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The Semitic Component in and its Ideological Role in Yiddish

Tal Hever-Chybowski Paris Yiddish Center—Medem Library thchybowski@.com

Abstract

The discusses the ideological role played by the Semitic component in Yiddish in four major texts of Yiddish philology from the first half of the 20th century: Ysroel Haim Taviov’ “The Elements of the Jargon” (1904); ’s “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology” (1913); Nokhem Shtif’s “The Social Differentiation of Yiddish: Hebrew Elements in the ” (1929); and ’s “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew?” (1931). The article explores the ways in which these texts attribute various religious, national, psychological and class values to the Semitic com- ponent in Yiddish, while debating its ontological status and making prescriptive sug- gestions regarding its . It argues that all four philologists set the Semitic component of Yiddish in service of their own ideological visions of Jewish linguistic, national and ethnic identity (Yiddishism, , Soviet , etc.), thus blur- ring the boundaries between descriptive and ideologically engaged philology.

Keywords

Yiddish – loshn-koydesh – semitic philology – Hebraism – Yiddishism – dehebraization

Yiddish, although written in the Hebrew , is predominantly Germanic in its linguistic structure and .* It also possesses substantial Slavic

* The comments of Yitskhok Niborski, Natalia Krynicka and of the anonymous reviewer have greatly improved this article, and I am deeply indebted to them for their help.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/24519197-12Downloaded340031 from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access The Semitic Component In Yiddish 369 and Semitic elements, and shows some traces of the Romance . Its Semitic elements derive from Hebrew and , both of which are referred -loshn-koydesh,1 literally “the lan) לשון־קודש to in Yiddish collectively either as guage of the Holy [=],” that is, the language of the , and hebreish), “Hebrew.” Accordingly, expressions) העברעיִש ) or simply as such as “the Semitic component” of Yiddish or its “Hebrew-Aramaic compo- nent,” “Hebrew elements,” “,” “loshn-koydesh ” etc. appear both in Yiddish and non-Yiddish more or less synonymously.2 The Semitic roots, words, expressions, and even whole sentences within Yiddish, pose an ontological problem for linguists. Namely, there is an unre- solved ambiguity as to whether these only derive from loshn-koydesh (and are subsequently no longer loshn-koydesh, but rather Yiddish), or whether they remain loshn-koydesh. This is complicated further when considers that certain loshn-koydesh elements may have been “merged” (i.., phonologically adapted) into Yiddish more than others.3 In the 19th century, and then more so in the first half of the 20th century, language played a central role in Ashkenazi discourses on Jewish national identity and ideology. As Yiddish and Hebrew came to represent conflicting Jewish movements of secular , the problem of the Semitic com- ponent in Yiddish began to occupy Jewish linguists and non-linguists alike. Jewish philologists of Yiddish who dealt with this problem at the were greatly influenced by ideologies such as , Diasporism, Socialism and

1  of Yiddish and Hebrew in Yiddish contexts follows YIVO standards. Transliteration of Hebrew in non-Yiddish contexts follows the transliteration scheme of the . 2 Following Max Weinreich, Yiddish linguistics uses the term “component” to express a distinc- tion between “stock languages” (i.e. Hebrew, German, etc.) and their corresponding etymo- logical components which have been “fused” into Yiddish. See Max Weinreich, of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble, vol. 1 (New Haven: Press, 2008), 29. For the usage of the term “Semitic component” see , Explorations in the History of the Semitic Component in Yiddish, vol. 1, PhD Thesis (London: University College, 1982), 31. 3 The categories “Merged Hebrew” and “Whole Hebrew” in Yiddish were introduced by Max Weinreich to distinguish the Semitic elements that were integrated into Yiddish speech (Merged Hebrew) from proper that may appear within a Yiddish context as a citation or in official speech (Whole Hebrew). The difference can be observed above all phonetically: the of non-accented are often reduced in Merged Hebrew, -blessing”] is pro“] ברכה whereas Whole Hebrew maintains them (for example, the nounced /’broxe/ in Merged Hebrew, but /’broxo/ in Whole Hebrew). Weinreich is well aware that the border between “Merged Hebrew” and “Whole Hebrew” is not always clear: Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, vol. 2, 351ff.

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Soviet Communism,4 which were not always mutually exclusive. Whether they criticized or defended Yiddish, they all saw it as a crucial instrument for any Jewish national project, as it was spoken by millions of , more than any other language at the time. In this article, key works by four prominent Yiddish philologists who wrote on the Semitic component in Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century will be surveyed, analyzed and compared: Ysroel Haim Taviov’s “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon” (1904); Ber Borochov’s “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology” (1913); Nokhem Shtif’s “The Social Differentiation of Yiddish: Hebrew Elements in the Language” (1929); and Max Weinreich’s “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew?” (1931). It will be argued that these philologists in their lin- guistic theories set the Semitic component in Yiddish into the service of their often contrasting ideological visions of Jewish linguistic, national and ethnic identity.

