Yiddish is a phenomenon of Jewish life in diaspora, a term that indicates displacement from a locus of rootedness. Therefore, notions of where the language “resides” are anything but straightforward. Efforts to locate Yiddish geographically can challenge conventional concepts of how a speech community, or a language itself, inhabits a place. Competing theories on the origins of Yiddish, as discussed in the first chapter, situate its formation in different locales. From its beginnings, wherever that may have taken place, Yiddish speakers migrated across northern Europe. By the seventeenth century, Ashkenazim had established communities, both large and small, as far west as the Netherlands, as far south as northern Italy, and extending throughout eastern Europe from the Baltic lands in the north to Ukraine in the south. In addition, some Ashkenazim had migrated to Jerusalem as early as the fourteenth century.
The settlement of Yiddish speakers in Europe was geographically distinctive from that of their neighbors.1 Jews resided more in towns and cities than in the countryside, unlike Christians, the majority of whom were peasants living on farmlands or in rural villages. In some locations, notably Venice and Amsterdam, Ashkenazim lived alongside other diaspora Jewish communities. But for the most part, Ashkenazim were remote from other Jews, especially in eastern Europe. Beginning in the sixteenth century the number of Yiddish speakers expanded in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, eventually surpassing the Jewish population of German lands, where most scholars situate the beginnings of Yiddish. Over time, Jews became the largest local ethnic group in many of the hundreds of provincial eastern European towns in which they settled and at times comprised a town’s majority of residents. In some instances, the growing numbers of Jews helped transform small towns into cities.2
Eastern European Yiddish speakers voiced a sense of local belonging through their own names for streets and other landmarks in the places where they lived, as well as for towns and cities themselves. Examples in interwar Poland include Apt (Polish: Opatów), Brisk (Brześć nad Bugiem), Ger (Góra Kalwaria), Kuzmir (Kazimierz Dolny), Libivne (Luboml), Shekev (Osjaków), Tiktin (Tykocin). When authorities in the Habsburg and Romanov Empires enacted laws requiring all subjects to acquire family names, at some time between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many Jews chose surnames that invoked their home towns or regions, for example: Avrich, Brody, Danziger, Golub, Krakauer, Litvak, Miropol, Ostrov, Pinski, Rovner, Starobin, Tomashevski, Vinograd, Zitomer.3
The mandate to adopt surnames was a consequence of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the territories that comprised this vast polity were annexed by its more powerful neighbors. The Yiddish-speaking population burgeoned in what became the westernmost provinces of the Russian Empire (an expanse known as the Jewish Pale of Settlement), Congress Poland (which was under Russian domination), and the northeast region of the Austrian Empire (called Galicia). At the same time, the use of Yiddish began to decline in German states, as Jews there shifted to German as their vernacular. This was a gradual transition, swifter among Jews who lived in cities, practiced Reform Judaism, and were wealthier than among those who were located in the provinces, were Orthodox in observance, and were less prosperous. During this period, attention to the differences between western and eastern European Jewry grew more pronounced in the realm of “high culture,” reflecting these two populations’ “divergent paths to modernity.” However, historian Steven Lowenstein observes, such a distinction was more nuanced at the level of “folk culture,” including language use, revealing that “the boundaries between East and West are quite varied and complex.”4
From the 1880s to the 1930s, Jews’ mass immigration out of eastern Europe brought large numbers of Yiddish speakers to major cities in western Europe—including Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris, and Vienna—as well as to the Americas and South Africa. Eastern European Jews’ internal migration also extended the language’s reach further east into Russia/the Soviet Union. Solomon Birnbaum notes that these decades ushered in “a new era in the geography of Yiddish,” during which recent immigrant communities quickly came to constitute about one-third of the world’s Yiddish speakers.5 Indeed, by 1900, New York boasted the largest Jewish population of any city in the world, comprised mostly of recently arrived eastern European immigrants. New York swiftly emerged as a major center of Yiddish culture, in part because greater political freedoms and economic opportunities enabled publishing, theater, and political activism to flourish more readily in the United States than they could in much of Europe. After World War II, the language’s intercontinental distribution shifted radically once more. While some Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors returned to their prewar homes, notably in the western republics of the Soviet Union, most sought new places to live in Europe or left the continent altogether to settle in the Americas, Palestine/Israel, and Australasia.
