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Words on Fire
Words on Fire

T he U nfin ish ed

S tory of Y iddish

D ovid Katz

BASIC

B
BOOKS

A M em ber o f the Perseus Books G roup

N ew York
 Maps and Graphics by

Giedre Beconyte
Center fo r Cartography at
Vilnius University, Lithuania
(www.kc.gf.vu.lt)

Copyright © 2004 by Dovid Katz

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in
the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more
information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group,
11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298 or (800) 255-1514, or
e-mail [email protected].

D esign b y J e ff W illia m s

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Katz, Dovid.
Words on fire : the unfinished story of Yiddish / Dovid Katz,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-465-03728-3 (alk. paper)
1. Yiddish language—History. I. Title.

PJ5113.K38 2004
439'.1'09—dc22
2004010296

04 05 06 07 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For Chic Wolk, Richard Maullin, Mtndy Cahan
Visionary builders of a new Yiddish island in Vilnius
A Yiddish Poet
by M enke K a tz

I am a Yiddish poet— a doomed troubadour,

a dreamsmith jeered by the soft-voiced yokel,
the smooth snob with the swinging lash shrieking: jargon!
O are the mocked tears of my people a jargon?

Yiddish,
formed as Adam of the dust of the four corners o f the earth;
the quenchless blaze of the wandering Jew,
the thirst of the deserts.

My m other tongue is unpolished as a wound, a laughter, a love-starved kiss,

yearnful as a martyr's last glance at a passing bird.
Taste a word, cursed and merciless as an earthquake.
H ear a word, terse and bruised as a tear.
See a word, light and lucent, joy rapt as a ray.
Climb a word— rough and powerful as a crag.
Ride a word— free and rhymeless as a tempest.

Yiddish,
The bare curse thrown against the might of pitiless foes.
A "black year” shrouding dawn after a massacre.
The mute call of each speechless m outh of Treblinka.
The prayer of stone to turn into gale.

from Land of Manna (Chicago 1965)

 Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Notes to the Reader xv

In tro d u c tio n 1

1 G enesis 11

2 T h e T h re e Languages o f A shkenaz 45

3 O ld Y iddish L iteratu re 79

4 W h a t S h o u ld a L ady R ead? 89

5 Y iddish a n d K abbalah 113

6 In th e E ast 131

7 W e ste rn izatio n a n d Language 173

8 N e w V isions o f Ju d aism 225

9 T h e T w en tieth C en tu ry 257

10 In th e T w enty-F irst C en tu ry 349

11 T h e F u tu re o f Y iddish 367

Index 399

ix
Acknowledgments are among the most pleasant tasks. This book, for
all its faults, is finished, and it is time to thank friends and colleagues
who have taken time and trouble to help. Here it is also fraught with
concern, however, because I know that some of the people who have
helped would passionately differ with a number of the controversial
views proposed. So let the usual disclaimer come before and not after.
Not only are none of the acknowledgees responsible for weaknesses
and errors, which goes without saying, but none is in any way respon-
sible for the views proposed. The beauty of the community of writers
and scholars lies precisely in that rarified spirit of working together in
harmony, disagreements notwithstanding.
Various ideas about the history of Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and
the nature of Jewish history that come together in this book directly
or indirectly derive from discussions starting in early childhood with
my father, poet and teacher Menke Katz (1906—1991). I have also ben-
efited enormously from the challenging questions posed by my stu-
dents at Oxford (1978-1996), Yale (1998-1999), and Vilnius (from
1999). My students are all equally dear to me, but those at Yale asked
the toughest questions, forcing some serious rethinking.
At Yale, I had the privilege of being among the members of the (very
modest) Ashkenazic Hebrew Society, at which various "heavy" Jew-
ish language issues were thrashed out in an atmosphere of collegiality
and good humor. Special thanks to Rachel Wizner and Rabbi Jim
Ponet for fostering a spirit of friendly, open discussion. Yale's inspira­

