8

Religion

The connection of Yiddish to Jewish religiosity may seem self-evident and straightforward. Yet there is a remarkable range of interrelations between the language and Ashkenazic Jews’ observances and tenets. So wide-ranging and mutable are these relationships that they not only challenge any simple connection between Yiddish and Judaism but also question the aptness of “religion” as a relevant concept for understanding Yiddish-speaking Jewry for much of its history. Indeed, religye is a distinctly modern word in Yiddish, compared to more venerable terms signifying Jewish devotional practice or conviction: din, das, halokhe, khok (“rabbinic law”); mineg, regiles, shteyger (“custom”); frumkeyt, tsidkes, yires-shomayim (“piety”); emune, betokhn (“faith”).

As noted earlier, the oldest evidence of the language now called Yiddish concerns its role as a vernacular used in devotional scholarship to translate sacred texts. At least as far back as Rashi’s eleventh-century glosses, the “language of Ashkenaz” has been used to render loshn-koydesh words comprehensible in familiar terms. Today the practice of studying sacred texts by translating them into Yiddish continues among some haredim, including in settings where it is no longer the language of daily life.¹ The movement between the language of sacred texts and the vernacular was bilateral. Thus, Aramaic terms of rabbinic discourse entered the general vocabulary of Yiddish speakers, such as the following: agev (“by the way”), aderabe (“to the contrary”), avade (“certainly, definitely”), gufe (“itself”), dehayne (“namely”), dafke (“deliberately, precisely”), legabe (“concerning”), mistame (“probably”), nafke-mine (“distinction”), sugye (“topic of discussion”), kashe (“question, problem”). These and other terms appear in the contemporary phenomenon called Yeshivish, which emerged after World War II as an exigent language for Talmudic study among immigrant Yiddish-speaking instructors teaching American-born Anglophone yeshiva students.

Yiddish has long been employed to comment on Ashkenazic ritual observance, as evinced by the earliest known recorded Yiddish sentence: Gut tak im betage / se veyr dis makhazor in beys hakneses trage (“A good day comes / to the one who carries this prayer book into the synagogue”).² Found in the 1272 Worms mahzor, this rhymed couplet offers a vernacular recognition of the social practice of conveying this large, elaborately ornamented tome into the synagogue on special occasions.

The oldest known Yiddish sentence, inscribed in open spaces within the letters of the Hebrew word בדעתו, in the Worms mahzor of 1272. (From the National Library of Israel.)

Yiddish books describing local customs for holidays and life-cycle observances date as far back as the beginning of the sixteenth century.³ In some Passover Haggadahs published at this time, the canonical Hebrew and Aramaic text is imbricated with Yiddish instructions on the seder’s ceremonies; later editions of the Haggadah also sometimes include translation and commentaries in Yiddish.⁴ Indeed, from their first appearance in the 1500s and for centuries thereafter, books published in their vernacular provided a general Ashkenazic readership with renderings and elaborations of sacred texts, literary adaptations of biblical narratives, guides to the observance of ritual obligations and customs, works of moral exhortation, and an expansion of liturgy for women. These books fostered new devotional practices for Ashkenazim outside the learned elite, which could be termed, albeit anachronistically, “popular religion.”⁵

Translations of the Bible into Yiddish consolidate in book form the language’s long-standing use to study this sacred text by glossing it into the vernacular. The format of these books evolved over time, beginning with Mirkeves ha-mishne, a Hebrew/Yiddish concordance issued in Cracow in 1534. The earliest printed Yiddish translations of the Bible, published in 1544 in Augsburg and Constance, emulate the syntax and morphology of Hebrew in word-for-word translations that imitate the traditional pedagogical practice of rendering the Hebrew text into the form of Yiddish known as ivre-taytsh. Subsequent renderings integrate the biblical narrative with homilies and commentaries in a running Yiddish text.⁶ Rather than simply serving as aids to deciphering the original Hebrew, these works could stand on their own, engendering new devotional reading practices in the vernacular.

