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VI. Yiddish Studies Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan, and Gennady Estraikh, New York University

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VI. Yiddish Studies Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan, and Gennady Estraikh, New York University VI. Yiddish Studies Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan, and Gennady Estraikh, New York University 1. Language and Linguistics History and classification of Yiddish. The origin of the Yiddish language, and correspondingly of the Ashkenazic Jewry, continues to be a contentious issue among scholars. Weinreich’s model of the historical development of the language has been questioned by a number of linguists and specialists in other fields. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2 vols, New Haven, Yale U.P., 2008, 1752 pp. (the first full English translation of the 1973 Yiddish text) describes an unbroken chain of migration and language shift (from Middle East to Roman-speaking areas of Europe, then to the Rhineland, and finally to Slavic-speaking territories), though recent publications suggest different models. Paul Wexler, of Tel Aviv University, has been playing the leading role among the ‘revisionists’, especially following his article ‘Yiddish — the Fifteenth Slavic Language: A Study of the Partial Language Shift from Judeo-Sorbian to German’, IJSL 91, 1991:1–50. According to Wexler, Yiddish has to be treated as an essentially a Slavic language, which put on a Germanic garb as a result of later ‘relexification’. Two decades later, Wexler rejects another important element of Weinreich’s theory, an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to Hebrew. P. Wexler, ‘The Myths and Misconceptions of Jewish Linguistics’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 101.2:276–91, claims that most Jewish languages were created independently of pre-existing Jewish languages. As in his previous publications, he advocates the view that the contemporary Jews predominantly descend from ethnic groups that once converted to Judaism. Id., ‘A Covert Irano-Turko-Slavic Population and Its Two Covert Slavic Languages: The Jewish Ashkenazim (Scythians), Yiddish and “Hebrew”’, Zbornik matice srpske za slavistiku, 80:7–46, argues that Ashkenazic Jews are largely descendants of people of Iranian ethnic origin, who settled in the German-Sorbian lands. There they acquired the Sorbian language, which later was replaced, or ‘relexified’, by German vocabulary, producing a language, Yiddish, that ‘superficially resembles German’. Conversion of varied ethnic groups, including perhaps some number of Khazars (Khazaria hypotheses persists in the literature on Ashkenazic roots), also plays a central role in Jits van Straten, The Origin of Ashkenazi Jewry: The Controversy Unraveled, New York, de Gruyter, xii + 234 pp. Straten’s research encompasses history, historical demography, historical genetics and historical linguistics. His model, which combines elements of virtually all existing hypotheses concerning the origin of Ashkenazi Jews, is based on the premise that, during the Middle Ages, there was no mass migration of German Jews to Poland. Instead, Jews came to the area directly from the Middle East or via the Byzantine Empire, and settled first between the Caspian Sea and today’s Moldova, and later migrated to other parts of eastern and central Europe. Some of them were ‘genuine’ Jews, while others were proselytes, either local or from outside the region. As for Yiddish, it initially expanded into the Bavarian-speaking region and from there was gradually disseminated by teachers and rabbis among the predominantly Slavic-speaking eastern European Jews. Joshua A. Fishman, a disciple of Max Weinreich’s school of Yiddish scholarship, sums up the centuries-long relations between Yiddish and German in his chapter ‘The Failure of “German Language Advocacy” among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews prior to and 416 Yiddish Studies since the Holocaust: The Major Travails and the Minor Triumphs of an Unprotected Language’, pp. 349–63 of Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, vol. 2: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, ed. Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, OUP, xvii + 492 pp. According to him, neither autonomy-motivated distancing from German nor depend- ency-motivated approximation to German, once two major factors in shaping standard Yiddish, play any more significant roles in determining the future of Yiddish. Its fate will depend on the linguistic resilience of Yiddish-speaking Ultra-Orthodox Jews under the pressure of such languages as English and Hebrew. The Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO), established in 1925 and directed by Weinreich, was conceived as one of the central institutions aimed at transforming of the traditional eastern European Jewish population into a modern Yiddish-speaking nation. K. Kijek, ‘Max Weinreich, Assimilation and the Social Politics of Jewish Nation Building’, East European Jewish Affairs, 41.1–2:25–55, analyses the Research Project on Jewish Youth, conducted by YIVO in the 1930s. According to Kijek, it was more than an attempt of an academic institution to establish links with grassroots reality by collecting 600 autobiographies written by young Jews. Rather, it was a scientific social intervention programme, which meant to engage young people in the institute’s nation-building endeavours. A two-volume collection of works by the Jewish linguist Solomon Birnbaum (1891–1989), a pioneer in Yiddish historical linguistics and in the paleography of Jewish languages, was published as A Lifetime of Achievement: Linguistics, ed. Erika Timm, Berlin–Boston, de Gruyter, xlviii + 540 pp., and A Lifetime of Achievement: Palaeography, ed. Erika Timm, Eleazar Birnbaum and David Birnbaum, Berlin–Boston, de Gruyter, xxv + 458 pp. The volumes contain 62 pieces of research conducted during six decades of Birnbaum’s academic life in Germany, England and Canada. Morphology. Two articles authored or co-authored by Ekaterina Melnik (Kemerovo University) analyse the prefix unter-: E. Melnik, ‘Глаголы с префиксом unter-, описываюшие ситуацию приближения, в языке идиш’, Vestnik Kemerovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 4:196–99, and E. Melnik and K. Shishigin, ‘Семантико-когнитивные характеристики глаголов с префиксом unter- в языке идиш’, Gumanitarnyi vektor, 4:102–06. Shishigin, M.’s academic adviser, also studies the system of Yiddish verbal prefixes, whose forms and semantics developed under the influence of Germanic and Slavic languages: K. Shishigin, ‘Когнитивно- семантический подход к описанию и классификации префиксальных глаголов языка идиш’, Znak — svidomist’ — znannia, 2:100–06; Id., ‘Ситуация и концепт ситуации (на примере префиксальных глаголов языка идиш)’, Filologicheskii sbornik, 11:623–27. Sociolinguistics. Tsvi Sadan, ‘Yiddish on the Internet’, LComm, 31:99–106, examines the sociolinguistic situation of Yiddish on the Internet in comparison with other languages. The author argues that Yiddish as a diaspora language can benefit from the internet for building speech communities, but this potential has not been sufficiently used yet and the virtual community in Yiddish remains small. Yiddish is mainly used on the Internet in communications about Yiddish rather than in Yiddish. However, Sadan hardly mentions the numerous Internet forums, whose contributors use predominantly or exclusively Yiddish. It can be helpful to read this study against the backdrop of a general analysis of Internet usage by Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who form the main Yiddish-speaking population. R. J. Adler Peckerar, ‘Yiddish as a Vernacular Language: Teaching a Language in Obsolescence’, Language Learning Journal, 39.2:237–46, suggests that teachers of Yiddish have to use Internet-based learning resources in order to overcome the problem of not having full access to a language environment, because Ultra-Orthodox communities show reluctance to interact with contemporary students..
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