Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Romance

Caroline Gruenbaum is an editorial associate at the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She holds a PhD in Judaic Studies from New York University, where she was also affiliated with the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center.Annegret Oehme is an Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her PhD in 2016 from Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through the Carolina–Duke Graduate Program in German Studies.

In a seamlessly coordinated collection of essays, Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Romance seeks to refine the collective and continually evolving definitions of romance in medieval and early modern Europe via examinations of romance-inflected texts by Jewish authors. In their introduction, the volume’s editors, Caroline Gruenbaum and Annegret Oehme, propose inquiries into Jewish texts—outliers that draw on mainstream forms and themes—as particularly suited to the task of providing a fresh way to reevaluate and clarify the meanings of romance. The chapters that follow present thematically arranged studies ranging geographically from the Mediterranean to Northern France and Germany, linguistically from Hebrew to Judeo-Provençal to Yiddish, and temporally from the thirteenth through the early seventeenth centuries—an arrangement that engages chapters across these divides to highlight fruitful connections.[...]While its contributions are focused on specific works by Jewish authors in Jewish languages and intended for medieval and early modern Jewish readers, the upshot of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Romance is elegantly broader in scope: the collection offers today’s scholars and students of medieval and early modern Europe a fruitful lens for considering iterations of romance in a robust, comparative context that enriches our grasp of the multifarious European literary landscape. Further, by bringing together a variety of methodological and thematic approaches to romance, the volume is positioned to contribute to Jewish studies in a more complex and nuanced way than would a monograph concentrated on a specific text, genre, language, or geographical region. Taken together, the essays move beyond the now- stale method of offering examples of ways in which Jewish authors were intimately familiar with non-Jewish texts, forms, and themes to illustrate how romance actually functions in these settings, as Eli Yassif remarks in the afterword: “We no longer need to prove that Jewish literature used romance, but we must attempt to understand how and why it did it” (207)—and, in turn, to understand what such experiments can reveal about medieval romance writ large.

• "Introduction," by Annegret Oehme and Caroline GruenbaumPart I: Writing Beyond GenreEitan P. Fishbane: “The Zohar as Medieval Jewish Romance”Dana Fishkin: “Letters of Loathing: Immanuel of Rome and Romance Epistolary”Sara Offenberg: “Illuminated Knights and Tales of Romance in the Rothschild Miscellany”Part II: Is Jewish Romance Jewish?Tovi Bibring: “he Queen Nudatio, a Romanesque (?) Topos in Israel Caslari’s Roman d’Esther”Shamma Boyarin: “At the Court of the Demon King: The Story of the Jerusalemite and Chivalric Romance”Rella Kushelevsky: “King Artus as a Jewish Romance: Horizons of Expectation and Generic Configurations”Part III: Global NarrativesRuth von Bernuth: “A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed? Friendship, Love, and Loyalty in the Yiddish Seven Sages of Rome”Astrid Lembke: “Stealing back One’s Husband: The Yiddish Mayse mi-Danzek in the Context of Early Modern Cross-Dressing Narratives”Revital Refael-Vivante: “Romance Elements in Meshal haQadmoni by Isaac Ibn Sahula: A New Reading”"Afterword: Jewish Romance in Search of Identity," by Eli YassifSelect BibliographyIndex