article will explore this socioliterary discourse as reflected in one Hebrew tale that has not yet been studied or published. The story, the beginning of which is unfortunately missing, was copied in an Italian hand in the pages of a manuscript known as MS JTS Rab. 1164.Footnote 2 The forty-two-page manuscript, dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contains the commentary of Shlomo ben Yiẓḥak to Mishneh Torah (Maddaʿ, ʾAhavah, Zemanim) and Tikkun shetarot (versions of legal documents) according to the custom of Rome. It also includes several tales. The story discussed here appears on pages 39r–42r. The colophon mentions “Benjamin the copier.”
The manuscript's Italian script and its contents indicate that it was probably ordered by an Italian Jew and intended for his particular Jewish community. For example, the manuscript contains a passing comment in this tale that can be seen as alluding to the political split into the various principalities and states in the Italian peninsula that took place during this period.Footnote 3 Also indicating an Italian origin for the manuscript are the presence of the “Tikkun Shetarot according to the custom of Rome” and the commentary on the Mishneh Torah, which was a central axis of Halakhah studies, especially among Italian Jews, during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries.Footnote 4 As far as current scholarship is aware, the tale was not recorded in any earlier Jewish sources or other manuscripts. Thus, for the purposes of this article, the date of this manuscript serves as terminus ad quem, the latest reference point for the story's date.Footnote 5 I will argue that the Hebrew tale (which I have titled “The Ring”) contains textual links to the Arthurian romance Yvain, The Knight of the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes, one of the most widely read authors of medieval romance, who was active at the court of Henry the Liberal and Marie in Champagne, northern France, during the twelfth century.Footnote 6 In addition, I further argue that the story is situated within a particular social and cultural context of Italian Jewish society of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries.Footnote 7
The Story as It Appears in MS JTS Rab. 1164
The missing opening of “The Ring” could not be reconstructed from parallel stories, since none have been found thus far.Footnote 8 However, it is possible, in general terms and using the rest of the narrative as a guide, to guess its contents to a reasonable level of probability. The story begins by introducing Joseph, the protagonist, and his widowed mother. Joseph is very devoted to his mother, whom he supports and cares for. One day, Elijah the prophet reveals himself to Joseph, appearing in the image of his father, standing next to a spring. Elijah gives Joseph a ring, apparently in return for taking such great care of his mother and respecting her dignity, and commands him to safeguard it from any harm. Joseph places the ring on his finger and his face and personality are immediately transformed. Elijah, still appearing as Joseph's father, takes Joseph to meet his intended bride, the daughter of a scholar, and they marry. Then Elijah leaves, but promises Joseph that when his son is born, he—Elijah—will come to the circumcision ceremony and circumcise the baby himself.Footnote 9
From this point on we have the text of the story, enabling us to follow the plot with a greater measure of confidence. Joseph's new father-in-law provides him with conditions necessary to become a great scholar. In his room, Joseph studies day and night from the books he receives from his father-in-law. He rises early every morning to pray in the synagogue, where he also teaches Torah and prays in the evening. Soon his reputation as a Torah scholar spreads far and wide. His father-in-law places him in charge of the household, and as a result the father-in-law's home and possessions are blessed.
Joseph's wife eventually bears him a son, and when it is time for his circumcision, Joseph's “father” (i.e., Elijah) does not arrive. Joseph refuses to call in someone else to perform the ceremony and continues to wait for him with deep concern. Joseph's father-in-law and the members of the community take the baby away from Joseph against his will in order to perform the circumcision within the required time when suddenly, just when the rite is about to begin, Elijah arrives in the form of Joseph's father and performs the ritual.
Elijah/Joseph's father stays with Joseph and his wife for fifteen days and shares their joy, after which he instructs Joseph to continue on the straight path, warning him to safeguard the ring with all his might. He then tells him that he will not be returning and reveals that he is Elijah. Elijah further promises Joseph that he and his father have a place reserved for them near him in the world to come because “they are very important in the eyes of the Lord.” Joseph persists in the study of Torah and his reputation for scholarship and wisdom grows, as does the fame of his Sabbath sermons and pleasant prayers. He and his wife have a loving marriage and she bears him another son.
One day, the first day of the Passover holiday, Joseph and his wife go for a walk in the parks and orchards, together with young men and women of the community, and as they are relaxing on a bridge above the river, he falls asleep in his wife's lap. She gazes at her handsome husband and is enthralled by his shiny ring. She slips it off his finger while he sleeps and the ring falls from her hand into the river. At that very moment, Joseph awakes, and a great storm appears, in the course of which Joseph disappears without a trace. From then on his wife mourns him day and night, refusing to be comforted. Being pregnant, she bears their third son some time later.
