Both the dropping of final letters and “Ethnicity and Supra-Ethnicity in Corpus the naturalization of Hebrew-/Aramaic- Planning,” Nations and Nationalism 10.1–2 origin words—part of the Soviet antireli- (2004): 79–94; Joshua A. Fishman, “Do Not gious posture—were also defended on the Leave Your Language Alone: The Hidden Sta- tus Dimension in Corpus Planning,” Wawah grounds of making Yiddish more Euro- (2005); Dovid Katz, Klal-takones fun yidishn pean and modern. oysleyg (Oxford, 1992); Heinz Kloss, “Ausbau Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Languages and Abstand Languages,” Anthro- both the naturalized system of spelling pological Linguistics 9.7 (1967): 29–41; Y. M. Hebrew/Aramaic-origin words and the Lifshits, Rusish-yidisher verterbukh (Zhitomir, discarded final letters have been almost 1869); Mordkhe Schaechter, “Four Schools of universally discontinued. Thus, in the Thought in Yiddish Language Planning,” world of Yiddish, there has been a com- Michigan Germanic Studies 3.2 (1977): 34–66; plete triumph for “classicism,” on the one Mordkhe Schaechter, “Fun folksprakh tsu hand (in connection with the spelling kultursprakh: An iberblik,” in Der eynheytlikher yidisher oysleyg (New York, 1999); Mendl Lefin and the preferences for Hebrew/Aramic- Sotenever, “Mishli” (1813 ms.; reproduced, origin words), and on the other hand, for Vilnius, 1930); Max Weinreich, “Vos volt “internationalism” (in connection with yidish geven on hebreyish?” Di tsukunft modern econo-technical vocabulary). 36.3 (1931): 194–205; Max Weinreich, This is an example of how opposite di- “Daytshmerish toyg nit,” Yidishe shprakh rections can be pursued simultaneously, (1975): 23–33. rather than only seriatum, in language —Joshua A. Fishman planning. Although the profile of Yiddish lan- Multilingualism Torah mantle. Sušice, Czechoslovakia (now in guage planning is multidirectional when Throughout most of their history, the Czech Republic), early twentieth century. viewed as a whole, just as are the profiles Jews were a multilingual nation, both in This mantle, donated to the synagogue by Dr. almost all other language-planning efforts fact and as part of their identity con- He÷man Barthï and his wife Kamil, represents the world over, the Yiddish undertaking sciousness. As small Jewish minorities an unusual example of Czech written in He- is preponderantly oriented toward mod- moved from one land and culture to an- brew characters. (Jewish Museum in Prague) ernization and participation in the world other, they carried with them their multi- community (via ample use of both purity lingual library of texts. Jewish multilin- and internationalism), rather than being gualism in Eastern Europe was influenced (Vladimir Jabotinsky), or Czech (Siegfried self-isolating and rejective of such partici- by the nature of the Jewish historical ex- Kapper). Those who immigrated to South pation (via classicism and Ausbau). Al- perience, by the Jews’ own myth of ori- America learned Spanish or Portuguese; though it reveals the input of the right gins, and by the exceptional historical sit- knowledge of Polish and Russian made and of the left, of the Soviet orbit and uation of the Jews in Eastern Europe reading Ukrainian poetry easy; and in of the capitalist West, of religious tradi- between the eighteenth and the twenti- Palestine, many Jews studied Arabic. tionalism and of secular modernization, eth centuries. An exuberant multilingual- Those multilinguals had at least some Yiddish language planning has weathered ism was widespread among the first gen- sense of the grammar, vocabulary, and the Holocaust and has continued to be a eration of Jews from Eastern Europe who poetry of several languages, drawn from voluntary presence and to provide a vol- broke out of small-town (shtetl) exis- at least three language groups: Germanic, untary standard to this very day. The tence, went to the cities, and immigrated Slavic, and Semitic. community that is voluntarily bound by to Western Europe, America, or Palestine. This phenomenon was not unique to this standard can point to its being ac- Multilingualism was a moving force in intellectuals. Many Jews of the period of cepted by virtually every tertiary (college the total transformation of the Jews in mass emigration were born in the Pale and university level) school, Yiddish pub- the modern age, affecting their place in of Settlement before the Revolution of lishing house, and Yiddish periodical the geography and history, their education, 1917, moved to a city in Eastern Europe world over. The major holdouts today are choice of professions, behavior, and con- (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vilna, Warsaw, in ultra-Orthodox circles and even there, sciousness. Odessa), emigrated to Germany, then to beginnings of acceptance have been The number of languages spoken by France, then to America, and at some made (see, for example, the textbooks Jews in the modern age and mentioned point tried out Palestine. Some went from prepared for use in the first few years of in Jewish memoirs and conversations Ukraine to Canada or the United States, the twenty-first century in the Jerusalem ranged from five to seven and, in special moved from there to the Soviet Far East to Beys Yankev schools and teachers semi- cases, to 13 or 15. The standard set would build a Jewish state in Birobidzhan, went nary) and will doubtlessly continue to in- include Yiddish and Hebrew, Polish and on to Moscow, and eventually to Israel. crease in number in the future. Russian, German, perhaps French, and Other itineraries led people to South the New World language, English. Indi- America, South Africa, Australia, New • Shloyme Asher Birnbaum, Alef-beys fun viduals who attended yeshivas or had pri- Zealand, or Uzbekistan. ortodoksishn oysleyg (Êódß, 1930); Michael vate tutors could read Aramaic; graduates In medieval Europe, the same phenom- Clyne, ed. Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning (Berlin and New York, 1997); Jack of a humanistic gymnasium would know enon prevailed on a smaller scale. Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: ancient Greek and Latin. In particular Whether because of persecutions and S Eliezer ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Lan- cases we may add other languages, that is, expulsions or because of opportunities R guage (The Hague, 1973); Joshua A. Fishman, Lithuanian (Emmanuel Levinas), Italian grasped combined with a lack of “rooted- L

LANGUAGE: Multilingualism 991 ness,” Jews experienced unease staying in them had written. Writing about Men- litical or cultural authority worked to en- one place, and frequently traveled be- dele Moykher-Sforim, the founder of force this unity, identifying ethnic and tween territories and languages. Their both Yiddish and Hebrew modern litera- political boundaries with language bor- very existence in the Christian world was tures, Klausner discussed the Hebrew ders. If the ideal of national unity did not defined by the religious opposition: Jew novels but not their original Yiddish ver- match the linguistic facts, that ideal was vs. Christian. It might be said that in this sions. Klausner was a nationalist Zionist imposed on deviant persons or groups. In way, Jews acquired a critical perspective and strove to realize the formula of one the twentieth century, Yiddishists sought of biculturalism and bilingualism, as well language on one land by one Hebrew to impose a unified “standard language” as a sense of cultural relativity, flexibility, (rather than Jewish) nation. Much earlier, on various dialects, mainly by means of and irony. Mediation was typical of Jews, Mendele Moykher-Sforim had countered the school system and mandatory unified who tended to specialize in the exchange this restrictiveness: “I like to breathe with spelling. Similarly, in Palestine in the be- of goods (trade), signs (languages), and both my nostrils” (Yiddish and Hebrew). ginning of the twentieth century, the Se- signs of goods (money). Yet for both Niger and Klausner, Jews who phardic pronunciation was imposed on Basic Concepts wrote in non-Jewish languages, like Kafka immigrants who were fluent in various Multilingualism is the knowledge of or Freud, were not part of “Jewish” litera- Ashkenazic dialects of Hebrew. Yet the as- more than one language by a person or ture. sumption of an overlapping identity of within a social group; it assumes the abil- In modern times, Jewish society in East- nation, land, and language is an essen- ity to switch from one language to an- ern Europe supported the use of Yiddish, tialist fallacy. In history, these three cate- other in speech, in writing, or in reading. Hebrew, Aramaic, Russian, German, and gories are most often asymmetrical. The Other terms describing this phenomenon Polish. All these languages could be active identity of language, ethnic group, na- include bilingualism, polylingualism, in a single community and even in a sin- tion, and state is an ideal, an instrument plurilingualism, diglossia, and languages- gle family, but not all individuals knew for homogenizing larger social groups, in-contact. Multilingualism may be per- every one of them. Many women and and a goal of nationalist and cultural sonal, social, or intersubjective. Personal men, especially of the lower classes, knew movements. multilingualism refers to the knowledge only Yiddish and some “Goyish” (the lo- The Structure of Multilingualism and verbal behavior of an individual, not cal dialect). Economically active men No society or state has just one lan- necessarily shared by the whole commu- knew some German as the lingua franca guage, nor can language be isolated from nity. Social multilingualism refers to the of trade, as well as the languages of Jewish culture. Societies are multilingual because communicative practices of a nation, learning, Hebrew and Aramaic. Yet the so- of minorities that live within the domi- tribe, or other social group that sustains ciety as a whole was familiar with the en- nant language group, and also because two or more languages. When Shmuel tire set of five or six languages, creating the official language itself presides over Niger, the prominent Yiddish literary what can be described as a third, inter- numerous dialects. In the