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Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, LPL, UMR 7309; the Academy Of 10 Cyril Aslanov (Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, LPL, UMR 7309; The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem; Saint-Petersburg State University) Should Yiddish be Taught as an Independent Language? 1 Yiddishistics seems to be a very disputed field of studies and investigation, as shown by the multiplicity of disciplines that claim the right to integrate Yiddish in their curricula: Germanistics; Jewish Interlinguistics; Eastern European Studies; Jewish sociolinguistics and even Hebraistics. This article tries to evaluate the respective advantages of such affiliations on the base of strictly linguistic arguments. Since the grammatical base of Yiddish is mainly the continuation of German, or more precisely of medieval German dialects, the best choice would be probably the inclusion of Yiddishistics within the field of Germanistics. Another argument could corroborate this assumption, namely the historical and geographical continuity that used to unite Modern Eastern Yiddish with Western Yiddish, and more specially with Yidish-Taytsh, once a high language in the frame of Eastern European Jewish diglossia. Another affiliation that could also be legitimate on the base of strictly linguistic arguments is to view Yiddish as a complement to Hebrew in the era of Haskalah and later on, when the nativization of Hebrew exposed this language to a huge pression of the Yiddish substrate. As for the other options (inclusion in the study of all the Jewish languages considered as a whole; part of broader continua), they will be mentioned, but not recommended for scientific or pedagogical purposes. Keywords : Eastern Yiddish; Western Yiddish; Yidish-Taytsh; Middle High German; Jewish Interlinguistics; Slavic languages; Eastern European Jewry; American Jewry; Modern Hebrew. *** This paper stays in the continuation of an article where I reassessed the status of Yiddish by stressing that compared with German dialects rather than Standard German, Yiddish is far less idiosyncratic than it may appear from a normativist vantage point. 2 This approach that insists on 1 This research was conducted thanks to the funding of the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 15-18-00062), Saint Petersburg State University. 2 (Aslanov, 2014: 103–119). 11 the continuum uniting Yiddish to other German dialects should now be applied to the didactic of Yiddish. In other terms, is the teaching of Yiddish for its own sake without any reference to Germanistics a sound way to transmit the language to the generations to come? Is it legitimate to teach and research Yiddish in the frame of special programs where every possible Jewish language are gathered in spite of blatant differences between them? What is more important in Yiddish: The German foundation? The fact that this German foundation underwent a process of Slavization? The Hebrew component? Or its insertion within a multilingual sociolinguistic horizon? It could be thought that since the study of grammar is more essential than that of the lexicon for language acquisition, the focus on the German foundation of Yiddish and the appreciation of its connection with other German dialects of the present or of the past is certainly more efficient than overrating the importance of the Hebrew or the Slavic components that are after all the result of relexification, sometimes with some impact on the grammatical level, but not necessarily. However, shouldn’t we consider that advocating such an approach that tries to replace Yiddish in its German context is somehow a regression to a pre- Weinreichian stage of Yiddishistics? Or could it be promoved as a dialectic move that tries to moderate Weinreich’s conceptions whereby the pedagogical and scientifical views were sometimes subordinated to or influenced by the vision of a language renewer? Instead of opposing Yiddish to Standard German in the frame of a Sprachaufstand , whereby Yiddish may really appear as a quite independent entity, the approach that takes into account the diversity of German dialects may reveal whatever Yiddish owes to its German medieval background. In order to appreciate at its true value the merits of a Germanistic- oriented approach in researching and teaching Yiddish I would like to compare it with three other methods commonly used in Yiddishistics: the attempt to consider Yiddish as part of a broader field called Yiddish Interlinguistics; the focalization on Yiddish as a language of its own; the perception of Yiddish as part of a loose Eastern European Jewish cultural continuum, which goes far beyond the strictly linguistic dimension. On the base of some selected examples I will try to show what are the expected pedagogical results of each of the aforementioned research orientations. 