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To the Point (Tsum Punkt)
Vol 7, no. 1 (September–October 2005)
BOOK REVIEW
By Shelby Shapiro
Dovid Katz. Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. NY: Basic Books, 2004. ISBN 0-465-03728-3. Illus., Table. xvi + 397 pp + 32 pp index.
Writing a review of Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish presents
a daunting task, for Dovid Katz has written a big, brawling book that covers
linguistics, theology, sociology, literary studies and print culture, politics,
history and much more. Words on Fire is a locomotive running on broad-gauge
tracks: the ride is exciting, interesting, entertaining, and guaranteed to make
every reader think, even considering the bumps raised by some of his arguments.
The present lack of documentation in the form of footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography or bibliographic essay is the most frustrating aspect of the work. But note the word "present": in a May 25 email to this reviewer, Katz wrote that a second paperback edition will contain a "Debates, Notes, and Bibliography" section.
Consider this review, then, as provisional, the final verdict to be rendered upon publication of the second edition. Not written for an academic audience, Katz employs a passionate (and sometimes breezy) style as he ties together the various threads in his narrative.
Katz's narrative rests on the conception of Yiddish as the latest link in a chain of Jewish common languages. Basically he sees Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish historically as the respective common languages of Jews, one replacing the other. By the time Aramaic served as a Jewish vernacular, Jews no longer used Hebrew as a major mode of communication. The ability to read and write Hebrew and Aramaic fluently became the province of a religious elite. The Hebrew learned by male Jews in kheyder did not enable students to use the language to communicate. The purpose of such learning lay in the ability to attach sound to symbol for the recitation of prayers and to give students a minimal familiarity with a limited number of religious texts. Two Israeli scholars drive this point home.
In Lewis Glinert's Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile (NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), Shaul Stampfer examined Hebrew literacy in 19th Century Eastern Europe in his fascinating paper, "What Did 'Knowing Hebrew' Mean in Eastern Europe?" Notwithstanding the Conventional Wisdom, his research into various sets of records led him to the conclusion that the vast majority of Jewish males had only the most minimal knowledge of Hebrew. He explained this by examining teaching techniques in the kheyder, the primary, and for the most part, only site of Jewish education for most Jewish males. He looked at both what students learned and how they were taught. Thorough fluency – reading and writing – comprised an area of knowledge belonging to a privileged minority, the religious elite which controlled traditional Jewish society and against which the maskilim (adherents of the Enlightenment) rebelled. Those within the elite usually had the benefit of private tutors and went from the kheyder into a yeshiva. To enter a yeshiva meant a student had the ability to read a page of the Talmud, a skill not fostered on the elementary level. Learning to read, write and speak Hebrew became commonplace only after the triumph of the modern Hebrew movement which led to the formation of Ivrit.
Iris Parush's "Another Look at The Life of 'Dead Hebrew': Intentional Ignorance of Hebrew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society" (Book History 7), dealt with the problems of developing a Hebrew literary language. She found Hebrew fluency to exist primarily among the religious elite. A central point in her paper concerned the fact that Jewish males customarily did not learn Hebrew grammar. Obtaining a knowledge of grammar often marked the starting point of maskilic rebellion, since the elite deliberately chose to enforce a mass ignorance of grammar. In a society which tied social status to religious learning, to spread the possession of this specialized knowledge would jeopardize power relationships.
The resistance of this elite towards Yiddish translations of holy texts has a direct analogy to the campaigns waged by the Catholic Church against those seeking to translate Christian religious texts from Latin into the vernacular. In the 1500s, William Tenderly fled England for the Continent because he had translated the Christian Bible into English. All but a handful of the 18,000 copies of his translation were destroyed. As he worked on translating Jewish religious works from Hebrew into English, his enemies caught up with him and he was executed. The invention of the printing press, coupled with vernacular literacy, enabled anyone to interpret religious texts, not just an elite.
Katz furnishes one of the few accounts read by this reviewer on the language wars between Hebraists and Yiddishists within Palestine (and after 1948, Israel). This is an ugly story of terrorism, discrimination, and resistance, not usually told. He makes the point that the pioneer Hebraists themselves had grown up in a Yiddish cultural and linguistic milieu. He also employs gender as an analytical tool, citing Naomi Seidman's A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (reviewed in the May-June 2004 Tsum Punkt). Added to this is a discussion of European Zionist assumptions and arguments concerning Eastern European Jewry and Yiddish. His sections on the language wars could stand on their own as a separate publication, being nuanced, subtle, detailed and extensive.
