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Yiddish Civilization: The story of Yiddish and the people who spoke it

Author: Published on: Published in: Religion, Arts & Culture

(Author: Bernard Katz, Vol. 65, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2010)

  • Feature image: The Sarah Sylvia Company in Cabaret Singers, 1950. Left to right: Bernard Berman, Sarah Sylvia, Pinie Goldstein, Chayele Rosenthal, Harry Ariel

Max Weinreich, the greatest Yiddish scholar of his generation, was in Finland delivering a lecture when World War II broke out. This lecture saved his life. Unable to return to his home in Vilna, he made his way to New York, where he taught Yiddish. Although he had only a few students and many thought his work was hopeless, he persisted. When a student asked him why, he answered: “Because Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history”.1 Weinreich had been a founder of YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) in Vilna in 1925. After his move, he transferred its offices to New York, where it became the centre of Yiddish scholarly research. He went on to author the authoritative four volume history of the Yiddish language.

Shmarya Levin, the Zionist leader and Hebrew and Yiddish author, wrote that “…the Jewish people … represent the only instance of a people that has created two languages of its own”.2 He contrasted the two Jewish languages as follows: “…if Hebrew was nobler and more dignified – the exterior of the coat – Yiddish was warmer and more comfortable – the lining of the coat”. 3

Yiddish is, in fact, only one of more than a dozen languages invented by Jews. These include: Bukharic (aka Judeo-Tadjik), Dzudezhmo (Ladino, Judeo– Spanish), Haketiya (Judeo–Spanish), Judeo-Arabic (Yahudic), Judeo–Aragonese, Judeo–Aramaic (Kurdit, Hulaula, Targum, Kurdishic), Judeo–Berber, Judeo–Corfiote (from Corfu), Judeo–Georgian (Gurjuc, Gruzinic), Judeo–Greek (Yevanic), Judeo– Italian, Judeo–Moroccan, Judeo–Persian (Dzidzi, Jidi, Parsic), Judeo–Yemenite (Temanic), Judeo– Iranian (Juhuri, Judeo–Tat, Tatic), Judeo–Czech (Knaanic), Neo–Aramaic (Lishanit, Targum), Judeo– Provencal (Shuadit) and, of course, Hebrew.4 Four thousand years ago, Abraham’s tribe in Ur, Babylon, spoke Aramaic. When his people migrated to Canaan, they created the first major Jewish language – Hebrew. It was a fusion of the local Canaanite dialects (which over time became the majority component) and the language they brought with them – Aramaic (the minority component).5

Two and a half thousand years ago, in the year 586 BCE, the First Temple was destroyed. The Jews were exiled to Babylon and Hebrew ceased to be the everyday spoken language. Here, by the “Rivers of Babylon”, the Jewish exiles created the second major  Jewish language – Judeo–Aramaic. This was a fusion of the local Babylonian Aramaic (which over time became the majority component) and Hebrew (the minority component). The Talmud was written in Judeo-Aramaic because that was the language the Jews spoke in Babylon. In the Jewish context, Judeo– Aramaic is mostly referred to simply as Aramaic.

Around a thousand years ago, Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German towns along the Rhine (Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Metz) and Danube (Regensberg). These spoke Laaz – a Jewish version of Old French (western Laaz) and a Jewish version of Old Italian (southern Laaz). The Torah was studied in Hebrew and the Talmud in Judeo-Aramaic. The settlers became the first Ashkenazim (German Jews). They created the third major Jewish language – Yiddish, a fusion of the local Germanic dialect (the majority component over time) and the languages they brought with them – Laaz, Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic (the minority component). The earlier creation of Hebrew and Judeo–Aramaic has been referred to as little bangs whereas in Germany, the creation of Yiddish by a fusion between a Semitic language and a very different Germanic language has been referred to as a big bang.6

