Jewish languages of the diaspora

Yiddish is not the only language spoken in Europe to have been born outside its limits, but it is assuredly the only one to have taken its source in the Bible, borrowing in order to constitute itself the characters of the Hebrew/Aramaic alphabet, to which it added the vowels that Hebrew associates with consonants through diacritical signs. Hebrew/Aramaic, direct complement and component of Yiddish, supplies it with as much as 15% of its lexicon, in spoken language as in conceptual or learned language, taking part in an intimate fusion, visible in the writing.

And yet it is Europe that is the cradle of Yiddish, its land of welcome, the crucible of its history, but at the same time its land of mourning, the digging of its grave. Its birth is a consequence of religious precepts: women being ignorant of the sacred texts — only men had access to their study — an instrument had to be fashioned for them for prayer, and that instrument was Yiddish, from the twelfth century onward, in the Rhenish region where important and active Jewish communities had taken root. They spoke then a German dialect, Mittel Hoch Deutsch, Middle High German, which became a vernacular language, then, recast in the mold of the Hebrew alphabet, a written language — where the history of a literature, and first of all of a poetry, begins.

Had poetry not existed, it is probable that the Jews would have invented it, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, precisely on account of their diaspora — whether in the Iberian peninsula, or along the shores of the Mediterranean, from Salonika to Venice and the Maghreb, or in Central and Eastern Europe. For wandering is the leaven of dreams. It incites a nostalgia for a lost land, untouchable and sacred, that only the arrangement of words, the marvel of words in mutation, can recover. The Jerusalem of language is no less chimerical than the heavenly Jerusalem, but poetry favors its approach. The Jews, scattered for centuries across Europe, from France to Germany and Russia, following the flow of their migrations, forged of poetry an armor, a material refractory to all the undertakings of marginalization or elimination they had to confront. The heritage of the Tanakh, of the Prophets, of the Psalms, from time immemorial, bathed them, like a river in which one believes one can immerse oneself anew in order to find youth again and to recover one’s voice. But we have known since Heraclitus that one never bathes twice in the same river. Without forgetting that of the Torah, they had to reconquer their source as they invented a language for themselves.

This language, Yiddish, a people adopted and augmented over generations. A language torn from its rags, from its scornful designation as “jargon,” not to disguise itself but to honor the feast and the labor. A language to understand one another and to create, to say simply happiness and to exorcise at every instant the menacing or hidden misfortune.

The servant tongue was promoted to mistress tongue, endowed with the power to say everything and to translate everything across the most complete of registers — suffering and joy, irony and meditation, conflicts and compassion, information of every kind and ideological debates. It is the living flame of the shtetl, village or small town with a Jewish majority, possessing freedom of worship and a certain juridical autonomy under rabbinic authority. The shtetlekh were scattered, numerous, throughout the provinces of Poland, Galicia and Volhynia, in old Lithuania (which encompassed a part of Belarus), in Romania and its enclaves of Bukovina and Bessarabia. They took root in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the empire of the tsars, especially in that part of Ukraine and Russia assigned to the Jews as the “Pale of Settlement.” It is the shtetl that Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jew of Poland become American, would depict in his novels, and whose memory Marc Chagall, a Jew of Vitebsk become Parisian, would transform into painted mythology and illuminations, both of them infusing reality with an appreciable dose of the marvelous. It is in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that Yiddish literature, most especially poetry, would deploy its whole register of rhythmic structures, its prosody and its original semantic feats.

But today:

The majority language of the Ashkenazim, Yiddish has become, among the Jews of Europe, a minority language (such is also its situation in the United States, where it was once the cultural bond of several million immigrants), a shagreen-skin language reduced to keeping vigil over its own survival, thinned by the disappearance of most of its writers and speakers in the Shoah, a language henceforth held suspect, prey to a fatal erosion, for all that it represented of subjection, of resignation, of nonviolence, of valor without employment, of deviance from the norm — a language of residence in a zone of escheat, of partial resistance and total dissolution, so little prized, so often scorned, cast into the outer darkness of an inexpiable past by the builders of a Jewish State, of a Jewish dignity at last restored, of a Jewish self-defense transformed into a capacity for offensive and riposte. Yiddish had at stake the maintenance of the force of souls and not the assurance of conquests by the force of arms.

