Much of the discussion of Yiddish, especially in the modern period, centers on its health—or, more often, its unhealthiness. The earliest external examinations of Yiddish regularly pathologized it; this notion was subsequently taken up by Ashkenazim who disdained the language and then rebutted by other Jews who championed it. This discourse of disability targeted not only the language itself, conceived as a living entity whose well-being was in question, but also the impact of Yiddish on its speech community—in effect, likening the language to a communicable disease and conflating Yiddish speakers’ bodies with the anthropomorphized ailing language. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the characterization of Yiddish as unhealthy influenced many Jews’ abandonment of it for other vernaculars and contributed to the larger discourse of modern anti-Semitism. At the same time, the pathologizing of Yiddish informed the way that its advocates have both come to its defense and worked to reform the language.
The earliest descriptions of Yiddish as unhealthy appear in the work of Christian scholars, both clergy and early humanists, including some Jewish converts to Christianity. After beginning in the mid-1500s, this scholarship flourished in the following century and continued into the late 1700s. The authors were German speakers, writing first in Latin and then in German, a shift reflecting a larger turn to producing scholarly work in European vernaculars as their stature rose.1 As noted earlier, these scholars assessed Yiddish in terms of its variance from German, rather than as a language in its own right. Their scholarship had an enduring impact on how future generations evaluated Yiddish as deviating from a presumed linguistic norm. This approach was not inevitable; it may have arisen from concomitant attention to German, especially its increasing scholarly prestige and its significance in defining Germans as a people with an inherent common character and an incipient national identity. Because German speakers then lived in a cluster of separate polities and their Christian majority was divided between Protestants and Catholics, language played a salient role in articulating a shared Germanness. In this milieu, Yiddish marked a non-Christian minority that incurred economic and political restrictions imposed by various governing authorities, repeated theological attacks by Christian clergy, and occasional violent assaults by Christian neighbors. From a Germanist perspective, Jews’ linguistic deviance manifested their aberrant and abject nature. According to Jeffrey Grossman, many Germans came to perceive Yiddish and its speech community as “an anarchic element that undermines the image of a culturally homogeneous Germany.”2
The discourse of Yiddish as unhealthy centered on concepts of purity and honesty, which, though focused on language, redounded to the nature of Ashkenazic Jews. When Germanist scholars compared the Germanic component of Yiddish to their own language, they perceived the differences as signs that Yiddish was either archaic or distorted. The language’s imbrication of terms and grammatical features from its Semitic determinant made Yiddish seem mongrel and arcane. As Germanists sought to refine their own language in order to facilitate a unifying high culture for the German people, Yiddish exemplified the opposite. Its hybrid character bespoke a contaminated language and, moreover, a threatening Judaization of German. The perception of Yiddish as esoteric prompted concerns about its use to deceive or harm Christians in business dealings. Studies of Rotwelsch (German: “thieves’ slang”) highlighted the use of terms derived from the Semitic component of Yiddish in the argot of the German-speaking underworld. Christians also feared that the “secret language of the Jews” was used to propagate anti-Christian teachings.3
This 1851 cartoon, published in the German humor magazine Fliegende Blätter (Flying leaves), depicts two Jewish speculators speaking in German and Yiddish, respectively: “Baron, the boy is stealing your handkerchief!” “Let him go, we also started out small.” The slippage between the two languages, which would have been comprehensible to the magazine’s readers, reinforces the portrayal of Jews as morally lax.
