In a collection of midrashim dating from the Middle Ages, one finds the following text:
“The children of Israel were delivered from Egypt by virtue of four merits: they had not changed their names, they had not changed their language, they had not revealed their secrets, and they had not abandoned circumcision.”
(Shohar Tov 114, Yalkut Shimoni, cited by H. N. Bialik, Sefer Haagada).
An explanation that has lost none of its relevance.
For if it describes what long characterized Jewish behaviour, it is also interesting in the way it designates and specifies the very heart of Jewish identity. Through what pertains to the body (the covenant by circumcision, in Hebrew Brit Mila); through what pertains to personality and to the inscription of the individual within the generational system (the name); and finally through what concerns language — instrument of communication, of symbolization, and of the individual’s inscription within his group and, more broadly, within the community of humankind, carrying a dimension of exchange, of culture, and of collective identity.
In the modern, democratic and open society in which we live, it is precisely these three aspects of Jewish identity that are called into question, in the face of all that prompts us to wonder about the transmission and the permanence of this identity.
We devote the dossier of this issue of Plurielles to “Jewish languages in the diaspora.” Modern Jewish identity is in fact fragmented into diverse components and modalities — a multiplicity that reflects, in its own way, the multiplicity of Jewish languages, which were one of its principal supports.
These Jewish languages of the diaspora are in the process of disappearing. The causes are many: the gradual integration of Jews into democratic societies such as those of the United States or Western Europe; the destruction of a large part of European Jewry during the Shoah; then the cultural oppression endured in the countries of the East under the communist regimes; the emigration of the Jewish communities of North Africa, where they had been settled for centuries.
Despite a real investment by the younger generation — to which the interview with Itzhok Niborski and the article by Haïm Vidal-Sephiha bear witness — despite the interest, notably academic, that they arouse, and the institutional recognition these languages have acquired (in particular at the Council of Europe, for Yiddish and Ladino as non-territorial minority languages of Europe), they lack the collective soil of daily experience, which alone can keep a language alive and engender creation.
But these languages, with the richness of their heritage, with their memory and the trace it has left, still constitute today an important component of our historical consciousness and therefore of our Jewishness. They are also the testimony of our presence among the peoples and cultures in which we lived, whether in Europe or in the Mediterranean basin, bearing the imprint of a fertile osmosis between our history, our culture, our identity and their linguistic and spatio-cultural environments.
We hope to devote a dossier in a forthcoming issue to contemporary Hebrew and to Israeli literature, and also to Israeli society.
It will indeed be noticed that the Hebrew language does not figure in this dossier, except in a historical capacity — a language which today, after its renaissance and the vicissitudes of history, is without any doubt a principal support of Jewish identity: language of the Jewish tradition, language of the State of Israel, and modern language of a large part of the Jewish people.
Thus the question of language, or of languages, as the midrash cited above reminds us, raises the problem of our survival as a cultural minority. Outside of religious practice, and in a context where we find ourselves culturally, socially, economically and politically integrated, can we preserve our Jewish identity without a language of our own as a minority group? Over several generations, will the Jewish cultural production now flourishing in French — the majority language and mother tongue of a large part of French Jewish writers — be able to sustain itself, in the absence of any practice of, or at the very least proximity to, a Jewish language?
And what will become of our collective memory, a large part of which is deposited in these languages?