While much early Yiddish literature belonged to pious genres, quasi-secular genres-epic, drama, and lyric-also developed. Jerold Frakes contends that the historical context of the emergence of Yiddish literature is an essential factor in any understanding of its cultural relevance in a time and place where Jewish life was defined by expulsions, massacres, and discriminatory legislation that profoundly altered European Judaism and shook the very foundations of traditional Jewish society.

Jean Baumgarten's Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, thoroughly revised from the first edition and translated into English, provides students and scholars of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern European cultures with an exemplary survey of the broad and deep literary tradition in Yiddish. Baumgarten conceives of his work as the study of an entire culture via its literature, and thus he conceives of literature in a broad sense: he begins with four chapters addressing pertinent issues of the larger cultural context of the literature and moves on to a consideration of the primary genres in which the culture is expressed (epic, romance, prose narrative, drama, biblical translation and commentary, ethical and moral treatises, prayers, and the broad range of literature of daily use - medical, legal, and historical). In the field of early Yiddish studies the book will be the standard of intellectual breadth and scholarly excellence for decades to come. In this second edition, the hundreds of text citations and bibliographical references that are the scholarly basis of the study have been verified, and the citations translated anew directly from the original source.

What does Yiddish have to do with German? It is a question that has perplexed Jews and Germans alike for centuries. The relationship between the two languages - both originating from a common source and from a common location - has often become a metaphor for the relationship of German and Jewish societies, a relationship whose fraught and complex history is one of the most important in the study not only of Jews, but of modern European history. The two languages and their literary cultures have continued their intimate and mutually nourishing relationship and exchange over the course of a millennium, as is documented even from the earliest substantial corpus of Yiddish texts (ca. 1382), while during the last four centuries the relationship can be seen surprisingly clearly and profoundly in a broad range of texts and genres. A reevalution of this fraught cultural relationship is the focus of the present volume, whose panoramic approach suggests that the study of German culture is essential for those who wish truly to understand Yiddish literary culture - and, even more provocatively, vice versa.