Still, Katz's contention that "Israeli Hebrew is a language that was artificially and tenaciously constructed" to the point that it "...has blossomed into a fully natural language," as contrasted with Yiddish, which is "the naturally and uninterruptedly surviving modern rung" in Jewish linguistic continuity (p. 2), remains unconvincing. What makes any language - or particular words in a language, for that matter - "natural," after all, is repeated use over time. Since all languages are systems of symbols, necessarily all languages are "constructed," even Yiddish. Nobody pops out of the womb and strikes up a conversation in a recognizable language.
Katz also shines throughout with accounts of the development of Yiddish among traditional Jews, a field ignored by too many scholars. Among the few toiling in that particular academic vineyard, Katz notes, is Miriam Isaacs. His argument runs into problems with his concept of "secular outbursts" which "...tend to occur during the first few generations of creative intermingling within tolerant, multicultural, non-Jewish civilizations. After that the secularists' own not-too-distant descendants tend to assimilate to the surrounding culture" (p. 8). That culture clashes or intermingling result in enhanced creativity is nothing new, nor is it something specific to Jews. Nobody could claim that Tsarist Russia was "tolerant." Yet the Jewish centers of Russia and Poland (then under Russian domination) produced a vital Jewish civilization that comprised both secular and sacred elements. Further, the most recent "secular outburst" received its most damaging blow not from assimilation to a "tolerant, multicultural non-Jewish civilization," but from the Holocaust.
In writing of the Holocaust, Katz makes a number of assertions which cannot go unchallenged. He states that
It is uncomfortable for modern Jews to acknowledge one of the basic facts about the Holocaust: The vast majority of Ashkenazic Jewry did go to the slaughter without putting up even such resistance as might have been possible. If the maximum resistance had been put up, the Holocaust would nevertheless have been carried out. People are only people as against the mechanized horror of the twentieth century, and against a powerful enemy determined to murder an entire civilian population. Still, the numbers of survivors and escapees would have been somewhat higher. (p. 308)
He goes on to say that "…of course, there was remarkably brave resistance in a number of ghettos where there were uprisings, and among the partisans in the forests" (p. 308f). He does not note another "uncomfortable" fact: namely, that the vast majority of civilians in countries occupied by the Nazis did not engage in "maximum resistance." As with Jewish resistance fighters, those so engaged constituted a minority. Resistance took many forms, from gathering intelligence to printing underground papers, running underground schools, sabotage, and armed resistance. To conduct armed resistance, however, presupposes a supply of arms, and suppliers of arms and ammunition. Jews had neither supplies nor suppliers. Keeping in mind Mao Tse Tung's dictum that guerrilla warfare can only succeed if those involved are like fish in the water, the environment in which Jews "swam" can only be called toxic. These and other factors all militated against armed resistance. And yet, as noted by British historian M. R. D. Foot in Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism, 1940-1945 (1976):
[T]his time they fought back. Calvocoressi prints a map of Eastern Europe showing areas of Jewish resistance in 1940-44: including, besides Warsaw, sixteen other ghettoes in which armed risings took place against the nazi oppressor. Let their names at least be cited: Bendzin, Bialystok, Brody, Cracow, Czestochwa, Lvov, Lutsk, Minsk, Mir, Riga, Sielce, Sosnowica, Stryzow, Tarnopol, Tarnow, and Vilna. In nine areas-one of them, between Vilna and the Pripet marshes, measuring about fifty miles by thirty-Jewish partisan bands controlled the district for months, sometimes for years on end. Such areas, when known to the Nazis, provoked frightful reprisal attacks; diverting men and weapons from the main front, at however fearful a cost. (p. 294)
Whether "... the numbers of survivors and escapees would have been somewhat higher" is far from certain, given the German practice of collective punishment.
Katz seeks to tie alleged non-resistance to a mythical pacifism among Ashkenazic Jews, a mythical pacifism that somehow did not deplete the ranks of self-defense groups sponsored by various radical political parties even before World War II.
Words on Fire – the reservations raised by this reviewer (as well as other problems not discussed) notwithstanding - is well worth reading. Areas of disagreement force the reader to think and rethink; the wealth of detail, the dynamism of his writing, the sheer breadth of knowledge all make this a book worth reading. This reviewer eagerly awaits the second edition with the promised source material included.