Early modern Yiddish literature offers an important window onto popular Jewish culture, which has been studied far less than early modern Jewish “high” culture. Yiddish, the Jewish vernacular of Central and Eastern Europe, was spoken throughout Ashkenazi society and was widely read across social strata by those who lacked proficiency in Hebrew. Yet while the significant corpus of early modern Yiddish literature has received growing attention—especially in Israel and Germany, by scholars like Chava Turniansky, Sara Zfatman, Erika Timm and others—the study of this literature has not extended to include a study of its readers, who were mostly “uneducated” by the standards of formal Jewish education.
Jeremy Dauber—one of the few American scholars whose work extends to Yiddish literature composed before the late nineteenth century—turns to this reading audience in his latest book. He demonstrates how an innovative reading of pre-modern Yiddish literature can teach us about popular Ashkenazi culture and society. His thoughtful investigation starts from a simple but important question: how did contemporary readers absorb the texts they read? By focusing on narratives about the supernatural— narratives that negotiate literary belief and skepticism—Dauber examines these readers' literary capacities at a level beyond what is typically assumed for a popular audience. He then seeks to draw more general inferences about their knowledge structures and intellectual skills.
Underlying this approach is the assumption of a close writer-reader relationship. Given such a relationship, it should be possible to reconstruct the early modern author's (or compiler's or editor's) sense of the abilities of contemporary readers by examining the text for clues. In an elaborate theoretical introduction (chapter 1), Dauber presents five literary modes that he uses as analytic tools: allusion, parody, moral polemic, allegory, and narratology. A Yiddish author's use of these reveals how he intended the text to function, and what capacities or knowledge he assumed his audience had. An analysis of the literature in terms of genre consciousness and conventions, ideological concerns, and contemporary social and political practices also sheds light on authorial intentions and audience reception.
Dauber's theoretical approach is paired with, and complicated by, an acute awareness of the complexity of the Yiddish reading audience. Members of this audience possessed a wide range of interpretative capacities, at various levels of comprehension. As Dauber rightly stresses, the division lines of “elite” and “popular” audiences were rather murky (11). The consumers of Yiddish literature included an oral audience that did not have direct access to the written text at all (cf. p. 16); but it also included elite readers (“slumming elites”) that read Yiddish literature despite their facility with Hebrew (22).
After fifty pages of methodological preliminaries, often quite abstract, Dauber turns in chapters 2 to 6 to a discussion of specific texts, based on his theoretical approach. Before delving into his Yiddish texts, however, Dauber offers a comparative case study in chapter 2, in which he makes use of scholarly work in the more fully developed field of early modern English literature. The two famous texts he considers, which were contemporaneous with the Yiddish works he analyzes, are Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Macbeth. He focuses on encounters with the supernatural in these two plays to examine the criteria popular audiences used to determine whether a supernatural subject (a devil, demon, dybbuk, or ghost) was “real” or “fictional.” Both English works, according to Dauber, testify to a “skeptical approach within a structure of belief, borne out by an investigative process” (54), a process that includes a consideration of extra-textual knowledge (e.g., genre conventions, general discourse, and experiences).
The main body of the book is composed of individual literary analyses of four Yiddish narrative texts (or groups of texts), spanning different genres and dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are the following: the animal fables of Seyfer Mesholim (chapter 3), the folktale Mayse fun Vorms (chapter 4), dybbuk tales, with The Tale of the Evil Spirit in Koretz during the Time of War in particular (chapter 5), and the chivalric Tale of Briyo and Zimro (chapter 6). Dauber's intelligent and original readings of these well-known texts, with a careful eye to small but revealing details, testify to a Jewish reading audience sensitive to nuance. Despite most of the readers' limited fluency in Hebrew and their lack of access to biblical and rabbinic texts, they must have been, in Dauber's view, competent in logical thinking and complex analysis.
Chapter 3 focuses on the Yiddish fable tradition as found in the 1697 Seyfer Mesholim (a revised version of the earlier Ku-bukh, or “Book of Cows”). Dauber reads the fables and their morals as a pietistic quest, calling for acceptance of existing social hierarchal structures and suppressing revolutionary tendencies. Genre conventions (Hebrew elements, rhyme schemes, the narrator's presence, woodcuts) serve as analytical tools for determining the audience's intellectual capacities and their identification and manipulation by the anthologizer of the collection. Mayse fun Vorms (Northern Italy, first half of the sixteenth century), analyzed in chapter 4, is woven around the folkloric motif of a marriage/sexual relationship between a man and a she-demon, well-known in both Jewish and Christian traditions. Dauber argues that by drawing on the readers' allusive and symbolic understanding, the work makes use of the theme of sexual desire to address economic problems and class struggles. Chapter 5 deals with stories about spirit possession by dybbuks, focusing on The Tale of the Evil Spirit in Koretz (probably printed in Prague in the 1660s). While Dauber generally relies on a “historicized and contextualized writer and reader” (44), in this chapter he adopts a comparative approach. Making use of Christian discourse about witchcraft, he suggests reading the Yiddish tale as an allegory of socially acceptable and unacceptable gender roles. In chapter 6, Dauber analyzes the romance of Briyo and Zimro (dated to 1580/85), also through the lens of gender, focusing on the problematic construction of Jewish masculinity.
In the Demon's Bedroom takes the reader step by step through complex methodological deliberations and literary analyses. The book owes its accessibility not only to its clear and well-organized presentation. Among the book's strengths is the explication of complicated issues by relating them to issues in more familiar contexts (including the TV series Law and Order). It would have improved the book's readability, however, if some discussions of material not directly essential to the argument had been relegated to the notes, rather than placed parenthetically in the main body of the text.
In the Demon's Bedroom makes an important contribution to the field of early modern Yiddish studies. Analyzing early modern Yiddish literature within the framework of cultural studies enriches a field that has long been dominated by linguistics, philology, bibliography, and literary analysis with a thematic or comparative approach. (Another contribution in this new direction is Shlomo Berger's Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective, 2013.) Although Dauber emphasizes that his book is not a historical, but a literary, work, he masterfully shows why the study of Yiddish literary texts is important for history. And his theoretical work will undoubtedly prove useful for future studies of early modern Yiddish literature, providing tools for understanding the texts' meaning, function, and reception in the early modern world.
