1. The term “black slavery” is used for reasons of accuracy, with no intention of disrespect. The texts discussed in this article deal with African slaves transported to many colonies in the New World before, during, and after the Atlantic crossing as well as slaves born into slavery on the American continent and some in colonies on the African continent—e.g., black slaves on plantations in Senegal. Although “African American” is more politically acceptable today, in the case of the persons described herein this term does not provide an accurate description, as is also true of the term “African.” Likewise, since the skin color of the slaves was such a significant defining factor during the period in which these texts were composed, it is appropriate to use “black” here.

2. For a detailed discussion of blacks in American Yiddish literature, see Rontch, Isaac E., Amerike in der yidisher literatur [America in Yiddish Literature: An Interpretation] (New York: Martin Press, 1945), 203–55Google Scholar; Bachman, Merle Lyn, “American Yiddish Poetry's Encounter with Black America,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 21, no. 1 (2002): 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bachman, , Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 114–73Google Scholar.

3. Parallels between black and Jewish experiences have been drawn frequently since the antebellum period. As Hasia Diner notes, since much American rhetoric of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflects the Old Testament heritage of the Puritans, the image of black slaves as the Children of Israel was used repeatedly in sermons, editorials, literature, and other media by blacks and white abolitionists alike. These parallels were similarly drawn in Yiddish prose and poetry of the early twentieth century; Diner, writes in In the Almost Promised Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), 20–21Google Scholar: “decades after Emancipation American Jews would point with pride to the fact that the Old Testament had been an inspiration to the cause of abolitionism.” For a modern academic comparison of the situations of the Jews in Europe and the blacks in America, see Phillipson, Robert, The Identity Question (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2001), ix–xiiGoogle Scholar.

4. On Jewish involvement in the slave trade see, e.g., Schorsch, Jonathan, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009)Google Scholar; Schorsch, , Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Iris Idelson-Shein, “‘Blessed is the Changer of Beings’: Uses and Representations of ‘the Exotic’ in the Jewish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2010), 3–5.

5. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 280.

6. Ibid.

7. Schorsch for the most part excludes Ashkenazic Jewry from his discussion both for pragmatic reasons and because he claims that they knew almost nothing of slavery, colonialism, and related subjects. For a discussion of Schorsch's approach, see Idelson-Shein, “‘Blessed is the Changer of Beings,’” 7–8.

8. Diner, Almost Promised Land, 21.

9. Diner also notes that Herzl touches upon the slave trade and the issue of race relations in Altneuland; ibid., 22–23.

10. Ibid., 23.

11. See Idelson-Shein, “‘Blessed is the Changer of Beings,’” 171.

12. For a discussion of maskilic commentary on black slavery outside of sea adventures, see ibid., 170–78.

13. Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–4Google Scholar.

14. On the noble savage, see, e.g., Ellingson, Ter, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. The first (and incomplete) edition of the anonymous Robinson, The Story of Alter Leb: A True and Wonderful Story for Entertainment and Instruction (Alter Leb) held by the National Library of Israel was printed in Lvov in 1850/51. However, this is not the first edition of the work, which Leah Garrett dates to 1820. The fact that Shlomo Ettinger, writing in the 1830s, refers to a Yiddish translation of Robinson Crusoe titled אלטעלי indicates that the earliest edition was published well before the extant one. Ber Shlosberg's 1937 identification of Yosef Vitlin, a Galician maskil, as the translator has been followed by Dov Sadan, David Roskies, and Leah Garrett, who has discussed this adaptation at length in her article “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” Comparative Literature 54, no. 3 (2000): 215–28Google Scholar. See Weiner, M., Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yohrhundert (New York: YKUF, 1945), 255Google Scholar; and Garrett, “Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 216.

16. Lefin's Masa‘ot ha-yam and the anonymous (although attributed to Lefin) ’Oniyah soʿarah are not discussed herein since they do not contain commentary on black slavery.

17. This issue is discussed in my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, The Sea and Sea Voyage in Maskilic Literature.

18. See Idelson-Shein, “‘Blessed is the Changer of Beings,’” 8, 175.

19. See Feiner, Shmuel, “Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,” in Feiner, Shmuel and Sorkin, David, New Perspectives on the Haskalah (London; Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 187–89Google Scholar.

20. Pelli, Moshe, The Age of Haskalah: Studies in Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 1–2Google Scholar.

