Safran examines the nineteenth-century publishing history of Jewish dialect joke books and Yiddish dictionaries and the generic links between dictionaries and joke books in Russian–Yiddish and English–Yiddish cases. In the 1870s in the Russian Empire and in the 1890s in the United States, Jewish speech style (Jewish Russian and Jewish English) was enregistered; that is, the concepts of ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewish speech’ took on new meanings. This was reflected in both dictionaries and joke books that, at least in some cases, were intended to teach their readers to be humorous as well as knowledgeable. These texts demonstrate the tension between dialect humour that is derogatory and that which embraces its subject; beyond this dichotomy, Safran argues that the confluence of Yiddish lexicography and Jewish dialect humour in the Russian Empire and the United States also reflected the marketing of distinctive spoken language by publishers for general readers. As Safran shows, the commodification of dialect humour and low-status spoken languages was facilitated by a nineteenth-century publishing boom fostered by cheap machine-made paper, fast printing techniques, the rise of literacy, the decline of book prices, the increase in railroad journeying, and the concomitant demand for portable entertainment.
