Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: How the Wise Men Got to Chelm
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://vonbernuth.web.unc.edu/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://jewishstudies.unc.edu/people/people-profiles/faculty-profiles/ruth-von-bernuth-profile/ * http://mems.unc.edu/faculty/ruth-von-bernuth/ * http://vonbernuth.web.unc.edu/files/2016/08/CV_September_2016.pdf * http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-serious-history-of-a-comical-town/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
nb2010027516
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/nb2010027516
HEADING:
Bernuth, Ruth von
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__ |a Wunder, Spott und Prophetie, 2009: |b t.p. (Ruth von Bernuth)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Erstes Staatsexamen, 1999; Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, assistant professor, 2008-14, associate professor, 2014-; Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, director, 2013-.
AWARDS:Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship, YIVO Institute, New York, 2011-12; Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Rothschild Foundation, Israel, 2011-12; Jewish Studies Research and Travel Grant, UNC, 2012; Alfried Krupp Junior Fellowship, Greifswald, Germany, 2013. UNC-Chapel Hill MEMS Research Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill MEMS Conference Travel Award, both 2010; UNC Junior Faculty Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Research Council Award, both 2011.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to academic journals. Contributor to books, including Scham und Schamlosigkeit: Grenzverletzungen im Spannungsfeld von Dissimulation und Ostentation, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Hans Rudolf Velten, De Gruyter (Berlin), 2011; Wege zur Kultur: Barrieren und Barrierefreiheit in Kultur- und Bildungseinrichtungen, edited by Anja Tervooren and Jürgen Weber, Böhlau (Cologne), 2012; and Savoir ludique: Pratiques de divertissement et émergence des institutions littéraires dans l’Europe moderne, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Alexandre Stroev, Honoré Champion (Paris), 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
Ruth von Bernuth is an assistant professor of Germanic languages at the University of North Carolina and the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of one book in German, Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: natürliche Narrheit in den “Historien von Claus Narren,” and one book in English, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition.
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is a study of the folktales about the fictional Eastern European town of Chelm. According to Jewish tradition, when God created the world, he sent out an angel to distribute a bag of foolish souls equally all over the world, with one foolish soul per town. Unfortunately, the angel’s bag broke; all of the foolish souls landed in the same place, and together they built a town called Chelm. The imaginary town of Chelm has become the source for many folktales, with much attention put on the foolish residents. There is also a real city of Chelm in eastern Poland, which von Bernuth writes leads a double life, one as a real city and one onto which the imaginary town of Chelm has been projected. Von Bernuth writes that the imaginary town of Chelm has been fodder for both entertainment and as a way to highlight issues in society.
William Kolbrener, writing in the Times Higher Education Online, commented: “For all the insights of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, von Bernuth sometimes seems overly enchanted by the tales, occasioning an interpretive reticence in relation to some of the texts that she invokes. She does, for example, relate that Trunk’s climactic conference scene ends with a Chelmite ‘placing a yarmulke on Einstein’s head and offering him water for the ritual purification of his hands’. She stops short, however, of interpreting these details.” In a review at the Reading Religion Web site, Rachel Slutsky observed: “In a sense then, von Bernuth does something beyond teaching her readers about Chelm: she leads by example in showing how one can research anything; that nothing is too foolish for analysis. In so doing, von Bernuth discovers and exposes a world of material and a five-hundred-year-old folk tradition that no other writer has adequately addressed. She does so in a convincing and enjoyable way. This book is therefore highly recommended.”
Library Journal contributor Jennifer Harris found the book effective, stating: “Thorough and accessible, this book is a welcome addition to Jewish and European history, literature, and folklore collections and is recommended for both specialists and general readers.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer said that How the Wise Men Got to Chelm “provides a detailed and comprehensive examination of the evolution of some of the best-known Yiddish folk stories … that places those tales in historical and cultural context.” In a profile of von Bernuth’s research for her book, Matti Friedman wrote in the Times of Israel Online: “Over time, Chelm became popularly seen as one of the purest expressions of Jewish folk traditions from Europe. For German scholars before WWII, on the other hand, the Yiddish stories were derided as foreign corruptions of the original Schildburg fables.” The Schildburg fables centered on a mythical German town run by well-traveled wise men who assumed to character of fools to avoid being widely known for their wisdom. Shedding light on the German folk roots of the Chelm tales, Friedman elaborated on von Bernuth’s own approach: “In fact, von Bernuth said, the only way to understand Chelm is as the joint creation of different people who lived in the same place and listened to their neighbors’ stories. ‘These stories are one of the most interesting examples of how German and Yiddish culture influenced one another,’ she said. ‘It shows how intertwined they were…. To tell the story of Chelm, you need to know about German culture and German literature. Otherwise it’s rootless.'” Friedman also commented on the unusual nature of von Bernuth’s research, noting: “[She] used to raised eyebrows from scholars who hear how she spends her time — ‘Some of them think I’m crazy,’ she said. But there are advantages. ‘When I meet people, especially elderly people, and tell them I’m working on Chelm,’ she said, ‘they smile.'”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, November 1, 2016, Jennifer Harris, review of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition.
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2016, review of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, p. 61.
ONLINE
Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, http://jewishstudies.unc.edu/ (May 14, 2017), faculty profile
Reading Religion, http://readingreligion.org/ (March 7, 2017), Rachel Slutsky, review of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm.
Reporter Group, http://www.thereportergroup.org/ (March 10, 2017), Rabbi Rachel Esserman, review of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm.
Ruth von Bernuth Faculty Home Page, http://vonbernuth.web.unc.edu/ (May 14, 2017).
Times Higher Education Online, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (October 27, 2016), William Kolbrener, review of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm.
Times of Israel Online, http://www.timesofisrael.com/ (March 23, 2012), Matti Friedman, “The Serious History of a Comical Town: A Scholar Unravels the Origins of Chelm.”*
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Website, http://mems.unc.edu/faculty/ruth-von-bernuth/ (May 14, 2017), faculty listing
Ruth von BernuthText:
Ruth von Bernuth, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Published Spring 2011
vonbernuthFaculty Member Researches Relationship Between German and Yiddish Literature
Junior faculty members play a critical role at Carolina, and for the Center, by helping to expand course offerings, extend the curriculum, and further new and important research. During the past few years, several new assistant professors have joined Carolina, including Professors Marienberg, Lambert, and Shemer, who are all helping the Center meet increasing student demand for Jewish Studies courses.
Another assistant professor to join Carolina in recent years is Ruth von Bernuth, who is based in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her focus on Germany’s early modern period (15th to 18th Century) has filled a special academic niche in the German Department, and her new research focus on Yiddish literature is likewise filling an important curricular need for Jewish Studies.
“When I was seeking a faculty position, I knew Carolina was a perfect fit for me because of its strength in several areas, specifically its Early Modern program, German department and the Center for Jewish Studies,” said von Bernuth. In fact, Carolina was the only institution to receive an application from von Bernuth. “There really is no other institution that could provide the same level of opportunity for me and my particular research interests.”
Since joining Carolina in 2008, von Bernuth has taught a range of courses, furthered her own research initiatives, and helped guide undergraduate research. Last year, one of her students was honored with one of the Center’s first undergraduate research awards. The student, Trey Meeks, used the funding to travel to Germany to complete the duo’s translation of a Yiddish prayer book.
“What truly sets von Bernuth apart from her peers is the energy and enthusiasm she expends turning her research interests into innovative new courses for our students. Indeed, I know of no other colleague who’s done more to promote undergraduate research on campus. We’re thus very excited that she’s proposed a new undergraduate course on early modern Jewish literature. And when we get our major in Jewish Studies on the books—in the very near future—she’ll be a natural choice to teach the capstone seminar for Jewish Studies majors as well,” said Jonathan Hess, director of the Center.