21. Among the wide variety of literature existing on Haskalah see, e.g., Feiner, Shmuel, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Naor, Chaya (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feiner, , Milḥemet tarbut: tnuʿat ha-haskala ha-yehudit ba-meʾah ha-19 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2010)Google Scholar; Katz, Jacob, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Reinharz, Yehuda and Schatzenberg, Walter, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985)Google Scholar; on Haskalah literature, see Pelli, Moshe, “Haskalah Literature—Trends and Attitudes,” Jewish Book Annual 39 (1981/2): 92–101Google Scholar; on the Haskalah in Russia, see Raisin, Jacob S., The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913)Google Scholar; and Zalkin, Mordekhai, Ha-haskala ha-yehudit be-rusiya 1800–1860: hebetim ḥevratiyim (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1996)Google Scholar.

22. In Divrei shalom ve-'emet (1782) Naphtali Herz Wessely suggested that the study of the humanities has an intrinsic value and is not subordinate to that of Torah—rather it should be either equal to or above the latter in terms of importance, since it is vital to the understanding of religion. He outlined the need to study the law of humans—language and grammar (both Hebrew and German), social behavior, and good manners—alongside the law of God, i.e., the Bible, religious precepts, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature.

23. On maskilic schools, see Graupe, Heinz Moshe, The Rise of Modern Judaism: An Intellectual History of German Jewry, 1650–1942, trans. Robinson, John (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1978), 104 ffGoogle Scholar; and Simon, E., “Pedagogic Philanthropinism and Jewish Education,” in Sefer ha-yovel likhvod mordekhai menaḥem kaplan, ed. Davis, Moshe (New York: JTS, 1975), 163Google Scholar.

24. Batten, Charles L. Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

25. On this, see, e.g., Nancy Sinkoff, Tradition and Transition: Mendel Lefin of Satanow and the Beginnings of Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, 1749–1826 (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996), 93–94; and Garrett, “Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 224.

26. See Bor, Harris, “Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah's Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre,” in Feiner and Sorkin, New Perspectives, 48–63Google Scholar. Bor describes musar as the “theoretical underpinning for halakhah” or “theological grounding for religious life” (49–52). Musar literature, especially the kabbalistic ethical works popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, also voiced social criticism, attacking religious or moral laxity and aiming to rouse readers to repentance, greater observance, and intense piety. The focus of most of this literature was on the afterlife, and works often advocated ascetic penitence and used threats of punishment to invoke fear, as opposed to love, of God. Maskilic writers sought to move away from these views and inspire their readers to love God. Musar literature became an area in which maskilim could innovate without trespassing into the more sensitive domain of halakhah. Maskilim also began to associate morality with the Haskalah, stressing the importance of social improvement. As Bor notes, “In the Enlightenment period political, philosophical, religious, and scientific developments merged to shape a climate dedicated to a worldly morality based on rational principles.”

27. Lederhendler, Eli, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 119–24Google Scholar.

28. Bor, “Enlightenment Values,” 48.

29. Sinkoff, Nancy, “Benjamin Franklin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of the Enlightenment” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 1 (2000): 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. On this, see Lederhendler, Modern Jewish Politics, 125 ff; and Zinberg, Israel, A History of Jewish Literature, ed. and trans. Martin, Bernard (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972–78), 10:32–33Google Scholar; Zinberg, however, suggests that these comments reflect the maskilim's belief that the government was protecting them.

31. Even-Zohar, Itamar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in Even-Zohar, Itamar, Polysystem Studies, Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990): 45–52Google Scholar; Toury, Gideon, “Translating English Literature via German—and Vice Versa: A Symptomatic Reversal in the History of Modern Hebrew Literature,” in Die literarische Übersetzung: Stand und Perspektiven ihrer Erforschung, ed. Kittel, Harald (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1988): 139–57Google Scholar; and Shoham, Ḥayim, be-ẓel haskalat berlin (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1996).Google Scholar

32. On Campe see for example, e.g., Ewers, Hans-Heino, (ed.), Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991)Google Scholar; Fertig, Ludwig, Campes politische Erziehung: Eine Einführung in die Pädagogik der Aufklärung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977)Google Scholar.

