Goethe and the Jews

To Be Continued

The following is the second of a series of illuminating articles revealing Goethe’s lively interest in Jewry and things Yiddish, based upon excerpts from “Goethe and the Jews,” (G. P. Putman’s Sons, publishers), by Dr. Mark Waldman of the College of the City of New York. The author, who is a distinguished teacher, scholar and lecturer, has won high praise for his literary contributions and research on Goethe from Professor Carl F. Schreiber, head of the Germanic Department at Yale University and head of the Goethe Symposium, to which Professor Waldman’s contribution was adjudged outstanding.

BY DR. MARK WALDMAN

The question arises, what caused the budding genius, not quite twelve, who had acquired a goodly number of languages, both modern and classic, to embark upon the study of Yiddish? For this tongue was not in the repertory of his father. Nowhere does he give a reason for his venture. It seems that a number of circumstances combined to actuate the boy to take up its study. As a child, he tells us in Dichtung and Wahrheit, he was already greatly interested in the antiquities of his native city and in the personages of bygone times who had made a name for themselves:

Fettmilch, a rebel, had incurred debts among the Jews which either he could not or would not pay. The safest way to get rid of the debts was to get rid of the Jews. And so it happened that on the twenty-second of August, 1614, the gates of the Ghetto were stormed, the Jews fled in mortal fear to their cemetery, ready to throw themselves into the river rather than rely upon the tender mercies of the criminals. For three days the rabble deliberated whether to massacre the Jews or to expel them from the city. They finally decided upon the latter course. Their synagogue and its sacred scrolls were desecrated in the vilest and foulest manner; even the cemetery was not spared. Their property and their personal belongings were plundered by the mob. Robbed of hearth and home, of all earthly possessions, they were allowed to leave the city to the number of 1,380, and to seek a refuge wherever they could. The Jews of other cities, of course, came to their rescue.

MATTHIAS PROSCRIBES FETTMILCH

The Jews, however, were not without influence. They succeeded in reaching the ear of the Emperor Matthias. He proscribed Fettmilch and his accomplices and had them executed in the most barbarous manner in February, 1616, and brought the Jews back to their former homesteads against the protests of the Frankfort burghers. Thus ended the last pogrom in the city of the poet.

This event is described in poetic form in Yiddish by an eye witness under the title Vinz-Hans-Lied. His first name was Vinzenz. This poetic description of the horrors was, as already mentioned, incorporated in the Merkwuerdigkeiten. It is therefore more than likely that the lad with his inquisitive mind, ever endeavoring to search and scrutinize, trained to read in the original instead of a translation, felt the desire to read the account in the original. That is why he may have taken to the study of the “baroque” language, as he later styled it.

There may be another reason why young Goethe engaged in the study of the Ghetto patois. His uncle on the maternal side, Jost Textor, son of the chief magisstrate, was an attorney who had a large Jewish clientele. The youngster, no doubt, met them in his uncle’s office and overheard their conversations, which he hardly understood. The desire to get into personal contact, to understand others was, in all likelihood, a contributing factor to his study of Yiddish …

A MYTHOLOGICAL POEM

Young Goethe was at the time of his uncle’s marriage a student at the University of Leipzig. Prior to the wedding his father requested him to compose a poem in honor of it. He, therefore, pictured a conclave of the entire Olympus to hold council over the marriage of a Frankfort attorney. Venus and Themis got into a broil on account of him, but a roguish stratagem, which Amor played upon the latter, caused the gods to render a favorable decision in behalf of the former and sanctioned the marriage. His poem was applauded and he received a letter of commendation from his father. However, Goethe was not quite satisfied with this poetic effusion. He, therefore, submitted it anonymously to his professor of stylistics, Clodius, who massacred and subjected it to a profuse bloodbath of red ink. He also criticized the contents very severely: he thought it preposterous to invoke such a galaxy of mythological personages and to employ divine means for such a trite human business. The author was somehow recognized and received a great many jibes and jabs from his fellow students, so that out of chagrin he destroyed it. Since that time he was careful never to write any wedding poems. Even the wedding of his beloved sister, Cornelia, he let pass without celebrating in song …

We can understand why the boy Goethe feared to enter the Ghetto and we can sympathize with him. He might have feared never to return alive, for did not the Schandgemaelde stand out as a “historic” record and warning to the non-Jews? And was it not put up by “learned, educated” people and officials to boot? But he did return alive more than once and as he states, was well entertained and allowed to see the ceremonies without let or hindrance. The impression he carried away was, of course, very unpleasant. This also is quite intelligible, for how else could a lad, living in luxury, descending suddenly into a cesspool, be affected? In addition, the customs which must have appeared strange to him and the language which sounded to him like some sort of gibber which he did not understand must have had a peculiar effect on him. And the very failure to understand that gabble might have been another and perhaps a decisive factor in his determination to learn Judeo-German.

READ FIRST, THEN WROTE

It seems that he learned reading first and then writing as he informs us: “Denn indem ich mir das barocke Judendeutsch zuzueignen und es ebenso gut zu schreiben suchte, als ich es lesen konnte ..” (“For since I endeavored to acquire the baroque Judeo-German and sought to learn to write it just as well as I was able to read it …”)

After Goethe had obtained a reading knowledge with the aid of Christamicus, his teacher, in the “baroque” Yiddish, he must have started by himself the learning of writing from some model, as the two existing exercises from his Labores juveniles: Anweisung zur Erlernung der teutsch – hebraei-schen Sprache (Method for the Acquisition of the German-Hebraic Language) sufficiently indicate.

Goethe’s father was an inordinately severe taskmaster, who punctiliously saw to it that Goethe junior and his sister Cornolia conscientiously practiced day in and day out all the subjects they were studying.

In view of the fact that Goethe had added a new language to his repertoire, he struck upon the felicitous idea of coordinating all his languages, and practiced them at the same time in order to save time. He, therefore, edvised a novel in (letters) which was to be carried on by six brothers and a sister, who lived far apart, scattered over the western part of Europe. The idea was not a new one, for Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, as well as Rousseau’s Julie had appeared in epistolary form.

The oldest of the brothers wrote in German, to which his sister replied in feminine style in her vernacular, giving an account of the happenings at home and her love affairs. The second brother, a student of theology, couched his letters in Latin with an occasional postscript in Greek. The third, a clerk, stationed at the port of Hamburg, communicated in English. The fourth, who had landed in Marseilles, used French. The fifth, who acted the part of a musician, employed Italian. The youngest, a “smart Aleck” not conversant with any of the languages, contributed his part in Yiddish. The cryptograms of this idiom drove the other correspondents to despair and aroused salvos of laughter on the part of his parents. What a pity that this interesting work was lost to posterity! Who can tell what psychological insight this, his first novel, would have afforded us into the psychic realm of the budding genius?

ONE YIDDISH WORK SURVIVES

One of his Yiddish productions, however, has come down to us, viz., Die Judenpredigt, or Jewish sermon, written in a semi-Yiddish published after his death in a religious paper in Weimar, in 1856. In it Goethe utilized a Jewish Messiah legend still in vogue among the Lithuanian Jews. In it {SPAN}###{/SPAN} related that, when the Messiah shall arrive, riding on a donkey, the Jews will occupy the front part, whereas the Gentiles will have to be satisfied with a place on the croup. Upon crossing a bridge—perhaps across the Red Sea, as stated in Goethe’s version—the latter will suddenly part in the middle, and the Jews sitting in the front will safely reach the shore. The Gentiles, however, will drop into the water and drown. Goethe somewhat embellished the legend by adding to it a hmorous tinge.

To Be Continued