Austro-Hungar- critic, wrote Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun subjective kind of multilingualism, a us- ian Empire, many linguistic and cultural undzer literatur (The Bilingualism of Our age that is spread among many individu- communities had their own territories in Literature; 1941), he did not imply that als in a given society, but not obligatory a common state, dominated by German. every Jew reads both Hebrew and Yiddish, for every one of them. Language cannot be isolated from cul- but, endorsing a concept of Bal-Makh- In discussions of multilingualism we ture, because every language is a reposi- shoves, maintained that there is a larger, face three entrenched stereotypes. First, tory of values, images and memories: the national entity (“our literature”) that in- people tend to base their description of semiotics of culture. The boundary be- cludes both branches, even though by language on the spoken word; hence bi- tween the semantics of language and the that time the two were quite separate. At lingualism is described as speaking in two semiotics of culture is blurred, so that the beginning of the twentieth century, languages. Yet much of culture is pre- multilingualism shades into multicultur- many Yiddishists would not include He- served in writing, as is the case with the alism. brew in “our” literature (the literature of Jewish religious library, and an acquired The boundaries between dialects and “the people”) and Hebrew culture in Pal- written language may be overwhelmingly languages are fuzzy too. There is often a estine would not include Yiddish. Niger’s richer than the spoken language. Hebrew gradual shading from one dialect to the book was itself a statement of cultural and Aramaic texts were the source of all next, until a new language appears on the politics, an attempt at saving Yiddish lit- Jewish knowledge. But they were taught map. In Jewish life, the different dialects erature as part of Jewish culture. Indeed, in the spoken language, Yiddish, result- of Yiddish caused animosity between Lit- by that time, most speakers of one Jewish ing in a multilingualism based on three vak, Galitsianer, and Polish Jews, yet language didn’t know or didn’t read the languages in two different media (speech those did not crystalize as languages be- other. [See the biographies of Niger and Bal- and print). A second, related stereotype is cause of the overarching power of a com- Makhshoves.] the Romantic idea of authenticity in lan- mon religion, alphabet, and nationalism, Yosef Klausner, who occupied the chair guage, a mother tongue that is “imbibed and the shared experience of antisemi- in Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew Uni- with mother’s milk.” Yet this “natural” ac- tism. versity in Jerusalem, wrote the multi- quisition of a language in childhood is Societies are multilingual in different volume Toldot ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit ha- modified by important learning processes ways. To begin with, the participant lan- Õadashah (History of Modern Hebrew Lit- on all stages of life. guages can relate to each other horizon- erature; 1919), which included detailed A final stereotype is embedded in na- tally or vertically. biographies of all the Hebrew writers. Yet tion-state ideology promoting the ideal of In Horizontal Multilingualism the par- he ignored the Yiddish texts that most of “one nation, one land, one language.” Po- ticipant languages are parallel to each S R L

992 LANGUAGE: Multilingualism other in their use. The category subdi- with Russian in the states of the former guage, the so-called mother tongue (in vides into several modes: Soviet Union). At the present time, intel- Yiddish, mame-loshn), intimate and emo- lectual life worldwide uses the supra-lan- tive. But with time, the relationship may 1. Bilingualism proper: two alternative guage (mostly English) for reading and invert and an acquired language may take languages are coextensive. The lan- writing, while creative writing and na- its place as the base language of an indi- guages share either the same territory tional culture are in the national lan- vidual or a whole society. or the same mind. In bilingualism, guage. We may distinguish among the base two languages are synonymous and Within this complex horizontal and languages of an individual, a society, and interchangeable, and are used depend- vertical grid of languages, languages in a text. Not every individual shares the ing on the addressee and situation. contact with one another influence each base language of the society and an indi- 2. Diglossia: two languages are comple- other. A large scholarly literature inves- vidual may write a text that is not in his mentary. They are both necessary for a tigates these influences. Many societies own base language. The principle of mir- person’s verbal behavior but fulfill dif- maintain a perennial struggle against for- roring describes the constant attempt of ferent communicative functions, cov- eign words introduced into their national individuals to mirror the base language ering different semiotic domains. language, while at the same time in- of a society by eliminating asymmetries. Thus, the immigrant language is used cessantly importing them to utilize the On the contrary, following the principle at home, often with one’s spouse or knowledge and cultural distinctions that of asymmetry, a creative text or a social older people, while the dominant lan- other languages have obtained. The rapid group may deviate from the standard lan- guage is used at work or with one’s growth of modern Yiddish and modern guage and, in the process, create new children. Hebrew was enmeshed in this process. asymmetries. 