More than a formally adulterated language, historian Aya Elyada argues, Yiddish was perceived as an “antilanguage, . . . an extreme version of a non-standard social dialect, deliberately created by socially inferior and marginalized groups antagonistic to the dominant society.”4 The trope of Jews’ language as a perniciously obfuscating force persisted into the twentieth century and eventually informed the racialized anti-Semitism of National Socialists. Thus, Adolf Hitler wrote in his 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf (My struggle): “On this . . . lie, that the Jews are not a race but a religion, more and more lies are based in necessary consequence. Among them is the lie with regard to the language of the Jew. For him it is not a means for expressing his thoughts, but a means for concealing them. When he speaks French, he thinks Jewish, and while he turns out German verses, in his life he only expresses the nature of his nationality.”5
The widely shared perception of Yiddish as tainted German spread by unhealthy Jews inspired multiple diagnoses of this disease’s etiology. Some scholars posited that Ashkenazim had once spoken the same German as their Christian neighbors, but, by dint of cultural isolation or immigration, the German of these Jews either became atrophied or devolved into a corrupted variant. Thus, Herder “ascribes to Jews a process of decay produced by the changing cultures and geographies of diaspora existence,” with deleterious impact on their language that, in turn, “signals a decline in national consciousness” as Jews.6 Other scholars characterized Yiddish as evidence that Ashkenazim never mastered German properly in the first place but either “deliberately cultivated a language of their own” or “were simply not capable of speaking ‘proper German.’ ”7
As noted earlier, Jews in German states began to shift their language of daily life from Yiddish to German during the eighteenth century, as part of a larger refashioning of Ashkenazic culture. This change took place in response not only to their Christian neighbors’ contempt for Yiddish but also to these Jews’ desires to integrate into a Germanic social and cultural mainstream. Both the initiative of Reform Judaism to reconceive Jewish life as a religion parallel in scope to Protestantism and the intellectual agenda of the Haskalah advocated for the abandonment of Yiddish as a salubrious advance.8 Philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who is generally recognized as the progenitor of these developments, argued that the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazim was an impure mixture of German and Hebrew that hindered effective communication and was even symptomatic of a moral corruption.9
The discourse of Yiddish as a disabled and disabling language did not end with these Jews’ shift to German. On the contrary, during the nineteenth century their Christian neighbors extended the pathologizing of Yiddish to its perceived vestigial presence in the idioms and inflections of these Jews’ German speech. As German language assumed a central role in defining a collective, normative Germanness, its defenders asserted that the efforts of Jews, as ineluctable aliens, to assimilate the language could never succeed. Rather, their impaired German would inevitably reveal their diseased Jewish selves, through the telltale symptom called jüdeln or mauscheln.
Some German-speaking Jews internalized the anti-Semitic ideology that Jews were intractably stigmatized by Yiddish, which infused their rhetoric—even when they spoke “perfect” German—and exposed their Jewishness. As a result, historian John Efron observes, “German-Jewish hostility to Yiddish was a sentiment made all the more neurotic because of the proximity of the two languages. Linguistic familiarity bred contempt.”10 Historian Sander Gilman argues that this pathologizing of Jewish language “served as the basis for self-hatred,” in which Jews’ efforts to enter mainstream German culture and “deal with their real fear of being treated as a Jew” compelled them to “accept the qualities ascribed by [Christian German speakers] to their own language” and “ingratiate [themselves] into European society through self-hatred.”11
Remarkably, this self-hatred later engendered a radical revaluation by some German-speaking Jews of the symbolic worth of Yiddish and its eastern European speakers. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, certain intellectuals, including the philosopher Martin Buber, developed an interest in the Yiddish-speaking eastern European Jew as an object of contemplation, which they could use to redefine their own sense of Jewishness by taking “an older, anti-Semitic model of nonacceptable Jewish language . . . and transform[ing] it into a positive image.” Eventually, German Jews identified eastern European Jewry as providing “an idealized image of the ‘good Jew,’ ” in contrast to “the pathology of ‘self-hatred,’ an illness attributed to [western European] Jews.”12 Rather than characterizing Yiddish as diseased, its abandonment—and what this exemplified for German Jews as the loss of a forthright Jewish authenticity—became the illness. Thus, author Arnold Zweig, writing in German, characterized the eastern European Jew as having “a life that is lived to the fullest” and asserted that “Jewish ideas live in him and through him.” However, Zweig feared that an encroaching modernity would compromise eastern European Jews, as had already happened among Ashkenazim to the west: “Will there still remain this Eastern Jewry in its ethnic richness and authenticity? For this is the last part of the Jewish people on earth which has created its own new songs and dances, rituals and myths, languages and forms of community.”13
In fact, many maskilim in eastern Europe had followed the lead of German Jewry by repudiating Yiddish. However, they did so in a different milieu, shaped by its own constellation of languages and their uses. In addition, advocates for the Haskalah in this region grappled with a different set of external economic and social circumstances as well as the internal challenge posed by Hasidism. Benjamin Harshav characterizes the posture of eastern European maskilim toward Yiddish as “intimate and hated at the same time,” their rejection of it constituting a recoil “from their parents’ home in the shtetl, corroded by idleness and Jewish trading, and from the world of prayer, steeped in the scholastic and irrelevant study of Talmud, and the irrational and primitive behavior of the Hasidim.”14
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This “vituperative maskilic condemnation” of Yiddish, Efron notes, “runs like a red thread through all Jewish discourse concerning Hebrew from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.”15 What coalesced as a shprakhnkamf between Hebraists and Yiddishists at the turn of the twentieth century continued to rage for decades. Hebraists’ anti-Yiddish sentiments perpetuated some of the pathologizing tropes that had originated generations earlier among Christian writers and were adopted by maskilim. As Hebraists embraced Zionism, they extended the attack on Yiddish by characterizing it as “a perverted language . . . reflecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew.”16 Some Hebraists linked longstanding associations of Yiddish and women with the anti-Semitic pathologizing of Jewish men as feminine, and therefore weak. Consequently, many Zionists viewed Yiddish as either a cause or a symptom of Jewish emasculation and disempowerment.