xi
x ii ‫׳‬-‫ —׳‬- A c k n o w led g m en ts

tional Professor Donald J. Cohen (1940-2001) began to persuade me in

early 1999 that it was time for a radically alternative view of Yiddish
to be presented in a book in English for a wider readership. American
Jews in particular, he assured me, would benefit from a genuine and
frank debate on these subjects, without any of the sides being "la-
beled" as anti-anything. "Israel and Hebrew are doing very well for
themselves," he once told me. "I heard you, the other day, passion-
ately defend the need for there to be a strong Jewish state in the
world. Now you go and tell your truth about Yiddish!"
For many years, and until his death at the age of ninety-seven, I had
the benefit and challenge of discussing the history of Yiddish with the
remarkable Carl Cowl (Kalmen Kovel, 1900—1997). I suspect (may he
forgive me if I'm wrong) that he is the one interlocutor who would
agree with all the premises of this book, many of which emerged in a
quarter century of long talks during my visits to his Brooklyn Heights
residence and his visits to me in Boro Park in Brooklyn; London, Ox-
ford, and North Wales in Britain; and Vilnius, Lithuania.
The impetus to write the book came from Scott Mendel of Mendel-
media in New York, to whom I am profoundly grateful for expert guid-
ance. Professor Arthur Hertzberg (New York University) provided vital
support in a variety of ways to enable the project to get underway.
Chip Rossetti, my editor at Basic Books, spared no effort to ensure
the best possible result. I am deeply grateful for his wise counsel on
style and content, and his numerous improvements to the text. By the
time we were ready for press, I came to see Chip as a teacher as much
as an editor. Senior project editor Kay Mariea and copyeditor Chrisona
Schmidt also gave generously of their time and expertise at each phase
of production.
My friends and colleagues Professor Jerold Frakes (University of
Southern California) and Professor Dov-Ber Kerler (University of Indi-
ana at Bloomington) graciously reviewed the manuscript and sug-
gested numerous changes. Professor Kerler, with whom I have been
discussing the history of Yiddish for a quarter century, provided gen-
erous and invaluable help throughout preparation and editing of the
manuscript. My friend and research assistant Ildi Kovacs spared no ef-
fort to assist the project at each stage.
 Acknowledgments -‫—״‬ xiii

Various parts of the work on which this book is based were carried
out over the years thanks to the generosity of various benefactors. They
include the Abraham Lerner Foundation for Jewish Culture (Tel Aviv)
and its president, Ophra Alyagon (in 1997), the Memorial Foundation
for Jewish Culture (1998), Mendy Cahan (1998-2000), the Leverhulme
Trust (1999-2001), and the Guggenheim Foundation (2001-2002).
Many colleagues and friends generously helped in various ways
during preparation of the manuscript, including Shoshana Balaban
(New York), Olga Bliumenzon (Vilnius Yiddish Institute), Julian and
Paula Breeze (Bangor University, Wales), Colin and Christine Brown
(Countryside Council for Wales, Capelulo, North Wales), Professor
Alfredas Bumblauskas (Vilnius University), David Djanogly
(Bournemouth), Professor Menachem Friedman (Bar-Ilan University),
Troim and Frank Handler (West Palm Beach, Florida), Vilma Gradin-
skaite (Vilnius), Shahar Hecht (North American Jewish Data Bank),
Shmuel Hiley (London), Professor Miriam Isaacs (University of
Maryland at College Park), Irina Izhogina (Brest, Belarus), Rivke Katz
(Spring Glen, New York), Rabbi Avremi Kievman (Liverpool Chabad),
Professor Sharunas Liekis (Vilnius University), Dr. Richard Maullin
(Santa Monica), Bruce Mitchell (Worcester, Massachusetts), Doris
Nicholson (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Professor Dov Noy (Hebrew
University, Jerusalem), Professor Eugene Orenstein (McGill Univer-
sity, Montreal), Hilde Pach (University of Amsterdam), Loreta
Paukshtyte (Vilnius Yiddish Institute), Professor Leonard Prager
(Haifa University), Professor Stefan Schreiner (Tubingen University),
Professor Ada Rapoport-Albert (University of London), Sco, Birute
Ushinskaite-Shvabauskiene (Vilnius), Harry and Clare Smith, and
Professor Irena Veisaite (Vilnius).
Special thanks for help in locating rare materials, as well as permis-
sion to use them, are owed to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in
New York; to its executive director Dr. Carl Rheins, chief librarian Aviva
Astrinsky, photo archivist Krysia Fisher, reference librarian Yeshaya
Metal, stack manager Herbert Lazarus, preservation librarian Stanley
Bergman, and, for many kindnesses and cheerful willingness to share of
his vast expertise, Yivo's project archivist, Vital Zajka, formerly of
Minsk. Thanks are also due Dr. Vladimir Ivanovich Prokoptsov, direc­
x iv ‫—ז׳‬ Acknowledgments

tor of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, for permis-
sion to reproduce materials. Dr. Herman Suess (University of Rostock
Library), the remarkable railway conductor turned master Yiddish bib-
liographer, has, as ever, generously shared rare materials.
Dr. Giedre Beconyte of the Center for Cartography at Vilnius Uni-
versity produced the maps and charts with endless patience and in-
sightful dedication.
D o v id Ka tz