The best-known Bible translation into Yiddish of this kind, and the most frequently reprinted work in the language, is Tsene-rene. Compiled by Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac Rabbino of Janova in the early seventeenth century, Tsene-rene soon became a mainstay of Ashkenazic piety. The earliest extant edition of this work was issued in Hanau in 1622; its title page references earlier printings issued in Cracow and Lublin. Many dozens of editions of Tsene-rene have since been published, eventually including translations into other languages.⁷ The text of this popular work changed over time. Yiddish typefaces, orthography, and grammar were updated to reflect shifts in usage; additional commentaries were sometimes added to the text, as were illustrations.⁸ Though its form has varied, Tsene-rene exemplifies the Bible’s enduring place in the domestic devotional practices of Ashkenazim. Moreover, this book complements the male-centered recitation of Scripture during communal synagogue worship with the practice of private, domestic reading, often by women, parallel to the relationship between public, collective Hebrew prayer and the individual recitation of Yiddish tkhines.

During the early modern period, Yiddish translations of other Hebrew texts (prayer books, books of moral instruction), as well as original Yiddish works on Jewish customs and ethics appeared for the express purpose of making devotional and didactic materials more accessible to the Ashkenazic public. Some of these works integrate instruction with engaging narratives, such as the Ku-bukh (Book of cows, 1595), which combines edifying fables with earthy humor. Other texts elaborate biblical episodes in the form of epic poetry, including Seyfer melokhim (The book of kings, ca. 1515), Shmuel-bukh (The book of Samuel, 1544), and Doniel-bukh (The book of Daniel, 1557). These verse narratives not only were read but also were sung. (The texts of other early modern Yiddish epics mention that they were set to the melody of the Shmuel-bukh.)⁹ In addition, Yiddish plays were staged on the festival of Purim as part of its carnivalesque observances. These folk dramas adapted the book of Esther or another biblical narrative (“The Selling of Joseph” being especially popular) and sometimes interpolated comic or parodic material, in keeping with the ludic spirit of celebrating Purim.¹⁰ Hebrew manuscripts and publications outnumber the inventory of extant Yiddish texts during this period. However, the latter corpus represents a wider engagement by Ashkenazim with sacred narratives and devotional practices, reaching men, women, and children in their vernacular.

Hasidic leaders began to promulgate a radically new approach to Jewish spirituality during the late eighteenth century, beginning in small towns in western Ukraine and soon spreading throughout much of eastern Europe. Yiddish was put to innovative use in realizing core principles of Hasidism. The language figured strategically in the movement’s commitment to popularizing esoteric mystical teachings and practices. In addition, Yiddish helped empower the movement’s charismatic leaders, variously called rebeyim (“masters”) or tsadikim (“saintly men”), who served their followers as spiritual mentors and as mediators with God. Preaching and storytelling in Yiddish imbued the language with new significance as a demotic point of entry to transcendent exultation, along with other practices of daily life, such as singing, dancing, and feasting, that Hasidism invested with an elevated stature.

Not only were foundational Hasidic texts disseminated in Yiddish; it was the primary language of oral communication between the tsadik and his community, a practice widely maintained to this day. Innovative customs distinctive to Hasidism are marked by terminology that transforms common Yiddish words into the names of spiritually charged phenomena: each tsadik has a hoyf (“court”), where he ministers to his followers; there, a Hasid arranges to meet with the tsadik for guidance on personal matters by submitting a written request, called a kvitl (“note”). Hasidim gather with their tsadik on the Sabbath and holidays for a festive meal, known as a tish (“table”), at which he offers discourses on sacred texts appropriate to the occasion. While praying, a male Hasid wears a gartl (“sash”) around his waist to symbolically separate the upper, more spiritual part of his body from the lower part.¹¹

