Before the Haskalah, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe operated within a system of diglossia1, in which Hebrew and Aramaic — subsumed under the formula loshn koydesh, the sacred language — served as the H language, the language of “high culture,” of the Bible and its commentaries, of the liturgy, of erudition, as well as of philosophical, poetic and commercial discourse, while Yiddish was used in the so-called L sphere, that of “low culture,” that is, of the vernacular and of everyday functions. This dichotomous presentation must, however, be qualified. As early as the Middle Ages there appeared a literature written in Yiddish, composed for the vast public — male as well as female — ignorant of the sacred language, treating subjects both religious and profane. Like the Western vernaculars in the face of Latin, Yiddish at first appeared only in the margins of the Hebrew text, in the ancillary function of glossary or translation.2 The authors of Yiddish literary works always felt obliged to justify the use of the profane language, castigated by the rabbinic oligarchy that held knowledge. Hayim ben Nathan of Prague, the author of Esrim vearba (1674), a translation of the Pentateuch into Yiddish, nonetheless affirmed that “it is equally valid to study in the sacred language or in Yiddish; for in the study of Halakha one also uses Yiddish.”3 Although deprived of the sacred status reserved for the Hebrew language, the Yiddish language nevertheless managed to impose itself de facto in a growing number of registers, ranging from the chivalric epic to tales, legends on biblical or medieval themes, elegiac poetry on historical themes, and even the theatre.

This more or less clear distribution of the zones of attribution reserved for each of the two languages was called into question by the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), which arose in Germany around the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) about 1770. This geographical fact played an altogether decisive role, inasmuch as German, the hegemonic co-territorial language, was relatively close to the Western Yiddish spoken by the Jewish minority. One of the first aims of the maskilim, the proponents of the Haskalah, was precisely the elimination of Yiddish. Indeed, in relation to German — the language of bourgeois Bildung (cultivation) that sought to impose itself on the one hand, and of the Aufklärung, that is, of emancipatory philosophical discourse (Kant) on the other — Yiddish was perceived as an outdated dialect, even a linguistic corruption. Mendelssohn demanded “either pure German or pure Hebrew… but no mixture of languages.”4

All the German maskilim, then the great figures of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism), shared the opinion that the use of the Yiddish language was responsible for corruption in the most varied domains. The Yiddish language, whose different components were stigmatized as heterogeneous, contravened aesthetic requirements and seemed to incarnate ugliness. According to the Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), it was a “repugnant and hateful jargon, [a] pitiful gibberish”5 and an “example of bad taste”; for the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), a “semi-animal language.”6 According to the maskil and reformer David Friedländer (1750–1834), the Jews speak “an intolerable mixture and dialect.”7 For the historian Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), Eastern Yiddish was a sort of “confined and degenerate” German8 — a “perverted” and impoverished dialect that fills its gaps with “unused or false” German words, “old-fashioned, obsolete or provincial expressions,” or borrowings from foreign languages.9 The underlying aim was to demonstrate that the morphological and syntactic structure of Yiddish — judged either outdated or false — was a replica of similar defects intrinsic to the culture of which it is the expression. The identity conveyed by a language to which such failings are ascribed must simply be eliminated.

In the religious domain, the biblical translations into Yiddish were perceived as intimately bound up with a corruption of the meaning of the text, “an abominable distortion in exegesis.”10 This supposed corruption is also assumed to have disastrous effects on the moral values of its speakers. Mendelssohn described Yiddish as a “language that has contributed not a little to the demoralization of the common man.”11 For this reason, the first imperative was to wrest children from the grip of the Polish masters, representatives of “Oriental barbarism,”12 and to place them in institutions whose language of instruction was German. The governments of the various Germanic countries and of Austria let themselves be easily persuaded to apply these measures. Likewise denounced was the use of Yiddish in commercial letters and account ledgers, taken as a sign of alleged lapses in commercial ethics and in the transparency of accounts.

To aid in the suppression of Yiddish in the study and paraphrase of the Bible, Moses Mendelssohn composed the Biur (1780–1783), his translation of the Bible, published in German printed in Hebrew characters and accompanied by a commentary in Hebrew — the only presentation that made reading possible for the Jews. The effect was radical: within the space of a generation, the German Jews abandoned not only Yiddish but also Hebrew. It was quite improperly that Heine called Mendelssohn the “Jewish Luther.” For if Luther had created the linguistic unity of the German nation, Mendelssohn, on the contrary, shattered the linguistic unity of the Jewish people and opened the way to the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the German Jews. The confessionalization of Judaism in Germany soon rendered superfluous the existence of a specific Jewish language, whatever it might be. In a short time, the Hebrew Haskalah, too, was doomed to disappear.13

Quite other was the situation in the East, where the Haskalah advanced first in Galicia (1820), then in Russia (1840).14 The co-territorial languages, Russian and Polish, were too distant from Yiddish to permit an easy linguistic assimilation of the Jews. As in Germany, the first maskilim (Joseph Perl [1773–1839], Isaac Ber Levinsohn [1788–1860] and Nakhman Krochmal [1785–1840]) turned to the Hebrew language, but managed to reach only the thin fringe of the lettered. Reluctantly, other maskilim — among them Isroel Aksenfeld (1787–1866), Shloyme Ettinger (1800–1856), Abraham Ber Gottlober (1811–1899), Ayzik Meyer Dik (1814–1893), and above all Sholem Abramovitsh (pseud. Mendele Moykher Seforim) (1836–1917) — had recourse to Yiddish, a language then despised and burdened with a strongly negative value. Ayzik Meyer Dik, one of the most prolific authors of the Haskalah, felt obliged to offer excuses, in Hebrew, for his commercial and literary successes in Yiddish: “I have debased my pen by writing numerous stories in the language which, to our great shame, is the dialect spoken by our people in this country.”15 It is from this paradoxical commitment, as the critic Dan Miron shows, that modern Yiddish letters were born. It was in wishing to educate the Jews, and because there was no other means of doing so than to address them in the language they understood, that the maskilim created their work in Yiddish. Between Hebrew and Yiddish, the disparity remained glaring: the first modern Hebrew novel and best-seller of the genre, Ahavat Tsiyon [The Love of Zion, 1853] by Abraham Mapu, sold 1,200 copies. Ayzik Meyer Dik’s didactic little tales in Yiddish reached a print run of 100,000.16

It was thus that there appeared simultaneously, between 1880 and 1900, a veritable Jewish national literature in two languages, in the expression of the critic Bal Makhshoves.17 At the same time, young authors decided to invest the Hebrew language and/or the Yiddish language with their politico-cultural options. But this was also the beginning of a linguistic rivalry and of a fratricidal war of unheard-of violence. For the appearance of a Jewish literature forged (and fed upon) the appearance of a national consciousness that chose as its vector one of the two competing languages. The aim was then linguistic and cultural renewal, that is, the putting in place of a veritable language policy, which successively takes the form of “corpus planning,” then of “status planning.” The first stage comprises the modernization and standardization of the language, the establishment of lexicons, chrestomathies and grammars. The second stage concerns the development of the scientific research that comes to buttress the claims to recognition of the language, the organization of conferences, and accession to the political sphere.