On Campe's significance in maskilic literature, see Shavit, Zohar, “From Friedländer's Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Beginning of Hebrew Children's Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 385–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shavit, Zohar, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish Hebrew Children's Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (1992): 41–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. This term is used by David Roskies; see, e.g., “The Medium and Message of the Maskilic (Yiddish) Chapbook,” Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 3/4 (1979): 275–90Google Scholar. The term designates the corpus under study here whose recurring characteristics include: the central presence of the sea, elements of the adventure genre (see Green, Martin, Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991])Google Scholar; and shared ideological, and especially pedagogical, aims. However, the works also exhibit many influences from other genres. On the difficulty of categorizing texts according to literary genres, see, e.g., Fishelov, David, “Genre Theory and Family Resemblance—Revisited,” Poetics 20 (1991): 123–38Google Scholar; and Gerhart, Mary, “The Dilemma of the Text: How to ‘Belong’ to a Genre,” Poetics 18 (1989): 355–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Although the term “translation” is used here, these are free reworkings and not close translations of Campe's works. They remove and add material, make changes in the narrative and plot, and often Judaize the source text. See Rebecca Wolpe, “Judaizing Robinson Crusoe: Maskilic Adaptations of Robinson Crusoe in Hebrew and Yiddish,” in Jewish Culture and History, forthcoming; and Wolpe, The Sea Voyage Narrative as an Educational Tool in the Early Haskalah (Master's thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005).

35. There are seven extant Jewish adaptations of Robinson der Jüngere (see Wolpe, “Judaizing Robinson Crusoe”) and five of Die Entdeckung (see Wolpe, Sea Voyage Narrative). Six of Campe's works were adapted by maskilim for Jewish readerships: Robinson der Jüngere, Die Entdeckung von Amerika, Theophron oder der erfahrne Rathgeber für die unerfahrne Jugend, Sittenbüchlein für Kinder aus gesitteten Ständen, Merkwürdge Reisebeschreibungen, and excerpts from Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die jugend. Robinson der Jüngere, Die Entdeckung von Amerika, and excerpts from Sammlung were the most popular. The first two have been adapted by various writers. All three have been published in numerous editions. For more on Campe's influence on the maskilim, see Shavit, Zohar, Poetics of Children's Literature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Shavit, “From Friedländer's Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe”; Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish Hebrew Children's Literature during the Enlightenment”; and Shavit, , “Intercultural Relationships: The Importance of the Study of Cultural Interference for the Historical Study of Children's Literature (Test Case: The Relations between German and Jewish Children's Literature during the 18th and 19th Centuries),” Comparison 2 (1995): 67–80Google Scholar.

36. Works by Dik include: Di antlofene tokhter (Vilna, 1856); ’Iyei ha-yam (Vilna, 1856), Pil’ei Ha-shem (Vilna, 1856), Der melamed (Vilna, 1864), Ma'oz ha-yam (Vilna, 1864), Ben Padok (Vilna, 1865), Di vistenay zahara (Vilna, 1868), Der apekun (Vilna, 1872), Der Bartenura (Vilna, 1877), Das ayngefrorene shif oyf dem ayzmer (Vilna, 1882), and Amerikaner geshikhte oder keyn soyne zol dir tsu kleyn zayn (Vilna, 1899). On the border between fact and fiction in travel writing, see Martels, Zweder von, Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies in Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994)Google Scholar.

37. See Feiner, Milḥemet tarbut: tnuʿat ha-haskala ha-yehudit ba-me’ah ha-19, 155–69.

38. Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60Google Scholar.

39. Paasman, A. N., “West Indian Slavery and Dutch Enlightenment Literature,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. Arnold, Albert James (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins B.V.; Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, 2001), 2:481–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Ibid., 483.

41. See for example Edward Derbyshire Seeber's discussion of the Marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789), Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Lennox Hill, 1971), 93 ffGoogle Scholar.

42. Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 422 ffGoogle Scholar.

43. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 438 ff.

44. Outram, The Enlightenment, 61–65, 74.

45. See “The Changing Image of the Negro” in Davis, Problem of Slavery, 446 ff.

46. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1764), quoted in Davis, Problem of Slavery, 440.

47. “…so-called inferior peoples were, in many respects, to be envied…. Rousseau stressed the advantages of the savage over the civilized man. Nature is generous to those who live close to her. Savages are stronger and more agile than Europeans…. All the senses of primitive man are keener.” Cox, Mercer, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Negro,” The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 3 (1936): 298Google Scholar.

48. Ibid., 294–303, esp. 300–302.

49. E.g., The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: Nation of Islam, 1991)Google Scholar.

50. Midrash Bereshit Rabba offers various explanations of why Canaan is cursed and not Ham. One is that Ham himself could not be cursed since God had already blessed Noah and his sons, hence Noah cursed Ham's son. Another is that it was Canaan who actually saw Noah in his drunken state first and went to report it to his father, Ham. See Midrash Bereshit Rabba, 36.

