Claudia Rosenzweig | Delivered in Yiddish.

In 1982 the celebrated Yiddish scholar Khone Shmeruk published a descriptive catalogue of Yiddish prints from Italy (from 1545 to 1663), listing thirty-five books (including desiderata). Two decades later, in 2003, Chava Turniansky and Erika Timm published a catalogue of old Yiddish manuscripts and printed books that numbered ninety-nine items. Since then, additional manuscripts and printed books have come to light. Claudia Rosenzweig will present some of these newly discovered items, along with the suggestion that, given evidence from written sources, the history of Yiddish in Italy is far more extensive than previously thought and has yet to be evaluated in terms of its richness and variety, as well as its connections with both Hebrew and non-Jewish prints of the time. Most of the works composed, copied, and printed in Italy during this period had a wide reception throughout “Yiddishland.” This suggests that, although the flourishing of Yiddish literature in 16th century Italy isn’t detachable from its local cultural context, the works that were created there became an intrinsic part of general Yiddish culture tout court.

About the Speaker
Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts. In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Rosenzweig is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).