The Ontology and Epistemology of the Semitic Component in Yiddish, Illustrated through a Yiddish Joke

Before dealing with the philological works themselves, the complex problem of the Semitic component in Yiddish calls for another introduction. As we shall observe, the ontological status of the Semitic component in Yiddish was often measured by the epistemological criterion of how much of it (or how much loshn-koydesh) was actually known to the Yiddish speaking masses. The onto- logical problem of the Semitic component in its epistemological configuration A balegole) ”אַ בעל־עגלה אַ למדן“ ,can best be illustrated with the Yiddish joke a lamdn, “a Coachman-Scholar”). The joke, which has been cited as paradig- matic of oral Yiddish humor,5 was preserved by the Jewish folklorist Olsvanger, who published it in transliteration in his 1920 collection of Yiddish jokes and anecdotes Rosinkess mit Mandlen (“Raisins with ”).

4 Moshe Altbauer, “Metanalysis of Hebrew Borrowings in Yiddish” [in Yiddish], Di goldene keyt 29 (1957): 224; Avraham Ya‘ari, “A Story to Prove the Abundance of Hebrew Elements in the Yiddish Language” [in Hebrew], Ḳiryat sefer: Bibliographical Quarterly of the Jewish National and University Library 40 (1964): 286. 5 See below, and cf. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wex , “Humor: Oral Tradition,” YIVO of Jews in Eastern , 2010, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article .aspx/Humor/Oral_Tradition.

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In the following of the joke,6 all words in bold type are of Semitic origin:

[galekh ,גלח] gzeyre] was declared in : a ,גזירה] An decree ,לשון־קודש] vikuekh] in Hebrew ,װיּכוח] wanted to hold a disputation loshn-koydesh] with the Jews. As the priest said that understood porets] ordered that a ,ּפריץ] Hebrew better than any , the nobleman disputation be held: the town’s Jews were to appoint one of them to test the priest [for the of a word or a phrase in Hebrew], and the priest would then test the Jew. As for the one who did not know the mean- ing of the first word, there would be a soldier standing by who would chop [tomer ,טאָ מער] his head off before he might be able to cough. And in case the Jews had no one to appoint, then all of the them would be massacred, mistome] there was a ,מסּתמא] as many as there are in town. No doubt !mehume] and a commotion in town. Good ! Jews ,מהומה] turmoil What should we do? The devil knows this priest [and what he is capable -tomer] he really has a good head on his shoul ,טאָ מער] of]! And what if kashe] that the ,קשיא] ders? And what should we do if he poses a ,רחמנות] tsores]! Mercy ,צרות] Jew cannot answer? This is truly a calamity asife] in ,אַ סיֿפה] rakhmones] on the Jews! They convened an assembly the [to decide] whom they should send [to represent them in the disputation]. But no one wanted to step forward. Then some coach- amorets], an ignoramus ,עם־הארץ] balegole], a simpleton ,בעל־עגלה] man bur] stood up and said: “What do you care? I will . I was never ,בור] galokhim].” “What do ,גלחים] moyre gehat] of ,מורא געהאַ ט] afraid you mean, ‘you will go’? But you are a simpleton, an ignoramus!” But the coachman insisted that he should go. In short, they announced to the misvakeyekh ,מתװּכח זײַ ן] nobleman that Itzke the coachman will dispute zayn] with the priest. The next , all gathered in the nobleman’s [pritsim ,ּפריצים] a sakh] people: priests, noblemen , אַ ס ך] house. Many yontef ]! Here stands the priest, here the ,יום־טוֿב] and the Jews. A festival coachman, and here stands the soldier with the sword raised high in his hand. The Jew had to begin the disputation. He said to the priest: “So ,eyneni yoydeye] אינני יודע me, dear priest, what is the meaning of “I do not know”]? The priest said: “I don’t know.” As the soldier heard ,ׂשימחה] I don’t know,” he immediately chopped off the priest’s head. Joy“ !sosn]! The Jews were saved! The clever Itzke ,ׂשׂשון] simkhe]! Jubilation They assembled in the synagogue, they recited the blessing for

6 Unless indicated otherwise, all are mine.

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:goyml]. Afterwards they asked the coachman ,גומל] rescued from danger “How did you ask it so well? Who told you to ask this question, being the ignoramus that you are?” The coachman answered: “Look, it is a sim- :rebe] and I asked him once ,רבי] poshet] matter. I had a ,ּפשוט] ple eyneni yoydeye, “I do not know”]? And] אינני יודע What is the meaning of‘ he answered: “I do not know”—now if the rabbi himself did not know, how on earth would the priest know?”7

The joke captures the unclear and often ambiguous borderline between Yiddish and loshn-koydesh. The simple coachman, a symbol for ignorance in , does not know the meaning of the Hebrew expression eyneni yoydeye. However, he has heard it before and is able to pronounce it cor- rectly. Although he may not know its exact meaning, he knows enough about it to use it to overcome the priest in the disputation. What saves him is a right mixture between ignorance and knowledge. To fully appreciate the ambiguous ontological status of eyneni yoydeye in Yiddish (although still through an epistemological prism), we should consider not only the joke itself, but also the act of its telling. In the German introduc- tion added to the second edition of Rosinkess mit Mandlen, Olsvanger refers to this joke as a paradigmatic implementation of the “pseudo-punchline” (Pseudopointe), which he considers to be characteristic of . After the decapitation of the priest, the listener, who, from the beginning, had sym- pathized with the coachman and identified with his side, laughs in relief as he learns that the Jews managed to cleverly escape the deadly ordeal. The “real punchline,” however, comes shortly afterwards and produces a much stronger comic effect:

For although the listener laughed at the pseudo-punchline, he neverthe- less secretly felt inferior to the coachman: is this coachman cleverer than he, who would never have come up with such an idea? Now it turns out that it was not at all the coachman’s cleverness, but his ignorance that brought him to ask this question. The listener can breathe a sigh of relief: I am still the smarter one!”8

7 Immanuel Olsvanger, Rosinkess mit Mandlen. Aus der Volksliteratur der Ostjuden. Schwänke, Erzählungen, Sprichwörter und Rätsel, 2. völlig veränderte und vermehrte Auflage (: Verlag der Schweizerischer Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 1931), 121f. (Joke no. 207: “A balegole a lamdn”). 8 Ibid., xliii-xliv.

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Part of the joke’s sophisticated humor is in the parallel that it produces be- tween the simple coachman within the joke and the potentially simple listen- ers of the joke. Applying the epistemological criterion to the listener of the joke can somehow nuance Olsvanger’s analysis. To fully enjoy the first punchline (the “pseudo-punchline”), the Yiddish listener must know the meaning of eyneni yoydeye. If it would have to be explained to them at this point, they may feel all the more inferior to the simple coachman. In that case, the joke’s humor would be shifted to the end, for only then would the listener be able to enjoy their recently gained advantage over the coachman and laugh at his ignorance, which they no longer share. On the other hand, if the coachman and the listener are to be compared— and I think that this is an essential part of the joke—, then the ambiguity regarding knowing what eyneni yoydeye means should also be applied to the listener: the listener may not fully understand this expression, they may not know how to read or write it, but they may very well have heard it before, or at least parts of it.9 They may have even already heard the joke. According to a Yiddish proverb, “one who knows that he does not know is half a knower” .(a yedeye-sheyne-yedeye iz a halber yedeye ,אַ יודע־שאינו־יודע איז אַ האַ לבער יודע) To that we can add that one who does not know that he knows is half a knower as well. Olsvanger certainly did not consider this joke to be particularly elitist or to require any special knowledge of Hebrew. Immediately after analyzing it, he claims that such jokes and anecdotes were the “oral literature of the people” (mündliche Volksliteratur): “Besides popular translations of [into Yiddish],” this oral literature served for generations as “the only intellectual entertainment of the people to the extent that they did not know Hebrew.”10 This

(yedeye in its “merged” ; see note 3 below and note 11 above) יודע The word 9 yedeye zayn, “to know”), in) יודע זײַ ן exists in Yiddish as a in the periphrastic verb -yedeye-kheyn, “kab) יודע־חן ,(”yedeye-hakl, “know-it-all) יודע־הּכל the ,(”yedeye-seyfer, “learned man) יודע־סֿפר ,(”yedeye-nagn, “musical expert) יודע־נגן ,(”balist ,(”yedeye-sheyne-yedeye, “a person who knows that he doesn’t know) יודע־שאינו־יודע sheyne-yedeye-lishoyl, “he who does not know how to ask”; the fourth) שאינו־יודע־לשאול mi-yedeye, “who knows?”) and) מי־יודע of the ) and in the expressions lev yedeye, “the heart knows”): Yitskhok Niborski, Dictionnaire des mots ’origine) לֿב יודע hébraïque et araméenne en usage dans la langue yiddish [in Yiddish], Troisième édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Bibliothèque Medem, 2012), 189f., 273. 10 Olsvanger, Rosinkess mit Mandlen, xliv (my emphasis): “Abgesehen den populären Bibelübersetzungen (Tajtsch chumesch), die mit Parabeln und Gleichnissen durchsetzt sind, bildete diese mündliche Volksliteratur bis zur letzten Zeit die einzige geistige Unterhaltung des Volkes, inwiefern des Hebräischen unkundig war.”

philological encounters 2 (2017) 368-387 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access 374 hever-chybowski last statement particularly highlights the ambiguous ontological and episte- mological status of loshn-koydesh in Yiddish. While the narrative of the joke presents eyneni yoydeye as a loshn-koydesh expression that is unknown to Yiddish speakers who are not versed in Hebrew,11 its appearance in the context of a popular Yiddish joke suggests that it was nevertheless part, at least to a certain extent, of the Semitic component that was inherent in the Yiddish of common people. Indeed, it may be worth citing Olsvanger’s short note on the Semitic component in Yiddish:

With regard to the Hebrew elements [in Yiddish], one could say that every Hebrew word can be used in Yiddish. Even neologisms of the mod- ern find their way into the language. One could right- fully say that the Hebrew as a whole forms a latent vocabulary of Yiddish.12

We shall bear in mind these ontological and epistemological ambiguities in regard to the Semitic component in Yiddish when discussing the work of four central Yiddish philologists who worked on the topic in the first half of the 20th Century: Ysroel Haim Taviov, Ber Borochov, Nokhem Shtif and Max Weinreich.

