A Note on an Old Jewish Bibliotaphos

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Abstract

In the editio princeps of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) are circa 250 stories. The last one is a translation/reworking of a story that appears in Sefer Hasidim, and is about a bibliotaphos, someone who is ready to bury his books, but not to lend them. In this short paper, I try to show the differences between the Yiddish and the Hebrew source, suggesting that these differences can hint at historical and social transformations of the reading public of Yiddish texts in the Early Modern era.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)49-57
Number of pages9
JournalZutot
Volume17
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019.

Funding

This article is part of a research project supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1088/14). I am grateful to Erika Timm, Pavel Sladek, Avriel Bar-Levav, Anna Linda Callow and Daniel Abrams for their generous help, and to Sara Tropper for the revision of the English. The epigraph is taken from Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting,’ in idem, Illuminations, edited with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York 1985) 59–67, here 64.

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation1088/14

    Keywords

    • Bibliotaphos
    • Early modern yiddish
    • History of reading
    • Mayse-bukh
    • Old yiddish literature
    • Sefer hasidim

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