1. Bibring, Tovi, “Fairies, Lovers, and Glass Palaces: French Influences on Thirteenth-Century Hebrew Poetry in Spain—the Case of Yaʿakob ben Elʿazar's Ninth Maḥberet,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 3 (2017): 296–321Google Scholar; Einbinder, Susan, “Signs of Romance: Hebrew Prose and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Signer, Michael Alan and van Engen, John (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 221–33Google Scholar; and Einbinder, , Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fudeman, Kirsten A., Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 116–23Google Scholar; Marcus, Ivan, “‘Why Is This Knight Different?’ A Jewish Self-Representation in Medieval Europe,” in Tov Elem: Memory, Community and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Societies, Essays in Honor of Robert Bonfil, ed. Baumgarten, Elisheva, Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, and Weinstein, Roni (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2011), 139–52Google Scholar; Kushelevsky, Rella, “Chastity versus Courtly Love in a Hebrew Story Collection from Medieval Northern France: A Study of ‘The Poor Bachelor and His Rich Maiden Cousin,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (2013): 61–82Google Scholar; Kushelevsky, , “Abstinence in Medieval Northern France: A Comparison of ‘A Slave for Seven Years’ in Sefer ha-Maʿasim to ‘The Life of Alexis,’” in Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France, ed. Baumgarten, Elisheva and Galinsky, Judah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 259–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kushelevsky, Tales in Context, Sefer Ha-maʿasim in Medieval Northern France, with a historical epilogue by Elisheva Baumgarten, Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 65–82; Rotman, David, Dragons, Demons and Wondrous Realms, The Marvelous in the Medieval Hebrew Narrative [in Hebrew] (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2016), 355–57Google Scholar, 362–4; Tohar, Vered, “The Story of Johanan and the Scorpion: A Thirteenth-Century Hebrew Romance,” Fabula 50 (2009): 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yassif, Eli, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Teitelbaum, Jacqueline S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 514 n. 28Google Scholar. These articles are situated along the scale between literary and sociohistorical research, in accordance with the different points of emphasis and methodical approaches of their writers.

2. Image provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary. I would like to thank Jerry Schwarzbard of the Special Collections Room for granting me the right to reproduce manuscript images, and the library's staff for the help I received during my visits. The manuscript's date is based on the catalogue of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

3. “Shalakh sheliḥim be-khol ha-malkhuyot u-be-khol ha-gelilot” (39v–40r).

4. Jeffrey R. Woolf, “Admiration and Apathy: Maimonides' Mishneh Torah in High and Late Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Beʾerot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky, ed. Jay Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 427–53.

5. There is always a possibility of an oral channel of transmission that predates this manuscript, but no trace has yet been found, for example, in the tradition of Jewish communities as documented by the Israel Folklore Archive (IFA). I would like to thank Haya Milo, who investigated this information.

6. By 1170, after nineteen years of Henry's rule and six years of marriage to Marie, Champagne “had evolved into one of the more prosperous and influential principalities in northern France.” Theodore Evergates, Henry the Liberal, Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 124; see 61–99 on Henry's financial, religious, political, and cultural interests and activities as Count of Champagne before the 1170s. Note that Evergates doubts Marie's reputation as a patron of vernacular literature in the 1170s in Champagne (with the exception of Lancelot) (147), but does contextualize Chrétien's Cligés with Henry's experience during the Second Crusade (152–53).

7. My gratitude to Sandra Stow, who suggested Yvain and the reception of French romances in Italy as possible contexts for “The Ring.”

8. The beginning of the story is missing because a page was omitted during the binding. Such omissions can also be found in other places in the manuscript.

9. This is a reconstruction of the missing beginning of the story, up to the point where Elijah suddenly arrives in the form of Joseph's father and performs the circumcision rite.

10. B. Ketubbot 62b–63a.

11. Midrasch Schir Ha-schirim, ed. Lazar Grünhut (Jerusalem, 1897), 3:7–8, 29a–30.

12. Isaac of Acco, ʾOẓar ḥayim, MS Moscow-Günzburg 775, 193r–196r.

13. Compare to three stories in B. Avodah Zarah 10b, 17a, 18a. This is a familiar story type in Jewish sources and folklore.