Around the year 1000, the rabbinic and Talmudic authority of Babylon was approaching its end and was being passed to Ashkenaz.7 The symbolic “founder of Ashkenaz” was Rabbeinu Gershom (960 – 1028), whose yeshiva became the pre-eminent yeshiva in the Jewish world. Rabbeinu Gershom is well known for a number of new laws enforced under a cherem – known as the “Cherem of Rabbeinu Gershom” – which included the famous prohibition against polygamy. Weinreich termed this “Cherem of Rabbeinu Gershom” as the “declaration of independence of Ashkenaz”. He writes that the profound significance of this act can be gauged from the fact that Rabbeinu Gershom entered history under the proud name of “Luminary of the Exile”.8 Rabbeinu Gershom was followed by Rashi (1040 – 1105), the greatest of the Biblical and Talmudic scholars, who studied in the former’s yeshiva before returning to France. Rashi spoke Laaz, and repeatedly refers to it in his commentaries whenever he required an Old French word for purposes of explanation.

These cataclysmic events – the creation of Yiddish and the establishment of Ashkenaz as the centre of rabbinic and Talmudic authority – came about through a small number of Jews. Around the year 300 CE, approximately one million Jews lived in the Western Roman Empire, but of these only 5 to 10 000 survived as Jews by the year 800 CE. All Yiddish speakers, all Ashkenazi Jews, are descendents of this small group.9

The Yiddish language is only a thousand or so years old. But many of its elements – words, phrases, idioms, etc – are much older. When, for example, a place hasn’t been spruced up for a long time, you can say in Yiddish that it hasn’t been renovated since “sheyshes yemey breyshis” (the “six days of creation”), which is as old as one can get for embedded living history in a currently spoken language. But some Yiddish words are even older. About 5000 years of history lie behind the Yiddish word mazal,10 sourced from biblical Hebrew, which in turn sourced it from ancient Akkadian.

Laaz, Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic fused with the medieval German dialects in a very Jewish way. The Germanic elements incorporated into Yiddish were so radically ‘Judaized’ that Germans who heard their neighbours speak were immediately aware that the Jews had their “own language”. Perhaps the best example of how far Yiddish has departed from German is that Yiddish is arguably the most humorous language in the world. It would be hard to imagine such a claim being made with reference to German!

Dovid Katz is of the view that the Germanic elements of Yiddish are most closely related to the German dialects of Regensberg and Bavaria and that Regensberg and the Danube region is the closest Yiddish has to a home town.11 Weinreich writes that there is no document of birth for Yiddish and that the language would have developed slowly without the speakers initially being aware that they were in fact speaking a new language. Hence, it is impossible to point exactly to the beginning of a language; “the beginnings” is more correct.12 The oldest evidence of Yiddish is a sentence written in a Passover machzor from Worms, presumably by the owner, and dated 1272. It was discovered in 1963 and reads “A good day will happen to the person who brings this machzor to the synagogue”.13

No sooner had Yiddish established itself as a separate language than its people began to move. Jewish catastrophes starting with the Crusades resulted in the eastward expansion of Ashkenaz to Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere across Europe. Poland and Lithuania were tolerant societies. Abraham Menes wrote that “Since the golden age of Jewish life in Babylonia, Jews had not felt as much at home in a country as they now did in Poland”.14 In Lithuania, King Vytautas granted extensive rights and privileges to its Jewish citizens, which were preserved for many centuries by the country’s enlightened rulers.15

The year 1500 is taken as the symbolic shift in rabbinic and Talmudic authority from Germany to Poland.16 Later Lithuania, and Vilna in particular, established itself as the preeminent yeshiva system in the Jewish world. For a period of almost 250 years from around 1500, while the Councils of Poland and Lithuania were in place, Jewish self-government existed. It was a golden age for Polish and Lithuanian Jewry.

