Naharaim 2016; 10(2): 195213

Ofer Dynes*
Yiddish for Spies, or the Secret History
of Jewish Literature, Lemberg 1814
DOI 10.1515/naha-2016-0015

Abstract: This article has two goals: first, it aims to solve a mystery in Yiddish
studies by identifying the previously unknown author of one of the earliest
Eastern European modern literary texts in Yiddish, and reconstructing the
historical context in which he wrote the text. Second, it will show how this
archival-biographical discovery sheds new light on the history of Eastern
European Jews during the Napoleonic Wars (17991815) as well as on the rise
of Haskalah literature. Finally, as the title of this article suggests, I will argue
that there was a direct link between narration and denunciation, between the
Austrian imperial interest in collecting insider information about the Jews and
the turn to writing literature in Jewish languages.

Keywords: Habsburg Empire, Galicia, Haskalah, Napoleonic Wars, Yiddish

Literature, Johann Eduard Sack, Joseph Perl

For truth now came to be seen as something that will not reveal itself unless it is pursued
through the clandestine methods of the secret police Truth cannot be seen directly, it
must be spied out.1
(Andreas Glaeser)

Who is Johann Eduard Sack?

In 1937, Filip Friedman (19011960), the Polish-Jewish historian, discovered in
the Austrian censorship archives in Lww a manuscript in Yiddish, transcribed
in the Roman alphabet, of a poem authored in 1814. The works long title in

1 Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East
German Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 31.

*Corresponding author: Ofer Dynes, Department of Jewish Studies, McGill University, Leacock
Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7,
E-mail: ofer.dynes@mail.mcgill.ca

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196 Ofer Dynes

German reads Schloime Klappzmbels treuherzige Beschreibung der von der

Lemberger Judenschaft abgehalten wordenen letzten Friedensfeyer Seinem
innigsgeliebten Freunde Hersch Schmeckpdele als ein Denkmahl des dabei
genossenen unvergesslichen Freudengefhls dargebracht (Schloime Klapzmbels
nave description of the peace celebrations of the Jewish community of
Lemberg given as a gift to his beloved friend Hersch Schmeckpdele as a
souvenir of his unforgettable happiness on that occasion.)2
The poem offers a detailed description of the festivities in the Jewish
community of Lemberg, the administrative capital of Galicia, following
Napoleons abdication in April 1814. Friedman assumed that this manuscript
had been rejected by the censor. In fact, it was published the same year it was
authored, 1814, in Lemberg, without any modifications.3 In his article,
Friedman speculated about the identity of the unfamiliar writer: Johann
Eduard Sack. Either, Friedman suggested, this is the pseudonym of a Jewish
enlightener, hiding under a Christian surname, or, offering an ostensibly wild
guess, he proposed that this might even be an Austrian who had taught himself
Yiddish. Friedmans intuitions were right. Johann Eduard Sack (17761826),
I will now show, was indeed an Austrian bureaucrat, working for Lembergs
gubernium (governing council), no less. According to governmental documents,
Sack served as a kanzelist, or clerk, in the K. K. Gubernial Expedits Direkzion,
the chancellery tasked with dealing with taxation.4 Sack was a prolific
dramaturge and poet in German. In addition, he penned at least one other

2 Filip Friedman, Schloime Klappzmbels bashraybung fun der sholem fayrung in Lemberg, a
yidish lid fun yor 1814, in: Fun Noentn Over (Warsaw: Farlag Literarische Bleter, 19371938),
123130. For the sake of brevity I will call it from this point onward Schloime Klappzmbels. The
historian Nathan Michael Gelber also copied the manuscript from the same archival collection.
The copy is now part of his personal archive, housed at the Central Archive for the History of the
Jewish People (Jerusalem). See CAHJP P83 G/21.
3 Johann Eduard Sack, Rebb Schloime Klappzmbels treuherzige Beschreibung der von der
Lemberger Judenschaft abgehalten wordenen lezten Friedensfeyer: Seinem innigstgeliebten
Freunde Rebb Hersch Schmeckpdele als ein Denkmahl des dabei genossenen unvergelichen
Freudengefhls dargebracht (Lemberg, 1814). The book is accessible online at the following
address: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ157270602.
4 Stanisaw Grodziski, Historia ustroju spoeczno politycznego Galicji, 17721848 (Wroclaw:
Ossolineum, 1971), 158. Schematismus des Konigreiches Galizien und Lodomerien (Lemberg:
1814), 42. So far I was able to locate one personal letter authored by Sack, in which he
elaborates on his theatrical projects. The letter is preserved in the archival collections of the
Vienna City Library (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus), Ankauf Kstler ZPH 1083. I would like to
thank Agnieszka Dudek for helping me get access to this document.

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 Yiddish for Spies 197

poem in Yiddish.5 Nevertheless, he is relatively obscure in German literary

historiography (or in Yiddish literary history, for that matters) and his name is
mentioned only in passing in a few German and Polish literary lexicons.6
Sacks Yiddish poem in book form was one of the earliest, if not the first,
modern literary works in Yiddish to be published in Eastern Europe. It appeared
one year before the two earliest publications of Hasidic stories, both of which
were bilingual Hebrew and Yiddish editions Shivhe Ha-besht (In Praise of the
Besht, 1815), and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslavs Maasiyot (Tales, 1815) and two
years before the earliest maskilic literary piece, the play Di Genarete Velt
(Lemberg, around 1816).7 Stated provocatively, the first Yiddish writer in
Eastern Europe was a non Jewish Austrian official. How can we make sense of
this new addition to the early nineteenth-century canon of Yiddish literature?
How does Sacks poem relate to the nascent Haskalah literature? Why would a
non-Jewish Austrian author write a poem in Yiddish? What is the relationship
between Sacks professional identity and this creative project?
Friedman himself was too cautious to provide any analysis or explanation.
Dov Sadan, in turn, who shared Friedmans intuition that the writer was not
Jewish, argued that the poem pertained to a genre he called shpot lid (scorn
poems), which were meant to ridicule Yiddish, and, analogically, Yiddish speak-
ers.8 At first blush, Sadans argument is rather convincing. There is a long
tradition, both in early modern German literature as well as in Western
Yiddish literature, of associating linguistic expression in idiomatic Yiddish

