For most of its existence, Yiddish has been acquired by Ashkenazim mimetically as a first language. As is typical of vernaculars, young children in Yiddish-speaking milieus learn from their immediate environment to comprehend and produce the language through imitation and experimentation. They may well acquire other vernaculars simultaneously (if, say, they grow up in multilingual households) or subsequently (for example, as immigrants in contact with new neighbors) and may study additional languages in school or independently. What distinguishes learning Yiddish according to this model, even when it occurs in a multilingual context, is its intimacy as the everyday language of one’s home and community, the utterance of Yiddish implicitly identifying the speaker with yidishkeyt.
Yiddish is proverbially known as di shprakh vos redt zikh—“the language that speaks by itself”—suggesting that it inheres in the native speaker. At the same time, characterizing Yiddish as “speaking by itself” implies that it has an anthropomorphic agency of its own. Traditional practices of learning Yiddish and of using it as a language of instruction long assumed this foundational notion of Yiddish as native, even autochthonic. But as the education of Ashkenazim became more varied, complex, and contentious, the bonds between yidish and yidishkeyt and between the language and its speakers were loosened, problematizing what it might mean for Yiddish to “speak by itself.”
The acquisition of Yiddish in traditional Ashkenazic communities contrasts with learning how to read biblical and liturgical Hebrew, known as ivre. In keeping with the general pattern of internal Jewish diglossia, ivre entails reading and reciting, rather than conversing. Ivre is acquired through schooling, with Yiddish, the students’ first language, serving as the language of instruction. Even when learning ivre begins at an early age, per traditional Ashkenazic practice, it is through Yiddish that the meaning of holy writ is understood. The engagement with ivre centers on language in its written form and is passive, a matter of mastering canonical texts rather than creating new ones. By contrast, vernacular Yiddish entails active, ongoing innovation in the course of its use.
Traditional teaching of ivre involves a set of cultural practices that mark the language as instrumental to fulfilling the Jewish male’s onus of devotional study. For example, celebrating the first day of a young boy’s formal instruction in the Jewish alphabet with a special ritual dates to the Middle Ages among Ashkenazim in German lands, and similar practices were observed in eastern Europe.1 In contrast to the deliberateness of studying ivre, learning Yiddish as one’s first language does not involve ceremonial recognition, nor does it require the rigors of instruction. Thus, Max Weinreich asserts, likely with traditional Ashkenazic pedagogy in mind, “No one was ever flogged for not knowing Yiddish.”2
Yiddish has, of course, long been written as well as spoken. Learning to read or write Yiddish differs from studying ivre, which begins with mastering the Jewish alphabet. Among vernacular speakers of Yiddish, by contrast, literacy in the language typically follows some degree of oral fluency. Consequently, learning to read Yiddish—which also uses the Jewish alphabet, though with some key differences—has traditionally been a corollary of studying ivre. The practices of reading and writing Yiddish were discussed in some of the earliest published texts in the language, including the translation of Seyfer mides (Book of virtues) issued in Isny in 1542 and an edition of Yosifon (an expanded adaptation of ancient Jewish history texts by Flavius Josephus) in Yiddish, printed in Zurich in 1546.3 Composed in the language itself, these guidelines may have been intended to instantiate principles of Yiddish orthography in the then-new medium of print.