Vilnius, Lithuania , 2004

 Notes to the Reader

The dates given for events in antiquity are approximations.

Translations provided are by the author and often intended to be
accurate overall rather than narrowly literal. Biblical translations are
often based on the classic King James renditions.
Forms of names common to Yiddish civilization are given primacy.
The modern Israeli Hebrew variants likely to be found in some refer-
ence works occasionally follow in parenthesis. Common English usage
is often followed where it exists, where Yiddish specificity is not at
issue, especially in the case of biblical names for which there is a
durable tradition, and for various "Jewish words" that have become
common in English.
Where actual transcriptions of Yiddish, traditional Ashkenazic He-
brew, and modern Israeli Hebrew are used, they all follow the Yivo
system for transcription in English, with the accent sign (') frequently
added to show which syllable is accented. In renditions of biblical He-
brew and classical Aramaic, th (as in thought) is used too.

a is "C o ntinental a " resem bling A m e ric a n lot, hot; B ritish cut, hut
(phonetic [a])
ay a s in aye or bite b u t sh o rter flai]), jaj])
e (accented) a s in let or rest ([8])
e (unaccented, reduced) as in coming, Irish, spoken, or Moyshe ([9],
M)

XV
xvi ‫—^׳‬ Notes to the Reader

ey as in gate, they, or late ([ei], [ej])

i as in peek, she, but not diphthongized ([i])
o is "Continental 0" resembling American cut, hut, British lot, hot
m )
oy as in Lloyd, foist, loiter, but shorter ([01], [0j])
u as in book, root but not diphthongized ([u])
kh as in Chanukah, Loch Ness, Kharkov ([x]); it is used also fo r clas-
sical and some Israeli H ebrew [h]
tsh as in choose, catch ([c], [tf])
zh as in Asia, closure, measure ([z], [3 ])
 Introduction

A C C E P T E D T R U T H , GLOB ALIZA TION , AN D YIDDISH

It is commonly accepted that Hebrew is the "major" or "real" Jewish

language (past, present, or future). In casual usage the name is nowa-
days taken to be the same as (or close enough to) the majority spoken
language in modern Israel. As part of the same set of givens for most
of today's Jews, as well as many interested non-Jews, Israel and its
mainstream culture are the prime inspiration and practical focus for
world Jewry. It is usually assumed, even by those who may feel some-
thing for Yiddish and the East European Jewish heritage, that Yiddish
entered the arena of Jewish history relatively recently, it was spoken
in a fairly restricted region, interest in it is now more or less academic
or sentimental, and, crucially, it is on the way out. This book presents
an unabashedly alternative model of Jewish cultural history for the
reader's consideration, with no claim on absolute truth and no malice
toward the incumbent "winners" of the public relations battleground.
Israel, Israeli Hebrew, and the modern American Jewish establishment
are all splendid creations, and they are all, thank heaven, secure and
mature enough to withstand efforts to add to the mainstream canon
some other parts of the Jewish heritage. Not a word in this book is in-
tended against them. It opposes, rather, the opinions of those who dis-
miss the idea that Yiddish and the East European cultural heritage are
also vital to authentic Jewish identity, continuity, and spiritual sur-
vival (rather than some kind of add-on or pop-up). Surely the coexis-
tence of different strands of Jewish culture, with diverging areas of
emphasis, is a sign of vitality, diversity, and a considerable wealth of

