von Bernuth, Ruth

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: The Apocrypha in Yiddish: Translating Biblical Literature in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Biblical literature was the most common reading material in the medieval and early modern world for Jews and Christians alike. Beginning in the fifteenth century, biblical texts multiplied through the invention of the printing press, as well as through Bible translations into the vernacular. The Protestant Reformation questioned the canonicity of the books of the Bible and suggested a new order for the Bible that included a new section incorporating the Apocrypha. The Bible and biblical literature in Yiddish are commonly seen as having been transmitted separately from the Christian tradition. There are, however, multiple Yiddish manuscripts and prints of various books of the Apocrypha, which prove to have been derived from the German-language Bible translations of the Reformation era, such as the Zürich Bible (1531) and the Luther Bible (1534/45). The dependencies of these Yiddish texts on German Protestant sources has been hitherto unnoticed, in spite of the wide circulation attained by the Yiddish editions in German-speaking lands, Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This book project, The Apocrypha in Yiddish, will examine these texts and the related dynamics of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-religious negotiations.

Ruth von Bernuth is a professor at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.