5 Schreiben des Rebb Jossel Pippik aus anlass von Madame Catalani hier gegebenen Vokal
Konzerte. An seinen Freund Rebb Simche Hoyker Jagiellonian (Lemberg, 1820). I was able to
locate one single copy of this poem in the library of the Jagellonian University. I would like to
thank Adam Puchejda for helping me gain access to this book.
6 For example, Karol Estreicher, Bibliografia Polska XIX Stlecia, vol. 4 (Krakow: W Druk. Uniw.
Jagiellonskiego, 1878), 22. For a recent reprint of the poem, with no substantial discussion, see
Claus Jurgen Hutterer, Ein deutschmerisches denkmal des Jiddischen aus Lemberg, in:
Deutsche Sprache in Raum und Zeit: Festschrift fr Peter Wiesinger zum 60. Geburtstag,
ed. Peter Ernst and Franz Patocka (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 1998), 503515.
7 Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Literature: Yiddish Literature after 1800, in: YIVO Encyclopedia of
Jews in Eastern Europe, see online: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Yiddish_
Literature/Yiddish_Literature_after_1800 (accessed 28 September 2016). Another potential can-
didate for the beginning of Modern Yiddish Literature, according to some, is Mendel Lefins
translation of the Book of Proverbs, which appeared in 1814, Sefer mishle shlomo: im perush
katsar ve-haataka adasha bilshon ashkenaz letoelet aenu beit Israel be-artsot polin (Tarnopol:
1814). While Lefins book has literary merits, it is not an original fictional narrative, but rather a
translation of the Bible, and for this reason cannot be easily classified as the first modern
literary text in Yiddish.
8 Dov Sadan, Kheyn gribelekh, tsu der biografie fun vort un vertl (Jerusalem: 1971), 212.

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198 Ofer Dynes

with pejorative qualities: for example, close-mindedness or immoral behavior.9

This tradition is evident in German lands as late as the first half of the nineteenth
century. One of the most recognizable nineteenth-century examples is a series of
anti-Semitic writings in pseudo-Yiddish, which Heinrich Holzschuher (1798
1847), a non-Jewish author, published under the pseudonym Itzig Feitel Stern.10
The names of the characters in the poem, Klappzmbels and
Schmeckpdele, add to the sense that this is a parody, and what the author
calls a nave description of the peace celebrations further strengthens the link
between simple-mindedness and folksy, colloquial Yiddish. Indeed, Sacks poem
can seemingly appear as a joke at the expense of the unsophisticated Jew and
his limited perception of the political events in his town.
Friedmann and Sadan, however, were not privy either to Sacks professional
activity or to the historical circumstances in which he was writing. Rather than
being written in the Prussian cultural sphere, Sacks poem was written by an
Austrian author in Galicia, in partitioned Poland. In this respect, it does not
replicate the politics of Yiddish in the German lands, as Sadan argued, but
rather marks the development of a new relationship between German-speaking
imperial bureaucrats and Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Polish territories that
were annexed to the Austrian empire in 1773.
The story behind this text, I will now show, is much darker and more
complex than a mere parody of Yiddish for German speakers. If partitioned
Poland, where this poem was written, can be defined as a translation zone,
to adopt Emily Apters term, it is also, according to Apters astute theoretical

9 On the interest in Yiddish among Christians in the early modern period see Aya Elyada, A Goy
Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012). On the discourse on Yiddish in Germany in the modern period
see Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: from the Enlightenment to the
Second Empire (Rochester: Camden House, 2000). A fascinating close reading of an eighteenth-
century Yiddish text authored by a non-Jew is presented in: Hans Peter Althaus, Jdisch-
deutsche Hochzeitscarmina. Gelehrtes Spiel und parodistischer Scherz im 18. Jahrhundert, in:
Jiddische Philologie. Festschrift fr Erika Timm, Hrsg. von Walter Rll und Simon Neuberg
(Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 285314. On the linguistic ideology of Western Yiddish maskilic
comedies see Marion Aptroot, Euchels Kollegen: Reb Henoch und die aschkenasischen
Komodien im spaten 18. Jahrhundert, in: Isaac Euchel. Der Kulturrevolutionar der judischen
Aufklarung, ed. M. Aptroot, A. Kennecke and C. Schulte (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2010),
295318.
10 See Steven M. Lowenstein, The Yiddish Written Word in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Leo
Baeck Institute Yearbook 24.1 (1979): 186.

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 Yiddish for Spies 199

formulation, a war zone, governed by the laws of hostility and hospitality, by

semantic transfers and treaties.11
In order to understand Sacks poem about the peace celebrations, we have
to go back to what Apter calls the laws of hostility and hospitality, in other
words, to the political dynamics in the Austrian Empire at the end of the
Napoleonic Wars. The questions that guide our historical investigation are:
What were Polish Jews imagined to be writing about Napoleon in 1814? How
does Sacks fictionalized letter in Yiddish intervene in these expectations? How
does this letter participate in the public discussion concerning the political
loyalty of the Jewish population to the imperial state? And finally, how did the
linguistic kinship between German and Yiddish shape the political relationship
between Austrian bureaucrats and Polish Jews?

