Ruth von Bernuth: "The Wise Men of Chelm: Eastern European Jewry’s Favorite Folk Tradition and Its German Origins"

Widely read twentieth-century compilations present scores of stories describing the intellectual limitations of the Khelmer naronim or Khelmer khakhomim, the fools, or, in the more common ironic formulation, the wise men, of Chelm. Although the stories are widely regarded today as the quintessential Yiddish folktale corpus, it seems as if the association of folly with the very old and important Jewish community of Chelm cannot be traced further back than to a hint in the writings of Y.M. Dik from 1867. His short text is influenced by two different traditions based on German literature, which are crucial for the for­mation of the Jewish Chelm canon: maskilic parodies and social utopias. But only through the work of ethnographers did Chelm become the preferred town of fools by the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars of Jewish folklore collected different types of tales and transferred well-known stories from the early modern German Schildbürgerbuch tradition into the Chelm canon. This was the starting point from which many famous Yiddish writers of the twentieth century build up their own work. In the talk she will present the first comprehensive research on more than 35 different collections of the ex­isting Chelm stories published between 1867 and 2011 and printed in separate collections, anthologies of assorted writings, newspapers, and periodicals. By placing them into a historic context, she will show that Chelm serves as an utopian model of society in Yiddish writing until today.

Ruth von Bernuth (Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures) is spending most of this academic year doing research for her next book project, Shared Worlds, Shared Texts: Early Modern Contacts between Old Yiddish and German Literature.