Of course, the defence and illustration of each of these two languages encountered specific problems. At that period, to write a novel in Hebrew — a language that had ceased to be spoken some two millennia earlier — was something of a wager. It fell to the writer to create his own vocabulary and to proceed, from his work table, to the normalization of a language that existed, as a spoken language, only in his imagination. The first possible style, the melitsah, practised for example by Abraham Mapu or by Sholem Abramovitsh in his first novel, Limdu heytev [Learn to Do Well, 1861], proceeds from the technique of cut-and-paste at the computer. Biblical expressions and quotations of varying length are placed end to end, the chief advantage being to confer upon the text thus composed the authority and dignity of the intangible biblical sources. The disadvantage, conversely, is the constitution of a rigid pastiche made of fragments whose incongruity with the modern age verges on the ridiculous.18

Sholem Abramovitsh managed to emerge from this impasse through two significant innovations, which made him the founder of both modern Hebrew and modern Yiddish literatures. After his first novel, written in the frozen style of the melitsah, he abandoned writing in Hebrew and devoted himself entirely to founding and developing writing in Yiddish, under the pseudonym of Mendele Moykher Seforim. Then, two decades later, he returned to Hebrew with his novella Beseter ra’am [In the Secret of the Thunder, 1886], deciding to mingle biblical Hebrew with the much later language of the Mishnah. The altogether artificial enterprise of fusing, within a single text written in the nineteenth century, different strata of the evolution of the language, historically distant by several centuries, even millennia, permitted a significant enrichment of Hebrew vocabulary and grammar. It is therefore a historicist — and thereby iconoclastic — approach that lies at the origin of the reconstitution of a language at once ancient and new, which was to function as a new pole of identification for a fringe of intellectuals, such as for example the Hovevei Tsiyon, the Lovers of Zion.19 At the same time, the constitution of modern Hebrew vocabulary owed much to the spoken language, Yiddish, and was often a faithful calque of it, drawing from it as many vivid expressions as syntactic turns.

For Yiddish literature, the first stage of the constitution of a literary corpus was accomplished as early as the 1860s. The review Kol mevaser (1862–1871), which appeared at first as a supplement to the Hebrew review Hamelits, publishes the works of classics such as Mendele Moykher Seforim or Itskhok Yoel Linetski (1839–1915), and contributes to standardizing the modern written language. The classic Yiddish writers launch literary almanacs, such as the Hoyz-fraynd (1888) of Mordkhe Spektor (1858–1925), or the Yidishe folks-bibliotek of Sholem Aleykhem (1888–89), which proposes to create a veritable Yiddish literary history.

The lexicographer Yehoyshue Mordkhe Lifshits (1829–1878), author of Yiddish-German (1867), Russian-Yiddish (1869) and Yiddish-Russian (1876) dictionaries, defends as early as 1863 in Kol mevaser20 the status of the Yiddish language. He demonstrates that Yiddish is a fusion language, just like English, formed from different components that meld into a coherent and autonomous whole. It is therefore not an assemblage of heterogeneous bits and pieces, more or less deformed, of other languages. It is as false to treat Yiddish as corrupted German as it would be to treat French as corrupted Latin. Finally, says Lifshits, a language that is spoken by an entire people composed of millions of persons cannot be qualified as a “jargon.” This text constitutes the first stage of an entire labour of “status planning” intended to promote the status and recognition of the Yiddish language.21

The scientific research that unfolds from the 1880s onward likewise contributes to emancipating Yiddish from its cumbersome kinship with German.22 The Romanian linguist Lazar Saineanu (1859–1934)23 established in 1889 that it is inadequate to compare Yiddish with contemporary German (Neuhochdeutsch), but that it should rather be compared to Mittelhochdeutsch, that is, to the German of the Middle Ages. Yiddish cannot be seen as a perversion of modern German, since it derives historically from medieval German. Also at the turn of the century, Jakob Gerzon compares the phonology of Yiddish with that of Middle High German, and Alfred Landau (1850–1935)24 establishes that Yiddish derives from the spoken medieval German dialects and not from the standardized written language of the Middle Ages.25 All these works contribute to positing an autonomous status of the language. Finally, in the volume Der Pinkes (Archives, 1913),26 the linguist (and, moreover, theorist of the left-wing Zionist movement Poalei Tsiyon, the Workers of Zion), Ber Borokhov (1881–1917),27 draws up the list of the desiderata of Yiddish philology, opposing philology — “a national science that concerns itself with the national value of a language” — to linguistics, which has only purely descriptive and cognitive aims. He thus formulates the link between philology and politics that underlies his involvement in the two domains. He appends to his article a list of 499 works dealing with the Yiddish language over five centuries, thereby establishing a veritable genealogy of his discipline.

It is indispensable to resituate the revival of the Yiddish and Hebrew languages and literatures within the geopolitical and politico-cultural framework of the period. There is first of all the geopolitical framework of the western provinces of the Russian Empire and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which formed complex ethnic mosaics. For this reason, the Herderian conceptions of the nation — according to which language, literature and culture are a crystallization of the “soul of the people” — found a wide resonance among the Slavic peoples,28 in contrast to the idea of the nation issuing from the French Revolution and from Renan, proper to Western Europe. It is only in such a context of a coexistence of minority or “minor”29 ethnicities that one can conceive the project of raising Yiddish to the rank of national language of the Jewish people, or of the Jewish nation still itself to be constituted. In this conception of the nation, language (and not territory, nor the State) plays a primordial role in the definition of national identity. This Eastern European conception is also totally opposed to the political Zionism of Herzl, which is altogether “Western” in the sense that language is not a decisive factor in it, at least at the outset.