1
2 —— Words on Fire

cultural assets from which users may pick and choose what to concen-
trate on, with no prejudice to anything or anyone else.
Israeli Hebrew is a language that was artificially and tenaciously con-
structed by determined Yiddish-speaking East European Zionists around
a century ago as part of the movement to return to the ancient homeland.
In the few generations that have elapsed, their success has proven to be
phenomenal. Ivrlt (Israeli Hebrew) has blossomed into a fully natural
language of the twenty-first-century Middle East, one which is in many
ways more a contemporary Middle Eastern language than it is a linguis-
tic continuation of the millennial language chain of Jewish history (the
philological etymology of most of the words notwithstanding).
Yiddish, on the other hand, is the naturally and uninterruptedly
surviving modern rung in a (nearly) four-thousand-year chain of lan-
guage continuity that starts with the oldest Hebrew, runs through the
era of Jewish Aramaic, leads into the Yiddish period and nowadays
through traditionalist (mostly Hasidic) Jews, takes world Jewry
(rather than just Israelis) into the far future.
Over the past century and a half, a permanent treasure store of lit-
erary masterpieces was created in Yiddish during the kind of "secular
outburst" that recurs periodically in the cycles of Jewish history. We
find ourselves today at the twilight of the greatest secular outburst
ever, one in which Jewish innovators created a new Yiddish literature,
a new Hebrew-based language, and a new Jewish state, as well as
making countless contributions to world culture and the arts. It comes
to its end before our eyes, while the so-called Ultraorthodox (our un-
fair term for them, looking from the outside and at great distance) con-
tinue, as ever, to adhere to the age-old laws of traditional religious
Judaism, treating it as a bona fide civilization with culture-specific
language, dress, and totalistic lifestyle (rather than a religion to be
practiced on Fridays, Saturdays, holidays, or to be felt as some kind of
identity issue in a modern society). Yiddish today is the language of
three principal groups: the last (and rapidly dwindling ranks of) sur-
vivors of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, a minute number of serious
secularist enthusiasts, and (by the lowest estimates) hundreds of thou-
sands of traditionalist Orthodox Jews (overwhelmingly Hasidim) who
are multiplying into the millions of native Yiddish speakers of the next
century.
 Introduction —— 3

All languages are of inherently potential equal value. A master Yid-

dish scholar of the twentieth century, Max Weinreich (1894-1969),
quipped that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." There
are no good and bad, beautiful and ugly, complicated and simple lan-
guages from a scientific point of view. All natural languages are of
equal capacity to grow, develop, and meet the needs of the communi-
ties that speak them. They can serve the motives of the best and worst,
the beautiful and the ugly, the inspired and the ridiculous.
There are many ways to categorize and divide the world's lan-
guages—by their etymological sources, geographic spread, internal
structure, comparative features, ethnic correlations, social status, and
more. For the purpose at hand, there is just one major division that
matters, the one that distinguishes mass communication (interna-
tional) languages from culture-specific (ethno-cultural) languages. Of
course, the mass communication languages also have their traditional
dialects. In the depths of northeastern England, there is a kind of Eng-
lish spoken in villages that goes back many centuries and is rich in the
lore, history, and world outlook of the locals and, in some sense, the
English people in general. It is full of "real English" that outsiders
who grew up with international English can barely understand. It dif-
fers radically from North American and even standard British English.
But log on to the Internet, and you are in the great sea of mass-
communication international English that is today a kind of extraordi-
narily useful "Esperanto English."
These two varieties of language are as old as human societies. Only
the details have changed. Just over 2,700 years ago, in 701 b .c ., in the
days of King Hezekiah and Isaiah the prophet, the Assyrian king Sen-
nacherib sent his emissaries to persuade the population of Jerusalem
to surrender. The Assyrian government sent specialists to speak to the
Jerusalemites in Judean (the language of Judea or Judah, i.e., biblical-
era Hebrew). Fearing panic and demoralization, three high-level
Judean officials, Eliakim, Shebnah, and Joah, implored the Assyrian
emissaries, in the timeless spirit of diplomatic discourse, to "Be good
enough to speak to your servants in Aramaic for we understand and
do not, please, speak in Judean within earshot of the people who
stand by this wall" (2 Kings 18:26; Isaiah 36:11). In those days and in
that part of the world, a certain kind of Aramaic had become the in­
4 —— Words on Fire