Joseph, “tired and exhausted, battered and tortured,” finds himself next to the spring where Elijah first revealed himself to him. There he finds the bedraggled clothes that he had left behind when he went off to become the son-in-law of the rabbi and a great and renowned scholar, along with his four fishing nets. He puts on his old clothes and is restored to his previous appearance. He sells the nets and returns to his mother's home as if he had never left it. The four years of his absence from his mother's home are completely erased from his memory and he only wants to know if she ate the food he prepared for her “yesterday.” A short time later, his mother dies and he buries her with great honor. Afterwards he lives in destitution, begging for alms and eating meals at the homes of different people.
Back at the home of his father-in-law, where they have just finished a period of deep mourning for Joseph, Joseph's father-in-law decides that the time has come to marry his daughter off to a different man in place of her husband, whether he is dead or was carried off by an “evil spirit,” that is, a demon. He declares a “groom competition,” and proclaims near and far that the one who is worthy of his daughter by proving himself a great scholar will win her hand along with a great deal of money. Furthermore, he forbids the members of his community to host any guests in town, but instead instructs them to send guests to him. The reason is not explained, but perhaps he believes that this would give him the opportunity to get to know the candidates better. Perhaps he wishes to discover the fate of his mysterious son-in-law, if he is in fact still alive. For her part, Joseph's widow refuses to cooperate with her father and continues to mourn her husband.
In response to the proclamation, two exemplary, rich young men decide to try their luck and set out for the rabbi's town. As devoted friends, they decide in advance to each take joy in the success of the other, whichever of them is chosen to be the groom. On their way, they stay over in Joseph's town, where they are hosted by the Jewish community. They hire Joseph to be their servant (shamash) to accompany them on their way and care for their needs. He agrees to do so on condition that they supply him with a proper horse to ride, because the journey is long and arduous. Approaching the rabbi's town, they leave their horses and things with Joseph at an inn on the outskirts of town and give him a sum of money to purchase food for the Sabbath. They then go to spend the Sabbath with the rabbi. Joseph buys himself a fish for the Sabbath as well as new dishes. When he cuts open the fish to prepare it, he finds his ring inside. He “places it on his finger and is instantly restored to the man he had been previously.” Seeing his new face, the innkeeper recognizes him as the rabbi's son-in-law, serves him generously and treats him with great respect.
The rabbi, still seated at his Sabbath table, expresses his surprise to his guests, the two friends competing over the hand of his daughter, that they had not hired a servant to help them on their journey. They respond that they had indeed taken an attendant to serve them, but that he remained behind to guard their possessions, and that he had everything he needed for the Sabbath. The rabbi asks to see him, and refusing to dine without him, sends a servant boy from his household to fetch him. Looking at Joseph through the peephole in the door, the servant boy recognizes him as the rabbi's “dead” son-in-law. Terrified, he runs back to the rabbi to report on what he saw. Time after time, the rabbi sends messengers to Joseph to beg him to come to his house, but to no avail: Joseph refuses, claiming that he had already bought everything he needs for the Sabbath. Finally, Joseph agrees to come.
When Joseph arrives at the home of the rabbi, his father-in-law greets him together with his grandchildren. He waits to see how Joseph would react to his sons, hoping to find out if Joseph is indeed his son-in-law. Although the two suitors do not recognize their servant because Joseph's “face radiated light and turned him into a different person,” this is not the case with the rabbi, who tells his daughter about her husband's return. Languishing in her room, she continues to mourn her dead husband and refuses to emerge. The family gathers at the Sabbath table without her. Joseph refuses to accede to his host's pleas that he recite Kiddush (the blessing over wine), but cannot refuse his request that he say Birkat Ha-mazon (the blessing after the meal). From the manner in which Joseph recites the blessing, the rabbi is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the guest is indeed his son-in-law. His daughter, on the other hand, refuses to believe it and demands further proof. At her request, her parents offer Joseph a bed in the library. Only when she notes his yearning for his books and observes him perusing them as he did in the past, does she become convinced.
However, Joseph has to pass yet another test before she would agree to accept him as her missing husband. Would he rise early to go to synagogue for prayers as her husband used to do? The next morning, he indeed rises early and is first to arrive in the synagogue, where he prays as beautifully as he had done before and delivers a particularly long and stirring sermon. The congregation recognizes him as the lost son-in-law and accompanies him to his father-in-law's home. Only at this stage, after he had proven his wisdom and greatness, and after the meeting with his wife had been delayed—because of the hesitation of both parties, when he refused his father-in-law's invitation, as well as when she did not believe the rumor of her husband's return—does Joseph ask to see his wife. She expresses deep remorse at losing his ring, and he encourages her to put it behind them, don her fine garments, and join him. Joseph teaches Torah to many and his greatness and wealth become known near and far, and the two suitors return home disappointed. In the epilogue, the narrator proclaims Joseph's reward in the world to come because he meticulously observed the commandment of honoring his mother, and concludes with hope for the coming of the messiah.