By the 16th Century, the spread of Yiddish across Europe was at its maximum, from Alsace and Italy in the southwest to Holland in the northwest to Ukraine in the southeast and Belorussia in the northeast. It became one of the most extensive contiguous linguistic empires in the history of Europe.17 Ashkenaz lost its strict geographic definition as signifying a territory of German speaking lands and came to designate the culture of the Jews who had originated from there. So extensive did this geographic territory become that in 1750 a Christian grammarian, who published a book on the Yiddish language, wrote that Jews used to brag that “With Yiddish you can travel the world”.18

The eastward migration of Jews brought them into contact with Slavic languages – Polish, Ukrainian and Belorussian, and these made a massive contribution to Yiddish. The oldest contacts with Czech, and the more recent ones, with Russian, have left far less numerous traces. The impact of nonSlavic languages – Hungarian, Rumanian, Lithuanian and Latvian – has on the whole been of a strictly regional nature and has not penetrated the common literary language.19

The way in which the different languages fused in the process to create Yiddish makes it difficult to calculate the proportions of vocabulary contributed by various stocks.20 Attempts have nevertheless been made. In 1904, Leo Wiener estimated 70% German, 20% Hebrew and 10% Slavic.21 Most experts, however, advise treating such statistics with caution.

What follows are the origin of some well-known Yiddish words:22 From Old French, comes layen (read) and from Old Italian, bentch and yenta. German words include alter kocker, bagel, dreck, flayshig, fress, frum, haimish, kibbitz, kichel, klap, knaydl, kochleffl, kopdraynish, kugel, kvetch, macher, milchik, mish-mash, nuchshlepper, shlep, shmaltz, shnorrer, shnoz, shetl, shtik, tsimmes, tummel and zetz. Mentsch derives from German, but in German it means man, while in Yiddish it refers to a decent, ethical human being. Words derived from Hebrew include baleboss, chacham, chaver, chutzpah, gonif, koved, maven, mishpocheh, momzer, naches, rachmones, shikker, shikse, shmooz, and tsoris. Slavic words include blintzes, borsht, bubkes, dreml, kishka, latke, nudnik, shmatte, tsatske, yarmulke and zeide. The experts tell us that the Slavic influence extends far beyond the vocabulary contribution and that Slavic had a profound impact on syntax – the way in which words are put together to produce phrases and sentences. Some sources claim that the Yiddish word daven is derived from Latin’s most reverent reference to God, i.e. divine.23 Leo Rosten declares the source of the word daven to be unknown,24 as does Weinreich.25

Yiddish is a living chronicle of Yiddish civilization. Take, for example, the following sentence: Di bobe est tsholent af Shabes – The grandmother eats cholent on the Sabbath. Bobe is Slavic, Est is German, Tsholent is Old French and Shabes is Hebrew.

Many foreign customs were incorporated into Judaism. Yahrzeit is German for “time of the year”. The lighting of a Yahrzeit candle was a Catholic German custom. The tradition that Jewish men cover their heads is possibly of oriental influence and this practice puzzled the rabbis. A distinguished 16th Century Polish rabbi (Rabbi Solomon ben Yehiel Luria, known as the Maharshal) claimed to know no reason why Jews prayed with covered heads.26 The dress code of Chassidic men, including the wheel shaped brown fur hat, was the fashion of 17th Century Polish noblemen.27

The historical study of Yiddish is hampered by a shortage of texts from the earliest periods. It is safe to say that no event was more decisive in the development of Yiddish than its movement into Slavic lands and away from German influence. It was under Slavic influence that the grammatical system was restructured and the genetic relation of Yiddish to German was weakened.28

Over time Yiddish split into dialects, first into two large groupings, Western Yiddish (in Central Europe) and Eastern Yiddish (in the Slavic and Baltic lands), and then into individual dialects within each group.29 Western Yiddish in turn split into North-western (Dutch), Mid-western (German) and South-western (Swiss–Alsatian). Eastern Yiddish split into North-eastern (Lithuanian), Mid-eastern (Polish) and South-eastern (Ukrainian).30

The historical development of Yiddish has been segmented into four periods, namely31 Earliest Yiddish (? – 1250), Old Yiddish (1250 – 1500), Middle Yiddish (1500 – 1750) and Modern Yiddish (post-1750). During the Earliest Yiddish period Jews from France and Italy, speaking the language they called Laaz, established themselves in German speaking territory. It is plausible that their speech remained rife for many generations with imports from Laaz, even though the number of surviving vestiges has constantly been reduced. No surviving continuous texts from this period have been found.

