A German Tune, A Hebrew Script: A Yiddish Translation of Lutheran Liturgy

This arti­cle adds to the ongo­ing dis­cus­sion of inter­re­li­gious rela­tion­ships between Jews and Chris­tians in Old Yid­dish and ear­ly mod­ern Euro­pean Jew­ish his­to­ry by exam­in­ing a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown source: an anony­mous Yid­dish trans­la­tion of Johannes Kolroß’s ​“Ich dank dir lieber Herre” (I thank you dear Lord). This Protes­tant morn­ing hymn, writ­ten in 1535, was includ­ed in Luther­an litur­gi­cal antholo­gies. The trans­la­tion is found in one sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry eclec­tic man­u­script con­tain­ing var­i­ous Yid­dish lit­er­ary pieces. It is one of the ear­li­est known trans­la­tions of a Protes­tant litur­gi­cal piece into any Jew­ish lan­guage. This arti­cle dis­cuss­es the trans­la­tion of ​“Ich dank dir lieber Herre” for the first time. It uses this hymn and its trans­la­tion as a case study of the trans­mis­sion of pop­u­lar com­po­si­tions in inter­re­li­gious con­texts. It presents the poem, the basic mech­a­nisms of the trans­la­tion, and the role of the piece in the gen­er­al wider con­text of the manuscript.