Elia Levita Totally Explained

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Elia Levita (13 February 1469 – 28 January 1549), (Hebrew: אליהו בן אשר בחור) also known as Elijah Levita, Elias Levita, Eliahu Bakhur ("Eliahu the Bachelor") was a Renaissance-period Hebrew grammarian, poet and one of the first writers in the Yiddish language. He was the author of the Bovo-Bukh (written in 1507–1508), the most popular chivalric romance written in Yiddish, which, according to Sol Liptzin, is "generally regarded as the most outstanding poetic work in Old Yiddish".
   Born at Neustadt near Nuremberg, he was the youngest of nine brothers. During his early manhood, the Jews were expelled from this area. He lived in Venice for a time after 1496, where he was part of a brief efflorescence of Yiddish literature, before the descendants of the Ashkenazic Jews who had emigrated this area adopted the local Italian speech.
   During these years, Levita scratched out a living as an entertainer. After Venice, he relocated to Padua (1504), where he wrote the 650 ottava rima stanzas of the Bovo-Bukh, based on the popular romance Buovo d'Antona, which, in turn, was based on the Anglo-Norman romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton.
   Escaping a war, he left in 1509 for Rome, where he acquired a patron, the humanist Petrus Egidius (1471–1532) of Viterbo, who from 1517 held the rank of a Roman Catholic cardinal. Levita taught Hebrew to Petrus, and copied Hebrew manuscripts—mostly related to the Kabbalah—for Petrus's library. While in Germany he also printed the first edition of his Bovo-Bukh. He adds that Levita "was not the equal" of his contemporaries Ariosto or Tasso, and that the "knightly adventures" he depicted "had no basis in Jewish reality": compared to other chivalric romances, Levita's works "tone down the Christian symbols of his original" and "substitute Jewish customs, Jewish values and Jewish traits of character here and there..."

Works

Elia Levita Bachur's Bovo-Buch: A Translation of the Old Yiddish Edition of 1541 with Introduction and Notes by Elia Levita Bachur, translated and notes by Jerry C. Smith, Fenestra Books, 2003, ISBN 1-58736-160-4.
Paris and Vienna (attributed)
miscellaneous shorter poems

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