3. Lingua franca: a basic vehicle of com- Relations between Languages and The scope of a person’s knowledge of munication among separate language Their Users each language may vary greatly, along the communities. A lingua franca estab- A state of multilingualism may be following scale: (1) mastery of the lan- lishes bilingual relations with each achieved naturally, when a person grows guage with its textual tradition and a local language, and diglossia rela- up with two parents speaking different large, pan-historical vocabulary; (2) gram- tions when the semiotic functions are languages, or is a member of a minority, matical competence in the contemporary complementary (official business vs. or lives in a multilingual community. It language and confidence in its use; (3) el- home). may also be acquired later in life, through ementary communication; and (4) traces In Vertical Multilingualism, languages immigration or learning. of that language in the form of words and enter hierarchical relations with each Participant languages may be associ- expressions included in the syntax of an- other in a three-tiered structure. The lev- ated with different communicative me- other. els can be described as follows: dia: conversation, writing, reading, and Both Yiddish and Hebrew grew im- symbolic systems can use different, and mensely in the last century through the 1. Local dialects, professional idiolects, or not necessarily overlapping, languages. acquisition of large semiotic domains languages of origin, indicating a per- Thus, in the Jewish religious tradition, from other languages. At first, the original son’s home language or professional the law is given in Hebrew texts, its dis- term was included in the language, then attachment. cussion and explication in Aramaic texts, a substitute, based on a Hebrew or Yid- 2. The standardized national language, and the process of interpretation, study, dish root, was often invented. Thus, in where all differences are neutralized. and education takes place in spoken Yid- Hebrew, “culture” was first called kultura, From this common base, the speakers dish (or spoken modern Hebrew, English, then it became tarbut. Even when the for- can move to any dialect or profes- etc.). eign word is preserved, there are modes sional idiolect or to any text in the The functional relations between com- of secondary adaptation. Yiddish coined past. plementary languages in a multilingual tragedye, komedye with penultimate stress, 3. A supra-language for international situation are determined both by the as in Russian, rather than the German communication, usually the language implied addressee (learned discourse in stress on the last syllable of these words of a current or former colonial or cul- Latin or Hebrew vs. family correspon- and the English on the first. This process tural power. Whereas lingua franca dence in the vernacular) and by semiotic occurred subconsciously in the Jewish covers the intellectually lowest levels domain (religious texts vs. daily life, or languages in the centuries before 1800 as of culture and immediate interper- scientific discourse vs. social interaction). vocabulary was absorbed from Polish and sonal communication, the supra- Except for cases of bilingualism proper, Ukrainian, while in the modern age, a language covers the highest levels of there is asymmetry among the par- large international vocabulary was ab- science and culture and is comple- ticipant languages. Usually one of the sorbed primarily through Russian. This mentary to the national languages. languages becomes a base language that vocabulary tended to appear first in the Printed Hebrew serves this function provides the syntactic frame for the Yiddish context of political speeches, es- for scattered Jewish communities multilingual discourse. From this base, says on political and social issues, and around the globe. speakers may depart into other lan- newspaper articles, from where it was of- Each tier in this hierarchy can have sev- guages, invoke historical layers of the ten adopted by Hebrew. eral options. There can be several inter- “same” language, quote texts scattered in In this multilingual situation, an inter- acting local languages, several competing geography and history, or unfold profes- national network of words, idioms, and national languages, and several compet- sional and scientific idiolects. The earliest other expressions emerged, that have S ing supra-languages (as English competes base language may be a person’s first lan- equal signifieds (semantics) but different R L