A “Marriage Between and ”: Ysroel Haim Taviov and the Hebraist Philology of Yiddish

Ysroel Haim Taviov (1858-1921), a Hebrew philologist, journalist, translator and educator, contributed to the major Hebrew periodicals in of his time. Already in his lifetime, Taviov’s came to be associated with relentless and extreme disdain towards his own , Yiddish. An ardent Hebraist, that is, a proponent of the dissemination of Hebrew as a spoken among Jews, Taviov explicitly and repeatedly re- jected the name “Yiddish,” its literal meaning being “Jewish,” writing on one occasion that “there is only one Jewish language—our national Language,

11 Olsvanger’s transcription, “ejneni jêjdeja,” suggests that it is pronounced à la Whole Hebrew (see note 3 below). This, of course, is necessitated by the context (i.e. an offi- cial disputation with the priest). The marked as “êj” is the Northeastern (Lithuanian) Yiddish/Ashkenazi realization of the khoylem vov in Hebrew; in Merged Hebrew (i.e. the Semitic component), this would be reduced to “yedeye.” 12 Olsvanger, Rosinkess mit Mandlen, liv.

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Hebrew.”13 Following the tradition of Mendelssohn and of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (haskole), he referred to Yiddish with the pejora- tive term “Jargon.”14 In 1901 he wrote: “I have always been a complete hater of the Jargonic language and its literature […] never did I dirty my pen with the Jargonic language.”15 Taviov’s of Yiddish did not stop him from being one of the first Jewish philologists of that language. In 1904 he published, in the quarterly literary supplement of the Zionist Ha-Zeman (), a Hebrew article entitled “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” which was the thorough philological examination of the Semitic component in Yiddish to date.16 At the outset of the article, Taviov tells the history of Yiddish as a series of linguistic corruptions. The first Jews to settle in spoke German, but following their segregation into , their language “gradually became damaged and ugly.”17 At that point, however, this language still did not deserve the name “jargon,” for it was nevertheless “a German in the of the .” For Taviov, this German dialect was transformed into a “jar- gon” only after it was adopted by Slavic Jews, who were unable to nurture and develop it “according to the way and of the German language.” Instead, “they spoiled and deformed it without mercy.”18 Subsequently, he writes, Polish Jews, and especially Polish Jewish (melamdim) who re-immigrated to Germany, contaminated the Jewish dialect spoken there with their “corrupted Jargon,” thus spreading it throughout . While Taviov decries the crossing of the geographic, racial and linguis- tic boundaries of “Germanic” and “Slavic,” his approach towards the Semitic component in Yiddish is surprisingly positive. He attributes to the Slavic Jews not only the worst “deformations” of German, but also the introduction of the

13 Yisroel Haim Taviov, “To ” [in Hebrew], in The Jewish-German Language and Its Literature, by ‘azar Schulman (Riga, 1913), iv. 14 Ibid. “Jargon” stands here for “a hybrid speech arising from a mixture of languages” (Oxford English ). 15 Yisroel Haim Taviov, “On the History of ‘Folk Songs’ (Memoirs)” [in Hebrew], Ha-Melits, June 26, 1901, 2. 16 . . Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon” [in Hebrew], in The Writings of Y. H. Taviov ( and : -Devir, 1923), 214-278. First published in Ha-Zeman 3 (1904): 126-144. 17 Ibid., 215. 18 Ibid.

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Hebrew elements into Yiddish.19 But unlike German, Taviov claims, Hebrew was not corrupted by the Jargon.20 He writes:

As much as German suffered when it fell into the hands of the Jews dwell- ing outside of the German , so has Hebrew profited from it. As much as German spoken by Jews became increasingly ‘jargonized,’ its Hebrew component has strengthened and multiplied. The Jargon was a sort of marriage between “Shem and Japheth”: the marriage did not turn out well for “Japheth,” but it did for “Shem,” who saw a good life in this marriage.”21

In Taviov’s biblical-linguistic allegory, where Japheth stands for the Germanic and Shem for the Semitic components of Yiddish, the characterization of the Semitic or Hebrew component as having “seen a good life” forms part of his argument regarding the revival of Hebrew through Yiddish:

In a certain way, Hebrew became a living and spoken language through the Jargon. […]. While of the German language have a right to re- and feel bitterly about the rise of the Hebrew element in the Jargon, the national should only celebrate this. Since the Hebrew ele- ments in the Jargon have increased, the ceased to be dead. Since millions of people speak a language that is mixed with - sands of Hebrew words and idioms, here is Hebrew a language capable of speech! […] Hebrew words became a substantial and necessary element in the Jargon, and the life of these Hebrew words in the Jargon was a natu- ral life, a life of natural evolution.22

Taviov’s linguistic narrative is a striking departure from Hebraist-Zionist narratives of Hebrew as a dead language that was only revived in modern .23 However, the descriptive historical reconstruction soon gives way to a Hebraist ideological prescription:

19 Ibid., 216. For an excellent overview of the various theories regarding the origin of the Semitic component in Yiddish, see Dovid Katz, Explorations in the History of the Semitic Component in Yiddish, 32-39. 20 Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 227. For a criticism of this claim, see text accompanying note 39 below and cf. note 40. 21 Ibid., 216 (my emphasis). 22 Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 216. 23 See Ya‘ar Hever, “: The Uncanny Story of the Life and of an Undead Language.” Paper presented at the conference Semitic Philology within European