Napoleon Bonaparte, Polish Jews,

and the Austrian Secret Police
The French Revolution (17891799) and, later, the Napoleonic Wars (17991815)
occasioned a new information order, to adopt Christopher Baylys term, in the
Habsburg Empire.12 The Austrian authorities were worried about revolutionary
ideas being imported into the Habsburg lands and began to spy not only on
foreign statesmen and leaders but also on their own residents. Ludwig van
Beethoven, for example, described in August 1794 the atmosphere of fear and
suppression in Vienna: It is said that a revolution was about to break out
Several important persons have been imprisoned here One doesnt dare raise
his voice here, otherwise the police find lodging for you.13 This regime of
surveillance persisted long after the victory over Napoleon. A visitor to the
Habsburg Empire in the 1820s described how every footman in a public
house is a salaried spy. There are spies paid to visit the taverns and hotels
Others will be seen in the Imperial Library for the same purpose, or in the

11 Amily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 9.
12 Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication
in India, 17801870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. For a classical account of
the shift from enlightened absolutism to political repression see Ernst Wangermann, From
Joseph II to the Jacobin trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Habsburg
Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979).
13 Cited according to Donald Eugene Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 24.

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200 Ofer Dynes

booksellers shop, to inquire into the purchases made by different persons.14

The rise of secret police in Habsburg lands has already received ample scholarly
attention. Its implications on the relationship between Jews and the state, in
contrast, have not been sufficiently researched and discussed. This article seeks
to offer some preliminary comments on this matter.15
Initially, Galician Jews, unlike their Polish neighbors, were not considered to
be a political threat. In the wake of Polands first partition (1772), the Austrian
police were interested in Polish Jews not because they were implicated in any
sort of anti-governmental activity, but rather because they were imagined to be
prone to criminal activity. The head of the Galician Police, Daniel von Halama,
deemed the entire Jewish population of Galicia dangerous, since Jews were
prone to be involved in usury, fraud, mendicancy and secret theft, (Wucher,
Betrug, Betteln und heimlicher Dieberey) and, for this reason, were closely
monitored by the police.16 At the same time, the Austrian police did not associ-
ate Jews with any form of political activism against the state.17 This would
change very quickly during the Napoleonic Wars. In less than a decade,
Austrian bureaucrats would consider the prospect of Jewish political autonomy
under Napoleons aegis as a very serious concern.
On May 22, 1799, during Napoleons campaign to Palestine and Egypt, the
Parisian newspaper Moniteur Universel announced: Bonaparte published a
proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather
under his flag in order to re-establish ancient Jerusalem.18 This communiqu
has never been found, and, some suspect, never existed; the article is usually
considered to be French propaganda. True or not, news about Napoleons plan

14 Charles Sealsfield [Karl Anton Postl], Austria as it is; or Sketches of Continental Courts
(London: S. and R. Benteley, 1828), 8687.
15 For the most recent scholarship see Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror, The Threat of
Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 17891848 (London: William Collins, 2015). For a
sober evaluation of the impact of the Secret Police on the daily life in the Austrian Empire
see Alan Sked, Metternich and Austria, an Evaluation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
123175.
16 Friedriech Schembor, Galizien im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert: Aufbau der sterreichischen
Verwaltung im Spiegel der Quellen (Bochum: Winkler, 2015), 216.
17 For example, in another report, Von Halama complained that Galician Jews are so numerous
that there seems to be a wish to make Galicia a Jewish kingdom. See Schembor, Galizien im
ausgehenden, 276. Clearly, at this point Halama did not associate Jewish politics with the desire
to gain political autonomy, and, for this reason, he used the term Jewish kingdom ironically, as
an expression of dominance in number rather than a manifestation of political governance.
18 The translation is cited after Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin
(London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1979), 24.

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 Yiddish for Spies 201

to re-establish ancient Jerusalem circulated throughout the Jewish world,

raising messianic expectations.19
In 1806, Napoleons victorious campaign against Prussia brought the French
army to the Polish lands for the first time. Upon entering Prussian Poland,
Napoleon authorized the creation of the local Polish administration, which was
interpreted by the local population as a first step towards Polish autonomy. But
alongside the Poles, the Jews also celebrated the entrance of the Polish-
Napoleonic army. In Pozna, Jews were dancing and singing in the streets.20
The same year, 1806, saw Napoleons creation of a pan-European Jewish parlia-
ment, the Sanhedrin. As a result, in addition to the Poles, Jews were also
suddenly seen as a potentially subversive element, a people waiting to achieve
political liberation. When, in 1806, Napoleon summoned European Jews for the
European Sanhedrin, this was taken as a sign of the revival of his hypothetical
1799 promise of Jewish autonomy. The governor of Linz sent information to the
police ministry in Vienna regarding a French plan to occupy Jerusalem and to
settle Jews in the city, where they would live freely according to the rules of the
Talmud.21 Klemens von Metternich (17731859), who was, at the time, the
Austrian ambassador to France, warned that the establishment of the Sanhedrin
was Napoleons way of destabilizing European politics. Polish Jews, he argued,
will now see France as their homeland, and will pledge allegiance to Napoleon:

Les dernires manuvres avec les Juifs ne laissent pas que de mriter galement sous ce
point de vue lattention si lEmpereur na pas conu lide du grand Sanhdrin dans
lintention de le faire concider avec ses oprations militaires, il ny a pas moins de doute
quil ne ngligera pas celle de prsenter en librateur au people chrtien de la Pologne et
en Messie a son immense population Juive.
The recent maneuvers with the Jews are worth considering, one wonders whether the
(French) Emperor didnt conceive of the notion of a Jewish Sanhedrin to coincide with a
military campaign, and he will surely present himself as a liberator of the Christians in
Poland, a Messiah to the masses of Polish Jewry.22

19 N.M. Gelber, La Police autrichienne et le Sanhdrin de Napolon, Revue des Etudes Juives 83
(1927): 119 and 121145. Gershon Wolf, Geschichte der Juden in Wien 11561876 (Vienna:
J.C. Fischer & Comp., 1876), 113120. For additional materials collected by Gelber see CAHJP
RP083, folder I/44, entitled: Sanhedrin 1806; verschiedene Abschriften aus den 1806
Sammlungen vom Haus-, Hof- u. Staatsarchiv, Wien. On the Russian context see Binyamin
Lukin, Sluzhba naroda evrejskogo i ego kagalov: evrei i Otechestvennaja vojna 1812 goda,
Lehaim 187 (2007): 3843.
20 Dawid Kandel, Hymn do Napoleona, Kwartalnik Powicony Badaniu Przeszoci ydw w
Polsce 1.2 (1912/13): 122.
21 Wolf, Geschichte der Juden in Wien, 114115.
22 Letter from Metternich to Philip Stadion, 23 October 1806, cited in: Gelber, La Police
autrichienne, 137.

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202 Ofer Dynes

Strikingly, Napoleons pan-European policy pushed Austrian officials to position

both the Poles and the Jews in the same political category as a potential threat.
Napoleons 1806 call for European Jews to participate in the Sanhedrin was
a transformative moment in Habsburg policy toward the Jews. For the first time,
Jews across the empire were suspected of collaboration with the French. Secret
police agents throughout the empire were tasked with providing insider infor-
mation about Jewish communities and with reporting what influence the news
(about the Sanhedrin) had on the local Jewish community, specifically on the
local teachers and Rabbis (welche Wirkung die diesfllige Nachricht im allge-
meinen auf die hierl[andige] Judenschaft vorzglich aber auf die Rabbiner und
Lehrer hervorgebracht.)23 In addition, communication between the empires
Jewish residents and Paris was intercepted, translated and analyzed, in order
to detect possible relations between Habsburg Jews and the Napoleonic
government.24
The same year, the Viennese authorities inquired of the governor of Galicia,
Joseph Urmenyi, whether he believed the Jews in his crownland supported the
French Sanhedrin. Urmenyi categorically ruled out this option. Galician Jews, he
argued, were uneducated, provincial, and too conservative to grasp what is
going on in the West: they are all, both Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, absolutely
stupid, attached to their Tora and the Talmud (aussi bien les orthodoxes que
les Hassidim sont absolument stupides et attachs la Tora et au Talmud).25
According to Urmenyi, the only Jews who could pose a threat were those living
in Brody, where, he pointed out, there was already a small community of
educated Jews, who were worldly enough to be in touch with their co-
religionists in Paris. In 1806, it was the assimilated Jews, the Maskilim, who
were imagined to pose a threat to the regime, not the Hasidim.
In 1809 Galicia was taken over by a Polish army supported by Napoleon. In
April, Napoleons Polish army marched into Lemberg. Aleksander Fredro, a
Polish writer, was among these Polish forces, and registered the popular support
of both the local Polish nobility and the local Jewish residents: as I was going,
I saw the Polish nobility, everywhere, heated with patriotic enthusiasm. Jews:
Vivat! The peasants were indifferent. And everywhere Germans, greeting us in
Polish, in Polish (Jechaem, wszdzie szlachta patriotyzmem rozgorzaa.
ydzi: Wiwat! Chopstwo obojtne. Wszdzie Niemcy po polsku witali...).26
The political situation, noted the historian Markian Prokopovych, was still

23 CAHJP RP083, folder I/44.

24 Gelber, La Police autrichienne, 137.
25 Ibid., 131.
26 Aleksander Fredro, Trzy po Trzy (Warsaw: Zielona Sowa, 2004), 74.

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 Yiddish for Spies 203

uncertain, and the population rather tended to think that Napoleon would never
be defeated making a long-term investment in a promising political out-
come. Genuine or not, the Jewish support of the Napoleonic troupes contrib-
uted to the Austrian view of Galician Jewry as politically suspect.27
When the Polish army entered Lemberg, the soldiers were warmly welcomed
by the local Polish nobility and by the Jews. The Austrian bureaucrats, who, for
the most part, remained behind, were also watching the scene, reporting to
Vienna about Jews joining the side of the Polish rebels. Two months after, in
June 1809, the Polish army withdrew, and the Austrian bureaucrats returned to
their offices.28
Protocols of police investigations testify to the growing Austrian suspicion of
Galician Jews as politically disloyal. In 1811, two Lemberg Jews were investigated
for offering lodging to the Polish general Jan Krukowiecki (17721850) during his
secret stay in the city before joining Naploeons Russian campaign. The Austrian
assumption behind this investigation was that the Jews were cognizant of the
prominent identity of the general, and collaborated with the Napoleonic Polish
forces in his hiding. These accusations were eventually dropped.29 In 1813, the
Austrian authorities investigated the connections between Jewish merchants
from Radzivilov, Russia and the Jewish community of Brody, suspecting that
the Radzivilov Jews worked for the Russian intelligence services.30 In April 1814,
a Russian Jewish spy was caught and incarcerated in Lemberg, and several
Galician Jews were interrogated under suspicion of collaboration with the
Russian intelligence force.31
In March 1814 Napoleon abdicated the throne and was exiled to the island of
Elba. The war was over, but the new political stereotype of Jews as politically
suspect had a lasting effect. Yet publicly, at least, the Jewish community
expressed its loyalty to the Austrian crown. When, on June 29, 1814, cities across