Chapel Hill is a long way from the East German town where von Bernuth grew up. Her experiences growing up in East Germany and then witnessing the fall of the wall and the remarkable transformation in her home country give von Bernuth a unique perspective for Carolina undergraduates. She has also introduced some students to her parents, who have come to Carolina to share their personal experiences of life in Leipzig.
Her current research project is focused on Yiddish literature written in central and eastern Europe between 1450 and 1700 and explores representative works of the major genres of writing in Yiddish—biblical texts, heroic epics, early novels and songs. Von Bernuth is currently writing a book based on her research, tentatively titled, “Shared Worlds, Shared Texts: Early Modern Contacts Between Old Yiddish and German Literature.” She will spend much of next academic year in Israel, thanks to a visiting fellowship from Yad Hanadiv. While in Israel, she will work with Chara Turniansky, a highly renowned expert on old Yiddish literature. She also has received a fellowship award from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, giving her access to many of the works she is planning to study for her book.
“I feel so privileged to have so much time to focus on one project,” added von Bernuth.“There are so few people working on old Yiddish, but this project is introducing me to wonderful colleagues around the world and exposing me to remarkable writers and publishers from centuries ago.”
Ruth von BernuthText:
Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages
rvb@email.unc.edu
Erstes Staatsexamen, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1999
Ph.D. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2005
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Early modern German Literature and Culture, Old Yiddish Literature, Folly Literature, Disability Studies
RUTH VON BERNUTH
Curriculum Vitae Revised: September 2016
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures CB# 3160 432 Dey Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3160 rvb@email.unc.edu
CURRENT ACADEMIC POSITIONS
2014-present
2013-present 2008-2014
EDUCATION
Associate Professor, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill
Director, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill
2005
1999
POSTDOCTORAL HONORS AND AWARDS
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, PhD in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Erstes Staatsexamen
2013 Alfried Krupp Junior Fellowship, Greifswald, Germany
2012 Jewish Studies Research and Travel Grant, UNC
2011/12 Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Rothschild
Foundation, Israel
2011/12 Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship, YIVO Institute, New
York
2011 UNC Junior Faculty Development Grant
2011 UNC-Chapel Hill Research Council Award
2010 UNC-Chapel Hill MEMS Research Grant
2010 UNC-Chapel Hill MEMS Conference Travel Award
2009 UNC-Chapel Hill University Research Council Award
2009 Best Faculty Presentation in the Humanities, University Research
Day
2008 Brine Family Charitable Trust
2007-2008 Herzog-Ernst Fellowship of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
2007 Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 2
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: Natürliche Narrheit in den “Historien von Claus Narren.” Frühe Neuzeit 133. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009.
CO-EDITED BOOK
Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (with Julia Weitbrecht and Werner Röcke). Berlin: de Gruyter, July 2016.
REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
1. “Neros Missetaten: Ein Einbandfragment aus der Sammlung Jantz als unbekannter Text- zeuge der Harburger Legenda Aurea I” (with Janice Hansen), Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 144 (2015): 346-358.
2. “Das jischev fun Nar-husen: Jiddische Narrenliteratur und jüdische Narrenkultur,” Aschkenas 25 (2015): 133-144.
3. “Zu Gast bei Nikolaus Selnecker: Der jüdische Konvertit Paulus von Prag in Leipzig,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 13 (2014): 15-36.
4. “‘My love for rare books and fine bindings’: Die Jantz-Sammlung der Duke University Libraries” (with Janice Hansen), Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 142 (2013): 228-237.
5. “Zwischen Kreuzrittern und Sarrazenen: Der jüdische Held in Elia Levitas Bovo d’Antona,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Beiheft 44 (2012): 411-432.
6. “Über Zwerge, rachitische Ungeheuer und blödsinnige Leute lacht man nicht: Zu Karl Friedrich Flögels Geschichte der Hofnarren von 1789,” Traverse 13 (2006): 61-72.
7. “From Marvels of Nature to Inmates of Asylums: Imaginations of Natural Folly,” Disability Studies Quarterly 26:2 (2006) URL: http://www.dsq- sds.org/article/view/697/874
REFEREED BOOK CHAPTERS
1.
“The Carnivalesque in Early Modern Ashkenaz: Juspa Shammash’s Minhagim and the
Oxford Old Yiddish Manuscript Songbook,” in Worlds of Old Yiddish Literature, eds.
Simon Neuberg and Diana Matut (Legenda: Oxford, forthcoming).
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 3
2. “Dein Gott ist mein Gott: Jüdische und christliche Identitätsentwürfe in frühneuzeitlichen Auslegungen des Buchs Ruth auf Jiddisch und Deutsch,” in Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, eds. Julia Weitbrecht, Werner Röcke, and Ruth von Bernuth (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 277-296.
3. “Baron Jakob Paul von Gundling et le Collège du Tabac,” in Savoir ludique: Pratiques de divertissement et émergence des institutions littéraires dans l’Europe moderne, eds. Katja Gvozdeva and Alexandre Stroev (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 177-204.
4. “Bettler, Monster und Zeichen Gottes: Behinderung in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Wege zur Kultur: Barrieren und Barrierefreiheit in Kultur- und Bildungseinrichtungen, eds. Anja Tervooren and Jürgen Weber (Köln: Böhlau, 2012), 116-132.
5. “‘Die spihlende Hand Gottes’: Schamlosigkeit und Christusnarrheit im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Scham und Schamlosigkeit: Grenzverletzungen im Spannungsfeld von Dissimulation und Ostentation, eds. Katja Gvozdeva and Hans Rudolf Velten (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2011), 300-329.
6. “Shalom bar Abraham’s Book of Judith in Yiddish” (with Michael Terry), in The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the disciplines, eds. Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti, and Henrike Lähnemann (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 127-150.
7. “‘Wer jm guots thett dem rödet er vbel’: Natürliche Narren im Gebetbuch des Matthäus Schwarz,” in Homo debilis: Behinderte – Kranke – Versehrte in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Cordula Nolte (Korb, Remstal: Didymos, 2009), 411-430.
8. “Glaube am Narrenseil: Claus Narr am ernestinischen Hofe zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhun- derts,” in Glaube und Macht: Sachsen im Europa der Reformationszeit, eds. Harald Marx and Cecilie Hollberg (Dresden: Sandstein, 2004), 298-304.
9. “Aus den Wunderkammern in die Irrenanstalten: Natürliche Hofnarren in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” in Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Disability Studies, ed. Anne Waldschmidt (Kassel: Bifos, 2003), 49-62.
OTHER ARTICLES
1. “Mędrcy chełmscy: Popularna tradycja ludowa wschodnioeuropejskich Żydów i jej źródła.” In: Cwiszn 4 (2013), 16-24.
2. “Early Modern Yiddish Readers: Immoderately Addicted to Rhyme? ” In: Early Modern Workshop 6: “Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in the Early Modern Period,” Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 2009. URL:
http://www .earlymodern.org/workshops/2009/vonbernuth/index.php?pid=99
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 4
3. “‘Dem dot zu drucz und dracz’: Zum Tod im Fastnachtspiel,” in Narren – Masken – Karneval: Meisterwerke von Dürer bis Kubin aus der Düsseldorfer Graphiksammlung “Mensch und Tod,” ed. Stefanie Knöll (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009), 80-85.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES AND NOTES
1. “Folly, and Fools Christianity,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 9, eds. Dale C. Allison, Christine Helmer, Thomas Chr. Römer, Jens Schröter, Choon-Leong Seow, Hermann Spieckermann, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric Ziolkowski (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 359-362.