During the second period Yiddish speakers first make contact with Slavic speakers – first in south eastern Germany and Bohemia and then in Poland. This period was marked by the expansion of Eastern Ashkenaz, and consequently by the withdrawal of Yiddish speakers from German influence. A shortage of texts hides the Slavization which must have gone on at the time.32

The third period witnessed the slow but fatal decline of Yiddish in the West. Czernowitz (today in Ukraine) was the venue for a Yiddish Conference in 1908. This marked the high point of Yiddish self consciousness and provided an impetus for the meteoric rise of 20th Century Yiddish literature.33 The subsequent introduction of Yiddish as a medium of school instruction, scholarly research and regional administration contributed to the expansion and stabilization of the language.34

In the 18th Century, two important social movements impacted on the Jewish world and Yiddish. The Haskalah (Enlightenment) started in Germany and later spread eastwards. Its central figure was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), who rose in Berlin society due to his intellect and charm. Mendelssohn was a deeply religious Jew and made it his mission to Germanize the Jews. This, he believed, would speed up their emancipation and make them full citizens. To accomplish this, he came to the conclusion that eradicating Yiddish and replacing it with German was a priority.

Mendelssohn was a driven individual. The story is told that he spent his honeymoon working on a philosophical essay, pitching for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It is recorded that this effort beat Immanuel Kant into first place. What his new wife thought of this behaviour is unrecorded.35

The Haskalah led to conversions to Christianity on an epidemic scale. In Berlin, no less than 50% of the Jews converted, including four of Mendelssohn’s six children.36 The German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine also converted, albeit for purely pragmatic reasons. He nevertheless retained some affection for Judaism and wrote that his conversion could not be honest, because no Jew could believe any other Jew was Divine.37

A counter impulse to the Haskalah was the Chassidic movement, founded by Yisrael Baal Shem Tov (1700 – 1760), whose adherents wanted to become more Jewish. The movement emphasized joy and merrymaking and introduced exaggerated movements, headstands and somersaulting during prayers. Drinking, dancing and smoking were encouraged. In its early stages, the study of Torah was downgraded in favour of over-enthusiastic prayer.38

The Chassidic movement spread rapidly and, at its peak, it is estimated that half the Jews in Eastern Europe were Chassidim. When the movement began to make inroads in Lithuania, it met with serious resistance, particularly from the Vilna Gaon. Despite this opposition, Chassidism survived in Lithuania, albeit in a different form. It reformed itself by purging its extremist tendencies and emphasizing the importance of learning. This is reflected by the choice of name for the movement in Lithuania – Chabad. An acronym of the Hebrew words for Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge (Chochma, Bina, Da’at), it was a clear statement that traditional Judaism had nothing to fear. When the dynasty later moved to the town of Lubavitch, the movement became known as Chabad-Lubavitch.

Historically, Jews were forbidden to live in Russia, and the subsequent significant presence of Jews there resulted from the Partitions of Poland. In 1795 a large part of Poland, what is today Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, came under Russian control, as did the one million Jews who lived there. High Jewish birth rates resulted in significant increases in Russia’s Jewish population from one million in 1800 to five and a half million by 1900.39

The year 1881 was important, not only in Jewish but in Russian, American and world history. When Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, the Jews were blamed and this set off a wave of pogroms in Russia followed by the introduction of harsh laws referred to as the May Laws. This resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews. Between 1881–1914, two-and-a-half million Jews emigrated from Russia and of these, two million went to America.40

Professor John Klier has pointed out, contrary to the popular myth, that it was not just antisemitism that motivated the emigrants – they had no guarantee that tolerance would be greater elsewhere. The claustrophobia of shtetl existence, its class and clan divisions, its ruthless dominance by reactionary Tsaddikim or ultra conservative rabbinic oligarchies and its self imposed limitations on living a full, rich and successful life were also significant contributors.41

Life was hard for the new immigrants. In New York’s Lower East Aide, almost one million Jews lived squashed into one square kilometre in unsanitary, filthy tenements. It is no surprise that many immigrants failed to make a success of their move. Around a quarter of those who left Eastern Europe for America returned there. Perhaps as many would have done so had they been able to afford the fare.