ternational language of diplomacy, culture, and commerce (the English

of the day in the region), while Judean was the specific language of the
small nation of Israelites.
Nowadays, English is spreading rapidly throughout the world's pop-
ulations, though other multiregionals, including Russian, Spanish, and
French, continue to play the multiethnic role in a number of countries
where they have been strong for various reasons (usually past colonial-
ism). Thanks to the Internet, the ubiquity of American popular cul-
ture, and international communications, English is coming to fulfill the
role that the grand linguistic dreamer (and Yiddish scholar) Ludwig
Lazar Zamenhof (1859—1917) imagined for his own created language,
Esperanto. The Bialystok native believed it would be an international
means of communication that nobody would feel is particularly tied to
any one ethnicity and that could therefore unite humanity. But English
has now attained a pan-ethnic status and is becoming the Esperanto
that Esperanto itself could never become. Internet lingo and the mod-
era mass media "esperantize," avoiding narrow particularities, whether
ethnic, political, or racial. That is good insofar as it brings communica-
tion and understanding to more and more people and places, and so
long as it does not displace the rich local, culture-specific vernaculars
of the diffuse corners of the earth.
And so it turns out that The Yiddish Question, small as it may at
first seem in the bigger scheme of things, is part and parcel of a vastly
bigger quandary, the contemporary globalization debate. At most,
Yiddish can offer a globalized English some "fun words" (especially
off-color epithets and satiric tell-offs), some good literature in transla-
tion, and a few other bits and pieces that the global trolley car may
take on board. But all of that misses the point, which is that small and
"culture specific" languages represent a unique way of experiencing
life and viewing just about everything, from a speck of dust to a pro-
found set of ideas.
The centrality of language to culture, and its importance for a spe-
cial heritage and the spiritual freedom of its people, was propounded
in Central Europe by various Romantic philosophers for whom lan-
guage is the singular soul of a nation. One of them, Johann Herder
(1744-1803), stressed the overriding importance of insights gained
 Introduction —— 5

from immersion in the past. He saw a divine hand in the majesty of the
very diversity of the world's peoples and languages, and wrote a lot
about the way each culture has to be studied through its own eyes,
which means, to a great degree, through the perceptions of its lan-
guage. Wilhelm Humboldt (1767-1835) followed up with detailed, so-
phisticated analyses of languages that were (and are still) considered
"marginal" by Western observers, such as Basque and the Kawi lan-
guage of Java. He showed they are every bit as susceptible to the most
sophisticated analyses as the "great languages" of the major powers.
They and others came up with ideas that fed into the rise of nine-
teenth-century nationalism with all its good and its evil effects.
In twentieth-century America, well before the term "globalization"
was popularized, modern linguistics arose as an "antiglobalization dis-
cipline," largely out of anthropology and ethnology in the hands of
modernist thinkers. One of the first was Edward Sapir (1884-1939), a
rabbi's son (and Yiddish linguist) who was brought to the United
States as a boy and grew up in New York City. He helped establish lin-
guistics as a discipline in America with his book, Language (1921). In
it he claimed that "language does not exist apart from culture, that is,
from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that de-
termines the texture of our lives."
His boldest follower was Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), a fire
prevention inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company whose
family, unlike Sapir's, had come over to the New World back in the
days of the Pilgrims. Whorf's studies of the Hopi Native American lan-
guage emphasized how the tribe views time in a way that differs rad-
ically from the Western concept. His theory of linguistic relativity is
best known from his (posthumously published) Language, Thought,
and Reality (1956). In its final chapter he made the sensational claim
that "the moment we begin scientific, unbiased research into language
we find, in people and cultures with the most unprepossessing exteri-
ors, beautiful, effective, and scientific devices of expressions un-
known to western Indo-European tongues or mentalities." Whorf
proclaimed that "no language is 'primitive.'"
Ashkenazic Jews in America and elsewhere would do well to leave
open the possibility that their modest shtetl forebears, their own re­
6 —— Words on Fire

cent immigrant parents or grandparents, tailors and cobblers in-

eluded, and today's so-called Ultraorthodox, all speak a language that
is not "primitive" in any pejorative sense (though it has elements that
are certainly ancient), but one that is rich in "beautiful, effective, and
scientific devices of expressions." The "devices" of Yiddish include
the unique and irreplaceable living repository of a nearly four-thou-
sand-year-old Jewish civilization, whose final thousand-year incarna-
tion in Europe was almost eradicated in the Holocaust. Every culture
has its distinct mode of thinking, and it is entirely natural that at least
some members of a group should want to preserve that group's lan-
guage and culture. That desire is not extreme, fanatic, or even far-
fetched, and in the case of Yiddish, it does zero damage to the causes
of Hebrew and Israel.