51. JPS Bible (Philadelphia: JPS, 1917).

52. Theodor, J. and Albeck, Ch.. eds., Midrash Bereshit Rabba: Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965), 341–42Google Scholar.

53. Goldenberg, David M., “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism?” in The Promised Land, ed. Salzman, Jack and West, Cornel (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24–32Google Scholar.

54. Ibid., 44.

55. Ibid., 33–35. Ephraim Isaac comes to a similar conclusion regarding the linking of these two separate myths in his article “Genesis, Judaism and the Sons of Ham,” Slavery and Abolition 1, no. 1 (1980): 3–17.

56. For further details, see Wolpe, “Judaizing Robinson Crusoe”; Reinhard, Angelika, Die Karriere des Robinson Crusoe vom literarischen zum pädagogischen Helden: Eine literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung des Robinson Defoes und der Robinson-Adaptionen von Campe und Forster (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994)Google Scholar; Elisabeth Stambor, L'entrée de Robinson Crusoé dans la littérature enfantine: naissance du mythe, de De Foe à Campe, 1719–1779 (Master's thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1992).

57. It is interesting to note that Elizabeth Helme, the English translator of Die Entdeckung (Columbus or The Discovery of America as Related by a Father to his Children [London, 1818]), 245, adds a footnote on this issue, in which she strongly disagrees with Campe and takes an even stronger antislavery stance: “The translator must differ in opinion from Mr. Campe, and consider it as a pernicious thought, for those millions of pounds of sugar cannot surely be put in competition with the numberless barbarities the culture of that plant has occasioned, any more than can the luxury of Europeans be considered of sufficient consequence to be purchased at the yearly expense of the lives of thousands of their fellow creatures. In the eye of the world, the death of a few negroes may be immaterial; but in the eye of God, will it not be the death of men and brethren, who, however destitute of external advantages, and deficient in the refinements of education, are equally estimable in his sight as the polished European?” Campe is a clear supporter of colonialism, as is apparent from his discussions of its benefits for both Europeans and the “conquered nations” in volumes 2 and 3 of Die Entdeckung.

58. Campe, Joachim Heinrich, Die Entdeckung, 6th ed. (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1806), 314Google Scholar.

59. Meẓiat ha-'areẓ ha-ḥadasha (Altona, 1807).

60. Campe, Die Entdeckung, vol. 1, 164–165.

61. In his article on the subject Daniel Hopkins is not as positive about the Danish king's actions as was Mendelsohn: “The historic prohibition was hailed—and not only in Denmark—as a landmark in the affairs of the human race…. The institution of slavery itself was not affected by the ordinance however, and modern historians have taken rather a cynical view of it.” Hopkins, Daniel P., “The Danish Ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade and Denmark's African Colonial Ambitions, 1787–1807,” Itinerario 25 (2001): 154CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

62. All translations from Hebrew and Yiddish, aside from biblical verses, are my own.

63. It is not possible to read this as an expression of patriotism, as similar phrases were used to praise the Danish king Frederick II, not the Prussian king, in Hame'asef and may be found in later periods in Bikkurei haʿitim, Dik's Yiddish works, and Hebrew newspapers of the Russian Empire (see below). However, it is an expression of the writer's respect for everything European and enlightened, and his desire that his readers, and the Jewish people as a whole, aspire to these values.

64. Glot ha-'areẓ ha-ḥadasha (Vilna, 1823).

65. Die entdekung fun amerike (Vilna, 1824).

66. It is of course impossible to discuss the attitude to slavery in Robinson der Jüngere without mention of the character Friday. In Robinson Crusoe Friday is very clearly Robinson's servant, far below his master in hierarchy, able to speak only a pidgin English and totally uncivilized. In Campe's adaptation of Robinson Crusoe Friday remains servant to his master, but the relationship between the two is far more complicated. Friday swiftly learns to speak fluent German and is shown to be capable of all intellectual pursuits. He excels at certain physical skills far beyond Robinson's abilities; he is able to light a fire whereas Robinson has repeatedly failed to do so; and he saves Robinson from drowning early on in the story. There is an exchange of knowledge and skills between the two men, rather than a simple hierarchy, yet Friday remains a servant. So too the Jewish adaptations of the work follow Campe's characterization of Friday. However, the character of Friday is more relevant to a discussion of colonialism and the approach to the exotic than to a discussion of the institution of black slavery.

