The two volumes are a carefully prepared and beautifully published edition and commentary, by Diana Matut, of two collections of Yiddish poems assembled sometime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Ms. opp. add. 4o 136 (the so-called Wallich manuscript) in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and (the earlier portion of) Ms. hebr. oct. 219 in the Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Why “poetry and music” (Dichtung und Musik)? Because the same poems appear to have been sung to well-known melodies preserved in German song books.
The Wallich manuscript contains fifty-seven texts (not all of them complete) and the Frankfurt manuscript ten, of which only the first five belong to the early seventeenth century—the same five appear to have been copied by the same scribe, hence their inclusion in the present edition. They were compiled or possibly even copied by or for Isaac Wallich from Worms and, in the nineteenth century, belonged to the library of Eliakim Carmoly in Frankfurt only to make their way after his death to the Bodleian and the Universitätsbibliothek.
Volume 1 of Dichtung und Musik is an edition of the texts of both manuscripts (1:50–507) with a transcription in Latin letters and the original Hebrew script for the Yiddish on facing pages. Preceding the edition are various sections on the history of the manuscripts, a description of their contents, and remarks on the edition; following it are indices of the persons, places, and specifically Hebrew and Aramaic lexical “components” in the two manuscripts. Volume 2 is a detailed commentary on both sets of texts (2:101–400), preceded by various sections on previous research on the manuscripts (notably, for the Wallich manuscript, a dissertation by Felix Rosenberg published, in 1888–1889, in the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland); the collection and its genesis, in particular, Isaac Wallich, song books and their domestic use, concordances between the poems in the two manuscripts and printed works from 1480 to 1640, the choice of texts as a reflection of the personal taste of the owner, their performance for various Jewish festivities within the family (weddings, circumcisions) or for holidays (Simḥat Torah, Purim, Pesaḥ), scattered evidence for Jewish “musicians” in German-speaking countries, and one major conclusion (2:59–61): the two collections testify to Jewish enthusiasm for music making and speak for Wallich as “a Jew embedded in a great musical-literary tradition” of Jewish-Christian origins. To these Matut adds an invaluable reconstruction of twenty-two melodies for the Yiddish texts after their counterparts in the German song books (2:63–76), melodies known in part from Lutheran chorales later used by Johann Sebastian Bach; and a discursus on the linguistic habitat of the Yiddish texts. Volume 2 closes with a detailed bibliography (2:409–46) and indices of persons, places, and topics.
Obviously, the most important part of the collection is the texts themselves, all but one of them strophic (with anywhere from two to thirty-five stanzas, though most range from seven to sixteen). They represent a major contribution to Yiddish literature. True, the majority draws from earlier German texts, but the transfer is not mechanical: Christian references are exchanged for Jewish ones. Thus “I thank you Christ, o son of God” (in “Warum betrübstu mich, mein junges herz,” Wallich, no. 25, stanza 13:1) becomes “I thank you, God, on the highest throne”; “When he was first baptized” (in “Ach, reicher got, fun höchem sal,” idem, no. 22, stanza 2:2) becomes “When he first escaped”; “roast pork” (in “Wu sol ich hin-keren,” idem, no. 34, stanza 9:1) becomes “fat roast”; and “a pious man of Christ” (in “Wilhelmes fun Nase'e,” about William of Nassau, d. 1627; idem, no. 55, stanza 5:4) becomes “a pious man of honor.” Beyond references to contemporary Jews, e.g., “I wish I knew as much as Rabbi Joseph Ashkenazi [d. 1577]” and “Oh, if I were only as rich as Mordecai Meisel [d. 1577]” (in “Min hameẓar, ich tu' an-rufen got,” after Psalms 118:5; Wallich, no. 13, stanza 11:3–4), the poems illustrate the many topics current in the Yiddish Volkslied: love songs, riddles, wedding songs, psalm adaptations, drinking songs, ballads, dance songs, folk tales, Purim songs, and last but not least, Tageslieder, a genre known from medieval literature under the name alba (“dawn”)—the pain of separation when, at dawn, lovers must separate (idem, no. 29). Of particular interest are the eleven texts of Jewish authors with distinctly Jewish themes. One is “a silly play about a fellow named Jeklein” for Purim (Wallich, no. 11); another (no. 46) berates the parnassim of the congregation—“the way they treated the poor is an utter disgrace … Our God and God of our fathers, if our highest parnassim Hirsch Schwarz and Schmerle Schuplech wanted to keep us alive, they wouldn't have made us suffer such great pain”; a third (no. 53) concerns the riddles it was the custom to recite on the eight-day Festivals—the author identifies himself in the last line as Rabbi Schlomo of Prague; in “Min hamezar” (no. 13; see above), a paraphrase on the psalms of the Hallel, Yiddish interchanges with Hebrew (“khi gabar alenu chasdo … kol hagojim … Jeruscholajim … lo amoth … haschem jisbarach,” etc.); “Ein weser flist vor Bovilon” is a reworking of Psalms 137; a Purimspiel in prose (115 lines long; no. 2), “the so-called Jonaspiel” (from the book of Jonah), is matched elsewhere by a Purim song (no. 7) that describes the eating and drinking of yeshivah baḥurim; be forewarned to requite a miẓvah (“If someone did you good … your heart should be heavy if you felt no gratitude”; no. 13); one wedding song (no. 43) starts with “I'll open my mouth in sweet song to honor the ḥatan and thank the kallah; I'll come to the point,” namely, that despite their joy “the fear of God is where everything begins”; and another one (no. 30) acknowledges there being “no greater joy on earth than two persons loving one another … the ḥatan and kallah,” but lest they forget, they should take to heart the need to help the poor.
The collection raises questions yet to be answered. One knows little about the cultural activities of the German Jewish elite in the early modern era. Isaac Wallich, to all appearances, was an affluent Jew with a fervent interest in collecting Yiddish poetry and having it performed to certain melodies. But how was it performed? By a single voice? By a group of voices? To accompanying instruments? If Wallich and presumably others were so keen on having poetry sung or played, why is there no evidence of contemporary Jewish art music, i.e., music composed for two or more voices, in German-speaking countries? Certainly, Wallich et alii could have covered the expenses of training budding Jewish musicians in composition, and one wonders, if they were so influenced by German linguistic and musical norms, what prevented them from doing so. Why is it, by contrast, that in early modern Italy where Jews were increasingly ghettoized and subject to burdensome socio-economic restrictions one finds records of ebrei who distinguished themselves not only as musicians but also as composers? Is it because they sometimes worked for the courts and thus enjoyed patronage? True, there is only one published collection of Hebrew “songs” in Italy, Salamone Rossi's Songs by Solomon (1623), and only one partially preserved manuscript of Hebrew “songs” composed perhaps for the “academy of music” that Rabbi Leon Modena founded in Venice in the late 1620s. But Rossi and other Italian Jewish composers left their mark elsewhere, in a number of collections of secular music: like the songs to which the poems in the Wallich and Frankfurt manuscripts appear to have been sung, the works in these collections were modeled, in style and form, on Italian prototypes. How does one unravel this conundrum of German Jewish inactivity in art music?
