Literary Review
June 2005
A Language for the People
by David Cesarani
Dovid Katz, Words On Fire, The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. New York: Basic Books, 2004
Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilisation. The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005
When I was growing up in London in the 1960s I used to hear my mother talking on the phone in Yiddish. I figured out that she was saying something she didn't want me to understand, probably about a poor school report or what a surprise birthday present. It never occurred to me that what I was hearing represented one terminal point of a great 'language chain' stretching back to Hebrew and Aramaic in Ancient times. Even when I learned Yiddish formally so that I could use Jewish newspapers for research, I believed that it gestated in medieval Europe. But thanks to the efforts of a remarkable coterie of experts, eccentrics, and enthusiasts, Yiddish is undergoing a revolution.
Owing largely due to the efforts of Henry Saposnik, Yiddish song and klezmer
music is now established in the repertoire of world music. Aaron Lansky created
the National Yiddish Book Centre in the USA, rescuing a million volumes from
destruction to provide a platform for research and teaching. (He tells his remarkable
story in Outwitting History [London: Souvenir Press, 2005].) Meanwhile,
Dovid Katz has almost single-handedly been responsible for the growth of academic
research and teaching programmes in Yiddish. He is a controversial figure, for
his philological views as much as his pedagogic techniques, but no one can gainsay
his energy or his encyclopaedic knowledge. Now he has poured his erudition into
a wonderfully readable book that will transform the appreciation of Yiddish.
Katz provides readers with a lucid, graceful, and often witty chronicle of Jewish
languages from their inception in pre-Biblical times to the present day, carefully
situated within a concise yet authoritative historical context. Katz argues
that it is impossible to understand Yiddish without grasping the language of
the tribes that settled the Land of Israel. From the beginnings this people,
who we rather misleadingly call 'the Jews', used two languages, one high and
one low. Aramaic was the vernacular of everyday life while the educated and
the priestly class used Hebrew. When the Jews settled throughout the Roman Empire,
or were forcibly displaced, they took their languages with them. But like all
migrants they adapted to local conditions. In the Rhineland and southern Germany
they gradually developed a 'fusion language' based on urban German dialects
leavened with Hebrew and Aramaic.
The early phase of Yiddish can be pieced together from caustic remarks by rabbinical commentators who scorned its use for devotional purposes as against Hebrew. Somehow, Yiddish made the transition from a profane discourse, limited to business dealings and domestic affairs, to the vehicle for spiritual and cultural aspirations that would grant it immortality. By the late fourteenth century Yiddish acquired its first written texts and a hundred years later benefited from the invention of printing. This success was underpinned by a combination of female acolytes and market forces.
Katz writes intriguingly about the nexus between Yiddish and Jewish women. Medieval rabbis restricted the circle of learning to men and confirmed a machismo status on the official languages of the Bible and the Talmud. But they could not curb the spiritual appetite of Jewish women or satisfy their craving for entertainment. Wealthy patronesses paid for the translation of devotional works into Yiddish. Women provided a market for Yiddish versions of the great epic poems, including the story of King Arthur. By the mid fifteenth century original works were being composed in Yiddish on the model of the Chaucerian tales. Yiddish took flight as a mean to empower Jewish women and poor, ill educated Jewish men. In a further twist, Katz points out that the first Yiddish printing entrepreneurs were Christians or Jewish converts to Christianity. Indeed, because Jews associated printing with Christendom, printed letters were known in Yiddish as galkhes, which is derived from the Yiddish for priests.
The success of popular religious commentaries and domestic advice books is evidence of 'a Yiddish "counter spirit" to a male dominated traditional Near Eastern civilization long ago transplanted into the heart of Europe'. Yiddish only became established as a legitimate language for the male world with the rise of Hasidism, the pietistic response to the mid-seventeenth century massacres and poverty that afflicted the Jews who had earlier arrived in Poland from Germanic-speaking central Europe. Hasidism promoted Yiddish to the 'third great language of Jewish spiritual life'. As the movement grew from a chiliastic cult to embrace millions it created a civilization that was inseparable from Yiddish. This demographic base was to be its glory and its fate. In Western Europe Jewish modernizers stigmatised Yiddish and toiled to eliminate it. But in the east it flourished. To gain any following religious reformers, cultural entrepreneurs, and political radicals were all obliged to express themselves in the language of the street and the shtetl.
Katz writes marvellously about the explosion of Yiddish culture that gave us the novels of Sholem Aleichem, who created the world of 'Fiddler on the Roof', and Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is scrupulously fair in assessing the rival claims of modern Hebrew and Yiddish in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the Zionist movement willed Hebrew back into life, he points out that Jewish socialism and diaspora nationalism in Eastern Europe rode the back of Yiddish. The competition between these Jewish languages was brutally curtailed by the Nazis, who destroyed the demographic base of Yiddish, and the Soviets, who wrecked any surviving infrastructure. Shamefully, the pioneers of Israel denigrated what they regarded as a discourse of powerlessness and passivity. Katz endorses and even lauds the notion of Yiddish as a language of the weak, in my view mistakenly, but he cannot hide his anger at the way Israel treated the rump of Yiddish-speakers.
For Katz 'the most bitterly painful time is the present'. Yiddish is burgeoning in Orthodox enclaves in Israel, America and some other centres, but it reached its most glorious heights as the vehicle for a Jewish secular humanistic culture with which it was virtually synonymous. Will the devotees he has inspired manage to achieve what the Zionists pulled off for Hebrew, rescuing Yiddish from a future as Frumspeak, the argot of the pious?
Paul Kriwaczek has written ostensibly about the same subject, but with very different results. His book claims to be rescuing both the language and its speakers from historical obscurity though, as we have seen, Yiddish was never 'forgotten'. Indeed, it is hard to see the point of his book. He opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe.
Kriwaczek proclaims the admirable intention to 'celebrate the success and splendour
of the Yiddish civilisation, its contribution to Europe's economic, social,
religious and intellectual, process'. Rather than dwell on conflict and catastrophe,
he sets out to highlight the productive encounters between Jews and those around
them, 'a long struggle which called up new interpretations of what it means
to be a Jew'. In practice, however, this means a partial selection of material
from antiquated secondary sources, forming neither a reliable account of how
Yiddish evolved nor a comprehensive history of the European Jews.