67. Quotations from Robinson der Jüngere are from Alwin Binder and Heinrich Richartz's critical edition in German (Philipp Reclam Jun: Stuttgart, 1981), 310 ff.

68. Binder and Richartz, Robinson der Jüngere, 311. For an English translation see Robinson, the Younger; or, The New Crusoe. Translated by Hick, R. (London: G. Routledge and Co, 1856)Google Scholar

69. Fleischer, Ezra, Shirat ha-kodesh ha-’ivrit biyemei ha-beinayim (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1975), 103–4Google Scholar, as quoted in Pelli, , “On the Role of Melitzah in the Literature of Hebrew Enlightenment,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz, ed. Glinert, Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 100Google Scholar.

70. Pagis, Dan, Ḥidush umasoret be-shirat ha-ḥol ha-ʿivrit: sefarad ve-'italiya (Keter: Tel Aviv, 1988), 75Google Scholar, quoted in Pelli, “On the Role of Melitzah,” 103.

71. Pelli, “On the Role of Melitzah,” 101.

72. Robinson der yingere (A Reading Book for Children) (Breslau, 1824)

73. Ibid., 131.

74. Leah Garrett notes that “slavery necessarily generates some very specific reactions among Jewish readers because of its inevitable associations with the story of Moses heroically leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt, a heroic vision necessarily intermingled with a Jewish discomfort with slavery born from a long history of discrimination. The slaves that escape in Vitlin's tale reflect, I believe, both of these peculiarly Jewish associations. Indeed, I would even argue that Defoe's failure overtly to condemn slavery would have been impossible in a Judaized text.” Garrett, “Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” 226.

75. Robinzon: Di geshikhte fun alter leb, ayne vare und vunder bare geshikhte tsum unterhalt und zur belerung (Vilna, 1894), 71–72.

76. Rumsch, Isaac, Sefer kur ‘oni (Eydtkuhnen, 1861)Google Scholar.

77. Rauch, Franz, Robinson's Leben und Abenteuer (Berlin, 1840)Google Scholar.

78. Idelson-Shein, “‘Blessed is the Changer of Beings,’” 173.

79. Dik, Isaac Meir, Maʿoz ha-yam oder di viste inzl (Vilna, 1864)Google Scholar.

80. Here Dik uses Psalm 107 as his prooftext, legitimizing his subject material. The significance of this Psalm as a source of the maskilic-hasidic polemic has been discussed by Nancy Sinkoff and Ken Frieden. See Frieden, Ken, “Neglected Origins of Modern Hebrew Prose,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 3–43Google Scholar; and Sinkoff, Nancy, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004)Google Scholar. On the basis of Dik's use of this prooftext it could be argued that Maʿoz ha-yam is a continuation of the polemic that raged between the two groups through the medium of sea literature.

81. Roskies, David, “An Annotated Bibliography of Ayzik Meyer Dik,” in The Field of Yiddish, ed. Herzog, Marvin, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Miron, Dan, and Wisse, Ruth (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), 117–34; 176–77Google Scholar.

82. David Roskies, “Medium and Message,” 283.

83. These are most of the group that Roskies defines as “travelers' tales” in “Annotated Bibliography,” 176–77. Roskies lists eleven works that he describes as “designed to familiarize Jewish readers with the world and its wonders.” These include travels to the Land of Israel, Africa, Asia, and America. Here I deal only with those that involve adventures at sea.

84. Dik, Isaac Meir, trans., Der Bartenure (Vilna, 1877)Google Scholar.

85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin or Negro Life in the Slave States of America (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852)Google Scholar; Dik, Isaac Meir, trans., Di shklaveray oder di laybeygnshaft (Vilna, 1868)Google Scholar.

86. Evidence of this is to be found in his descriptions of journeys to the poles in pil'el Ha-shem and Das ayngefrorene shif oyf dem ayzmer, which draw upon volume 1 of Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend, and in his descriptions of the history of the conquest of America and Mexico in Amerikaner geshikhte.

87. Hecht, David, “Russian Intelligentsia and American Slavery,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 265–69, esp. 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88. Ibid.