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The outcome of this is that the Jargon is a vessel that holds a blessing and an exceedingly easy and convenient instrument for the revival of Hebrew in the mouths of the masses of our people. […] We should strive to grant the Jargon, both in writing and in speech, an increasingly Hebrew form, until we gradually deliver the masses of our people from the Jargonic lan- guage to Hebrew.”24

Taviov does not fail to notice the of relying on Yiddish for its replace- ment with Hebrew: “in order to eradicate the Jargon from the mouths of our people and to in their mouths our national language, there is no better stratagem than the Jargon itself.”25 Indeed, the tactic of using Yiddish against the language itself traces its origins back to the practices of the haskole, where its followers, the maskilim, had fought and condemned Yiddish, while at the same time often made use of it to spread their ideas among the masses.26 For Taviov, who blames the Russian maskilim for having failed to revive Hebrew speech,27 this was not enough. Yiddish should be exploited, he suggests, not merely as a means of communication between the maskil and the masses, but its etymological components must be disassembled in order to isolate from it the Semitic component and augment it not only in writing, but also in ev- eryday speech, for “a language can only live a natural life if it is spoken by the whole nation, by the masses.”28 The attempt to revive Hebrew by increasing the Semitic component in Yiddish rests, of course, on the ontological assumption that there is no dif- ference between the Hebrew elements in Yiddish and Hebrew itself. Just as crucial for Taviov’s case is the assumption that the Hebrew elements in Yiddish are “an asset of the entire people, including the common men and women.”29 To substantiate his theses empirically, Taviov composed a list of Hebraisms in Yiddish to be published as an appendix to his article in a following issue of Ha-Zeman’s literary supplement. Due to the discontinuation of this quarterly,

Intellectual History: Constructions of Race, Religion and Language in Scholarly Practice. Berlin, June 19, 2013. 24 Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 216. 25 Ibid., 217. 26 Shmuel Werses, “ Hand Pushes Aside While the One Closer: On the Attitudes of Haskole Writers Towards the Yiddish Language” [in Hebrew], Ḥulyot 5 (1999): 15-22. 27 Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 226. 28 Ibid., 217. 29 Ibid., 216.

philological encounters 2 (2017) 368-387 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access 378 hever-chybowski the list was only published posthumously in 1923.30 In this list of 1800 words, Taviov claims to have included “only those words and expressions which are common in the speech of the majority of the people” while leaving out “those words and expressions which are spoken only by the learned, whose artistry is study, and which were not so much vernacularized in the spoken language.”31 Taviov’s insistence that the Semitic component in Yiddish was known to the masses was not an argument in favor of its importance for Yiddish. According to Taviov, neither the Semitic nor the Slavic components of Yiddish were ever organic parts of Yiddish, which was never a true language, but rather a cor- rupted “jargon.”

“The Tasks of the Yiddish Philology”: Ber Borochov’s Rehabilitation of Yiddish as an Organic Language

A much different perspective on the Semitic component in Yiddish and on Yiddish in is provided by Ber Borochov (1881-1917). Outside of Yiddishist circles, Borochov is mostly known for his active role as a theoretician and activ- ist of . His political theory, a synthesis of Socialism and Zionism, greatly influenced the leadership of the Zionist movement and the socio- economic policies during the first decades of Jewish statehood in . However, during the last decade of his short life, Borochov undertook intensive research on Yiddish philology, bibliography and literary history. Despite the common association of Zionism with Hebraism, Borochov saw in Yiddish a language most compatible with Jewish nationalism and with Zionism. Borochov’s “The Tasks of the Yiddish Philology” was the opening article in Der pinkes (“the Record Book”), a groundbreaking Yiddish scholarly volume published in 1913 in Vilnius.32 Borochov begins his article with the following definition of philology:

30 Ibid., 230-278; cf. Ya‘ari, “A Story to Prove the Abundance of Hebrew Elements,” 286. 31 Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 230. 32 Ber Borochov, “The Tasks of the Yiddish Philology” [in Yiddish], in Der pinkes [the Record Book]: Yearbook for the History of the Yiddish Literature and Language, for Folklore, Criticism and Bibliography, ed. (Vilnius: B. A. Kletskin, 1913), 1-22.

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Of all sciences, philology plays the biggest role in the national revival of oppressed peoples. Philology is more than linguistics, it is not just a hol- low theory for scholars […], but a practical guide for the people.33

Borochov stresses the distinction, as he sees it, between philology and lin- guistics: “linguistics is a general science, philology—a national one.” While linguistics may deal with “dead” or “wild” languages, philology postulates that the language to which it is devoted has not only a cultural-historical value in its past, but also a national value in its future.34 Borochov refers to scholars such as Taviov when he claims that “a person who does not believe in the exis- tence of Yiddish may still be a Yiddish linguist, but not a Yiddish philologist.”35 The “belief in the existence of Yiddish” should be understood in this context both as the belief in the ontological existence of Yiddish as a full-fledged lan- guage (and not as “jargon”), and as the belief in the rightful importance of its existence. According to Borochov, one of the challenges of Yiddish philology lies in the fact that it is a “mixed language.” This is of course not to say that Yiddish is shprakh-gemish) or “mishmash.”36 ,שּפראַ ך־געמיש) ”a “jargon”, a “lingual mixture Yiddish may be mixed of several etymological components, but it is neverthe- less a language in its own right. In fact, there are no “pure” languages, Borochov claims, reminding the reader that even Hebrew contains Aramaic, Greek and Persian elements.37 Furthermore, Borochov maintains that the relation be- tween the various etymological components in Yiddish is an organic one. The different components complement each other “just as the functions of a living organism.”38 In contrast to Taviov, Borochov shows that the Semitic component in Yiddish consists not only of Hebrew and Aramaic words and expressions, but is also present in Yiddish and . Unlike Taviov, who claimed that Yiddish did not “mutilate” its “Hebrew words,” Borochov demonstrates that the Hebrew words in Yiddish differ both in pronunciation and in meaning from their in Ashkenazi Hebrew.39 In that respect, Borochov also points to the large vocabulary of words whose is of mixed origin, such

