Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar in Its Historical and Cultural Context1 Kalman Weiser

2 Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar in its Historical and Cultural Context1 Kalman Weiser The twentieth century saw the publication of two major grammars and study guides for English-speakers of modern Eastern Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of the Jews of Eastern Europe.2 The first, College Yiddish (1949), was written while its author, Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), was a twenty-three-year-old doctoral candidate at Columbia University.3 The second, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (YSG, 1979), appeared three decades later. In contrast with College Yiddish, YSG represents the mature fruit of a long and remarkably prolific career spanning almost the entirety of the twentieth century. Its author Solomon Birnbaum (1891-1989) was the first to occupy a position in Yiddish in a modern university, which he did in 1920s Hamburg. He was also a pioneer in the academic study of Yiddish and Jewish languages in general, and the founder of the field of Hebrew palaeography, subjects to which he continued to devote himself after fleeing Nazi Germany and living for decades in England and later Canada. Yet, he first articulated many of his most profound and enduring insights about Yiddish during his adolescence and early adulthood. Birnbaum (known in his writings in German generally as Salomo, in English as Solomon A., and in his Yiddish contributions as Shloyme/Śloimy) composed his first book in 1915, Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den Selbstunterricht, also at the age of twenty-three (the book was not published, however, until 1918). Remarkably, he wrote it before having received formal linguistics training. A classic and foundational work of Yiddish scholarship, this pocket-sized German language grammar of Yiddish lies – in a much expanded and revised English version – at the heart of YSG’s grammar section. Intended as an introduction to the language and its culture for university undergraduates, Weinreich’s College Yiddish debuted following the era of the Second World War, when Yiddish was first being introduced into the curricula of American universities. This was largely the achievement of the author’s father, [. ] xxv Historical and Cultural Context the renowned linguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. The elder Weinreich was a co-founder and the guiding spirit of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut/Iîdiśer visnśaftlexer institút; known in English by the acronym YIVO), which was conceived to function as a national library, language academy, and university for a Yiddish-speaking, diasporic Jewish people. Unattached to any government apparatus, it was headquartered in Vilna, Poland, but maintained branches in Eastern European Jewish immigrant centres around the world in the period between the two world wars. Arriving in New York City as a refugee in 1940 in the company of his teenage son, Max Weinreich committed himself to building Yiddish scholarship on American shores and became the inaugural professor of Yiddish at City College in New York in 1947.4 In 1952, after completing a doctorate in linguistics, Uriel was appointed to the newly created Atran Chair of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University. A product of both the Yiddish secular schools of Vilna and American educational institutions, he compressed the work of several lifetimes into a brilliant career as both a Yiddish scholar and general linguist until cancer cut him down in his prime.5 Much like their authors, who both established prominent careers in English- speaking lands, these two masterpieces of modern Yiddish scholarship share many parallels but have had very different fates. The two volumes, written by scholars who cordially disagreed about much, complement as much as compete with each other;6 together, they reflect different perspectives on the language while illuminating its broader cultural history. While Birnbaum’s Praktische Grammatik was the first sophisticated grammar of Yiddish in any language, Weinreich’s College Yiddish, published more than thirty years later, became the first scientific English-language grammar of Yiddish and remains a standard text for beginners more than sixty years since its first publication. It has been only slightly revised in more than twenty new editions and reprintings since 1949, making it as much a fascinating cultural artefact as a tool for learning ‘Standard Yiddish.’ Standard Yiddish is ‘largely a “common-ground” variety of Eastern Yiddish in which many of the most dialect-marked features are dropped …’ Its ‘ideal’ pronunciation or orthoepy is that of the pre−Second World War secular Jewish intelligentsia of Vilna.7 Beyond imparting basic competency in Standard Yiddish, the book seeks to distil through its cultural component the essence of a remarkably diverse and vibrant civilization that had only recently been murdered by Germany and its accomplices. College Yiddish sees religion as having played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi Jewish cultural life and the Yiddish language. Still, it emphasizes a modern, secular era in pre−Second World War Eastern Europe as the culmination of this civilization, and implies a secular future for Yiddish.8 The book’s longevity xxvi Kalman Weiser is due not only to its general excellence but also to its association with YIVO, which has played the leading role in codifying and disseminating the norms of Standard Yiddish in non-ultra Orthodox circles in the post-war era, and has become the language’s de facto authority in academic circles. Most university- educated students of Yiddish today are familiar with both this work and Uriel Weinreich’s magisterial Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, the leading bi-directional dictionary for these languages, which similarly prescribes the norms of Standard Yiddish.9 In contrast, although YSG’s Part One (‘Jewish Languages’ and ‘The Cultural Structure of East Ashkenazic Jewry’) and Part Two, chapter 1 (‘The External History of Yiddish’) contain much information of interest to non-specialists, it is a work known mainly to experts. In many ways, it also constitutes a polemic against the norms promoted by YIVO and the entire ideology of Yiddishism, the movement to transform Yiddish from the folk language of the traditionally religious Jews of Eastern Europe into the officially recognized language of a modern, secularized Jewish nation. Best suited to more advanced language learners and to linguists, YSG has remained out of print and difficult to obtain until the current edition. Like his famous father Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937), Solomon Birnbaum was very much an individualist. He lived most of his life on the geographic periphery of Yiddish culture rather than in cities with dense Jewish concentrations such as Warsaw, Vilna, or New York.10 Despite spending most of his formative years in Vienna, he identified not with acculturated German-speaking Jewry, but with the Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe, most of whom spoke Yiddish but did not share his lionization of the language. Solomon Birnbaum was still in high school when he embarked upon what would become a life’s path as an uncompromising champion of Yiddish and the cultural distinctiveness of traditional Ashkenazi Jewry. His very insistence upon referring to the language in his earliest writings in German as Jiddisch (Yiddish) – the designation commonly used by its speakers – and not Judeo-German (Jüdischdeutsch) or some other externally imposed term then in vogue, testifies to his maverick obstinacy at an early age.11 For personal and ideological reasons, Birnbaum avoided close collaboration with many of the notoriously fractious community of ideologically-committed Yiddish scholars and cultural activists. Although they shared his love of Yiddish, they were often quite indifferent, if not hostile, to religious practice.12 As a matter of principle, his work rejects many of the secularist and ‘northernist’ assumptions of YIVO scholarship and offers a guide to the language based on the southern dialects spoken by the vast majority of Yiddish speakers to this day. As such, its masterful grammar section, which draws on materials systematically culled from the spoken language,13 presents a welcome challenge to many of the positions widely accepted in university pedagogy and expands students’ understanding of the dynamics of Yiddish as a living language. xxvii Historical and Cultural Context A more comprehensive reference to the language than College Yiddish, YSG also covers some grammatical topics (such as verbal aspect) too advanced for a beginner’s textbook, and gives greater attention to the sounds and script of the language.14 It presents Yiddish language materials in both Standard Yiddish Orthography (SYO, also known by its Yiddish name der eynheytlekher oysleyg/der ainhaitlexer ous-laig, ‘unitary spelling’), the spelling system promoted by YIVO, and in his own ingenious interdialectal system that enables the reader to pronounce words in any of the three major dialects of Eastern Yiddish: Northeastern Yiddish (NEY, popularly known as ‘Lithuanian’ or Litvish/Litviś), Central (CY, ‘Polish’), and Southeastern (SEY, ‘Ukrainian’).15 Further, the volume, which is almost exclusively based on the author’s own painstaking research, contains invaluable overviews of such topics as the phonological evolution of the language,16 the relationship between Yiddish’s constituent ‘components’ (Germanic, Semitic, Romance, and Slavic), the development of Jewish languages and writing systems in general, and the role of Judaism as a religious

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