89. Dow, Roger, “Seichas: A Comparison of Pre-Reform Russia and the Ante-Bellum South,” Russian Review 7, no. 1 (1947): 3Google Scholar. On Turgenev's writings, see Kaspin, Albert, “Uncle Tom's Cabin and ‘Uncle’ Akim's Inn: More on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Turgenev,” The Slavic and East European Journal 9, no. 1 (1965): 47–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90. Alongside Dik's familiarity with Campe, a wide range of travel literature, novels including Eugène Sue's Les mystères de Paris, Jewish and non-Jewish folktales, his up-to-date knowledge indicates that he read newspapers and maintained a constant interest in current affairs, within and outside the Russian Empire. His narratives of the exploration of the poles and the Sahara Desert, for example, demonstrate his familiarity with the latest developments in exploration and colonialism. He also displays current knowledge of the British imperial expansion in several works. For a fuller discussion of the influences on Dik, see Roskies, “Annotated Bibliography”; and Roskies, Ayzik-Meyer Dik and the Rise of Yiddish Popular Literature (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1975).

91. Dik, Isaac Meir, Der apekun (Vilna, 1872), 6Google Scholar. A similar comment also appears in Isaac Meir Dik, Amerikaner geshikhte (Vilna 1899), 15.

92. Similar sentiments appear in his praise of the tsar's emancipation of the serfs in Ha-carmel (Vilna, 1861, e.g., 259) alongside portraits of the bloody war raging in America.

93. As Roger Dow notes in his comparison of the antebellum South and prereform Russia, the two were in fact very similar:

(Dow, “Seichas: A Comparison of Pre-Reform Russia and the Ante-Bellum South,” 3–15.)

94. Eli Lederhendler, Modern Jewish Politics, 126–28. For purposes of public relations with non-Jews the short-lived Russian newspaper Raszvet (1860–61) and later Zederbaum's Vestnik russikh evreev (1871–73) and Odessa Den (1869–71) were created.

95. Ibid., 149, quoting Ha-magid 13 (1860).

96. Charney, Shmuel Niger, “America in the Works of I. M. Dick,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 9 (1954): 63–71Google Scholar.

97. Dik, Isaac Meir, Amerikaner geshikhte (Vilna 1899)Google Scholar.

98. In the latter part of his career Dik published fewer travel accounts and sea adventures, a choice that may be attributed to changes not only in ideology but also in the literary milieu. Dik was threatened by the sensational romances written by Shomer (Naḥum Meyer Shaikevitz, who began publishing in 1876), as is clear from his critique of these “new” novels in Dos ayngefrorene shif oyf dem ayzmer (The Frozen Ship on the Ice Sea) (Vilna, 1882).

99. Dik, Isaac Meir, ’Iyei ha-yam (Vilna, 1856)Google Scholar.

100. Ibid., 11–12.

101. The African Squadron or Anti-Slavery Squadron was established by Britain in 1808 in response to pressure from abolitionists. Other countries signed treaties to cooperate with Britain in putting an end to the slave trade, but in reality most captures of slave ships were by the British. Estimates put the success rate between 1811 and 1867 at one in five slave ships. For further information, see Eltis, David, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

102. Dik, Ma‘oz ha-yam, 28.

103. Dik's heroes are often enlightened, western Jews, who during the course of his stories demonstrate how they successfully combine in perfect harmony traditional piety with their enlightened way of life and involvement in European society. Dik's portrayals of his heroes provide an indication of his ideal “maskil,” which he hoped would provide an example to which his readers could aspire.

104. Dik, Di vistenay zahara, 11–15.

105. Dik is mistaken as to the year and location of the revolt: what he describes here is actually the Saint Domingue rebellion of 1791.

106. Dik's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin is a complete rewriting of the novel, including the Judaization of most of the characters and significant plot alterations. This work will not be discussed here in detail since it cannot be classified as a work of sea literature, but will be referred to only with regard to its influence on Dik's abolitionist ideology.

107. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin (London: John Cassel, 1852), 44Google Scholar.

108. Dik, Isaac Meir, Di shklaveray, 2nd ed. (Vilna, 1887), 1:30Google Scholar.

109. Ibid., 1:45.

110. Ibid., 1:36–41.

111. See Roskies, “An Annotated Bibliography of Ayzik Meyer Dik,” in which Roskies categorizes and provides an overview of Dik's works.

112. Dik, Der apekun, 47–48.

113. Dik, Der apekun, 61.

114. Dik, Di vistenay zahara, 12–13.

115. Dik, Der apekun, 63.