LANGUAGE: Multilingualism 993 signifiers (sound structure, morphology, became two languages—Hebrew and Ara- communication vehicles according to lexical roots). This layer of multilingual maic. The fact is that we deal with two media type contributed to the preserva- discourse, embedded in all Jewish lan- languages which, though neighbors, are tion of the “Holy Tongue” (Hebrew and guages, was enhanced by the interna- radically different from each other, not Aramaic) throughout the ages. The writ- tional nature of the genres of discourse: the in words and expressions but in their ten vehicle originates in a complex and particular language of a sonnet, an item soul....WeareHebrew-Aramaic in our detailed network of religious beliefs and in the newspaper, an editorial, or a ro- language” (Berdichevsky, 1987, p. 102; behavior that has its basis in a library of mantic letter is international within the emphasis added). In Eastern Europe, He- texts and commentaries, studied in a framework of Western culture. Culture is brew-Aramaic bilingualism was sup- mandatory system of schooling. The spo- anything but the monolingual existence planted by Hebrew-Yiddish, with the two ken vehicle, however, absorbed cultural of isolated monolithic social groups; we languages fulfilling a similar functional elements from the surrounding lan- can speak of a unity that crosses lan- division. guages, folklore, and verbal behavior. guages, bringing them together in a sin- The full complexity of Jewish multilin- This was not an accidental but an essen- gle semiotic discourse. gualism developed in the Diaspora. Jew- tial multilingualism that enabled the Multilingualism in Jewish History ish languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic) functioning of the Jews in a bifurcated ex- The Jewish national myth is not based were used alongside local dialects, on the istential situation. on one cradle or homeland, but on a bi- one hand, and the majority language and Three Multilingualisms polar pattern. From one place Jews are ei- language of power, on the other. To fur- The languages known to Eastern Euro- ther exiled or flee to another, opposite ther complicate the picture, migrating pean Jewry were of three kinds: internal place, either positive (Exodus) or negative Jews shifted from the language of their languages, external languages, and the in- (Exile). The foundational event of this old country to the language of the new ternalized multilingualism of Yiddish. territorial bipolarity is recorded in Gene- one. The four-language dictionary of Elye Internal Multilingualism. The autono- sis 12: the Lord sends the father of the Bokher (Elias Levita) reflected his origins mous stratification of Jewish social insti- Jewish nation, Abram, from his native and his two homelands: he moved from tutions within the larger state was imple- Mesopotamia “to the land I will show Germany to Rome and Venice, became a mented in Ashkenaz in three internal you,” the land of Canaan. Jewish readers teacher to cardinals, wrote a grammar languages, all written in the Hebrew al- often perceived this chapter as a Zionist and versification treatise in Hebrew, and phabet: Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic. message, sending Abram to the Promised composed epic romances in ottava rima in Yosef Klausner, a leader of the modern re- Land. Yet it also represents the first expul- Yiddish. vival of Hebrew, maintained that Hebrew sion of the Jews as a nation, for the Lord The Jewish Diaspora was unprece- is not one language but four: Biblical, commands Abram: “Go forth from your dented in its preservation of a commu- Mishnaic, Tibbonite (the Hebrew of the land and your birthplace and your fa- nity throughout history, in spite of medieval translators of Arabic philoso- ther’s house.” In the ears of Diaspora Jews, migration, assimilation, and repeated ex- phy), and Modern. These Hebrew “lan- moledet (birthplace) meant also “home- pulsions. In every new language territory, guages” appeared in history in spurts, as land” in the national sense: Abram was the second generation adopted the new, isolated developments without the conti- expelled from his homeland. And Lekh- non-Jewish language, but kept traces of nuity of a spoken language. Jewish Ara- lekho (Go forth!), with its repeated harsh the previous one. The so-called “Jewish maic was also at least three languages: (1) sounds, was expressive of the coarse com- languages” (Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, variants of classical Aramaic in the Bible mand: “Get out!” Sholem Aleichem fin- Judeo-German) that Jews spoke among and Bible translations; (2) the colloquial ishes his saga of Tevye the Dairyman with themselves for generations were marked Aramaic of Talmudic discourse; (3) the the chapter “Lekh-lekho.” The expression variants of the dominant language. The artificial medieval Aramaic of the thir- “we’re at the chapter Lekh-lekho” meant new formation was marked as a Jewish teenth-century Zohar (the classical book in Yiddish “we’re in a time of expulsions” language in several respects: (1) it pre- of the Kabbalah) and shorter texts. Ara- (in Tevye’s case, the expulsion of Jews served some expressions of the earlier lan- maic was the Yiddish of an earlier millen- from Russian villages). guage, for example, the retention in Ger- nium; it mediated between the spoken From the period of late antiquity, Jews man-based Yiddish of Romance words and the written world. With its demise scattered, in several stages, around the (kreplakh, cholent) and names (Yentl from as a spoken language among Jews, it was world. Like all immigrants they adopted Gentilla); (2) it included some Jewish cul- sanctioned as part of the Holy Tongue. the local spoken language, and some ac- tural markers (in the same way as Jews Yiddish never achieved this status in quired the dominant languages of culture speaking English retained references to print, but compensated for it in the edu- or power. Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski biblical tradition, Hebrew poetry, and cational process. Study was conducted in (Berdichevsky), who studied the (Ara- Jewish cuisine, as well as Yiddish words Yiddish dialogue discussing the Aramaic maic) Talmud at the famous Volozhin ye- and the semantics of Yiddish proverbs); dialogue about the Hebrew monologues shiva in Lithuania, became a prominent (3) it assimilated only part of the scope of of the Bible. Hebrew secular fiction writer, lived in the new language; and (4) it was written From the position of Yiddish, all the Berlin, and wrote criticism and essays in in the Hebrew alphabet. historical variants of Hebrew and Ara- Yiddish and German. Berdyczewski de- That the Jews did not disappear in his- maic are one language, loshn-koydesh (the fined an essential Jewish bilingualism in tory may be partly due to their retention Holy Tongue). Many factors cause this his essay “Hebrew and Aramaic,” using as of their holy language, Hebrew, for writ- unity: the unique correlation of nation a metaphor the story of Jacob and Esau: ten communication, a choice that kept and religion; the validity of all variants as ‘Two nations in your womb’ (Gn. 25:23) Hebrew unaffected by spoken, external, arbiters of both daily life and theology; S . . . still clash within us, and our tongue and changeable vehicles. This split of their unifying Hebrew alphabet, separate R L

994 LANGUAGE: Multilingualism from all neighboring writing systems; Yiddish. It also required broad external turies a unique phenomenon in Jewish and the scholarly settings in which texts competence: living on the interstices of history occurred: the Jews became a ma- in all those languages were discussed languages and nations, Jews could com- jority on a polka-dotted map covering as one continuum. On one page of the municate using Low forms (the colloquial the vast territories of the Russian Pale of Talmud one encounters separate texts language) as well as High (the language of Settlement and the Austro-Hungarian in biblical Hebrew, Mishnaic Hebrew, power and culture). While their knowl- Empire. Of course, in absolute numbers Ashkenazic Rabbinical Hebrew, classical edge of those languages was incomplete the majority population in the Pale were Aramaic, and Talmudic dialogical Ara- and primarily oral, they nevertheless had peasants, but the peasants were serfs, maic, all organized as a highly controlled, a foothold in several languages, conspicu- bound to their villages until 1861. Mo- graphically deployed and canonized mo- ously belonging to several language fami- bile, well connected through trade net- saic. On a stratified page of a latter-day lies. works, and full of initiative, Jews con- family Torah, one encounters biblical He- Yiddish As Internalized Multilingual- stituted as much as two-thirds of the brew, two Aramaic translations, the Rab- ism. According to the great historian of population of all towns and often a third binical Hebrew of the major commentar- the Yiddish language, Max Weinreich, or half of the population of cities. They ies, and Yiddish translations of both the Yiddish was born in the Carolingian Em- built and owned most of the local small Bible and commentaries. Nevertheless, pire at the end of the first millennium. In- industries and banks, and dominated since the components of the Holy Tongue deed, from a Yiddishist ideological posi- local and international trade. The Yid- were not spoken, they kept their indepen- tion in the twentieth century, there is one dish language served as the communica- dence in writing, as separate genres of dis- continuum of a spoken language going tion network of this nation. Its Russian course. Aramaic was much quoted in Yid- back to the tenth century. and German components were a natural dish, but rarely written in independent When Jews settled in Slavic territories, bridge both to the language of power, sentences and texts. Books, correspon- in a language environment that was not Russian (earlier, Polish), and to the lan- dence, community chronicles, and legal similar to Yiddish, they preserved the lan- guages of culture, Russian and German. proceedings were written in a Hebrew guage for many generations. The earliest As Max Weinreich argued, Yiddish is a framework, with embedded Yiddish and Yiddish texts in Poland are from the six- fusion language: it uses components of Aramaic phrases. In some realistic He- teenth