Hasidim were not the only Jews in eastern Europe to regard Yiddish with a newly deliberate awareness of its value in maintaining piety at this time. Moshe Sofer (known as the Hatam Sofer), a leading rabbinic authority in Moravia and Slovakia during the early decades of the nineteenth century, insisted that Jews should maintain Yiddish in opposition to the linguistic assimilation advocated by the Haskalah. Sofer rooted this conviction “in a Talmudic source,” notes historian Jacob Katz, the purpose of which was “to distance Jews from their non-Jewish surroundings.”¹²

The advent of secular ideologies among Yiddish speakers at the turn of the twentieth century not only posed further challenges to east European Jewish piety but also inspired innovative practices involving the language among traditionally observant Jews. Political movements, Yiddish newspapers, schools, and theater instantiated new forms of Jewish culture that were ambivalent, if not hostile, toward Jewish piety. The widespread appeal of these developments soon prompted traditionally observant Jews to adapt these new practices to their own purposes. At the start of the twentieth century, they established political organizations—the non-Zionist Agudath Israel and the Zionist Mizrachi—which later employed Yiddish in interwar Poland to field candidates in elections, publish journals, and sponsor school systems and youth groups.¹³ Like secular Yiddishists, these organizations fostered a continued commitment to Yiddish, in the face of Jews’ increased adoption of state languages as vernaculars, while asserting the importance of Yiddish as a mainstay of Jewish piety.

After World War II the relationship of traditionally observant Ashkenazim with Yiddish changed both instrumentally and symbolically. As the language figured less in other Jews’ religiosity, the use of Yiddish, whether as a language of daily life or a language of devotional study, came to distinguish haredim from other, less stringently observant Ashkenazim. Indeed, some haredim, especially Hasidim, use Yiddish both to maintain connections to east European traditions and to articulate the divide between themselves and other Jews, including those who speak the language. Thus, some Hasidim will refuse to speak Yiddish with less pious Jews.¹⁴

Contemporary Hasidim use Yiddish for internal communications through newspapers and magazines as well as with posters displayed on exterior walls in some Hasidic neighborhoods. These posters, which can include texts in Hebrew, Russian, and English as well as Yiddish, promote communal policies and agendas, announce events, and advertise goods and services. For Hasidim, information on these posters reinforces authoritative figures, institutions, and practices; for other people in these locales, the posters’ presence denotes a Hasidic enclave, materializing the audial presence of Yiddish speakers and thereby, according to sociologist Samuel Heilman, constituting “an assertive . . . taking over [of] the public space.”¹⁵

Advertisement for a sale on shtraymlekh, fur-trimmed hats worn by married Hasidic men on holidays and special occasions, which was posted on the street in Boro Park, Brooklyn, in the 1990s. The Yiddish text interpolates some English-language terms in both the Roman alphabet and the alef-beys.

Contemporary Yiddish books for Hasidic adults include instruction on pious conduct and hagiographies of tsadikim as well as works of fiction that provide entertaining reading compatible with community values. Yiddish also appears in a wide assortment of products for Hasidic children—picture books, board games, puzzles, coloring books, stickers—that foster language learning in conjunction with reinforcing pious practices and beliefs. Thus, the preface to Di yidishe shprakh, undzer tsirung (The Yiddish language, our jewel) states that this workbook links “teaching children how to write Yiddish without mistakes” with “inculcating values of devotion to God and good conduct.”¹⁶ Recordings of Yiddish songs as part of what has been termed “Orthodox popular music” provide a similar melding of instruction with entertainment,¹⁷ as do videos of Yiddish plays staged on Purim or during Succos. These recordings sometimes identify the performers as “heymishe yunge layt”—that is, young men who are members of Hasidic communities (whose protocols of modesty forbid women from performing in the presence of men). Here, the Yiddish word heymish—pronounced haymish by most Hasidim—is assigned a distinctive meaning. Whereas the word more generally means “homey, intimate, familiar, informal,” Hasidim use haymish to signify that which is normative within their communities.¹⁸ In addition to identifying performers or performances as haymish, the word has been used in advertising to signify as acceptable services by musicians and health-care providers, as well as a variety of products, including baked goods and even a brand of kosher imitation seafood.¹⁹

