When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From linguistic and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (Sherman 2004, 9)

Argument

The Ashkenazi grammars of Hebrew written between roughly 1600 and 1800 fill a modest and largely forgotten shelf in the Jewish scholarly library. At first sight, especially when compared with the medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian Hebrew traditions, they seem to lack technical sophistication. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, however, this apparent lack of sophistication was not so much an intrinsic flaw as a deliberate choice. For the earliest Ashkenazi textbooks were not about studying grammar, but about teaching Hebrew. By adapting the existing descriptive models to the needs of the classroom and the gemeyne leytn (ordinary people), Jewish scholars and teachers in such cities as Prague, Wilhelmsdorff, and Amsterdam hoped to find and instruct new audiences. Depending on context and target audience, they either relied on Hebrew, Yiddish, or on an intricate interplay of the two for maximum success and efficiency. It was this innovative combination of didactic simplification and functional bilingualism that allowed them not only to reach a new readership, but also to equip that readership to henceforth read their Bible and prayers with unprecedented autonomy.

Argument

In the 1920s the Soviet Union invested a group of talented, mostly socialist, occasionally Communist, Jewish writers and thinkers to use the power of the state to remake Jewish culture and identity. The Communist state had inherited a multiethnic empire from its tsarist predecessors and supported the creation of secular cultures for each ethnicity. These cultures would be based not on religion, but on language and culture. Soviet Jews had many languages from which to choose to be their official Soviet language, but Yiddish, the vernacular of eastern European Jewry, won the battle and served as the basis of secular Soviet Jewish culture. Soviet Jewish scholars, writers, and other cultural activists remade Jewish culture by creating a usable Jewish past that fit the socialist present, reforming the “wild” vernacular of Yiddish into a modern language worthy of high culture, and transforming Jews into secular Soviet citizens.

Argument

Jacob Lestschinsky (1876–1966) emerged as the leading social scientist in pre-1917 circles of Yiddishist Marxist nationalists, most notably the Territorialists, who sought to create Jewish statehood outside Palestine. Lestschinsky played a central role in Jewish institutions formed in Ukraine in 1918–1920. A convinced anti-Bolshevik, he lived in Germany, then in Poland, America, and eventually in Israel. He combined two careers: a popular Yiddish journalist and an influential scholar. He conducted demographic and statistical studies under the auspices of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) whose headquarters were in Vilna (Vilnius) until the beginning of World War II and were later moved to New York. Lestschinsky was one of the fathers of YIVO and was associated with the organization until the 1950s. In January 1945, during a YIVO conference in New York, he was the first to estimate the number of Holocaust victims as six million. This article analyzes Lestschinsky's theoretical outlook and its transformation under the influence of the vicissitudes of Jewish life.

Argument

This article explores the relationship between ideology and statistical knowledge in Soviet Yiddish scholarship during the first Five-Year Plan and Cultural Revolution. Specifically, it examines the political status of Yiddish-language socioeconomic research as a tool of state building in the shtetls (small market towns) of the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. Historically, many Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl worked as economic middlemen between city and countryside, a function that became politically untenable after 1917. The Soviet regime sponsored Yiddish socioeconomic data collection in order to monitor its efforts to transform the occupational structure of shtetl Jewry. Accordingly, this data was expected to demonstrate the steady self-disintegration of the shtetl as an obsolete artifact of the old regime. In fact, these Soviet Yiddish narratives inadvertently highlighted the endurance of the shtetl in Soviet life at both the concrete and discursive levels. A close reading of these sources provides insight into how a segment of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia attempted to align itself within the new state's scientific establishment by fusing modern Jewish social scientific knowledge with Marxist-Leninist principles. In the polemics of the “shtetl problem” we find an example of how Soviet yidishe visnshaft registered the constantly shifting perceptions of ideological orthodoxy and deviation among Jewish Communists, and provoked international debate among Jewish demographers and economists as to the political use and abuse of statistics.

Argument

The Argentine-based Yiddish philosophical journal Davke functioned as a mediator between general European philosophy and Jewish philosophy. Its editor Shlomo Suskovich wished to introduce readers of Yiddish to the western tradition of philosophy and, at the same time, to show how Jewish thought contributed to abstract thinking. Through topical issues dedicated to central ideas or to giants among Jewish philosophers, particular knowledge could be successfully transmitted to the reading public. Sigmund Freud was honored with such a topical issue. In it the editor wished to show this Jew's contribution to basic philosophical contemplation rather than limit the discussion to his contributions in the field of psychology. In the central article of the issue on Freud, the editor emphasizes that all the articles in the issue, including those which deal with psychoanalysis, focus on Freud's importance to the world of ideas rather than just the world of medicine.

Argument

This article discusses a number of heterogeneous Yiddish monographs on Einstein's theory of relativity. It presents background information on Einstein's relationship with the Yiddish language, with the cultural movement, Yiddishism, and with its leading institution, YIVO. Although Einstein avoided taking sides in the conflict between Yiddishism and its rival Zionism, his Zionist friends were successful in establishing at least a “primacy of palestinocentric Zionism” in his thinking. Of special interest are two books by philosophic writers and one by an author trained in mathematics and physics, Tuvia Schalit, an acquaintance of Einstein's assistant Jacob Grommer. This article describes the underlying motivations and the philosophical horizon of these authors, in particular with respect to their view on the relationship between Kantianism and the theory of relativity. In contrast to many German academic philosophers, the Yiddish authors thought it possible to reconcile Kantianism with the new physics.

Argument

Ber Borochov (1881–1917), the Marxist Zionist revolutionary who founded the political party Poyle Tsien (Workers of Zion), was also one of the key theoreticians of Yiddish scholarship. His landmark 1913 essay, “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology,” was his first contribution to the field and crowned him as its chief ideologue. Modeled after late nineteenth-century European movements of linguistic nationalism, “The Tasks” was the first articulation of Yiddish scholarship as a discrete field of scientific research. His tasks ranged from the practical: creating a standardized dictionary and grammar, researching the origins and development of the language, and establishing a language institute; to the overtly ideological: the “nationalizing and humanizing” of the Yiddish language and its speakers. The essay brought a new level of sophistication to the field, established several of its ideological pillars, and linked Yiddish scholarship to the material needs of the Jewish people. Although “The Tasks” was greeted with a great deal of skepticism upon its publication, after his death, Borochov became widely accepted as the “founder” of modern Yiddish studies.

Ber Borochov's Di oyfgabn fun der yidisher filologye (The Tasks of Yiddish Philology) first appeared in 1913 in the academic journal, Der pinkes: yorbukh far der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur un shprakh, far folklore, kritik un bibliografye, edited by Shmuel Niger and published by Kletskin (Kletskin farlag) in Vilna. The cover of the journal is reproduced in the appendix (fig. 1). The original article was not paginated. In 1966, a reprint appeared in a posthumous collection of Borochov's articles published in Tel Aviv by Brener, Shprakh-forshung un literatur-geshikhte (The Science of Linguistics and the History of Literature) (pages 53-75).

Judeo-German developed, like any popular dialect, according to unconscious and natural laws. No gardener nursed and tended it, nobody cut back its wild shoots. (Ph. Mansch 1888)