century. It stands to reason that several languages and melts them in one brew fiction in the Revival period, Ara- Jews who lived in Slavic lands before this linguistic system. Thus, shlimezalnik (an maic represented the spoken language spoke Slavic languages, Czech or [proto-] unfortunate person) is composed of three of the characters. Yiddish realistic prose Ukrainian. The syntax and vocabulary of elements: schlim + mazl + nik (German + used a synthetic language, including Yiddish carry a Slavic impact to this day. Hebrew + Russian) and the general Euro- many Aramaic expressions alongside Eu- In the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- pean “doctor” gets a Hebrew plural: ropean imports. Selected chapters of the Torah and Components of Yiddish. The inner circle is basic Yiddish; the central circle represents the domain prayers were studied in heder, the ele- of merged Yiddish (the shaded lines indicate merely the source of the components, without show- mentary school, mandatory for all boys ing their mutual interpenetration). Outside the circle, discontinuous boundaries mark areas of from the age of 3 or 4 until bar mitzvah at extension; dotted lines represent areas open for further borrowing from the adjacent languages. 13. Aramaic, more difficult, was studied (Reprinted with permission from The Meaning of Yiddish, by Benjamin Harshav [Stanford, Calif.: Stan- by teenage boys in yeshivas, the elite ford University Press, 1999].) academies that produced certified rabbis for hundreds of communities and became the breeding ground of modern, secular Hebrew literature. External Multilingualism. In the Mid- dle Ages, Jewish populations concen- trated in Poland and Lithuania, in parts of Italy, in some German towns, and in the Ottoman Empire. Few in numbers, Jews were outsiders. They kept their inter- nal languages in writing and acquired to various degrees the spoken dialects of their neighbors as well as the “King’s lan- guage” of the state. As few medieval Jews read the Latin alphabet, they needed to write German texts in Hebrew letters. In the nineteenth century, in the Rus- sian “Pale of Settlement,” most Jews did not live among Russians but among speakers of local dialects or minority lan- guages. Jews were exposed to Belorussian and Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Ger- S man. This situation encouraged the pres- R ervation of their own spoken language, L

LANGUAGE: Multilingualism 995 doktoyrim. But this fusion is not as com- The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, Calif., khsia Evreev (OZET; Society for the Settle- plete as an independent Yiddish ideol- 1999); Michael Holquist, “What is the Onto- ment of Jewish Toilers on the Land). He ogy would have liked. Americans hardly logical Status of Bilingualism?” in Bilingual was also a founding member of KOMZET pay attention to whether an English word Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. Doris (Komitet po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Sommer, pp. 21–34 (New York, 2003); Samuel comes from one source or another, Trudiashchikhsia Evreev pri Prezidiume Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Liter- whether legal and loyal are from Latin and Soveta Natsional’nostei Tsental’nyi Is- ature, trans. Joshua Fogel (Lanham, Md., French, nation is French, and right is An- 1990), also in the original Yiddish as Di politel’nyi Komitet SSSR; Committee for glo-Saxon, or vice versa. But in Yiddish tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (Detroit, the Settlement of Jewish Laborers on the there is high consciousness of the compo- 1941); Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Land under the Council of Soviet Nation- nent languages and the literature uses Language, vols. 1–2, trans. Shlomo Noble and alities for the Central Executive Commit- their differences for stylistic purposes. Joshua A. Fishman (Chicago, 1980), vols. 3–4, tee of the USSR). Although he encouraged Yiddish speakers lived in a Hebrew library trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, Jewish national autonomy in the Black among Slavs and were also close to Ger- ed. Paul Glasser (New Haven, 2008), also in Sea region, Larin opposed the later So- many. Because the fusion is incomplete, original Yiddish as Geshikhte fun der yidisher viet call to create a territorial entity in shprakh, 4 vols. (New York, 1973); Uriel Wein- the different components of the language Birobidzhan. Claiming that Birobidzhan’s reich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Prob- often behave according to the grammars geographic isolation, inhospitable cli- lems, Publications of the Linguistic Circle of of Hebrew, Slavic, and German. Thus, the New York, 1 (New York, 1953). mate, and poor soil made it a poor choice, Hebrew-origin word mokem (place, city) —Benjamin Harshav he argued that Crimea and its environs has a Hebrew plural form mekoymes were the only realistic places for Jews (rather than the Yiddish plural, which to establish their territory. This stance would be mokems). Unlike English, in LARIN, IURII ALEKSANDROVICH earned him criticism from Evsektsiia, the which the process