As extensive as their commitment is to Yiddish as a language of daily life, Hasidim also value the language for its circumscribed role within their complex multiglossia. This constellation of languages also includes loshn-koydesh, used in worship and devotional scholarship; Hungarian or Polish, which had been spoken in pre–World War II locales, now mostly used among older Hasidim; and current local languages: English in New York, London, and Melbourne; Flemish and French in Antwerp; French and English in Montreal; Israeli Hebrew in Jerusalem. How a Hasid employs these languages conforms to particular contexts of speaking, reading, or writing and is further differentiated by the Hasid’s gender, generation, level of education, occupation, and particular community.²⁰

Moreover, the languages used among Hasidim can seem fungible, not only to an outsider but also to members of their own community. American Hasidic women reported to Ayala Fader that neither their children nor they themselves are always sure what language they are speaking. What Fader distinguishes as Hasidic English is infused with Yiddish, as Hasidic Yiddish is with English (especially among women) and loshn-koydesh (especially among men).²¹ Even as Hasidim attribute a defining value to using Yiddish, rather than their neighbors’ vernaculars, hybridization of what are conventionally understood as discrete languages is extensive. Consider the text on a sticker, sold in a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1990s, given as a reward to children for doing well at reciting their prayers:

I Davened

!געשמאק²²

What would be “I prayed with gusto!” in English or “איךהאָבגעדאַװנטגעשמאַק! / Ikh hob gedavnt geshmak!” in Yiddish is rendered in two different alphabets and what are arguably three distinct languages: English, Jewish English (in which “to daven” is conjugated like a regular English verb, hence the past tense “davened”), and Yiddish.²³ In addition, the sticker’s text invokes yet more language: liturgical loshn-koydesh.

Given the fluid character of their multiglossia, Hasidim can find scrutiny of language use to be a fraught issue. Whereas some Hasidim make more conscious efforts to bolster the use of Yiddish, especially through its curricularization, others have worried that increased attention to standardizing Yiddish usage and expanding its lexicon smacks of Yiddishism. Beyond its association with secularism, the notion of Yiddishism raises concerns for Hasidim as an undue devotion to Yiddish for its own sake. Thus, explanations of Yiddish grammar and vocabulary featured in a Hasidic family magazine in the early twenty-first century inspired one reader to write in, complaining, “Who says that there has to be a Yiddish word for everything? Not all languages are equally rich.”²⁴ Rather than weakening Yiddish, Hasidim regard constraints on the scope and use of the language as bolstering its power to signify their communities’ distinct piety. As a linguistic gatekeeper, Hasidic Yiddish both limits its speakers’ access to the larger world and separates them from other Jews.

At the same time, Yiddish has emerged as a language of nonconformist cultural creativity among some individuals who have left Hasidic communities and as a vehicle for dissent by others who choose to stay. Several former or marginalized Hasidim have participated in the creation of film and television dramas, spoken partly or entirely in Yiddish, that scrutinize Hasidic mores: Mendy (2003), Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (2010), Where Is Joel Baum? (2012), Félix and Meira (2014), Menashe (2017), and Unorthodox (2020).²⁵ In defiance of their leaders’ condemnation of the internet, growing numbers of dissident Hasidim, including those remaining in their communities, avail themselves of the anonymity afforded by this medium to air criticisms of communal corruption or voice doubts about theological tenets, using both Yiddish and English. Fader terms these covert writers a heretical “counterpublic” that has “challenged the authority of the ultra-Orthodox religious public sphere.”²⁶

