The first book of Jewish jokes is actually two books: Lippmann Moses Büschenthal’s Sammlung witziger Einfälle von Juden (“Collection of Witty Notions from Jews”), published in Elberfeld, Germany, in 1812, and Judas Ascher’s Der Judenfreunde (“Friend of the Jews”), published in Leipzig in 1810. The two collections are joined in this volume because Büschenthal lifted three-quarters of his collection directly from Ascher. The present volume contains a complete critical edition of both works, translated from the German by Michaela Lang and annotated with analogs from other Jewish joke collections. Elliott Oring has added a concordance of texts that Büschenthal took from Ascher and two lengthy introductory chapters discussing the collection and its author and describing the social and political life of European Jews in Büschenthal’s day.

After diligent research, Oring has determined that these two books are the earliest published collections of Jewish jokes, which is surprisingly late given the reputation of the Jewish people as humorists par excellence. With this scholarly edition and background material, he seeks to explain how, when, and where the People of the Book became “The People of the Joke" (7), admitting that his title, The First Book of Jewish Jokes, is meant to stimulate further research to find even earlier examples.

Oring describes the collection’s topical contours in a “jokescape” (13-19). Almost all the texts feature Jewish characters, and in almost half of them the Jewish characters interact with Gentiles. Among them are some familiar migratory texts, e.g., no. 7 (“What’s the difference between a Jew and an ass?”), which recalls one of the standard jokes in the Arkansas Traveler routine. No. 36 features a Jewish cavalryman who straps his armor on his back since they are retreating, a joke more familiar today about the Italian army. No. 102, The Weighed Cat (ATU type 1373), also appears as a Hodja Nasreddin story. However, although a small army of folklorists helped to track down analogs, they found relatively few. Appendix II lists all the sources where analogs were found and the much longer list of sources that yielded none.

Büschenthal’s selection of jokes derided some Jewish behaviors, especially moneylending and canny business practices. An Enlightenment intellectual, he distinguished himself from other Jews, but he also defended them. In what Oring speculates may be the first published theory of the Jewish joke, Büschenthal argued that Jewish humor was the product of centuries of oppression that had forced them to become cunning, and hence, witty (27). Variations of this theory are widespread to this day, but Oring finds little evidence for them. On the contrary, the term Judenwitz (“Jewish wit”) first appears in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century as a criticism for caustic, negative humor, antithetical to the mainstream and quite distinct from the benevolent Humor associated with national cultures like, say, Germany’s.

Since he used German rather than Yiddish, and incorporated explanations of Jewish lore, we know that Büschenthal had Gentile as well as Jewish readers in mind for his joke book. His purpose was not simply to amuse, but also to arouse sympathy. Oring’s comparison of the two collections shows that Büschenthal omitted the texts in Ascher with darker themes—floggings, executions, duels. But he kept the sad autobiographical story of one Nehemiah Jehuda Leib, sentenced to a flogging and a lifetime of hard labor in 1790 for armed robbery (88-97). No joke, this story reveals the cruel oppression, including arbitrary taxations and punishments, that European Jews were forced to live under. The purpose of the joke book, then, was to humanize the Jews in Gentile eyes.

Perhaps the most significant question that Oring addresses in this work is this: “Why did Jews adopt the joke genre as a symbol of their nationhood” (7)? Büschenthal was an early adopter of this effort, spurred on by Enlightenment thinking of his day. Spread in part by Napoleon’s armies, the Enlightenment led to tremendous changes in the conditions of life for European Jews, including how they were viewed by Gentiles and to some extent how they viewed themselves. With the imposition of the Napoleonic code, civil rights were extended to Jews in many parts of Europe, albeit slowly and unevenly, and the Enlightenment belief that all people shared in a common humanity began to be extended to Jews as well. In this context, Büschenthal’s project was meant, as his subtitle put it, as “a contribution to the characterization of the Jewish nation,” intended to both showcase Jewish distinctiveness and humanize their image.

But Napoleon was finally defeated in the same year that Büschenthal published his collection of witty notions of Jews, and with that defeat Jewish civil rights were rolled back. When Büschenthal died six years later, in 1818, romantic nationalist movements were once again pushing the notion that the Jews were not only distinct from Europeans, but an irredeemable race. Büschenthal’s joke book was needed, but it was not enough.

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[Review length: 815 words • Review posted on February 25, 2021]