Yiddish As a Diaspora Language and Its Future

9/3/2014 ABC-CLIO eBooks

From: Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture (2008) M. Avrum Ehrlich, Editor

Yiddish as a Diaspora Language and Its Future

Dovid Katz

The notion of Jewish Diaspora languages is an inherently loaded nationalist origin type term that effectively crowns one language “native” and all others as implicitly “foreign.” The (retrospectively speaking) first Jewish language, biblical Hebrew, was in fact an intricate fusion between the im ported Aramaic (of the Abrahamic clan) and the native Canaanite (of the Promised Land’s native inhabitants), along with some later admixtures from Egyptian, Persian, and other foreign sources. Still, if ancient Hebrew is regarded as the first and only native Jewish language for having arisen in ancient Israel, then Jewish Aramaic, the second major Jewish language, becomes at once its first Diaspora language (during and after the Babylonian Exile). Jewish Aramaic went on, of course, to become the prime Jewish vernacular in Palestine throughout the Second Temple period and beyond. If a Diaspora language is brought to the Holy Land, does it stay a Diaspora language? And what of a native language taken to a Diaspora where it develops far beyond its original “inthe nativeland” scope? The popular definitions are conceptually problematic.

Frequently, however, the term “Jewish Diaspora languages” is diplomatically reserved primarily for the European period in Jewish history, which started around a millennium ago, in contradistinction to both Hebrew and Aramaic, themselves closely related northwest Semitic dialects. The European Jewish Diaspora language category has come to include, among others: Laazic (JudeoItalian), Knaanic (JudeoSlavic), Yevanic (JudeoGreek), and Zarphatic (JudeoFrench). The firstcited “linguonym” in each case reflects the anthropologic method of looking through the eyes of the culture in question and avoiding the externalized (and often disparaging) hyphenated no menclature imposed (by which logic Hebrew might have been “IsraeloCanaanite,” and is in fact called “Language of Canaan” in the Hebrew Bible itself, at Isaiah 19:18). Yiddish scholars Matisyohu Miesis (1885–1945), Solomon A. Birnbaum (1891–1989), and Max Weinreich (1894– 1969) passionately championed the “internalized” conceptualization of all the Jewish languages, sometimes attempting to put them on a generally equal conceptual footing—though they are by no means equal by the empirical measures of number of speakers, geographic extent, duration in history, literary output, or structural and lexical differentiation from the major source language.

http://ebooks.abc-clio.com/print.aspx?isbn=9781851098743&id=JEWDIA1E.116 24/35 9/3/2014 ABC-CLIO eBooks The two bestknown European Jewish languages are Ladino (or Judezmo or “JudeoSpanish”), the language of preexpulsion Sephardic Jewry on the Iberian

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Peninsula (and its progeny in various parts of Europe and northern Africa), and Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry, which has been spoken by more Jews than all the other Jewish languages combined, and alone among the European Jewish languages is in the league of Hebrew and Aramaic in the realm of its qualitative and quantitative literary output (much of which remains to be studied).

Yiddish arose around a thousand years ago, among the (retrospectively speaking) first Ashkenazim, who came to inhabit the Rhine and Danube basins (linguistic evidence pointing more to the latter, more easterly region). The language combines—in a highly specific and intricate series of “fusion formulas”—the inherited Hebrew and Aramaic remnants the settlers brought with them with the majority component evolved from local urban dialects of German. From the start, Yiddish participated in an elaborate system of internal Jewish trilingualism. As the sole and universal vernacular, it stood in largely complementary distribution with the two classic languages that were studied, recited, and, importantly, also used for new literary works: the more prestigious Hebrew, used for biblical and legal commentaries and community correspondence, among others, and the still more prestigious Aramaic, used for major Talmudic and kabbalistic works.

Written Yiddish words are attested from the 11th century onward. The oldest dated Yiddish sentence is from 1272. In time, older Yiddish literature developed a “secular” branch, which included reworkings of medieval knightly European romances, such as the King Arthur cycle, into Yiddish, and significantly, the fusing of the European epic genre with Jewish material, perhaps best exemplified by the Shmuel bukh and Mlokhim bukh, based on the biblical books of Samuel and Kings. The synthesis of ancient Jewish content with contemporary European form is in a sense a metaphor for Yiddish generally. A pietistic and religious branch of Yiddish literature, which came to prominence in the 16th century, included works on morals and ethics and, eventually, complete Bible and prayer book translations, as well as original Yiddish prayers, particularly for women, that are known as tkhínes.

From its original territory in central Europe, Yiddish expanded along with the migrations of the Ashkenazim, who fled medieval Christian massacres and expulsions (including the Crusades) on the original Germanbased territory. Colonies of Ashkenazim arose to the south (in Italy), the north (Holland), and, most significantly, in many parts of the Slavic and Baltic lands of Eastern Europe, which eventually came to constitute Ashkenaz II or Eastern Ashkenaz.