12 1. Yiddishistics in the frame of Germanistics The approach that consists in putting Yiddishistics in the frame of Germanistics already characterizes Yiddish studies in Germany, where the sections of Yiddish Studies are often integrated within the Departments of Germanistics. This model has also been applied in some other institutions outside Germany, as for instance at Columbia University where the Department of Germanic Languages hosts the Yiddish Studies program since 1989, after the Department of Linguistics at Columbia that previously hosted the Yiddish Studies program was dismantled. However, there is more than a merely organizational reshuffling in this shift from the frame of general linguistics to that of Germanistics. It can be considered an implicit recognition of the fact that Yiddish studies are a satellite disciplin of German studies alongside with other Germanic languages (Dutch and Swedish in the case of Columbia). It is also symptomatic that the main project that emanates from the Yiddish Program at Columbia, Marvin Herzog’s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, was published by Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen with the help of a German editorial committee that gathers no less than three prominent German germanists: Ulrike Kiefer, Robert Neumann, and Wolfgang Putschke. 1 No less significant is the fact that YIVO was a partner in this publication. The Institute founded by Nochum Shtif and Max Weinreich was and still is a proponent of a Sprachaufstand attitude toward German. And yet it accepted to collaborate with a publishing house partly specialized in the publication of researches in the field of Germanistics. Apparently, there is a gap between the proclaimed YIVO attitude in terms of linguistic policy and its praxis as a research institute. Moreover, the fact that the founder of the Yiddish Studies Program is no other than Max Weinreich’s son Uriel is also symbolic of the gradual shift that contributed to integrate Yiddishistics into a Department of Linguistics, which was the first step toward the admission of this discipline in the lap of a department of Germanic studies. Admittedly, as mentioned above, the Yiddish Studies program was relocated within the Department of Germanic languages 22 years after Uriel Weinreich death. However, judging from the publications gathered in the collection The Fields of 1 (Herzog , 1992–2000). 13 Yiddish , where considerations about the Germanic base of Yiddish hold a significant place, it is easy to guess that Uriel Weinreich would have appreciated such a move. 1.1. Diachronic attitude: From Middle High German to Modern Eastern Yiddish through Old Yiddish and Yidish-Taytsh Considering Yiddish from a Germanistic perspective helps understand the dynamics of language evolution that allowed the crystallization of a specifically Jewish koiné on the base of several dialects of Middle High German (mainly East-Franconian 1 and perhaps also Bavarian-Austrian 2 and Thuringian). 3 It also allows to appreciate the paradoxical archaism of this language that in spite of its relative young age (the Late Middle Ages, i.e. the stage of Late Middle German or even Early New High German , and not around 1000 at the stage of Late High Old German, as Max Weinreich thought) owes to its relative isolation from the German-speaking lands to have preserved some features from medieval German. Let us mention for instance the word mume that continues directly the Middle High German kinship term muome/mume “aunt (the mother’s sister)” (cf. Modern German Muhme that is actually an obsolete word mainly used with a touch of irony) or the word feter , which does not mean “cousin” like Modern Standard German Vetter but “uncle” like Middle High German veter(e) /feter(e) , a word that can also refer to other relatives, like “nephew” or occasionally “cousin”. From the wide range of meanings expressed by Middle High German veter(e)/feter(e) Yiddish has retained only that of uncle while Modern German has continued only that of “cousin”. However, Yiddish expanded this signification of uncle inasmuch as it started to use veter(e)/feter(e) also in order to designate the mother’s brother, not only the father’s brother. Sometimes, the Middle High German etymology has been blurred by a phonetic superevolution specific to Yiddish like in bronf < bronfem < bronfen where one can recognize the Middle High German etymon brantewîn “brandy”. However, some other times, Yiddish is the trustful continuator of a Middle High German etymon, the morphological 1 (Beider, 2015: 206–230). 2 (King, 1987: 73–81; Eggers, 1998). 3 (Beider, 2015: 118, 163). 14 structure of which has been blurred in Modern Standard German. Such is the case of eynikl , which continues the Middle High German term eninkel better than the modern form Enkel does. Erika Timm’s researches in
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