Throughout this history, Yiddish has been the language of a minority in all these lands, even in regions where its speakers were most concentrated. In many places there has been no official recognition of Yiddish or documentation of the extent of its speech community. Yet the geographic presence of Yiddish can be reckoned by other means, especially in the modern era: evidence of Yiddish speakers found in correspondence, communal records, or cemeteries; the locations of publishers of Yiddish books and periodicals, as well as their subscription lists; the presence of schools, theaters, political parties, and other organizations that operated in Yiddish; and, by the turn of the twentieth century, the number of speakers reported in some censuses. On the eve of World War II, the estimated total of Yiddish speakers in Europe was over seven million—comparable to contemporaneous numbers for Czech or Greek in their respective countries—and worldwide approached eleven million (out of a total Jewish population of some seventeen million).6 It was therefore possible to conceive of Yiddish as having the scale of a European national language, with substantial immigrant outposts beyond the continent, by dint of demography as well as the quantity and scope of the publications; the religious, educational, and cultural institutions; and the social and political organizations that functioned in Yiddish.7
Given the distinctive history of Ashkenazic settlement and language use, conceptualizing a residence for Yiddish entails grappling with contradictions. As a population concentrated in urban environments, Yiddish speakers could be a sizeable and at times predominant presence locally—for example, in a small town or a district of a large city—while at the same time constituting a minority within a municipality, a province of an empire, or a nation-state as a whole. At the local level of quotidian experience, it has been possible for Jews in some places to function largely in Yiddish—including, at times, when communicating with non-Jews. The public presence of Yiddish was manifest in certain locations by signage on stores and cultural institutions or by the appearance of Yiddish periodicals at newsstands and posters on walls. And on occasion Yiddish received official recognition as one of several languages in a multicultural state. For example, Yiddish appeared, together with Polish and Ukrainian, on currency issued by the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in 1917, and was included alongside Belorussian, Polish, and Russian on the state emblem of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. On a more local level, Yiddish was one of four languages to appear on municipal postage stamps used in the town of Luboml at the end of World War I. Such acknowledgments of Yiddish have, however, been the exception rather than the rule and do not always correlate to the size of speech communities. Thus, Yiddish was officially recognized as a minority language in Sweden in 1999, where the number of speakers a decade later was estimated as being, at most, 1,500;8 in Israel, where at least one hundred times as many Jews speak Yiddish, if not more, comprising about 2 percent of the population, the language has no official status.9
One of a set of five of postage stamps used for local mail delivery in the town of Luboml (now Liuboml, Ukraine), issued during the final year of World War I. On the stamps’ borders the inscription “Luboml Municipal Postage” appears in four languages: German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, reflecting the town’s multiethnic population. This stamp depicts Luboml’s main synagogue, built in the early sixteenth century.
Though Yiddish lacked a territory “of its own” in a conventional geopolitical sense, by the turn of the twentieth century it thrived in a network of millions of speakers living in towns and urban neighborhoods on multiple continents. In each of these places Yiddish was used in homes, schools, workplaces, synagogues, and on the street as a shared vernacular and, especially in major population centers, in print matter, public performances, and educational, cultural, religious, social, and political institutions. These sites were connected with one another through the international circulation of mass media in Yiddish—including periodicals, books, sound recordings, and films—in addition to a robust private correspondence among relatives and other acquaintances. Further contact involved an array of travelers who moved throughout the Yiddish-speaking world: researchers, journalists, musicians, and theatrical troupes, as well as emissaries of philanthropies, religious institutions, cultural organizations, and political parties.10 Beyond their instrumental role of linking Yiddish speakers throughout an expansive diaspora, these language practices had a symbolic value, creating a sense of at-homeness for Yiddish speakers despite their physical dispersal and the widespread notion of Jews as a “people without a land.”