Jewish Motifs in “The Ring”
This previously unknown story appears to be of Jewish origin. The values reflected in it are typically Jewish, such as Torah study, public prayer, charity, honoring one's parents, the covenant of marriage, the value of family, and belief in reward and punishment in this world and the next. Joseph is described as having attained the most sublime ideal in his development as an erudite Torah scholar, and the conflict between Torah study and family life that underlies the crisis of his loss of memory is a well-known talmudic topos.Footnote 10 Intertwined in the story itself are motifs and idioms drawn from the sources, in the style of such talmudic stories as “Joseph Who Revered the Sabbath,” in which the protagonist also finds his reward in the belly of a fish while preparing it for the Sabbath, and one in which King Solomon was forced to wander the roads mocked and humiliated after Asmodeus, king of the demons, snatched his royal ring, which was engraved with the Tetragrammaton (B. Gittin 68b). In some versions of the story Solomon's ring was found in the belly of a fish,Footnote 11 and when he placed it on his finger he was restored to his throne and his former glory together with his wife.Footnote 12 The great tempest in our story can be seen as an allusion to Elijah's parting from his disciple Elisha and his ascent to heaven “in a tempest” (2 Kings 2:11). Traces of these sources can be found in the description of Joseph's ring, and the change that occurred in him following its loss. The epilogue is also written in the form of a Jewish topos known as “reward for a single commandment.” Thanks to the meticulous observance of just a single commandment, even a simple person can achieve reward in this world and the next.Footnote 13 Examples of phrases from the sources include “She gave herself no relief” (Lamentations 2:18),Footnote 14 and “She refused to be consoled,” an echo of Jacob's reaction on being presented with Joseph's bloody coat.Footnote 15 The scribe clearly used the language and formats familiar to him and his audience to transform the raw material of what appears to be a non-Jewish story into something that would resonate with his community.Footnote 16
The Infrastructure of the Medieval Romance: Shared Motifs in “The Ring” and Yvain
The ring and the loss of memory that occurs as a result of its loss give the story its magical quality. Another, more implicit, magical motif is the role played by the spring, next to which the protagonist first encounters Elijah and where he miraculously finds his bedraggled clothes and fishing nets after four years.Footnote 17 These motifs are related to states of transformation and questions of identity, on an axis between “presence” and “absence”: the appearance and disappearance of Elijah, who functions as a kind of “magical agent”; the search for the revered Joseph, who disappeared without a trace; and the “bridegroom competition” for the hand of the rabbi's daughter, which also touches on the issue of an absent versus present husband. Delays and obstacles are also found on the axis of presence and absence: Joseph's repeated rejection of the rabbi's invitation to be a guest in his home, and his wife's refusal to join her family at the Sabbath table so that she can meet the guest, her husband. These delays are important, from the perspective of the narrator, to ensure that the reunion between Joseph and his wife takes place only after Joseph repeatedly proves his worth (i.e., as a scholar). The crisis in the story is precipitated by the protagonist's fatal flaw, specifically when Joseph fails to guard the ring, even against his own wife, and allows it to be removed from his finger and lost. Although Joseph's wife takes responsibility for what happened, the narrator places the principal burden of responsibility on Joseph. It is Joseph's failure to constantly keep watch over the ring, as he was instructed to do by Elijah, that is the cause of his magical amnesia. This failure is itself related to the central conflict in the story between the Torah and devotion to study and prayer on the one hand and love and married life on the other. The crisis occurs when Joseph, who “always studied in his home” and was well known for his wisdom and Torah, goes out for a stroll with his wife among the parks and orchards with other “young men” and “young women” and falls asleep in his wife's lap. Because he “forgets” to study the Torah, his punishment is to forget his wife and all “his pleasures.” Another conflict in the story is marrying for love versus an arranged marriage, expressed by the rabbi's efforts to choose a proper husband for his daughter and her refusal to cooperate and to stop mourning her lost but beloved husband.
The narrative of “The Ring” reveals a structure similar to the quest narratives typical of Chrétien's romances,Footnote 18 adapted of course to the Jewish cultural context. In “The Ring,” Joseph, the Jewish “knight,” is on a quest for the wisdom of the Torah, which he then betrays and must prove himself once again to be worthy of before he can regain his status, as defined analogously by the ring, his wife and family, and the Torah.Footnote 19
Chrétien's Yvain, The Knight of the Lion
Several interesting parallels link Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian romance, Yvain, The Knight of the Lion, and the Jewish story, despite the different adaptations and changes that obscure the connection.Footnote 20 King Arthur and his entourage visit the court of Queen Laudine and her husband Yvain, who are recently married (vv. 2466–638).Footnote 21 After a week of pleasure, recreation, and games of love in the forest and along the riverbank, King Arthur's entourage sets out to return home. At the instigation of his friend Gawain, Yvain asks his wife's permission to leave her for a time and join the entourage in order to fulfill his knightly duty in jousts and rounds of tournaments. Gawain's stated motivation is to prevent his friend from losing himself to the point of self-negation in his love for Laudine. The queen reluctantly grants him permission, but only on condition that he return to her exactly one year later. If he is even one day late, she will never forgive him and will despise him forever.