Indeed, the revolution that consists in wishing to make Hebrew a spoken language and to bind this project to the return to the land of Israel is at the outset the work of an isolated individual, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922). From 1904 onward he publishes his great work, a historical dictionary of the Hebrew language, with numerous neologisms intended to remedy the obsolescence and inadequacy of the language to the modern world. Alone in passing to the act, he had settled in Palestine as early as 1881, addressing everyone only in Hebrew, compelling wife and son to speak only this language, and above all forbidding them Yiddish. This education, which made of him the first child raised in modern Hebrew in history, did not prevent the latter from pursuing his studies in Paris and Berlin before becoming a multilingual journalist under the name of Ithamar Ben-Avi (1882–1943). But the movement launched by Ben-Yehuda found an echo in the agricultural colonies of Palestine, and was vigorously defended by the Zionist parties established on the spot.

The renewal of Yiddish operates in parallel with that of other languages of Eastern Europe, such as Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, and so on. There too, the creation of modern literary languages was often the work of a single man, and proceeds in certain cases from the imposition of an L language that comes to supplant an H language judged outdated. Thus Vuk Karadzic (1787–1864), the author of the first Serbian dictionary (1818), chose to use the popular language against Old Church Slavonic, which served as the written language. Modern Ukrainian is the work of a few men of letters, such as Shevchenko and Kulish, who relied on the popular language, in particular the dialect of southwestern Ukraine. By contrast, in Russia, it was the poets Nicolas Karamzin (1766–1826) and Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) who created the modern Russian language, against the French in use among the nobility, by using elements deriving mainly from the language of the upper stratum of society.30

Finally, there is also a social basis to this linguistic renewal. A generation of educated young people, vegetating without social and economic prospects, attempts to overturn the traditional religious and communal oligarchy attached to Hebrew, by supporting the Yiddish language. Attachment to the “language of the people” thus becomes the spearhead of a social revolt.31 The modern Hebrew writers are likewise in rupture with the traditional authorities, who regard their activity as sacrilege. It is also significant that most of the authors and militants of Yiddish as of Hebrew first pass through a phase of assimilation. Some even had to learn the language they were defending — as, in the case of Yiddish, the Bundist Vladimir Medem, the theorist of diaspora nationalism Nathan Birnbaum, or again the founder of the socialist Zionist party Poalei Tsiyon Ber Borokhov. The observation is obviously general for Hebrew, which very few of its defenders were capable of using for ordinary conversation. Numerous are the actors of the national or nationality movements (from members of the Bund to the Zionist parties) who pursued their studies in Western Europe, in Germany or in Switzerland.32 Now it is precisely in exile that these émigrés raise the Jewish national question, at the moment when they find themselves far from their milieu of origin, and thus doubly confronted with the minority condition.33 Moreover, these commitments do not come about without contradictions. The Yiddish writers Sholem Rabinovitsh (Sholem Aleykhem, 1859–1916) and Yitskhok Leybush Perets (1852–1915) respectively spoke Russian and Polish at home. The founder of cultural Zionism Ahad Ha-am (1856–1927), an opponent of Yiddish, used Yiddish in daily life. Their positions do not reflect their reality, but are normative.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Yiddish and Hebrew languages and literatures have managed to establish themselves fairly solidly, and possess their socio-cultural networks. A new question arises: that of accession to the political sphere, to power (empowerment). According to the Yiddishist socialist Khayim Zhitlovski (1865–1943), the Jews will not be able to be recognized as a people by the other nations so long as they do not themselves recognize their own language. It is therefore the political movements that will seize upon the languages to buttress their political and territorial claims.34

In 1905, the Bund, or General Union of Jewish Workers of Russia, Poland and Lithuania (founded in 1897, even before the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which it helped to form and within which it is the exclusive representative of the Jewish proletariat), pronounced itself in favour of Jewish national cultural autonomy on the basis of the Yiddish language. The novelty consists this time in making of Yiddish not a literary language, but the language of the expression and the stake of a political struggle.35

Next, the Congress on the Yiddish language, convened at Czernowitz36 in 1908 by a group of defenders of Yiddish — among them the theorist of Yiddishist diasporism Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), the linguist Matthias Mieses (1885–1945), the Yiddishist socialist Khayim Zhitlovski (1865–1942) and the writer Yitskhok Leybush Perets (1852–1915) — proclaims Yiddish “the national language of the Jewish people,” on a par with Hebrew. The writer Perets declared in his inaugural address:

“We proclaim it to the face of the world: we are a Jewish people, and Yiddish is our language. We want to live and create our culture in this language. It is in our language that we want to live our lives, create our national treasures, and no longer sacrifice them to the false interests of the State, which is but the protector of the dominant and governing peoples and which vampirizes the weak.”37

“Whether we be Yiddishists or Hebraists, we must organize ourselves to preserve this language (Yiddish) which, apart from religion, is the sole bond that unites the Jewry of Eastern Europe… The Jewish people must rid itself of this self-contempt and become aware of the significance and the sacredness of Yiddish,”38 added Matthias Mieses, who, like Perets, did not oppose the Hebrew language, which remained for him a national treasure, but underscored the importance of the internal and external recognition of Yiddish.

Transcending the ancestral distinction that opposed Hebrew, the language of “high culture,” to Yiddish, the language of “low culture,” Yiddish sees itself raised to the rank of H language (in the German debates, from Volkssprache to Kultursprache). The question of status, indeed of the “representation” or the respect due to the language, is evident when one knows that workers who came without dinner jackets were not admitted to the gala.

It is the same when one considers the process of accession to the political sphere of Hebrew. In 1897, the First Zionist Congress was held at Basel. The importance of the representative dimension is evident when one looks at the photographs of the congress, with all the delegates clad in frock coats. Herzl’s charisma as a Zionist leader owed much to his photogenic quality and to his capacity to confer upon the movement a bourgeois and European character.39 At the time, German was the language of the Zionist congresses. Herzl himself thought that German would impose itself quite naturally in Palestine. But he then sided with the partisans of Hebrew, who were alarmed by the progress of the recognition of Yiddish in Eastern Europe. In 1909, in response to the Yiddish Congress of Czernowitz, the Hebraists held their Congress at Berlin. However, for the sake of efficacy, their propaganda brochure was published in 10,000 copies… in Yiddish.