In 1906 South Africa placed Yiddish on the list of languages that immigrants could use to fulfil literacy requirements. America did likewise in 1917.

The printing of Yiddish books began around 1475, about a quarter of a century after Gutenberg ‘invented’ the printing press at Mainz.42 The first known page in Yiddish in a Jewish book can be found in the Prague Haggadah of 1526. The printing of books in Yiddish was slow to gain traction as Jewish printers were unsure whether it was acceptable to produce books in the language of women and men who did not participate in the study of Torah and Talmud.43

Yiddish literature began in the 16th Century, but in its initial period consisted mainly of stories based on the Bible, Talmudic fables and popular folktales.44 The little literature that did exist was mainly for women and perhaps uneducated men. Educated men studied in Hebrew and Aramaic. Although they spoke Yiddish, they believed that it was beneath them to read or write in it.45

Yiddish literature was in many cases adaptations for Jewish audiences of the same stories enjoyed by their Christian neighbours. Christian references would be changed to something neutral or Jewish. The Yiddish versions added a humour that was absent in the original.46

One of the most popular Yiddish books was the Bove bukh (1541), named after its hero, Bove. This was a Jewish adaptation of a Tuscan Italian epic romance of chivalry and knights in shining armour. Although most people assume that the popular Yiddish expression “bobe mayse” comes from the Yiddish word bobe (grandmother), some scholars believe it to be a corruption of bove, referring to a story so outlandish that it sounds like something straight out of the Bove bukh.47

The Bible is the ultimate source of Yiddish drama and Yiddish plays based on Bible stories were common. It became acceptable over the centuries for the traditional Jewish Purim play, based on the book of Esther, to contain more than a bit of “off colour” that would be condemned for the rest of the year.48 The Tsenerene (Yiddish Woman’s Bible) was first published in the 1590s, with the oldest surviving edition being from 1622. It has appeared in over 300 editions and is still used by women in Chassidic communities.

Yiddish publication primarily for women led to women becoming writers. Perhaps the best known and most significant was the memoirs of Gluckel of Hamel (1646–1724). At the age of 14, Gluckel married Chaim of Hamel, a businessman trading in pearls and gems and engaged in money-lending. In addition to bringing up their 13 children, she ran most of his business affairs, rather more successfully after his death. After Chaim passed away, when Gluckel was 43, she started writing a journal. She stopped writing on remarrying but went back to the journal after the death of her second husband. While composed as a book length memoir, Gluckel’s work may be regarded as an ethical will, and indeed is addressed to her children. In 1896, it was published and became a classic.49 The memoir, which has achieved classic status following its publication in 1896, is the most significant religious writing by a pre-modern Jewish woman.50

The emergence of Yiddish as a modern sophisticated language with a literature of its own did not happen until the second half of the 19th Century and when it did was largely the work of three individuals: Mendele Moycher Seforim (Sholom Jacob Abramowitz, 1836-1917), Sholom Aleichem (Solomon Rabinowitz, 1859-1916) and Y L Peretz (Yitzchak Leib Peretz, 1852–1915). These writers had much in common. All received an orthodox Jewish education and came under the spell of Jewish Enlightenment. It is no accident that two of them hid behind pseudonyms. They were initially embarrassed to be writing in Yiddish – Yiddish books were for women and uneducated men. They would have preferred to write in Hebrew, but a few years before Mendele published his first book, the year’s best selling Hebrew book sold 1200 copies whereas in the same year a minor Yiddish novel sold 120 000.51

Mendele published his first Yiddish story in 1864, which became the symbolic birth-date of modern Yiddish literature. Between 1864 and 1939, nearly 30,000 separate Yiddish titles appeared, constituting one of the most concentrated periods of literary creativity in all of Jewish history.52 Yiddish literature found its largest audience in America, but with one or two exceptions, all the significant Yiddish writers were born in Europe. Two-thirds of all Yiddish books were published in New York, with the remainder mostly being published in Warsaw, Vilna and the other cultural centres of Eastern Europe.