14. “Let your tears flow like a river day and night; give yourself no relief, your eyes no rest.”

15. Genesis 37:35: “All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted.” There are additional allusions in the story to the biblical Joseph, the lost son, inspired by the name of the story's protagonist, Joseph: “And the rabbi, his father-in-law, put him in charge of his household and God blessed the home of the rabbi his father-in-law because of Joseph, and God's blessing was in everything he had in the house and field” (as in Genesis 39:2–5); “And the two young guests who came to marry the rabbi's daughter did not recognize Joseph” (as in Genesis 42:7).

16. Additional idioms from the sources include the combination of צרורות, “confined,” and living widows (2 Samuel 20:3); a delegation of ministers “more numerous and more distinguished than these,” hinting at the delegation of ministers that Balak sent to Balaam to convince him to curse Israel (Numbers 22:15); and “on the day of his wedding and the day his heart rejoiced” (Song of Songs 3:11); borrowing from the sources is also reflected in the syntax and rhythm: “My father, my father, why have you deceived me?” (as in Psalms 22:2).

17. The descriptions of the spring are missing from the beginning of the story because of the reasons noted above, and we can only fill in the blanks based on the mention of the spring later in the story.

18. Norris J. Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art, Davis Medieval Texts and Studies 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 1, “… the quest is one of the most natural and most nearly constant characteristics of the Arthurian romance,” and “All Chrétien's works can be divided … into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The dividing line between these two parts is the crisis, by which a character realizes his failing and sets out to repair it.” On the development of the quest motif from Chrétien's romances to the prose romances after Chrétien, see Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Chrétien's Medieval Influence: From the Grail Quest to the Joy of the Court,” in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy and Joan Taskner Grimbert (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 214–27.

19. On “analogy” as a poetic principle in Chrétien's romances see Lacy, Craft, 68–71.

20. After Chrétien, the story Yvain appears in a number of later adaptations in the Middle Ages and in a number of languages, but since an Italian version is presently unknown, I am referring, as noted, to the version by Chrétien, which was apparently written in 1177. For the date of the romance see Joseph J. Duggan, afterword to Chrétien de Troys, Yvain, The Knight of the Lion, trans. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 206. On Yvain's manuscripts see Keith Busby, “The Manuscripts of Chrétien's Romances,” in Lacy and Grimbert, Companion to Chrétien, 69. Interpretations of his romance range from those that consider it an expression of courtly ideals of love and morality that the protagonist must succeed in upholding and in the process overcome his human frailties, to those that see in these texts an ironic and ambivalent narrator who leaves the protagonist's weakness unresolved. See, for example, Renée L. Curtis, “The Perception of the Chivalric Ideal in Chrétien De Troyes's Yvain,” Arthurian Interpretations 3, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 1–22, compared to Tony Hunt, “Le Chevalier au Lion: Yvain Lionheart,” in Lacy and Grimbert, Companion to Chrétien, 156–68.

21. Z. P. Zaddy, “The Structure of Chrétien's ‘Yvain,’” The Modern Language Review 65, no. 3 (July 1970): 523–40, points to this turning point as a fourth episode in the romance.

22. “No true and loyal lover / Can be captured, or lose any blood, / Nor have any evil come to him, / As long as he wears it and holds it / Dear and remembers his beloved.” Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, trans. Raffel, 79, vv. 2604–8. Quotations of Yvain in the notes below will also cite Raffel's translation.

23. “And such a storm broke / In his skull that he lost his senses, / And tore at his skin and his clothes / … And they hunted everywhere, seeking him /… but nowhere / They looked was where he was” (85, vv. 2804–13). The description of his madness after the queen has the ring removed from his finger is ambivalent. On the one hand, he goes mad with grief: “He would choose to go mad / Rather than not take revenge / On himself, for taking away / His happiness” (85, vv. 2793–96), in other words, the reason for his madness is psychological; on the other hand, the change that occurs in him is compared to the bursting of a storm in his head, changing his personality and causing him to go mad, which creates the effect of a magical transformation.

