PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Early Modern Yiddish literature presents a variety of genres and topics. Besides, the extant works, both in manuscript and print, attest of the existence of several ways of conceiving the book and reading it. In my lecture I shall try to show, through some examples – in particular from the Mayse-bukh –, how Ashkenazi Jews were looking for old and new books to copy, print, sell and read, and how they devised strategies of translations/adaptations of non-Jewish texts.

Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Dr. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts.In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Lecce, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Dr. Rosenzweig is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).