To prevent him from being late due to unexpected circumstances, Laudine gives Yvain a magic ring that will protect him from harm as long as he remembers her.Footnote 22 Yvain sets out on his journey, meets all the challenges he encounters along the way, wins all the prizes, and earns a reputation as an especially bold and fearless knight. Suddenly, however, he is struck by the realization that he had forgotten his promise to his wife and missed the day he was supposed to have returned. Just as he recalls this, a courier arrives with a message from the queen forbidding him to return to her and demanding that he send back her ring. The courier then forcibly removes the ring from Yvain's finger. At that moment Yvain goes mad, ripping off his clothing and tearing at his skin. He then flees, disappearing into the forest without a trace.Footnote 23 Yvain, his mind and memory gone, lives in the forest like a savage.Footnote 24 One day, he is found naked and asleep by a young girl and her lady, who recognize him by the scar on his face. The two cure him by using a magic ointment and Yvain comes back to his senses and is ashamed of his nakedness. Although his memory also returnsFootnote 25 he does not immediately go to seek out his wife.
From here until the end of the narrative, the plot covers many pages that describe in minute detail all the duels Yvain fights. While the circumstances differ from battle to battle, their ultimate goal—the defense of women, the helpless, and the oppressed—remains the same, in line with the ideals of chivalry. The battles repeatedly delay his return to his wife, Queen Laudine, and serve to postpone the climax—the meeting between them at the end of the story. Only once he has proven himself as a worthy knight does he return to her and earn her forgiveness, as they make up and are reunited. The queen forgives Yvain for pragmatic reasons grounded in the feudal context of the romance: her need to protect her subjects from harm. A magical spring bordering her kingdom causes a severe storm every time a stranger pours water on the stone next to it, and a fearless knight, in this case Yvain, is needed to guard the spring and defend the queen's land.
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion is replete with topoi typical of this literature, as discussed above: the conflict between love and the chivalrous ideal of virtus; the revered lady and the ethos of courtly love; the knight's adventures and duels that postpone his return in time to his wife; the motif of transformation; and the Christian chivalrous ethos of helping the weak and defenseless. Fairies and magical objects are also typical features, evidence of vestiges of Celtic legends. What is unique in Yvain, from the comparative perspective of this article, is the way in which the three motifs of the ring, the spring, and the loss of memory all appear in “The Ring” as well.Footnote 26
The ring appears repeatedly throughout the Yvain narrative. It makes its owner invisible, and at the start of the narrative indirectly helps Yvain win the queen's heart.Footnote 27 The ring gives its owner immunity in battle, and functions as both the reason for the rift between Yvain and Laudine as well as the impetus for their reunion. The quest to win the queen's love is thus framed by the ring motif.Footnote 28 As for the function of the spring within the narrative, Yvain's first test as a knight takes place by the spring. Yvain, despite having killed Laudine's husband, known as the “knight of the spring,” in a duel, falls in love with her and wins her heart.Footnote 29 It is from the spring that he returns to the queen and ultimately receives her forgiveness. Yvain uses the spring to cause a storm so severe that Laudine has no choice but to take him back in order to have him serve as protector of her land.Footnote 30 The idea of the spring as a locus for terrible, sudden storms that, when spent, transform into idyllic scenes of beauty, is well documented in Celtic sources and contributes to the fantastic nature of the romance.Footnote 31 The final motif is the magical loss of memory, closely tied to the motif of madness in the romance, which renders the character anonymous and unknown.Footnote 32 This is a vital liminal stage in the process of returning to the beloved Laudine and the values and culture that she represents, especially the love ethos. Anonymity, which is a kind of “forgetting,” also characterizes Yvain's duel with Gawain, as well as the image of Yvain, who is known only by his appellation “the Knight of the Lion,” rather than by his name. It is with this appellation that his wife Laudine agrees to take him back, before she has actually recognized him as her husband who betrayed her trust.Footnote 33
When comparing the two stories, the following similarities are evident: (1) A chosen protagonist receives a magic ring and is ordered to guard it carefully: in “The Ring,” Elijah gives Joseph the ring and finds him a bride, while in Yvain the ring is given to Yvain by his wife, the queen; (2) The protagonist fails in his task and is found unworthy: Joseph lets down his guard and thus is responsible for the loss of the ring, and Yvain forgets his pledge to return to his wife on the set date; (3) The protagonist forgets his past and his personality and outward appearance are transformed: Joseph is “tired and exhausted, battered and tortured,” Yvain is penniless, hungry, naked, and animalistic; (4) At a certain stage, the protagonist returns to himself through magical means: Joseph finds the ring in a fish, and Yvain is anointed with magical ointment; (5) The protagonist must undergo a series of trials aimed at testing his worth, which repeatedly postpones the resolution; (6) The “happy end” in both stories comes with the protagonist's reunion with his wife. It should further be noted that the transformation of the protagonist, either when he becomes a scholar in the Jewish story or proves himself worthy as a knight in the romance, occurs near a spring. In the Jewish story, the loss of memory also occurs near a spring. In both narratives, the protagonist undergoes a rite of passage, a reconsolidation of his former identity as a scholar/knight manifested in his liminal status during the period of his loss of memory.
