In one of their enlightening confessions, my most authentic American-Jewish friends (the rare breed among them who honestly and openly care about the preservation of the historical Yiddishkeit) have made this rather sad point to me---and quite ruefully, at that---concerning the decline, this time perhaps terminal, of the Yiddish language, which decline they have attributed to the establishment of the Hebrew-speaking State of Israel, which, according to them, openly discriminates against the use of Yiddish, no longer a competitor tongue to be sure, but, still, a ‘shameful reminder’ of the shabbiness of the shtetl subsistence of most of these Israelis’ forebears.
The state of Yiddish in the State of Israel is indeed pitiful, judging from the Time Almanac’s-2005 entry on Israel’s languages, which I now quote in its entirety: “Hebrew (official), Arabic, English.” The Almanac’s mistake of not identifying Arabic here as Israel’s second official language, of just two, can be understood, as there have been persistent efforts to deny Arabic its official language status, and, in practical terms, it is virtually impossible to live in Israel on Arabic alone. Without denying the importance of English in the country, one must not nevertheless fail to mention the huge importance of Russian as a dominant non-Hebrew language, actively spoken by at least one-fourth of Israel, but understood and accepted as a legitimate Israeli language by virtually all ethnically Jewish population of the country.
But even if we add a fourth language and somewhat rearrange the priorities, that still sadly leaves out, both in legal and practical terms, the most sentimentally Jewish of all languages: Yiddish. My American-Jewish friends were right, to worry...
Curiously, it was not Hebrew, but Yiddish, which was allowed as the second official language (the Russian language being the first) of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia, formed in 1934, with its center in the city of Birobidjan. The political reason behind the cultivation of Yiddish, while suppressing Hebrew, in the USSR, is easy to figure out: Hebrew quickly established itself as the language of international Zionism, and Yiddish was used in Russia as a counter-weapon. But it was also a practical matter of convenience, as most Soviet Jews at the time were Yiddish speakers, and Hebrew was a foreign language to most of them.
Leaving politics and convenience aside, though, this official policy of cultivating the otherwise endangered language has done a lot of good for the preservation of Yiddish, even if not too many younger Russian Jews wanted to have anything to do with it.
Today, the continued official status of Yiddish is of course mainly a formality, which does not guarantee the actual survival of Yiddish, as outside that fairly exotic place it is hardly maintained enough by Russian Jews to keep it alive and well. But it is quite heavy on symbolism, and scores a huge point in Russia’s favor with the sentimental world Jewry, even if this most remarkable fact is by no means widely enough advertised.)
Yet, insofar as Yiddish is concerned, the Almanac is not lying, and this is the main subject of interest to me in this entry. Which leads me to the key question that needs to be answered before I am done: Is such contempt for Yiddish (outside Birobidjan and JAR) completely or at least partially justified, and then, when finally this endangered species is officially pronounced extinct by its few remaining champions, will the rest of Judenthum breathe a sigh of relief and say, Good riddance!?
The basic facts about Yiddish are well known, or, better put, are readily available to anyone who wishes to obtain such information. Here is a summary of some references to Yiddish in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, interspersed with my own comments:
“Living in the Germanic Frankish lands of Western Europe among people who spoke Middle High German, the majority of Ashkenazic Jews adopted their language for colloquial use, but still relied on the language of their religious services, which was Hebrew, that had remained the language of worship and scholarship. As a result, an amalgam called Jüdisch-Deutsch developed, soon corrupted into Yiddish-Teitch, and then, reduced to the simple Yiddish. In the wake of the Crusaders’ massacres of the Jews, they now moved into Eastern Europe, where Yiddish acquired a strong Slavonic element, and now developed along independent lines, flowering into a rich literary language.” (In modern linguistic classification of world languages, this turns Yiddish into a product of artificial insemination, allowing it to occupy a unique place in the group of one, called Germanic-Slavonic Languages, but, conspicuously, giving no credit in this classification to its Hebrew connection.)