2. “Bartholomäus Krüger,” in Frühe Neuzeit in Deutschland 1520-1620: Literaturwissen-schaftliches Verfasserlexikon, vol. 3, eds. Jan-Dirk Müller, Wilhelm Kühlman, Michael Schilling, Johann Anselm Steiger, and Friedrich Vollhardt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 604-608.
3. “Andreas Hondorff,” in Frühe Neuzeit in Deutschland 1520-1620: Literaturwissen-schaftliches Verfasserlexikon, vol. 3, eds. Jan-Dirk Müller, Wilhelm Kühlman, Michael Schilling, Johann Anselm Steiger, and Friedrich Vollhardt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 397-401.
4. “Wolfgang Bütner.” In: Frühe Neuzeit in Deutschland 1520-1620: Literaturwissen-schaftliches Verfasserlexikon, vol. 1, eds. Jan-Dirk Müller, Wilhelm Kühlman, Michael Schilling, Johann Anselm Steiger, and Friedrich Vollhardt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 404-409.
5. “Fool,” in Encyclopedia of Disability, vol. 2, ed. Gary L. Albrecht (London: Sage, 2006), 738- 740.
6. “Folly Literature,” in Encyclopedia of Disability, vol. 3, ed. Gary L. Albrecht (London: Sage, 2006), 1038-1040.
7. “Der (im-)perfekte Mensch. Zwischen Anthropologie, Ästhetik und Therapeutik,” Das Argument 43 (2001): 701-702.
BOOK REVIEWS
1. Review of Reinhart, Max, ed., Early Modern German Literature, 1350-1700, on: H-German (H-Net Reviews), April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23091
2. Review of Schumacher, Jutta, ed., Sefer Mishle Shuolim (Buch der Fuchsfabeln) von Jakob Koppel- mann, Zeitschrift für Germanistik New Series 18 (2008): 419-420.
3. Review of Dicke, Gerd and Klaus Grubmüller, eds., Die Gleichzeitigkeit von Handschrift und Buchdruck, Sehepunkte 4 (2004).
URL: http://www.sehepunkte.historicum.net/2004/10/5680.html
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 5 INVITED ACADEMIC LECTURES (SELECTION)
“A Most Violant Woman: Translating Judith,” annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 980 “Episteme in Motion: Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period” on “Figurales Wissen: Medialität, Ästhetik und Materialität von Wissen in der Vormoderne,” Berlin, July 2-4, 2015.
“Yiddish as Kulturträger: Binjamin Wolf Segel and Yiddish Studies,” international workshop “Yiddish Culture in Past and Present Scholarship: Histories, Ideologies, Methodologies,” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, May 27-28, 2015.
“Translated Utopias: Schilda’s Wisdom and Chelm’s Hakhme,” international workshop “Jewish Educational Media and Cultural Translations,” Georg Eckert Institute, May 5-6, 2015.
“Becoming Protestant with Jewish Time,” symposium “
“Shabbat haBakhurim oder Jung und Jüdisch im Worms der Frühen Neuzeit,” interdisciplinary conference „Aventiuren in Aschkenas. Jüdische Aneignungen nichtjüdischer Texte und Erzählstoffe im vormodernen Europa,“ Berlin, March 10-11, 2014.
“The Topography of Folly and the Invention of Chelm,” invited talk by the department of German studies, Stanford University, February 19, 2014.
“‘Wir sind Papst’ oder Ayzik Meyer Diks Träume in Jiddisch,” interdisciplinary conference “Mehrsprachigkeit und Interkulturalität in der europäischen Literatur,” Krupp-Kolleg Greifswald, September 9-10, 2013.
“Wort für Wort aus der christlichen Bibel? Jiddische Apokryphen in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Alfried Krupp Fellow Lecture, Greifswald, June 3, 2013.
“‘In honor of all women’: Translating Judith for Jewish readers,” symposium “On Men and Women Reading Yiddish: Between Manuscript and Print,” Amsterdam, February 18-19, 2013.
“Jüdische Narrenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Forschungskolloqium zur Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und zur Historischen Anthropologie, Freie Universität Berlin, January 15, 2013.
“In Praise of Folly: Hakhme Helem and European Folly Literature,” presentation in the serial Hoker be-Tsohorayim of the National Liberary of Israel, May 30, 2012.
“‘Dein Gott ist mein Gott’: Jüdische und christliche Konversionsdialoge in frühneuzeitlichen Auslegungen des Buchs Ruth,” interdisciplinary conference “Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Berlin, May 9-11, 2012.
“The Wise Men of Chelm: Eastern European Jewry’s Favorite Folk Tradition and its Origins.” Furst Forum Lecture, UNC, March 1, 2012
YIVO Institute, New York, March 5, 2012
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, May 2, 2012
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, May 21, 2012
15th Symposium für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland, Düsseldorf, September 3, 2012.
“Juden, Narren, Monster: Begegnungen mit dem Wunderbaren,” workshop “Konzepte des Wunderbaren,” Freie Universität Berlin, June 20, 2010.
“Le baron Jakob Paul von Gundling et le Collège du Tabac,” international colloquium “Savoir ludique: Pratiques de divertissement et émergence des institutions littéraires dans l’Europe
History of Mutual Impact,“ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 26-27,
Early Modern Europe and the Jews: A
2014.
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 6
moderne,” Sorbonne, Paris, June 18-19, 2010.
“Der spektrale Konvertit: Konversionsliteratur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” workshop at
the research cluster “Transformations of Antiquity, Project B 2: Identity in Transmutation: Figures of Metamorphosis and Conversion in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Literature,” Berlin, May 20, 2010.
“Shared Worlds: The Status of Old Yiddish Literature in the Early Modern World,” KCL-UNC Research Workshop, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King’s College, London, March 11, 2010.
“Paulus von Prag und seine moderne Nachgeschichte/ Paulus of Prague and his modern legacy,” conference on “Jewish Leipzig: City, Court and University Leipzig,” December 16-18, 2009.
“Schaustellungen: Frühneuzeitliche Darstellungen von behinderten Menschen im Buch, am Hof und im Privatmuseum,” conference on “Die Wege zur Kultur: Barrierefreiheit in Bibliotheken und Museen,” Herzogin Anna Amalie Library, Weimar, October 1-3, 2009.
“Early Modern Yiddish Readers: Immoderately Addicted to Rhyme?” Early modern workshop on “History of Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in Early Modern Europe,” Boston, August 23-25, 2009.
“Jiddische Literatur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Oberseminar of Jürgen Wolf, Technische Universität Berlin, July 1, 2009.
“Schamlose Christusnarren,” interdisciplinary conference on “Scham und Schamlosigkeit, Grenzverletzungen im Spannungsfeld von Dissimulation und Ostentation,” Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin, June 4-6, 2009.
“Luther auf Jiddisch,” 5th Conference of the Holy Roman Empire Research Cluster on “Early Modern Jewish History as Sacred History: Confrontation, Exchange, and Transfer,” Munich, March 28-30, 2009.
“Zwischen Narrenturm und Gebetbuch: Konzeptionen von natürlicher Narrheit in der Frühen Neuzeit,” conference on “Homo debilis: Behinderte – Kranke – Versehrte in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters,” Bremen, September, 2007.
“Aus den Wunderkammern in die Irrenanstalten: Natürliche Hofnarren in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” conference on ”Kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven der Disability Studies,” Bremen, July, 2003.