Although “The Ring” makes no direct reference to Chrétien's romance, either in its use of proper names or the region where the plot is situated, several parallels between the Jewish story and Chrétien's Yvain bolster the case for the affinity between the two works.Footnote 34 Both stories embed the plot in a collective milieu—the community that encircles Joseph and his family and that he leaves at the time of crisis and returns to at the end,Footnote 35 and the court of King Arthur, from which the knights set out and to which they periodically return.Footnote 36 Further similarities may be noted in the descriptions of the protagonist and his wife enjoying themselves in the country. In the Jewish story this is the background for the loss of the ring, because the protagonist is distracted away from his Torah studies.Footnote 37 In the romance, this feature of courtly culture is an example of how Yvain is overwhelmed by the pleasures of his love for Laudine and forgets his knightly duties.Footnote 38 In both works, fast friends compete against one another on the basis of a mutual agreement: in the Jewish story, the two suitors make their way together to the rabbi's home to win the hand of his daughter and agree to accept the outcome, whatever it is, while in the Chrétien text one of the climaxes of the story is the fierce and prolonged duel between Yvain and Gawain, who fight each other as champions of rival sisters over the issue of inheritance. After deciding that it would be pointless to continue the duel because they are too evenly matched, the two confess their love for each other and each insists on the right to declare the other the victor (186–90, vv. 6229–381).
The unique rules of hospitality as practiced in a particular place is yet another shared element. In the Jewish story, the rabbi declares himself to be the exclusive host of every guest in the city as part of his strategy to find a new husband for his daughter. In the romance, Yvain is treated as an honored guest by the king and his lovely daughter. When he desires to continue on his journey, he is told that the special rules of hospitality in the castle demand that he fight and defeat two demons, a seemingly hopeless task, as a condition of his release.Footnote 39 Finally, the motif of the horse is notable as a means for characterizing the protagonist in each of the stories. Joseph says he will accompany the two suitors only if he is given a proper horse to ride. A discussion ensues, and ultimately, the suitors agree to buy him a “fine horse” and promise him a fair wage and special treatment (“good company” in the words of the text). The extensive description of this seemingly trivial situation and the compromise Joseph forces on his potential employers express the narrator's recognition of Joseph's unique situation and his advantage over them. Joseph says that he needs the horse to make the journey easier, but implicit in the omniscient narrator's perspective is that Joseph is worthy of a fine horse because of his wisdom and personality, notwithstanding his current status. The image of the knight on a horse in duels and tournaments is not surprising in Chrétien's romance, but its presence in the Jewish story marks Joseph's status—thus creating a compelling parallel.
Poetics, Aesthetics, and “Horizons of Expectation”
In addition to the thematic parallels, the works share a poetics that addresses their readerships’ horizons of expectation, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. This can be seen in the interlaced episodic structure, although it is more pronounced in Chrétien's romance, since it is substantially longer.Footnote 40 The Jewish story moves between a number of plot lines: the transformations that occur in Joseph and the events that happen to him, the developments in the rabbi's house in the wake of Joseph's sudden disappearance, and the events involving the two suitors making their way to the rabbi's house. The frequent transitions between episodes are marked by linking phrases such as, “And the young man Joseph …” (inserted between the mourning episodes in the rabbi's home and the events that occurred to Joseph at the spring), and “And now we shall cease talking about him and talk a bit about his father-in-law <and his wife> so sad” (inserted between the spring episode and the episode involving the suitor competition), as well as “And Joseph remained and bought for himself …” (inserted between the suitor competition and the episode of the ring found inside the fish).Footnote 41
A further parallel is that of genre, expressed not in the extent to which the Jewish story and the romance comply with unambiguous genre norms, but rather in the extent to which they depart from them. Genre distinctions, notes Hans Robert Jauss, are not very helpful when dealing with medieval prose, which often departs from formalistic conventions at the same time as it is firmly grounded in genre rules. This expands the boundaries of the genre, while remaining within the medieval readers’ “horizons of expectation.”Footnote 42 The Jewish story is not a romance, as its modest length and Jewish values attest, but, as discussed above, it does contain certain features of the romance. It is not an exemplum, because the didactic message in the epilogue about the great reward awaiting those who perform even a single commandment, such as honoring one's parents, is an addendum that has no basis in the process and structure of the story as a whole, although it does contain exemplar features, as a more worthy alternative to the French romance in the eyes of the narrator.Footnote 43 The story can thus be defined as a novellenmärchen, a hybrid combination of the fairy tale and the novella.Footnote 44
Chrétien's romances do not express a uniform approach to love, although they do all make use of the motif of aristocratic love. In some cases, his romances are expressive of fin'amors (courtly love), a concept associated mainly with forbidden love, such as the tortuous love of a troubadour for his lord's lady, love that is not necessarily ever consummated. Sometimes they are grounded in the ethos of chivalrous love, which also allows for love that is fulfilled by marriage. Yvain and other romances, such as Cligés and Erec and Enide, are focused on love that aspires to the marriage of the lovers, as compared to Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, which justifies the forbidden love of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur.Footnote 45 While the latter addresses conventional notions of romance, such as in Tristan and Iseult, the former deviates from them. The diverse, even contrasting, perceptions of love that Chrétien puts forward in his romances, especially in light of what they share, contribute to the widening of the boundaries of romance as a genre that offers different possibilities.Footnote 46 When comparing the Jewish story to Chrétien's Yvain, it would appear that the genre ambivalence in both works is grounded in the readers’ horizon of expectations, and expresses a medieval aesthetic taste.