“The first books in Yiddish were written in the 12th and 13th centuries intended only for the women and the ignorant. In the wake of the catastrophes experienced by the Jews during the Thirty Years’ War, causing the massive migration to Poland, secular Yiddish literature disappeared completely, until its reemergence in the late 18th century.” (As a result of the Hasidic “revolution.”)
“The Haskala, Enlightenment, had a negative effect on Yiddish, most writers now working in Hebrew or in Russian, showing explicit contempt for the Hasidim and consequently satirizing the use of Yiddish. Its use was now mainly an expression of protest against the Haskala, but eventually even that wave of protest was bound to subside, leaving the future of Yiddish in serious jeopardy.” (I have already noted before how much that future was further threatened by the establishment of the State of Israel, giving no quarter to the "black sheep" of the Jewish linguistic family.)
This entry’s title question (How Yiddish Is Yiddish?) ought to be interpreted as a query, whether it is proper for the Jews to shun their shtetl past, or just to ignore the Yiddish connection as a sentimental, but obsolete fragment of their history, now that Hebrew is no longer a dead bookish language, but a living tongue well fit to represent the uniqueness of the Jewish national identity. The answer is in no way simple, but it may offer certain practical hints, which themselves are hard to ignore.
Even if the practical value of Yiddish is minimal, reduced to the ability to read certain Jewish writers of the past in the original, its antiquarian historical value is immense, not even in real terms, but as a question of attitude. It brings to mind that acutely “current” argument, raised in Karl Marx’s critique of Bruno Bauer’s works The Jewish Question (1842) and The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free (1843), to be discussed later in this section.
What is, after all, the ultimate objective of modern Judenthum? Is it to preserve its precious Jewish identity, as a unique flower in the lush garden of also unique and diverse national identities,--- or, in the pursuit of the Globalist dream, a perverted version of the Jewish nation-idea (which I find in the modern interpretation of the Lurianic concept of Tikkun Olam), to work toward the goal of neutering all expressions of a distinct national identity, such as religion, culture, and even historical memory, and in the process of this impossible pursuit, to abandon their own distinctiveness in religion, culture, and historical memory? Depending on the answer to this last question, the fate of Yiddish as well as the fates of many other aspects of Yiddishkeit will be determined…
The state of Yiddish in the State of Israel is indeed pitiful, judging from the Time Almanac’s-2005 entry on Israel’s languages, which I now quote in its entirety: “Hebrew (official), Arabic, English.” The Almanac’s mistake of not identifying Arabic here as Israel’s second official language, of just two, can be understood, as there have been persistent efforts to deny Arabic its official language status, and, in practical terms, it is virtually impossible to live in Israel on Arabic alone. Without denying the importance of English in the country, one must not nevertheless fail to mention the huge importance of Russian as a dominant non-Hebrew language, actively spoken by at least one-fourth of Israel, but understood and accepted as a legitimate Israeli language by virtually all ethnically Jewish population of the country.
But even if we add a fourth language and somewhat rearrange the priorities, that still sadly leaves out, both in legal and practical terms, the most sentimentally Jewish of all languages: Yiddish. My American-Jewish friends were right, to worry...
Curiously, it was not Hebrew, but Yiddish, which was allowed as the second official language (the Russian language being the first) of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia, formed in 1934, with its center in the city of Birobidjan. The political reason behind the cultivation of Yiddish, while suppressing Hebrew, in the USSR, is easy to figure out: Hebrew quickly established itself as the language of international Zionism, and Yiddish was used in Russia as a counter-weapon. But it was also a practical matter of convenience, as most Soviet Jews at the time were Yiddish speakers, and Hebrew was a foreign language to most of them.
Leaving politics and convenience aside, though, this official policy of cultivating the otherwise endangered language has done a lot of good for the preservation of Yiddish, even if not too many younger Russian Jews wanted to have anything to do with it.