ACADEMIC CONFERENCE PAPERS
“Nackt auf einem Steckenpferd: Repräsentationen des dritten und vierten Sohnes in der Pessach Haggadah,” conference on “Bella figura Judaica? Auftreten und Wahrnehmung von Juden in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Forum Jüdische Geschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart, February 12-14, 2016.
“When Peretz Went to Chelm—Kiedy Perec pojechał do Chełma,” conference on “W kręgu Pereca- I.L. Peretz and His Circle,”
,
The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews,
Polish Association for Yiddish Studies, Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage
in Poland, International Center for Research on the History and Cultural Heritage
of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
Warszawa—Zamość, September 7-10, 2015.
“How to Bear Fruit on Paper: Staging Sociability in Writings on the Fruitbearing Society,”
Renaissance Society of America, Berlin, March 26-28, 2015.
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 7
“Riding the Hobby Horse in Early Modern Christian and Jewish Cultures of Folly,“ Renaissance Society of America, New York, March 27-29, 2014.
“Medieval Philology and Old Yiddish,” interdisciplinary conference on “Medieval Philologies Today,” Università degli studi di Urbino, December 2-4, 2013.
“Anachronistic Apocrypha and the Reception of Luther’s Bible Translation,” interdisciplinary conference on “The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the Premodern Era,” Chapel Hill, March 22-23, 2013.
“Exemplarische Frau: Das Susanna-Buch in Jiddisch,” 15th symposium of Mediävistenverband “Abrahams Erbe: Konkurrenz, Konflikt, Koexistenz im Mittelalter,” Heidelberg, March 3-6, 2013.
“Natural Fools: God’s Gift to Humankind,” Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Montreal, October 14-17, 2010.
“Ayn shmue fun der frume Shoshana,” 13th Symposium für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland, Düsseldorf, October 4-6, 2010.
“Fortunatus: Mediterranean Traveler in Early Modern Yiddishland,” 9th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies, Ravenna, July 25-29, 2010.
“Luther in Yiddish: Hayyim ben Nathan’s book of Judith,” Carolina Seminar on Jewish Studies, Durham, February 28, 2010.
“Shared Worlds: The Status of Yiddish in Early Modern Germany,” Sixth Annual Carolina- Duke German Studies Works-in-Progress Forum, December 1, 2009.
“‘... für der Menschen Augen gleich ein Eckel/ Grewel vnd Schewsal’: Emotion und Sehen in Christoph Irenäus’ ‘De Monstris’,” German Studies Association, Washington DC, October 8-11, 2009.
“Christian prayers in Yiddish,” German and Jewish Studies Workshop, Duke University, February 15-17, 2009.
“Jüdischer Held? Zum Bovo-bukh von Elia Levita,” conference on “Altfranzösische Chanson de geste im europäischen Kontext,” Göttingen, August 14-16, 2008.
“‘S’iz nit keyn yidishe, s’iz reyn kristlikhe tfiles’: Christliche Gebetbücher in hebräischer Schrift vom Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts aus Augsburg,” Symposium für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland, Trier, October, 2007.
“Christliche Gebete in Jiddisch: Das Manuskript Ms. orient. Ag. 31 der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha,” scholars’ colloqium of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, April, 2007.
“Fools are everywhere,” 8th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies, Moscow, July, 2006.
POSTER PRESENTATION
“A little German prayer book with Hebrew characters” (with Joseph Meeks), presented at University Research Day,Chapel Hill, March 3, 2009
OTHER CONFERENCE ACTIVITIES
Section chair, session on “Jewish Appearance and the Surrounding Societies,” workshop on
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 8
“Appearance and Distinction: Images and Self-Images of Jews,” Martin Buber Society of
Fellows in the Humanities at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, April 22, 2012. Section chair, session on “Identity Test: Other Early Modern Germans,” Sixteenth Century
Society and Conference, Montreal, October 14-17, 2010.
Section chair, session on “Early Modern History,” 9th Congress of the European Association for
Jewish Studies “Judaism in the Mediterranean Context,” Ravenna, July 25-29, 2010. Section chair “German and Jewish Studies Workshop,” Durham. February 15-17, 2009.
Section chair, session on “Germany Looking Outward,” MEMS-conference “Global encounters.
Legacies of exchange and conflict 1000-1700,” Chapel Hill. November 14-15, 2008. Section chair, session on “Triumphale Einzüge – Entrées triomphale,” interdisciplinary conference on “Performativität der Prozession: Texte und Bilder ritueller Bewegung in der
Vormoderne,” Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, October 9-11, 2008.
Section chair, session on “Sprache der Askese,” interidisciplinary conference “Moral der Lüste?
Askese und Identität in Spätantike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Humboldt- Universität, Berlin, October 11-13, 2007.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
Organizer of the interdisciplinary conference “Reconsidering Antisemitism: Past and Present,” Chapel Hill, April 10-12, 2016.
Co-organizer of the interdisciplinary conference “Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Berlin, May 10- 12, 2012.
Co-organizer of the interdisciplinary conference “Scham und Schamlosigkeit: Grenzverletzungen im Spannungsfeld von Dissimulation und Ostentation,” Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, June 4-6, 2009.
TEACHING RECORD UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING
Fall 2016 Spring 2016
Spring 2015 Fall 2014 Spring 2014
Fall 2013 Republic
GERM 325: Fools and Laughter
GERM 225: Popular and Pious
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Chajim Bloch and Sigmund Freud
GERM 302: Language and Culture
JWST: 697: How Jewish is Jewish Humor?
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Authors and Filmmakers in the German Culture from the 18th to the 21st Century
GERM 225: Popular and Pious
GERM 390: Adaptations of the Past: Literature of the German Democratic
Ruth von Bernuth CV/ page 9
Fall 2012 Fall 2010
Spring 2010
Fall 2009
Spring 2009
Fall 2008
GERM 225: Popular and Pious
GERM 065: German Heroes? (First Year Seminar)
GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature: Verwandlungen
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: East and West German Literature since
1945
GERM 390: Adaptations of the Past: Literature of the German Democratic Republic
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Christian Prayers in Yiddish (manuscript
editing of Ms. orient. Ag. 31)
GERM 089: German Heroes? (First Year Seminar)
GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Christian Prayers in Yiddish (manuscript
editing of Ms. orient. Ag. 31)
GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature: Vaterland – Muttersprache GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Christian Prayers in Yiddish (manuscript
editing of Ms. orient. Ag. 31)
GERM 396.019: Independent Readings: Löwenkopf Papers (study and selective
translation of an uncatalogued collection of personal letters exchanged by a Viennese Jewish family during the Holocaust)
GERM 303: Introduction to German Literature: Abenteuer in der Fremde GERM 390: Fools and Laughter
GRADUATE TEACHING
Spring 2016 between Fall 2015 Spring 2015 Spring 2014 Fall 2012
Spring 2010 Spring 2009
GERM 896: Independent Readings: Old Yiddish Literature
GERM 896: Independent Readings: The Medieval and Early Modern Noble
Heaven and Earth
GERM 825: Reformation Literature
GERM 502: Middle High German
GERM 500: History of German Language
GERM 825: Birth of the Novel
GERM 896: Independent Readings: Old Yiddish Literature
GERM 825: Travel Literature
GERM 896: Independent Readings: Jantz Collection and Its Manuscripts
GERM 502: Middle High German
Ruth von Bernuth
CV/ page 10
GERM 896.019: Independent Readings: Early Modern Literature
PHD STUDENTS
Advisor: Matthew Hambro, Edana Kleinhans
ADDITIONAL GERMAN DEPARTMENT ADVISING
German Club faculty advisor (Fall 2010)
Search committee German literature and culture, 1750-1830 (Spring 2010) Administration for the German major (Spring 2010)
German house faculty advisor (Fall 2008 – Fall 2010)
Alpha Phi Delta faculty advisor (Fall 2008 – Fall 2010)
UNIVERSITY-WIDE SERVICE
Chair, tenure committee Gabriel Trop (Fall 2015)
Chair, search committee Medieval German studies (Fall 2014 and Spring 2015)
Search committee American Jewish studies (Fall 2014 and Spring 2015)
Post-tenure review committee Christopher Putney (Fall 2014)
Search committee Modern Jewish thought and culture (Fall 2013 and Spring 2014) Conference organization “The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the
Premodern Era” (2011-2013)
MEMS major committee (Fall 2009 – Fall 2010)
Jewish Studies public events committee (Fall 2009, Fall 2012) NCGS Roundtable: “Fall of the Berlin Wall,” October 29, 2009 Judge, University Research Day (Spring 2009)
Jewish Studies steering committee (Fall 2008 – present)
DUKE-CAROLINA PROGRAMM
Graduate admissions committee (Spring 2010)
UNC coordinator, German studies Works in Progress Series (Fall 2009 – Spring 2011)
MEMBERSHIP IN PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
Modern Language Association, European Association of Jewish Studies, American Association of Jewish Studies
LANGUAGES
German, English, French, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, Latin
Ruth von Bernuth
Associate Professor of German
Ruth von Bernuth researches the literature and culture of the late medieval/early modern period—or the 15th to the 18th centuries—with a special emphasis on the 16th century. Further specialties include Yiddish and conversion literature. Her first book, Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: Natürliche Narrheit in den Historien von Claus Narren (Niemeyer, 2009), focuses on natural folly, the precursor to the 19th-century constructs of mental illness and mental disability. Drawing on references from religious, scientific, and literary texts, she argues that natural fools were not yet a source of worry but of wonder. In her second book, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition, she unpacks the connection between German and Yiddish literary traditions by complicating the assumption that folk tales were simply transferred from the German via Old Yiddish translation into modern Yiddish.