JEWISH C ONTINUITY

There are three unbroken chains that are sometimes thought to bind
the Jewish present and future to its earliest past.
One claim to an unbroken chain is genetic continuity. Many (by no
means all) modern Jews are partially descended from ancient Israelites
in the Land of Israel. At first glance, that claimed pedigree may sound
miraculous, but it is not. During the long Jewish exile prior to the
modern melting pot, interethnic marriage was rare. It was common in
biblical times among the various ancient Near Eastern peoples; King
David, according to the biblical account, was descended from the
Moabite Ruth. All that changed when the Judeans of Judea became
the dispersed Jewish minority in other lands and group survival be-
came a conscious aim. Turning to Europe (and other diasporas), there
was a pattern of founders of communities taking local wives, result-
ing in more male-specific genetic material deriving from the ancient
Near East and relatively more female-specific material from the soci-
eties in which settlers had set up their new communities. In 2003, a
team of a dozen scholars from around the world published a major
study on Ashkenazic genetics in the American Journal of Human Ge-
netics. Traditional Jews have even retained, for thousands of years,
knowledge of whether they are a kohen (priest), leyvi (Levite), or Yis-
 Introduction —— 7

roel (plain Israelite). The research team confirmed earlier work de-
monstrating that the priests (kohanim) "predominantly share a recent
common ancestry irrespective of the geographically defined post-Di-
aspora community to which they belong, a finding consistent with
common Jewish origins in the Near East." They followed up with re-
search on the Levites (leviim), which led them back to "a founding
event, probably involving one or very few European men occurring
at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashke-
nazic community."
A second chain is linguistic continuity, although not in the superfi-
cial sense of continuing to speak the same language. It is a subtle,
complex process that has come to be known as the Jewish language
chain. Continuity is enhanced by reading, studying, praying, and
actually creating new written works in the previous languages in the
chain. But the core of the Jewish language chain is much more
dramatic and relates to everyday spoken language. It is the pattern by
which each new Jewish language is created by combining elements of
the previous inherited language with the surrounding non-Jewish
language. Each of the past Jewish languages has thereby been fated
not to "die" but to morph into a vital component of its successor and
live on in a new incarnation. The result was neither a mishmash nor
a pidgin, but a unique new Jewish language that carried forward the
primeval Jewish spirit in a fresh, revitalized linguistic medium. This
process of linguistic regeneration is as old as the Jewish people and
even characterized the development of the very first Jewish lan-
guage, ancient Hebrew. Communities, tribes, and nations sometimes
follow a recurring pattern as stubbornly as individuals who appear to
have themes to their biography.

RELIGIOUS CORE AND SECULAR O UTB URS TS

The third chain of preservation is religious and cultural continuity.

Again, at first glance, this act of national survival in the face of gen-
erations of persecution, expulsions, and massacres may appear to be
supernatural (and is often thought of as such, whether as an act of
God, a feat of immense human proportions, or both). But not necessar­
8 —— Words on Fire

ily. The group in question was not until recently invited to assimilate.
It did not, by and large, harbor a wish to trade in what it regarded as
its divinely privileged lot as the Chosen People of God (with all the ob-
ligations and all the suffering entailed) for the perceived primitive
darkness of the surrounding nations. In these circumstances, perpetu-
ated distinctiveness was the predictable route. The conscious and con-
stant binding force has been Judaism as a complete way of life based
on wholehearted belief in the literal, divine origin of the Torah (the
notion that God actually gave the first five books of the Old Testament
to Moses and the People of Israel), and on the belief in the infallible
authority of collective rabbinic interpretation over the generations.
What is known as Torah Judaism entails an absolute need to carry out
a multitude of positive ("thou shalt") and negative ("thou shalt not")
commandments on a daily basis. In rabbinic law, there are 613 com-
mandments. Throughout Jewish history, this believing, traditionalist,
ritual-observing central stream has been challenged, and also en-
riched, by secular outbursts. They tend to occur during the first few
generations of creative intermingling within tolerant, multicultural,
non-Jewish civilizations. After that the secularists' own not-too-
distant descendants tend to assimilate to the surrounding culture. But
each secular outburst is founded by individuals who were accultur-
ated to the central (traditionally Orthodox) stream in their childhood
or absorbed much of it from their immediate family background.
From Philo of Alexandria (20 b .c . - a . d . 50) in the Greek-speaking mi-
lieu, through Spinoza, Freud, and Einstein, the secular outburst giants
each had the central tree trunk of observant, antiquity-based Judaism
in their immediate background. Some secular outburst leaders were
dual trajectorists who attained much in both the Jewish and the con-
temporary secular arena. Maimonides (1135-1204) wrote his Jewish
legal code in Hebrew and his philosophical treatise in Arabic.
Modern linguists are understandably wary of too much "biogra-
phization" of language. A language is not a person. Nevertheless, lan-
guage is a dominion of people by definition, the major feature of
communication between people, and a major—if not the major—fea-
ture of group identity in a wide variety of ways, from the dialect with
features unique to a village, to the variety that becomes symbolic of
peoplehood or nationhood, all the way to the supranational languages
 Introduction —— 9