27 Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the
Galician Capital, 17721914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 203. This was not
unusual, and there are testimonies of other cities, for example, in Freiburg, where local citizens
would cry Vive la Nation! Vive la Rpublique! only to avoid potential violence on part of the
invaders. See Leighton S. James, Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German
Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 133.
28 The citation is from the diary of Count Dietrichstein, cited in: Iryna Vushko, Enlightened
Absolutism, Imperial Bureaucracy and Provincial Society: The Austrian Project to Transform
Galicia, 17721815 (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008), 281.
29 Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine, Lviv (TSDIAUL), fond 146.7.152. I have con-
sulted the reproduction at CAHJP, HM3 893.05.
30 Boerries Kuzmany, Brody, Eine galizische Grenzstadt im langen 19. Jahrhudert (Vienna:
Bhlau, 2011), 252.
31 CAHJP HM3 893.4 Original: TSDIAUL fond 146.7.570-571.

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204 Ofer Dynes

the Habsburg Empire, among them Lemberg, organized official festivities to

mark the Paris armistice, the Jews played an integral part in the festivities. In
the Lemberg synagogue, Yaakov Ornstein,32 the local state-appointed Rabbi
(Kreis-Rabiner), delivered a sermon, comparing Franz IIs participation in
the war with Davids triumph over Goliath.33 Menachem Schnayer, a Jewish
resident of Lemberg, attached to his wall two banners, stressing a communal
Jewish support of the Austrian war efforts sterreich ber alles, wenn es will,
(Austria above all things, when it wants to) and Liebe israelitische Brder
(Love Jewish brothers).34 The ostensible gap between the suspicion of Jews
as disloyal, on one hand, and the public display of loyalty, on the other hand,
was the background against which Johann Eduard Sack wrote his poem about
the celebrations.

Yiddish for spies

Schloime Klappzmbels was a Yiddish poem authored primarily for the German
speaking reader. Fittingly, its most salient feature is its typographic layout,
which couples a Yiddish text on top with commentary in German footnotes.
On top of each page, in Latin letters, one can read the unrefined Yiddish of
Schloime Klapzmbels, the narrator, describing naively, as the title of the
piece promises, the succession of events since the news about peace in Paris
reached Lemberg. For example, the first stanza reads as follows:
Wie Doowid Joonussen amohl
Lieb ech dich Brder leiben,
Drm tht sec hooch oos diesem Thool
Haant mane Penne heiben

32 On Orenstein see Hayim Natan Dembitzer, Kelilat yofi: kolel toldot ha-rabanim beir Lvov
(Lwow 1888), v. 1, 140(b) 152(b); Salomon Buber, Anshe Shem, geoney Israel, adirey ha-tora,
rabanim, asher shimshu bakodsh beir Lvov mishnat ha-ras ad ha-taran (Krakow: Joseph Fischer,
1895), 111112; Mayer Balaban, Shalshelet ha-yaas shel mispaat Orenshtain-Broda: (al sema
kitve-yad u-mekorot nidpasim), (Warsaw: Monolit, 1931), 3032; and Haim Gertenr, Ha-rav veha-
ir ha-gedolah: ha-rabanut be-Galitsyah u-mifgashah im ha-modernah, 18151867 (Jerusalem:
Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2013), 3766.
33 Balaban, Shalshelet, vi. According to Marc Saperstein, the early modern period saw a new
genre of sermons, occasioned not by a holiday in the Jewish calendar, or by an occurrence that
primarily affects the Jewish community, but by historical events in which Jews participate as
part of the surrounding society. See War and Patriotism in Sermons to Central European Jews:
17561815, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 38.1 (1993): 9.
34 Joseph Rossi, Denkbuch fr Frst und Vaterland, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1814), 271.

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 Yiddish for Spies 205

Und schraabt dir, woos sech hot gethn,

Wie die Stafett z ns vn Wien
Gekmmen weigen Scholem.
Just as David once loved Jonathan
I love you my dear brother
This is why, from this valley
I pick up my pen
And write to you what happened
How the messenger came to us from Vienna
In order [to announce] the peace [treaty].

The Yiddish text foregrounds an uncomplicated, simplified perception of the poli-

tical context, reducing an historical event of international dimensions to the local
geography of Lemberg and its surroundings. If the Napoleonic Wars were a global
event, which took place in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and affected the
political situation in America and South Asia, the plot of the poem is strictly
confined to the city of Lemberg, as if nothing has happened elsewhere.
This curious fact can be explained in the context of Sacks impressive ruse:
the translation of censorship constraints into a language of limited political
awareness. For example, the Yiddish text is particularly vague with respect to
the political events it describes. The description of the Paris pact does not
contain the word Paris. The Napoleonic Wars are mentioned without the use
of the words Napoleon or war. This lack of political and geographic speci-
ficity, which surely derives from censorial constraints, dovetails with the nave
political perception of the narrator. Schloime, the writer of the letter, is revealed
to us as a person whose entire conceptual world is limited to Lemberg, to
Galicia, and to the Austrian Empire. For example, his description of the celebra-
tions in the city center reads as follows:

es wird baam Platz

A grauisser, grauisser, Boigen
Hoich in die Lft gezoigen,
Noch dem Befaihl vm Gverneer
Z nsers gten Kaiser Ehr
Und Heim gebrachten Scholem
Following the governors decree
In the (citys main) square
they set a (victory) arch
high, up in the air
to celebrate the return of our Emperor
who brought peace home