During the early twentieth century some activists challenged this notion by employing geopolitical idioms to advocate for Yiddishism, a movement committed to the language’s potential to facilitate Jewish cultural autonomy and sustain a sense of nationhood in lieu of a sovereign state. For example, Chaim Zhitlowsky, a leading proponent of secular Yiddishism, grew up in the Vitebsk province of the Russian Empire (a region now in Belarus). He later described the milieu of his childhood, in which the use of Yiddish was predominant, as having “so little sense of exile” during the 1870s that it seemed to him as though Jews “did not live in exile among the Russians, but perhaps quite the opposite—that the Russians with whom we interacted lived in exile among us.”11
Zhitlowsky’s characterization of a place defined by the use of Yiddish has sometimes been referred to as yidishland (“Yiddishland”).12 This term does not merely identify a place of residence for Yiddish, whether actual or virtual, but ascribes territoriality, with its implications of rootedness and even sovereignty, to a language and its speakers widely thought of as placeless. Yidishland thereby both invokes and subverts the model of nationhood, then prevalent in Europe, as a claim on geographical turf, its scope delineated by the presence of speakers of what historian Benedict Anderson terms their “private-property” language.13
The word yidishland has come into frequent use over the course of the past century, whether as shorthand for the region of eastern Europe where Yiddish speakers lived before World War II or to refer to Yiddish speech communities of the present. Yidishland has been depicted in maps and other visual works and conjured in literary creations, especially Yiddish poetry. For example, A. Almi’s 1930 poem “Yiddish” uses elaborate geographical imagery to conjure a place for the language, conceived as a “scattered empire,” to flourish on “blossoming islands, rivers, gulfs, streams,” enumerated in a gazetteer of the Yiddish-speaking diaspora, starting in eastern Europe and extending outward to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as Yiddish “makes the rockiest soil bear fruit.”14 This and similar works exemplify literature scholar Sidra Ezrahi’s observations about the value invested in creating “imaginative space” in modern Jewish letters. She argues that, as a foundational project of modern Yiddish literature, “writing the exile” was “more than a response to displacement,” becoming “in itself a form of repatriation, of alternative sovereignty.”15 Likewise, critic J. Hoberman describes the flourishing of Yiddish film in the 1930s as “not just a national cinema without a nation-state, but a national cinema that, with every presentation, created its own ephemeral nation-state.”16
Some modern Jewish political movements that embraced the diaspora rather than repudiating it championed the power of Yiddish to realize a virtual homeland for its speakers on a grand scale. Through the principle of doikeyt (“hereness”), diaspora nationalist parties such as the Jewish Labor Bund and the Folkspartey asserted the right and the value of Jews to live “here”—that is, wherever they found themselves—as citizens of their respective countries and as Jews.17 In its very articulation, doikeyt implies yidishland. By proclaiming a speaker’s location as a site where Yiddish can flourish, doikeyt renders any place, however provisionally, as part of yidishland. In this respect, yidishland is a performative phenomenon, a locus summoned into existence by speech, suggesting that the place Yiddish and its speakers inhabit is both highly adaptable and highly mutable.