Education:
Ph.D., Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Email:
rvb@email.unc.edu
Office Location:
Dey Hall 423
Home Institution: University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Specializatons:
Medieval and Early Modern
Disability Studies
GDR
Jewish Studies
Popular Culture
Science and Culture
Curriculum Vitae:
PDF icon CV_September_2016.pdf
UNC-Chapel Hill's Jewish Studies Center Director to Speak at ASU
Ruth von BernuthOn November 15, Professor Ruth von Bernuth will give an evening talk entitled "How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition."
The talk will start at 7:00 pm at the Reich College of Education, Room 124.
Von Bernuth examines the collected tales of the "wise men," or "fools," of Chelm, which constitute one of the best-known folktale traditions of Eastern-European Jewry. Since the late nineteenth century, Chelm has figured prominently not only as a real Eastern-Polish city, but also as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, history and community have been projected. Her examination demonstrates how literary Chelm has function as a model of society, situated between utopia and dystopia. The imagined foolish town, von Bernuth argues, has allowed writers to entertain as well as to stress a variety of societal problems. Literary Chelm fulfills this function in Jewish literature to the present day. Professor von Bernuth's talk is based on her recently-published New York University Press book, which will be available for purchase after the lecture.
Professor von Bernuth serves as the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, the most successful Jewish Studies Center in the UNC system. She is also an Associate Professor at UNC's Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, which she joined in 2008. Professor von Bernuth holds a Ph.D. in medieval and early modern German literature from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (2005). She is also the author of Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: Natürliche Narrheit in den Historien von Claus Narren, a study of ideas of natural folly in early modern German literature.
On Wednesday, November 16, Professor von Bernuth and her work will also be at the center of the next Lunch Research Colloquium of ASU's Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies. This colloquium is based on two recent contributions by the speaker on Jewish conversion and identity and the carnivalesque in early modern Ashkenaz that are available from the Center upon request. The 2-hour colloquium will begin at 11:00 am.
Professor von Bernuth's visit is organized by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies and co-sponsored by ASU's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Philosophy and Religion and the university's Hillel chapter.
Attendance is free to ASU faculty, students, and staff, but an RSVP is required. A lunch (free of charge for participants) will be served. To RSVP and for more information, please contact holocaust@appstate.edu or call 828.262.2311.
4/13/17, 1:26 PM
Print Marked Items
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition
ProtoView.
(Jan. 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9781479828449
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition Ruth von Bernuth
NYU Press
2016
317 pages
$35.00
Hardcover
GR98
While a real Polish town, Chelm also serves as GodAEs metaphor of Jewish identity, history, and community. Von Bernuth analyzes the connections between the German and Yiddish traditions. The book offers the first comprehensive survey of all the collections of Chelm stories and their Yiddish precursors published between 1700 and the present. It argues that Chelm and its precursors have functioned for more than three centuries as an ironic model of Jewish society, both utopia and dystopia, an imaginary place onto which changing questions about Jewish identity, community, and history have repeatedly been projected. As Chelm stories were transplanted to America, well-known writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer used the town to critique aspects of Jewish society. ChelmAEs symbolic value allows ideas and opinions, feelings, and ideologies to be expressed and questioned at the same time. It has always functioned as well as a satirical model for the illustration of prevailing questions of Jewish history and community, history and memory, place, and time. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition." ProtoView, Jan. 2017.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476706448&it=r&asid=aa08bd711ae07bbd0cd231ce0092a315. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A476706448
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Fairy tales & folklore
Library Journal.