Major political events, in this literary piece, always happen elsewhere. While
Galicia was deeply affected by the war, and Lemberg fell under Napoleonic rule,

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206 Ofer Dynes

in Schloime Klappzmbels the war only takes place somewhere else, in a remote
location and does not affect the life of Lembergs residents. As the above-cited
paragraph exemplifies, Sacks protagonists are only interested in discussing the
peace treaty and its celebrations, as if the wars had no impact on the Polish
lands before 1814.
The bottom of each page, visibly separated by the use of Gothic script, also
contains explanations of the Yiddish for a German reader. These explanations
focus on words of Hebrew or Slavic origins, for example, Scholem Frieden
[Peace], and occasionally also on local aspects of the text for the outside
reader, for instance, the topography of Lemberg (the fact that it lies in a valley)
or its architecture.
In light of the common vision of Lemberg Jews as potential supporters of
Napoleon, which was common among Polish nobles like Aleksander Fredro, and
also among Austrian bureaucrats like Dietrichstein, both cited above, one would
expect the Yiddish text above to develop into a drama of political loyalty. In a
time when personal letters if the least suspicious, are opened,35 one could
surmise that the Yiddish letter would betray some of the secretive political
sentiments of the Jews. Sending letters, Sacks poem announces, was the pre-
ferable way for Jews to express among themselves their most authentic political
response to Napoleons defeat:
Maan Hersch! Doos is a Larm gewehn,
A jeider is geloffen,
nd hot gefrgt: Host die gesehn?
Is haant die Potscht noch offen?
nd hot a Briefel fortgeschickt
Z saanen Fraanden hoich baglckt
Vn weigen der Nowine.
My Hersh! This was a tumult
Everyone ran
And asked: have you heard?
Is the post still open?
And sent a letter
To his friends expressing their excitement
About the news.

As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the poem itself is part of this
enthusiastic letter exchange among the Jews of Galicia. Given that this is an internal
communication between two Jews, one could have imagined some expression of
disappointment over Napoleons defeat. This option, however, never materializes.
As the reader gradually discovers, the Yiddish speaker shares the general Jewish

35 Sealsfield, Austria as It Is, 186.

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 Yiddish for Spies 207

excitement about the news. He possesses an unfaltering appreciation of the

imperial ceremony and genuinely partakes in the expression of happiness.
The real drama in Schloime Klappzmbels lies in the German text, which
introduces a higher register and a broader context. The German evolves from
sporadic comments on the Yiddish into a full description of the events in the
celebrations, which illuminates the letter in light of the political context. For
example, when the narrator describes the procession, he mentions in passing a
portrait of the Emperor with script in high German. The Yiddish-speaking
narrator is unable to decipher the text, and, for this reason, is only susceptible
to the visual elements of the celebrations. The footnotes in German, which are,
in this case, longer than the Yiddish text, reveal the content of the script on the
back of the portrait, making the reader privy to the concrete political message of
the celebrations.
Des Kaisers Rckkehr, und des Sieges seiner Fahnen,
Erfreuen jubelnd sich, all seine unterthanen;
Trotz Kleidung, Sitten, Sprache, Religion,
Ein grosses Volk, nur Eine Nazion.
The return of the Emperor, and the victory of his flag
Brings great rejoicing to all his subjects;
Despite (differences in) clothing, morals, language, religion
One great people, only one nation.

The German foregrounds in an official language what the narrator performs as

an obedient subject: a concept of political belonging that transgresses linguistic,
religious and ethnic differences. It is worth commenting that the use of the term
Nazion in the Austrian context is rather unusual. According to the historian
Arthur Haas:

The word nation could mean all sorts of things to the Austrian authorities of the Congress
Era. It could refer to a large ethnic whole, or Kulturnation, such as the Italian, Polish or
German nations, or to a smaller organized ethnic or religious group such as the Serbian
or Illyrian nation. However, it was generally considered as an anomaly to designate as a
nation a realm composed of several nations such as the Ottoman or Habsburg.36

This unusual application of the term Nazion to refer to all residents of Lemberg
alike goes hand in hand with the linguistic ideology of the text. The year 1814 is
also the year in which both Hebrew and Yiddish were declared inadmissible in
court and were banned from any public use. Subsequently, all documents

36 Arthur G. Haas, Metternich, Reorganization and Nationality, 18131818: A Story of Foresight

and Frustration in the Rebuilding of the Austrian Empire (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963),
1213.