Given the ostensibly automatic nature of acquiring Yiddish as an internal vernacular, it is not surprising that the first efforts to provide some kind of formal instruction in the language came from without its speech community. As noted previously, the earliest works devoted to teaching Yiddish are German-language publications by and for Christians, first appearing at the turn of the eighteenth century. The readers of these books were motivated to learn Yiddish for a variety of reasons, including Christian theological studies, business interactions with Jews, efforts to convert them to Christianity, and their policing (this last motive reflecting a longstanding interest in connections between Yiddish and Rotwelsch). Jeffrey Grossman notes that all these efforts sought to reform and regulate Jews’ lives through external mastery of their vernacular with the ultimate goal not of enhanced engagement with Ashkenazim but of making their “use of Yiddish unnecessary.”4
In fact, at the same time that instruction in Yiddish gained popularity among these Christians, their Jewish neighbors were beginning to adopt German as their vernacular. Part of the reason for this change was externally imposed on Yiddish speakers, in the form of laws in the Habsburg Empire and German states requiring the use of German language for documenting business transactions and maintaining Jewish communal records, among other official practices.5 Educational motives internal to Jews in German lands reinforced this move. The Haskalah’s advocacy of pursuing secular knowledge and the new consciousness it prompted regarding Jewish language use inspired the movement’s adherents to study European languages of high culture and develop their command of Hebrew as a language for belles-lettres and intellectual exchange. Most maskilim did not consider Yiddish worthy of a similar commitment. Indeed, far from maintaining its longstanding role as the vernacular language of instruction in traditional Ashkenazic education, they argued that Jews should reform their approach to the study of sacred texts. Moreover, they deemed knowing Yiddish to be a sign of Unbildung (German: “lack of education”) and therefore something that should be unlearned, especially given the extent to which the language stigmatized Jews in the eyes of their Christian neighbors.6
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In eastern Europe, maskilic derogation of Yiddish did not prompt a large-scale shift away from the language. However, the Haskalah did inform early discussions of how Yiddish might be used to engage modern ideas and practices, including through innovations in education. Maskilim as a rule dismissed the notion of Yiddish as a language for modern schooling, conforming to the Russian Empire’s prohibition of this possibility except in traditional religious instruction. In fact, the only formal education most eastern European Jews received throughout the nineteenth century took place in a kheyder or talmed-toyre—private or communally run schools providing traditional elementary education in ivre and core devotional texts.7 Though primarily intended for boys, similar schools for girls (called meydl-kheyder) became more common by the turn of the twentieth century.8
A small but growing number of wealthier and more worldly eastern European Jews who wished their children to pursue an alternative to traditional Jewish education sent them to gymnasia, secondary schools in which the language of instruction was Russian in the Romanov Empire or German in the Habsburg Empire. Often these schools forbade Jewish students to speak Yiddish.9 During the mid-nineteenth century, maskilim opened a small number of schools that aimed to establish a modern approach to Jewish education. In most of these institutions as well, Yiddish was eschewed, viewed as inimical to modern pedagogy. In the words of maskil Shmuel Yosef Fuenn, the language was deemed “an iron wall” that separated Jews from their educated neighbors and “did not allow any ray of scientific light to penetrate.”10 While these modern institutions attracted only a limited number of students, growing numbers of eastern European Jews pursued private study of secular subjects, such as mathematics or other European languages, either on their own or with tutors.
A minority of maskilim in eastern Europe did, however, recognize the value of Yiddish for promoting the principles of the Haskalah, and this inspired the first efforts to create modern schools for Jews where Yiddish was either a subject of study or a language of instruction. The earliest of these include the Öffentliche Israelitische Hochschule (Israelite Public High School), established by Joseph Perl in Tarnopol in 1809, and a similar school founded by Avram ben Sholem Hacohen in Brody in 1845.11 A Jewish girls’ school that opened in Vilna in 1830 offered instruction in Yiddish as well as Russian, German, and French.12 Such efforts testify to the ambivalence with which these maskilim regarded Yiddish as an acknowledged presence in Jewish life, on one hand, yet in need of reform through curricularization, on the other hand. More generally, eastern European followers of the Haskalah could not accept Yiddish as it was. Through changes in Jewish education, the language had to be either improved or superseded, consistent with the maskilic view of traditional Ashkenazic life generally.
A more widespread innovation in Yiddish education reached eastern European Jews in the form of brivnshtelers (“correspondence manuals”). These books began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, as letter writing became more prevalent with the development of modern postal systems in Europe. In the course of providing examples of business and personal correspondence in Yiddish, brivnshtelers presented models of proper penmanship, orthography, and grammar, thereby teaching Yiddish speakers basic skills for self-expression in the written language. In addition, these books sometimes included lessons in arithmetic (for commercial correspondence) and sample texts for students to copy. Some of these texts addressed topics such as the natural sciences and geography, thereby introducing secular subjects and the possibility of learning about them in the students’ vernacular.13 Brivnshtelers were widely used by both men and women for self-study or tutorial instruction. These manuals continued to be published into the early twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic, as immigrants in the Americas depended on letters to maintain contact with family and other acquaintances in Europe.