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p84. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition. Princeton Univ. (Oddly Modern Fairy Tales). Nov. 2016.296p. ed. by Gretchen Schultz & Lewis Seifert, tr. from French by Gretchen Schultz & Lewis Seifert, photos, notes, bibliog. ISBN 9780691161655. $22.95; ebk. ISBN 9781400883455. LIT
Editors Schultz (French studies, Brown Univ.; Sapphic Fathers) and Seifert (French studies, Brown Univ.; Manning the Margins) present an anthology of French Decadent fairy tales published between 1870 and 1914. During a period of French history marked by social and political turbulence and advances in technology and industry, Decadent writers were cynical of the social, cultural, and political changes many people marked as progress. This collection includes tales by authors such as Rachilde, Charles Baudelaire, Willy, Catulle Mendes, and others who wrote fairy tales that illustrate the anxiety, anger, and nostalgia these writers felt toward topics including industrialization, changing gender roles, nontraditional sexualities, and more. Many of the stories rework classic fairy tales (e.g., Charles Perrault's Stories or Tales of Yesteryear) to address contemporary issues through the lens of the Decadent movement. VERDICT This valuable collection of tales is recommended for both scholars and readers with a general interest in fairy tales and French literature.--Jennifer Harris, Southern New Hampshire Univ. Lib., Manchester
Nigg, Joseph. The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. Univ. of Chicago. Nov. 2016.496p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780226195490. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780226195520. LIT
In this insightful cultural history of the mythical, self-immolating bird, Nigg (Sea Monsters) traces the evolution of the phoenix from its origin as a sacred Egyptian symbol of the sun to its modern appearances in popular literature and as a motif in civic and corporate logos. Using excerpts from the writings of scholars, ecclesiastics, and poets--as well as a selection of pictorial representations from ancient eras to the present day--Nigg illustrates how the creature's association with rebirth and longevity has resonated throughout history, serving variously as a symbol of resurrection to Christians, an alchemical allegory for the process of chemical and spiritual transformation, and a poetic convention for an idealized lover or the hopeless passion of the lovelorn. The enduring power of the phoenix as an emblem of triumph over adversity even led to its adoption as a symbol for rebuilding efforts following the September 11 terrorist attacks. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in the origins and history of a popular mythological creature and iconographie symbol.--Sara Shreve, Newton, KS
Von Bernuth, Ruth. How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition. New York Univ. Oct. 2016.336p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781479828449. $35; ebk. ISBN 9781479886654. LIT
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The fictitious town of Chelm, where all the world's fools are said to have mistakenly fallen during creation, is an important part of Yiddish folk tradition and paradigm of folly literature. Von Bernuth (Germanic languages & director, Carolina Ctr. for Jewish Studies, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) delivers an effective discussion and detailed history of Chelm tales and folly literature, and the influences from Jewish and European culture, history, and identity on these traditions. Enhanced with Chelm stories, topics include Chelm in literature and on stage (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer's seminal stories), a history and meticulous discussion of folly literature (e.g., comparisons of the German collection of folly literature, Schildburgerbuch, and its Yiddish translation, Shildburger bukh), connections between real-world and fictitious geography (e.g., similarities between tales of the foolish town Schildburg, and Schildau in Saxony), and more. VERDICT Thorough and accessible, this book is a welcome addition to Jewish and European history, literature, and folklore collections and is recommended for both specialists and general readers.--Jennifer Harris, Southern New Hampshire Univ. Lib., Manchester
* Williams, Mark. Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Princeton Univ. Nov. 2016.608p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780691157313. $39.50; ebk. ISBN 9781400883325. LIT
From the early Middle Ages to modern times, Williams (Simon & June Li Fellow in the Humanities, Univ. of Oxford; Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700-1700) guides readers through an examination of the history and development of Irish gods and their myths. Discussions include topics such as how stories and characteristics of the pre-Christian gods changed when Christianity was introduced (e.g., the pagan god Lugus's transformation into the literary Lug), the effects of Irish gods and mythology on history and culture (e.g., the emergence of "Celtology"/Celtic studies), the Irish gods in literature and art (e.g., the work of W.B. Yeats, George Russell, and impact of the Literary Revival), and more. Examinations of ancient and modern Irish sagas, poems, and other narratives such as "The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Lir" and Standish James O'Grady's two-volume History of Ireland appropriately frame these discussions. Includes a glossary and pronunciation guide.
VERDICT Scholarly, complete, and engaging, this volume will complement existing works on the topic. Strongly recommended for students, scholars, and fans of Irish mythology and literature--Jennifer Harris, Southern New Hampshire Univ. Lib., Manchester
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fairy tales & folklore." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 84. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830381&it=r&asid=de01379b1b0be2afa89f841c4b298a24 Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467830381
.
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How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition
Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition Ruth Von Bernuth. New York Univ., $35 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4798-2844-9
Bernuth, director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides a detailed and comprehensive examination of the evolution of some of the best-known Yiddish folk stories-- those revolving around the comically foolish men of the town of Chelm--that places those tales in historical and cultural context. She goes back centuries, looking at traditions of stories of fools as early as the late Middle Ages, and how they came to be incorporated in European Jewish culture. Her cogent analysis carries through to the present day and to non-European milieus; Woody Allen parodied the Chelm stories in a 1970 comic essay for the New Yorker, and a current blog, Chelm-on-the-Med, collects absurd soft news stories about Israel. The existence of that blog, evidence of what the author terms Chelm's "major and still-unexplored role in Israeli popular culture and literature," is but one of the eye-openers for readers who enjoy the stories of inept Jews who try to trap moonlight in a barrel. There are plenty of other revelations as well, including a close study of how the stories evolved between the world wars. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016,
p. 61. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900429&it=r&asid=b45281eac3fc052fc5ef65e898257a20. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900429
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he serious history of a comical town A scholar unravels the origins of ChelmBY MATTI FRIEDMAN March 23, 2012, 1:00 pm
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The Chelm stories, usually seen as an expression of an authentic Jewish folk tradition, have more complicated origins. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin's 'Khakhme Khelm,' Warsaw 1926.)WRITERSMatti Friedman
Matti Friedman
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CHELM
How, you may ask, was Chelm created?
The truest answer to that question, they say, is that Chelm, the most famous town in Jewish folklore, came into being when the Lord sent an angel with a sack of foolish souls to distribute across the entire world, and the angel tripped and spilled them all in the same place.
That, we are told, is how we were given a town with sages so wise they captured the moon by shutting its reflection in a barrel of water, so Talmudically adept at outsmarting logic itself that they carried each other on their shoulders to avoid leaving footprints in newly fallen snow.
The factual origins of this mythical town, a researcher is now showing, might be more prosaic but are no less interesting.
The field of Chelm studies is, perhaps unsurprisingly, as pristine as the snow in the Chelm story, largely undisturbed by the footsteps of serious scholars. Professors of literature feel, perhaps, that the word “Chelm” would not add much gravitas to their curriculum vitae.
But one scholar, a literature professor at the University of North Carolina, has embarked nonetheless on an attempt to methodically map the origins of Chelm. In archives in Europe and the US and at Jerusalem’s National Library, Ruth von Bernuth has gone through newspapers and books dating back four centuries in an attempt to trace the origins of the stories. Tales that have come to be seen as products of a pure and authentic Jewish culture, it turns out, have origins less simple than they would seem.
Ruth von Bernuth has gone over old newspapers and printed books to piece together the story behind the stories of Chelm. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin's 'Khakhme Khelm,' Warsaw, 1926.)
Ruth von Bernuth has gone over old newspapers and books to piece together the story behind the stories of Chelm. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin's 'Khakhme Khelm,' Warsaw, 1926.)
Chelm is a real town, a fairly average one, in a part of Poland near the border with Ukraine. Chelm and its 70,000 present-day residents have given the outside world little reason to notice that they exist.
Their physical existence, though, was never the point. For Jews of European descent, Chelm is a word synonymous with fools convinced of their own wisdom, a name that sums up a tendency — one Jews might think of as being particularly Jewish — not to let common sense interfere with a really good idea.
In this Chelm, for example, when the synagogue sexton became too old to walk around knocking on shutters to wake the townspeople for morning prayers, the elders met and solved the problem: The sexton would remain at home and all of the shutters would be brought to him.
Von Bernuth, the daughter of a Protestant theologian, grew up in East Germany. The Communist regime fell the year she finished high school.
She was exposed to Yiddish while working on a German literature dissertation at Oxford, and in 2000, a colleague suggested she look into Chelm. She had never heard of it. Today, Chelm is where she spends nearly all of her time.
The story of the Chelm fables, von Bernuth says, begins in 1597. It begins not, as one might assume, with Jews in Poland, but with Christians in Germany.
That year, an unknown German author published a collection of tales about a fictional town where wise men behaved foolishly. Those stories became famous as the Schildburg tales, named for the fictional village where they were said to have taken place.
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Some of these stories will be familiar to those raised on tales of Chelm. In one, for example, the village elders try to shovel sunlight into sacks to illuminate the town hall, which they have built without windows. In another, to combat an infestation of mice they buy a creature they are convinced is a special “mouse-hound” — it is, in fact, a cat — and then, terrified by the animal, rid themselves of it by torching the entire town.
The books, spread across German-speaking lands by peddlers, were reprinted more than 30 times, and they crossed over the cultural lines separating German Christians from the Jews who lived among them. In 1700, the stories were first printed in Yiddish.
At the time, von Bernuth has written, the two languages were so close that some scholars debate whether such works “are best considered translations or transliterations.” Had the stories been read out loud, Germans and Jews would have understood either version.