Sholom Aleichem’s popularity resulted in him being referred to as the Jewish Mark Twain (the latter, on hearing this, wittily referred to himself as the American Sholom Aleichem).53 The following abridged passage is characteristic of his wit:

When a man gives an account of what befell him at a fair, he must always be considerate of the feelings of his neighbours….So, for instance, if I went out to the fair…and did well, sold everything at a good profit, and returned with pocketfuls of money, my heart bursting with joy, I never failed to tell my neighbours that I had lost every kopek and was a ruined man. Thus I was happy, and my neighbours were happy. But if, on the contrary, I had really been cleaned out at the fair, and brought home with me a bitter heart and a bellyful of green gall, I made sure to tell my neighbours that never since God made fairs had there been a better one. You get my point? For thus I was miserable and my neighbors were miserable with me.54

On the eve of World War II, there were probably eleven million Yiddish speakers and of these perhaps nine million lived in Europe.55 Even without the Holocaust, it is uncertain whether Yiddish would have survived as the dominant Jewish language. Already in interwar Poland, there was a move to Polish amongst the younger generation, the suppression of Judaism in the Soviet Union and English and Hebrew being almost universally spoken in America and Israel respectively.

Zionism set out to create a new type of Jew and Hebrew, not Yiddish, was to be their language. In interwar Palestine, gangs of Hebraist thugs beat up Yiddish writers, Yiddish bookshops were set on fire, riots were incited in Jerusalem and professors roughed up. The various campaigns against Yiddish succeeded. One metaphor for the period was a comment made by Ben Gurion while listening to a talk in Yiddish given by an anti-Nazi resistance fighter: “the language grates on my ears”. The second president of the State of Israel attempted to pass a law retroactively Hebraicizing the names of the great founders of Zionism. A Yiddish supporter wrote a satire at the time writing that the Herzl (little heart) in Theodor Herzl would have to be renamed LevHakatan and the Weizmann (wheat man)  in Chaim Weizmann would have to be renamed Hachiti.56

In our time, the battle for Yiddish seems virtually over. But perhaps not? An astonishing survey conducted in the mid 1990s into the future of American Jewry found the following: that whereas 100 Chassidim and Haredim will have produced 2578 Jews by the fourth generation, the same number of Neo-orthodox  Jews will have produced 346, Conservative Jews 24, Reform Jews 13 and secular Jews five.57 It is difficult to estimate the number of Yiddish speakers in the world today, but a figure of around one million is probable. In Dovid Katz’s view, a world figure of 500,000 Chassidic Yiddish speakers in 2005 is conservative and overcautious. Also by 2005, the number of Yiddish speakers in the secular world making significant use of it in daily life had dropped to around 500 000, and this figure will soon collapse altogether.58 If the above projections are correct, it means that Yiddish could once again become the language of the bulk of Diaspora Jewry.

Yiddish has enriched everyday English speech. Webster’s International Dictionary reputedly lists over 500 Yiddish-derived terms in use in American English,59 many of which have integrated into the language to such an extent that speakers are not even aware of their origin. They include such words as bagel, chutzpah, gonif, kibitz, klutz, kvetch, maven, mish-mash, momzer, megillah, meshugger, nudnik, oy vey, and such expressive ‘sh’ words as shlimazel, shlemiel, shlep, shmo, shikker, shikse, shlump, shnorrer, shnapps, shmaltz, shmooz, shmattes, shnoz and shtik. Yiddish phrases when translated suffuse American speech, such as “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, “if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas” and “if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a trolley” (and other less pulpit-friendly versions). There are also structural borrowings, evident in such expressions as, “Don’t ask”, “Enough already”, “From that he makes a living?”, “How’s by you?”, “Get lost!”, “I need it like I need a hole in the head”, “I should worry”, “That’s all I need” and “That’s for sure”, amongst many others.60

Yiddish has made a contribution to other languages as well. The Australian word ‘cobber’ comes from chaver. In German, strangely, shicksel means a Jewish girl.