The Reception of the Story in Italy
Yvain, Erec, and Perceval are the three Chrétien romances that were widely read even beyond the French-speaking domains. By the first half of the fourteenth century, dozens of translations and adaptations existed in a variety of languages.Footnote 47 Given that Italy is the region where “The Ring” was copied and narrated, it is worthwhile to examine the development of the Chrétien tradition in Italy.
At the turn of the thirteenth century, a period prior to the Italian literary renaissance, in the Veneto, French was a language that was greatly admired as especially beautiful. As a result, the Venetian vernacular was often merged with French, producing new texts that deviated from their French sources. Thus, it was from the Veneto that Carolingian literature first began to penetrate the rest of Italy. And it was in the Veneto—in Verona, Treviso, Padua, Ferrara, and Bologna—that a rich Franco-Venetian literature was created in the fourteenth century.Footnote 48 In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, French prose romances such as Prose en Tristan and the Lancelot-Grail cycle, all of which were based on Chrétien's verse romances and various versions of Tristan, were copied in Italy on an almost commercial scale, and then often translated into the Franco-Venetian dialect and adapted. In addition to these texts, there were also more subtle traces of verse romances by Chrétien and others, by means of allusions and the integration of prominent characters (including allusions to Yvain, the Knight of the Lion) from these works into later ones.Footnote 49
The extensive reception of French literature and language in northern Italy, a phenomenon that Keith Busby calls “cultural colonization,”Footnote 50 can be explained by several causes: a multilingual society, marriage between families of the merchant class and nobles that led to far greater acceptance of French-Arthurian romances, and the broad popularity of prose romance among the lower classes of society as well as upper classes.Footnote 51 The wide range of the Franco-Venetian or Franco-Italian literary trend (as noted above) in the period congruent to when the story in MS JTS Rab. 1164 was copied may explain the appearance of “The Ring” in Italy and its relationship to Chrétien's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. Whether the manuscript was written at the same time as the story or is a copy of an earlier manuscript, it seems such an earlier manuscript would not have predated MS JTS Rab. 1164 by much.Footnote 52
Various articles in the first part of Arthur of the Italians (edited by Gloria Allaire and Regina Psaki) examine the transition of Arthurian materials from France to Italy, while the second part of the book discusses the Arthurian foundations of works in the Italian vernacular. In both parts of the book, a number of additional points relevant to the current study are noted: (1) There was a tendency to adapt the original French narrative to the aesthetic, ethical, and political expectations of the Italian audience, while at the same time maintaining its affinity to the French source material.Footnote 53 In this way, the Jewish story of “The Ring” addresses Jewish values, but also preserves salient motifs found in Yvain, as well as a similar narrative sequence as the second half of the romance; (2) The poetics of interlacing (conjure) was typical of the Italian romances,Footnote 54 and is a feature of “The Ring” as well, as discussed above, even though entire episodes from Yvain are missing from the story, perhaps simply in order to keep it briefer;Footnote 55 (3) Franco-Italian prose literature tended to consist of short stories as well as longer works, which were based on episodes taken from the French romances, to which they allude.Footnote 56 This trend is consistent with the Jewish “Ring” story, which was based on episodes from Yvain, and developed as a short narrative.
The typology characteristic of Franco-Venetian literature, involving copies, translations, and adaptations of Arthurian literature, was also present in the Jewish literature of Italy. Examples include the fragmented romance Melekh Artus (King Arthur), which is a translation-adaptation of Mort Artu and Estoire de Merlin that was copied in Umbria/Tuscany,Footnote 57 as well as the early sixteenth-century Yiddish romance Bovo d'Antona by Elye Bokher, derived, as Claudia Rosenzweig demonstrates, from the Franco-Venetian tradition of the Buovo d'Antona that was well known in Italy throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote 58 Once Yvain was adapted into a Franco-Venetian dialect, it may have made its way to Italian Jews in written, or more probably, oral versions.