The global geopolitical context, in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, is another parameter in the turbulent renewal of the Jewish languages. Germany attempts to instrumentalize, for the benefit of its cultural imperialism in Eastern Europe, the linguistic proximity between German and Yiddish, as well as the antisemitism of the Tsarist regime, in order to posit the Jews as outposts of Germanization in the East. The German government officially supports the wishes for Jewish cultural and linguistic autonomy, with the aim of weakening the future Polish State and of constituting there a minority anticipated as Germanophile.40 The first generation of German Zionists, very Germanophile, fully supports the aims of the government, in particular during the First World War and the occupation of Poland by German troops.41

The geopolitical rivalries extend as far as Palestine, where the linguistic war first pits Hebrew against German. The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden and the Alliance Israélite Universelle wage a ferocious Kulturkampf (culture-struggle) through interposed school networks, and reinforce at the beginning of the century the place of German and French in their respective establishments. But as early as 1903, a conference bringing together 14 teachers decides to use Hebrew as the language of instruction in the primary schools, in particular in the agricultural colonies. The question of the language of higher education arises in 1913, upon the founding of the Technion, the technical university of Haifa, financed among others by the Hilfsverein, which was bent on propagating German scientific culture in Palestine. “Blood will flow in the streets,” announced Ben Yehuda. At the end of an immediate strike, students and teachers imposed that the courses be given entirely in Hebrew, allowing this language to develop also as a vector of European scientific culture. Politically, this decision marks the victory of the Hebrew language in Palestine.

At the same moment, the question of the status of the Yiddish language in Palestine touches off a second veritable war.42 The Zionist parties of the left, in particular Poalei Tsiyon, are divided, and form the target of virulent attacks from other more radical left-wing parties, such as Hapoel Hatsair, which manages to have their Yiddish review Der Onheyb closed down in 1907. Certain leaders of Poalei Tsiyon, such as for example Zerubavel, Borokhov or Nir-Rafalkes, continue to demand the right to use Yiddish, if only to address the new immigrants ignorant of Hebrew. Jacob Zerubavel (1886–1967), for example, thinks that Hebrew and Yiddish could develop in parallel in Palestine, Hebrew alone being used for external relations. In Europe and in the United States, this same party commits itself wholeheartedly to the development of Yiddish culture, by virtue of the primacy of “Gegenwartsarbeit,” that is, of the defence of the Jews and their culture hic et nunc (here and now). But the opponents brandish the “jargonist danger.” In 1914, the high-school students of Herzliah prevent the Yiddishist socialist Khayim Zhitlovski, come on tour in Palestine, from delivering a lecture in Yiddish. The struggle takes on quasi-military forms. In 1923 the Gdud meginei hasafa, the “Legion of the Defenders of the Language,” is founded — a paramilitary organization composed mainly of high-school students, but supported by academics and Hebraist linguists. The Gdud carries out acts of intimidation against printers, owners of lecture halls or cinemas, to force them to renounce the programming of cultural activities in Yiddish. But they do not hesitate to resort to force when this does not suffice. Thus, in 1928, the Betar43 and the Gdud make a raid on the club of the left-wing Poalei Tsiyon, which was organizing a literary evening comprising the reading of Yiddish poems, attacking the audience with stones and clubs. The incident provokes a great commotion. In 1930, they prevent the screening of the Yiddish film Di yidishe mame (yet quite inoffensive!) in two cinemas in Jerusalem. The film is finally shown at Tel Aviv, where the spectators have to be protected by cordons of English police against their attackers. In 1935, another assault targets the council of Yiddish writers at Tel Aviv during the visit of the Yiddishist woman of letters Rokhl Faygenberg.

A great polemic erupts in 1927, when the New York daily Der Tog proposes to Yehuda Leib Magnes, the president of the Hebrew University, to launch a subscription of $50,000 to found a chair of Yiddish at Jerusalem. Joseph Klausner (1874–1958)44 and Menahem Ussishkin (1863–1941), Zionists figuring among the administrators of the University, are among the most active opponents of the creation of such a chair, whose introduction they compare to that of an “idol in the temple.” It is the period of the fourth aliya, a wave of immigration essentially of Polish origin. Each new arrival of immigrants touches off the fear, among the partisans of Hebrew, of being submerged by a mass of Yiddish-speakers who would impose the vitality of the spoken language. In accepting a chair of Yiddish, which they dreaded would become a centre of Yiddish cultural activism, the Hebraists would have had the feeling of bringing the Trojan horse into the Hebrew University. They therefore oppose with all their might the creation of such a “jargonic chair,” which they consider “an idol in the temple” (tselem ba-heikhal), and which would amount to the “destruction of the University.” The discussions on the advisability of creating a chair of Yiddish at the Hebrew University drag on from 1928 to 1938, without success. It would finally come into being only in 1951, when Yiddish, after the Shoah, would no longer present any danger to the supremacy of the Hebrew language.

The same policy is pursued at every level of cultural life. Investigating the book-acquisition policy at the library of the Histadrut (the organization of workers in Palestine) of Tel Aviv, Ben Adir45 observes that Hebrew books are acquired sometimes in 10 copies, whereas Yiddish works — even excellent ones — are absent, despite a strong demand from the public.46 Everywhere he observes a systematic policy of obstruction against any Yiddish cultural manifestation.

During the 1940s, the violence redoubles. Kiosks and bookshops offering the Yiddish newspaper Nayvelt are set on fire. A new organization, Igud le-hashlatat halashon (Association for the Imposition of the Language), supported by personalities as prominent as Rav Kook (1865–1935),47 chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine, as well as another association still more radical in its means, born in 1943 and aptly named Brit lohamei hakanaut haivrit (Alliance of the Combatants for Hebrew Fanaticism), carry out violent actions against the publications of the Yiddishists (also, moreover, against those of German-language writers fleeing Hitler’s Germany and taking refuge in Palestine during the war, such as for example Arnold Zweig).

When Ruzhka Kortshak comes to testify to the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto at the sixth conference of the Histadrut in February 1945 — in Yiddish, because she did not know Hebrew — David Ben Gurion confined himself to remarking that her speech had been delivered “in a foreign and dissonant language.”48 The infamous phrase would be taken up throughout the world. In restaurants, cafés, public places, signs reading “No Yiddish Allowed” are commonplace. Thus, during the Second World War and the Nazi persecutions, on the land of Israel, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe and Yiddish culture found no right of citizenship.

*

The war of languages is played out around complex ideological arguments and conflicts. On what do the claims to power of the two languages rest? In the name of what do the Hebraists propose to eliminate the Yiddish language, and the Yiddishists to promote it?

The Hebraists explain that Hebrew is the original language of the Jewish people, that of its historical past, that of the Bible, witness to its national past and to its religious message. It is diachronically the only Jewish language that has not been lost over the course of the millennia, and synchronically the one that unites the Jews of the entire world. Finally, it is bound to the land of Israel and to the hope of the return to that land.49 The land, the people and the language constitute the three pillars that must again be brought together.

