Abraham Mapu was a Russian Hebrew novelist; born near Kovno in 1808 and died at Königsberg in 1867. Mapu introduced the novel into Hebrew literature. His early education in Bible and Talmud was received at the ḥeder. At the age of twelve, he continued the study of the Talmud in private, and was so successful that he soon acquired the name of "'Illui". Moved thereto by his own poetical and impulsive disposition and influenced by his father, Jekuthiel, himself a mystic and cabalist, Mapu took up, at the age of fifteen, the study of Kabbalah. Mapu later studied Talmud and Kabbalah with Elijah Kalisher (Ragoler), rabbi at Slobodka (Mapu's birthplace). In Kalisher's house he found a copy of the Psalms with a Latin translation, and this awakened within him a desire to study Latin, which he did from that translation. A better opportunity to study Latin presented itself when he formed the acquaintance of a Catholic priest while teaching in a country school; and he made such good progress in the language that he wrote a book in Latin. Ma'oz Ẓur. From this time dates Mapu's devotion to secular studies, particularly to languages and literatures, which he pursued henceforth assiduously. In the forties he moved with his family to Rossieny, government of Kovno; there he became acquainted with the scholar Senior Sachs, who greatly heightened his love for ancient Hebrew history and literature and for the beauties of Biblical diction, of which Mapu made later such good use in his romances. A few years later he became teacher in the house of Apatov Parnes at Vilnius, and then was appointed teacher of Jewish religion and German at the gymnasium of Kovno. His first work is the novel "Love of Zion", published in Vilna in 1853. This first novel of Hebrew literature in the 19th century, introduced the world of the Bible and glamor of Israel during the First Temple. The book "Love of Zion" made a strong impression and was translated to several languages: Yiddish, German, English, Russian, Ladino, classical Arabic, and more.

This Book attempt to trace the transformations of the motif of marriage between a mortal man and a she-demon in Jewish folklore, especially in the folk-tradition of Ashkenazi Jewry. Five texts were selected for this research: three in Yiddish, one bilingual (Yiddish and Hebrew) and one in Hebrew. They cover a time-span of almost four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. The five texts, all published here in full, are: "Mayse fun Vorms", MS F.12.45 Trinity College, Cambridge, fols . 24r-31r. "Mayse fun der Malke-Shvo", in: Yiftah Yospe ben Naftali ha-Levi, Sefer Ma'ase Nissim, Amsterdam 1696, No. 21. "Mayse Pozna", in: Zvi Hirsh Kaidanover, Sefer Qav ha-Yashar, II Frankfurt am Main 1706, Chap. LXIX. "Ma'ase ha-Ari", in: Yosef Sambari, Sefer Divrei Yosef, Paris, Alliance Israelite Universelle, H 130 A, Sec. 182, fols . 108v-109v. B.W. Segel, " Materaly do etnografii Zydow wschodnio - galieyjskieh ", Zbior wiadomosci do antropologii krajowef , XVII(1893), No 22, pp. 289-290 – an East-Galician version of "Mayse fun Vorms" in Polish, translated here into Yiddish. The starting –point of the discussion is "Mayse fun Vorms", a story written down in North Italy after 1514, though most probably originating in the folklore of the Worms community. It draws on three different sources: the mediaeval Christian narrative tradition, apocryphal and midrashic literature and German folk narrative. All these are combined in a sophisticated and unique way by means of various modifications, dictated by the new structure and cultural context. The result is a highly complex and interesting text, presenting its material with purely artistic narrative intentions. On the basis of a comparison between "Msydr gun Vorms" and the famous Hebrew story "Ma'ase Yerushalmi " we came to the conclusion that the former cannot justifiably be seen as a version of the latter. It should rather be regarded as representing an alternative narrative model, even though both works centre around the same motif of marriage between a man and a she-demon. The second part of the book deals with the transformations and vicissitudes undergone by "Mayse fun Vorms" in the various genres of Jewish literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in collections of stories in old Yiddish (Sefer Ma'ase Nissim), in ethical Literature ( qav ha-Yashar) and in Lurianic hagiography (Toledot ha-Ari). This section concludes with a comparison between all these sources and an East-Galician version of the story, which was written down from the oral tradition at the end of the nineteenth century. This textual genealogy enables us to illustrate the great variability of the folk narrative tradition concerning the motif of the marriage of a man and a she-demon, as well as the extent of its adaptation to changing contexts and functions. From a text of purely novelistic purpose, the story turns – via the appropriate modifications – into: a text of clearly moralizing intention, containing a pattern of crime and punishment; a text presented as documentary, though used by ethical literature for its own ends; a typically hagiographic text; until in East Europe, at a late stage, it reverts to the status of an artistically oriented text, exactly as it had been when it set out on its journey almost four hundred years earlier. Thus the Jewish folk narrative of the marriage of a man and a she-demon shows a developmental affinity to the narrative tradition on exorcism, which also varies from test to text , in accordance with the various functions that it implements: documentary, hagiographic, ethical and narrative per se.