of globalization. Language is the key factor distinguishing humans

from all other beings. Still, it is important to remember that biograph-
ical terms, such as "born," "moved," "be in danger," or "be revived,"
need to be taken partially as metaphors, at least insofar as the precise
ramifications are not identical to those of an individual. With that
caveat, the "linguography" of Yiddish can be enjoyed as a dramatic life
story of an embattled, controversial language and people. A part of
that story follows, written from the point of view of the language and
its people. It is a story of a language (and a people) subject to attack
from within and without.

First, from the outside. Its people have repeatedly been subject to mas-
sacres for their religion or ethnicity or both from the early eleventh
century through the Holocaust. Second, from the inside. Yiddish has
repeatedly been identified with the uneducated masses, with women,
with the disenfranchised of traditional Jewish society, and it has been
the object of overt rejection from medieval times and onward. These
tribulations came to enhance the passion of the language. For all its ge-
ographic spread and huge numbers of speakers, it is not the language
of even a microcosmic "Jewish globalization." It is a language whose
everyday words, naturally spoken, continue to burn with ancient
ideas, humor, and psychic content that have come down the line of
generation-to-generation language transmission, from antiquity into
the twenty-first century. The opposite of globalization is not necessar-
ily parochialism. It is a uniqueness, a specificity, that makes the
world's natural languages as spiritually melodious to each other as the
instruments of a fine orchestra, each of which is to be cherished in
ways inconceivable for the global colossuses of the age.
 Genesis

PREHISTORY

The Yiddish language is only a thousand or so years old. But many of

its elements—words, turns of phrase, idioms, embedded historical ref-
erences—are much older. They fed into Yiddish in a continuous lan-
guage chain that antedated ancient Hebrew, progressed through
Hebrew and then Jewish Aramaic, and ended up in today's Yiddish—
without interruption, seam, or discontinuity, despite an ever-shifting
geography and changing historic circumstances.
When, for example, a place hasn't been spruced up in a long time,
you can say in Yiddish, with a delicate touch of criticism, that it seem-
ingly was last renovated during sheyshes yemey breyshis (the "six days
of creation"). Any state of chaos can be called toyhe-voyhe, after words
in the second verse of the Bible (usually translated "without form and
void"), as disordered as the cosmos was prior to creation. You can't get
a lot earlier than that for embedded living history in a currently spo-
ken language. But some Yiddish words are even older.
Take mazl, which means "luck" and is used in common Yiddish ex-
pressions, such as mazl-tof! (congratulations!), goyishker mazl (good
luck, literally gentile luck), ayidisher mazl (bad luck, literally Jewish
luck), and in certain trades in the handshake proclaimed by mazl-