Systematic, sustained efforts to use Yiddish in secular classroom settings are a twentieth-century phenomenon, arising from new ideological commitments to the language and changes in its speakers’ social and political circumstances. In eastern Europe, advocacy for Yiddish-language schools preceded their realization by several years. In 1906 journalist Yoysef Beker asserted in the Bundist periodical Folkstsaytung (People’s newspaper) that such schools were necessary because “a child will achieve a measure of normal development only when he is taught in his mother tongue.”14 The following year, a group of progressive Jewish educators in Vilna convened to discuss establishing modern Yiddish-language schools. As the conference was illegal, its participants were arrested, but they continued their meeting in prison.15 Calls for educating Jewish children in their native language were issued at a landmark conference on Yiddish held in Czernowitz in 1908 and in an official resolution issued by the Jewish Labor Bund in 1910.
Remarkably, these aspirations were first realized during World War I in eastern European territories under German occupation. To counter the hegemony of Russian culture in the region, German forces mandated the establishment of schools in which the children of each ethnolinguistic group were taught in their native language. Creating these Yiddish schools entailed multiple difficulties, including the dearth of both suitable pedagogical materials and qualified teachers fluent in Yiddish. In addition, the schools’ advocates faced the challenge of convincing skeptical parents of the feasibility, as well as the value, of a secular education in Yiddish, which was opposed by traditionally observant Jews as well as those who wished to educate their children in a European language of high culture.16 Though Yiddishists championed modern schools for Jewish children in their first language as “normal,” efforts to realize this vision exposed the complexities of eastern European Jews’ multilingualism, both instrumentally and symbolically. Indeed, much of the work undertaken to create modern Yiddish-language education did not simply employ this vernacular but transformed it.
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After World War I, the range of educational possibilities available to Jewish children in eastern Europe’s newly established nations included a variety of schools run in the Yiddish language. They were made possible by provisions in treaties signed at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference guaranteeing the rights of minority educational and cultural institutions in these countries. Yiddish-language schools were administered either by the state (in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) or by Jewish communities (in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania). In most cases, Jewish political organizations established these schools, forthrightly linking education with ideology. The most extensive Yiddish-language school system in Poland, then home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, was the Tsentrale yidishe shul-organizatsye (Central Yiddish School Organization). Known by the acronym TSYSHO, these schools were founded in 1921 by members of the Jewish Labor Bund and left-wing Labor Zionists, who shared commitments to promoting socialism and fostering a secular Yiddish culture. At its peak, TSYSHO enrolled some twenty-four thousand students in over two hundred schools throughout Poland, ranging from kindergarten through high school, and also ran vocational training, a teachers’ seminary, and a children’s sanatorium. To address this enterprise’s manifold newness—socially, politically, and culturally, as well as pedagogically and linguistically—TSYSHO published textbooks for students and issued curricula and educational studies for teachers.17
Realizing the ideological commitment to providing modern education in Yiddish tested its limits as a vernacular. These schools needed to create instructional materials and develop new vocabulary for fields of study, such as the natural sciences. Moreover, educators had to establish standards of Yiddish-language usage, from penmanship to grammar. This undertaking involved a population of both students and teachers whose command of Yiddish was sometimes limited. Many Jews who were qualified to teach in these schools spoke little or no Yiddish and acquired expertise in their fields of knowledge at university, where they had become fluent in German, Polish, or Russian and embraced the mainstream secular culture. A growing number of Poland’s younger Jews were raised in Polish-speaking homes, and more young Jews were studying the language in the classroom, as mandated in all the nation’s schools, including those in which Modern Hebrew or Yiddish was the language of instruction. Thus, when students who spoke only Polish enrolled in the Vilna Jewish Technical School, where all instruction was in Yiddish, they had to learn the language in order to study such subjects as mechanics or applied physics. The students used textbooks with newly developed lexicons for these fields and were often taught by instructors for whom Yiddish was also an unfamiliar language.18