The Hebraists are necessarily in difficulty when it comes to justifying their support for a language that is used only in writing. In his essay Riv haleshonot [The War of Languages],50 the theorist of cultural Zionism Ahad Ha-am (1856–1927) establishes a distinction between the “national language” and the “spoken language” or the “mother tongue.” He maintains that the national language is not necessarily identical to the spoken language. Many nations (he cites Germany and France) have a national language that is not understood by large segments of the population. In the case of the Jews, to choose the spoken language (Yiddish) would mean reducing the historical past of the Jewish people to the four or five centuries of its presence in Eastern Europe, and thereby reducing the Jews to the status of the small surrounding Slavic peoples, such as the Ruthenians or the Serbs.

At another point in the same essay, and still in order to combat the argument of the “mother tongue,” Ahad Ha-am proposes the following analogy: just as a man considers as his language the one he heard and spoke in his childhood, so a people must return to the language it spoke at the dawn of its historical existence. Thus, the return to Hebrew would be for the Jewish people the return to origin and to authenticity.

But this comparison between the man and the people functions on the artifice of a cleavage between the normative idea of the people (Hebrew-speaking) and the reality of the individuals who compose it (and who are Yiddish-speaking). It places the imagined collectivity before the sum of the individuals who constitute it. Ahad Ha-am must therefore justify the attachment of the Jews to the Hebrew language — all the more difficult to prove in that they have ceased to speak it. Ahad Ha-am furnishes a surprising interpretation of it. According to him, after the destruction of the Temple, the Jews would have deliberately let their culture die: they would have abandoned their language, codified and thus petrified their literature and their religion, the better to be able to transport them. Their whole life in exile would amount to the mourning of this dead past, of the dead language, the dead literature, and a dead religion. But when they returned to their land, the natural bond that united these elements would be restored, and they could then resume their organic growth. Then national language, mother tongue and spoken language would be reunited. It was therefore a matter of restoring a natural state that existed previously, and that had been dislocated by exile.

Ahad Ha-am’s position is that of cultural Zionism, which attributes a fundamental place to Jewish culture. For the political Zionists, things present themselves in different terms.

Political Zionism had as its aim the creation of a new man, of a new Jew. The Jews had to be de-Judaized, normalized, then (re-)Hebraized. Yiddish was perceived as a foreign language; opposition to Yiddish was part of the shelilat hagola, of the rejection of the diaspora51 — an attitude not devoid of self-hatred, but commonly adopted by Zionist theorists, for example Max Nordau (1849–1923) or Jakob Klatzkin (1882–1948).52 For Klatzkin, Judaism in the diaspora is not worthy of surviving; worse still, “it has no right to exist if it claims to be an end in itself.” It can exist only as “a means and a transition toward a new existence. The diaspora (galut) deserves to live in order to attain the redemption of the diaspora… Without the negation of the diaspora, there is no reason to grant it any value whatsoever.”53 The Yiddish language would then be the sonorous physiognomy of the “type of the ghetto Jew, with his hydrocephalic head, his hands gesticulating nervously, and his withered and paralytic body.”54 The neurosis, the uprootedness and the alienation of the Jews would be similarly coupled with the use of the Yiddish language, which is reduced to a pathology of the diaspora.55

By contrast, Hebrew would be the vector of a new collective identity, more authentic because in organic connection with the land. The Hebraists are touched by Orientalism; they reconnect with the Semitic roots of the Hebrew language, dress in the Arab manner, adopt the “Sephardic” pronunciation of Hebrew. At the same time, they aim at the creation of a “new community,” created by the use of Hebrew, and which is no longer the outdated religious community united by the liturgical language, but a modern and secular community.

On the opposite side, the partisans of the Yiddish language could avail themselves of reality and of the present. The figures were unanswerable. At the Russian census of 1897, 97% of Jews indicated Yiddish as their mother tongue. Yiddish was spoken by four-fifths of the Jewish people, that is, 11 million persons. Even in 1939, 92% of Jews were Ashkenazi, and the German-speaking group of 1 million persons could easily have learned Yiddish. By contrast, in 1914, there were still only nearly 80,000 Jews in Palestine, and the census of 1916 indicates that only 40% of them used Hebrew as their first language. In practice, the Zionist project seemed totally utopian. It seemed, on the one hand, impossible to transfer the millions of Jews of Eastern Europe to Palestine, and, on the other, senseless to think that they would suddenly begin to speak a dead language, when they had at their disposal a living language, spoken and written.

The Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe were by far the largest Jewish group presenting all the signs of a distinct nationality, namely “a national specificity expressed by dress and language, literature and art, customs and traditions, and in a religious, social and legal life that proves that they possess a unique culture.”56 It was henceforth a matter of making of Yiddish, the language of the people (folks-shprakh), a national language (natsyonal-shprakh), of relying on this living source rather than returning to Hebrew, the language of the past. “A national language is not a storeroom where one keeps the Sabbath candlesticks, be they the most precious, the most beautiful objects. A national language is a living source,” wrote the linguist Max Weinreich.57

The Yiddishists likewise tried not to skirt history. Yiddish was the only Jewish language that brought together at once a historical permanence (more than a thousand years of existence) and the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people of the time. It was also the bearer of the Hebrew tradition. By its form, it had preserved the essential Hebraisms, and this in a spoken and living form. By its essence, it had made possible the perpetuation of Jewish life and culture. “It is not the words that constitute a language, but the spirit that animates it. […] The spirit that animates Yiddish is truly Hebraic. Its rich folklore, its emotions and its humour, its Hebrew grammatical forms, etc. attest to this,”58 wrote Matisyohu (Matthias) Mieses, for whom “Yiddish is the footbridge that connects us to Hebrew.”59 For Nathan Birnbaum, the proponent of diaspora nationalism, and later of the return to religious orthodoxy, Yiddish expressed “the absolute idea of Judaism,” because it had been the vector of yiddishkeyt, of the traditional Jewish way of life. It should therefore be fully recognized in this position, and “even Hebrew will take no offence at it but will continue to fulfil its eternal role as perpetual witness to the permanence of our people.”60 Yiddish was therefore the vector of a living and moving Jewish identity that petrified and outdated Hebrew could no longer represent.

For the Yiddishists, an assimilated French or German Jew had scarcely anything Jewish left about him. “Whoever mocks Yiddish mocks the Jewish people. Whoever does not know a word of Yiddish is a half-goy,”61 wrote the Yiddishist Khayim Zhitlovski. A Yiddish-speaking Jew of Warsaw, whether atheist or religious, of the left or of the right, was steeped in Jewish culture, for he spoke and read in Yiddish. It is precisely on the basis of Yiddish that a modern and secular Jewish culture would flourish. Yiddish had been and would continue to be a rampart against assimilation. From this observation a veritable “linguistic nationalism” took shape, in which language takes the place of the absent territory. As Zhitlovski said, the aim of the Congress on the Yiddish language of Czernowitz had been to create a “spiritual and national territory,” an international “Yiddish-land” that would make it possible to safeguard the existence of the Jewish people.62

Moreover, Yiddish literature had been considerably enriched since the beginning of the century, with the flowering of modernist and avant-garde literary currents in the 1910s and 1920s, which seemed to make the small number of partisans of Hebrew lose hope. In fact, the Yiddishists had at their disposal an imposing network of schools in Poland and above all in Russia, where, after the Revolution, Yiddish was recognized by the State as the language of the Jewish minority, against Hebrew, judged “clerical and reactionary.”

