I Am a Friend to a Frog: From Hebrew Iberia to Yiddish Modernity

The Golden Age of medieval Hebrew poetry in Spain served as an inspiration for early Zionist intellectuals. The virtuosic poetry of figures such as Avraham and Moshe Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Ha-Levi, and Shlomo Ibn Gabirol was seen as an example of the possibility of creating a secular Jewish culture expressed in beautiful Hebrew. The literary achievements of medieval Spain were also discussed by early Yiddishists in the first decades of the twentieth century. While Zionist thinkers regarded the medieval Hebrew poets of Spain as models for a renewed Hebrew culture, the Yiddishists, who believed that Yiddish, and not Hebrew, should serve as the modern national Jewish language, sought a different narrative, one less centered on the Hebrew of these poets. Some of these Yiddishists also translated the medieval Spanish Hebrew poetry into Yiddish.

In this talk, I examine the role of such Yiddish translations and the reception of medieval Hebrew poetry within the ideological world of Yiddish culture. I do so by focusing on a single case study: the reception of the medieval drinking song Ki-khlot yeini (“When My Wine Was Consumed”). Attributed to the renowned Spanish poet Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, this humorous lament on the absence of wine appears in manuscripts as early as the fifteenth century. The poem experienced renewed interest at the beginning of the twentieth century: it was included in modern Hebrew anthologies of the Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry in Spain and was also sung and performed in the Yishuv in Palestine. At the same time, the poem attracted the attention of Yiddishists. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, scholars and writers within Yiddish culture, such as Israel Zinberg and Israel Jacob Schwarz, translated the poem as part of a broader engagement with the Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry in Spain.

This talk tells the story of the Yiddish translations of this poem and explores their role in shaping a new Yiddishist narrative of medieval Hebrew poetry.