Unyielding Yiddish: Past, Present, and Beyond
Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkhenazi Jews, has a long history in time as well as geography spanning from France to eastern Europe and ultimately the United States. It’s been considered a dying language ever since WWII by many, yet it never seems to go away completely. Jeffrey Shandler in Adventures in Yiddishland defines Yiddish not as a dying language but as one that has transformed into a postvernacular one.
Postvernacularity is a new situation that a language can find itself in when it stops being a language that people readily speak to each other in order to communicate. The utterances of the language take on secondary significance apart from the semantic values they carry. Plenty of people are nowadays fascinated by Yiddish and express great admiration for it but do not actually speak it.
“In other words, in postvernacular Yiddish, the very fact that something is said (or written or sung) in Yiddish is at least as meaningful as the meaning of the words being uttered — if not more so.” (p. 22)
Shandler gives an example of two people at a conference exchanging greetings and formalities in Yiddish while speaking loudly enough to be overheard. Speaking Yiddish has become a performance important on its own and quite divorced from the content of the words.
“The primacy of its form over its content … renders Yiddish as something more akin to music than a language, to be appreciated as a signifier or affect or as aesthetic experience of sound play.” (p. 139–140)
This applies when we distinguish two types of Yiddish enthusiasts in the world today. The Hassidic speakers and everybody else. Hassidic movements have managed to maintain Yiddish as vernacular as possible as it used to be before WWII. However, it has become more of a symbol of their trademark approach to piety than anything else. In that sense, speaking Yiddish separates the “real” Jews from the rest and becomes an internal zhargon of Hassidism. For the everybody-else group, speaking Yiddish now seems aspirational. One wishes to take part in a culture and inhabit a world that is long gone, a Jewish world. Some take up Yiddish to return to religious traditions or simply to find some other way of being Jewish. So how did we get here and what’s next in store for Yiddish?
The Yiddish of yesterday
These developments in the perception of Yiddish are in fact nothing new. Proponents of the Haskalah did not abound with love for Yiddish. Yiddish was despised and uncultivated. That said, they still wrote in Yiddish because that’s what their readers understood.
Yiddish, as originally derived from German, was also imbued with more secondary meaning even by the Nazis. Jews speaking perfect German could apparently sometimes be betrayed by their rhetoric. Yiddish was, therefore, a threat to the health of the German culture.
“From the late 1800s until the end of World War II the discourse about Yiddish ranged widely, from ardent advocacy to equally passionate repudiation.” (p. 12)
On the other hand, Yiddishism, the various ideologies that sprung up in the late 19th century, championed Yiddish as a vernacular perfectly fit for modern, radically secular Jews drawing their cultural descendency from East Europe. As such, Yiddishists offered a model of Yiddish and Jewishness that was equally coherent as the vision of those who wished to assimilate or those who proposed Hebrew as the foundation. Interestingly, the Yiddishist project in East Europe received unexpected support during WWI:
“The Germans banned Russian as the language of instruction in schools. Each national minority was expected to run its schools in its own mother tongue. Yiddish schools sprang up spontaneously, but the transition to Yiddish as the language of instruction was by no means a simple matter. There were not enough textbooks, and they did not exist on subjects for which there was virtually no Yiddish terminology. Few teachers were really fluent in Yiddish and not all parents were pleased that it was being used as the language of instruction. However, the commandment of the time was: Mother tongue! Yiddish!” (p. 69)
This continued in Russia after the Versailles Treaty. Many (never the majority of Jews though) were able to attend Yiddish-language schools in the interwar period as Soviet Russia officially recognised Yiddish as the language of the Jewish national minority, but many parents still prefered Russian for their children since they perceived learning Yiddish as being, in fact, disadvantageous in searching for future employment.
In short, there were roughly three major Jewish populations in the area that each tried their own approach to Yiddish in Poland, Vilna and Soviet Union. Yiddishists pushed the project forward by establishing the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, an important Jewish centre, in 1925 to standardise the language, orthography, lexicon and grammar. It was a period of standardisation, but a messy one because language reform in the Soviet Union was a matter of state policy (no influence of YIVO) and the Polish Jews often simply ignored or resisted what YIVO was doing.
