One of the foremost exemplars of cultural mediation in the history of Ashkenazic culture was Elia Levita (1469-1549), a Jewish Humanist active on both sides of the Alps as teacher, publisher, printer, and author; as mentor, friend, and colleague of the great men of church and synagogue, university and the arts. By means of his extensive grammatical and lexicographical studies, which were reprinted, translated into Latin, and disseminated throughout the world during the following two centuries, he rendered Jewish cultural traditions more accessible to both Jews and Christians, effectively enabling the foundation of modern Jewish studies. As a romancier, furthermore, he created one of the masterpieces of early Yiddish literature, the Bovo d’Antona (1507, publ. 1541), adapted from a Tuscan version of the popular tale, thus establishing a cross-cultural Yiddish genre of adapted Christian epics which was to remain popular into the nineteenth century. The most neglected of his works are his two poetic satires, "Di sreyfe fun venedig" (‘The Great Fire of Venice,’ c. 1510) and "Hamavdil-lid" (‘Hamavdil Song,’ c.1514), which still suffer from long-standing anti-Yiddish prejudices, such as the claim by Meir Medan (Encyclopaedia Judaica) that they "lack any literary value" and by Erika Timm that "[sie] sind viel zu früh und alles andere als ‘reif.’" Quite to the contrary, these magnificent, bawdy, learnèd, hilarious, consummately artistic poems operate within the great traditions of both Hebrew and Renaissance Italian poetic satire and demonstrate the principles of Jewish and in particular Yiddish cultural liminality and literary hybridity that have characterized Ashkenaz from its very origins. The conference paper will attempt to articulate the manifestation of those principle in the two poems.