The advent of secular Jewish schools in eastern Europe prompted the development of educational alternatives for traditionally observant Jews, using modern pedagogy toward traditional ends. The key innovation concerned girls’ education, as boys continued to study in yeshivas. Bais Yaakov schools, founded by Sarah Schenirer in Cracow in 1917, soon educated thousands of girls in Jewish Scripture, ethics, and prayer, while employing innovative pedagogical practices, such as staging plays, going on outdoor excursions, and reading world literature in translation.19 Yiddish was the language of instruction in these schools. Most Bais Yaakov schools only offered classes in the afternoon, and many of their students attended Polish public schools during the day. Consequently, Bais Yaakov viewed Yiddish as a bulwark against cultural assimilation and fundamental to promoting traditional piety. Supporters of Bais Yaakov asserted that their commitment to Yiddish was different from—indeed, inimical to—that of secular Yiddishists, who were denounced as apikorsim (“heretics”). Bais Yaakov’s advocates argued that their schools did not “fetishize” Yiddish, unlike TSYSHO and other secularist institutions, but used the language to guarantee “cultural distinctiveness to Jews” while providing “a continuity of generational heritage going back to antiquity.” Notwithstanding their divergent ideologies, both TSYSHO and Bais Yaakov adopted modern measures to standardize and curricularize Yiddish, and each felt it necessary to justify maintaining the language as a means of upholding a distinct, proud Jewishness.20
Concurrently, Yiddish-language schools figured prominently in the Soviet Union’s array of official institutions for its Jewish citizens. In keeping with a policy of the Soviet Union during its early years to offer all children an education in their respective native languages, these schools taught every subject in Yiddish. The language was essential for recognizing Jews as an official national minority in the Soviet Union, as they were understood as not having a defining territory, unlike Armenians, Ukrainians, and other nationalities. Yiddish-language schools both received unprecedented governmental support and were subject to unparalleled state oversight, as was true for other components of Soviet Yiddish culture. Soviet Yiddish schools promoted the state’s class-based social and economic revolution and repudiated capitalism and religion. These principles informed all aspects of pedagogy, including Yiddish-language instruction and state-approved curricula on Yiddish literature. Thus, stories in children’s primers praised Lenin and Stalin, while demonizing clerics and the bourgeoisie.21
At their peak, Yiddish-language schools in the Soviet Union enrolled over a hundred thousand students. However, more Soviet Jews sent their children to Russian-language schools, believing that they offered a superior education and provided children with better professional futures. As state support for national minority cultures was curtailed during the 1930s, the number of Yiddish-language schools declined, as did enrollments. Soviet Yiddish educational institutions were all shuttered during World War II; a limited postwar revival of these schools came to an end by 1951, as part of the state’s suppression of all public forms of Yiddish culture.22
While only a minority of Jewish children enrolled in these various Yiddish schools, the language played an increasingly important role in adolescent and adult self-education during the twentieth century’s first decades, especially among large numbers of laborers and immigrants who lacked opportunities for formal study and had limited command of other languages. Of special note among the array of Yiddish publications for autodidacts are textbooks printed in Poland, the United States, and Palestine for learning other languages, among them Arabic, English, Esperanto, German, Modern Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. These include languages spoken by neighbors (or potential neighbors of would-be immigrants) as well as languages of high culture or ideological conviction.23 Though written to explain the workings of other languages, these textbooks also implicitly taught their readers Yiddish grammar by analogy.
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In the wake of Yiddish-speaking Jews’ mass emigration from eastern Europe, schools to teach the language to their children were established during the first decades of the twentieth century in western Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Australia.24 These institutions mark a threshold change in learning Yiddish and exemplify the impact of immigration on Yiddish culture generally. Teaching children Yiddish in these new multilingual settings grappled with the larger question of the language’s future beyond its role in immigrants’ lives as it became, for ensuing generations, something other than their first language and other than a vernacular.
