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At the origins of the Yiddish lexicographic tradition: the Mirkevet ha-mishneh (Kraków, 1534)

Original (French): Aux origines de la tradition lexicographique en yiddish : le Mirkevet ha-mishneh (Cracovie, 1534)

Paper · 2023 · Jean Baumgarten

Summary

This article examines the Mirkevet ha-mishneh, an anonymous Hebrew–Yiddish biblical glossary printed in Cracow in 1534 and regarded as the earliest printed book of Yiddish literature. Baumgarten places it within medieval Hebrew lexicography, which arranged biblical words by root. He shows that the compiler shortened entries from earlier Hebrew sources. Each entry kept only the vernacular gloss and the biblical citation. The book has about 170 folios and roughly 13,000–14,000 glosses, set out in three columns: the Hebrew form, its Yiddish rendering (fartaytshung), and the verse reference or references.

The study looks at how the work is structured, which grammatical principles governed the rendering of biblical Hebrew lemmas into Yiddish, and how a consistent system of vernacular equivalents came about. Its main claim is that this glossary connects two things. It continues the root-based Hebrew dictionary tradition, and it also sits at the start of Yiddish grammatical and lexicographic writing. Early printing made this possible, because it opened a market for learners with little Hebrew, such as children, women and girls.

Key points

  • The book was printed in Cracow in 1534 by the Helicz brothers (Shmuel, Asher, Elyakim). It was reissued without changes as Sefer shel Rabbi Anshel (Prague printer Aaron Prostitz, Cracow, 1552 and 1584).
  • It runs to about 170 folios with 13,000–14,000 glosses. Each entry has three columns: Hebrew form, Yiddish gloss, and biblical reference(s).
  • The main sources are:
    • David Qimḥi's Sefer ha-shorashim
    • Dunash ibn Labrat, known for attacking Menaḥem Ibn Saruq's Maḥberet
    • Isaac Nathan ben Kalonimus's Meir nativ
  • The glosses aim at the literal sense (peshat) and add short notes, mostly on morphology. The intended readers were children, women and young girls learning Hebrew.
  • The compiler says he is not the author of the glosses. He claims to pass on what his teacher taught and what printed commentaries contain. Related works such as Elie Lévita's concordance (Sefer ha-zikhronot) and the Beˀer Moshe (Prague, 1604) show the same habit of recording glosses from the ḥeder classroom.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each entry links a word form to its translation and to the exact verse where it occurs, so every gloss can be checked against the text it came from.
  • I2. The compiler condensed large scholarly dictionaries into a lean form that keeps only the gloss and the citation, which made the work usable for beginners.
  • I3. Lévita's concordance arranges every root's derivatives in a fixed order: verb stems first, then tenses, then nouns (singular before plural, absolute before construct), then forms with prefixed particles.
  • I4. The glosses deliberately capture the plain literal meaning first, because the authors saw it as a prerequisite for interpretation and commentary.
  • I5. The compiler openly credits his teacher and printed commentaries as the origin of the glosses, rather than presenting them as his own invention.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Lexicon and ontology entries could store a pointer to the corpus sentence that justifies them, so the explanation for any sense choice can show its evidence.
  • I2 (world): Compiled knowledge from WordNet, FrameNet or Wikidata could be distilled into small per-sense records with one attesting example, which keeps lookups fast and readable.
  • I3 (tokens): A fixed canonical order for listing a lemma's inflected forms would make morphology tables predictable, easy to diff, and simple to check for missing cells.
  • I4 (frames): Keeping a strictly literal frame layer separate from, and below, implicature and irony reflects the same priority and keeps each inference step traceable.
  • I5 (learn): Silver labels could carry provenance tags (which parser, which LLM tier, which rule), so disagreements and errors can be traced back to their source.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France104 works · 60,877 citations🔬École des hautes études en sciences socialesParis · France8 works · 2,159 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 worksHebrew & Aramaic · 481 works

Cite

Cite as Jean Baumgarten. 2023. Aux origines de la tradition lexicographique en yiddish : le Mirkevet ha-mishneh (Cracovie, 1534). Histoire Épistémologie Langage 45.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/hel.4338

@inproceedings{baumgarten2023aux,
  title = {{Aux origines de la tradition lexicographique en yiddish : le Mirkevet ha-mishneh (Cracovie, 1534)}},
  author = {Jean Baumgarten},
  booktitle = {Histoire Épistémologie Langage 45},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.4000/hel.4338},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/hel.4338}
}

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