The repudiation of Yiddish was especially consequential in Palestine, as Zionists struggled to establish Modern Hebrew as the sole language of Jewish settlers, many of them native Yiddish speakers who were often far from fluent in Hebrew.17 In 1910, Labor Zionist leader and future prime minister of the State of Israel David Ben-Gurion (né David Grün) argued against the party issuing publications in Yiddish, insisting that they use only Hebrew in order to ensure “our future as a healthy nation.”18 Yiddish came under especially strong attack for its association with the diaspora as a locus of Jewish “subservience and decline” and for its evocation of “the degenerate commercial agent,” still mired in “bitter exile,” as opposed to the haluts (Hebrew: “pioneer”), the secular Zionist ideal of the healthy Jew.19
Even as eastern European Jews who immigrated to Palestine strove to adopt Modern Hebrew as their vernacular, the perceived threat of Yiddish contamination endured. In his efforts to correct the pronunciation of Hebrew among his followers, right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky decried their “slovenly pronunciation, lacking any line or rule or taste” as evidence of having “jargonized [i.e., Yiddishized] our speech and defiled our language.” Similar to the anti-Semitic mockery of Jews’ Yiddish-inflected German as mauscheln, Jabotinsky also decried the singsong typical of traditional Yiddish speech as the “tune of the ghetto,” describing it as not merely “ugly” but a “sick frenzy” that is “the result of the Diaspora” and “is nothing but an echo of this national disease.”20
When Yiddish-speaking immigrants arrived in large numbers in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, their language often met with apprehension and disdain. On New York’s Lower East Side, home to the country’s largest concentration of Yiddish speakers, the “jargon of the street” indexed a community associated with unsanitary and morally suspect conditions.21 In addition to scorn from much of the Anglo-Saxon establishment, given its dim view of newly arrived immigrants generally, Yiddish was held in low regard by German-speaking Jews who had come to America from western Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Yiddish was mocked in vaudeville sketches, joke books, and early comic sound recordings, as part of the broad spectrum of American dialect humor in the popular culture of the period, and was also derided in observations on immigrant life by patrician writers from Henry Adams to Henry James.22
Efforts to Americanize immigrants centered on replacing their “Old World” languages with English. Public schools in New York City, home to the largest immigrant Jewish population in the United States, strove to suppress students’ use of Yiddish. Historian Deborah Dash Moore reports that a German Jew who was superintendent of schools on the Lower East Side during the early 1900s was an “extremely zealous Americanizer” who “forbade children to speak Yiddish among themselves during recess or in the halls and bathrooms” and instructed teachers to “wash out with soap the mouths of those who relapsed.” Moore also notes that the city’s Board of Education “regularly penalized Jewish applicants for [teacher] certification if their speech was Yiddish accented.”23 A similar concern to remove the stigma associated with this sound inspired the Jewish Theological Seminary to hire an elocution instructor to teach immigrant rabbinical students how to speak English without a Yiddish intonation.24 In light of this extensive pathologizing of Yiddish, Leo Wiener remarked at the turn of the twentieth century that “there is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped.”25
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Repeated assaults on the health of Yiddish galvanized the language’s advocates to come to its aid. The discourse of Yiddish as a disabled language and a disabling presence in Jewish life prompted the language’s defenders to make the case for its linguistic health and its beneficial value for Jews. This undertaking paralleled the concomitant Muskeljudentum (German: “muscle Jewry”) movement, initiated by Zionists at the turn of the twentieth century for “the physical transformation of the Jew”26 through participation in athletics, as a response to anti-Semitic critiques of Jewish bodies as habitually weak or racially inferior. By emulating the standards of Western culture, whether linguistic or gymnastic, Jews strove to demonstrate their fitness both to other Europeans and as Jews wished to perceive themselves, refracted through the prism of their neighbors’ sensibility.
Yiddish literature played a salient role in defending the language, both as a subject of writing and in the deployment of literary activity as the foundation of modern Yiddish culture. During the late nineteenth century, some of the most prominent Yiddish writers saw their task as not only to compose and publish in the language but also to advocate for its value. Early in his career, Sholem Aleichem undertook unprecedented efforts to promote Yiddish literature by issuing two landmark anthologies in 1888 and 1889. In the first of these collections he addressed the importance of establishing principles for a proper literature of the Jewish people in their vernacular, with regard to form (including orthography) as well as content. Sholem Aleichem denounced escapist Yiddish fiction and championed literature that engaged the actualities of contemporary Jewish life in eastern Europe.
Sholem Aleichem’s conceptualization of this literature was retrospective as well as prescriptive. He constructed a “great tradition” for Yiddish letters in the form of a genealogy, in which he positioned Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh as its grandfather and himself as Abramovitsh’s grandson.27 This implicitly biological schema imparted to Yiddish literature an image of organic continuity and growth. Naomi Seidman argues that Sholem Aleichem’s patriarchal genealogy also refuted notions of Yiddish as feminine, with its connotations of weakness and intellectual inferiority, thereby making this literature “safe for men.”28
Related to this dynastic vision of Yiddish letters is the embrace of Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Leib Peretz as the literature’s klasiker (“classic figures”). Their stature as founders of modern Yiddish literature was secured following their deaths in close succession: Peretz in 1915, Sholem Aleichem the following year, and Abramovitsh the year after that. Coinciding with the great upheavals of eastern European Jewish life during World War I, these authors’ passings marked the end of a formative period in Yiddish letters and the beginning of another era. The klasiker figured prominently in the flourishing of interwar secular Yiddish culture on both sides of the Atlantic. The anniversaries of their births and deaths occasioned commemorative events, their collected works were published in multivolume editions, and selections were incorporated into the curricula of secular Yiddish schools. Some of these schools were named after the klasiker, and their portraits hung in classrooms, comparable to the display of political leaders’ pictures in government-run schools. Hailing these writers as “classic” supported the high-culture status that Yiddishists sought for this literature, and the public display of these writers as iconic leaders implied that Yiddish literature constituted the voice of a thriving nationality.
In this textbook illustration, a classroom in a secular Yiddish school is decorated with portraits of the three klasiker (from left to right): Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz. From David Bridger’s primer Der onheyber (The beginner), first published in New York in 1941 by Farlag matones, for use in schools run by the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute.
Yiddish schools became an important proving ground for establishing a standard language, with a regulated phonology, orthography, and grammar. Beyond pedagogical concerns for teaching correct usage, secularists deemed a standard Yiddish essential for a language of high culture shared across a widely scattered speech community. Reflecting on this issue in the years immediately following World War II, linguist Roman Jakobson maintained that “under conditions of diaspora, a rigorously unified standard is even a much more vital premise for the being and development of a cultural language than it is in a closely-knit speech community. There cannot be approximate knowledge of a literary language for its users. Full mastery or illiteracy—tertium non datur.”29
In addition to legitimating Yiddish as a vehicle for high culture, standardization served as a hallmark of a thriving modern national language. A standard language not only facilitates comprehension across a nationality’s regional, class, and other internal divisions. It also requires an authoritative body and a social system capable of establishing and implementing language regulations on a scale that exemplifies a cohesive nationality.30 To forge this shared language, standardization imposes constraints on a speech community’s actual usage, restricting existing options in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Deviations from the standard may be marked as regionalisms or colloquialisms, connoting a lesser stature, or they may be identified as foreign or otherwise inadmissible elements that fall outside the standard’s boundaries. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddishists committed to establishing a standard language embraced this task, despite a general lack of social and political resources for realizing language regulation as well as a geographically and ideologically disparate speech community that, on the whole, demonstrated little enthusiasm for conforming to a common version of Yiddish.