The end of East European Yiddish
The begining of the end to these developments in Yiddish actually arrived much earlier than one would presume. Roughly a third of the population moved to the United States in the decades leading up to WWI. Once in the US, the immigrants ironically had little interest in maintaining their vernacular. New generations received English education and Yiddish was relegated to bar mitzvah training at talmud torahs. In the postwar United States, the Jewish population moved to suburbs, managed to enter universities and their view of Jewishness shifted from ethnicity to a religious community. American Jews wanted to be and be seen as American and they didn’t need a reminder of difference in the form of Yiddish. In addition, the fact Yiddishits as representatives of secular Yiddish were associated with the left did not help things in the early years of the Cold War.
The Yiddish of tomorrow
Yiddish in Europe is undoubtedly done for (at least for the moment). Yiddish in Israel is indubitably linked with Hassidism and their way of doing things. Hassidic communities in the US continue to speak Yiddish, but there may as well be a cultural wall built between them and the rest. Secular Yiddish has been profoundly tainted by past Yiddishism and Yiddish is now seen as rather too limited to be able to cover all aspects of life. So what is a young (or not-young) Jew to do?
To try to enrich it to be a vernacular again is akin to reviving left-wing Yiddishism and the fight with Hebrew and local languages that Yiddish has already lost. Hebrew is unquestionably now the vernacular of secular Jews in Israel and local languages play that role for everybody else. Is non-hassidic Yiddish dead? Hold your horses!
Option 1 — Yiddish as cultural roots
“While learning Hebrew is typically a fixture of an American Jewish childhood (and not infrequently ends with Jewish rites of passage into adolescence), taking a class in Yiddish now marks for some a voluntary step in the formation of one’s Jewish adult self, along with other college studies and activities, such as attending Hillel programs, joining a Jewish political group or chorus, or living in a kosher dormitory.” (p. 87)
Aron Lansky, the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, proposed a view of Yiddish literature as a new Mishna, a collection of history and sensibility. A cultural wellspring that may inform and sustain Jewish creativity in whatever language one happens to speak today. The new is hard to create when one has nothing to draw upon. The new Jew is then one who is firmly rooted in her cultural history and literature, which is naturally Yiddish, and who continues to create and build on it.
Option 2 — Yiddish as sensibility
“Indeed, while many college students are still attracted to Yiddish as an embodiment of Jewish heritage, for others learning the language has a subversive cachet, offering alternatives to American Jewish social and cultural conventions. Students are now often drawn to Yiddish as a Jewish signifier of the diasporic, politically progressive, culturally avant-garde, feminist, or queer, the language emblematic of what one observer has described as a new, Jewish “twenty-something in-yourface radicalism.” (p. 87)
It turns out that queerness and Yiddishkeit have plenty in common. Diasporism, rootless cosmopolitanism, border-crossing, interest in transgression and being proudly different define both and Yiddish obtains a new significance from the contrast of the two in Queer Yiddishkeit. Queer Yiddish is aesthetic, symbolic and deliberate. Most importantly, it relies on a different form of transmission than traditional language acquisition that has become problematic for Yiddish. Queer Yiddish can be learnt as new members join the club regardless of family adherence, thus creating a new family.
What’s next?
The only thing that’s clear is that Yiddish is far from gone. It is special and it has to be so. I have no clue what the right direction is, but I have no doubt that Yiddish will figure it out as it always has. Personally, I find the style of Queer Yiddishkeit quite intriguing. The concept opens new doors and it is something that can be recreated in other groups (and in fact has been). The one thing that we’ll have to give up is the hope for one standard Yiddish accessible to all. By its nature it is never going to be that as it never was. It will have to stay murky, complicated and thoroughly magical. !דאַנק גאָט
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Shandler, Jeffrey. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture. University of California Press, 2008, https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/9780520931770.