• • •
Complementing this notion of yidishland as a virtual home—in which Yiddish “resides” in an intercontinental network of scattered communities, large and small, linked by their use of the language in written and oral form—are efforts to root Yiddish speakers in a physical territory. In interwar Poland, Jews’ interest in local history and geography was popularized and institutionalized through the landkentenish (“land knowledge”) movement. The Yidishe gezelshaft far landkentenish / Żydowskie towarzystwo krajoznawcze (Jewish Society for Knowing the Land), founded in Warsaw in 1926, promoted learning about local environs through hiking, sports, lectures, reading, and photography as a fixture of modern Polish Jewish culture. Landkentenish was both inspired by and a response to the equivalent Polish krajoznawstwo movement, which often neglected or disparaged Jewish landmarks as sites of national interest. Through excursions, talks, and publications about Jews’ longstanding presence in Poland, landkentenish employed Yiddish as a polemical instrument, demonstrating through the language as well as its subject that “Jews were ‘settled inhabitants’ in Poland and not ‘aliens or guests,’ as some right-wing Polish nationalists and Zionists contended.”18 The movement’s bilingual publications in Polish and Yiddish symbolically placed both languages, as well as their speakers and their regional heritage, on equal footing.
Other efforts to situate Yiddish speakers in a territory of their own looked beyond established places of Jewish residence. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish philanthropies funded agricultural colonies in Argentina, Canada, and the United States for immigrant Jews from eastern Europe, seeking to relieve overcrowded Jewish neighborhoods in major cities and diversify Jews’ social and economic circumstances. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union resettled Ashkenazic Jews on collective farms in Ukraine and Crimea, in order to root this “landless” population in a place where they could engage in “productive” labor.19
The most elaborate effort to create a Yiddish-speaking polity took place in 1934, when the Soviet Union designated the oblast of Birobidzhan, located in far eastern Russia on its border with Manchuria, as a Jewish Autonomous Region, following its establishment as a Jewish agricultural settlement in 1928. In its heyday, Birobidzhan boasted a Yiddish theater, library, school system, and teachers’ college; the region published its own Yiddish newspaper, and official documents were printed in both Russian and Yiddish.20 Though Birobidzhan achieved only limited success as a Yiddish-speaking territory—its Jewish population briefly peaked at thirty thousand in the years immediately after World War II—it endures as a curiosity of Jewish history. In the post-Soviet era, Birobidzhan has become a destination for intrepid Yiddish enthusiasts, who seek out its landmarks of erstwhile Yiddish officialdom in the form of signs on streets and buildings.21
The Territorialist movement, which advocated creating a large-scale Jewish settlement in an unpopulated site somewhere in the diaspora, as opposed to the political Zionist agenda to create a Jewish state in Palestine, had been active since the early twentieth century. This effort intensified with the founding of the Frayland-lige (Freeland League) in 1935, which sought a place of refuge for eastern European Jews that would both afford them protection from political oppression and enable their cultural independence, including the use of Yiddish. During the next two decades the Frayland-lige pursued, without success, the possibility of establishing a Jewish territory in the Kimberley (a region of northwestern Australia) and in British, Dutch, and French Guiana. In the ensuing years the focus of the Frayland-lige shifted from territorialist advocacy to promoting Yiddish culture, and in 1979 the organization changed its name to the Yidish-lige (League for Yiddish). This shift is telling; whereas the Frayland-lige prioritized securing a physical place of residence for Yiddish speakers, the Yidish-lige promotes the use of Yiddish language and culture irrespective of its practitioners’ geographic location.
• • •
The mass destruction and displacement of Yiddish culture during the middle of the twentieth century has inspired new efforts to situate the language in a home of some kind, whether striving to document its prewar rootedness and flourishing in Europe or to conjure a place for Yiddish through the imaginary. Among documentary undertakings are mapping projects, which depict the presence of Yiddish on either a local or a continental scale. The former appear most extensively in hundreds of yizker-bikher (“memorial books”) that commemorate destroyed eastern European Jewish communities in municipalities large and small. For several decades after the war’s end, former residents of these communities contributed personal memories of local history and lore to these volumes. Many yizker-bikher feature a map, usually drawn from memory, that depicts the topography of the town as it was once experienced by Jews. Often these maps identify streets and other landmarks with the Yiddish names used by the towns’ Jews.22
Map from the memorial book for the town of Goniądz, Poland, published in Tel Aviv in 1960. The map indicates street names and other landmarks according to their Yiddish names.