24. “But nothing / He had done stayed in his mind: / He remembered none of it. / … And that was how he lived / In the woods, like a madman or a savage” (86, vv. 2821–28).

25. “She rubbed / His temples and all his body / So well, in that bright warm sun / That all his frenzy and his sadness / Slipped right out of his brain” (91, vv. 3001–4).

26. Motifs of the “magic ring,” the loss of memory, and the spring occur in other medieval works as well, but the combination of the three in both Yvain and the Jewish tale seem to indicate a connection between them.

27. “Accept / This little ring, and if / You please return it to me / When it's done its work, and you're free” (33, vv. 1022–25).

28. Compare Tony Hunt, “The Dialectic of ‘Yvain,’” The Modern Language Review 72, no. 2 (April 1977): 294–98. Hunt points to the dialectic link between these occurrences of the ring motif, as an expression of the narrator's criticism of Yvain and a reexamination of the social and moral values that he represents.

29. In the first part of the romance, 26, v. 802; 62–3, vv. 2033–48.

30. “And he thought it best to … / and go / To her magic spring, and create / Such a storm … / That force and necessity would make her / Seek peace with him” (194, vv. 6517–23).

31. Maxwell S. Luria, “The Storm-making Spring and the Meaning of Chrétien's ‘Yvain,’” Studies in Philology 64, no. 4 (July 1967): 564–85, assigns the spring motif a metaphoric function of spiritual baptism and testing on the background of Christian symbolism, alongside its magical-fantastic function based on its source in Celtic legends.

32. “As soon as she saw the naked / Man dismounted and ran trying / To find something about him / From which she might know his name” (88, vv. 2892–96). Even after he is identified later on by the scar on his face, Yvain has still not regained his own identity.

33. Vv. 6638—19858. On the link between questions of self-identity and norms of courtly culture and the critical function of anonymity in the romance, particularly in Yvain, see Sarah E. Gordon, “The Man with No Name: Identity in French Arthurian Verse Romance,” Arthuriana 18, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 69–81.

34. While there are Jewish translations and adaptations of non-Jewish literature that refer to their sources directly, such as the Alexander Romance, there are a great many Jewish tales based on non-Jewish parallels that rework their sources according to Jewish topoi known from talmudic traditions, and omit secondary details, such as proper names, etc. “A Slave for Seven Years” is one example of this trend.

35. I will elaborate on the community motif later on.

36. 3–8, vv. 1–74.

37. “One day, the first day of Passover on the festival it was and the whole congregation went for a walk and Joseph and his wife also went to the orchards and gardens with the rest of the young men and women,” 39r–39v.

38. “A week went by, spent / In pleasure and delight. The woods / And the river opened their arms / To anyone who wanted to enjoy them” (75, vv. 2466–69).

39. “This is our custom, and a settled rule / I expect will last a long time / For my daughter will never be married / Until they're conquered, or dead” (164, vv. 5501–5).

40. On “interlace” in Chrétien's romances (“conjure” is the term used by Chrétien himself), see Lacy, Craft, 67–112 and on Yvain, 93–100; Karl D. Uitti, “Intertextuality in ‘le Chevalier au Lion,’” Dalhousie French Studies 2 (October 1980): 3–13; Douglas Kelly, “Narrative Poetics: Rhetoric, Orality and Performance,” in Lacy and Grimbert, Companion to Chrétien, 55–63, and specifically on Yvain, 56–58.

41. The words inside the angle brackets here indicate an addition by the scribe in the margins of the page.

42. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), 87–90, and for a broader context, 76–109.

43. On this feature of the exemplum in the Middle Ages, see Yassif, Hebrew Folktale, 517 n. 42.

44. On Jewish novellenmärchen in Jewish folklore in the Middle Ages and their attributes, see Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Collection of Tales in the Middle Ages [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meʾuḥad, 2004), 144–45.

45. See this discussion of Chrétien's different perspectives on love as they are represented in his romances and references to the relevant research: Tovi Bibring, Marie de France's Lais, Hebrew Translation from the Anglo-Norman, Introduction and Notes [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2014), 23–24; and her reference to Moshé Lazar, Amour courtois et “finamors” dans la literature du XII^e siècle (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1964), 172.

