Jewish
Review
15 June 2005
Yiddish book goes far beyond word history
by Rabbi David Rosenberg
“Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish” by Dovid Katz, Basic
Books, 2004, 446 pages, $26.95
This is the most complete book I have seen on the history of Yiddish. It is
extraordinary in scope and in its ability to draw examples from the distant
past. Dr. Katz claims some Yiddish words currently in use can be attributed
to periods all the way back to 1000 B.C.E. (the pre-Hebraic Canaanite and Northwest
Semitic periods), and he traces the development of Yiddish through 400 C.E.
(the middle of the rabbinic period) to the 20th century.
Katz gives us the sources for many common Yiddish words we take for granted. The word tzuris, for example, is defined in Yiddish as problems, suffering and grief; and the word tzoraas comes from the early Biblical Hebrew for a type of skin disease caused by gossiping. An afflicted individual had to sit for seven days in solitary confinement until the high priest determined whether the condition was infectious. Moses' sister was thus quarantined.
Mazel tov, which means good luck, is a mixture of mazel, an ancient Hebrew term for the constellations, and tov, which means good. Mazel is found in the Book of Samuel in relation to witchcraft and the use of astrology as a way of affecting one's fate. The word mazelot is a Talmudic term for constellations in the firmament.
Katz points out that the current users of Yiddish are almost exclusively Hassidim, both in the Chabad world and in other Hassidic sects in Israel and New York. When he discusses the potential of Yiddish as a living language, he puts on the linguist's hat and describes the morphology of Yiddish from the small-town East European language of Jews to the literary language of the Enlightenment; to the language of the emancipated, university-educated American Jew in the late 1800s and early 1900s; to the Yiddish of the Borscht Belt; and finally to the Yiddish of the Hassidic world of Jewish learning in the 21st century.
Katz shows how Yiddish borrows from the non-Jewish communities in which it flourished - for example, Russia, Poland and Germany. As a linguist, he has a knack for detail that enables him to describe the language at its basic root level, and he has a sense of the various ways in which Yiddish differentiates between holy terms or concepts and secular terms.
For example, the word bikher is the Yiddish form of a Germanic word for books, so in Yiddish one would say bikher for secular books; but sforim, a Yiddish term that comes from a Biblical Hebrew term for book, means a "holy book."
The author portrays the fascinating versatility of Yiddish as it straddles the modern world, the literary world, the intellectual world and the world of the holy.
This work helps to define some of the secular and Orthodox sources of words. For example, the word shigatz describes a secular, non-Jewish lad in the pejorative sense (which becomes shiksa for the female). Sheketz is the Biblical Hebrew term in the Torah that designates an abominable insect. Here we can see that the secular Yiddish term really comes from a holy term for an abominable creature.
This book would serve well as a sister accompaniment to any history of the Jewish people in the Ashkenazic world. Katz brings up many of the greatest names in medieval halachic rabbinic literature as true Yiddishists. He also introduces us in a systematic fashion to the 19th-century Yiddish literary intellectuals who made Yiddish flower before its evisceration during the Nazi period.
This book is a must for those who want to understand and appreciate the rich heritage of our Jewish forefathers. The author's love for his subject emanates from every page.
Katz was born in New York and received a doctorate in linguistics from the University of London, after having studied at Columbia University. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania.