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 civilization in shaping Yiddish. It also contains a toponymical list explicating ‘Jewish geography’ (the Yiddish names for regions historically populated by Jews) and an invaluable bibliography of important works in the field. Birnbaum’s interests were hardly limited to the linguistic or religious dimensions of Yiddish Studies, however. The book includes specimens of Yiddish prose and poetic texts spanning eight centuries, providing a rich tapestry for the appreciation of Yiddish literature from the medieval to modern eras across its vast European geographic expanse and through the Holocaust. In short, Birnbaum’s Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar is essential reading for any serious student of Yiddish and its culture, Ashkenazi Jewry, or Germanic languages.

The Emergence of a Yiddish Scholarship In Solomon Birnbaum’s youth, Yiddish was widely denied recognition as an autonomous language. Instead, it was commonly derided as a corrupted German dialect, an unruly, unaesthetic amalgam of Slavic, Semitic, and Germanic elements spoken only by the most unenlightened of Jews – those millions dwelling in poverty in ‘semi-barbaric’ Eastern Europe or in immigrant quarters in Central and Western European and American cities. Yiddish was commonly assumed to be a product of Jews’ forced medieval segregation, its origins lying in ‘correct’ German that had been carried by Jews into Central European ghettos or beyond them into Eastern Europe. There it decayed over generations from its pristine state, proof of the vast chasm separating the lucky few, the ‘civilized’ (i.e. acculturated) Jews of the West and the ‘benighted’ majority, the distinctively Jewish masses in the East. That it was the historic language of all of Ashkenazi Jews was largely forgotten, repressed, or denied by those Jews whose ancestors had abandoned it in the course of the nineteenth century for German and other languages of modern states. xxviii Kalman Weiser

Since the beginnings of activity in the late eighteenth century on behalf of the Jews’ civil and political emancipation in the West, Yiddish’s disappearance was eagerly anticipated. The internal ‘Jewish Enlightenment,’ the Haskalah, typically denigrated the Jews’ mother tongue. It similarly encouraged Jews to embrace the language of the state as part of its program for them to transcend their traditional intellectual, cultural, and social boundaries. What little modern scholarship did exist about Yiddish by the late nineteenth century typically treated it as a minor phenomenon, a subfield of German philology rather than as a field in its own right demanding knowledge of Germanic, Semitic, Slavic, and Romance linguistics, in addition to deep familiarity with Jewish cultural history.17 These attitudes first began to change toward the turn of the twentieth century with the advent of the Jewish nationalist movement. Its founders, themselves often westernized Jews estranged from Jewish tradition, came to re-evaluate Jewish languages – first Hebrew and later Yiddish and other languages – for their cultural, sociological, and political value. Even before the Russified labour Zionist Ber Borochov published his epoch-making essay ‘The Tasks of Yiddish Philology’ declaring the promotion, study, and standardization of Yiddish a national necessity,18 Yiddish found an impassioned advocate in Solomon Birnbaum’s father Nathan. Indeed, Solomon Birnbaum composed his Grammatik in line with the pre-1914 movement his father espoused ‘which aimed at rebuilding Austria- Hungary as a structure of national-cultural [i.e. ethnic] units.’19 It is to him, as ‘the first western champion of Yiddish’ along with his ‘devoted wife’ Rosa, that Solomon Birnbaum dedicated YSG.

The Legacy of Nathan Birnbaum Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937) was raised in a German-speaking middle-class home in Vienna by his parents, traditional Orthodox Jews who had left behind their native Galicia for the capital of the Habsburg monarchy.20 His father died when he was eleven years old, and he slowly drifted away from religious observance. Nonetheless, in his later adolescence he rejected the integrationist ideology common among his generation of Central European Jews. Instead, Nathan Birnbaum became the foremost leader of the Jewish nationalist movement in the Habsburg Empire before Theodor Herzl arrived on the scene. Unlike Herzl, who was largely insensitive to Jewish languages, he was a staunch Hebraist, an advocate of the revival of Hebrew as the national language of the Jews, and as a spoken and written language for all of life’s functions, both sacred and mundane. Over time, he grew disillusioned by what he deemed the spiritual barrenness of political Zionism, the movement to gain an internationally recognized charter for the creation of a sovereign Jewish state in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Soured by ideological and personal differences with Herzl, he withdrew from the xxix Historical and Cultural Context

Zionist movement following the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. Meanwhile, contact with Yiddish-speaking Jewry during his itinerant Zionist activity in Eastern Europe inspired him to reappraise the diaspora. He came to see it no longer as deforming Jewish character, but instead as the site for the genesis of a unique and venerable Jewish national culture. Having earlier denounced Yiddish as the corrupt language of the ghetto,21 Nathan Birnbaum became enamoured of it as the language of authentic, unassimilated Jewry. Its former flaws were in his eyes transformed into virtues, evidence of a fundamental Jewish drive for uniqueness manifest in language. Mastering the language (he was in his forties at the time), Nathan Birnbaum worked increasingly as a publicist and politician to defend and promote the idiom and its blossoming secular culture. As early as 1904, he proclaimed the need to ‘awaken an open and conscious Jewish language-pride among Eastern European Jews’ in order to combat the widespread perception of Yiddish as, at best, a ‘hand- maiden’ of Hebrew and, at worst, a degenerate form of German.22 He was active in an attempt to gain official recognition for the language and, indirectly, for the Jews as a legitimate national community with rights to cultural autonomy within the framework of the multilingual, multi-ethnic Habsburg empire. In 1907 he even ran for election as a Jewish national delegate to the Austrian parliament from the Galician district of Buczacz, but was deprived of a mandate by the fraudulent vote counting of Polish nationalists who wished to preserve ethnic domination of this province populated chiefly by Poles, Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent, Jews. The following year he served as the chief organizer of the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, in the neighbouring Austrian province of Bukovina. There, Yiddish writers, intellectuals, and cultural and political activists met to discuss the future of the language and famously proclaimed it a national language of the Jewish people.23 Nathan Birnbaum drew adolescent Solomon, the eldest of three sons, into his efforts on behalf of the Jüdische Renaissance, the movement to ‘re-invigorate’ European Jewry as a whole and to develop its potential for Jewish secularized cultural creativity. The younger Birnbaum’s interest in Yiddish was evident as early as 1907, when at the age of sixteen he published his first translation of Yiddish literature into German.24 The following year his family relocated from Vienna to Czernowitz to pursue his father’s Yiddishist, Diaspora nationalist activity. There Solomon Birnbaum, a native speaker of German, mastered the local (Southeastern) dialect of the language.25 He returned to the Austrian capital in 1910, and in 1912 relocated again to Berlin, where his father had moved the family following a religious awakening that caused him to grow increasingly estranged from what he came to see as the linguistic ‘idolatry’ of the secularist Yiddishist movement. xxx Kalman Weiser

Influenced profoundly by his father, he endeavoured to build among German- speaking Jews awareness of and admiration for the cultural treasures of Yiddish- speaking Jewry. He translated or transcribed selections of Yiddish literature, poems, and folklore in order to make them accessible to a German-reading audience unschooled in the Hebrew alphabet. A number of these appeared in 1913-14 in Mordechai Fritz Kaufmann’s Die Freistatt, the ephemeral organ of the ‘pan-Jewish’ movement dedicated to uniting German and East European Jews, to which his father had begun contributing articles with an increasingly religious bent.26 He also published brief announcements and reviews of new works of Yiddish scholarship.27 Solomon Birnbaum was appalled by the then widespread use of transcription schemes for Yiddish that relied heavily on the norms of German spelling and that romanized its Semitic elements to reflect their pronunciation not in Yiddish but in Hebrew and Aramaic, somewhat as pronounced by German Jews. These measures reinforced, wittingly or unwittingly, the image of Yiddish as at best a folk dialect of German peppered with Hebrew words rather than as the self-sufficient, unitary language of a distinct people. In order to remedy this situation, Birnbaum devised his own system of transcription into Latin letters for use in Die Freistatt. He also began to experiment with his own orthographic system in Hebrew letters in order to facilitate the reading of texts in the original by those who did not know the language.28

Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache The First World War engendered a remarkable turn of events in the history of Yiddish scholarship and in relations between German speakers and Eastern European Jews. The encounter in occupied territories with masses of Yiddish- speaking Jews, so unlike the Jews known in German-speaking lands, not only generated much curiosity among Kaiser Wilhelm II’s soldiers; it also inspired a large number of articles in the popular press seeking to describe this strange people and evaluate its value for the war effort and its post-war future. It also necessitated that troops, officials, and businessmen in the German army familiarize themselves with the language and culture of a significant part of the local population in whose hands resided much commerce and whose émigré population was believed to hold decisive political influence in the United States. This prompted the use of Yiddish in official proclamations aimed at the Jewish population (including Kaiser Wilhelm II’s famous appeal to his ‘beloved Jews’ to support the German war effort to free them from arbitrary and brutal tsarist rule), the tolerance of Yiddish as a language of instruction in Jewish secular schools, and the sponsorship of a pro-German Yiddish press. Naturally, because of its formal similarity to German, Yiddish was more accessible to German speakers than the Slavic or Baltic languages spoken xxxi Historical and Cultural Context by other local peoples, yet mutual miscomprehension between speakers of the two languages was still the norm.29 To facilitate interactions, the Protestant theologian and Orientalist Hermann Strack (later one of Birnbaum’s professors at the University of Berlin) produced a Yiddish-German dictionary and the occupation authority issued a multilingual dictionary that included Yiddish alongside German and five other languages.30 In Birnbaum’s retrospective appraisal, the practical value imparted to the language by the war likely enabled him to secure a reputable publisher for his Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache.31 In April 1915, the twenty-three-year-old Salomo Birnbaum approached the A. Hartleben publishing house in Vienna with a proposal for a Yiddish volume for its popular series of language self-instruction books, Die Kunst der Polyglottie. Hartleben’s response was immediately positive, although not wholly free of doubts characteristic of the day about the soundness of the undertaking:

The question poses itself whether this Jewish language (Judensprache) suffices to fill a volume of 12 printer’s sheets (=192 pages) in my language library, whether it has scientific, grammatical foundations at all. Therefore, I request that you provide me with written information about it and inform me what literature already exists about the Yiddish language and whether it comprises only multiple separate dialects that are not mutually intelligible.

Above all, Hartleben asked Birnbaum, as yet unknown in academic circles, ‘Are you up to the task?’32 In composing his response, Birnbaum drew upon the already significant erudition he had demonstrated in his contributions to Die Freistatt.33 More than satisfied with Birnbaum’s response, which he complimented for its thoroughness and clarity, Hartleben quickly signed a contract with Birnbaum for the book’s production, to be completed by ‘the war’s end.’ The Grammatik outlines many themes and questions that would occupy Birnbaum throughout his career as a researcher. Its preface, written of necessity with great brevity, begins by asserting the almost total ignorance among non-Jews of post-biblical Jewish history, and the estrangement of denationalized Western Jewry from virtually all aspects of the Jewish nation’s distinctive culture in Eastern Europe – ‘the organic continuation of that of previous Jewish epochs.’ Since the decline of Hebrew as a spoken language some two thousand years ago, it explains that groups of Jews have spoken a number of Jewish languages – including ‘Jewish Aramaic, Jewish Arabic, and Jewish Spanish’ – but Yiddish dwarfs all of them in the size of its speech community in recent centuries.34 Repudiating the layman’s assumption that Yiddish is a perversion of modern (i.e., New High) xxxii Kalman Weiser

German, the preface advances that Yiddish has its origins in medieval (Middle High) German dialects shared by Jews and Germans (an idea Birnbaum would later repudiate in favour of the notion that Jews’ German was never identical with that of non-Jews). The spiritual uniqueness of the Jewish people over time – not ‘ghetto isolation’ – shaped it, however, into a distinct language, fusing it with Hebrew-Aramaic elements and imparting to it a unique phonetic colouration. The preface concludes with a discussion of the development of the modern literary language and Yiddish’s contemporary demographics. The body of the work provides the reader with an introduction to Yiddish orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, and dialectology. It concludes with a list of common first names, abbreviations used in print, geographical names, a bibliography of important scholarly works, and a table summarizing the phonetics of Yiddish. These are reinforced by language exercises and selections by contemporary writers in their original language and in German translation. At the time of its publication, this was a work far more comprehensive and superior to any other about Yiddish appearing in German or any other language. It describes contemporary Yiddish as an autonomous system, avoiding the use of descriptive categories influenced by the German literary language, Latin school grammars, or diachronic considerations.35 Today, scholars commend Birnbaum’s book for its excellent discussions of the phonology and morphology as well as of central syntactic phenomena of the language (including verbal aspect, a topic that would not be discussed by Yiddish linguists until decades later). Based on the grammar of Central Yiddish, it nonetheless contains a comprehensive summary of the ways in which Northeastern pronunciation differs from Central pronunciation, and references to syntactic and morphological uses that differ in the two dialects. Thanks to a preliminary version of Birnbaum’s interdialectal orthographic and transliteration systems, its entries can be read easily and precisely in any of the three major dialects.36 Birnbaum’s only concession to what he later decried as ‘maskilic spelling’ (phonetically imprecise spellings introduced in the nineteenth century by maskilim, proponents of the Haskalah, in imitation of literary German) was the preservation of ayin instead of yod in unaccented syllables and before lamed and mem when they function as syllables.37 Neither the war, nor the publication of Birnbaum’s Yiddish grammar came to an anticipated quick resolution. Birnbaum himself volunteered for military service, obtaining the rank of lieutenant, and was dispatched to the war front in what is now northern Italy, where he was severely wounded. Even while editing proofs in the trenches and later from a military hospital bed, he refused to compromise his exacting standards. By the end of 1916, with matters dragging out and no end in sight, Hartleben lamented to Birnbaum, ‘Repeatedly, I regret having taken this disastrous manuscript into the press.’38 Much to the annoyance xxxiii Historical and Cultural Context of the exasperated publisher, who assigned chief responsibility for delays to the author (a view Birnbaum did not share), the demands of the preparation of the volume far exceeded the publisher’s technical and financial expectations. Hebrew fonts with the necessary diacritics were unobtainable and had to be commissioned from a graphic design company in Bohemia. Typesetters familiar with Yiddish were hard to find in a time of war; endless corrections were required and became lost when finally printed and sent to the author for review. In short, Hartleben concluded, ‘doom weighs on this Yiddish grammar.’39 By the time the book was published some three years later in 1918, Hartleben had more than once expressed his extreme displeasure with the work and its author: ‘I consider it one of the unhappiest moments of my professional existence when you approached my firm to produce your book.’40 Perhaps not surprisingly, the book was not a great financial success. The 3000 copies printed landed mainly in the hands of German-speaking Jews and earned neither the author nor the press much money.41 It was, however, a critical success, earning praise for both its remarkable conciseness and for helping to demystify the culture of Eastern European Jewry. The scholarly Orientalistische Literaturzeitung commented,

The interest in the language and literature of Eastern European Jewry awakened by the war has remained platonic not because of a lack of willingness to occupy oneself with the subject but because of the lack of a thorough book to learn the language and penetrate this intellectual world. Strack’s texts and dictionary only partly met the need since a grammar was lacking… The texts [in Birnbaum’s Grammatik – KW] give a good sense of the height which Yiddish literature has reached and may surprise those who consider Eastern European Jewry to be an uncultured mass.42

The popular German-language Jewish press lauded the book’s value in bringing German and Eastern European Jews closer together. ‘How many Jewish soldiers who crossed the borders of Russia and Galicia for the first time and would have liked to converse in depth with their Jewish brothers felt the lack of an appropriate Yiddish grammar?’ asked the Swiss Jewish Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweitz.43 Following the First World War, Birnbaum turned to Oriental studies at the universities of Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, and Würzburg.44 His 1921 University of Würzburg dissertation, much of which he wrote while recuperating in a military hospital during the war, explores the subject of the Hebrew-Aramaic component of Yiddish. In it, Birnbaum discarded the final vestige of maskilic xxxiv Kalman Weiser orthography present in the 1918 Grammatik.45 It was published the following year under the title Das hebräische und aramäische Element in der jiddischen Sprache. Today, the book, which helped lay the foundation of research about Ashkenazi Hebrew as well as Yiddish, is praised for its innovative investigation of phonological developments within the Semitic component of Yiddish, and for demonstrating how Hebrew-Aramaic elements fused with other components within the language at all lexical and morphological levels to produce a coherent, unitary whole comparable to English, another language of extremely diverse origins.46 Ironically, a contemporary scholarly reviewer who was unconvinced by Birnbaum’s arguments about ‘Jüdischdeutsch,’ commented, ‘By the way, the dissertation contains many valuable contributions to the knowledge of Yiddish, with which the author seems to be extremely at home. Perhaps we might expect from him sometime a scientific presentation of Yiddish grammar, which remains a desideratum.’47 Soon after settling in Hamburg in 1921, Birnbaum became acquainted with the Germanist Conrad Borchling, who was devoting a semester with students to the study of Yiddish using Hermann Strack’s Jüdischdeutsche Texte48 and Birnbaum’s Grammatik. Through Borchling’s intervention, he received an appointment as lector in Yiddish at the University of Hamburg in 1922 – the very first position for Yiddish in a modern university. Throughout his teaching career in Hamburg, he offered instruction in the language in addition to courses about Yiddish linguistics and literature.49 Attendance in Birnbaum’s courses was modest due, in his opinion, to Yiddish’s lack of practical value in Hamburg, where there was but a small Jewish population and few Yiddish speakers. Those who attended his class were mainly German Jewish students and a few non-Jewish academics. Their motivations in studying Yiddish were diverse: Yiddish’s value for Jewish nationalism, its connection to religion, its literature, and interest in linguistics. Despite the small audience for his courses, his work drew the attention of Heinz Kloss, a specialist in minority languages then employed in Stuttgart in the Deutsches Auslandsinstitut (German Foreign Institute), an organization occupied with studying German nationals and people of German descent abroad, and to promoting Germany’s relations with them.50 Kloss and a colleague in the Deutsche Akademie (Akademie zur Wissenschaftlichen Erforschung und Pflege des Deutschtums [Academy for the Scientific Investigation and Cultivation of Germanness]) asked Birnbaum to head the Yiddish division of a proposed institute for the study of languages closely related to German. However, the institute, which was to occupy itself with Dutch, German, Afrikaans, Friesian, and Pennsylvania Dutch, as well as Yiddish, never came into existence. In the early months of 1933, Birnbaum himself solicited the support of Germanists, general linguists, Hebrew scholars, and Hebrew Bible xxxv Historical and Cultural Context experts – all non-Jewish - in German-speaking countries for the creation of an Institutum Germano-Judaicum dedicated to the study of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Jewry. Unfortunately, the project was still-born, owing to the advent of the Nazi regime.51