46. On Chrétien's departures from the rules of the romance that preceded his time in accordance with his poetic and thematic goals, see Evelyn Mullally, The Artist at Work: Narrative Technique in Chrétien De Troyes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988); W. T. H. Jackson, “The Nature of the Romance,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 12–25.

47. Michelle Szkilnik, “Medieval Translations and Adaptations of Chrétien's Works,” in Lacy and Grimbert, Companion to Chrétien De Troyes, 202–13.

48. Rosenzweig, Claudia, d'Antona, Bovo by Elye Bokher: A Yiddish Romance (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Brand, Peter and Pertile, Lino, eds., The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33Google Scholar, in brief on Franco-Venetian literature. For an expansion, especially in the context of the “import” of Arthurian legends to Italy, see my references in the following notes to a choice of chapters in Allaire, Gloria and Psaki, Regina, eds., Arthur of the Italians: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

49. Keith Busby, “Arthuriana in the Italian Regions of Medieval Francoplonia,” in Allaire and Psaki, Arthur of the Italians, 11–20; Maria Bendinelli Predelli, “Arthurian Material in Italian Cantar,” in ibid., 105–20.

50. Busby, “Arthuriana,” 13.

51. Ibid., 11, 14–20.

52. It is also possible that Chrétien's romance was itself based on an earlier tale, and that it is this tale that penetrated Jewish folklore in Italy through oral and written traditions and is the source for “The Ring.” French literature in the Middle Ages was often based on oral folkloric traditions, and these should by no means be overlooked. However, as long as we have no proof indicating that such an oral parallel existed, namely one that resembles “The Ring” so closely in its structure and poetics—its unique combination of the ring/spring/loss-of-memory motifs and the other minute details noted above—it seems reasonable to assume a direct connection between the Jewish tale and Chrétien's romance, either in the latter's written form, or through its oral performances. For a broader view of the ways to contextualize medieval Jewish folk narratives, see the methodological, by now classic, debate between Yassif and Rosman in a series of articles: Yassif, Eli, “Legends and History: Historians Read Hebrew Legends of the Middle Ages,” Zion 64 (1999): 185–220Google Scholar; Rosman, Moshe, “The Art of Historiography and the Methods of Folklore,” Zion 65, no. 2 (2000): 209–18Google Scholar; Yassif, Eli, “‘Legend and History,’ Second Thought,” Zion 65, no. 2 (2000): 219–26Google Scholar.

53. Daniela Delcorno Branca, “The Italian Contribution: La Tavola Ritonda,” in Allaire and Psaki, Arthur of the Italians, 79, 101–2.

54. Ibid., 91–92.

55. As noted above, the poetics of interlacing was also typical of Chrétien's romances in the twelfth century.

56. Marie-José Heijkant, “From France to Italy: The Tristan Texts,” in Allaire and Psaki, Arthur of the Italians, 56–58; Stefano Mula, “Narrative Structure,” in ibid., 91; F. Regina Psaki, “Arthur in Medieval Short Narrative,” in ibid., 145–57.

57. F. Regina Psaki, introduction to Allaire and Psaki, Arthur of the Italians, 2.

58. Rosenzweig, Bovo d'Antona, 28–45.

59. Bonfil, Robert, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Oldcorn, Anthony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar, xi. This is Bonfil's thesis throughout his book, and it is presented in detail in the third chapter: “The Problem of Sociocultural Identity: Some Preliminary Observations,” 101–24. In a later article, “The History of the Jews in Italy, Memory and Identity,” in The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity, ed. D. Bernard Cooperman and Barbara Glavin, Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture 7 (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2000), 25–44, Bonfil takes his thesis further and applies it to Italian Jewish history in general as a paradigm for the proper understanding of historical processes that formed modern Jewish identity.