What is the function of a short story like the one under discussion here, with its complex links to French romance and Franco-Venetian literature on the one hand and the Jewish world of the narrator and his readership on the other? To what extent do they work together to create an integral whole? To better explore these questions, it is important to understand further the unique perspective of the scribe/narrator, as a representative of an ethnic entity to which he belonged and within which he had a clear role to play. This was the perspective he brought when he decided to engage with the non-Jewish cultural processes around him.
The Story in Its Jewish Sociohistoric Context
The Jewish minority in Italy interacted naturally with Christian society, living together as they did in a shared cultural expanse. Yet this did not compromise their own sense of self and community. Rather, the cultural and social patterns of Italian Christian society were the context against and through which Italian Jewry forged its own identity—constructed, formed, and reformed in a dialogue of difference and sameness with the Christian society around it. As Robert Bonfil frames the issues:
My purpose has been to present the history of the Jews of Italy … from the point of view … of a historical subject who, having consciously opted to affirm his own diversity, faced the problem of defending it and giving it a meaning from which all residual tension and alienation had been expunged. A “history seen from the inside” is obviously not a history of isolation. Rather, it is a history of coming to awareness of the Self in the act of specular reflection of the Other, by which I mean a reflection of oneself in the Other as a mirror.Footnote 59
Bonfil further notes that this perception of Jewish identity as a religious identity continues the circumstance that prevailed in the Middle Ages, and it is in this context that the first harbingers of secularism, already evident in the Renaissance, should be seen. Whereas during the Renaissance Christians gradually separated secular from religious thought, Jews followed the opposite course by seeking to incorporate secular thinking into religious expressions of Jewish identity. Thus, Jewish culture—as reflected and contextualized by the surrounding Italian culture—remained firmly committed to its role of affirming Jewish self-identity.Footnote 60
Bonfil brings examples from various spheres, such as the conservative content of Jewish education on the one hand, as compared to certain formal and technical aspects related to the formulation of certificates and diplomas of rabbinical ordination, which were actually inspired by non-Jewish universities, on the other. For the purpose of our discussion, his observations on literature are especially relevant. Jews selectively borrowed literary genres and motifs, just as they did other norms and conventions of Italian literature. They borrowed theologically “neutral” forms and content and merged them with the biblical and postbiblical tradition. An example of this is Maḥbarot by Immanuel the Roman (1265–1335). Inspired by Dante's “Hell and Eden,” Maḥbarot adopted certain forms from the Italian poetry of the period, but is also laden with allusions to talmudic and mishnaic literature, as well as to medieval Jewish philosophy, especially Maimonides.Footnote 61
Issues of identity, such as those discussed by Bonfil, are closely connected to linguistic choices. This is a point made by Maria Modena in her survey of the spoken languages of the Jews of Italy from the late medieval period to modern times.Footnote 62 For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against the background of the Emancipation, Judeo-Italian was disdained because Jews sought to distance themselves from anything that set them apart from other people. In the pre-Renaissance period, on the other hand, examples of writing in Judeo-Italian are hard to find, because Hebrew, considered the sacred language, was seen as the only worthy means of written expression, some documental evidence of written translations from Hebrew to Judeo-Italian notwithstanding.Footnote 63 In the sixteenth-century Renaissance, however, Judeo-Italian, used in written texts such as derashot, sifre miẓvot, and paraphrases of the megillah and other Purim texts, gained the status of a “semispoken” language, which was not really evidence of a spoken language. Hebrew expressions in these texts, familiar from prayer and Bible reading but not understood, were ready to penetrate the everyday lexicon.Footnote 64 In the background of these semispoken instances there was “an ignorance of Hebrew [among the reading public of these texts] stemming from a tendency towards secularization and a breakdown of the barriers separating Jews from the non-Jewish world.…”Footnote 65 The changing status of Judeo-Italian as a spoken language worthy of use in writing as well is thus consistently connected with definitions and perceptions of self-identity among the Jews of Italy.
The study of “The Ring,” written in Hebrew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, presumably in the context of Franco-Venetian literature, demonstrates that Jews in Italy participated in the literary-cultural processes occurring all around, even as they continued to maintain their own distinct identity.Footnote 66 If the story indeed marks Jewish participation in Franco-Venetian phenomena, the Jews would also have needed to emphasize their Jewish identity as distinct from either the French or Italian. Just as Italian adaptors reworked the French texts that they copied, translating and adapting them to the political, social, and aesthetic contexts relevant to their readership, the Jewish scribe did the same, with one important difference: he adapted the text to fit the religious Jewish context of his community. In his hands, the story became a medium for consolidating a Jewish identity. At this stage, the means of adaptation are revealed to be an essential element in a story that deviates from the externalized technique aimed at obscuring its links to the French romance. The “community” motif in the story is that salient element.