Language and Ideology: Solomon Birnbaum’s ‘Traditionalist’ School of Yiddish Standardization52 Birnbaum followed his father’s path of religious return. While in Hamburg he was active in the circles of the Orthodox political party Agudat Israel (Agudes Yisroel/Agjdys Ïisruul), whose General Secretary his father had become after the First World War.53 In addition to his professional articles, whose appearance in top journals and encyclopaedias helped to disseminate his views and raise the prestige of Yiddish in the world of European and Semitic philology,54 he contributed articles on a variety of topics reflecting his religious worldview to German-language Jewish publications and the Yiddish press in Eastern Europe and New York. These include popularizations of his scholarship, discussions of the importance of Yiddish for Orthodox Jews, and critical appraisals of the secularization of Jewish life.55 Attracted by both the spirituality of Hasidic life and the bulwark against secular materialism it offered, he also published selections from Hasidic literature and produced a book about the venerated ‘founder’ of Hasidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov.56 For more than two decades, he also continued to refine the orthographic and transcription systems he had introduced in his earliest publications. With the rise of language consciousness among Yiddish-speaking intellectuals, the reform of Yiddish spelling became a pressing matter during the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, it became the subject of much popular and scholarly discussion in Poland, the USSR and New York. Birnbaum argued in various forums against the major spelling systems then in use, on both ideological and scientific grounds. The first of these was SYO (Standard Yiddish Orthography; known popularly as ‘Yivo-oysleyg/Iîvuu-ous-laig’ i.e. YIVO-spelling), which was elaborated in Poland in the 1930s by YIVO and implemented in the network of secular Yiddishist schools known by the acronym Tsisho/Ciśo (Tsentrale yidishe shul-organizatsye/Céntraly Iîdiśy śúl-organizaciy [the Central Yiddish School Organization]). The second was the Soviet system (Sovetisher oysleyg/Sovétiśer ous-laig), the only system conceived with official support and made binding by government decree. He called his own scheme the ‘Orthodox’ or ‘traditionalist’ system to emphasize that it drew upon traditional, pre-Haskalah conventions. Both the Soviet and YIVO systems reject the most blatant daytshmerizmen/ daaćmerizmyn (elements deplored by most Yiddish linguists as undesirable borrowings from literary German since the nineteenth century), and are xxxvi Kalman Weiser essentially phonemic and largely interdialectical, meaning that speakers of any of the three major Yiddish dialects can with practice read them according to their own dialectical pronunciations. However, single graphemes commonly represent multiple vowels, creating ambiguities for anyone not using Standard Yiddish pronunciation, especially when encountering an unfamiliar word.57 The Soviet system differs primarily in that it totally eliminated the original, non-phonetic spelling of the Hebrew and Aramaic component and final forms of letters, at least in publications destined for Soviet readers. The ‘Orthodox’ system, which Birnbaum defined in strict opposition to what he labelled the ‘neo-maskilic’ (SYO) and ‘Bolshevik’ (Soviet) systems, seeks to represent the maximum number of phonemic oppositions in all three dialects simultaneously, and is also more purist in its approach, rejecting secular European influences as foreign and on the whole inimical to the Jewish way of life. The Haskalah, Birnbaum charged, was responsible for the inner slavery of the Jews to Gentile values. Its vilification of Yiddish as a deformation of German barring Jews’ progress and integration into gentile society was tantamount to the negation of yidishkeyt/Iîdiśkait.58 The ‘new maskilim’ – twentieth-century secular nationalists and socialists – had declared war on the ‘ugly, Germanized corrupt language’ of the nineteenth century ‘old maskilim,’ and to some extent had actually improved on their predecessors’ Germanized orthography (which Birnbaum dismissed as being ‘from a scientific standpoint…stupid’). These changes, however, had not rendered the language ‘more Jewish.’59 On the contrary, rather than build upon the language’s native traditions, Yiddishists had further denuded it of its authentically Jewish character through the imitation of Gentile languages. Like the ‘old maskilim’ whom they opposed, Yiddishists lived ‘in a world which is not in its essence Jewish, or is only half-Jewish,’ and they had consequently lost or were in the process of losing the authentic Yiddish idiom suffused with religious culture.60 Solomon Birnbaum repeatedly expressed in his writings the profound conviction that Yiddish, together with the sacred liturgical and scholarly language of Hebrew-Aramaic – what traditional Ashkenazi Jews called loshn-koydesh/ luuśn-koidyś (the holy language) – represented the essential core of Ashkenazi religious and cultural life and thus necessitated careful cultivation. He denounced Modern Hebrew, which draws primarily on biblical and mishnaic (not rabbinic) Hebrew and introduces a non-traditional pronunciation. To him, Modern Hebrew was an inorganic and ‘soulless Esperanto,’ the artificial engineering of secular enlighteners and nationalists with little or no regard for its sanctity and historical legacy. Similarly, the goal of the predominantly leftist Yiddishist movement to transform Yiddish into an instrument of progressive, secular culture was for Birnbaum a distorted paradox. Yiddishists sought to make profane a language that xxxvii Historical and Cultural Context had for centuries served as a medium to convey religious thought and feeling and consequently absorbed an element of holiness. For him, the rival movements for a monolingual Jewish society, Hebraism and Yiddishism, were but two sides of the same coin threatening traditional Judaism, which constituted the raison d’être of the Jewish people and the source of its uniqueness. Moreover, the determined efforts of Yiddishists had rid contemporary Yiddish only of the most glaring Germanisms in spelling and vocabulary introduced by the Haskalah, and had unwittingly permitted new ones to creep in. Scores of contemporary German words had been adopted, often only with the slightest modification to make them appear more in harmony with the rules of Yiddish morphology and phonology. Worst of all, German words had displaced Yiddish cognates. The word visnshaft/visnśaft, used in traditional Yiddish translations of the Bible to mean ‘knowledge,’ had, for example, assumed the meaning of German Wissenschaft, ‘science’ or ‘scholarship.’ Hence the irony of the title YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific (visnshaftlekh/visnśaftlex) Institute, whose director Max Weinreich was a native speaker of German like Birnbaum, and shared his penchant for linguistic purism. Birnbaum scoffed at the notion of orthoepy, or standard pronunciation, for Yiddish on the grounds that it, too, constituted the conscious modelling of Gentile language habits. He rejected the argument that the diffusion of a single prestige- bearing dialect represents a natural and progressive sociolinguistic phenomenon. Instead, he encouraged each individual to retain his or her authentic, native dialect rather than assume a foreign or synthetic one.61 Thus, he supported the maintenance of a normative literary language, which had long existed in Yiddish and whose ‘… grammar is that of the Southern dialect,’ but not innovation in the form of a universal pronunciation.62 In particular, he objected to the ‘literary’ pronunciation (today commonly known as klal-yidish/klal-Iîdiś or YIVO-Yiddish despite the fact that YIVO did not create it) promoted in the Yiddish secular sector and most commonly taught in academic settings today.63 The pronunciation of klal-yidish/klal-Iîdiś is that of ‘purified’ Lithuanian Yiddish, the speech of Vilna intellectual circles before the Second World War.64 In the pronunciation of vowels, it more closely resembles literary German than any other Yiddish dialect. This type of speech is popularly summarized by the formula ‘NE Yiddish without /ej/’ where other dialects have / oj/ — for instance, Polish and Ukrainian /bojm/ (tree) instead of the Lithuanian / bejm/.65 Birnbaum further objected to the standard of ‘purified’ NEY pronunciation because of its association with secularism and the Haskalah, in contrast with the speech of the more Hasidic South. A norm based on NEY pronunciation was generally employed on both continents in the various networks of Yiddish secular xxxviii Kalman Weiser schools, which were largely organized on the initiatives of Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews), regardless of the native dialects of both teachers and students.66 That the members of YIVO in Vilna were frequently native speakers of NEY, or often made a point of adopting klal-yidish/klal-Iîdiś because of its modern and enlightened connotations, only strengthened his resistance to its spread. Nonetheless, he considered NEY – in contrast with klal-yidish/klal-Iîdiś – a legitimate historical development of the language, and deemed it in no way inferior to any other dialect. In his eyes, it was merely grossly inappropriate for NEY to usurp the place of other dialects in the mouths of non-Litvaks.67 Indeed, he later wrote, ‘if a standard pronunciation is regarded as necessary, then it ought to surely to be the speech of the three-quarter majority’ – i.e., based on the southern dialects.68 Organizers of the Beys-yankev/Bais Iaankyv (known in Polish as Bajs Jakow, in English as Beth Jacob) schools for girls in Poland shared Birnbaum’s concerns for the future of Yiddish in the Orthodox sector, and made the historic decision to adopt Birnbaum’s system in 1930. Thereafter Birnbaum was able to point with pride to the success of his system in the largest Jewish educational system in interwar Poland, where the number of children far exceeded that of even all Jewish secular schools put together. His system had the virtue of being phonemically accurate and wholly consistent. Unlike other systems that worked better with literary pronunciation than other dialects, his system could be read to produce the features of any of the major dialects of Yiddish – even by readers unfamiliar with a specific dialect. Much to his annoyance, however, most Orthodox writers and publications refused to employ a spelling system different from that of the rest of the Warsaw Yiddish press, arguing that Birnbaum’s system was too difficult to master. Having no native dialect of Yiddish, Birnbaum permitted himself to exchange the Bukovinian (Southeastern) pronunciation he had adopted in his adolescence for that of Central Yiddish, the dominant pronunciation in the ultra-Orthodox circles in which he increasingly traveled. While teaching summer courses for the Beys-yankev/Bais-Iaankyv schools in 1930, he had overheard a student unfamiliar with his Bukovina dialect unfavourably remark that ‘he speaks like a goy,’ and this provided the impetus for his own shift in pronunciation.69 Despite his ideological opposition to YIVO, Birnbaum contributed to its publications and maintained collegial relations with a number of its members. That he was greatly admired by YIVO’s director Max Weinreich is evident in the latter’s invitation to him to participate in the founding of YIVO in 1925, and in repeated entreaties for him to join YIVO’s philological section, as well as to participate in its 1931 spelling conference aimed at instituting a standardized spelling in all Jewish schools.70 Though he professed to respect the dedication of YIVO members, Birnbaum explained that he could not permit himself to be xxxix Historical and Cultural Context associated with an organization whose fundamental principles included secularism. In response, Max Weinreich argued that YIVO interferes in the personal views of none of its researchers. He warned that the championing of a separatist spelling system – one with which he did not necessarily agree was any more ‘traditional’ than YIVO’s – would only bring harm to the Yiddish literary language and in fact deprive Birnbaum of an audience to spread his message and win adherents for his views. Rather than promote the estrangement of one section of Yiddish speakers from another, he urged Birnbaum to attend the conference as a representative of the Beys-yankev/Bais-Iaankyv schools.71 For Birnbaum, however, this was not possible. As he wrote to Weinreich, ‘How could I, with my own hands, help to bring to, or strengthen among, the Jewish people an ideal I don’t approve of, an ideal which is dying out throughout the world even though it is fighting with its last, savage strength?’72 When Weinreich questioned why Birnbaum, an Orthodox Jew, felt no qualms about teaching at a secular German university populated by Christians of various denominations, he responded, ‘I am only a guest, even if I were a [full] professor. And besides that, secularism is not at its base. There is a theological faculty.’ While this answer may appear disingenuous, it expresses the crux of Birnbaum’s position. Quite simply, he explained, he could not in good conscience become an insider in a secularist institution, one whose ideological foundations were in diametric opposition to his own convictions, even though other Orthodox Jews may participate in it, and he would not be impeded from expressing his own views.73 Despite publicly expressing objections to YIVO’s spelling system, Birnbaum chose to propagate his system exclusively within Orthodox circles, where he considered himself an insider and therefore possessing influence.