• • •

The relationship of Yiddish with Jewish piety also includes its rejection by some speakers. Secular Yiddishism separates the authority of the rabbinate and the observance of rabbinic law from Jewishness and reconceptualizes it exclusively as an ethno-national identity. This phenomenon originated at the turn of the twentieth century among Jewish revolutionaries in the Russian empire, who sought to engage in international class struggle while maintaining a collective Jewishness through vernacular language. On this political foundation Yiddishists developed a secular culture centered on the written word—newspapers and other periodicals, as well as works of history, political theory, and belles-lettres—and engaged through an array of performances: lectures, rallies, community choruses, theatrical productions. Historian Barry Trachtenberg observes that for the founding generation of secular Yiddishists, the language “was more than a practical instrument through which to further their revolutionary nationalist aspirations. Rather, it was the highest expression of the Jewish people and contained the potential to transform their existence within the Russian empire.”²⁷

Secular Yiddishists have had a distinct relationship with religiosity that extends beyond its abandonment. They have replaced the definitional role of piety with their own authorities and ideals, realized in an alternate array of practices. Political leaders, authors, performers, public intellectuals, and cultural activists replace clergy and other traditional scholars, educators, and preachers as community authorities; the rational pursuit of humanistic knowledge replaces Jewish devotional study; political activism and expressive works of high culture replace worship and sacred texts. Originally embraced as the common language of the Jewish masses, Yiddish has assumed among these secularists the elevated stature, if not the sanctity, traditionally attributed to loshn-koydesh.

At its most programmatic, secular Yiddishism has nevertheless remained engaged with religiosity, even when it serves as a negative model. In the Soviet Union, state-approved Yiddish culture was not merely secular but forthrightly anti-religious, producing literary works and propaganda that repudiated rabbinic authority and ridiculed traditional Jewish practices such as circumcision and dietary rules. However, literature scholar Anna Shternshis notes, instead of either realizing the state’s envisioned integration of Jews into a common Marxist ethos or simply resisting state efforts to eradicate Jewish traditions, Soviet Jews of the 1920s and 1930s evolved a self-styled, hybrid culture of old and new, official and unofficial, public and private—a way of being both “Soviet” and “kosher.”²⁸

At the same time, secular Yiddishism in the Americas developed beyond its radical origins. As the language came to play a central role in defining Jewishness, irrespective of a particular political ideology, Yiddishism became, in effect, a civil religion, providing foundational value to a Jewish collective with the same gravitas as a religious identity. Secular Yiddishists have reworked elements of traditional Jewish religious practice, exemplified by their transformed definition of the word shul. Originally meaning “synagogue,” shul more recently came into use as a Yiddish term for a modern, non-religious school, along with other terms: shkole (cf. Polish szkoła, Russian shkola) and, in America, skul. Secular Yiddish primers published in the United States taught the word shul as meaning only “school,” referring specifically to the secular Yiddish school and implicitly negating the older meaning of the term as “synagogue.”²⁹

Similarly, canonical Jewish texts and traditional observances have been transvalued as fundaments of secular Yiddish culture. The rendering of the entire Hebrew Bible into modern literary Yiddish by the poet Yehoash (né Solomon Blumgarten), first published in 1926, was hailed as “a refined work of modern art”—a cultural, rather than religious, achievement.³⁰ In the 1930s, American secular Yiddishists inaugurated the driter seyder (“third Passover seder”), which remade the centuries-old domestic ritual commemorating ancient Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery, traditionally understood as an act of divine redemption, into a communal gathering, at which the performance of Yiddish music and drama recalls the Exodus as a paradigm of an ongoing human struggle for freedom that extends beyond Jewish experience. For some secular Yiddishists, the history of Jews’ persecution, from ancient times to the present, has inspired a commitment to the struggles of other oppressed peoples, both in the United States (for example, the Civil Rights movement) and abroad (the Spanish Civil War).³¹

