Live Journal
14 July 2005
Yiddish
by Bram Boroson
Slow, lazy day so far. Didn't reach the driving school-perhaps I'll try the
other one, which is further (they'll probably drive to me, but I like close)
and has a worse looking ad. It'd be better if there were like-minded people
to hang out with, or an interesting lecture series, etc.
[Update: thunderstorm. Not much I could be doing anyway, right?]
Ok, my entry on Yiddish. I just read "Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish" by Dovid Katz. Toward the end I skimmed back and forth. Oddly there's little about my favorite Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and there's little about the Holocaust. I think the book tries to keep to the positive.
As a history of Yiddish, the book is more about history than about Yiddish... I talked with phantom_mom about the book, and she asked me what I was learning about the language, which words I had learned, etc. But I didn't learn much of the language itself. I did learn much about the history though; I learned facts that my mother didn't know, even though she's been the editor of a Jewish newspaper for years.
The book put my understanding of my family history and of Judaism into context. I had read a book called "The History of the Jews" about 3 years ago (I may have written an entry here), but Katz's book was a poetic page-turner. I really enjoyed it.
How did I get here? My great-grandfather Abraham Babchin, living in the Lithuanian Jewish areas, went secular. He met his father at a train station. His father, seeing Abraham's shorn sideburns and modern dress, beat him to a pulp in anger that Abraham had left the fold of religious Jewry and the two never met again.
I'm partly named after Abraham Babchin.
The last name, Babchin, probably comes from the name of a small town. In the early to mid 1800s, Jews were conscripted into the army from childhood for about 25 years. An ancestor of mine from the town of Babchin must have been conscripted and must have taken the name of the town among his fellow soldiers.
Abraham Babchin courted the three daughters of a farmer, and married the youngest, a blonde girl named Sara Massarsky. One of the other daughters was frausensei's ancestor.
It was a dangerous time and place. Soldiers came looting and came upon Abraham and Sara's young son Semore. Semore pretended to be mute, and did not reveal where the family kept their savings. I used to laugh at that, but it's also been suggested the soldiers roughed him up.
"What will we do? What will we do?" Sara would ask, and Abraham would answer: "Don't be a fool. Go make some tea."
(Perhaps that's where I inherited my tea habit.)
Abraham was a jeweler and watch maker and repairer. He saved enough to travel to America, paid the authorities for a ticket-but they were corrupt. He saved again, and this time bought passage for his family to America.
I'm told Semore spoke Yiddish only clumsily, although he was a fluent speaker of Russian. But it's interesting to learn how my family's exodus related to the larger picture. Yiddish language and culture were kept alive longer in Eastern Europe than in Germany, where the Jewish strategy focused more on assimilation.
When I've wondered, perhaps not often enough, about why I'm like I am, I haven't wondered so much about why so many American Jews are secular, or indifferently religious, or liberal or left-wing. It seems obvious now that I know the answer, but there was a selection to who survived the Holocaust: generally assimilated Germans perished or the more religious of the Eastern Europeans. The equalities and opportunities of America beckoned more to restless secular Jews like Abraham Babchin. They didn't need to stay with their entire community.
The emphasis of Katz's book though, is certainly on the "good times" of Jewish history. Perhaps this is an antidote to the image of the long-suffering wandering old Jew (still being "punished" over some ancestral role in Jesus' death). Over and over Katz describes medieval European Jews guffawing at some hilarious multi-lingual pun in a Yiddish play, perhaps adapted from a knightly Christian epic, but with gefilte fish replacing the gentile feast.
phantom_mom, erudite though she is, wasn't aware that Yiddish was often known as "the language of Ashkenaz" [edit: she says she did; perhaps I did not enunciate "Ashkenaz" clearly]. Ashkenaz was the name Central and Eastern Europeans gave for their religious/cultural nation within nations. Ashkenaz was actually trilingual: the educated men read and wrote Hebrew, the language of the Torah (first five books of the Bible.) Those who specialized in scholarship worked in Aramaic, the language of the Talmud, the rabbinic commentary and interpretation of the Torah. Actually it is funny in a way to imagine Ashkenazic society and the way the women would pray for their sons to grow up to become great religious scholars. These are different from today's heroes-although my personal heroes tend also to be scholars (Einstein, etc.) Finally, Yiddish or the language of Ashkenaz was a mixture of Hebrew and German (using Hebrew letters) and was typically the only language known to women.
After the invention of the printing press, Jewish women became more educated in their culture: prayers and translations of the Bible were printed in Yiddish. Women also began to write. Still, Yiddish had a "taint" as a "women's language".
The Jewish religion did not stay static: Kabbalah developed, and the Chasid movement was quite the lightening rod to critics. (In fact the Jewish religion had for a long time gone beyond what was in the Old Testament, incorporating ideas of the afterlife, messiah, etc.)