Complementing these renderings of Yiddish speakers’ local places of residence in prewar Europe are scholarly studies of variations in the language across the continent. Noah Prylucki, one of the first individuals to analyze Yiddish dialects systematically, published a seminal article in 1912 on regional differences in the gender of Yiddish nouns. Prylucki expanded on this work in book-length studies issued in 1917 and 1921, in which he “provided a simple and elegant solution to the problem of distinguishing Yiddish dialects based upon the pronunciation of a single diphthong [variously as a, ay, or ey], which remains, despite later refinements and additions, the foundation of the contemporary division of Yiddish dialects by scholars.”23 During the 1920s linguists in the Jewish Department of the Institute for Belorussian Culture Research analyzed Yiddish dialects in the western territories of the Soviet Union. This undertaking included an appeal to the public to assist in documenting local language use.24
The largest such endeavor, the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), maps regional configurations of Yiddish dialects across northern Europe, documenting phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences as well as related variations in traditional folkways, such as methods of preparing farfl (“egg barley”) or customs to mark the end of Passover.25 This elaborate research project, initiated by linguist Uriel Weinreich (the son of Max Weinreich) at Columbia University in the late 1950s, gathered responses to an extensive questionnaire, containing over three thousand individual questions, from more than five hundred native speakers of Yiddish. Unlike prewar studies of Yiddish dialects conducted in situ, the informants for the LCAAJ were all immigrants, most of whom were interviewed in the New York area or Israel.26 Each informant represents a different site in Europe; these locations, which range from small villages to major cities, were selected to reflect the demographic distribution of Yiddish speakers across the continent before World War II. In the LCAAJ, the territoriality of Yiddish appears not as a bounded space, as national languages are conventionally rendered on maps, but as a constellation of representative individual speech sites.
The data collected from the project’s many interviewees enabled Weinreich and his colleagues to inscribe onto the landscape of Europe a set of isoglosses that delineate different regional variants of Yiddish. Following earlier models, the LCAAJ identifies the major dialects of Yiddish as Western, Central, Northeastern, and Southeastern Yiddish, their boundaries drawn by mapping informants’ pronunciation of the Yiddish phrase meaning “to buy meat.”27 Pronounced koyfn fleysh in Standard Yiddish—as reflected in its spelling, irrespective of dialect: קויפֿן פֿלייש —the vowel sounds generally differ according to region, as follows:
Western Yiddish: kafn flash
Central Yiddish: koyfn flaysh
Northeastern Yiddish: keyfn fleysh
Southeastern Yiddish: koyfn fleysh
These regional differences correspond to a considerable extent with other phonological variations:
“good” גוט (Standard Yiddish: gut)
Western Yiddish: gut
Central Yiddish: git
Northeastern Yiddish: gut
Southeastern Yiddish: git
“city” שטאָט (Standard Yiddish: shtot)
Western Yiddish: shtot
Central Yiddish: shtut
Northeastern Yiddish: shtot
Southeastern Yiddish: shtut
“today” הײַנט (Standard Yiddish: haynt)
Central Yiddish: hant
Northeastern Yiddish: haynt
Southeastern Yiddish: hant
“Geographic Schema of Yiddish Dialects,” a map accompanying Max Weinreich’s article on Yiddish in the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General encyclopedia), published in Paris in 1940. The heaviest dashed lines delineate (from left to right) Western Yiddish, Central Yiddish, and Eastern Yiddish. Eastern Yiddish is divided by a lighter dashed line into Northeastern and Southeastern Yiddish. Cities indicated on the map range from Riga to the north, Prague to the west, and Odessa to the southeast. An inset in the lower left corner extends the reach of Western Yiddish to include Alsace.
