The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street
June 2005 / Vol LXXXI, issue 136
Moribund it Isn't
Review by Stephen Collins of Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish,
by Dovid Katz, Basic Books £17.99.
Bagel, chutzpah, kibosh, kosher: what do these words have in common? They are, of course, among the Yiddish words that have entered into contemporary English usage. This in my view reflects the parlance of New York (of which one-third of the population is Jewish) transmitted elsewhere through film, television and the written word. It is ironic that a language which some think is dying out today obtains more exposure in the non-Jewish world than at any time in its history: to use a Yiddish idiom, moribund it isn't.
So what is that history? Well, to find out you could do no better than to read Dovid Katz's Words on Fire: but, oy veh, does he tell you more than you might want to know! For this is 400 pages of not just philological enquiry, but a magisterial survey of Jewish experience in Europe against the background, exhaustively conveyed, of all the sociological, religious and political influences that gave European Jewry such a culturally rich but ultimately tragic past.
Yiddish emerged in the area of Europe known in the Jewish world as Ashkenaz, which eventually ranged from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the south, and from France in the west to Russia in the east. It was the third of three languages common to the Jews. The oldest was Hebrew, the language of the Bible and prayers; next came Aramaic, the language in which scholars and rabbis debated the finer points of religious law; and finally there came Yiddish. No-one spoke Hebrew as their everyday language except as part of prayer; although Aramaic had been a commonly spoken language in the Middle East, in Europe it was confined to scholars; but Yiddish became the vernacular – every Jew's native language – in Ashkenaz.
Linguistically, Yiddish resulted from the confrontation of Jewish Aramaic (the minority component) with medieval German dialects. Katz characterises this as a 'big bang' collision of two utterly different languages, Semitic and Germanic. The fusion is most obvious in the use of the Hebrew alphabet for a vocabulary that would be recognisable to a German speaker. This happened about 1,000 years ago. The oldest known document containing a Yiddish sentence dates from 1272. There were some surprising renditions of well-known works into Yiddish, such as Lancelot, part of the King Arthur's Court cycle, that was translated first into Hebrew (a 1279 copy survives in the Vatican library) and then into Yiddish.
Yiddish was a spoken language for the masses, but it was not at first a written language for the masses. Rather, there was a tendency for Yiddish literature to be directed at women, whilst the holy and scholarly languages (Hebrew and Aramaic respectively) were confined to men. This trend continued right through to, and beyond, the emergence of printed Yiddish books (the first such dating from 1526). Thus, for example, the Yiddish Women's Bible became, in Katz's words, a long-running Yiddish best-seller, with over 300 editions having appeared to date. And by the way, the earliest publishers of Yiddish books in the 1530s and '40s were Christians by birth or conversion.
The bias of Yiddish literature towards women was not to last, however. One rather esoteric channel for spreading its influence came through the translation in 1711 of the Zohar, the leading text underlying the Jewish mysticism (enjoying a certain popularity among non-Jews today) known as Kabbalah. This followed a period of tumult in the Jewish world after the appearance of the false Messiah, Sabbethai Zevi, who had eventually converted to Islam in 1666.
Etymologically, it is possible to distinguish between West and East European Yiddish, which both, however, derive from a single source. The Yiddish still spoken today derives from the latter. Another distinction, which came to characterise profound developments in Jewish society, was between northern and southern dialects, known respectively as Litvak (denoting Lithuanian) and Galitsyaner (denoting the Austro/Polish province of Galicia). Katz devotes a great deal of space to exploring the religio-cultural conflicts between these two groups, which I found fascinating as social and religious history but not particularly illuminating on the evolution of Yiddish as such.
In more recent times, Yiddish has again been the centre of cultural and political conflict. Although the Chernowitz conference of 1908, the first conference for the Yiddish language, declared it to be 'a national language of the Jewish people', others had wanted it to be called 'the national language'. But even the weaker form was to prove too much for Hebraists who were seeking the restoration of the Hebrew language in Palestine, as it then was. Thus, for example, working in tandem with the British Mandate authorities in the early 1920s, Hebraists made it de facto illegal to produce a Yiddish periodical. For understandable reasons, the Zionist promoters of a Jewish homeland in Palestine wanted to encourage the renaissance of the original language of the Jewish people, and to suppress what they regarded as the language of the oppressed in Europe. In this they succeeded so far as Israel was concerned, except among minority ultra-orthodox groups. But there is one significant qualification to this statement, on which it is worth quoting Katz:
"Inevitably a population of Yiddish-hating native speakers of Yiddish, who would revive the words of ancient Hebrew in daily speech, would unconsciously be transferring native sound, metaphor, turn of phrase, and thought patterns. Much of Israeli Hebrew is in fact 'straight translated Yiddish' rather than the language of Moses, Isaiah, and Job."
Thus Yiddish lives on in the nuance and idiom of modern Hebrew. And it also lives on in actual fact in the language of the rapidly growing ultra-orthodox communities of Israel, the United States, and elsewhere. It is indeed among these communities where Katz sees its future as a language that will continue to exist and develop. These groups do not produce much in the way of literature, however, although there is still also a small secular Yiddish movement. But there remains an outstanding canon of Yiddish literature, which reached its zenith of recognition as recently as 1978 with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Isaac Bashevis Singer (whose short stories – in translation! –- are well worth reading, whatever your background). And let us not forget the works of the writer Sholem Aleichem, immortalised in the musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Well, enough already! Katz, currently Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Vilnius University, is an American who spent a long time teaching Yiddish at Oxford. He is clearly an authority in his subject. Would I recommend Words on Fire? Probably not for the general reader who wants only a broad overview of Yiddish and the culture that spawned it; or for someone seeking its unique intrinsic brand of humour (for which I would suggest Leo Rosten's, The Joys of Yiddish).
But if you are looking for a masterly and scholarly investigation into a remarkable language and culture, this is the book for you.