It is remarkable how often people have spoken about Yiddish as if it were a kind of person. They variously characterize the language as a mother, an orphan, a maidservant, a seductress, a deviant, a muse, a laborer, an invalid, a foreigner, a magician, even a ghost. What are the implications of this wide range of portrayals? How do they inspire—and complicate—relating the story of Yiddish as the narrative of a human being, as a biography?
A biography of Yiddish—or, for that matter, of any language—is an intellectually provocative concept. It anthropomorphizes something that, while not human, depends on humankind for its existence. Language is not only entirely the creation of humans (though religious traditions may teach otherwise) but also an attribute widely regarded as distinguishing humans from other beings. Moreover, language use figures extensively in differentiating among national, regional, ethnic, religious, class, gender, sexual, generational, educational, ideological, and professional groups. Therefore, approaching a language as the subject of a biography, a genre conventionally reserved for the study of an individual person, draws attention to the relationships of a language with its speakers and with the cultural practices that people realize in or in relation to the language.
These issues are especially fitting for a book about Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazic Jewry (that is, the diaspora Jewish people generally understood as originating in northern Europe). The language is closely identified with particular Ashkenazic populations, their activities, mores, convictions, and sensibilities. Moreover, the scope of discussions of Yiddish regularly expands to address the nature of these Jews and their cultural practices. This interrelation among people, language, and culture is a central concern for the study of Yiddish, as are its speakers’ complex internal diversity and their long, varied history of contact with speakers of other languages.
In order to probe both the possibilities and the challenges posed by the notion of a biography of a language, this book is not organized according to chronology, geography, activity, or ideology but instead offers a series of short thematic chapters that follow the rubric of a biographical profile: date and place of birth, family background, residence, and so on. Each chapter integrates an examination of some aspect of the development, form, or characteristics of Yiddish with part of the range and dynamics of the language’s role in Ashkenazic life, from the Middle Ages to the present, and in locations on every continent where Yiddish speakers have settled. These chapters also probe the symbolic meanings that Jews and others have attributed to Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding the varied perceptions and valuations of the language. For example, the chapter “Name” both enumerates the different terms used over the centuries to identify the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jewry and considers what each name that people have given to the language now generally referred to as Yiddish reveals about their understandings of its use and its significance.
This book’s structure enables an innovative approach to relating the story of Yiddish by integrating an account of its development over time with examinations of how the language has been discussed as a subject of interest in its own right. Therefore, rather than starting with a presentation of one or more theories of the origins of Yiddish, as is often the case in studies of the language, the chapter “Date and Place of Birth” first considers the relatively recent context in which theorizing the language’s origins emerged. The chapter then examines various models for the beginnings of Yiddish not only to present this range of possibilities but also to analyze their different assumptions regarding the value of the language and its speakers.
The implications of anthropomorphizing Yiddish receive particular attention throughout the book—for example, in the chapters “Health,” which examines how the language has been pathologized by its detractors and championed by its defenders, and “Personality,” which considers various attributions of a distinct character to the language (and, implicitly, its speakers) as a whole. Probing these discourses calls attention both to the problems that arise from likening Yiddish to a human being, especially as this notion readily conflates linguistic concerns with other issues, and to the enduring attraction of this comparison. In these discourses, language is both the subject of scrutiny and the means of its discussion. The tension resulting from the inevitable involvement of language at both levels resembles a tension that is inherent in relating the story of Yiddish as a biography, a genre that grapples with the difference between a life lived and a life narrated. Awareness of this distinction enables critical insights into how the story of a language has been told. For example, the rubric of biography implicitly endows Yiddish with the integrity and continuity of a human life, a notion that should not go unquestioned. At the same time, it is important to recognize the value invested in this conceptualization of the language.
While this book is organized thematically, the history, geography, activities, and ideologies of Yiddish and its speakers do figure within this book’s structure, though not in a conventional way. Rather, key phenomena recur in multiple chapters according to their particular thematic focus. These phenomena include the earliest Yiddish manuscripts and printed books, the settlement of Ashkenazic Jews across northern Europe, their development of new intellectual movements (such as the Haskalah) and religious movements (such as Hasidism), relationships between Yiddish and German and between Yiddish and Hebrew, the emergence of modern Jewish political movements, the efflorescence of modern Yiddish literature and culture, the development of Yiddishism as the ideology of a secular Jewish nationality, the mass immigration of Yiddish speakers beyond Europe, the advent of the field of Yiddish studies, and the impact on the language of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel.