33 Ibid., 1. 34 Ibid., 2n1. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 8. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 10 (my emphasis). 39 Borochov, “The Tasks of the Yiddish Philology,” 9.

philological encounters 2 (2017) 368-387 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access 380 hever-chybowski as the Germanic conjugation of with the frequent addition of a Germanic converb, Slavic on top of Hebrew nouns, etc.40 The quintessential argument in Borochov’s understanding of Yiddish is that “as soon as the German, Hebrew and Slavic elements enter the folkshprakh (“the , popular language”), they stop being German, Hebrew or Slavic [and] become Yiddish.”41 Moreover, Borochov was the first to have rec- ognized that the efforts of Taviov and others to isolate any one of the etymolog- ical components of Yiddish serves precisely to dispute its ontological integrity. Borochov’s claim that the various etymological components of Yiddish have merged into one organic linguistic entity will greatly influence future Yiddish philologists.

“The Hebrew Occupation of Yiddish”: Nokhem Shtif and the Soviet Rejection of the Semitic Component in Yiddish

A completely different scholarly and ideological approach regarding the Semitic component in Yiddish philology emerged in the ,42 where, since the early 1920s, the Jewish section of the Communist Party (the Evsektsiia) combatted traditional Jewish life, Zionism and Hebrew, all of which were deemed “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary” aspects of . While, for the time being, Yiddish was supported and even financed by the Soviet state, a campaign of “dehebraization” was pursued in order to decrease its Semitic component.43 This policy was already underway soon after the 1917 Revolution with a reform of Yiddish , in which the traditional of words deriving from Hebrew or Aramaic was abolished in favor of a phonetic spelling,44 thus obscuring their etymological origin. “Dehebraization” took a step further in the late 1920s when Yiddish philologist Nokhem Shtif

40 Taviov noticed these constructions as well, and while he advised to abandon them, their existence did not alter his judgment of the Semitic component in Yiddish as being “pure Hebrew” (Taviov, “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon,” 229). 41 Borochov, “The Tasks of the Yiddish Philology,” 9. 42 See Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 43 Rakhmiel Peltz, “The Dehebraization Controversy in Soviet Yiddish Language Planning: Standard or Symbol?,” in Readings in the Sociology of , ed. A. Fishman (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 128. 44 Avraham Greenbaum, “Yiddish Language Politics in the (1930-1936),” in The Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature and Society, ed. Dov-Ber Kerler (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), 24. Note that Soviet Yiddish also adopted a phonetic

philological encountersDownloaded from 2 Brill.com09/23/2021 (2017) 368-387 11:50:14AM via free access The Semitic Component In Yiddish 381 published an article that targeted the lexical Semitic elements in Yiddish as well. Nokhem Shtif (1879-1933), who had been an ardent Zionist since the in 1897, gradually moved away from Zionism and towards Socialism and Yiddishism. Unlike Borochov, who tried to reconcile Zionism with Socialism and Yiddishism, Shtif’s Yiddishism eventually led him to anti- Hebraism and a complete rejection of Zionism in favor of a socialist, yiddishist and diasporist . In 1925, Shtif, by then an already well-known Yiddish philologist residing in Berlin, initiated the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), which soon became the world center for Yiddish research. In 1926, however, Shtif left Berlin and moved to the Soviet Union to become the leading figure in the state-funded Yiddish philological research center in Kiev. In November 1929, he published an article on the Semitic component in Yiddish in Di yidishe shprakh, a journal for Yiddish linguistics that he edited in Kiev. The of the article was “The Social Differentiation in Yiddish: The Hebrew Elements in the Language.”45 Based on a thorough lexical analysis of the Semitic component in Yiddish, Shtif argues in his article that the Semitic-derived vocabulary in Yiddish were mainly used for religious and spiritual matters, rarely relating to the “real world of things and deeds,”46 or to the world of the working man.47 More significant- ly, Shtif claims that the Hebrew elements were intentionally introduced into Yiddish from the 15th century on by “the classes” in Jewish society. This process of “hebraization,” as he calls it, was carried out “not by the ‘masses,’ and most certainly not by the working man—the shoemaker, the tailor, the domes- tic worker, the maidservant,”48 but rather by “the economically and culturally dominant social strata: the middle class, the rich merchants, the religious func- tionaries, the scholars.”49 According to Shtif, the “hebraization” of Yiddish was part of a class struggle,50 in which the Semitic component was an instrument of what he terms “the aristocratic class.” Shtif goes so far as to call this historical process an

orthography of a very small number of frequently used words deriving from the German component. See Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish, 125. 45 Nokhem Shtif, “The Social Differentiation in Yiddish: The Hebrew Elements in the Language” [in Yiddish], Di yidishe shprakh 4-5 (17-18) (1929): 1-22. 46 Shtif, “The Social Differentiation in Yiddish,” 16. 47 Ibid., 21. 48 Ibid., 12. 49 Ibid., 21. 50 Ibid.