These hypotheses had major political consequences. It was therefore necessary to concentrate all political activity on the vital centre of Jewry, the one where the living Jewish language was spoken — that is, Russia, Poland, Romania, and so on — to devote oneself to Gegenwartsarbeit, the “work in the present” (and not to the hypothetical construction of a linguistic future in Hebrew or a territorial one in Palestine). This observation was at the basis of the diaspora nationalism (goles-natsyonalizm) of a Nathan Birnbaum, as of the claims for national cultural autonomy that the Bund shared with other Jewish nationality parties.

For all that the Yiddishist and Hebraist movements waged a pitiless war on one another, they nonetheless display striking similarities. Movements as different as the diaspora nationalism of Birnbaum, the movements demanding national cultural autonomy (the Bund, the Yidishe folkspartay of Dubnovian inspiration, politically close to the Russian Kadets, the [social-democratic] left-wing Poalei Tsiyon, the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party SERP “Sejmist”), the linguistic nationalism of Zhitlovski, and finally the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am — though a Hebraist — have close foundations, despite their divergences.

They all partake of the shift of national identity from religion toward language and culture that followed the phenomenon of secularization. It is precisely at the moment when Jewish identity found itself threatened (by other languages, by assimilation, by internal divisions and the disarray of the younger generations) that nationalism and the linguistic question appear, as a secularized form of religion. Khayim Zhitlovski, for example, preaches for an individual poetic and symbolic reinvestment of the religious forms of yore, which would make it possible to preserve those that have at once a national and a universally human value.63 Yiddishism and Hebraism often have very close problematics, but different solutions. The central question remains in each case that of Jewish identity. Is it a matter of the Jews as they are or of the Jews as they ought to be? Is it a matter of the Jews where they are (in the diaspora, that is, mostly in Eastern Europe), or of where one thinks they “ought” to be, that is, in Palestine? From these fundamental questions follows logically the choice of language: Yiddish or Hebrew. Each then has to (re)invent for itself a “lineage of belief,”64 a prestigious genealogy, by annexing religious, national, populist, etc. terminology.

The language, in its turn, does not emerge unscathed from these confrontations. In Palestine, the anti-Yiddishists hailed the Yiddish-speakers in the street with the injunction “Ivri, daber ivrit” [Hebrew, speak Hebrew!]. The word ivri “Hebrew” replaces the old word yehudi “Jew,” reserved to designate the Jews of the diaspora, condemned to disappear according to Zionist ideology. One recognizes here a procedure common to all totalitarian ideologies, which aim to change reality by changing the language, the manner in which it is enunciated. As Pierre Bourdieu very rightly says, “to say it rightly, in formally conforming fashion, thereby claims… to state the law, that is, the ought-to-be.” The invention of the word “ivri” can be referred to the “generative” and even “originary” capacity of language, “which is conferred upon it by its power to bring into existence by producing the collectively recognized — and thus realized — representation of existence.” The imposition of the (re)invented language, of the new words that come to be superimposed on existing usage, is indeed a manifestation of the “dream of absolute power” of transforming reality.65

*

Today, history has decided. The Shoah brought about the annihilation of the Jewish population and culture in Eastern Europe. A large majority of the some six million victims were Yiddish-speaking. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 on the basis of Zionist ideology consolidated the Hebrew language, while Yiddish still has no status in the country. It was only in 1976 that the teaching of Yiddish was authorized in the high schools (this subject being today selectable as a second-language option in the baccalaureate examinations), and later still in the primary schools. This teaching is today given in some forty schools, gathering about 2,300 pupils, not counting the network of religious schools (heder and yeshiva) where Yiddish is used as the language of instruction, but not taught for its own sake. In 1996, the Israeli parliament voted a declaration recognizing Yiddish and Ladino as Jewish languages — a heritage for which the State of Israel is responsible — as well as the creation of two commissions reporting to the Ministry of Education and provided with a budget, one for Yiddish, the other for Ladino. To this day, neither has come into being.66 Only the Hasidic circles maintain the use of Yiddish as a daily language. Yiddish has become, for most Jews in Israel as in the diaspora, the language of the “dead Jews.” In the other Western countries, assimilation has done its work. The USSR, after having supported Yiddish culture in the 1920s — but at the price of a policy of exclusion of the Hebrew language — sank into waves of purges and persecution (1937–38, 1948–52) directed against the Yiddish writers. Most of the newspapers and reviews were closed (only Der Birobidzhaner shtern and Sovetish heymland survived, entirely victims of the bringing-into-line). Since the lifting of the Iron Curtain, one witnesses a timid renewal, all the more curtailed by emigration toward Israel since the 1970s. In Western Europe, Yiddish has suffered the same indifference. The declarations concerning the regional languages that had followed the election of President François Mitterrand in France were not concretized for Yiddish. The European Union nonetheless dedicated to it a declaration of principle, itself too without great effect.

The fate of the two principal Jewish languages of the beginning of the century is today very different. Israeli (modern) Hebrew is the language of the State of Israel; its survival, dependent on that of the young State, is ensured by its educational and social structures (education, army, media). Yiddish no longer benefits from the support of any state structure. Apart from in certain religious circles, few are those who identify their Jewish identity with this language, which is nonetheless the object of a certain revival in culturalist intellectual circles. In any case, language is no longer today, by far, the criterion of Jewishness, which now crystallizes around three great poles: religious commitment, attachment to Israel, and finally Jewish history and culture, in particular the memory of the Shoah.67

Notes

  1. On diglossia and the distinction between H language and L language, see Charles A. Ferguson, in Word, 1959, no. 15, pp. 325–340; Joshua A. Fishman, “Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism,” Journal of Social Issues, 1967, 23, no. 2, pp. 29–38.↩︎

  2. A significant fact: the first sentence of which we have a trace in Yiddish is written in the hollow of a calligraphy adorning a prayer ritual entirely in Hebrew. Cf. Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish: Prakim letoldoteha, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University, 1978. According to the research of Erika Timm, the Yiddish glosses in the margins of Rashi’s Hebrew texts would be in his own hand.↩︎