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208 Ofer Dynes

containing Hebrew or Yiddish were nullified.37 The 1814 legislation was a con-
tinuation of a long history of official mistrust of Yiddish in Habsburg lands, as a
language implicated in the service of Jewish Deception, to use Aya Elyadas
wording.38 As early as 1781, Joseph II forbade the use of Hebrew or Yiddish in
public and commercial communications, in order to foster trust among Jews
and Christians.39 In Bohemia, Austrian bureaucrats portrayed Yiddish as a
Deckmantel, a cover for Jewish treachery and immoral practices.40 In
Germany, Gottfried Selig, a convert, published a study guide for Yiddish for
bureaucrats, lawyers, and businessmen, since the use of Yiddish was imagined
to allow for deceitful practices both in business transactions and in court.41
In Schloime Klappzmbels, Sack is invested in presenting the local Yiddish
dialect as perfectly legible for German speakers. While in the official discourse
Yiddish was named the so-called Jewish language (sogenannte jdische
Sprache), Sack calls it specifically a Galician-German-Jewish vernacular lan-
guage (galizisch-deutsch-jdische Volksprache), hierarchizing the Austrian-
German and local-Galician affinities of the Jewish component, presenting
Yiddish as a German Galician dialect of an ethnic sub-group.
The most intriguing question how did an Austrian bureaucrat come to
master Yiddish so well, is very difficult to answer. Joseph Errington, in his
studies of colonial linguistics, has qualified imperial documentation of non-
European languages as opaque with respect to worlds of talk which they
present in partial, written guises.42 The colonial dictionaries of indigenous
South Asian languages Errington examined reflect an intensive and prolonged

37 See Magistrat m. Lwowa, Kreisschreiben vom k.k. Galizischen Landesgubernium betr. der
jdischen Kleidung und Aufhebung des Gebrauches der hebraischen und sogenannten jdischen
Sprache und Schrift in allen ffentlichen gerichtlechen und aussergerichtlichen Handlungen, 1814
(CAHJP HM2 8283.8 Original: TSDIAUL 3.1.601.)
38 Elyada, A Goy who Speaks Yiddish, part II: Yiddish in the Service of Jewish Deception.
39 Johann Wendrinsky, ed., Kaiser Josef II. Ein Lebens- und Charakterbild zur hundertjhrigen
Gedenkfeier seiner Thronbesteigung (Vienna, 1880), 15257. For an English translation see
C.A. Macartney, ed., The Habsburg and Hohenzollern Dynasties in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, in Documentary History of Western Civilization (New York, Evanston,
and London: Harper & Row, 1970), 165169.
40 Dirk Sadowski, Haskala und Lebenswelt. Herz Homberg und die jdischen deutschen Schulen
in Galizien 17821806 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 177.
41 Gottfried Selig, Lehrbuch zur grndlichen Erlernung der jdisch-deutschen Sprache fr Beamte,
Gerichtsverwandte, Advocaten und inbesondere fr Kaufleute; mit einem vollstndigen Hebrisch
und jdisch-deutschen Wrterbuche (Leipzig: Vo und Leo, 1792). See Elyada, A Goy who Speaks
Yiddish, 84.
42 Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power
(Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 4.

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 Yiddish for Spies 209

interaction between colonial linguists and the speakers of these languages.

Unfortunately, one can only guess how, where, and when these interactions
took place, as well as what was included in them. Similarly, Sacks poem is also
opaque with respect to the worlds of talk that it represents. We dont know
what social setting enabled interpersonal communication between the Austrian
bureaucrat and Galician Jews and led to the creation of this document. Clearly,
Sack was sufficiently fluent in Yiddish to the degree that he was able to produce
the local dialect in writing. Did Sack eavesdrop on conversations in Yiddish?
And if so whose conversations? Did someone teach him Yiddish? Was he able
to actively speak the language? Did he possess documents in Yiddish?
The text does provide, however, a few clues concerning the degree to which
Sack was familiar with the local Jewish community. First, Sacks Yiddish is fairly
idiomatic, using expressions such as wie der Saichel heist (as logic [lit. the
brain] dictates). Sack is also familiar with some of the surnames of the local
financial elite, and provides the names of Rayces, Myses, Rosenthal, and
Rapaport.43 At the same time, he lacks knowledge of and correct terminology
for religious matters, calling the Jewish Synagogue synagog instead of shul,
using the terms Jehova and Eloim for God, a practice which is deemed
religiously unacceptable among Jews, and, finally, calling the Rabbis kimrim,
a term that is reserved for Christian priests. Sack also does not seem to know
about the sermon in the Jewish synagogue and does not provide the name of
Yaakov Orenstein, the citys rabbi. Building on this sparse information, we can
assume that Sacks interaction with Jews was organized either around business
or around governmental services. We can also safely assume he was not himself
a convert. From the vocabulary used in the text, which relates to state proce-
dures and local politics, it seems that Sack was drawing on his personal
expertise in communicating with Jews on bureaucratic matters.
It is tempting to place Sacks work in conversation with the Hebrew letters
intercepted by the Austrians during the war; however, this does not seem to be
the case. While the text is presented as a letter, the lack of formulaic opening
and closure and other stylistic features of genuine Yiddish letters suggest that
Sack was familiar with Yiddish as a spoken language, rather than in written
form. Schloime Klappzmbels is in a sense a continuation of another bureaucratic
genre, the so-called Stimmungsbericht, the report on the political mood of
different ethnic groups: what people say about the monarch and his regime,
and what is the public disposition on these matters (was im Publikum von dem
Monarchen und seiner Regierung gesprochen werde, wie das Publikum in

43 On the identification of these names see Friedman, Schloime Klappzmbels, 130.

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210 Ofer Dynes

diesem Punkte gestimmt sei).44 In this case, the fictionalized communication

between Jews is being documented in full, as part of the making of Galician Jews
as subjects of surveillance. The information provided in the text, however,
shows that Yiddish speakers are loyal subjects, and Yiddish itself is not a vehicle
for deception, but rather serves as a bridge between the Austrian bureaucracy
and local Galician Jewry.45

