Lehmann’s newspaper played a key role in the emergence and diversification of the German-language Jewish press that, as Jonathan Hess and other scholars have elucidated, was largely responsible for the popularization of “middlebrow literature,” which shaped modern German-Jewish identity in crucial ways.¹ In addition to the publication of such contemporaneous “middlebrow literature,” however, the feuilleton section of this newspaper provided space for the recovery of works of Old Yiddish literature, such as the writings of Glikl bas Judah Leib (ca. 1645-1724), which likewise appealed to the interests and tastes of German-Jewish readers during a time of flux.

Tendlau, the author of the feuilleton, remains best known as the compiler of the popular and widely disseminated anthologies Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit (Book of Sagas and Legends of the Jewish Past, 1842, with subsequent editions in 1845 and 1873), Fellmeiers Abende. Märchen und Geschichten aus grauer Vorzeit (Fellmeier’s Evenings. Tales and Stories from a Gray Past, 1856) and Sprichwörter und Redensarten deutsch-jüdischer Vorzeit (Proverbs and Sayings of the German-Jewish Past, 1860). In these collections, the latter two of which are directly referenced in his feuilleton,² Tendlau dedicated sustained attention to Old Yiddish texts, which, as Aya Elyada has suggested, “he perceived as an integral part of Jewish tradition and collective Jewish memory.”³ Tendlau’s recovery of Glikl’s writings should be understood as part of his larger engagement with these texts, which did not merely reflect “an ‘archeological’ or ‘antiquarian’ interest in the past,” but rather, as Elyada has further argued with reference to Tendlau’s broader efforts and to those of other Jewish scholars in the nineteenth century, “was driven by the ambition […] to create a distinctive German-Jewish subculture, one that sought to link the Jewish past with the German present, and to enable nineteenth-century acculturated German Jews to retain their strong sense of belonging to the Jewish community and its heritage.”⁴

While Glikl’s untitled writings, composed between 1691 and 1719, are well known today, this is due to the philological and translational efforts of Tendlau, David Kaufmann, Bertha Pappenheim, Alfred Feilchenfeld, Marvin Lowenthal, and Chava Turniansky, among others.⁵ For over a century after Glikl’s death, her writings were only disseminated in manuscript form among her descendants—until, that is, Tendlau published excerpts from them in Der Israelit. In addition to demonstrating the importance of the feuilleton as a space for the recovery and circulation of forgotten texts, as well as for a popular kind of philology, Tendlau’s feuilleton highlights a number of more specific issues related to the belated evaluation of her writings, including two issues, both fascinating and frustrating, that are emphasized in the feuilleton’s title: genre and gender. In manuscript form, Glikl’s writings were untitled, whereas subsequent editors and translators have usually opted to label them “zikhroynes,” “Memoiren,” “memoirs,” or something of that sort. Tendlau opts for the related but distinct genre of the “Tagebuch” (diary), though he also draws attention to the fluidity of the source text, which “deals with the history of the author’s own family as well as with remarkable events near and far” and includes “heartfelt admonitions […] didactic stories, fables, sayings and the like.” Tendlau thus thematizes the difficulty or even impossibility of categorizing Glikl’s writings, which has remained a subject of debate among later scholars, editors, and translators.⁶ In certain respects, this categorical uncertainty befits the feuilleton, which has long been characterized by its generic lability, even as this particular example points up the bluntness and frequent lack of nuance in newspaper titles and headlines.

Furthermore, in his emphasis on the gender of the so-called diary’s author, Tendlau raises difficult questions about the role of women in the creation of “a distinctive German-Jewish subculture” in the nineteenth century and, in the process, reveals the gendered limits of his own scholarship and writing. While some later editors and translators, such as David Kaufmann and Bertha Pappenheim, embrace Glikl as a role model for Jewish women in modernity and as a productive resource for rethinking the place of women within Jewish society, Tendlau both underlines Glikl’s gender and marginalizes her because of it.⁷ Remarkably, he does not mention her name until about half-way through the feuilleton, when he refers to her as “Glück” or “Glücklich;” before and after, he refers to her merely as “Frau” (woman), “Verfasserin” (author), or “sie” (she). He arguably obscures, moreover, Glikl’s own character, motivations, and achievements—aside from her atypical education and reading habits—in favor of the manuscript’s condition and the history of her community and extended family, the latter reflecting his obvious interest in genealogical research.

Nevertheless, in line with his larger engagement with Old Yiddish texts (or texts, as he calls it, in “Jewish-German writing and vernacular”), Tendlau does emphasize Glikl’s language and writing style, in large part by including long quotations from the source text in a peculiar mixture of transcription, transliteration, and summary that recalls the hybrid language of his popular anthologies. In other words, he quotes, as he phrases it in the second part of the feuilleton, “zwar möglichst in ihrer eignen Sprache” (“as much as possible in her own language”).⁸ While Tendlau glosses many words and phrases, he also assumes the multilingualism of his audience and their at least basic familiarity with loshn-koydesh (the Hebrew and Aramaic component of Yiddish). In so doing, he seems to suggest that the linguistic textures of the “diary” are just as important as their content and just as captivating to German-Jewish readers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as they grappled with the effects and implications of the sociocultural transformations of the Jewish community in the previous decades, marked not least by the linguistic shift from Yiddish to German. In my own translation of Tendlau’s feuilleton, I have tried to preserve the multilingualism of the original, while also inserting additional glosses of terms that may be unfamiliar to an English-language readership.