• • •

As a language forged by Jews living amid Christian majority populations, Yiddish has been shaped by European Jewry’s long, complicated relationship with Christianity. The language distinguishes between Christian and Jewish phenomena, sometimes with terms that are neutral in connotation, such as yontef (“Jewish holiday”) ~ khoge (“non-Jewish holiday”), davenen (“to pray [as a Jew]”) ~ molyen zikh (“to pray [as a Christian]”), kloyz (“Jewish chapel”) ~ kaplitse (“Christian chapel”). Other terms for Christians or Christianity, however, are derogatory, such as sheygets (“Christian boy”), which can also mean “rascal,” and tifle (“Christian house of worship”), which is related to a Biblical Hebrew word meaning “folly” or “immorality.” These terms exemplify what is known as lehavdl-loshn—literally, “separation language”—vocabulary used to distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. Moreover, inserting the term lehavdl between these two kinds of phenomena serves as a rhetorical marker signifying this divide.

Early works of Yiddish literature also articulate this distinction, whether by excising or emending Christian elements in German or Italian epics when they were rendered in Yiddish³² or by including polemics against Christian theology in Yiddish literary expansions of biblical narratives. Such is the case with Shire fun Yitskhok (The song of Isaac) and Akeydes Yitskhok (The binding of Isaac). These sixteenth-century adaptations of Genesis 22:1–19 in prose and poetry, respectively, obliquely refute Christian readings of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son as prefiguring the death and resurrection of a messianic Jesus and assert instead this episode’s significance for Jews’ enduring covenant with God.³³ Zalman Zvi Aughausen’s Yidisher teryak (Jewish antidote), published in 1615, offers a singularly forthright riposte in Yiddish against Christian anti-Jewish accusations.³⁴

Historian Elisheva Carlebach observes that the culture of early modern Ashkenazim “had built in strategies of internal resistance to the religious narrative of Christian society, trenchant polemic in the guise of folklore.”³⁵ This practice is exemplified by a sizeable corpus of folkways concerning Christmas—including names, lore, and observances for the holiday—that constitute a counter-practice in which familiarity with Christianity inspires Jewish ripostes. There are more than a dozen different terms for Christmas among Yiddish dialects, in addition to nitl, the most common word. Some of these terms are bilingual puns, such as veynakht (“woe night”), a play on German Weihnachten (“Christmas eve”).³⁶ This ludic term epitomizes the eastern European Jewish response to Christmas, both acknowledging and flouting this source of anxiety. This pattern is also manifest in Yiddish terms for Jesus, which either observe a taboo against uttering his name—instead referring to Jesus obliquely as oyse ish (“that man”) or der tole (“the one who was suspended”)—or deride the notion of his divinity. Thus, calling Jesus “Yosl Pondrik” or “Yoshke Pondre” references Toledot Yeshu (History of Jesus), a medieval Hebrew work, later translated into Yiddish, which debunks claims that Jesus is the Messiah and asserts instead that he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish woman and a man named Pandera.³⁷

Prominent among Christians’ varied interests in Yiddish during the early modern era was the desire to use the Jews’ vernacular to understand their heretical beliefs and thereby provide a point of entry to their conversion. Missionaries issued multiple translations of the New Testament into Yiddish—dating as early as 1540, making this publication of Christian Scriptures in “vesta Judaica” among the first printed books of any kind in the language.³⁸ Efforts to instruct Christians in Yiddish for the purpose of evangelizing among Ashkenazim include Johann Christoff Wagenseil’s 1699 Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Red- und Schreibart (Instruction in speaking and writing Judeo-German) and courses in the language offered at the University of Halle in the 1700s, the first institution of higher education anywhere to do so.³⁹ Among the most dedicated Christians to this undertaking was the eighteenth-century Lutheran theologian Wilhelm Christian Justus Chrysander, who “offered Yiddish courses and published a Yiddish textbook as well as a theological tractate on the importance of learning Yiddish—all in the name of the missionary cause.”⁴⁰ Protestant missionizing to Jews in Yiddish continued well into the twentieth century. In the United States, “evangelical institutions of higher learning, such as the Moody Bible Institute, established programs to train professional evangelists to the Jews,” including the study of Yiddish. It is remarkable, notes religion scholar Yaakov Ariel, that in America “conservative Christian schools of higher learning offered courses in Yiddish decades before secular . . . or Jewish institutions of higher learning did.”⁴¹

