Accessibility, Audience and Ideology: On Editing Old Yiddish Texts

Abstract

One of the basic purposes of text editions of all forms is to render the texts accessible to a wider audience than would be possible if they were available only in manuscript. The concept of accessibility is, however, in itself problematic, for in order to achieve its goal, it initially demands a conscious identification of audience. Moreover, just as the expectations of the intended audience condition both form and content of literary genres, so too does this apply to the genre of text editions. In making the edited text accessible to his intended audience, the editor necessarily manipulates the manuscript text to a greater or lesser degree in transcribing, printing, normalizing, standardizing and repunctuating the text. We generally accept some or all of these procedures simply as the editor's task. But even the ostensibly most innocuous editorial decision and mechanical task is interpretive, an exercise of judgment and thus also of editorial power. As in the exercise of any form of power, here too there can be abuse: depending on their degree of extremity, their unity of purpose, their guiding principle, the editor's interpretations can become ideological. The problem of accessibility with respect to Old Yiddish literary texts is somewhat more complex than normal, for both textual and cultural reasons. A simple list of some basic facts of the Old Yiddish textual tradition demonstrates the potential for the abuse of editorial power: Old Yiddish manuscripts are written in the Hebrew alphabet; yet at the time that the traditional Hebrew orthography was adapted for use in representing Old Yiddish texts, it had no established tradition of graphemically representing the vowels of a non-Hebrew language text; vowel pointing in Old Yiddish texts is very rare; only five graphemes represent all Old Yiddish vowels (in addition to their consonantal functions); thus specific identification of vowel phonemes is, except in rare cases, all but impossible. Yet the determination of vowel