Aya Elyada's book explores the less well-known “cousin” of Christian Hebraism, Christian Yiddishism. Christian interest in Western Yiddish began in the sixteenth century and continued until the second half of the eighteenth century. It was by and large a Protestant endeavor that was limited in scope to German lands, often undertaken by academicians and theologians.

Elyada's work is a welcome addition to the field, as it broadens the scope of scholarship about Christian interest in Judaica, Jewish-Christian relations, and early modern ethnography. Her focus on Yiddish highlights the importance of language as a facet of Christian interest in Jews. Like Christian Hebraism, Christian Yiddishism was motivated by missionary aims, as well as by a theologically-driven interest in Jewish texts and in contemporary Judaism. It was also fueled by early modern interest in vernacular languages, especially among Protestants.

Elyada's focus on a spoken language allows readers glimpses of often impenetrable and mostly undocumented conversations that took place between Jews and Christians. While this is not an explicit focus of her work, Elyada includes several fascinating examples of these exchanges. In some cases, Christian missionaries who were well versed in Yiddish struck up conversations with Jews in inns and taverns. These missionaries were encouraged to mix “specifically Jewish terms” into their conversations in order to lure Jews into conversations (33–34). In a wonderful example, Elyada describes a polemical exchange between a traveling missionary and a Jewish bookseller in 1734. After having discussed the Yiddish books intended for women “to read on the Sabbath,” the missionary recounts having argued that it was a “grave sin on account of the men, and especially of the rabbis, that the poor people are not instructed in works of Jewish law” (40–41). This Protestant “take” on the adaptation and translation into Yiddish, for Jews, of secular German works opens our eyes to the range of topics which conversations between Jews and Christians may have covered.

The oral exchanges between Jews and Christians are also alluded to in Elyada's discussion of manuals designed to educate Christian merchants in Yiddish (chapter 5). Scholars such as Wagenseil claimed that knowledge of Yiddish was essential for gentile merchants, since it was in that language that Jews “conduct their correspondence, write their promissory notes, [and] produce their receipts” (83). These manuals, mostly dating from the eighteenth century, included lessons on the Jewish calculation of the year, the numerical system of the Hebrew alphabet, sample promissory notes, Yiddish terms for money, weights, and measures, and sample conversations between merchants. Such texts were often overtly polemical, and stressed that Yiddish could be used as a language of deception; nevertheless, they highlight the spoken nature of many Jewish-Christian interactions.

Elyada's book is divided into three parts, each of which deals with a different aspect of Christian Yiddishism. The first part focuses on the theological reasons motivating Christian scholars to master this Jewish vernacular. Yiddish “provided Protestant scholars with new possibilities for the pursuit of older purposes” (77), including converting the Jews (chapter 1), ridiculing Judaism (chapter 2), demonstrating that Jews were blasphemous (chapter 3), and mastering Hebrew and Judaica by using Yiddish translations of the Bible and of Jewish biblical commentaries (chapter 4). Elyada explores individual texts from the first Yiddish translation of the New Testament in 1540 through the period of the Pietist revival, and also discusses the institutionalization of Christian Yiddishism pioneered by Heinrich Callenberg, who established the first course in Yiddish in a German university in 1729. Her discussion is conducted against the larger backdrop of developments in the early modern world. For example, Elyada contextualizes the use of the Yiddish vernacular as the primary vehicle used by German missionaries to convert Jews by pointing to the Protestant interest in vernacular and scripture. She also contends that whereas Jesuit missions to China and India could make use of local rituals, encouraging syncretism as a vehicle for embracing Christianity, this method was impossible to use to convert Jews, since Jewish rituals had a negative theological value in Christianity. These factors predisposed the missionaries to use a vernacular language in their proselytizing.

Elyada links these four theological aspects of Christian Yiddishism by arguing that the study of Yiddish was part of what demystified Jewish tradition to Christians in the early modern period. Following the work of Ronnie Hsia, she claims that in the wake of the Reformation, Jews were increasingly seen as human, rather than diabolical. At the same time, she demonstrates that Christian Yiddishists maintained and propagated a disparaging attitude toward Judaism. The first part of this argument, which suggests that before the early modern period the “Jewish world” was “closed” to Christians, is both surprising and somewhat unconvincing, precisely because Elyada's focus is on a spoken language. Vernacular oral exchanges between Jews and Christians had always been possible, making for permeable rather than closed boundaries. Elyada's assessment of Christian scholars' condescension toward Judaism in general and toward Yiddish specifically is thoroughly researched, and appears elsewhere in the book as well.

Part two explores some of the “secular” motivations behind Christian study of Yiddish. In chapter 5, discussed above, Elyada focuses on the interest among Christian businessmen and merchants in mastering relevant elements of Yiddish. The manuals described above often painted the Jewish merchants as conniving and fraudulent, attributes that, as Elyada aptly notes, were reinforced by theology. Elyada's description of these printed materials underscores the birth of a new genre, in which the “fraudulent” practices of the Jews were exposed to their would-be Christian “victims.” Works aimed at a popular audience were printed, and were even sold out in some cases, leading to new and revised editions. Elyada helpfully situates the growing interest in these manuals in the context of the wider economic history of Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Jews shifted from money lending to commerce.

In chapter 6, Elyada expands her discussion to include the perception of Yiddish as a language of criminals. The linguistic affinities between Rotwelsch (the language of German criminals) and Yiddish, the increasing numbers of Jewish poor, and the presence of Jewish bandits all reinforced the notion that Yiddish was a language of criminals, and that Jews supported criminal activity.

Part three of Elyada's book explores the power dynamics inherent in Christian use of Yiddish. In chapter 7, Elyada describes the Christian view of Yiddish as a “pitiful mishmash” and as a perverted version of German. In chapter 8, she returns to the use of Yiddish as the language used for converting the Jews, pointing here to the reluctance among missionaries and scholars to write in Yiddish, and their preference for writing in German using Hebrew letters. They considered Yiddish to be unintelligible, and saw their use of German as a sign of cultural patriotism. In chapter 9, Elyada discusses Christian Yiddishism in the context of Christian Hebraism. In an insightful discussion about language and power, she demonstrates that Yiddish was used as a tool for distinguishing between Christians and Jews. Christian Hebraists painted themselves as the Jews' heirs to a pure Hebrew language, whereas they painted the Jews as using a corrupted, inferior language. This served to dissociate contemporary Jews from biblical Jews. Elyada concludes from these three chapters that Christian Yiddishism “was part of a Christian attempt to achieve intellectual domination of Jewish culture, inextricable from their ambition to assert control over the Jewish minority in the German lands” (193).

One weakness of this study is its sometimes cumbersome organization. Similar topics (such as the Judenmission) are treated in both chapters 1 and 8. Its multiple overt references to theory may overwhelm an undergraduate reader. Nevertheless, Elyada's book lends crucial insights into Jewish and early modern history, and highlights the importance of language as a tool for understanding society. In the conclusion, Elyada suggests future research into the similarities between Christian Yiddishists' perceptions of Yiddish and those of Jewish maskilim, who similarly looked askance at this Jewish vernacular. The field can clearly anticipate further important work from Aya Elyada.