The purpose of this essay, which combines several research areas - such as the history of literature and printing, bibliography and graphics - is to expose the broader cultural context of the illustrations in Yiddish books from the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. Shmeruk's study mainly deals with the history of children's literature in the field of Ashkenazi culture. Only eight Yiddish books were printed with illustrations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The importance of these books lies in the wide distribution that some of them – Yosipon, Minhagim, Tsene U`rene – which have appeared in many editions over hundreds of years. The printing of illustrated Yiddish books depended on direct contact with non-Jewish print-shops. The examination of the illustrations in views of their traditions and origins suggests three possible modes: The borrowing of illustrations from the stock of non-Jewish printers, thus drawing on an earlier, non-Jewish tradition of illustrating, as, for instance, in Yosipon, Zurich 1546; Paris un Viena, Verona 1594; Tam Ve-Yashar, Frankfurt am Main 1674; Tsene U`rene, Sulzbach 1692. In Yosipon, Tam Ve-Yashar and Tsene U`rene woodblocks were used that had previously been employed in the illustrating of Christian Bibles. Woodcuts after the series of Old Testament illustrations by Hans Holbein the Younger stand out among these borrowed pictures. The adoption of the tradition, common to Hebrew and European literature, of illustrating books of fables; see, e.g., KuhBukh, Verona 1595; Mashal Ha-Kadmoni, Frankfurt an der Oder 1693. Original illustrations appearing in Minhagim books published in Venice in 1593 and 1600/1. Although they show some dependence on illustrations in earlier Passover Haggadoth, they seem to have been designed by a non-Jewish artist, albeit under the direction and supervision of Jewish patrons of publishers. Books translated from Hebrew into Yiddish were illustrated, where as the Hebrew original editions continued to be reprinted without illustrations, e.g., Yosipon, Minhagim, and Sefer Ha-Yashar. This indicates that illustrated Yiddish books were intended to reach youngsters, too, both in order to read and to look at the pictures. Publishers and printers made clear detailed statements to this effect. These books should be regarded as the beginnings of Ashkenazi literature intended for children. The last chapter deals with the ways borrowed illustrations were used in books on biblical subjects. There was a tendency to select pictures with no specific Christian significance. In some cases, however, there was blatant intervention by Jewish printers, who obliterated from the woodblocks elements that did not suit the Jewish audience. This is similar to the phenomenon found in transcriptions of German literature in Hebrew characters intended for the Yiddish reader. In the course of these adaptations, Christian elements were eliminated from the text. Despite the marginality of the borrowed illustrations and of the above-mentioned transcriptions, they are both striking evidence of the constant contact of Jews with the surrounding culture, of the ways used to adapt aspects of it for a Jewish audience, and of the essentially popular character of the elements, literary and artistic, borrowed from the surrounding culture.