One of the low points of Jewish thought, perhaps following some of these emergent movements and their popularization in Yiddish with the printing press, was the embrace of the false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, if I've spelled his name right. I'd read about him before: an eccentric who was encouraged in his delusions by a wayward scholar, he inspired much true belief but ended up captured by Muslim Turks. When threatened with torture, he converted to Islam and became the Sultan's doorman. Some Jews continued to believe in him, and coded approval for him showed up in Kabbalah manuscripts (inspiring a witch-hunt of Kabbalists).
I hadn't heard much about this before reading "The History of the Jews", so I'm wondering how much this incident had been downplayed, as it's not very flattering either to Jewish masses who went along or the scholars involved...
I usually think of Chasidism (most Jews in old-fashioned dress and beards are Chasids, I think) as a conservative movement, but at the time it was radical, and rabbinic authorities tried to stamp it out. The way I understand it, inspiration and meaning were given new priority over textual details, and this inspiration was personified in a charismatic leader, the rebbe, which is different from a rabbi or a Reb. Help.
Germanic Ashkenaz drifted apart from Eastern European Ashkenaz. Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather to the composer Felix Mendelssohn, opened up dialogue between Jews and Germans, and spearheaded a movement for assimilation. Yiddish came to be seen as a great liability. It was a "zhargon", or jargon. Jews were falling for the ideology that "purity" is an asset in a language, when, for example, English derives much of its richness from having both Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots, which can convey different nuances. Katz suggests that ironically assimilating Jews helped to stir up Germanic anti-Semitism by (1) trying to adopt the German culture but doing it only clumsily at first, and (2) becoming self-hating Jews by denying the value of the Ashkenazic culture. This was a provocative line of thought for me, as instinctively I prefer a modern, scientific world view and society to a medieval, superstitious one. Of course it's been pointed out that Christianity is quite full of superstitions too.
However, in Eastern Europe, Jews were experimenting with modernization from within. The Jews most educated in European cosmopolitanism tried to educate the masses through newspapers. Some provoked the ire of the intelligentsia by reaching out to the masses in Yiddish. The first article in a Yiddish newspaper reported on the US Civil War, although it made a glaring error (it suggested the black slaves had been the native inhabitants of the US, confusing them with Indians).
Accomplished Hebrew poets started trying their hand at Yiddish-and they had great success. Yiddish had been breaking up into dialects, borrowing from different Slavic nations, but these writers helped to make a rich language everyone could understand (an earlier attempt at standardization for a printing of the Bible just made a dull, stiff dialect.)
Earlier in this journal I'd speculated that if Israel had adopted Yiddish instead of Hebrew as its language it wouldn't have been so militaristic. I have mixed feelings about what's going on in Israel-I wanted to be for "doves" like Barak and against "hawks" like Sharon. Perhaps there is something to the militaristic side if it can keep the nation safe when the doves are rebuffed. Personally, I'm very little attached to the specific historical boundaries of Israel and Jerusalem, as opposed to having people not die.
Ben-Gurion, the first leader of Israel, actually walked out of a speech, in Yiddish, given by a woman who had heroically resisted the Nazis. "The language grates on my ears," he said. I understand that Yiddish is a gentle, ironic, satiric language good for left-handed compliments, subtle digs, and praise that doesn't take itself too seriously. After all, if you say something good about someone, the evil spirits will take them down a peg. Lust for power is for the goyim, and there's something a little ridiculous about it.
Just as Katz provocatively suggests assimilation caused some of the problems for German Jews, he suggests that Ashkenazic culture may have been too passive. It didn't stress defense or strength, instead only honor in being a martyr, a victim, for God, and the immediacy of the "next world". He doesn't write much about the Holocaust but he notes how little Jews resisted.
The culture of Ashkenaz is largely gone. There are pockets here and there. Israel miraculously revived a dead language (Hebrew), but some say you can't really do that. This is Hebrew II, the sequel to ancient Hebrew. I'm used to thinking Hitler lost because he died and the map was redrawn by his enemies. But the Ashkenazic culture centered on the Yiddish language is mostly gone, and in that sense he did win.
What made Yiddish?
One answer given in the book was the shtetl, the Jewish ghetto. And Yiddish does not make sense outside of that community.
Another answer, which the author prefers, is that Yiddish lived always in religious communities. As part of a trilingual system (Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic). And such communities still exist. We think of secularism as a norm because many immigrants to the US were secular, and because Jewish culture went through a rare "secular outburst" recently, but the future of Yiddish is with the orthodox.
phantom_mom can correct me if I've made mistakes!
I think there's a Yiddish conference in New Jersey coming up some time, perhaps
I should learn more and go to that.