Many Yiddish words, including numbers, are similar to English, the reason being that the Saxon part of Anglo–Saxon is related to the same German dialects from which Yiddish evolved. A few examples are: vinter (winter), zinger (singer), zumer (summer), hant (hand), gut (good), epel (apple), broyt (bread), orem (arm), bahken (bake), bord (beard), hoys (house) and putter (butter).

Amongst Yiddish-speaking Jews, swearing was rare but cursing was common. Physical violence was frowned upon and so verbal hostility tended to be compensatory.61 Yiddish created an art form out of curses and imbued them with humor. Here is one example:

You should own a thousand houses

With a thousand rooms in each house and a thousand beds in each room.

And you should sleep each night in a different bed

in a different room

in a different house

and get up every morning

and go down a different staircase and get into a different car,

driven by a different chauffeur,

who should drive you to a different doctor – and he

shouldn’t know what’s wrong with you, either.62

There has been a massive resurgence of interest in Yiddish, particularly in academic circles. In 1980, Aaron Lansky embarked on a campaign to save the world’s Yiddish books, and over one and a half million of these have been collected by himself and his colleagues to date. The National Yiddish Book Centre, which he founded, has a customer list which includes 4000 individuals and more than 5000 national and university libraries in 26 countries. It would seem that the Jewish immigrants were much more avid Yiddish readers than was previously thought. To conclude, a few quotations regarding the Yiddish language:

Its chief virtue…lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition (Paul Johnson).63

The new generation needs to know that forty or fifty years ago (c.1880–1890) not even Mendele, Sholom Aleichem…would have been able to dream that there would come a time when Yiddish would be competing, in education and in literature, in press and in scholarly work, with Hebrew, much less with the ‘exalted’ European languages, that in so little time the “language of the masses” would grow into a language of the nation….It is all being created before our eyes, and this is only a modest beginning!64 (Simon Dubnow)

Yiddish lends itself to an extraordinary range of observational nuances and psychological subtleties…I have always marvelled at how fertile this lingua franca is in what may be called the vocabulary of insight…. Jews had to become psychologists and their preoccupation with human, no less than divine, behaviour made Yiddish remarkably rich in names for the delineation of character types (Leo Rosten).65

Yiddish, the language that will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of our fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears (Y L Peretz).66

The Ashkenazic civilization is one of the most peaceful in human history. It is inherently stateless and weaponless, dedicated to life according to the ancient cumulative Jewish religious tradition and to dying when necessary to sanctify God’s name (Dovid Katz).67

[Yiddish] was the language of the Jewish masses; it vibrates with their history….From Yiddish we can build a picture of the life of the Judengasse (Israel Zangwill).68

For me, this tale qualifies as a miracle. A language is born in shadow with the lowliest of aims – only for women, only for the untutored, only for ordinary, workaday use. Yet that very dailiness and lack of expectation allows it to grow.… It links its people to their illustrious past. It has the world’s best sense of humour, unable to resist the virtuoso joke even in the curse…. (Miriam Weinstein).69

And finally, an excerpt from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel Lecture in 1978:

The high honour bestowed on me … is also a recognition of the Yiddish language – a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews. The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish – speaking people of the ghettos practised day in and day out. They were the people of the book in the truest sense of the word….

There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years…Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.70

Bernard Katz, a frequent contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a Chartered Accountant who works for an investment bank in Johannesburg.

