Journal of Jewish Languages 4 (2016) 109–124

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Book Reviews ∵

Katz, Dovid Yiddish and Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x + 330 pp. ISBN 978-02-30-51760-8

A book title that conjoins the words “Yiddish” and “power” makes an audacious proposition. It defies longstanding stereotypical associations of the language— understood as the argot of a much-persecuted religious minority, eking out an imperiled existence in the Diaspora—with a lack of political power. This title also flouts once widely held (and, of course, completely erroneous) notions of Yiddish as lacking in artistic or even linguistic power, a language dismissed as incapable of serving as a vehicle for literary expression and lacking a proper grammar. For good reason, the philologist Leo Wiener (1899:12) observed of Yiddish at the turn of the twentieth century, “there is probably no other lan- guage in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped.” But, as the historian David Biale (1986) has argued, conventional formula- tions of Jewish power and powerlessness, tied to models of state sovereignty (or the lack thereof), are neither inevitable nor particularly helpful for under- standing Jewish experience. The Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz follows suit in this volume, which traces the history of Yiddish language, literature, and culture from its earliest manifestations to the present to make the case for understand- ing the role of Yiddish as an empowering force in the lives of Ashkenazic Jewry over the centuries. Katz recounts the history of Yiddish from its medieval beginnings to the present day to demonstrate how the language has repeatedly empowered its speakers. The power of Yiddish lay in its wide and frequent use as a vernacular by generations of Ashkenazi Jews universally: “the spoken language and usu- ally the sole thinking language” of everyone in Ashkenaz, from the most erudite scholar of rabbinic and kabbalistic texts (written in Hebrew or Aramaic, but understood through their translation into Yiddish), to children, all women, and the great number of men who were not part of the traditional Jewish learned elite (19). Katz discusses at length the transformative impact of print on the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/22134638-12340065 110 Book Reviews power of Yiddish, this new medium creating what we would now call a lit- erature of popular religion, which in turn engendered new reading and devo- tional practices. In particular, Katz focuses on the empowerment of Ashkenazi women in the early modern period through printed works in Yiddish either written especially for a female readership (guidebooks to observing the “wom- en’s commandments” of ritual candle lighting, taking khale from bread dough, and observing menstrual taboos; volumes of tkhines that address the particular concerns of a pious woman’s life) or in which women figure as the archetypal, if not exclusive, readers (as is the case with Tsenerene, a translation of Bible texts intercalated with commentaries, published in hundreds of editions over the past four centuries). The empowering potential of an internal Jewish vernacular proves to be quite elastic. On one hand, it enabled innovative Jewish engagements with external cultures, whether the late medieval tales of wandering knights that are the basis for some of the earliest works of Yiddish epic poetry or the radical political movements of the modern age, which were conjoined with the cultural specifics of East European Jewry in works of modern secular Yiddish culture. On the other hand, this same vernacular fostered the enrichment of Jewish religiosity, especially in Eastern Europe, exemplified by the uses of Yiddish by haredim, both hasidic and non-hasidic. Katz argues that the diverse array of Yiddish cultural achievements of the first decades of the twentieth century, taking place almost entirely without external support, constitutes “one of the most successful language-for-power movements in human history” (272). Nevertheless, the rubric of empowerment is not an easy fit throughout the entire history of Yiddish. A case in point is the language’s decline in Western Europe in the early modern period. Katz situates the Mendelssohnian deroga- tion of Yiddish not merely as a case of Jewish self-hatred, per Sander Gilman (1986), but also as a cautionary tale of maskilim abandoning the power of a Jewish vernacular for the false promise of linguistic and social integration. Katz characterizes Soviet Yiddish culture—which enjoyed a singular, brief, and ulti- mately fatal state sponsorship during the USSR’s first decades—as creating an “artificial” kind of Yiddish, and he pronounces this conjoining of language and power “overwhelmingly disastrous,” with negative consequences that linger to the present day (265, 267). Perhaps the greatest challenge to this rubric arises in the final chapter of Yiddish and Power, which deals with the state of Yiddish in the post-Holocaust era. It is especially daunting not only because the chapter offers an open- ended history of the past seventy years, but also because of the extensive trans- formation of Yiddish language and culture in the post-World War II decades. First and foremost, the East European heartland of Yiddish—which occupies­

Journal of Jewish Languages 4 (2016) 109–124