Efforts to promote a standard Yiddish have employed the discourse of language purity and health, especially with regard to Germanisms deemed inadmissible as daytshmerish. In a 1913 essay on the tasks of Yiddish language development, political and cultural activist Ber Borochov asserted that, “far from being corrupted German, it was Yiddish that was being corrupted by German.”31 Max Weinreich likened daytshmerish to shatnez—cloth made of an “impure” mix of linen and wool fibers and therefore unfit for use by traditionally observant Jews.32 Both Borochov and Weinreich inverted the rubric of language purity that had been used to denigrate Yiddish as a contaminated merging of German and Hebrew to repudiate the mingling of modern Yiddish with modern German as the true adulteration. In place of Germanists’ diagnosing the corruption of their language as due to Jewish obstinacy, backwardness, or laxity, Weinreich attributed the problem of daytshmerish to Jews’ linguistic negligence and lack of regard for Yiddish. Mordkhe Schaechter invoked the biological model of language health when revisiting the issue of language standardization in 1969. Schaechter examined different arenas of contemporary Yiddish usage, especially the popular press, to assess the degrees to which the language was “susceptible” to the influence of modern German or was relatively “immune.”33
Much of the foundational scholarship on Yiddish by its supporters strove to demonstrate its fitness as a language and a subject of study. In a landmark article published in 1863, Shiye-Mordkhe Lifshits defended Yiddish by analogizing its characteristics to major European languages, comparing its hybridity to that of English and likening the relationship between Yiddish and German to that of French and Latin.34 In his 1907 essay “In Defense of the Yiddish Language,” Matthias Mieses made similar arguments: “The tongues of Molière and Victor Hugo, of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, of Dante and Tasso, of Shakespeare and Byron are as much jargons as the language of Mendele and Morris Rosenfeld. . . . From a philological viewpoint, in its development our people’s tongue is not below the Romance languages.”35 Subsequent scholarship on Yiddish often stressed the orderliness of the language, flouting its derogation as lacking in rules. Max Weinreich emphasized the systematic character of Yiddish as a fusion language both in its origins and in its development over centuries of expansion, negating views of the hybrid character of Yiddish as “haphazard, sloppy, uncouth, unsystematic.”36 Uriel Weinreich theorized the regional variations of Yiddish as a “structural dialectology” that not only reveals cohesion in dialect regions but also correlates these speech territories with the dynamics of Ashkenazic social and cultural history.37
More recent scholarship defends the vigor of Yiddish in the face of longstanding notions to the contrary. Dovid Katz’s 2014 study of “Yiddish and power” challenges stereotypical associations of the language with diaspora Jewry’s political weakness. Katz traces the history of Yiddish from its earliest manifestations to the present, highlighting the language’s role as an empowering force in the lives of Ashkenazic Jews over the centuries. Thus, he hails the wealth of Yiddish cultural activities during the first decades of the twentieth century, undertaken almost entirely without external support, as “one of the most successful language-for-power movements in human history.”38
Complicating the question of the fitness of Yiddish is a slippage that sometimes occurs between its instrumental and its symbolic value—analogous, perhaps, to disparities between a person’s physical and mental health. There can be striking differences between Jews’ use of Yiddish and the sentiments they attach to it. Just as maskilim could hold the language in contempt, even as they continued to speak and write Yiddish, it has been possible for others to proclaim their love of the language while having little or no command of it.
In the post-Holocaust era the discourse of Yiddish as unhealthy continues, but its significance has shifted. Seldom characterized as a diseased language or a disabling presence in Jewish life, the rhetoric has shifted to concerns for the viability of Yiddish. The language is often regarded as a “fabulous invalid”—ailing but enduring in the face of repeated threats to its existence.39 Rather than a symptom of its corruption, the infirmity attributed to Yiddish has become emblematic of its tenacity. At the same time, this defiant discourse entails new concerns by raising the possibility of this long-suffering language’s eventual demise.