60. Bonfil, Jewish Life, 156–58. Bonfil's perception of Jewish life in Italy during the Renaissance as a continuation of Jewish life in the Middle Ages rather than a radical new epoch of harmony and synthesis (as Cecil Roth suggested) is contextualized within extant studies of Jewish life in Italian Renaissance and Humanism in Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Culture in Renaissance Italy: A Metholological Survey,” Italia 9, nos. 1–2 (1990): 63–96. For a different approach, see Ruderman, David B., introduction to Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 9–24Google Scholar; Ruderman, , introduction to Cultural Intermediaries, Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, ed. Ruderman, David B. and Veltri, Giuseppe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6–14Google Scholar. While Ruderman does not completely agree with Roth's conception of Renaissance Italy as a place of harmony and acceptance for Italian Jewry, he does see the pursuits of individual Jewish intellectuals of Renaissance culture and “their human quest for truth” (Cultural Intermediaries, 7) as a model for understanding the “Jewish Renaissance” as an intellectual movement that likely marks a new epoch in Jewish life in Italy. See also Ruderman's, “Cecil Roth, Historian of Italian Jewry: A Reassessment,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, where he reevaluates Roth's approach emphatically, albeit bringing his own critical point of view to bear as a modern historian. On the role of Jewish culture in the formation of self-identity in Europe in general and specifically in Italy see also Foa, Anna, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 49–73Google Scholar.

61. Bonfil, Jewish Life, 151–58; Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Culture,” 77–78; on other aspects of Renaissance contexts, see Malkiel, David, “Eros as a Medium: Rereading Immanuel of Rome's Scroll of Desire,” Associazione Italiana per lo Studio del Giudaismo: Atti del Convegno 9 (2007): 35–59Google Scholar. On the poetics of a unique Renaissance genre of Hebrew love poems in Italy (and Spain), see Pagis, Dan, Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 45–71Google Scholar, and specifically on Immanuel of Rome, 58–60.

62. Maria Mayer Modena, “The Spoken Languages of the Jews of Italy, How Far Back?,” in Cooperman and Garvin, Jews of Italy, 307–16; Modena, “Women's Language in Judeo-Italian” [in Hebrew], in Baumgarten, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Weinstein, Tov Elem, 165–70, from a gender perspective. See also Seremoneta, Joseph, “The Bi-lingual Prose and Poetry of Italian Jews,” in Judeo-Romance Languages, ed. Benabu, Isaac and Seremoneta, Joseph (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Misgav Yerushalayim, 1985), 161–68Google Scholar.

63. Modena, “Spoken Languages,” 308, 312–14.

64. On written documentations from this period see Modena, “Spoken Languages,” 309–12.

65. Ibid., 310.

66. It is not clear how the Hebrew tale made its way to the Veneto. It was possibly written by local Italian Jews who were familiar with a Franco-Venetian adaptation of Yvain as I suggest in this paper, or brought by Jewish immigrants who fled over the Alps as a result of persecutions precipitated by the Black Death. It is also possible that the Hebrew tale was brought to the western coast of Italy with Jews from France after the expulsions from France during the fourteenth century. However, the first option seems to me the most reasonable, in light of the Italian character of the manuscript. The Tikkun shetarot in the manuscript may also indicate the Venetian context discussed here, given the emigration of Jews from Rome to the Veneto in the fourteenth century. On small settlements of Jews in the Veneto during the fourteenth and fifteenth century, see Ravid, Benjamin, “The Venetian Government and the Jews,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Davis, Robert C. and Ravid, Benjamin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3–7Google Scholar.

67. Bonfil, Jewish Life, 179–212, expands on the stages of the consolidation of the communities of Italy and on the complex process of consolidating a Jewish self-perception in the context of the urban Italian society in which they lived. On the scattered nature of Jewish communities in northern and central Italy in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, with some communities consisting of only a few households, see Foa, Jews of Europe, 108–19.

68. “And when the people of the synagogue saw him, they recognized him and they all set out quickly and went to the rabbi's house, running, and cried aloud: ‘Let our master the rabbi know that his son-in-law is coming and he was with us in the sun.’ And then they all accompanied him to the rabbi's house.”

69. “And he handed down an ordinance that applied to all the Jews of his city that no Jew was to host in his home any foreigner or guest without his permission, and that the foreigner should immediately be shown to the rabbi's home where he would be given food, drink, and a place to sleep.”