As part of this work, American evangelicals published new Yiddish translations of the New Testament, as recently as Henry Einspruch’s 1941 rendering of Der bris khadoshe. In his review of the translation, Yiddish writer Melech Ravitch encouraged Jews to read the book, praising the quality of the rendering and insisting on its value in the Yiddish literary canon as a work that no “intelligent Jew” could “afford to ignore.”⁴² Yet shortly before Ravitch subverted the significance of this translation, recasting its intended challenge to Jewish belief as a validation of the cosmopolitan capacity of secular Yiddish literature, the Yiddish literary world had been roiled by Sholem Asch’s 1939 novel Der man fun Natseres (published in English translation as The Nazarene). When the novel first appeared in serialized form in the Jewish Daily Forward, both critics and members of the reading public decried the renowned author’s sympathetic portrayal of Jesus.⁴³ As a result, the newspaper discontinued the novel’s publication, terminating its longstanding relationship with Asch, and a secular Yiddish school in Brooklyn that had been named in honor of the author removed his name from its building.⁴⁴

The extent to which Christians who have had some contact with Ashkenazim could understand and speak Yiddish is difficult to ascertain, in part due to the multiple variables this entails: the time, place, and context of interaction between particular Christians and Jews, their respective ages, genders, educations, occupations, and so on. On one hand, the Christians who operated the presses that printed the first Yiddish books often relied on converts from Judaism for their knowledge of the language, implying the publishers’ limited command of Yiddish.⁴⁵ Issuing books to teach Yiddish to Christian German speakers, beginning at the turn of the eighteenth century, evinces both a considerable interest in learning Yiddish and a lack of opportunity to acquire sufficient knowledge of it through interactions with Ashkenazim. On the other hand, the closeness with which Jews and Christians have long encountered one another in daily life as neighbors, in business transactions, and through employment—in particular, Christian women who worked in Ashkenazic homes as servants, starting in the Middle Ages—suggests that there have been considerable opportunities for Christians to become familiar with Yiddish.⁴⁶ There are occasional references in memoirs and literary works to Christians’ use (and sometimes comic misuse) of Yiddish in eastern Europe, as well as examples of how some Jews developed code words to evade comprehension by Christians, implying their considerable familiarity with the language.⁴⁷

In the United States, non-Jews’ ability to speak Yiddish has occasionally been presented as a piquant oddity—such as actor James Cagney’s snippet of Yiddish dialogue in a scene from the 1932 gangster film Taxi—or as a sign of cross-cultural enrichment, as in US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recalling the Yiddish he learned as a young man in the Bronx while working for a Jewish employer.⁴⁸ Now seldom an object of Christian suspicion, Yiddish is increasingly learned, sometimes masterfully, by non-Jewish scholars and performers, for whom the language and its cultural resources provide intellectual stimulation or creative allure.

Beyond its longstanding significance as an index of traditional Ashkenazic piety, Yiddish may be spoken, read, or written today by an ardent Jewish secularist, an agnostic scholar of comparative literature, a disgruntled Hasidic blogger, or an impassioned non-Jewish folksinger. For these individuals as well, Yiddish facilitates a devotion of some kind—to Ashkenazic culture, past or present; to their intellectual pursuits or ideological convictions; or to the Yiddish language itself. As these developments undo the longstanding tautology uniting Yiddish language with its speech community and a way of life, they expand the possibilities of who might turn to the language to embody new notions of yidishkeyt.