  3. Cited by Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: “Old Yiddish Literature from its Origins to the Haskalah Period,” New York, Ktav, 1975, p. 222.↩︎

  4. Mendelssohns Schriften, Leipzig, 1844, vol. 5, pp. 505–506.↩︎

  5. Abraham Geiger, “Allgemeine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Ludwig Geiger (ed.), Nachgelassene Schriften, Berlin, 1875, pp. 221–222, cited by Jean Baumgarten, “La définition nationale de la langue et de la littérature yiddish chez les savants de la Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Philologiques III, ed. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Paris, MSH, 1994, pp. 405–429.↩︎

  6. Cited by Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Century: A Study of Jewish Cultural History, Cranbury NJ, Associated University Presses, 1976, pp. 38 and 112.↩︎

  7. David Friedländer, Ueber die Verbesserung der Israeliten im Königreich Polen: Ein von der Regierung im Jahre 1816 abgefordertes Gutachten, Berlin, Nicolai, 1819, p. 63.↩︎

  8. Gesammelte Schriften von Dr Zunz, vol. 2, Berlin, Louis Gerschel, 1875, p. 110.↩︎

  9. Dr. Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden historisch entwickelt, 2nd enlarged edition, Frankfurt/Main, J. Kauffmann, 1892, p. 453 (and pp. 452–457 passim).↩︎

  10. Ibid., p. 462.↩︎

  11. Mendelssohns Schriften, Leipzig, 1844, vol. 5, pp. 505–506.↩︎

  12. Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, p. 110.↩︎

  13. The review Ha-measef, launched in 1780 by the association of the Friends of the Hebrew Language, had to cease definitively its publication, which had become episodic, in 1811. It never gathered more than 300 subscribers. The following reviews, Sulamith and Jeshurun, already appeared in German, and after 1830 there was no more literary creation in Hebrew in Germany.↩︎

  14. See Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985 (translated from the Yiddish original Der Kamf tsvishn haskole un khsides in Galitsye, New York, YIVO, 1942); Maks Erik, Etyudn tsu der geshikhte fun der haskole 1789–1881, Minsk, Melukhe Farlag fun Vaysrusland/Natssekter, 1934; Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. XI: “The Haskalah Movement in Russia,” Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College / New York, Ktav, 1978 (translated from the Yiddish original: Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn, vol. 12: “Di haskole-bavegung in Rusland,” Wilno, Tomor, 1929).↩︎

  15. See Dik’s introduction to Makhaze mul makhaze, Warsaw, 1861, n.p., cited by Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, New York, Schocken, 1973, p. 13.↩︎

  16. See Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised, op. cit.↩︎

  17. Bal Makhshoves, “Tsvey shprakhn, eyn-eyntsike literatur” (1908), reproduced in Geklibene verk, New York, Tsiko, 1953, pp. 112–123. The critic there reveals in an almost comical manner how reviews bring together writers of altogether antithetical political options, or how writers officially partisan of one of the languages translate their articles into the second, in order to receive twice over the meagre honoraria paid by the reviews.↩︎

  18. See Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1988, p. 23 ff.↩︎

  19. The Hibbat Tsiyon [Love of Zion] movement forms the link between the precursors of Zionism and the beginning of political Zionism. It is composed, in the years 1880–90, of non-political groups favourable to emigration to Palestine.↩︎

  20. Yehoyshue Mordkhe Lifshits, “Di fir klasn,” Kol mevaser, 1863, pp. 323–328, 364–366, 345–380, 392–393.↩︎

  21. On this subject, see Joshua A. Fishman, Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, The Hague, Mouton, 1981.↩︎

  22. See Dovid Katz, “On Yiddish, In Yiddish and For Yiddish: 500 Years of Yiddish Scholarship,” in Mark H. Gelber (ed.), Identity and Ethos: Festschrift for Sol Liptzin, New York, Peter Lang, 1986.↩︎

  23. Lazar Saineanu, Studiu dialectologic asupra graiului evreo-german, Bucharest, 1889. Saineanu, a Romanian philologist and folklorist, author of the great dictionary of the Romanian language in 4 volumes (1895), which went through 84 editions, taught Romanian linguistics at the University of Bucharest without remuneration, Romanian citizenship having been refused him even after his conversion. In 1901, he emigrated to Paris, where he would teach at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne.↩︎

  24. Alfred Landau, born at Brody in Galicia, emigrated to Vienna at the age of 15. A jurist, he then withdrew to devote himself to his research on Yiddish linguistics and folklore.↩︎

  25. Jakob Gerzon, Die jüdisch-deutsche Sprache. Eine grammatisch-lexikalische Untersuchung ihres deutschen Grundbestandes, Frankfurt/Main, 1902; Alfred Landau, “Das Deminutivum der galizisch-jüdischen Mundart,” Deutsche Mundarten, I, 1895, pp. 46–58.↩︎

  26. Ber Borokhov, “Di oyfgabn fun der yidisher filologye,” Der Pinkes, ed. Shmuel Niger, Vilna, Kletskin, 1912, pp. 2–21.↩︎

  27. Ber Borokhov developed a synthesis between Jewish nationalism and Marxist doctrine that would be at the basis of the Zionist workers’ party Poalei Tsiyon.↩︎

  28. See Johann Gottfried Herder: Zur Herder-Rezeption in Ost- und Südosteuropa, ed. G. Ziegengeist, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1978.↩︎

  29. I understand this word in the sense that Kafka gave, in his diaries, to his text on minor literatures dated December 25, 1911; cf. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923, Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1986, pp. 151–154. Kafka moreover notes the strong link between literature and politics among the minority nations, where “literature is the affair of the people.”↩︎

  30. On the renewal of the Slavic languages, see Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz (eds.), The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development, New York, Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1980. The phenomenon of the “first congress” devoted to the national language is significant; thus, the first congress devoted to Belorussian takes place in 1926, to Ukrainian in 1927, well after the Congress on the Yiddish language of Czernowitz in 1908. Cf. Joshua A. Fishman, The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.↩︎

  31. On the role of intellectuals in national movements, see John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985, in particular the chapter “The Social Bases of Nationalist Politics,” pp. 329–333, which affirms: “The typical nationalist intellectual can be seen as an unsuccessful professional,” p. 330.↩︎

  32. See Claudie Weill, Étudiants russes en Allemagne 1900–1914, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996.↩︎

  33. See Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862–1917, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, in particular for the Bund pp. 182 ff. and for the Zeitgeist group in Berlin pp. 271 ff.↩︎

  34. On the stakes of power, in particular on the insufficiency of Ferguson’s concept of diglossia for a dynamic vision of linguistic conflicts, see Jean-Louis Calvet, La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques, Paris, Payot, 1988.↩︎

