Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/583

 Bid Hog rap hie a I Notes. 235

ill-advised persecutions began in 1881 by the Russian government, in contra- vention of the, liberal policy adopted by the emperor Nicholas I., a great emi- gration has flooded the United States with Russian and Polish Jews, of whom the city of New York now contains not less than three hundred thousand. This population, although settled in Russia, was German by earlier resi- dence, language, and ideas. In the beginning of the sixteenth century a large number of Jews established themselves in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia, whither they were imported with a view to creating an urban pop- ulation, the Slavs being essentially agricultural in habit. These German immigrants retained their speech and conceptions, but in their separation were no longer affected by the currents of German intellectual life, and kept up a mediaeval condition of culture, out of which their German co- religionists emerged. Their language was essentially a German dialect, founded on the manner of speech prevalent in the region of Frankfurt, the centre of Jewish learning. While the language of the folk developed in several independent groups, the printed form continued uniform up to the nineteenth century, in which it first began to be employed for literary pur- poses. Increased by Hebrew and Slavic words, disguised by German orthography, the speech assumed a chaotic character, though such confu- sion, as the author observes, is common to all tongues in which historical continuity has been interrupted. The people speak of their vernacular as Jiidisch, of which designation Yiddish is the accepted English corruption.

The Jews, as Professor Wiener remarks, have been the most important element in the dissemination of folk-literature. In relation equally with the East and the West, travellers by profession, and addicted to story-tell- ing, they appropriated with equal facility the popular narratives of Egypt, Spain, Germany, and Russia. Printed literature of Yiddish fiction was designed in principal measure for the women, who received no serious instruction, and whose minds were in the same condition in the eighteenth century as in the fourteenth. " Time and space are entirely annihilated in the folk-lore of the Russian Jews. Here one finds side by side the quaint stories of the Talmud, of Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian origin, with the Polyphemus myth of the Greeks, the English ' Bevys of Hamptoun,' the Arabic ' Thousand and One Nights.' Stories in which half a dozen motives from various separate tales have been moulded into one harmonious whole jostle with those that show unmistakable signs of venerable antiquity." As varied are the superstitions and rites associated with every act of life, in which the ancient Oriental basis is overlaid with the ceremonies of Eu- rope. According to popular belief, Elijah frequently descends from his heavenly habitation to assist believers in distress ; during the ceremony of the circumcision, a chair is set for him to occupy. Moses and David are equally active ; the latter presides over a repast at the conclusion of the Sabbath. Thus Jewish monotheism has not prevented personages of the Bible from elevation into the position of patron saints. As with the m val Virgil, the rabbi Maimonides has become an enchanter. The founder of the fanatical sect of the Khassidim, Bal-schem-tow, lived only a century and a half ago ; yet it is now impossible to reconstruct the true career and

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