The Yingl Who Would be Pope: A Study in Jewish Cultural Plasticity

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies Admission: Free

This talk considers the recurrent fantasia of a Jew who ascends to a status "more Catholic than the Pope." Dating back to the early modern period in Yiddish (and far earlier in Hebrew), the most persistent instantiation of this fantasy is the narrative of the Catholic pope of Jewish origin. This evergreen motif raises a set of questions about Jewish cultural and ethnic plasticity that take on special urgency in the 1940's, when two crucial texts appear. One is the Lithuanian linguist Yudl Mark's children's story Der yidisher poyps ("The Jewish Pope;" New York, 1947), a retelling of a story from the Basel Mayse bukh of 1602, in which a kidnapped Jewish boy is raised by priests and ascends to the papacy. The second is Isaac Bashevis Singer's widely anthologized "Zeidlus the Pope" (Zeydlus der ershter; New York, 1943), which reimagines the tale of ascent (and subsequent fall) as the demonic seduction of an all-too-willing adult scholar. The resurgence of this papal fantasy during the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath suggests a rhetorical strategy for strenuously asserting that not only was geography not destiny, but neither was ethnicity or confessional affiliation. These stories present a single, dramatic leap over the chasms that marked off the domain and demesne of Eastern European Jewry; emerging when they did, they limn an all-too-desperate act of imaginative flight.

About the Speaker

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. Her research interests include Yiddish modernism, genre studies, Jewish children's literature, and American-Jewish literature. This April saw the publication of her first book, with the University of Michigan Press, entitled Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque. The title is a gesture toward Sholem Aleichem, as she will explain in her remarks tonight. She is currently involved in new research, in the rich but understudied field of Yiddish children's literature. She is preparing an annotated, translated anthology called Honey on the Page, slated to appear with New York University Press in 2018. She has spent this academic year as the Dr. Emmanuel Patt Memorial Visiting Professor at the YIVO Institute and as part of the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellows at her home institution. She has also held the Translation Fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, as well as the Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies. In addition to her scholarly writing, Udel's essays and reportage have appeared in The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Harvard Magazine.