Other phonological variations either reinforce these isoglosses or define dialect sub-regions. For example, the phenomenon called sabesdiker losn (“Sabbath language”), found among some Yiddish speakers in the Northeastern region, confuses or conflates hushing (sh) and hissing (s) sounds—thus, saying losn instead of loshn, or making no distinction between visn (“to know”) and vishn (“to wipe”).28 Some Yiddish speakers in what is now northeastern Poland and northwestern Belarus pronounced the letter lamed (l) in some words with the sound of w in the English word “water”—for example, gewebt instead of gelebt (“lived”). This practice, known as wamed woshn, likely reflects contact with speakers of Polish, in which the letter ł is pronounced w.29 Shifting the stressed vowel a to o in some words, heard among Yiddish speakers in southern Ukraine and Romania, is known as tote-mome loshn (thus, tote instead of tate, “father”).30
Dialects are also distinguished by lexical and morphological elements. For example, among more than a half-dozen Yiddish terms for “floor,” dil is found in Northeastern Yiddish, podloge in Central Yiddish, and brik primarily in Southeastern Yiddish.31 Various plural forms of noz (“nose”)—neyz, neyzer, nezer—tend to cluster in the Southeastern, Central, and Northeastern dialects, respectively.32
Grammatical variations among Yiddish dialects are most notable in Northeastern Yiddish, which departs from the three-gender system for nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter) used in the other dialects as well as in Standard Yiddish. In addition, the past tense of all verbs in Northeastern Yiddish is conjugated with the auxiliary verb hobn, whereas in the other dialects and in Standard Yiddish the past tense of several intransitive verbs is conjugated with the auxiliary verb zayn.
| Standard Yiddish | Northeastern Yiddish | |
| “I was” | ikh bin geven | ikh hob geven |
| “you [singular] went” | du bist gegangen | du host gegangen |
| “she ate” | zi hot gegesn | zi hot gegesn |
| “we smiled” | mir hobn geshmeykhlt | mir hobn geshmeykhlt |
Awareness of dialect differences was common among Yiddish speakers before World War II, evident in popular names of such variations as sabeskider losn and tote-mome loshn. Humor also reflects a common knowledge of these variants in jokes that rely on dialect confusion and comical characters who speak in dialect in Yiddish plays, such as the stock figure of the Lithuanian Jew who speaks sabesdiker losn.33 The expression Vu freyt ir zikh? (“Where do you rejoice?”) is an idiomatic play on Vu voynt ir? (“Where do you live?”), used by speakers of Northeastern Yiddish to avoid the unhappy confusion occasioned by their pronouncing voynen (“to live [i.e., to reside]”) the same as veynen (“to weep”).34
Yiddish speakers typically identified major dialects according to familiar geopolitical regions—for example, galitsyaner (“Galician”), voliner (“Wolynian”), litvish (“Lithuanian”), poylish (“Polish”)—although these geographic designations did not completely conform to actual dialect distinctions. For example, Jews in easternmost Galicia spoke Southeastern Yiddish, whereas the rest of the Jews in the region spoke Central Yiddish. Unlike these conventional terms for mapping Yiddish speech, the dialect regions of the LCAAJ delineate a Yiddish geography distinct from political borders, past or present. Rather, in this mapping of yidishland, isoglosses articulate the idiomatic equivalent of provincial boundaries within a nation. At the same time, the primary focus on dialect differences produces a set of borders distinct from other descriptions of Ashkenazic geography. Lowenstein notes that the isogloss between Western and Eastern Yiddish lies considerably to the east of the boundary between the local practices of minhag Ashkenaz (Hebrew: “the Jewish customs of German lands”) and minhag Polin (“the Jewish customs of Poland”). These two frontiers, he argues, delineate a “transitional area” between eastern and western Ashkenazim.35
Beyond mapping the dialects of Yiddish spoken in Europe before World War II, the LCAAJ imbues the geography of the language with intellectual as well as ideological value. Weinreich, a leading scholar in the field of language contact generally, posited that the configuration of modern European Yiddish dialects reflects the dynamics of Ashkenazic settlement across the continent over several centuries, thereby positioning Yiddish dialectology at the nexus of diachronic and synchronic linguistics. By conjoining time and space, Yiddish dialectology demonstrates that the language has a geography of its own as well as a singular history and reveals their interdependence.36