NOTES

  1. Lansky, Aaron, Outwitting History, The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004, Foreword. [See also Robert Schwarz’s review in Jewish Affairs, Vol. 64, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2009].
  2. Levin, Shmarya, The Arena, tanslated by Maurice Samuel, George Routledge & Sons, 1932, p90
  3. Levin, Shmarya, Childhood in Exile, Translated by Maurice Samuel, George Routledge & Sons, 1929, p105.
  4. Stavans, Ilan, Resurrecting Hebrew, Schocken Books, 2008, p83 quoting Prof. Spolsky, Israel and the Jewish Languages, Sociolinguistics: International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 2006
  5. Katz, Dovid, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Basic Books, 2004, p13
  6. Ibid, p24
  7. Katz, Dovid, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, Baltos Lankos, 2004, p38, hereafter referred to as “Lithuanian Jewish Culture”
  8. Weinreich, Max, History of the Yiddish Language, Translated by Shlomo Noble, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p3
  9. Agus, Irving, The Heroic Age of Franco–German Jewry,1969, pp10-11
  10. Katz, op cit, pp11-12 11
  11. Ibid, p45
  12. Weinreich, op cit, p6
  13. Weinstein, Miriam, Yiddish, A Nation of Words, Ballantine Publishing Group, 2001, p20
  14. Rosten, Leo, The Joys of Yiddish, W H Allen, 1970, pp538-539
  15. Lithuanian Jewish Culture, op cit, p22
  16. Katz, op cit, p137
  17. Ibid, p62
  18. Ibid, p144
  19. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972, 16:793, hereafter cited as ‘EJ’
  20. EJ, op cit, 16:792
  21. Weinreich, op cit, p34
  22. Rosten, op cit
  23. Karlen, Neal, The Story of Yiddish, How a Mish–Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews, William Morrow, 2008, p11.See also www.balashon.com/2007/01/daven.html
  24. Rosten, Leo, Hooray for Yiddish, A Book About English, Calahad Books, 1982, p97, hereafter referred to as “Hooray for Yiddish”
  25. Weinreich, op cit, p680
  26. Kriwaczech, Paul, Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, p123
  27. Ibid, p15
  28. EJ, op cit, 16:795
  29. Katz, op cit, p27
  30. Ibid, p23
  31. Weinreich, op cit, p9
  32. EJ, op cit, 16:796
  33. Katz, op cit, p270
  34. EJ, op cit, 16:796
  35. Kriwaczech, op cit, p269
  36. Elon, Amos, The Pity of it All, A Portrait of German Jews,1743 – 1939, Allen Lane, 2002, p81
  37. Karlen, op cit, p3
  38. Lithuanian Jewish Culture, op cit, p123
  39. Sachar, Howard, The Course of Modern Jewish History, Vintage Books, 1990, p211
  40. EJ, op cit, 8:729 – 730
  41. Kriwaczech, op cit, p295
  42. Katz, op cit, p61
  43. Ibid
  44. Comay, Joan, The Diaspora Story, The Epic of the Jewish People Among the Nations, Random House, 1980, p87
  45. Lansky, op cit, p69
  46. Katz, op cit, pp81-82
  47. Lansky, op cit, p70
  48. Katz, op cit, p88
  49. Ibid, p110
  50. Abrahams, Israel, Selected and edited by, Hebrew Ethical Wills, The Jewish Publication Society, Expanded facsimile edition, 2006, pp 22 – 23
  51. Lansky, op cit, p70
  52. Ibid, p71
  53. Weinstein, op cit, p64
  54. Browne, Lewis, The Wisdom of Israel, Michael Joseph,1948, p536
  55. Weinstein, op cit, p191
  56. Katz, op cit, p318, 321
  57. Ibid pp375-6
  58. Katz, op cit, p388
  59. Rosten, op cit, pxii
  60. Hooray for Yiddish, op cit
  61. Hooray for Yiddish, op cit,, pp92-93
  62. Wex, Michael, Born to Kvetch, Yiddish Language and Culture in all its Moods, Harper Perennial, 2006, p117
  63. Johnson, Paul, A History of the Jews, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987, p339
  64. Katz, op cit, p246
  65. Rosten, op cit, pxvii
  66. Baron, Joseph, A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, Jason Aronson Inc, 1985, p558
  67. Katz, op cit, p38
  68. Baron, op cit, p558
  69. Weinstein, op cit, pp4-5
  70. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

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