This book offers readers who have little or no familiarity with Yiddish an introduction to its significance within multiple scholarly perspectives, including European studies, Jewish studies, diaspora studies, and immigration studies, as well as language and culture studies. As this book is written for readers of English, sources cited are in that language wherever possible, as a guide to further study. For those readers conversant with Yiddish and the field of Yiddish studies, this book’s format presents new ways of understanding familiar phenomena and scrutinizing conceptualizations of the language, its speakers, and their cultures. The notion of a biography of Yiddish invites all readers to engage the topic at hand creatively, as an edifying adventure.
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Several principal observations about Yiddish are fundamental to this book’s approach. To begin with, Yiddish has an unrivaled reach in the history of Jewish language use, as a vernacular once employed widely by generations of Ashkenazim. Though the origin of Yiddish is, like most languages, modest in scope, its speakers grew in number and geographic reach over time. By the eighteenth century, Ashkenazim had become the world’s majority Jewish population, surpassing the number of Jews living around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East who spoke other Jewish vernaculars. The presence of Ashkenazim expanded further during the following century, as they began emigrating in large numbers from Europe to the Americas, South Africa, Palestine, and Australasia. At the same time, some of the practices that traditionally distinguished Ashkenazic Jews changed, including their vernacular language. Though they now comprise approximately 75 percent of the world’s Jewish population, most Ashkenazim today do not speak Yiddish.1 Many of these Jews are removed only by a generation or two from ancestors who were Yiddish speakers, and many Ashkenazim profess an attachment to Yiddish, even though they have limited or no knowledge of the language.
Given this history, examining the dynamic relationship between the instrumental uses of Yiddish as a vernacular with the symbolic values that people have invested in the language is central to this book. A vernacular, or demotic, is not merely a language that people use in the course of daily life for basic, routine communication. Often referred to as a native or mother tongue, it can have a defining significance for its speakers’ sense of belonging to a national, regional, ethnic, or religious community. At the same time, a vernacular’s esteem can vary, according to its use in different modes (speaking, performing, reading, writing) and contexts (for example, at home versus in school), by distinct categories of users (such as men versus women), and in relation to other languages. These might be the demotics of other peoples or languages of different stature, such as sacred languages, official state languages, or languages of high culture. All of these variables pertain to how Yiddish has been used and valued.
As a demotic, Yiddish is the language in which its native speakers have thought, even while engaging with other languages. These engagements are essential to its development, for Yiddish has never stood alone. Indeed, like other diaspora Jewish languages, it emerged from contact between different speech communities. Wherever Yiddish speakers have lived, they have always found themselves in multilingual environments. More precisely, these are multiglossic environments, in which not only are there several languages in use but they are each employed in distinct ways and toward distinct ends.
Yiddish is always positioned within a hierarchical relationship to the other languages in these various sociolinguistic configurations. Assigned a value regarding its scope, prestige, or other criteria vis-à-vis these languages, Yiddish seldom ranks at the top. This positioning of Yiddish reflects its association with the Jewish diaspora and with Jewish vernacularity. Consequently, the varied esteem accorded to Yiddish corresponds to how both Jews and others conceptualize Jewish difference in diasporic settings and how the lives of yidn fun a gants yor—a Yiddish idiom meaning “ordinary Jews”—are understood in relation to elite populations, concepts, and mores, internal as well as external, traditional as well as modern. Over time, the relationship among Yiddish, its speakers, and their cultures has proved to be more unsettled, especially as Ashkenazim encounter modern ideas and practices that prompt new understandings of Jews as a people and how they might lead their lives, including their employment of language. These developments variously expand and contract Jews’ use of Yiddish and alter their understanding of its significance.
The dynamics of Yiddish are manifold in their instability—if not more so than other languages, then widely perceived as such. This volatility is often regarded as a shortcoming, but it can be more useful to think of it as a defining feature. Therefore, rather than attempting to constrain the story of Yiddish within the rubric of a more conventional historical narrative, taking an unconventional approach to the topic, using the rubric of a biographical profile, enables the language’s shifting complexities to be examined more on their own terms. Given the nature of Yiddish over the centuries, across continents, and among different, often divergent, speech communities, one needs to think nimbly and flexibly about what it has been and what it might yet be. Moreover, the story of Yiddish prompts larger questions about how a language is conceptualized, distinguished from other languages, and positioned in relation to them; how language continuity and integrity are constituted and debated; and how, apart from their ongoing use of a language to convey information, people can imbue it with potent symbolic value and wide-ranging definitional significance.