The ‘Second Life’ of Birnbaum’s Grammatik When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Solomon Birnbaum almost immediately emigrated from Germany. He settled in England where, fortunately, his reputation preceded him. Not long after arriving, he was invited by Professor Norman Jopson of University College in London, who had read his Grammatik, to deliver a series of public lectures about Yiddish. The quality of his lectures and his scholarship in general helped him obtain dual appointments as Lecturer in Hebrew Palaeography and Epigraphy in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, 1936-1957) and as Lecturer in East European Studies in the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES, 1939-58), both at the University of London, until his retirement in 1958.74 The lectures form the basis of a book titled The Yiddish Language, whose proofs Birnbaum had begun to read and correct when the Second World War erupted and German bombs destroyed them.75 Its contents, preserved in his archives, reveal that Birnbaum was ready to publish a substantial, English- xl Kalman Weiser language survey of Yiddish and its grammar decades before YSG was published. He clearly appeared eager to continue the project when he renewed contact with the Viennese publisher Hartleben in the 1950s. The original English language work was, however, never published because of his preoccupation with other projects. His sons say that shortly after the war, with the then recent discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he became very much occupied with dating them and with his Hebrew palaeographic research in general, including his magnum opus, The Hebrew Scripts.76 The impetus for Birnbaum’s contacting Hartleben was simple. In a letter to Hartleben in 1952, he explained that someone had written to him from America, informing him that he had seen a new edition of the press’s Bibliothek der Sprachenkunde advertised, and asked whether Birnbaum had reworked his Grammatik.77 Birnbaum wrote to the press to inquire whether it had, without his knowing, published a second edition of the book, and whether it might be interested in publishing an English-language version in exclusively Latin letters. Hartleben’s response was less than encouraging: a new edition was ‘neither necessary nor intended. There are still so many copies of the 1919 [sic] edition that the very slight demand for it is certainly covered for the next two decades.’78 When his son David showed him in 1961 what appeared to be a reproduction of the book that he had bought in a London bookstore, he turned to Hartleben again to inquire about honoraria. He was informed that a number of sets of unbound sheets had been provided with a new cover in the last decade but that no new edition had been issued.79 The book’s fortunes changed in 1965. Helmut Buske, an aspiring academic publisher who had previously operated his own bookstore in Tübingen, approached Birnbaum about issuing a reprint of the 1918 edition to meet what he had noticed was a growing demand. For reasons of cost and time, Buske and Birnbaum agreed that changes in the new edition would be kept to a minimum. The new edition, to which the author attached a preface and an expanded and updated bibliography, proved enough of a success to warrant the publication of a third edition in 1978 and fourth and fifth editions in 1984 and 1988 (each one with a further enlarged bibliography). The pleasure Birnbaum took in this increased interest in Yiddish was, however, tinged with pain. ‘How tragic,’ he noted in the preface to the third edition, ‘that millions had to die to make possible this interest.’80 Indeed, the interest in Yiddish had become adequate to justify a new, more general work: Die jiddische Sprache: Ein kurzer Überblick und Texte aus acht Jahrhunderten (Hamburg: Buske, 1974; second expanded edition, 1986; third edition, with foreword by Walter Röll, 1997). At the same time, Birnbaum encouraged and assisted scholars in post-war Germany to establish the field of Yiddish Studies there. In 1981, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 100: Sonderheft Jiddisch. xli Historical and Cultural Context

Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft was dedicated to him in honour of his ninetieth birthday. In recognition of his lifetime of major contributions to Yiddish Studies, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1986 at the University of Trier, a leading post-war centre for Yiddish research.81 Despite the renewed and growing interest in Yiddish in German-speaking lands, Birnbaum recognized that the most sizeable audience for his work was likely in the English-speaking world. Since the 1970s Yiddish was being introduced in an increasing number of American universities, where it found an audience above all among the children and grand children of Yiddish-speakers who were eager to understand their cultural heritage. He himself relocated in 1970 to Toronto to be close to his three sons: Eleazar, a professor of Turkish Studies at the University of Toronto; David, an architect; and his eldest son, Jacob, who founded and directed the movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the 1960s while residing in New York City. The doyen of Yiddish Studies, Solomon Birnbaum was urged, in his mid- eighties, by Eleazar to produce a reliable comprehensive general work in English and to offer it to the University of Toronto Press. The present volume of YSG is that work in updated form. It builds upon his vast oeuvre of both published and unpublished articles, books, and lectures. He continued his research until his death in 1989.

Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar The synthesis of a lifetime of pioneering research, YSG cannot be fully appreciated without acknowledging its polemic thrust against secular Yiddishism in general, and the standardization norms promoted by what Birnbaum considered the secular- dominated ‘northern’ school of Yiddish linguistics and language standardization specifically.82 Following the Second World War and the liquidation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, Birnbaum directed his criticism almost exclusively at YIVO, whose headquarters had relocated with Max Weinreich from Vilna to New York City in 1940. He polemicized with YIVO Yiddishists on the pages of Yidishe Shprakh/Iîdiśy Śprax, YIVO’s journal for language standardization. Throughout his career, Birnbaum continued to oppose what he saw as the tyranny of an ‘insignificant minority’ of secular, Vilna-centric intellectuals determined to impose their own language standards on the vast majority of Yiddish speakers, who were speakers of other dialects.83 As Yiddish scholar Joshua Fishman notes in a review of the original edition of YSG, ‘Except for his views on the status of the language (language rather than dialect), age, and reasons for the appearance of Yiddish, Birnbaum is in a distinct minority (often a minority of one) among Yiddish specialists.’84 Even in his terminology, Birnbaum departed from the accepted conventions in the field of Yiddish dialectology.85 His pro- southern orientation, which is in no way concealed by the author, is evident in his xlii Kalman Weiser tendency to employ the terms ‘Yiddish’ and ‘New East Yiddish’ interchangeably with ‘Southern Yiddish’ (e.g. pp. 72, 96, 127).86 Distinctive southern features found in YSG include grammatical features such as gender (particularly the use of the neuter, e.g. dos os/dus os [‘the letter’] and dos yidishkeyt/dus Iîdiśkait [‘Jewishness’], where Uriel Weinreich’s bilingual dictionary prescribes otherwise); pluralisation, e.g. di khesroynim/di xesroinym along with di khesroynes/di xesroinys (‘flaws’); past participles, e.g. gebrengt/ gybréngt (‘brought’); numerals and counting forms (forms such as elef/élyf and tsvelef/cwélyf for ‘eleven’ and ‘twelve’ and ferder/férder and fifter/fifter for ‘fourth’ and ‘fifth’ are not only used in southern dialects but are also ‘further’ from their German cognates – elf, zwölf, vierter, fünfter – than Standard Yiddish elf/elf, tsvelf/cwélf, ferter/férter and finfter/finfter and therefore most distinct)87; reflexive pronouns (here declined according to person rather than taking the generic zikh/ zex, ‘one’s self’ e.g. ikh leyg mikh/ex laig mex instead of ikh leyg zikh/ex laig zex, ‘I lay myself’); and use of the Central Yiddish form undz (h)obmir or (h)omir/jndz (h)obmir or (h)omir, which does not appear in the literary language, alongside the pan-dialectal mir hobn/mir hobn ‘we have.’ He also includes Central Yiddish ets/éc (you, nominative, plural or formal) and enk/énk (you, oblative, plural or formal) alongside pan-dialectal ir/ir and aykh/aax. To his credit, where NEY syntactical and morphological features differ from those he promotes, they are usually noted and described. Differences in the phonology of northern dialect are indicated on pp. 218-19. Naturally, Birnbaum employs his own spelling system in the grammar section of the book. While he does provide SYO spellings alongside it, he is sure to demonstrate what he deems the inadequacies of this system. The prescribed pronunciation for SYO, he argues, actually impoverishes the language and creates new homophones. In particular, he protests the disappearance of distinct vowels, especially in the phonemically richer Central and Southeastern dialects, through their representation with a common grapheme in SYO (pp. 100-1). Birnbaum’s system, in contrast, establishes a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme for the Indo-European component of the language. Thus, a speaker or student of any of the three major Yiddish dialects can more easily read using his own pronunciation, rather than a normative one. Birnbaum’s system also facilitates the reading of the Semitic component by employing vocalization points (niqqudot) in stressed syllables or where further disambiguation is needed. SYO, in contrast, allows for full vocalization of Hebrew and Aramaic-origin words, but this feature is not mandatory88 (and is seldom employed in publications). Birnbaum’s ‘traditionalist’ spelling system is used in his ‘An Outline of Yiddish Grammar’ (YSG, 190-307); in other sections of the book he employs his own transcription system, not YIVO’s, for the benefit of those who seek only xliii Historical and Cultural Context an overview of the subject and not to master the language. Mastering both his transcription and spelling systems (outlined in YSG, 200-9) may seem daunting to new learners as well as to those already familiar with the YIVO systems, which are less precise than Birnbaum’s for rendering any dialect other than Standard Yiddish.89 The table that follows, which summarizes the differences between Birnbaum’s orthographic and transcription systems and those of YIVO, should therefore be of assistance to the reader who is already acquainted with Standard Yiddish or who is interested in pronunciation differences between dialects. Today, Standard Yiddish and traditional dialects continue to exist. The former is used, however, almost exclusively in the dwindling circles of the ideological Jewish Left and in academia. It has few native speakers. Traditional dialects have the lion’s share of speakers (overwhelmingly, Hasidic Jews), but are rapidly evolving in new directions, grammatically and otherwise, outside of Eastern Europe. It may still be too early, however, to concur with Birnbaum’s evaluation that the Yiddish of the secular and religious sectors are on their way to becoming two distinct languages.90 Birnbaum’s orthographic and transcriptions systems never caught on outside of ultra-Orthodox circles and fell into disuse, if not oblivion, after the Second World War. It speaks to the strength of his convictions that he never wavered in their use even though he was alone in doing so. The post-war Hasidic press retains to this day some elements of the ‘maskilic’ spelling and vocabulary Birnbaum disdained, although it has moved much closer to the kind of norms favoured by both Birnbaum and YIVO. It is also heavily influenced by co-territorial English and modern Hebrew in ways that undoubtedly would offend the linguistic purism and aesthetic sensibilities of Birnbaum as much as those of the Weinreichs and other YIVO stalwarts. Birnbaum’s system is ideally suited for contemporary Hasidic communities, most of whom use southern pronunciation and tend – not without good reason – to see the language as their exclusive possession, but lack Birnbaum’s heightened sensitivity to its cultivation. It is also of great benefit to students who wish to learn the authentic or living Yiddish generally in use outside the classroom. The table1 below illustrates the major differences between Birnbaum’s ‘Traditionalist’ spelling and transcription system and that of YIVO (Standard Yiddish Orthography, SYO) in the representation of vowels and diphthongs for the Indo-European component of Yiddish. The relevant sounds are also rendered for each of the major dialects of Eastern Yiddish according to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Since differences in the representation of consonants between the two systems are quite minor, they are not shown here. Birnbaum’s strategy (YSG, 213-215) for the representation of vowels in the Semitic component of Yiddish – a more complicated subject because of the much greater ‘discrepancy between phonemes and graphemes in the Semitic element of Yiddish…than in its Indo-European element, or in the orthographies of the languages using ‘Western’ alphabets’2 – is also not fully illustrated here.

Comparison between Birnbaum’s and YIVO’s Yiddish Spelling and Romanization Systems 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 SAB YIVO IPA Written Transcription Written Transcription SE C NE Indo-European Semitic

חַֿבר,ּכֹהַנים זַאמד, גרַאם A 3 a/a: a ַא a/á ַא zamd, xaver, ɔ grám koihánym חֶשּבון עּפל E ע é ע épl xéźbm ɛ ɛ ɛ ׂשינאה כ'ּבין I i i י i י x’bin siny ɪ חָכמה האט O ָא o א hot xoxmy ɔ ɔ ɔ éimjny אֶמונה די זון U i u ו j ו di zjn (sun) ɪ -- אינסטיטוט U ʊ4 ʊ ʊ ו ú (in ו international institút words) גָדול דרָאט :O u u ָא uu ָא druut guudl ɔ סֵידר שניי EY j5 aj ej יי ai יי śnai saider ɛ מריִדה גיּבריִמט I i i: i י ii ִי gybriimt meriidy -- ייִדיש I i i: i ִי î (after word ִי initial i) Iîdiś ּתֹורה טֹויּב OY j j ej וי oi ֹוי toib toiry ɔ ɔ (deaf) רּוח דער זּון U i i: u ּו jj ּו der zjjn (son) rjjex -- נַאטּור U u u u ּו úú (in ּו ‘international natúúr words’) מַ עַ לה דרײַ AY a a: aj ַײ aa ַײ draa maaly (Continued) (Continued) SAB YIVO IPA Written Transcription Written Transcription SE C NE Indo-European Semitic -- טויּב OY u6 u j וי ou וי toub (dove) ɔ ɔ ɔ ּבֶגד טעֶג E j7 ej ע éi ֶע téig béigyd ɛ ɛ חֹורבן דֹורך U u ו o ֹו dorx xorbm ɛ ɔ מְ חַ ּבר ווַײרעך E ע e ע vaarex mexaber ɒ ɒ ɒ מְשונה לאּפיטע E ə ə ə ע y י/ע lopyty myśjny

1 This table is adapted from that devised by Hugh Denman. It has been simplified and slightly expanded. ‘For the sake of clarity, sub-dialects and most positional variants have been excluded from the table while the examples drawn from the Hebrew-Aramaic component are included simply in order to demonstrate that they pertain to the same diaphonemes’ (Denman, 254). That is, the column titled ‘Semitic’ merely gives an example of a Semitic-origin word whose vowel has the same sound – and therefore transcription – as that of the word presented in the corresponding cell of the ‘Indo-European’ column. A fuller exposition of vowels – one that includes subdialects and in some ways differs from Birnbaum’s scheme – can be found in Uriel Weinreich, ‘Yiddish,’ The Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 21. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, 336. 2 Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 214. 3 This vowel realization (see YSG, p103, examples 20 and 21) is common in the southern part of the territory of southeastern Yiddish. In the northern part, the vowel is typically realized as /a/. (Mordkhe Schaechter, Yiddish II. An Intermediate and Advanced Textbook. New York: League for Yiddish, Inc., 1995, 443-4). Some scholars maintain that [ ] also applies for example 19, ‘hant.’ (Dr. Paul Glasser, personal communication.) 4 Birnbaum may be unique in noting a difference between this vowel, which is realized identically in allɔ dialects, and the one represented in the row that immediately precedes it. 5 Other scholars maintain /ej/, which Birnbaum resolutely rejects (see YSG, p98, note 3). 6 Other scholars also note /u/ in the southern part of this dialect area (see Schaechter, Yiddish II, 443). 7 Other scholars maintain /ej/, which Birnbaum resolutely rejects (see YSG, p98, note 3). In the northern part of the dialect area, [ ] is common – a defining feature of the subdialect popularly known as khirik-loshn/xiiryk-luuśn. See Schaechter, Yiddish II, 443. ɪ xlviii Kalman Weiser