In the first Yiddish edition and in those that followed, the town was still called Schildburg. The characters were still Christians who ate pork and went to the bathhouse on Saturday.
In the 1800s, von Bernuth has found, the modern-minded Jewish intellectuals known as the maskilim picked up on a later version of the same stories and began telling them in a Jewish context. For them, the foolish village elders, with their pretensions of sagacity, reflected an archaic rabbinic establishment opposed to their own new ways of thinking.
The stories of Chelm, von Bernuth's work shows, show how close Yiddish and German were. (photo credit: Courtesy of Ruth von Bernuth)
The stories of Chelm, von Bernuth has shown, demonstrate how close Yiddish and German culture were. (photo credit: Courtesy)
No one had yet mentioned Chelm, which was still known simply as home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. Other towns, like Prague, were the butt of jokes among Jews at this time, but not Chelm. It was only in 1887 that the first Yiddish book to explicitly link Chelm with foolishness appeared in the city of Lvov, in Galicia.
That book, Der Khelmer Khokhem, survives in one known copy at the National Library in Jerusalem, where von Bernuth recently arrived with a research grant from the Rothschild family’s Yad Hanadiv foundation. The book includes the classic story of the rabbi who sets out from Chelm to visit a nearby city and is hidden under a blanket by a wagon driver who drives around for a few minutes and then deposits him back in the same place.
The big city, the rabbi is astonished to discover as he walks around, looks just like Chelm. Indeed, the whole world is Chelm.
If all the Chelm stories can be said to have a shared punchline, that, of course, would be it.
The reason Chelm was selected for the starring role is still not entirely clear. Von Bernuth believes that storytellers probably just needed a kind of eastern European Everytown, and Chelm fit.
By the turn of the 20th century, Chelm stories were spreading. They were parables, occasionally bawdy ones, for adults, not entertainment for children. The first large collection was published in 1917, including versions of the original German stories and new additions.
By the turn of the 20th century, what originated with a collection of German stories in 1957 had become the literary canon known as Chelm. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin's, 'Khakhme Khelm,' Warsaw, 1926.)
By the turn of the 20th century, what originated with a collection of German stories in 1597 had become the literary canon known as Chelm. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin’s, ‘Khakhme Khelm,’ Warsaw, 1926.)
In the 1920s, the Yiddish writer Menachem Kipnis wrote a series of humorous articles in the Warsaw newspaper Haynt in which he identified himself as a journalist reporting from Chelm. These dispatches were so popular that a mother from the real Chelm is said to have written the paper begging it to stop printing them — she was afraid she would never be able to marry off her daughter.
This anecdote might be just another Chelm story. But von Bernuth did notice that as the stories gained in popularity people stopped referring to themselves in print as “Chelmers.” Chelm was no longer just the name of a town — it was a joke, one that somehow remained funny even after hundreds of Chelm’s real Jews were marched out of the town and shot by German troops in late 1939 and thousands of others were sent to the death camp at Sobibor.
“In addition to the already mentioned Hersh Welczer, whose widow and his orphans later escaped from Chelm to Wolyn,” reads a description of the events of 1939 in a memorial book later published by survivors, “the following popular Chelm Jews were shot during the slaughter: Dr. Oks, the photographer, Rozenblat, the three Lewensztajn brothers — rich iron merchants, Gamulke, a former lieutenant in the Polish military and Itshe Sznicer, owner of the perfumery.
“Their dead bodies were then handed over to their orphaned families by the peasants who knew them,” the account tells us, and the rest were buried together, 50 to a grave.
It became clear long before that war that the world of the Chelm stories was disappearing, and their role changed — they became less a living culture’s joke about itself than a wry love letter to an endangered species.
The stories might have survived when so much else of Yiddish culture was lost because “their absurd, humorous logic gave them a certain life,” said Yechiel Szeintuch, a Yiddish professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Though interest in Yiddish culture is increasing worldwide and new Yiddish departments are opening up in places like Lund, Sweden, Hebrew University shut its own department down in 2008. Szeintuch calls this “a modern-day Chelm story.”)
Over time, Chelm became popularly seen as one of the purest expressions of Jewish folk traditions from Europe. For German scholars before WWII, on the other hand, the Yiddish stories were derided as foreign corruptions of the original Schildburg fables.
In fact, von Bernuth said, the only way to understand Chelm is as the joint creation of different people who lived in the same place and listened to their neighbors’ stories.
“These stories are one of the most interesting examples of how German and Yiddish culture influenced one another,” she said. “It shows how intertwined they were.”
“To tell the story of Chelm, you need to know about German culture and German literature. Otherwise it’s rootless,” she said.
Von Bernuth is used to raised eyebrows from scholars who hear how she spends her time — “Some of them think I’m crazy,” she said. But there are advantages.
“When I meet people, especially elderly people, and tell them I’m working on Chelm,” she said, “they smile.”
_______
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition, by Ruth von Bernuth
William Kolbrener on a study of the tales that centre on a place that is both a real Polish city and an imaginary realm
October 27, 2016
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By William Kolbrener
The Jewish old age home in Chelm, 1918
Source: Yad Vashem
A ‘timeless super-shtetl’: the Jewish old age home in Chelm, 1918
The “folktale repertoire” of the literary Chelm, Ruth von Bernuth observes in How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, claims its own fantastic, indeed mythic, origins: “When God created the world, He sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls to distribute them all over the world, but the bag tore, and all the foolish souls spilled out on the same spot.” A genuine Polish town, Chelm today bears only a few traces of its centuries-old Jewish community: a cemetery and an early 20th-century synagogue now converted into a western-themed saloon. Von Bernuth provides a comprehensive literary account of the tales of Chelm’s foolish wise men, showing their city to be an “imaginary place onto which changing questions about Jewish identity, community, and history have been repeatedly projected”.
She begins by elaborating the provenance of the Chelm stories, including Ayzik Meyer Dik’s skeletal ur-tales of Khes of 1867, showing how they emerged through a long process of “dynamic negotiation” with various literary traditions. The Wise Men of Chelm, performed by the Yiddish Arts Theater in 1933, provides an example of the Chelm tales’ hybrid affiliations, showing a point of contact with neo-Hasidism but also “resonating with echoes of European and classical Greek drama”.
Of the different forms of cultural work that the imaginary Chelm helped to perform, negotiating secular modernity, von Bernuth shows, was primary. Chelm stories often served an enlightenment (or maskilic) agenda, mocking the “narrow-mindedness inculcated by backward towns and the Hasidic lifestyle”, targeting especially the reactionary agendas of community leaders. But even the more negative renderings of Chelm tended towards idealisations, as in I. L. Peretz’s tales, with their implicit celebration of “universal foolishness”, that is, folly as wisdom.
After the Shoah, Chelm increasingly served as a nostalgic marker for a world that had been lost, “an authentic Jewish community”. Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk, in a post-war novel about Chelm, evoked the town’s “ruined past” (his story ostensibly based on “an old record book…found in the attic of a mikveh”) – with the town now presented as what von Bernuth calls a “timeless super-shtetl”, “a parable for the whole world”. Trunk’s narrative climaxes with a conference that includes “the best known fools in Yiddish folklore”, as well as a keynote speech by none other than Albert Einstein. Despite the physical destruction of European Jewry, through Trunk’s narrative, the imaginary Chelm persists as a fantasy, and the older Judaism of Europe, as von Bernuth notes, “has a future”.