  35. Yiddish would officially replace Russian in the political meetings of the Bund from 1910.↩︎

  36. On the congress, see Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Century: A Study of Jewish Cultural History, Cranbury NJ, Associated University Presses, 1976; Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents: barikhtn, dokumentn un ophandlungen fun der Tshernovitser konferents 1908, Wilno, YIVO / Filologishe sektsye, 1931.↩︎

  37. Cited by Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism, p. 193.↩︎

  38. Di ershte yidishe shprakh konferents, p. 182.↩︎

  39. See Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, in particular the chapter “Art and Zionist Popular Culture,” Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.↩︎

  40. See Steven E. Aschheim, “Eastern Jews, German Jews and Germany’s Ostpolitik in the First World War,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, XXVIII (1983), pp. 351–365.↩︎

  41. Cf. in particular the creation by Max Bodenheimer of the Komitee für den Osten (KfdO) in 1914. The ideology of the founders is expressed in the review Neue jüdische Monatschriften (1916–1920), under the direction of Hermann Cohen, Alexander Eliasberg, Adolf Friedemann, Eugen Fuchs and Franz Oppenheimer, and in the special issue devoted to the “Ostjuden” of the review Süddeutsche Monatshefte in February 1916.↩︎

  42. See Arye Leyb Pilovski, Tsvishn yo un neyn: yidish un yidish-literatur in Erets-Isroel 1907–1948, Tel Aviv, World Council for Yiddish and Jewish Culture, 1986, from which most of the following facts are borrowed.↩︎

  43. Betar: a Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 at Riga, influential in the 1930s, marked by an ideology influenced by the revisionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky.↩︎

  44. Joseph Klausner, literary critic, obtained the chair of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University while sitting on the Academy of the Hebrew Language.↩︎

  45. Avrom Rozin, known as Ben Adir (1878–1942), Yiddishist socialist, member of the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (“Sejmist”) from 1906, then of the Unified Jewish Socialist Party in 1917, left the USSR in 1921 to settle in Berlin, then New York.↩︎

  46. Ben Adir mentions 65,000 volumes available at the central library of the Histadrut, of which 45,000 in Hebrew and 4,000 in Yiddish, as a consequence of the policy of systematic exclusion targeting this language. See Ben-Adir, “Tsu der lage fun yidishn bukh in Erets-Isroel,” Bikher-velt, June 1928, pp. 20–24. Ben Adir chose the library of the powerful workers’ organization Histadrut because it is supposed to represent the bibliographic tastes of the working class, within which the interest in Yiddish is significant.↩︎

  47. Abraham Isaac Kook, first chief rabbi of Palestine, was the architect of the reconciliation between Zionism and religious orthodoxy through his interpretation of the Zionist movement, even secular, as a form of redemption of the Jewish people.↩︎

  48. Cited by Pilovski, p. 243.↩︎

  49. See Chaim Rabin, “The National Idea and the Revival of Hebrew,” Studies in Zionism, 7 (Spring 1983), pp. 31–48.↩︎

  50. Ahad Ha-am, “Riv haleshonot,” Hashiloah, vol. 22, no. 2, 1910; see also Zalmen Zilbertsvayg, Akhad Haam un zayn batsiung tsu yidish, Los Angeles, Farlag Elisheva, 1956.↩︎

  51. See Eliezer Schweid, “The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.), Essential Papers on Zionism, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 133–160.↩︎

  52. On the notion of “rejection of the diaspora,” see Yaakov Klatzkin, Tehumim, Berlin, 1925, pp. 76–82, where he affirms that “the diaspora is not worthy of surviving” because it “falsifies our national character” and “corrupts our human character and our human dignity.”↩︎

  53. Yaakov Klatzkin, Tehumim, Berlin, 1925, pp. 81–82.↩︎

  54. Quotation from a young Zionist of the period, Dr. J. Eljaschoff, “Ueber Jargon (‘Juedisch’) und Jargonliteratur,” Jüdischer Almanach 5663, ed. Berthold Feiwel and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Berlin, Jüdischer Verlag, 1902, p. 58. Israel (Isidor) Eliashev, who would later become, under the pseudonym Bal Makhshoves, the founder of Yiddish literary criticism, was then still a convinced anti-Yiddishist Zionist.↩︎

  55. See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.↩︎

  56. Nathan Birnbaum (Address to the First Zionist Congress), Ausgewählte Schriften zur jüdischen Frage, Czernowitz, 1910, vol. I, p. 40.↩︎

  57. Maks Vaynraykh, “Der Bund un di yidishe shprakh,” 25 yor (1897–1922). Zamlbukh, Warsaw, Di velt, 1922, p. 56.↩︎

  58. See the two articles by Matisyohu Mizes, “Bizehut hasafa hayehudit” [The Identity of the Yiddish Language] and “A Few More Words on the Yiddish Language,” Ha-olam, nos. 22 and 23 (June 5 and 12, 1907) (one will note in passing that these two pro-Yiddish articles were written in Hebrew), cited here after Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism, p. 152.↩︎

  59. Matisyohu Mizes, “Lisheelat halashon hayehudit” [On the Question of the Yiddish Language], He-atid, 1910, p. 209. Mieses’s article, in Hebrew, was written in response to Ahad Ha-am’s “Riv haleshonot.”↩︎

  60. Nathan Birnbaum, “Di absolute ideye fun yidntum un di yidishe shprakh,” Di yidishe velt (St. Petersburg), no. 1, March 1912, pp. 48–49.↩︎

  61. Khayim Zhitlovski, “Dos yidishe folk un di yidishe shprakh” (1904), Geklibene verk, ed. Yudl Mark, New York, Tsiko (CYCO), 1955, p. 124.↩︎

  62. Khayim Zhitlovski, Mayne ani maymins, New York, YKUF, 1953, p. 403.↩︎

  63. Khayim Zhitlovski, “Di natsyonal-poetishe vidergeburt fun der yidisher religye” (1908), reproduced in Geklibene verk, pp. 219–255.↩︎

  64. See Danielle Hervieu-Léger, La religion pour mémoire, Paris, Cerf, 1993.↩︎

  65. Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris, Fayard, 1982, pp. 20 and 21.↩︎

  66. Information furnished via the internet by Leybl Botwinik, vice-president of the World Council for Yiddish Culture, October 30, 1997.↩︎

  67. See Martine Cohen, “Les Juifs de France: Affirmations identitaires et évolution du modèle d’intégration,” Le débat, no. 75, May–August 1993, pp. 101–115.↩︎

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