The Papal Game: Telling a Jewish Story from the Mayse bukh, Ayzik Meyer Dik and Marcus Lehmann

Summary

IN SEPTEMBER 2011, Jonathan Hess sent the following email, inquiring about the story of a Jewish pope:

You don't have anything written on the Mayse bukh yet, do you? I’ve been reading in and about it. Marcus Lehmann wrote a[n] 1867 historical novella, “Rabbi Elchanan,” that is clearly both a response to the Mortara case (it was printed in Der Israelit alongside news items on the case) and a reworking and expansion of the version of the tale that's in the Mayse bukh. I’ve read Joseph Sherman […] Lucia Raspe [… and a]lso gone back to Baumgarten and other places, but [I’m] not finding much of interest—and this stuff is very interesting, as you know all too well!

Lehmann obviously knew the Mayse bukh (and writes about it at times). There's also a verse version of the tale adapted from the Mayse bukh in Abraham Tendlau's very prominent Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden juedischer Vorzeit (printed several times in the 1840s). Are there other verse adaptations of this tale that you’re familiar with? Most of Tendlau's modern German adaptations are in verse—most of which is at the level of typical 19th-century poems that people wrote at home to celebrate family members’ birthdays …”

Jonathan's curiosity about the Jewish pope was part of his larger vision for expanding how we think about Jewish literature by looking beyond disciplinary and canonical boundaries. His interest in the endurance of this legend resurfaced when he wrote on literary responses to the Mortara case—the nineteenth-century battle over the Catholic Church's seizure of a young Jewish boy—in one of his last articles, published in winter 2018. In this article, he investigated how various Jewish writers used the form of melodramatic literature to find agency in response to contemporary events.

In his email connecting the Jewish pope and the Mortara case, Jonathan pointed to the staying power of the Jewish pope story: from the Yiddish story found in the Mayse bukh to Lehmann's nineteenthcentury version.