NOTES 1 I am most grateful to Prof. Eleazar Birnbaum and to David Birnbaum for providing me with invaluable assistance in revising this essay, for sharing their personal reminiscences, and for granting me access to the Birnbaum Archives and other relevant materials. I would also like to thank Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser for his insightful comments on versions of this essay and for assistance with the Romanization of Yiddish titles. I thank Prof. Carl Ehrlich (York University) for assistance with the Romanization of Hebrew titles. 2 Western Yiddish refers to the now extinct branch of the Yiddish language, which was spoken by Jews in German-speaking territory for about a millennium (Solomon Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979], 12). The terms Eastern and Western Yiddish referring to the major dialectal division between the Yiddish of Eastern and Central Europe are used in most contemporary literature about Yiddish dialects. Solomon Birnbaum preferred the terms East and West Yiddish. See note 86 for more about his terminology. 3 Jeffrey Shandler, ‘College Yiddish: An Appreciation,’ foreword to the sixth edition of Uriel Weinreich, College Yiddish. An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1999), 3. 4 See Kalman Weiser, ‘Coming to America, Choosing Yiddish: Max Weinreich and the emergence of YIVO’s American center,’ in Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah Pressman, eds. Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2012), 233−52. 5 On the creation of the Atran Chair, see Andrew Sunshine, ‘The making of a Chair: Uriel Weinreich and the Yiddish Chair at Columbia University,’ in EYDES. Beiheft zum Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Vol. 5. Marvin Herzog, Ulrike Kiefer, Robert Neumann, Wolfgang Putschke, Andrew Sunshine, eds. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2008): 305−19. 6 See, for example, Birnbaum’s critique of Uriel Weinreich’s arguments claiming that standardizing spelling and pronunciation on the basis of Northeastern (‘Lithuanian’) dialect yields a near perfect one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme in Shloyme Birnboym/ Śloimy Biirnboim, ‘Interdialektish/Interdialéktiś,’ Yidishe Shprakh/Iîdiśy Śprax 4 (3−6): 104−9. 7 Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish. A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2, 286−8. 8 Shandler, 2−7. xlix Historical and Cultural Context

9 For a description of the phonology of Standard Yiddish, see the section ‘4. Spelling and Pronunciation,’ in Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968). Reprinted by YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Inc., 1990, xx− xxv. See also notes 63 and 65. 10 ‘Tsu Sh. Birnboyms eleftn yortsayt/Cj Ś. Biirnboims élyftn iuurcaat,’ Afn shvel/Ofn Śvel 320 (October−December 2000): 1. 11 David Gold, review of YSG in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 81/4 (October 1982): 532. 12 David Birnbaum, personal communication. 13 Dovid Katz, review of YSG in Journal of Semitic Studies 26/1 (1981): 172. 14 Katz, 172. For reviews of College Yiddish, see Alan Hubbell, ‘A Yiddish Grammar,’ American Speech 25/3 (October 1950): 209−10 and Khayim Gininger/Xaaiym Gininger, ‘A bukh tsu lernen di yidishe shprakh/A bjjx cj lérnyn di Iîdiśy śprax,’ Yivo-bleter/Iîvuu-Bléter 33 (1949): 204−11. 15 The designations used here are those customary in Yiddish linguistics literature. For Birnbaum’s own terms, which differ slightly, see note 86. 16 Dovid Katz , who calls Birnbaum the ‘father of historical Yiddish phonology,’ observes that Birnbaum ‘untangled and systematized the vowels of Yiddish and correlated them with the relevant Semitic, Germanic and Slavic vowels’ in his 1923 Übersicht über den jiddischen Vokalismus. (Dovid Katz, ‘Shloyme Birnbaum 1891−1989/Śloimy Biirnboim 1891-1989,’ Oksforder yidish/Oksforder Iîdiś 2 (1991): 274). 17 On the history of Yiddish Studies, see Dovid Katz, ‘On Yiddish, in Yiddish and for Yiddish: 500 Years of Yiddish Scholarship,’ in Identity and Ethos. A Festschrift for Sol Liptzin. Mark H. Gelber, ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 23−36. 18 See Barry Trachtenberg, ‘Ber Borochov’s ‘The Tasks of Yiddish Philology,’ Science in Context 20/2 (2007): 341−79. 19 Solomon A. Birnbaum Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 97. 20 Nathan Birnbaum, reflecting on his life, described his father in this way: ‘My father, Menachem Mendel Birnbaum, may he rest in peace, was from Ropczyce (Galicia) and descended, on his mother’s side, from a Hasidic family, intimates of the old Ropczycer rebbe, may his merit protect us, but he himself was no longer a Hasid. On the contrary, he was something of an Enlightened Jew (‘a shtikl maskil/a śtikl maskil’) but still conducted himself in a Jewish manner.’ To illustrate his point, Birnbaum relates how his father, a manufacturer of beer yeast, failed one year to divest himself of the factory’s contents in time for the Passover holiday, when leavened foods and l Kalman Weiser

leavening agents (hametz) such as yeast are forbidden to Jews. He solicited a rabbi’s ruling and was obliged to destroy his hametz at great financial loss rather than violate Jewish law. (Nathan Birnbaum, ‘An iberblik iber mayn lebn/An iberblik iber maan léibn’ in Yubileum-bukh tsum zekhtsikstn geburts-tog fun d’r Nosn Birnboym/Iúbiléium-Bjjx cjm zéxcikstn gybúrts-tug fjn d’r Nuusn Biirnboim, ed. Y.L. Orlean and Nosn Hasoyfer/I.L. Orléian and Nuusn Hasoifer. Warsaw: Farlag Yeshurun/Farlag Iyśjjrin, 1925, 9). 21 ‘What is the Jargon? It is the image of Israel in Exile … a comic medley of languages which undeniably has something of a cozy and nostalgic (one can almost say “stirring”) quality. The Jargon is the scenery for the tragi- comedy named “Judaism in Exile.” In this true recognition of the nature of the Jargon, both the goal-conscious assimilationist, whose striving seems to be a struggle for liberation, as well as the goal conscious nationalist Jew, who acts for the true redemption of his people, both must raise a demand for the displacement of the Jargon. Certainly, both wish to escape the ghetto, so both must unlearn the language of the ghetto.’ (Nathan Birnbaum, ‘The Jewish Jargon,’ translation of ‘Der jüdische Jargon,’ Selbst-Emancipation 15 [1890] in Joshua A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language [Ann Arbor: Karoma Pubishers, 1987], 158). 22 Nathan Birnbaum, ‘Die Sprachen des jüdischen Volkes,’ in his Ausgewählte Schriften zur jüdischen Frage, vol. 1 (Czernowitz: 1910), 324. 23 On Nathan Birnbaum’s life, see Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) and Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language. On the attempt to win legal recognition for Yiddish, see Gerald Stourzh, ‘Recognizing Yiddish – Max Diamant and the Struggle for Jewish Rights in Imperial Austria,’ Simon Dubnow Institut Year Book 1 (2002): 153−67. 24 David Pinski, ‘Durchgesetzt,’ translated by Ben Acher (Solomon Birnbaum) Neue Zeitung (Vienna), 5 July 1907, 7 and 11 July 1907, 6−7. 25 See Shmuel Hiley, ‘Solomon Birnbaum,’ in History of Yiddish Studies, ed. Dov-Ber Kerler (Chur, Switzerland; Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), 3. 26 See, for instance, Nathan Birnbaum, ‘Sprachadel,’ Die Freistatt 1/2 (15 May 1913): 83−8 and 1/3 (15 June 1913): 137−45. 27 For a comprehensive list of his more scholarly publications, see the bibliography in Salomo A. Birnbaum, Ein Leben für die Wissenschaft: Wissenschaftliche Aufsätze aus sechs Jahrzehnten/A Lifetime of Achievement: Six Decades of Scholarly Articles, Erika Timm, Eleazar Birnbaum, and David Birnbaum, eds. (Berlin; Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), vol 1, xxix−xlviii. li Historical and Cultural Context

