Yiddish Literature and German-Jewish Nostalgia: The TSENE-RENE in Imperial and Weimar Germany

• In Event: Yiddish and German in Modern Jewish Culture(s): Ideological and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

The TSENE-RENE, or the “Women’s bible,” was the best-known and most beloved book of Old Yiddish literature. Composed around the end of the 16th century, it achieved immediate popularity and extreme longevity, undergoing over 300 editions up to the present. Although the TSENE-RENE was originally intended for both men and women, it was used primarily by women as reading material on the Sabbath and holidays. By the early 19th century, with the gradual decline of Yiddish in the German-Jewish communities, the TSENE-RENE ceased to appear in the German lands. But this once very popular Yiddish book was by no means forgotten. Rather, it gained a “second life” as an object of translation, examination, and discussion in the works of 19th- and early 20th-century German-Jewish scholars and men of letters.
The first decades of the 20th century saw the expansion of the discourse on the TSENE-RENE in Germany, as Jewish women, too, entered the fray. The feminist and social activist Bertha Pappenheim, who translated the first book of the TSENE-RENE into German in 1930, is the most celebrated example. Yet other German-Jewish female intellectuals, such as literary scholar Bertha Badt-Strauss and the poet and philosopher Margarete Susman also contributed to the discourse. They held public lectures on the TSENE-RENE and published literary reviews on this FRAUENBIBEL in the German-Jewish periodicals of the time.
The discourse on the TSENE-RENE, which took place among Jewish men and women in Imperial and Weimar Germany, stands at the focus of my lecture. With selected prominent examples, I will show that two different kinds of nostalgia informed the entire discourse on the book, and highlight the ways in which the various understandings of the Jewish tradition and of gender roles helped shape the attitudes of modern German Jews towards this Old Yiddish masterpiece. By this, I aim to shed light on a little known chapter not only in modern German-Jewish history, but also in the REZEPTIONSGESCHICHTE of the TSENE-RENE in modern times.

Author

• Aya Elyada, Hebrew University of Jerusalem