The language would keep only the force of tears, language of no one, according to the terrible and magnificent formula of Rachel Ertel,¹ because it had become the language of shadows, the language of specters without face and without mouth, the language of the tortured without explanation, of supplications without answer, the language of threnodies, of funeral chants, of the kaddish proffered for father and son, of the lamentations told out before the wall higher than Babel called Death, before that wall which gathers all the murmurs; a phantom language because it belongs to the survivors alone, a language to which the offering of a horse, of a whole herd of horses, could not have restored its kingdom; language of those who bent and who prayed, even at the threshold of the gas chambers, language that was incinerated with so many bodies in the crematoria and of which there was to remain but a handful of ash; language of the hated memory of the ghettos, of the Pales of Settlement, of the reserved quarters, of the reserved trades, of the reservations on everything, of the victims given no quarter, of the merciless misfortunes, of the miseries without statistics, of the commerce of misery, language whose very words are shmates, scraps of rag to be marked down on the stalls of the fairs; language of the shops, of the lease-keys, of the workshops, of the sweat-shops that the century of industry and technology has consigned to the rank of old moons; language rendered obsolete before its time, demonetized by the modernization of labor, language of the machines for stirring memories, of the sewing machines henceforth doomed to chance encounters with an umbrella on a dissecting table; language of my father’s knitting machine, knitting regret, knitting worry and bitterness, coffee-mill of nostalgia that will always have grain to grind and wounds to stitch up; language that does not bear comparison with other languages, above all Hebrew, its consanguine sister, its fortunate rival, patched, readjusted, made new, brought to study, dusted off but not possessed by its mother-Bible, in order to speak in the virile mode the language of the tanks, of the mirages, of the laboratories and the universities; the Yiddish language left in quarantine for a long while in Israel, as I observed during a stay in Jerusalem, made to stand in the corner like a bad schoolgirl, a girl of doubtful life and dubious death, with impossible parents, not presentable, often endowed with unpronounceable names, of a local color slowly washed out before fading away — and, besides, could her forebears even have recognized her in her cast-off rags?