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“invasion of the scholarly Hebrew” into Yiddish51 or “the Hebrew occupation of Yiddish.”52 This, however, was bound to change: “with the advent of the Jewish work- ing class and of the Jewish workers movement, the Hebrew vocabulary [in Yiddish] declines both in number and in weight, [together with other archaic expressions] which do not accord with the life and struggle of the working class.”53 While large parts of the old Hebrew vocabulary in Yiddish has become superfluous, he writes, “the working class has created a new language, with a minimum of Hebrew elements.” This time, Shtif claims, this process takes place without any conscious language policy: “that which is foreign to the life and struggle of the new class has declined by itself.”54 While Shtif considered the reduction of the Semitic component in Yiddish in the Soviet Union to be the necessary outcome of an historical process, his claim that Yiddish could do with no more than “several hundred Hebrew words and expressions”55 can be taken as an implicit demand for dehebraization. Similarly to Taviov, Shtif conceptualized the Semitic component of Yiddish in isolation and saw it as a non-organic part of the language. Unlike Taviov, who sought to expand it until it might replace the other etymological components in Yiddish (namely, the Germanic and the Slavic components), Shtif portrayed its inevitable decrease in light of the new economic order in the Soviet Union.

“What Would Yiddish Have Been Without Hebrew?”: Max Weinreich’s Understanding of the Semitic Component as the Heart and of Yiddish

Yiddish linguist Moshe Altbauer summarized in 1957 the role of ideology in the research of the Semitic component in Yiddish during the first half of the 20th century:

With a few exceptions, the research of the Hebrew elements in Yiddish until recent times has been influenced by political factors—on the one hand, by the negative attitude towards Yiddish as a national language (for Y. H. Taviov, Yiddish and its Hebrew elements was an instrument to revive

51 Ibid., 17. 52 Ibid., 16. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Ibid., 20. 55 Ibid.

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the Hebrew language among the masses), and on the other hand, by the blind hatred of the Evsektsiia in the Soviet Union, for whom Hebrew and Hebrew orthography of Hebraisms in Yiddish were a symbol of reaction and counterrevolution.56

In a list of Yiddish scholars who “have liberated the research of the Hebrew elements in Yiddish from non-scientific factors,” Altabauer lists, among oth- ers, Max Weinreich (1894-1969), a most prominent linguist and historian of Yiddish. It should be mentioned, however, that, in addition to his scientific and literary achievements, Weinreich was also active in the Bund, the Secular Jewish Socialist Party, which was the largest Jewish political party in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. The extent to which Weinreich’s philological work was influenced by ideological considerations is open to interpretation.57 In the preparatory meeting held in Berlin in 1925 to create the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), Weinreich was chosen to head its philological sec- tion in Vilnius. Soon thereafter, he became the driving-force and most domi- nant scholar of YIVO, and it was under his leadership that it became the world center for Yiddish research. When Weinreich emigrated to the following the outbreak of the Second , YIVO, so to speak, transferred with him from Vilnius to . In 1931, when still in Vilnius, Weinreich published in the New York journal Di tsukunft a response to Shtif’s article from 1929 entitled “What Would Yiddish Have Been Without Hebrew? Hebrew Elements in the Yiddish.”58 In this article he does not dispute Shtif’s argument that the Semitic component in Yiddish stems from the Jewish religion,59 but he does contest Shtif’s inter- pretation of the facts. The Jewish religion did not “invade” or “occupy” Yiddish, Weinreich argued, it created Yiddish in the first place. According to Weinreich, the Semitic component is not only essential to and inseparable from Yiddish—as Borochov had already claimed—but also a deci- sive factor in its genesis. Weinreich writes: “without the Hebrew-Aramaic ele- ments, the Yiddish language would not have existed.”60 It is “thanks to elements

56 Altbauer, “Metanalysis of Hebrew Borrowings in Yiddish,” 224. 57 See, for example, Kamil Kijek, “Max Weinreich, Assimilation and the Social Politics of Jewish Nation-Building.” East European Jewish Affairs 41:1-2 (2011): 25-55. 58 Max Weinreich, “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew? Hebrew Elements in the Yiddish Language” [in Yiddish], Di tsukunft 36, no. 3 (1931): 194-205. 59 Ibid., 194. 60 Ibid., 198.