The Motif of Community and Its Contexts
Expressions of Jewish community life—the Jewish life-cycle events from birth to marriage and parenthood—in the story lend it an authentic local air, in addition to the more general religious motifs, such as the Sabbath and festivals. This is not to claim that the story is an accurate reflection of reality, but rather that it constitutes a perception of a collective Jewish identity within a community that lived as a minority within a non-Jewish majority society.Footnote 67
The importance of community in the life of Joseph and his family can be seen first of all from a statistical datum: the Hebrew word kahal (congregation or community) is repeated six times in the story: four times in the context of the circumcision ceremony, once in regard to the promenade taken by Joseph and his wife together with members of the community, and once in regard to the encounter between Joseph and the members of the congregation before he is revealed to be the lost son-in-law of their rabbi. The circumcision ceremony is held in the presence of the “entire community,” which expresses a sense of identification with the baby's father: “And the young man and the entire community greatly rejoiced.” The community is a source of strength and support for its members, which is also apparent from the participation of the entire community in the rabbi's joy at finding his missing son-in-law.Footnote 68 The synagogue is the religious and ceremonial center of the community, especially on the Sabbath, but also for special occasions such as the circumcision ceremony. It was in the synagogue that Joseph delivered his outstanding sermons “every week on the Sabbath”; it was there that the congregation enjoyed his pleasant voice as he led them in prayer; and it was there, in the synagogue, that he proved his identity as the son-in-law of the rabbi later in the story, just before being reunited with his wife. The community structure is evident even when the word kahal is not explicitly used. It is implicit from the function of the community rabbi as its leader and teacher. The story's “happy end” includes the recognition of Joseph as a great scholar and the fact that people come “from every side and every corner” to learn from him. Joseph's father-in-law, the rabbi, is also characterized as a community leader with the power to determine social behavior (namely, declaring that all guests must come to him).Footnote 69 In other words, the community is the primary social-religious institution that provides the framework for both daily life and outstanding events that constitute collective Jewish identity.
In addition, the community is the institution that defines the collective Jewish identity vis-à-vis the non-Jewish population. This is expressed when the setting of the plot moves from the familiar community to a different city. The two suitors competing for the hand of the rabbi's daughter stay over on their way in “a big city where there were many Jews.” The community is described in very general terms in comparison to the great detail provided about Joseph's community in the first part of the story. The guests’ sense of belonging to the Jewish collective is created simply by their being defined as Jews, especially because the unfamiliar community is large. This is arguably the reason why the two suitors decide to remain in this community over the Sabbath, in addition to the pragmatic consideration that they would be more likely to find a servant there willing to accompany them on their way. The attribute “Jewish” distinguishes between the members of the community and the other inhabitants of the city. The distinction between Jews and non-Jews is explicit when they arrive, later in the story, in the rabbi's city. They find accommodations until the Sabbath in “the home of a gentile, the owner of an inn outside the city,” perhaps because the members of the Jewish community refrain from hosting them due to the rabbi's injunction. The non-Jewish innkeeper is the first to recognize Joseph as the missing son-in-law and treats him with great respect, in a manner suggesting close familiarity and many years of good neighborly relations with the Jewish community.
The motif of community is an integral part of the plot of the story and lends it local authenticity, even if it is not evidence of particular concrete historical facts or settings. Its significance is in the perception of identity that it forges among its readers. The seeming paradox of Jewish society, which shares cultural activity and aesthetic tastes with the surrounding Christian society, but defines its religious identity as distinct from it, is embodied in the prominence of the motif of community in the story. The story gained acceptance not despite the non-Jewish French romance elements underlying it, but rather because of them. The “blend” of Jewish and non-Jewish raw material embedded in the story to make it authentic and meaningful represents the social and cultural experience in which identity was created within the tension of comparison and contrast with the Other, non-Jewish identity.
* * * * *
This close reading of “The Ring” demonstrates that it is possible to broaden our understanding of the complex cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews that took place throughout western Europe during the Middle Ages, in this particular instance with regard to the dialogue between French literature and its Jewish literary adaptations. The type of socioliterary research presented in this article is still in its infancy. As we widened the lens from the Hebrew story to the textual relationship with Chrétien's French romance, and from there to the socioliterary context of the Franco-Venetian trend in Italy and the sociohistorical context of Jewish cultural life in Italy, we discovered a complex relationship that led to a French romance being transformed into a Hebrew story for the use of the Italian Jewish community in the Middle Ages. It may be assumed that there are other stories, as yet unknown to us, that like “The Ring,” share a textual link with the French romances. These stories, once discovered, have the potential to open up unique channels of discussion regarding their specific ties to the society in which they were narrated and accepted. This tantalizing possibility warrants further study of manuscripts in Hebrew and western European vernaculars that might very well contain within their pages—one hopes—additional, as yet unknown stories from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
