ABSTRACT
Few scenes illustrate the achievements of Jewish auto-emancipation as poignantly as that of a Berlin salon during the change from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The perception of Yiddish amongst Jews themselves and non-Jews is interdependent and interlinked. The formulation 'muthwillige Faschingstracht' testifies to contemporary awareness that Yiddish stage roles were exaggerations, comic stock figures with comic stock speech that did not bear much resemblance to real people and their real idiom. Literature, and particularly the attribution of a distinct and strange speech to Jews in literature, played a part in branding Jews unfit for acceptance into the community of German citizens. The scandal and uproar surrounding the Berlin staging of Karl Borromaus Sessa's farce Unser Verkehr has often been discussed. In the nineteenth century, the Yiddish presence in German literature is a literary Yiddish that should not be confused with any real Yiddish that might, or might not, have been spoken in Central Europe at the time.