The LCAAJ also makes an important symbolic statement about the erstwhile territoriality of Yiddish in Europe. In 1963 Weinreich noted that the project had been rejected for funding under the United States National Defense Education Act, because Yiddish is not the official language of any country. In response, he argued that it is precisely the “lack of a self-contained territory” that endowed the project “with exemplary value for a particularly crucial problem in social history: the effect of communication channels and barriers on the diffusion of cultural innovations.” Yiddish and its European speakers exemplify on a grand scale how “the geographic fragmentation of a culture and a language . . . yields an opportunity to reconstruct the influences of neighboring localities upon one another.” Moreover, Weinreich claimed, preliminary data demonstrated that linguistic and cultural variations follow “definite regional patterns,” with implications for understanding the relationship between culture and territory not just for this particular subject, but for the social sciences in general. At the same time that the project endows Yiddish with an impressive geographic expanse across northern Europe—which Weinreich described as surpassed only by the scope of Russian—the LCAAJ situates the language’s diasporic territoriality as strategic to understanding the interrelation of Ashkenazic society with its European neighbors across time and space.37 Rather than linking languages to discrete geopolitical territories, the LCAAJ implicitly presents a different way to conceptualize linguistic geography by focusing on the sites of contact among languages.
Complementing notions of a place where Yiddish resides that are based on either local memories or linguistic data are phenomena of folklore and the imaginary. Occasionally these examples focus on a particular location. For example, through generations of repeated tellings in multiple languages, comic folktales about the so-called “wise men” of Chelm—a town in Poland that, by the mid-nineteenth century, had come to be known as the quintessential Jewish town of fools—fostered a popular image of Yiddish as the language of provincial folly.38 Major works of modern Yiddish literature by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem established archetypal sites of Jewish poverty with the fictional towns Kabtsansk and Kasrilevke (their names formed by adding Slavic suffixes to loshn-koydesh words for “pauper”). In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jewish summer camps in upstate New York were named after Boiberik, the Ukrainian summer colony mentioned in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories, and Nitgedayget (meaning “no worries”), a collective farm in works by Soviet Yiddish writer Peretz Markish.39 Other names of places, whether real or fictitious—Hotseplots, Lespets, Pipiduvke—became bywords in Yiddish for remote locales at the imagined limits of yidishland.40
More generally, the term ghetto has extensive associations with Yiddish, including the urban neighborhoods to which Jewish residence was restricted in western European cities starting at the end of the Middle Ages. (The word originates with the ghetto in Venice, established in 1516.) Emancipation from ghettos during the nineteenth century coincided with the abandonment of Yiddish by western Ashkenazim for the vernaculars of their Christian neighbors, both developments understood as a departure from a way of life that had isolated these Jews from European society and culture. In actuality this separation was less thorough than subsequently imagined and was often initiated from within Jewish communities rather than imposed from without.41 Nevertheless, the mythic image of the ghetto fostered the notion of Yiddish as the linguistic equivalent of these locales and their constraints. Well after Jews left these urban districts, ghetto continued to define neighborhoods where Yiddish speakers lived in cities, with enduring connotations of abjection.42 At the turn of the twentieth century, the crowded, impoverished sectors of some major cities in which Yiddish speakers settled in the United States were referred to as ghettos, though not, as a rule, internally; local Jews were more likely to refer to their neighborhood as di yidishe gas (“the Jewish street”) or der yidisher kvartal (“the Jewish quarter”). Eventually, ghetto became synonymous in America with slum, irrespective of its inhabitants’ identities. During World War II ghetto was revived in Europe to define the zones in which Jews were forcibly confined within cities and towns throughout countries occupied by Nazi Germany.43
