Di Yiddish-Imperye: The Dashed Hopes for a Yiddish Cultural Empire in the Soviet Union (original) (raw)
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Explorations in the history of the Semitic Component in Yiddish
1982
Yiddish arose in Central Europe. Nevertheless, the language includes a Semitic Component comprising thousands of lexical items that is synchronically fused with the Germanic Component within Yiddish. Theories from the sixteenth century to the present have contended that Semitisms entered a previously (nearly) wholly Germanic language from sacred Hebrew and. Aramaic texts used in the traditional Yiddish speaking civilization known as Ashkenaz. The thesis challenges the text theory. The alternative proposed is the continual transmission theory claiming that the Semitic Component entered Europe in the vernacular of the original settlers who were, retroactively speaking, the first Ashkenazim. Questions concerning the origin of the Semitic Component are also relevant to the determination of the relative age of Yiddish and to the contested status of the protolanguage within historical linguistics. The Semitic Component of all known Yiddish dialects is characterized by a system of long and...
Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality
The article deals with the question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish. Before the 16th century, the languages used in works compiled by various Jewish authors from western German-speaking provinces show close similarities to dialects spoken by local Christians and do not represent texts written in a single specifically Jewish language. Texts dating from the 16th to 17th cen turies demonstrate the existence of two separate Jewish idioms: western and eastern. The former covers western Germany and northern Italy and is mainly based on East Franconian and Swabian. The latter characterizes works written in Bohemia and Poland. It is closely related to Bohemian colonial dialect of German. It is inappropriate to consider all varieties of modern Yiddish to be dialects of one single language. Indeed, the analysis shows that in many aspects, Southwestern Yiddish inherits features of East Franconian, while Eastern Yiddish is primary based on Bohemian. Its consonantal system was later adapted to the Silesian dialect spoken by German Christian urban population in Polish towns. These two Yiddish idioms inherit numerous features from the two languages, western and eastern, respectively, that existed during the 16th to 17th centuries. As a result, as a whole, Yiddish is not descending from any hypothetical Proto-Yiddish. 1 This article could not be written without Erika Timm. Firstly, her works represent a basis for numerous elements of the analysis presented here. Secondly, during the preparation of this text, she shared with me copies of numerous quite helpful sources and answered to many questions of mine.
A thousand years of Yiddish in the European arena
2009
Honoured delegates, guests, and hosts: We are gathered here to consider the fate of a language and culture that have survived a thousand years of European history. The history of Yiddish is somewhat exotic, as European languages go, and if contemporary meanings can be read into history, then Yiddish may just have something to say about the borderless and the displaced among the minority languages of Europe, and about minority languages in general. The history of Yiddish, and the dialectology of Yiddish, have tended to ignore the political boundaries and divides within Europe. For centuries, the Yiddish territory constituted a vast "linguistic empire" in Europe, albeit as a minority language everywhere, in power nowhere. From a linguistic point of view, Yiddish was left free to develop entirely according to the external vicissitudes of history and the internal laws of historical linguistics, without the usual apparatus of normative academies and government edicts. Yiddish was and remained a folk language in Western and Central Europe. It was only in its "second home" in the Slavonic and Baltic lands of Eastern Europe that it evolved into a highly nuanced medium suitable for sophisticated literature of international status. It is that modern, Eastern European Yiddish that was exported by emigrés to the satellite Yiddish centres of London, Paris, and Berlin, to other Western European cities, and overseas, early in our own century. West to east progressions from the folksy to the sophisticated are, as, we see from Yiddish, every bit as viable as those going the other way. Let us not be the ones to predict where the greatest European creations will come from in the next hundred years.
The Birth of Yiddish and the Paradigm of the Rhenish Origin of Ashkenazic Jews
Revue Des Etudes Juives, 2004
This paper introduces a methodology to approach the question of the origins of Yiddish. It stresses the importance of the defining the exact geographical locations and time frames of various elements of Yiddish, distinguishing between those peculiar to that tongue as a whole and those of only regional significance. Also of interest is the distinction between elements unique to Yiddish and those shared with German and Slavic languages. These methodological principles are applied for several purposes: (1) to compare different theories of the origins of Yiddish; (2) to introduce formal definitions allowing to address the question of mono- or polygenesis of Yiddish; (3) to extract the onomastic layer of Proto-Yiddish. The paper shows that important differences between various Yiddish linguists are partly related to purely methodological aspects of their analysis: these authors use (implicitly or explicitly) distinct definitions for several key terms. Concerning the historical conclusions about the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry drawn by linguists from their theories about Yiddish, it is shown – using the analysis of personal names - that the descendants of Jews who lived in the Middle Ages in the Rhine-Moselle valley played an important role in the formation of the Ashkenazic communities in various German and Slavic countries. As a result, contrary to the claim of certain Yiddish linguists, the Rhenish paradigm of Ashkenazic history should not be rejected
This paper is about the changing position of the Yiddish language among Rus sian Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: its use, its func tions, the social base of modern Yiddish culture, and the symbolic meaning of Yiddish culture in the evolving identity of Russian Jews.Ŷ iddish and the 1897 Russian Census According to the 1897 Russian census, there were 5,280,000 Jews by religion in Imperial Russia. (The census recorded subjects' religion, not their nationality or ethnicity.) Of them, 97 percent declared "Jewish" to be their mother tongue {rodnoi iazik).^ This statistic is frequently cited to demonstrate the strength of Yiddish in Russian Jewry, and it is sometimes abused to conclude that Russian Jewry was an entirely Yiddish-speaking entity. But this number needs to be put into its proper proportions and context. First, a few quibbles. The number of 5.28 million included about 65,000 non-Ashkenazi Jews in the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is clear that when they declared "Jewish" as their mother tongue, they had in mind languages other than Yiddish. Second, in 1897, Jewish nationalist sentiments and ideas were quite strong and widespread, and one may assume that there were thousands of Russian-speaking Jews who declared "Jewish" as their mother tongue, not as a statement of fact, but as a demonstrative act, to affirm their Jewish nationality before the tsarist government. This is known to have happened in censuses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.® But the bigger problem with the figure of 97 percent of Jews declaring Yid dish their mother tongue has to do with the meaning of the term rodnoi iazik. While each respondent was free to understand the term as he or she wished, the 1 My book The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (published by Pittsbuigh University Press in 2005), provides a fuller treatment of these issues. 2 The figure is widely cited.