In the United States, home to the largest number of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the first schools that taught the language to Jewish children were established in the 1910s, several decades after the efflorescence of American Yiddish culture in the form of press, literature, theater, and political activism, all of which served adult immigrants.25 By 1930 there were four major secular Yiddish school systems in the United States. Then at the height of their popularity, these schools enrolled almost 10 percent of those American children (and some 20 percent in New York City) who received a formal Jewish education.26 As in Europe, the organizations that established these schools integrated their commitment to Yiddish with a political or cultural ideology: Farband (Labor Zionism), Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle; socialism), Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute (Jewish secularism), and Internatsyonaler arbeter-ordn (International Workers’ Order; communism). Adding children’s schools to these organizations’ other undertakings reflected a growing awareness of the disparity between immigrants’ command of Yiddish and that of their children. Almost all of them attended public schools, where English was the sole language of instruction and immigrants’ children were often discouraged from speaking their parents’ “Old World” languages. A 1920 study on teaching English to the “foreign born” asserted that there is “no question that it is the will of the people that no child in America shall grow into citizenship without mastering the language of America.” At the same time, this study noted the challenge educators faced in fulfilling this goal, especially given “the close connection in the alien’s mind between language and religion,” noting that, for the immigrant, “religious devotion and feeling are inextricably bound up with the native language.”27
In fact, a commitment to teaching Yiddish to immigrants’ children extended beyond secular Jews. Some Orthodox Talmud Torahs, afternoon and weekend schools that taught children to read biblical and liturgical Hebrew, also offered instruction in Yiddish. A primary motive for doing so was to prepare boys to deliver a speech in the language on the occasion of becoming a bar mitzvah. During the first decades of the twentieth century, this practice nominally enacted speaking Yiddish as a sign of coming into Jewish adulthood.28
For Orthodox as well as secular American Jews, teaching Yiddish to the next generation figured in larger efforts to negotiate a changing relationship with their European past—which came to seem more remote in the wake of World War I and the subsequent curtailment of mass immigration—and in their concerns for the future of Jewish life in the United States. Immigrants committed to Yiddish may have perceived their native fluency in the language, their solidarity with its speech community, and their devotion to its culture to be innate. But as this appeared increasingly not to be the case for the next generation, these native speakers had to consider how their children might acquire a similar familiarity with Yiddish, and all that it represented, through schooling.
Yiddish primers published in the United States in the decades before World War II, used in both Talmud Torahs and secular schools, reveal how the innovative practice of learning the language in a classroom setting was configured as an extension of linguistic and cultural endurance. For example, many of these primers begin by teaching the same first word—mame (“mother”)—in conjunction with an illustration of a mother cradling a child. Though these introductory lessons use this iconic image to invoke intimate, intergenerational linguistic continuity, this connection was, in fact, disrupted by the very books in which these lessons appear and the classrooms in which children learned Yiddish. Even though English had become the primary language of many immigrants’ children, Yiddish was to be regarded, at least symbolically, as their mame-loshn.29
Secular Yiddish schools not only transformed the way that the immigrant Jewish child learned the language; they also became centers of communal activity for students’ families, presenting programs and celebrations that enacted a new Jewish culture realized in Yiddish. The reach of secular Yiddish education extended further to summer camps, where both children and adults inhabited temporary utopian environments in which Yiddish was the official language for cultural performances as well as routines of seasonal recreation.30