Even more widespread is the use of the term shtetl (“town”) as a metonym for Yiddish-speaking Jewry. Beginning in the nineteenth century, authors of modern Jewish literature conceptualized the provincial towns of eastern Europe as epitomizing social environments of traditional Jewish life, defined in part by the use of Yiddish. The term shtetl embodied these authors’ ambivalent feelings about this cultural milieu, disparaged as a parochial backwater yet also celebrated as a “hub of true Jewish intimacy and spiritual self-sufficiency.”44 After the Holocaust, shtetl entered other languages, specifically referencing provincial Jewish communities in prewar eastern Europe, as opposed to the word’s meaning in Yiddish simply as “town”—any town, anywhere, at any time, inhabited by anyone. With this more constrained definition, shtetl acquired added significance as the emblem of prewar Europe’s Yiddish-speaking milieus, a “lost” or “vanished world,” reimagined in works of literature, theater, film, and other cultural forms as well as in other languages.45
The world-wide reconfiguration of Jewish population centers in the wake of the Holocaust created new places of residence for Yiddish. Haredim use the language in neighborhoods of Antwerp, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, London, Melbourne, and Montreal, among other cities, as well as in towns (Kiryas Joel, Monsey, and New Square, all in New York State; Kiryas Tosh, in the suburb of Boisbriand, Quebec) where Hasidim have established a significant presence. Yiddishist summer camps and retreats, as well as intensive programs of instruction in Yiddish at universities and cultural institutions in North America, Europe, and Israel, have created temporary environments in which use of the language calls each of these sites into existence as a yidishland. The differences among these postwar locations exemplify divergent contemporary relationships with Yiddish: on one hand, as a vernacular used to reinforce a sense of community and stringent piety among haredim, distinguished from other Jews as well as from non-Jews; on the other hand, as a language taken up voluntarily by any interested parties, including some who are not Jews, often as an end in itself.
These relationships with the language converge in a remarkable recent exercise in Yiddish territorialism: Yiddish Farm, established in 2011 in Goshen, New York, which strives to “expand the role of the Yiddish language, serve as a bridge between Yiddish speakers of various backgrounds, and promote environmental stewardship through organic farming.”46 The farm invites guests and students for periods ranging from a day to several weeks to observe or participate in its commitments to sustainable farming and to creating a diverse Yiddish-speaking community, which includes visiting members of nearby Hasidic groups. Though recalling Jewish agricultural collectives of previous generations, Yiddish Farm is very much a product of contemporary projects that seek to bolster the Jewish identity of young American Jews (including other projects involving Yiddish).47 The conjoining of Yiddish with farming integrates two ostensibly unrelated practices in a mutually reinforcing effort to nurture a local community: whereas the use of Yiddish marks agriculture as a Jewish undertaking, the farming implicitly marks Yiddish as rooted and organic.
In contrast to efforts to provide Yiddish with its own turf, the internet appears to offer the most expansive approach to establishing a place of residence for Yiddish. Online Yiddish periodicals, radio programs, blogs, podcasts, and videos circulate internationally, enabling the distribution of mass media and personal writing in the language with unprecedented facility. The internet facilitates learning Yiddish with dictionaries and other resources, including instructional media and interactive online classes. Social media platforms foster virtual communion among disparate individual Yiddish speakers. Linguist Tsvi Sadan writes that the internet “has a greater potential for diaspora languages like Yiddish than for non-diaspora languages for forming virtual communities, as the former have few non-virtual communities, while the latter already have communities outside the internet.”48
It remains to be seen how the internet transforms the diasporic nature of Yiddish. At the same time that this medium seems to let Yiddish be anywhere, the internet sometimes does so by undoing the language’s connections to actual people in particular locations, a longstanding basis for identifying a language’s residence. As with every other location, physical or virtual, real or imaginary, in which a place for Yiddish has been sought or conjured, whether by its speakers or by others, the effort does not yield simple or stable results. This is not merely due to the migrations of Yiddish speakers or the various contingencies in which it has been used; this also reflects the limitations of conceptualizing something as evanescent and mutable as a language as residing, like a person, in a place of its own.