Within Eastern Yiddish, two major dialects of Yiddish developed: a northern (Lithuanian Belorussian) dialect known as Lítvish (Northeastern Yiddish to linguists); and a southern (Polish Ukrainian) variety sometimes called Póylish though it is itself markedly divided into a western (PolishGalicianHungarian) variety (Mideastern Yiddish) and an eastern (UkrainianBessarabian Rumanian) variety (Southeastern Yiddish).

In Eastern Europe during the later half of the history of the language, a prominent Slavic component joined the core Semitic + Germanic union that is universal to both Western and Eastern Yiddish. This gave added capacity for nuanced meanings; see, for example, neutral víkhtik (important) from Germanic, respectfully human referencing of khóshev (esteemed) from Hebrew, and humorous or sarcastic

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vázhne from Slavic. It is not always possible to predict which historic source might contribute the unmarked or neutral form; see, for example, póshet (simple) from Hebrew versus prost (coarse or uncultured, of a person) versus Germanderived éynfakh (simplistic), which is usually limited to journalistic usage. A nar (fool), from Germanic, can be anyone, but only a Jew can be a típesh or shóyte (from Hebrew).

The older dialects of Western Yiddish faded away, from the 18th century, as western Ashkenazim were assimilating to German and other central European cultures. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, Yiddish expanded dramatically, both demographically and culturally. The language became central to the new Hasidic movement in Ukraine and beyond in the 18th century. Moreover, various offshoots of the Haskalah enlightenment movement began to develop a variegated and vast moderngenre literature in the language in the 19th century. Highlevel Yiddish fiction is traditionally dated to November 24, 1864, when Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, ca. 1836–1917) began to publish, in installments, his first Yiddish novel. His satiric fiction was followed by the romanticism of Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915) and the humor of Shalom Aleichem (pseudonym of Sholem Rabinowitz, 1859–1916). The Mendele–Peretz–Aleichem trio became known as the “triumvirate” of classic modern Yiddish literature.

From the start of the 20th century, a network of modern cultural and educational institutions, a vibrant daily press, and an ever more sophisticated literature helped mark the status of Yiddish as one of the major languages in Jewish history. In addition to the output of thousands of authors, there was an overarching demography. On the eve of World War II, there were around 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world, split between the native territory of Eastern Europe and the immigration centers. There were leading centers of Yiddish culture in Poland and other East European countries, and until the Stalinist repressions, there was a considerable Soviet Yiddish literature, too. In the West, New York City became a major center of Yiddish literature, press, education, and theater. In 1978, Polishborn Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), who migrated to the United States in 1935, was awarded a Nobel Prize for literature.

Yiddish language and culture were decimated by the Holocaust; most of the 6 million victims were native speakers, and the Eastern Ashkenazic civilization was destroyed in its native lands. The suppression of Yiddish in the Land of (and during the early years of the State of) Israel, the violent Stalinist repressions in the Soviet Union, and massive voluntary abandonment in western countries in the course of assimilation to the dominant national cultures, led to predictions of the imminent death of the language by the late 20th century. These were only slightly mitigated by the rise, on the one hand, of symbolic and sentimental reattachment in the west (e.g., Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish in 1968 in the United States), and on the other, by the development of serious study of Yiddish language and literature at leading universities in North America, Israel, and Europe in the waning years of the century.

By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the number of (by then elderly) Yiddish speakers who had come to maturity before World War II dropped to around half a million, and this number was quickly collapsing with the death of this last prewar generation. The advent of several thousand younger “Yiddish

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enthusiasts” around the world, only several dozen of whom were capable of publishing extensive works in the language itself (rather than just work “about” Yiddish), could barely offset the http://ebooks.abc-clio.com/print.aspx?isbn=9781851098743&id=JEWDIA1E.116 26/35 9/3/2014 ABC-CLIO eBooks devastating demographic loss of the last prewar generation.

The demographic surprise has come from Yiddishspeaking Haredim, and particularly Hasidim of the southern dynasties (including Satmar, Vizhnitz, Belz), among whom there were, by the midpoint of the first decade of the 21st century, over half a million Yiddish speakers of childbearing age internationally, ensuring the continuity of the vernacular language. Hasidim are producing a considerable Yiddish didactic and popular literature, and they publish a number of weekly newspapers. One of the largestcirculation Yiddish newspapers, the Algemeyner zhurnal, is edited by a prominent Lubavitch Hasidic family in Brooklyn (the Jacobsons), and it seeks to synthesize religious and secular material, in contrast to such publications as Satmar’s Der yid, which are strictly ingroup. Given that Israeli Hebrew is not spoken by families that did not live in Israel per se, Yiddish is set to remain the world’s major (or only) Jewish Diaspora language, though only for sections of ultraOrthodox Jewry, particularly its southern Eastern Europe origin Hasidic groups.