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The state of Yiddish after World War II raised unprecedented questions about how the language might be both viable and meaningful for future generations. Within less than a decade, the Holocaust destroyed half of the world’s Yiddish speakers as well as their educational and cultural infrastructure. The worldwide displacement of those Jews still alive at the war’s end further roiled language continuity. Nevertheless, secular Yiddish education for children continued in the early postwar decades, in both existing venues and new institutions established by survivor communities in Europe (for example, in Paris and Łódź). The fate of these schools has varied, sometimes in response to political circumstances. Such was the case in Poland, where Yiddish education was constrained and eventually shuttered by government policies during the communist period, which culminated in the expulsion of most of the country’s Jews in the late 1960s. In immigrant Jewish communities beyond Europe, schools that taught Yiddish were also affected by new social trends, notably a shift toward studying Modern Hebrew at the expense of Yiddish among Jewish communities in the Americas, South Africa, and Australasia. Yet as secular Yiddish pedagogy declined in some locations, it has emerged elsewhere. In 1975, Bundists who were among the Holocaust survivors settling in Melbourne, Australia, established the Sholom Aleichem College, a day school for elementary-level students where Yiddish language and literature continue to be taught as part of the school’s commitment to “ ‘veltlekhe yiddishkayt’—a secular approach to Jewish history, traditions and customs, ethics and values.”31 Plans to create “a dual-language Yiddish-English program in a New York City public school” were proposed in 2019, to start the following year.32
The postwar dedication of Hasidim to maintaining Yiddish as a language of daily life has engendered an expansive pedagogical apparatus for children. Yiddish remains the language of instruction in most Hasidic yeshivas and is a subject taught in Hasidic girls’ schools. Similar to immigrants’ creation of American Yiddish schools in the early twentieth century, most Hasidic girls’ schools opened decades after Hasidim had established new postwar communities, reflecting their awareness of the intergenerational rupture in linguistic continuity wrought by the Holocaust and postwar migrations. Just as secular Yiddish schools integrated ideological instruction with language learning, Hasidic girls’ schools combine lessons in Yiddish with moral edification and preparation for the students’ future as pious wives and mothers.33
The general postwar decline of secular Yiddish education for children coincided with the advent of courses in Yiddish language in higher education, as part of the rise of Jewish studies in universities in North America and western Europe. In this context, learning Yiddish is a choice young adults make for themselves, rather than a decision parents make for their children. For some students, electing to study Yiddish may be part of their Jewish questing; for others, including students who are not Jews, the choice may arise from scholarly pursuits in history, linguistics, literature, religion, or other fields of study or from an artistic interest in Yiddish as actors, musicians, or writers.
This new configuration for studying the language was set forth in 1949 in Uriel Weinreich’s College Yiddish, the first book for university-level study of Yiddish published after World War II. As a work of humanistic scholarship, College Yiddish does not assume an audience of Jews but one of language students. At the same time, the book validates the tenacity of Yiddish in the wake of the Holocaust, by proclaiming that the language “unites Jews from every country.”34 Weinreich’s textbook includes language lessons and supplementary readings that present an interdisciplinary vision of Yiddish studies, embracing history, linguistics, literature, folkloristics, and sociology, among other fields. Inspired by the first generations of modern scholarship on Yiddish, and emulating in particular the agenda of the prewar YIVO Institute, Weinreich’s model anticipated the realization of Yiddish studies in postwar universities by decades. In recent years, intensive Yiddish-language programs have been offered, usually in the summer, by institutions of higher education in Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, and the United States. These programs attract participants from diverse backgrounds and interests and thereby model expansive possibilities for Yiddish as a language to be studied both as an end in itself—often separate from ethnic, religious, or ideological affiliation—and as a point of entry to further endeavors.
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The dynamics of Yiddish education resemble the plot of a Bildungsroman. Following the trajectory of a sentimental education, an anthropomorphized Yiddish speaks “by itself” in its early years. It then becomes newly self-conscious, as its long, youthful innocence comes to an end with the advent of the Haskalah. Thereafter, Yiddish no longer simply speaks on its own but increasingly requires schooling of some kind—even when the language serves as an instrument of pedagogy. As Yiddish matures, it encounters educational opportunities and challenges posed by new neighbors, ideologies, and governments. It is roiled by war and mass immigration and survives a genocidal assault on its very existence, albeit in a much-altered state, prompting the pursuit of newly concerted efforts of study. If, in its current stage of educational development, Yiddish may speak more deliberately than ever before, it does so perhaps with the wisdom of years, with greater self-awareness.