Louis Ginzberg: The Legends of the Jews. First edition of the German original of Louis Ginzberg's The Legends of the Jews
(Philadelphia, 1909-1938)

Current editors: Joanna Nowotny, Andreas Kilcher

Introduction and project summary

Louis Ginzberg's (1873-1953) collection The Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, represents a high point in modern Jewish narrative writing. Widely read in the English-speaking world, this anthology is the most comprehensive collection of traditional Jewish narrative literature (such as midrash, aggada) in modern European language. It contains a rich treasure of extra-biblical narrative material on biblical and biblical-related thematic complexes, which have here been elaborated and developed in little-known but highly creative forms. The Talmud scholar and long-time collaborator and director of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Louis Ginzberg, has gathered these from a stupendous variety of Jewish and, in some cases, extra-Jewish sources of the post-Biblical period. The importance of this work was undisputed from the beginning - even in the German-speaking world. This is shown not only by the correspondence Louis Ginzberg had with many outstanding representatives of German Jewry and German philology, theology and Oriental studies. Concrete attempts were made to publish the work in German and in Germany; the most prominent example is Martin Buber's request in September 1933 for a German edition to be published by Schocken Verlag.
For although they are primarily known in the English-speaking world, the Legends of Ginzberg, who was born in Kovno (then Wilna Governorate), earned his doctorate in Heidelberg and immigrated to New York in 1899, are based on a German-language manuscript. This great product of decades of work has remained unpublished until now because it remained undiscovered, but also because it was intended from the beginning to be the basis for the American edition. To this end, it was edited, redacted, translated for the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia) by Henrietta Szold, founder of the American Zionist Women's Organisation and later director of child and youth immigration in Palestine; later, anthropologist Paul Radin took over Szold's role. The present edition of the original German manuscript of the legends, on the other hand, brings to light a great untapped treasure: the original version of Ginzberg's so important modern complete edition of traditional Jewish narrative literature.
The edition has been produced in print and in digital form. The print version presents the text of the German manuscript as a reading edition and includes commentary apparatuses as well as indexes with editorial explanations and further information. As this is the first German publication of the text, corrections have been made with regard to readability; a more detailed editorial report can be found in the book.

Louis Ginzberg: Legends of the Jews. Edited by Andreas Kilcher and Joanna Nowotny. Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag 2021.

The digital edition of the manuscript is intended to provide a starting point for researchers and interested parties who wish to delve deeper into the heterogeneous text corpora. Ginzberg's erudition and his 'diasporic' writing becomes fully apparent through the presentation of the facsimiles and transcriptions. In doing so, the digital edition not only makes the creation and editing of the text tangible, but it also contains an important part of Ginzberg's project that could not be included in the printed reading edition due to the specific manuscript form: the very extensive annotations, which represent a significant scholarly enrichment and document Ginzberg's extraordinary erudition. The print edition and the digital edition thus complement each other: while the printed reading edition brings the content of this great Jewish narrative literature in Ginzberg's original version to a wide audience and thus presents the labyrinthine paths and forms of post-biblical retelling and retelling on a large scale, the digital edition offers insights into the writing workshop of the legends and the basis for further research on Ginzberg's monumental project.