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'Since I have learned of these evil tidings, I have been heartsick and I am unable to sleep': The Old Yiddish and Hebrew Letters from 1476 in the Shadow of Blood Libels in Northern Italy and Germany
Ist Teil von
The Jewish quarterly review, 2012, Vol.102 (1), p.1-17
Ort / Verlag
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2012
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The blood libel against the Jews in Trent in 1475, the first of this kind in the Early Modern Times, which led to execution of all Jewish men of the city, caused an investigation initiated by Pope Sixtus IV. The court proceedings of the case, stored in the city archive of Trent for more than half a thousand years, include four private letters written in Hebrew characters, two in Old Yiddish and two in Hebrew. The letters were found in possession of a Catholic priest by the name of Paolo da Novara who was arrested following the blood libel, and initially meant to serve as evidence of his attempts to help the Jewish women imprisoned at Trent make contact with the outside world. Later da Novara was accused of trying to poison Bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach. It seems that the case contains the oldest private letters in Old Yiddish known until the present. Albeit the very fact of their existence was known to researchers, they remained undeciphered, not analyzed and not contextualized. Being a good example of earliest texts in Yiddish in general and evoking a special interest as the earliest representation of a specific “epistolary genre” in particular, they are first of all a rare reflection of the Trent tragedy and some other contemporary blood libels from the Jewish inner perspective.