Discovering Yiddish treasures in a glorious Italian library

Parma, Italy is best known for parmesan and prosciutto, but it is also a place of Jewish pilgrimage,

Yiddishists come here, as I did last October on a YIVO tour, to visit the Palatina Library and walk in the footsteps of the first Yiddish linguist – Max Weinreich.

 Born in 1894 in what is now Latvia, he studied in Germany, lived in Vilna  and escaped the Holocaust to become a professor of Yiddish at City University in New York.

Like many 20^th century Jewish intellectuals, Weinreich sought a contemporary Jewish identity “neither in Moshe Rabeinu nor the Messiah”, in the words of one of our on-board historians, US-based Professor Sam Kassow, a specialist in Ashkenazi Jewish history. Our other was US-based Professor Elissa Bemporad, a specialist in Italian Jewish History.

Weinreich’s point of entry was the Yiddish language.  After completing his dissertation in Germany in 1923 “Studies in the history and dialect distribution of the Yiddish language”, in 1925 he went on to co-found the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Yiddish Scientific Institute), abbreviated as YIVO,  with trustees including Freud and Einstein.

Today YIVO, based in New York, is the world’s primary archive of 1000 years of Ashkenazi Jewish culture recorded in Yiddish.

But the Palatina Library in Parma is home to some of the treasures it honours, an unparalleled collection of medieval Jewish texts.