philological encounters 2 (2017) 368-387 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access 384 hever-chybowski from Torah, from and from [Talmudic] study, [that] the Yiddish lan- guage became what it is.”61 For Weinreich, the Semitic component was always the heart and soul of Yiddish.62 However, this view does not bring him, as it did bring Taviov, to prefer Hebrew over Yiddish. He emphasizes that the title of his article—“What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew”—should not suggest that he takes part in the quarrel between Yiddishism and Hebraism.63 For Weinreich, the Semitic component in Yiddish perhaps owes its existence to Hebrew, but has now become an inseparable component of Yiddish. It is worth noting Weinreich’s position on the comprehensibility of the Semitic component in Yiddish among the less-educated parts of Jewish society. Shtif had claimed that most of the Hebrew words introduced into Yiddish by the elite were not understood by the masses. In his response, Weinreich calls to our attention that while Jewish law permits one to pray in whatever language one understands, Jews insisted on praying in Hebrew. He writes: “the mental purification that a prayer can give was found to exist more in the incompre- hensible Hebrew text, than in the comprehensible translation. […] Maybe the fact that people did not understand well the Hebrew text only elevated the mystical contents of the prayer.” It is the “incomprehensibility” or the quality of being “barely comprehensible” which won over the masses. Weinreich, thus offers a more complex view of the Semitic component in Yiddish. Even the parts of it that are not understood by everyone can be seen as integral parts of the language. The proposition is quite radical: the compre- hensibility of the Semitic component is not a necessary condition for its status as part of the language. Weinreich’s nuanced theories offer a more sophisticated approach to the ontological and epistemological ambiguities of the Semitic component in Yiddish that were demonstrated with the Yiddish joke presented in the begin- ning of this article. While Weinreich’s Yiddishism can certainly be considered an ideology, his lucid exposition of the ontological problem of the Semitic

61 Ibid., 197. 62 Ibid. Similarly, for the Zionist thinker A. D. Gordon, the Semitic vocabulary in Yiddish was much more about expressing the “Jewish soul” than fulfilling “religious purposes,” or a result of the “persecutions which forced [Jews] to use words that others could not under- stand.” To illustrate this, Gordon points out that the Yiddish word for “soul” is the Hebrew neshome, and not the Russian dusha, the German Seele or the French âme. Aharon Gordon, “The Hebrew Speech” [1913; in Hebrew], in Selected Writings (Jerusalem: The Zionist Library, 1982), 224f. 63 Weinreich, “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew? Hebrew Elements in the Yiddish Language,” 194.

philological encountersDownloaded from 2 Brill.com09/23/2021 (2017) 368-387 11:50:14AM via free access The Semitic Component In Yiddish 385 component and his non-dogmatic approach to the question of its epistemol- ogy set him apart from the previous Yiddish philologists, whose prescriptive philology was in constant contrast with scientific rigor. … The philological writings of Taviov, Borochov, Shtif and Weinreich offer a glance at the intertwinement of Yiddish philology with various ideologies in the first half of the 20th century. Their pioneering philological work on the Semitic component in Yiddish shows how far-reaching ideological centered on a specific linguistic problem. Their writings on the Semitic com- ponent mirrored their often-conflicting ideological visions of Jewish linguistic and national identities. As much as they moved back and forth between de- scriptive linguistics and ideologically engaged philology (to adopt Borochov’s distinction), they constantly measured the ontological status of the Semitic component in Yiddish using epistemological criteria. Taviov, who created a racial mythologization of Yiddish as an unequal “- riage between Shem and Japhet,” used his philological analysis to promote a radical linguistic vision: a gradual transformation of Yiddish into Hebrew. His questioning of the ontological integrity of Yiddish is closely connected to the epistemological proposition according to which Yiddish speakers know much more Hebrew than one would think. For him, the Semitic component in Yiddish is basically Hebrew. Borochov, whose article can be considered a political manifesto of Yiddish philology, sought to refute the very philological prejudices promoted by schol- ars such as Taviov. By differentiating between scientific linguistics and national philology, Borochov stands out as a philologist who fully acknowledges the ideological underpinnings of his own work. Affirming the ontological integrity of Yiddish as a fully-fledged language was his single most important argument. Accordingly, the Semitic component in Yiddish is an integral and organic part of Yiddish. Shtif’s work marks the ideological shift of Yiddish philology in the Soviet Union. Conforming with the Soviet policy of dehebraization, he constructs a historical narrative that portrays the Semitic component in Yiddish as an inva- sive and oppressive agent in a historical class struggle within Yiddish. The refu- tation of the ontological necessity of the Semitic component rests upon the epistemological argument that it is simply not known to the Yiddish working masses. For Shtif, the Semitic component is not an integral part of Yiddish and can therefore be easily removed. Thus, Shtif’s presumably descriptive account

philological encounters 2 (2017) 368-387 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 11:50:14AM via free access 386 hever-chybowski of the Semitic component fading away by itself hardly succeeds in concealing the prescriptive character of the Soviet language planning policy that actively sought to reduce the Semitic component in Yiddish to a minimum. Weinreich presents the ontological question of the Semitic component in Yiddish already in the title of his article: “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew?” It is a direct response to Shtif, but also a general commen- tary on a question that has clearly become central for Yiddish philologists. According to Weinreich, there is a distinction between the Semitic compo- nent of Yiddish and Hebrew, although this line is often blurred. At any rate, without its Semitic component, Weinreich argues, Yiddish would not have ex- isted. The ontological question, which is also considered through an historical lens, is complicated through an innovative epistemological theory, according to which knowing loshn-koydesh is often ambiguous. Therefore, Weinreich ar- gues, the ontological status of the Semitic component is not to be measured through a simple epistemological dichotomy of knowing versus not knowing, as was attempted by Taviov and Shtif.

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