FOR CENTURIES mayufes was part of the Polish–Jewish experience. In Polish dictionaries and other sources, mayufes is usually defined as ‘a song sung by Jews at the Sabbath midday meal’, or ‘a song sung by Jews at certain religious ceremonies’; a ‘dance’; or even a ‘ritual Jewish dance’. According to Polish dictionaries mayufes derives from the opening words of the well-known Hebrew Sabbath zemer (song sung at the Sabbath table) Mah yofis (‘How fair you are’) (in modern Hebrew pronunciation, Mah yafit).

None of these definitions takes note of a crucial feature of the concept of mayufes in Polish–Jewish culture, however. When a mayufes was sung or danced by a Jew (or someone imitating a Jew), it was not at the family Sabbath table. Rather, it was performed before a Polish audience, without any relation to the context or significance of the original Jewish zemer.

The Polish historian Janusz Tazbir paints a vivid picture of the mayufes show in his discussion of the ‘entertaining character who dances the … mayufes’, describing the Jew who is performing as a ‘quasi-jester, a crude type who abuses the Polish language in the most amusing away’. The characterization of the performer as a ‘quasi-jester’ also includes the persona adopted by the Jew while performing the mayufes. Although Tazbir does not cite his sources, the context indicates that he was writing about a phenomenon known as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Although I have not yet discovered any references to mayufes before 1763, the later sources show that this dubious form of entertainment— Jews singing or dancing mayufes amid heckling by Poles—had been common for some time.

The sources quoted above, as well as Tazbir's comments, do not reveal that mayufes represented a traumatic experience for Polish Jewry. As far as Jews were concerned, mayufes lost its original meaning as the name of a Sabbath song and was redefined in response to its Polish usage. Within the Jewish world, mayufes became a term for toadying or coerced conformity to the expectations of Polish gentry. At times it referred specifically to the degrading abuse of a Jew.