28. See, for example, Salomo Birnbaum, ‘Jiddische Dichtung,’ Die Freistatt 1/1 (April 1913): 56−62; S.B., ‘Die jiddische Orthographie,’ Die Freistatt 1 /10 (20 January 1914): 588−91. 29 On this period see, Zosa Szajkowski, ‘The Struggle for Yiddish during World War I.’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 131–58; Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Kalman Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 120−39. 30 Hermann Strack, Jüdisches Wörterbuch – mit besonderer Berücksichtung der gegenwärtig in Polen üblichen Ausdrücke (Leipzig, 1916). Sieben-sprachen- wörterbuch. Deutsch / Polnisch / Russisch / Weißruthenisch / Litauisch / Lettisch / Jiddisch (Leipzig: Hrsg. im Auftrag des Oberbefehlshabers Ost, 1918). Hermann Leberecht Strack (1848−1922), professor of Oriental languages in Berlin, was a leading non-Jewish scholar in the fields of Bible and Talmud, Hebrew and Aramaic linguistics, and Judaica in general. He employed his scholarly knowledge to serve as an ardent defender of Jews and Judaism against antisemitic libels. He also founded and directed the university’s Institutum Judaicum, whose purpose was to convert the Jews to Christianity. (‘Strack, Hermann Leberecht.’ Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 19. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. 240. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 1 January 2014). 31 Salomo Birnbaum, ‘Institutum Ascenezicum,’ in Timm, Birnbaum, and Birnbaum, op. cit., vol. 1, 297. 32 A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 6 April 1915. Solomon Birnbaum Archive (Part of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto), Hartleben folder. 33 Notes for his response are contained in the Hartleben folder in the Solomon Birnbaum Archive. 34 Preface to Salomo A. Birnbaum, Grammatik der Jiddischen Sprache (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1966), 5. This volume is the second edition of Birnbaum’s 1918 Grammatik. 35 Timm, Birnbaum, and Birnbaum, op. cit., vol. 1, xii. 36 See Katz, ‘Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biinboim,’ 271. See Hugh Denman, ‘Terumato šel Šlomo Birnbaum la-balšanut ha-yidiš,’ Ha-sifrut 35−6 (1986): 256. Naturally, the volume did not fail to make an impression on the aspiring Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who praised the Grammatik in a study drawing largely on his 1923 University of Marburg doctoral dissertation lii Kalman Weiser

about the history of Yiddish language research (Studien zur Geschichte und dialektischen Gliederung der jiddischen Sprache; reprinted as Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung, ed. Jerold Frakes [Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1993]). Weinreich commented, ‘Birnbaum’s book is extremely precise in its formulations; you can rely on it. When I want to know the form among Galician Jews, I look in Birnbaum’s work. But he also doesn’t degrade the Lithuanian dialect, and a whole series of characteristics of Lithuanian Yiddish are also indicated in his work.’ (Max Weinreich. Shtaplen: Fir etyuden tsu der yidisher shprakhvisnshaft un literaturgeshikhte/Śtaplyn: Fiir étiudn cj der Iîdiśer śpraxvisnśaft jn literatúúr gyśixty [Berlin: Wostok, 1923], 14−15). 37 Preface to Salomo A. Birnbaum, Grammatik der Jiddischen Sprache (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1966), 3. 38 A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 1 December 1916. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Hartleben. 39 A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 23 February 1918. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Hartleben. 40 A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 16 August 1917. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Hartleben. 41 Salomo Birnbaum to Helmut Buske, 22 June 1965 and 9 July 1965. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Buske; Shikl Fishman/Śiikl Fiśman, ‘lezikorn reb Shloyme Birnboymen/lyzikuurn reb Śloimy Biirnboimyn,’ Afn shvel/Ofn Śvel 320 (October–December 2000): 5. 42 Felix Perles, review of Birnbaum’s Grammatik, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 23/7–8 (July–August 1920): 163−4. 43 Felix Goldschmidt, review of Birnbaum’s Grammatik, Israelitsches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz, 19/36, 5 September 1919. 44 Denman, 258. with (געגעסן ,in unaccented syllables (for instance ע Birnbaum replaced 45 see) ( גיגעסן ,for instance) י (traditional (and more phonologically precise used in both ע Hiley, ‘Solomon Birnbaum,’ 5). He also abandoned the silent traditional and maskilic orthography preceding syllabic consonants (for He retained, however, the traditional and .(לעבען replaced לעבן ,instance /that SYO rejected. See Shloyme Birnboym א maskilic silent or prosthetic Śloimy Biirnboim, ‘Di yesoydes fun yidishn oysleyg/Di iysoidys fjn Iîdiśn ous-laig,’ in Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg, materialn un proyektn tsu der ortografisher konferents fun Yivo/Der ainhaitlexer ois-laig, materialn jn proiektn cj der ortografiśer konferénc fjn Iîvuu (Vienna: 1930); Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim, Geule fun loshn/Gjly fjn luuśn (Lodz: 1931), reprinted in Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish Life and Letters, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: 1981), 181−95. liii Historical and Cultural Context

46 Hiley, 5. Denman, 257. 47 S.F., review of Salomo Birnbaum, Das hebräische und aramäische Element in der jiddischen Sprache in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Mundarten. 18.1/2 (1923): 141−2. I thank Prof. Mark Louden for bringing this review to my attention. 48 Hermann Strack, Jüdischdeutsche Texte. Lesebuch zur Einführung in Denken, Leben und Sprache der osteuropäischen Juden (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich, 1917). 49 Birnbaum, ‘Institutum Ascenezicum,’ in, Timm, Birnbaum, and Birnbaum, op. cit., vol. 1, 298. 50 Heinz Kloss (1904−1987) went on to achieve recognition after the Second World War as a leading expert in the study of minority languages, language planning, and language rights. A shadow is, however, cast over his post-war career by his activity in the 1930s and 1940s. His interest in the fate of ethnic Germans abroad and in cultivating a role for them in the future of Germany and of the German Volk made him useful as a researcher and propagandist in the service of Nazi aims. Among his contributions during this period is a report titled ‘Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada’ (Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada [Stuttgart: Publikationsstelle Stuttgart- Hamburg, 1944]). On this book, see Timothy W. Ryback, ‘A Disquieting Book from Hitler’s Library,’ The New York Times 7 December 2011. On the controversy surrounding Kloss, see Cornelia Wilhelm, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Uses of the Past: Heinz Kloss and the Making of a ‘German America,’ Amerikastudien/American Studies 44/1 (2002): 55−83; and Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race, and the Science of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 51 Ibid., 299−300; Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim, ‘In eyropeishn universitet lernt men yidish/In airopéïiśn úniversitéit lérnt myn Iîdiś,’ Der tog/Der tug (New York) 19 October 1929. 52 This section relies largely on prior research by this author. For a fuller treatment of this subject, see Kalman Weiser, ‘Language and Ideology: The “Orthodox” Orthography of Solomon Birnbaum,’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004): 275−95. 53 Joshua Shanes, ‘Nathan Birnbaum,’ YIVO Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe. vol. 1, ed. G.D. Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press and YIVO), 2008, 186. 54 Katz, ‘Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim,’ 274. Werner Weinberg, review of YSG, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 51/3 (1984): 378. 55 See, for example, his articles ‘Maskilisierung’ in Unser Weg (Berlin) 8 (February 1921): 53–64 and ‘Vi azoy yidn lebn in ashkenaz/Vi azoi Iîdn léibn in aśkenaz’ Yidishe tageblat/Iîdiśy tagyblat (New York), 27 July 1921. liv Kalman Weiser

56 Salomo Birnbaum, Leben und Worte des Balschemm: nach Chassidischen Schriften (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920). It appeared in English translation by his wife: The Life and Sayings of the Baal Shem, trans. Irene Birnbaum. New York: Hebrew Pub. Co., 1933. 57 Thus, for example, kop/kop (head) and zogn/zugn (to say) are written with although ,(וי) (as are royt/roit (red) and hoyz/houz (house ,(ָא) the same vowel most Yiddish speakers differentiate between the sounds. When encountering the ,קולטור a newer borrowing into the language, such as the internationalism speaker of southern Yiddish dialects might not know whether to say /kiltir/ ;usually indicates /i/ for him or her or to pronounce /kultur/ (ibid, 79 ו since Birnboym/Biirnboim, ‘Interdialektish/Interdialéktiś,’ 105). 58 See Birnboym/Biirnboim, Geule fun loshn/Gjly fjn luuśn. 59 Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim, Yidishkeyt un loshn/Iîdiśkait jn luuśn (Warsaw: 1930), 152−3. 60 Ibid., 152. 61 See B. (Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim), ‘Zeyer gerekht/Zaier gyréxt!’ Beys-yankev-zhurnal/Bais-Iaankyv-źúrnal 8/71−2 (1931): 42−3; reprinted in Fishman, Never Say Die! 668−9. 62 Birnbaum, Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar, 101. As early as 1913, Birnbaum took issue with arguments that the spelling of literary Yiddish was rooted in the pronunciation of Northeastern or ‘Lithuanian’ dialect or that this dialect was the basis of a generally accepted ‘correct’ pronunciation. He maintained that Yiddish spelling is, like that of Hebrew, ‘neutral’ with regard to dialect and none of the dialects, which differ chiefly in the pronunciation of vowels, is the basis of ‘educated’ speech. (See, S.B., ‘Die jiddische Orthographie,’ Die Freistatt 1/10 [20 January 1914]: 588−91). 63 On the prestige of NEY, see, for instance, Yudl Mark/Ijjdl Mark, ‘A por kurtse heores tsu Sh. Birnboyms notitsn/A puur korce hyuurys cj Ś. Biirnboims noticn,’ Yidishe Shprakh/Iîdiśy Śprax 8/1−2 (1948): 15−19. On its history and diffusion, see Dovid Katz, ‘The Religious Prestige of the Gaon and the Secular Prestige of Lithuanian Yiddish,’ in The Gaon of Vilna and the Annals of Jewish Culture, ed. Izraelis Lempertas (Vilnius: 1998), 187−99 and Dovid Kats/Duvyd Kac, ‘Naye gilgulim fun alte makhloykesn: di litvishe norme un di sikhsukhim vos arum zikh/Naaiy gilgjjlym fjn alty maxloikysn: di litviśy normy jn di sixsjjxym vus arjm zex’ in Yivo-bleter/Iîvuu-Bléter, n.s. 2 (1994): 205−57. 64 Seeking to explain the origins of literary pronunciation, Gennady Estraikh comments about Vilna Yiddishist intellectuals, ‘Many of them were, like [Ber] Borokhov, Yiddishist neophytes and either learned to speak Yiddish or returned to it after long years of speaking Russian, Polish, or German. lv Historical and Cultural Context