The historic layering of the language itself perhaps determines its status as a living linguistic repository of multiple “native” and “Diaspora” periods of Jewish history alike. Phrases such as shíker vi Lot (as drunk as Lot = very drunk; see Genesis 19, 31–36), a Yeróvm ben Nevót (a Jeroboam son of Nebat = an evil man) are among the many embedded expressions that hark back to the biblical period. A corpus of logical words comes from Aramaic of the Talmudic period, including such everyday items as aváde (definitely), makhtéyse (okay!) and mistáme (probably). Others are evocative of events in European Jewish history, for example, shabsetsvínik (believer in Sabbethai Zevi = someone who believes in something even after it’s apparent that it was a fraud), m’zol em brénen un brótn (even if he were burned and roasted = [he wouldn’t speak even if] burned and roasted [by the Inquisition]), fun Méylekh Sobétski’s yorn (from the years of King Sobieski [of Poland] = a very long time ago).

Beyond the synchronic linguistic embedding of millennia of Jewish history, the lexical and semantic structure per se of Yiddish is specifically Jewish at a cultural depth that transcends the language politician’s “native” versus “Diaspora” dichotomy. For example, gest (from Germanic) are any kind of guests; órkhim (from Hebrew) are (usually poor) Jewish guests welcomed for a Sabbath or holiday to one’s home or town; ushpízin (from Aramaic) are seven biblical figures, from Abra ham to David, who visit the sukkah during the festival of Súkes (Sukkoth, Feast of Tabernacles) according to Jewish mystical tradition.

In contrast to modern Israeli Hebrew, Yiddish often retains the exclusively Judaic connotation of traditional terms, with “nearsynonyms” from nonHebraic roots being used for a corresponding general concept, for example, bitókhn (optimism based on faith in God), mitsráyim (ancient, biblicalera Egypt), ríshn (first day of a Jewish holiday), and yad (pointer for the Torah reading) versus the nonHebraically derived words for “optimism” (optimízm), modern Egypt (Egíptn), “first” (érshter), and “hand” (hant). Compare with the modern Hebrew bitakhón (“security”), mitsráyim (Egypt), rishón (“first”), and yad (“hand”).

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In considering today’s Jewish languages, it is prudent to keep in mind that modern Israeli Hebrew (Ivrít) has its roots in the work of Eliezer BenYehuda and other East European revivers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and has been vastly affected by Yiddish and other European languages (in spite of many purist efforts to avoid this eventuality). Nearly all of Bialik’s and Tchernichowsky’s classic Hebrew poetry must be enjoyed with the Yiddish affected penultimate (“Diaspora”) stress pattern (miléyl) of Yiddish and Yiddishimpacted Ashkenazic Hebrew. At the same time, Yiddish presents an uninterrupted chain of linguistic continuity that spans all of Jewish http://ebooks.abc-clio.com/print.aspx?isbn=9781851098743&id=JEWDIA1E.116 27/35 9/3/2014 ABC-CLIO eBooks history. The essence of these two languages—Israeli Hebrew and Yiddish—can hardly be described, therefore, as “native” versus “Diaspora”; nevertheless, their functionality today and prognoses for the coming century do lead to a differentiation between the language of the State of Israel and the vernacular of traditionalist Hasidim. Outside the Yiddishspeaking Hasidic population, the remnant of Yiddish culture is more in a literary and cultural heritage than a viable future vernacular, though it is impossible to predict the directions future Hasidic Yiddish will take, particularly in the countries of the Diaspora.

Selected Bibliography

Birnbaum, Solomon A. 1942. “Jewish Languages.” In Essays in Honour of the Very Reb. Dr. J. H. Hertz, edited by I. Epstein, E. Levine, and C. Roth, 51–67. London: Edward Goldston.

Fishman, David E. 2005. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Goldsmith, Emanuel S. 1997. Modern Yiddish Culture. The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement. New York: Fordham University Press.

Katz, Dovid. 1985. “Hebrew, Aramaic and the Rise of Yiddish.” Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, edited by J. A. Fishman, 85–103. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Katz, Dovid. 2007. Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, rev. ed. New York: Basic Books.

Katz, Dovid. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, S. V. “Yiddish.” http://www.yivo.org/ downloads/Yiddish.pdf (accessed April 2, 2008).

Mieses, Matthias. 1915. Die Entstehungsursache der jüdischen Dialekte. Vienna: R. Löwit Verlag.

Weinreich, Max. 2007. History of the Yiddish Language. Translated by Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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