Narration, denunciation, and the beginning

of Haskalah literature in Eastern Europe
Schloime Klappzmbels could be easily dismissed as an anecdotal episode in the
history of Jewish literature. Yiddish literature did not become a supra-national
project, and Austrian bureaucrats in Galicia wrote reports, rather than poems in
Yiddish. Nevertheless, uncovering the history surrounding Schloime Klappzmbels
tells us something central, not only about the relationship between Jews and the
state in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, but also concerning the social and
political conditions for the emergence of Haskalah in partitioned Poland.46
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Austrian wartime anxiety developed into
political paranoia. Jewish enlighteners tried to partake in the imperial intelligence
network, producing information about the Jewish population. Maskilim like
Joseph Perl (17731839), Yehuda Leib Mieses (17981831), and Solomon Judah
Leib Rapoport (SHIR, 17861867) embraced a utopian political vision of a police
state as the ultimate solution for the tensions within the Jewish community. They
strove to take advantage of the increasing intrusion of the Austrian state into its
residents lives in order to shape the imperial policies in regard to the Jewish
population according to their own ideology. In order to achieve this goal, the
Maskilim volunteered their services to the authorities as experts on Jewish mat-
ters. In so doing they collaborated and competed with a larger network of Jewish

44 The citation is from the Police secret instructions, dated November 16, 1785. Thedocument is
reproduced in: Hermann Leitner, Der geheime Dienst in seinen Anfangen, (PhD. diss., University of
Vienna, 1994), 198. Winfried Baumger translates Stimmungbericht as intelligence report on
popular mood. See Wrterbuch historischer und politischer Begriffe des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts:
Deutsch-Englisch-Franzsisch (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014), 520.
45 According to the Ossolineum Librarys old catalogue, the local copy of Schloime
Klappzmbels became rare once Jews had destroyed all other books. This information, if
indeed true, may hint at the complexity of its reception. See http://ossolineum.pl/kat/(accessed
April 2016).
46 For an elaborated discussion on this topic see Ofer Dynes, The State Legibility Project and
the Jewish Literary Project, 17731848, Prooftexts (forthcoming).

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 Yiddish for Spies 211

experts: Yiddish-speaking bureaucrats like Johann Eduard Sack, converts,

censors of Jewish books, Jewish policemen, and Christian theologians, among
others.47
In his portrayal of Jewish subjecthood, Sack imagined a letter exchange
among Jews as an occasion to convey loyalty to the state and express unproble-
matic political ideologies. Jewish enlighteners, in contrast, did not repudiate the
accusations against Polish Jews as politically disloyal, but rather projected them
onto the Hasidic movement. They collaborated with the imperial police, provid-
ing insider information about the Jewish community, and adopted in their
writing a utopian vision of an omniscient police state.
In 1818, Joseph Perl sat down to write his own epistolary novel, the Revealer
of Secrets [Megaleh Temirin], in Hebrew, a fictionalized letter exchange between
the secretaries of Hasidic leaders.48 If, according to Sack, there was nothing
secretive in internal Jewish communication, in the maskilic imagination inter-
cepting Hasidic letters was the most effective way to reveal their secrets. If
Sacks fictionalized letter revealed that Jews were staunch supporters of the
state, in the Revealer of Secrets it is through deciphering Hasidic letters that
Hasidim are shown to conceal their activity against the state. Schloime
Klappzmbels encapsulates, in this respect, as a literary text authored by a
state official, both the drama of loyalty of Polish Jewry during the Napoleonic
War and the potentiality of literature to intervene in this political discourse. It
also represents a mirror image to the path taken by Maskilim, training its read-
ership to spy on Jews, while arguing that this practice of spying and denun-
ciation is, in fact, superfluous.

Acknowledgments: This paper was developed for a panel at the conference

Yiddish Culture in Past and Present Scholarship: Histories, Ideologies,
Methodologies (Jerusalem, May 2015). I wish to thank the convener of the

47 See Rachel Manekin, Hasidism and the Habsburg Empire, 17881867, Jewish History 27
(2013): 271297. On Jewish policemen see Schembor, Galizien im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert,
221. On Christian theologians as experts on Polish Jewry see the autobiography of Ignaz
Aurelius Fessler, an Hungarian ecclesiastic who served as a Hebrew censor in Galicia in the
1790s: Dr. Fesslers Rckblick auf seine siebzigjhrige Pilgerschaft, ein Nachlass an seine Freunde
und an seine Feinde (Breslau, 1824).
48 Recently, Yonatan Meir published an extensive scholarly edition of the Revealer of Secrets:
Yonatan Meir, asidut meduma, iyunim b-iktavav ha-satirim shel Yosef Perl, v. 13 (Jerusalem:
2014). For a general review of scholarship on Megaleh Temirin, see Shmuel Werses, Shiveim
shnot heker yetsirato u-foalo shel Yosef Perl, Huliot 7 (2002): 321338; Yonatan Meir, Mekar
ketavav ha-anti asidiyim shel Yosef Perl, in Joseph Perl, Megale Temirin (Jerusalem: Mossad
Bialik, 2013) vol. 2, 1519.

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212 Ofer Dynes

conference, Aya Elyada, and the participants, as well as Christoph

Augustynowicz, Israel Bartal, Matthias Kaltenbrunner, Boerries Kuzmany,
Adam Stern, Sunny Yudkoff, Ruth Wisse, Steve Zipperstein, and the two anon-
ymous reviewers, for their comments and advice. Research for this paper was
funded by the Galicia and Its Multicultural Heritage Forum at the University of
Vienna.

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 Yiddish for Spies 213

Figure 3: German title page of Johann Eduard

Sacks Yiddish Poem, Lemberg 1814.

Figure 4: A page from Sacks Yiddish poem; the

footnotes include German explanations of the text
for the non-Jewish reader.

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