As a result, Vilna intellectuals’ “high” Yiddish usually did not sound like any of the dialects, including ‘low’ Warsaw Yiddish.’ (Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism. [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004], 23). 65 More accurately, ‘purified’ Lithuanian Yiddish refers to a pronunciation based on Northeastern dialect – the speech of Lithuania and Belarus – with a few modifications and clarifications of historical distinctions that fail to be observed in ‘provincial’ speech in those areas. Essentially, this means the following: elimination of the ‘sibilant confusion’ that most notably characterizes the subdialect known as sabesdiker loshn/sabysdiker luuśn (thus, a clear distinction between /s/ and /š/, /z/ and /ž/, and /ts/ and/č/); the pronunciation of the consonantal yod in a number of words (for instance, / jid/ and /jingl/ instead of /id/ and /ingl/ for ‘Jew’ and ‘boy,’ respectively); the ,צו the converb ,צו preservation of the distinction between the preposition and the interrogative , צוthe particle preceding the infinitive ,צעverbal prefix all otherwise pronounced as /tsu/); and pronunciation of the) צי particle as /oj/ at all times instead of as both /oj/ and /ej/ depending on וי written vowel the word in question. See Yudl Mark/Ijjdl Mark, Gramatik fun der yidisher klal-shprakh/Gramatik fjn der Iîdiśer klal-śprax (New York: 1978), 15−16. 66 See Kalmen Vayzer/Kalmyn Vaazer, ‘Di debate arum aroysred in der yidisher veltlekher shul in mizrekh-eyrope/Di debaty arjm arousréd in der Iîdiśer veltlexer śúl in mizrex-airopy,’ Yidishe Shprakh/Iîdiśy Śprax 39 (2013): 17−43. 67 See Note Berliner/Nuty Bérliner, ‘Vegn litvishn dialekt in kongres-poyln/ Véign litviśn dialekt in kongrés-poiln,’ Beys-yankev-zhurnal/Bais-Iaankyv- źúrnal 8, nos. 71−2 (1931): 42; Birnboym/Biirnboim, ‘Zeyer gerekht!/Zaier gyréxt!’ Contrary to Birnbaum’s impression of conformity to a standard pronunciation, Chaim Gininger recalls that in the Vilna YIVO, ‘Each spoke with his pronunciation and that did not in the least diminish the dignity, and also not the communality, of our language. No one felt that if he spoke with a different pronunciation, it was less dignified.’ (Gininger, 209−10). 68 Birnbaum, Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar, 101. 69 See Hiley, ‘Solomon Birnbaum,’ 6. 70 See, for example, Max Weinreich’s letters to Birnbaum on 1 December 1930 and 19 April 1931. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Max Weinreich. 71 ‘Perhaps you are 5 percent more traditional and perhaps not even that. [KW - ָא Weinreich presumably means] א and א The distinction between is your innovation (a very good practice, if it can be implemented, but it ,with and without a ḥolam וי has no relation to tradition). The same with with a seghol and so on. Further, you write ע ,with and without a ḥireq י lvi Kalman Weiser

just ”,גליקליך“ and ”גוטר“ when tradition would require ”גליקלעך“ ”,גוטער“ and more. Is it really worth it to build your ”הענטיל“ ”,געבראכין“ ”,שלאפין“ like Max Weinreich to Solomon ’?(קוצו של יוד) own system for such a triviality Birnbaum, 28 January 1931. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Max Weinreich. It is worth noting that Birnbaum’s system, in contrast with both traditional spelling and the YIVO system, also distinguishes between long and short vowels – a useful distinction but still an innovation. Paul Glasser, personal communication. 72 Solomon Birnbaum to Max Weinreich, 8 December 1930. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Max Weinreich. 73 Solomon Birnbaum to Max Weinreich, 7 January 1931. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Max Weinreich. 74 ‘Yidish in di universitetn fun hamburg un london/Iîdiś in di úniversitéitn fjn hambúrg jn london,’ YIVO-bleter/Iîvuu-Bléter 7/1–2 (September 1934): 163−4. See also the essay by Eleazar and David Birnbaum in this volume. 75 Solomon Birnbaum, ‘The Origins of the German Elements in Yiddish,’ in Timm, Birnbaum, and Birnbaum, op. cit., vol. 1, 121, footnote. 76 David and Eleazar Birnbaum, personal communication. 77 Salomo Birnbaum to A. Hartleben, 6 November 1952. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Hartleben. 78 A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 12 November 1952. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, folder Hartleben. 79 Salomo Birnbaum to A. Hartleben, 7 March 1961. Birnbaum actually writes in the letter that a ‘colleague’ had shown him a book. ‘This “colleague” was actually his son David, who found it in Foyle’s, the biggest bookstore in Britain. Perhaps he wrote “colleague” to give it more gravitas with the stuffy, formal publisher.” (David and Eleazar Birnbaum, private communication); A. Hartleben to Salomo Birnbaum, 18 March 1961. Solomon Birnbaum Archive, Folder Hartleben. 80 Preface to fourth expanded edition, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (Hamburg: Buske, 1984), 2. 81 See his address in Verleihung der Würde eines Ehrendoktors der Universität Trier an Professor Dr. Salomo A. Birnbaum, 4. June 1986, in Timm, Birnbaum, and Birnbaum, op. cit., vol. 1, 297−304. 82 Not all Yiddish linguists and language activists who were native speakers of NEY belonged to the ‘northern school,’ however. Zalman Reisen, for example, belonged to the specifist school that guided much of Birnbaum’s approach to Yiddish. Moreover, it would be inaccurate to suggest that such southern-born linguists as Noah Prylucki, Elye Spivak, Chaim Gininger, and Mordkhe Schaechter were necessarily any less secular than their northern- born colleagues. Paul Glasser, personal communication. lvii Historical and Cultural Context

83 See Shloyme Birnboym/Śloimy Biirnboim, ‘Finf notitsn/Finyf noticn,’ Yidishe Shprakh/Iîdiśy Śprax 8/1–2 (1948): 14. 84 Joshua Fishman, review of YSG in Language Problems and Language Planning 4/2 (Summer 1980): 159. 85 Hence, his ‘East Yiddish, North’ = NEY, ‘East Yiddish, South East’ = SEY, ‘East Yiddish, South West’ = CY; his ‘Central Yiddish’ = Uriel Weinreich’s Transcarpathian Yiddish. The now defunct Yiddish dialects of Central Europe are known as West(ern) Yiddish in all schemes (Birnbaum, Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar, 96−9). 86 Dovid Katz, review of YSG, 172−3. 87 Mordkhe Shekhter/Mordxy Śexter, ‘D’r Shloyme Birnboym – der shprakh- normirer/D’r Śloimy Biirnboim – der śprax-normirer,’ Yidishe Shprakh/ Iîdiśy Śprax 12/2 (1962): 42−3. 88 Paul Glasser, personal communication. See Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut/ Iîdiśer Visnśaftlexer Institút. Der eynheytlekher oysleyg. Takones fun yidishn oysleyg/Der ainhaitlexer Iîdiśer ous-laig. Takuunys fjn Iîdiśn ous-laig, sixth edition. (NewYork: YIVO and the Yiddish Language Resource Center of the League for Yiddish, 1999). 89 It may also be objected that Birnbaum’s spelling and transcription systems place NEY speakers at a disadvantage because they oblige them to indicate vowel distinctions which they do not hear in their native dialect, effectively requiring them to master the more complicated vocalism of the southern dialects in order to spell and Romanize correctly. As noted above, however, when writing using traditional spelling or SYO, speakers of all dialects must learn both to indicate distinctions they do not normally make in speech and not to make distinctions they normally make. The same applies for the YIVO Romanization system. 90 ‘This [the existence of secular speakers of the language, who use fewer Hebrew-Aramaic elements than religious speakers – KW] is a linguistic indication of the fact that the ‘secularized sections’ have in reality become independent groups and that one ought not, logically, speak of a new development having started in Yiddish, for example, but that it would be more correct to say that Yiddish has begun to split up into two divergent languages.’ (Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 14).