Today, the continued official status of Yiddish is of course mainly a formality, which does not guarantee the actual survival of Yiddish, as outside that fairly exotic place it is hardly maintained enough by Russian Jews to keep it alive and well. But it is quite heavy on symbolism, and scores a huge point in Russia’s favor with the sentimental world Jewry, even if this most remarkable fact is by no means widely enough advertised.)
Yet, insofar as Yiddish is concerned, the Almanac is not lying, and this is the main subject of interest to me in this entry. Which leads me to the key question that needs to be answered before I am done: Is such contempt for Yiddish (outside Birobidjan and JAR) completely or at least partially justified, and then, when finally this endangered species is officially pronounced extinct by its few remaining champions, will the rest of Judenthum breathe a sigh of relief and say, Good riddance!?
The basic facts about Yiddish are well known, or, better put, are readily available to anyone who wishes to obtain such information. Here is a summary of some references to Yiddish in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, interspersed with my own comments:
“Living in the Germanic Frankish lands of Western Europe among people who spoke Middle High German, the majority of Ashkenazic Jews adopted their language for colloquial use, but still relied on the language of their religious services, which was Hebrew, that had remained the language of worship and scholarship. As a result, an amalgam called Jüdisch-Deutsch developed, soon corrupted into Yiddish-Teitch, and then, reduced to the simple Yiddish. In the wake of the Crusaders’ massacres of the Jews, they now moved into Eastern Europe, where Yiddish acquired a strong Slavonic element, and now developed along independent lines, flowering into a rich literary language.” (In modern linguistic classification of world languages, this turns Yiddish into a product of artificial insemination, allowing it to occupy a unique place in the group of one, called Germanic-Slavonic Languages, but, conspicuously, giving no credit in this classification to its Hebrew connection.)
“The first books in Yiddish were written in the 12th and 13th centuries intended only for the women and the ignorant. In the wake of the catastrophes experienced by the Jews during the Thirty Years’ War, causing the massive migration to Poland, secular Yiddish literature disappeared completely, until its reemergence in the late 18th century.” (As a result of the Hasidic “revolution.”)
“The Haskala, Enlightenment, had a negative effect on Yiddish, most writers now working in Hebrew or in Russian, showing explicit contempt for the Hasidim and consequently satirizing the use of Yiddish. Its use was now mainly an expression of protest against the Haskala, but eventually even that wave of protest was bound to subside, leaving the future of Yiddish in serious jeopardy.” (I have already noted before how much that future was further threatened by the establishment of the State of Israel, giving no quarter to the "black sheep" of the Jewish linguistic family.)
This entry’s title question (How Yiddish Is Yiddish?) ought to be interpreted as a query, whether it is proper for the Jews to shun their shtetl past, or just to ignore the Yiddish connection as a sentimental, but obsolete fragment of their history, now that Hebrew is no longer a dead bookish language, but a living tongue well fit to represent the uniqueness of the Jewish national identity. The answer is in no way simple, but it may offer certain practical hints, which themselves are hard to ignore.
Even if the practical value of Yiddish is minimal, reduced to the ability to read certain Jewish writers of the past in the original, its antiquarian historical value is immense, not even in real terms, but as a question of attitude. It brings to mind that acutely “current” argument, raised in Karl Marx’s critique of Bruno Bauer’s works The Jewish Question (1842) and The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free (1843), to be discussed later in this section.
What is, after all, the ultimate objective of modern Judenthum? Is it to preserve its precious Jewish identity, as a unique flower in the lush garden of also unique and diverse national identities,--- or, in the pursuit of the Globalist dream, a perverted version of the Jewish nation-idea (which I find in the modern interpretation of the Lurianic concept of Tikkun Olam), to work toward the goal of neutering all expressions of a distinct national identity, such as religion, culture, and even historical memory, and in the process of this impossible pursuit, to abandon their own distinctiveness in religion, culture, and historical memory? Depending on the answer to this last question, the fate of Yiddish as well as the fates of many other aspects of Yiddishkeit will be determined…
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