For all the insights of How the Wise Men Got to Chelm, von Bernuth sometimes seems overly enchanted by the tales, occasioning an interpretive reticence in relation to some of the texts that she invokes. She does, for example, relate that Trunk’s climactic conference scene ends with a Chelmite “placing a yarmulke on Einstein’s head and offering him water for the ritual purification of his hands”. She stops short, however, of interpreting these details (perhaps the religious sanitisation of Einstein expresses anxiety about how the fantasy world of Chelm might fare in an age of secular modernity?). But of course the Chelm tales are enchanting (a “cause for laughter”), and von Bernuth succeeds admirably in showing how the mythic locale allowed for the expression of various Jewish fantasies and anxieties over the past century and a half, and indeed continues to do so today.
William Kolbrener is professor of English, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and author of The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (2016).
How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition
By Ruth von Bernuth
New York-University Press, 336pp, £28.99
ISBN 9781479828449
Published 18 October 2016
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How the Wise Man Got to Chelm
The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition
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Ruth von Bernuth
New York, NY: New York University Press , October 2016. 336 pages.
$35.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9781479828449. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
Review
As foolishness is often received with dismissal from a serious and sober public, so too is scholarship about such foolishness often dismissed in the academy. Yet Ruth von Bernuth works hard in How the Wise Men got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition to make known a historical discourse of folly, and bring it into the academic sphere.
The stories of Chelm have developed an established place in Jewish lore and literature during the past hundred years. Chelm is an imaginary, Eastern European shtetl, or village, in which many of its Jewish inhabitants are constantly running into conundrums. These problems are solved through the ingenuity of the “wise men of Chelm,” men who conjure up what the reader knows to be utterly foolish and self-defeating “solutions.” Somehow, however, the townspeople are always satisfied with the result. These clever and humorous stories, originating in the Middle Ages, remain popular folklore among contemporary Jews. Where did these stories come from, and just how far back does this folk tradition go? How the Wise Men got to Chelm digs into Chelm’s past to find a more than five-hundred-year-old tradition of Chelm literature, situating its origins within a larger German genre of folly literature.
The method employed throughout this book is one of comparison. The reader learns about the development of Chelm stories by first understanding the striking similarities—and fascinating differences—between these stories and their German counterparts, the medieval Lalebuch and Schildbürgerbuch. This was a type of folly literature circulating throughout Germany during the sixteenth century concerning the silly and irrational solutions to problems that the townspeople of Schilda or Lalen concoct. For example, in one very Chelm-like story from the Lalebuch, von Bernuth summarizes the story goes as follows: "[a] further mishap occurs when one of the Lalen is decapitated, or so it appears except that no one can remember whether the man had anything on his shoulders before the apparent accident took place. Subsequently, another of the Lalen becomes so obsessed with trying to teach a cuckoo to cuckoo better that he climbs up a tree and remains there, oblivious to everything else, even when a wolf comes along and eats the horse he left at the foot of the tree" (64).
Von Bernuth is largely able to carry out her project, as she sharply observes, due to the fact that “research on the Schildbürgerbuch began uncommonly early—in the first half of the eighteenth century—thanks to the historian and educator Johann Christian Schöttgen” (66). She tells the reader both tidbits of these text’s hilarious tales, while pointing to larger themes and questions one must consider. For example, she discusses “folly societies” in medieval Europe, both serving to “represent and celebrate … maleness” while also “expos[ing] other men as fools for failing to live by the social norms of the community” (69). Eventually, these stories and texts made there way into the “Yiddish canon,” with a Yiddish Schildbürgerbuch emerging later in the eighteenth century. While appreciating the uniqueness of the still-extant Chelm tradition, von Bernuth also makes clear the literary and social culture in which this literature emerged.
In a sense then, von Bernuth does something beyond teaching her readers about Chelm: she leads by example in showing how one can research anything; that nothing is too foolish for analysis. In so doing, von Bernuth discovers and exposes a world of material and a five-hundred-year-old folk tradition that no other writer has adequately addressed. She does so in a convincing and enjoyable way. This book is therefore highly recommended.
About the Reviewer(s):
Rachel Slutsky is a doctoral student in Jewish Studies at Harvard University.
Date of Review:
March 7, 2017
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
Ruth von Bernuth is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Issue 10 > Features
Book review: Folklore or literary creation?
By: Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Although stories about the fools of Chelm may seem like timeless folk tales passed down through the generations, the actual story of their creation is far more complex. In “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (New York University Press), Ruth Von Bernuth, an associate professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, searches for the origin of these tales. While the term “the fools of Chelm” is not found in any literary source before 1873, the German and Yiddish precursors of these stories can be traced as far back as the late Middle Ages.
Although the following summary is an oversimplification of Von Bernuth’s research, it helps portray the complex path of the stories’ creation. According to the author, the initial inspiration for Chelm can be found in German folk tales about Christian fools. Collections of these tales were first printed in German and then in Yiddish. In these early Yiddish versions of these stories, the characters were not Jewish, although some aspects of their Christian lives were usually toned down or changed. During the Jewish Enlightenment, German Jewish writers adapted these tales to feature Jewish characters and situations. Some authors used them as a way of criticizing the Chasidic movement, although the tales did not necessarily take place in Eastern Europe, nor did they mention Chelm, which is a real town. As time passed, more and more authors placed their fools’ tales in Chelm – offering variations of stories that had already appeared and creating new ones. It was not until after World War II, though, that the “wise men of Chelm” become a well-known part of American Jewish culture.
Von Bernuth’s systematic look at the different versions of German and Yiddish books is impressive, even though there is more depth offered than the general reader may wish to know. However, included in this research is some fascinating material – for example, when the author shows what occurred when the German tales were first published in Yiddish. According to Von Bernuth, most Jews in the 1700s spoke German, so to say that the tales were translated into Yiddish is not technically correct. What these Jews could not do is read the Roman alphabet (for example, the alphabet used for German, French and English), so the text was transliterated – meaning that while the letters used were Hebrew, the language was actually German. Yes, changes were also made to the text, even though some authors claimed their work was exactly the same as the German original. It was only later – when the German language was modernized – that Yiddish became a separate language.
While contemporary readers may think of the Chelm stories as charming nonsense for children, that was not the original authors’ intent. Von Bernuth notes that there was an ideological component to the early works: the fools were those the authors opposed, for example, “dogmatic community rabbis, irrational Hasidic rebbes and their incredulous followers, and even differently enlightened.... rivals.” Things changed, though, when the tales began to appear in a Yiddish newspaper in Poland. The column written by Menakhen Kipnis for Haynt transformed the “Chelm stories into a full-fledged popular phenomenon.” Kipnis published a total of 67 stories, which greatly expanded on the Chelm tales already available. Some of them were taken from different fools’ tales not originally connected to Chelm, but, since Chelm soon became synonymous with foolishness, they were transferred to that locale.
Chelm stories did not appear in the United States until the 1940s, several decades after they became popular in Europe. The tales, which were originally written for adults, also began to be published in versions appropriate for children and continue to be popular in contemporary times. Writers create new versions of old tales or offer new stories – not only in books, but on the stage and screen. In addition, Von Bernuth notes that Chelm “plays a major and still-unexplored role in Israeli popular culture and literature and is frequently invoked even in newspapers and current-affairs broadcasting with references to parliamentary, governmental and institutional mismanagement and folly.... Chelm does appear to be regarded as one of Israeli culture’s richer natural sources, well-adapted to the population’s widely varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds and the misunderstandings to which this is liable to give rise.”
The sections of “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm” that focus on the minute differences between the various editions of the German and Yiddish tales will be of more interest to the scholar. The work does include some analysis of specific Chelm tales, but that’s only a small part of the work. However, those eager to discover how folk traditions evolve will be impressed by the level of Von Bernuth’s scholarship.