Yiddish then inspired mistrust, sometimes disgust for all that it dragged along of blood, of tears, of spittle endured or loathed — language like a blister in the memory, a pair of slaps that would remain imprinted on the face; doubtless one had to, in order to recover pride and then vainglory, then the arrogance of being Israeli, force the little sister of the poor to a detoxification cure, to a passage through the delousing stove of the lice-ridden, the snotty-nosed, while one re-educated at top speed the old Talmud/Torah Hebrew so that it might regain the luster of youth; thus Hebrew took its revenge as the language of the erudite over the language of the eradicated. Hebrew, absolute proof of the rebirth of a nation, over the landless and nationless language of the reprobates, Yiddish reduced to the portion of the incongruous, to the state of bizarrerie and anachronism, ranged among the bones of commemorative steles or of morgues, with the label “lost dialect” tied to its toe, or a vestige of a culture abandoned in the street, a language one no longer dared to call a language and whose destiny in Israel even the novelist Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, summed up by sardonically playing devil’s advocate, attributing to the Zionists the following reasoning: “They chose / as the official language of the Jewish State the language of a distant biblical past rather than the vulgar European dialect issued from the mouth of their powerless ancestors…” Yes, that “dialect” of the powerless who knew neither how to conjure away nor to halt the Hitlerite scourge, even by rising up in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilnius, in the Treblinka camp, by fighting on so many fronts, in the Red Army as in the American army; that vulgar dialect which gave to literature — in the United States, it is true — but a single Nobel Prize, that of Bashevis Singer, since one could not credit it with a Saul Bellow, even though the latter put into the Anglo-Saxon mead a few drops of Yiddish honey; that dialect, then, of the cast-offs, that language of anyone and of no one, that language which knew not how to oppose a true dike to the black tide of antisemitism and Nazism; that language, one must believe, of piety and of pity, which ended by inspiring pity, or condescension; that language in the latent state, but deprived of any State, that language literally “in want,” in want of a people, and which could not grow accustomed to this absolute weaning from its living substance; that language with no fixed abode save the cemeteries, the memorials, the tragic mountain of testimonies, the images that resurge from nightmares or from the photograms of a film such as “Shoah”; that language of the back courtyards of memory, of the bottoms of drawers and the depths of mirrors that have lost their reflections, from which the faces have vanished; that language which will not be studied like Latin or ancient Greek, for want of teachers in sufficient number; that language which will nonetheless not be converted into hieroglyphs, thanks to the retinal persistence of its alphabet in the eye of the readers of Hebrew, but which will perhaps slowly veil itself, darken, enter into its own mist, into its own sonorous and visual blurring, become as undecipherable as the cuneiform inscriptions on the clay bricks of Babylon, remain not only branded with the iron of suffering, but bear the seal of guilt, the label of humiliation; that language spiritual and secular, prosaic and lyric, melodic and ludic — tell me, yes, tell me by what aberration, by what crooked trick of history and of the soul it became, in spite of everything, a language of poetry, a language that never abdicated either the consciousness of tragedy or the expression of beauty?

Yiddish poetry is not the graft of a dialect more or less well accepted by a foreign organism. It takes part in the creation of a body, of a language, which in turn arranges and fuses all the elements of a coherent culture. In his language and his culture, the Yiddish poet, like his readers — even were they already in part in remoteness or assimilation — discovers at once a heritage and an identity. He regains a footing on his inner land. He repossesses his destiny and his history. He makes himself humus, genealogical tree and nation. He belongs to himself and he belongs to those who listen to him. He is no longer alone in the world. He is a world that has at last found its orbit, its answer, its mirror in the universe of escheat. Yiddish poetry spontaneously invents the thousand and one ways of being a Jew. To be a Jew is perhaps perpetually to ask oneself: “Who am I?” He who knows where he comes from never knows what he is becoming. Might poetry be, rather than an evasion, a kind of answer to that enigma of the nothing that opens onto the infinite? Unless it be merely an obstinate question that alone contains and knows its answer? Jewish being is nothing other than a mirror of man. A mirror in fragments, it is true, pulverized by centuries of scattering, of reification, but on which, in spite of everything, is reflected the recurrent image of the one who is the legatee of one of the most painful experiences of resistance to the time of opprobrium, to the erosion of the self that the obstinacy of rejection entails.

And one sees clearly thenceforth that one cannot define Jewish being by a single one of its parameters, be it religious or psychological. By its ambiguous, or rather polyvalent, inscription in history, it escapes the hierarchy, the grid of classifications. If one seeks its essence, carefully distilling all its antecedents and all the data that make it what it is, it is, in the end, a little human gold that one gathers at the bottom of the athanor, mingled with a little dross. But human all the same, with that indivisible part that makes it always the same and always different. To be a Jew, precisely, is to attain within oneself that which makes you OTHER, Rimbaud’s “I is an other,” but at the same time the I of all the others. It is to recognize oneself in all that misrecognizes you. It is to make the circuit of oneself in order to accomplish at the same time one’s rotation in the universe. It is to carry poetry everywhere on the sole of one’s shoes, knapsack on the back and pilgrim’s staff, in strangeness and in wandering, until the last stage, the last step, the last breath, at the end of the world and at the end of the language.

(excerpt from the preface to an unpublished essay: UNE LÉGENDE À VIF, littérature, chanson, arts et cinéma — A LEGEND LAID BARE: literature, song, arts and cinema)

Notes