of fusion was com- (1882–1932), Soviet economist, political Jewish Section of the Communist Party. pleted, Yiddish never had strict bound- figure, and publicist. Iurii Larin was born Larin’s most important work on Jew- aries. While Yiddish is to some extent a in Simferopol’ as Mikhail Aleksandrovich ish affairs was Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR language of fusion, it is also an open lan- Luria. His father, Shneur (Shelomoh) (Jews and Antisemitism in the USSR; guage; its speakers can easily roam in the Zalman Luria, was an engineer, Hebrew 1929). Here he argued that tsarist injus- reservoirs of the Holy Tongue, or turn to author, Zionist, and, according to some tices (among them, confinement to the German, Polish, or Russian and bring in sources, a kazennyi ravvin, or “crown Pale) inevitably brought Jews into con- whatever concept is needed at the mo- rabbi.” flict with non-Jewish peasants. Calling ment. People of learning will use more Larin joined the Russian Social Demo- for the repression of antisemitism, he en- expressions from the Holy Tongue, accul- cratic Party in 1900, becoming a member visioned transforming 500,000 Russian turated Europeans will use more German; of the Menshevik wing from 1904. From Jews into productive Soviet peasants, there is more German in the Yiddish of 1901 until the February 1917 Revolution, whereas the majority of Jews would be ab- Êódß or Silesia and more Slavic expres- he was an active rebel who spent time in sorbed into the nation’s new industry. sions in that of Ukraine. Yiddish has a various parts of the Russian Empire, tsar- Larin died in 1932 and was buried next to core, common to all its users, a wider cir- ist prisons, Siberian exile, and abroad. His the Lenin Mausoleum. In 1935, a new cle of component-conscious words, and writings on German economics drew Le- raion, or Jewish autonomous district, in an open frontier into its component lan- nin’s attention, and after Larin returned Crimea was named Larindorf in his honor. guages (see diagram, previous page). to Russia and joined the Bolshevik Party • Yosef Barzilai, “Iu. L’arin: Mi-Ri’shone ha- Yiddish is by nature a multilingual lan- in 1917, he quickly entered the Soviet tikhnun ha-sovieti,” He-‘Avar 18 (1971): 151– guage and its speakers are by definition economic administration and served in 161; Iurii Larin, Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR multilingual (as poor as their grammar in delegations to the Brest-Litovsk negotia- (Moscow, 1929); Anna Larina, This I Cannot other languages may be). The open bor- tions (1917–1918) and to Genoa (1922). Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s ders of Yiddish, which allowed a massive Considered a gifted economist, Larin was Widow, trans. Gary Kern (New York, 1993). influx of words from all its component a member of, and adviser to, key Soviet —Jonathan Dekel-Chen languages and the modernization of the economic and political bodies but held language in the modern age, also served no major leadership post. He addressed a LATVIA, state in the eastern Baltic re- as a bridge in the other direction. Yid- range of issues, from labor affairs to the gion, created in 1918 out of the former dish speakers could easily adapt to speak- role of capital in the national economy. Russian provinces of Courland (an auton- ing German (Yiddish minus Hebrew and His ideas and frequent contributions omous duchy linked to Poland until Slavic words) and Yiddish speakers re- to national newspapers were widely re- 1795), Livonia (under Swedish rule from vived modern Hebrew. Thus Yiddish was printed and, evidently, were embraced by 1629 to 1721), and Latgalia (part of the the bridge between the internal tradition many Soviet leaders in the mid-1920s. His Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until and European culture, between internal daughter married the famed Bolshevik 1772). Between 1940 and 1991, Latvia and external multilingualism. Nikolai Bukharin. was a republic of the Soviet Union, re- Inactive in Jewish issues until 1923, gaining full independence with the • Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, “‘Ivrit ve- Larin thereafter campaigned for Jewish breakup of the USSR. aramit,” in Shirah ve-lashon: MivÕar masot u- agricultural colonization in southern Early Settlement reshimot, comp. and ed. Emanuel Bin-Gorion, Ukraine and Crimea [see Agriculture]. In The first Jews came to Courland by sea, pp. 101–105 (Jerusalem, 1987); François Gros- jean, Life with Two Languages: An Introduction 1925, he was appointed adviser to the So- from Prussia, at the end of the sixteenth S to Bilingualism (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Ben- viet government on Jewish affairs and be- century and settled in the provincial jamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution came the first chairman of Obshchestvo towns of Hasenpot, Pilten, Grobin, and R (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Benjamin Harshav, po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Trudiashchi- Windau (Ventspils) in the Piltene district, L

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