11
brokhe! (a blessing of good luck, on concluding a deal). It goes back
to the earlier Hebrew mazzol and Aramaic mazzolo, which referred to
a constellation, star, or planet. The modern sense of mazl on its own
referring to "good luck" is a Yiddish development deriving from the
Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic sense of luck or fate, good or other-
wise. That sense followed from the pejorative biblical sense of idol
worship ("those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon,
and to the constellations,” 2 Kings 23:5). The biblical Hebrew term was
derived from ancient Akkadian, a language that was widespread in
Mesopotamia (largely covering the territory of today's Iraq) from the
third to the first millennium b . c . In Akkadian, it was a neutral term for
constellation or planet, but that neutrality implied belief in the godli-
ness and power of these constellations vis-a-vis human affairs. By Old
Testament times, the word referred to the cursed idol beliefs that
seduced people away from belief in God. In Talmudic times it was soft-
ened, abstracted, and shifted to mean fate in general. That's how it
eventually entered Yiddish and came to mean not just any luck but
good luck. About five thousand years of history lie behind this one
Yiddish word.
These links among Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish form the central
Jewish language chain, stretching from antiquity to the twenty-first
century. This uninterrupted traditional history started, according to
the biblical account and Jewish lore, with the era of the patriarchs and
matriarchs: Abraham with Sarah, Isaac with Rebecca, Jacob with
Rachel and Leah. Sometime during the first quarter of the second mil-
lennium b . c ., Abraham is reported to have trekked from Ur of the
Chaldees in Babylonia (today's al-Muqayyar in Iraq) to the land of
Canaan (now Israel). There Abraham's monotheism, in the biblical ac-
count, established the first of the Abrahamic religions. Whether or not
the biblical account is accepted as historical, the linguistic evidence
for its geocultural outlines is overwhelming.

HEBREW

The basis of Hebrew was the ancient Canaanite language of the people
living in the land of Canaan that the Israelites came to inhabit. The
 Genesis 13

historical origin of Hebrew was well-known in biblical times. The

prophet Isaiah, who wrote in the second half of the eighth century
b .c ., uses this common knowledge as a poetic image in a daring
prophecy of the rise of Judah over Egypt: "And the land of Judah shall
become a terror unto Egypt. . . . In that day there shall be five cities in
the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan" (Isaiah
19:17-18). The biblical account provides other clues. Abraham's clan
in Ur had spoken Aramaic. When they came to the land of Canaan,
they didn't just "drop" their native Aramaic and "start" speaking
Canaanite. Instead they created the first major Jewish language—He-
brew—which for hundreds of years was known as a form of Canaan-
ite. Classical Hebrew was an intricate fusion of the Aramaic heritage
that the Abrahamic tribe brought with it from Babylonia to Canaan
and the local Canaanite dialects, which provided the bulk of the "tem-
plate" for the machinery of the language. For hundreds of years, "lan-
guage of Canaan" was applied to the Hebrew language with no
pejorative strings attached. During the substantial Egyptian period,
an Egyptian component was added to the language, particularly
proper names. The best-known word contributed by Egyptian is of
course the name "Moshe."
Both Aramaic and Canaanite are members of the group of languages
known to scholars as Northwest Semitic. The extraordinary wealth of
biblical Hebrew poetry derives in no small part from the luxury its
writers had of using "near synonyms," one hailing from the Aramaic
component of Hebrew and one from its Canaanite component. Ish
from the Canaanite component is used for the everyday sense of "spe-
cific man," enosh from the Aramaic component for the more poetic and
abstract "human" or "mere person." The poetic and semantic richness
of biblical Hebrew derives precisely from the "hybrid pedigree" re-
suiting from the early history of its speakers and their westward trek.
Thus the book of Kings uses the expression, "in the month Bui, which
is the eighth month" (1 Kings 6:38), using Aramaic-derived yerakh for
the first occurrence of "month" in the passage and Canaanite-derived
khodesh for the second, with a slight but marked difference in usage.
Languages such as biblical Hebrew, where the union of diverse ele-
ments is obvious, are known as fusion languages. (There are of course
no “pure" languages, but in these languages the synthesis of two or
more elements is paramount. The term "fusion language" was con-
tributed by Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich.)
In fact, the Jewish people are commanded to never forget those dis-
tant Aramean origins. A passage in the Five Books of Moses instructs:
"And thou shalt speak and say before the Lord thy God: A wandering
Aramean was my father"' (Deuteronomy 26:5). The Bible is not in the
least squeamish about ongoing bilingualism. When Abraham's grand-
son, Jacob, had a mound of stones made to witness his agreement with
his father-in-law, the Aramean Laban, we are told (in Genesis 31:47) that
"Laban called it Yegar-sohadutho" (Aramaic for "witness mound"), "but
Jacob called it Gal-eyd” (the Canaanite-Hebrew equivalent).
In the biblical account the twelve tribes of the people of Israel came
to be named for the sons of Jacob. The clan migrated to Egypt and
grew into a populous minority. According to some datings, they
would have been enslaved from around 1700 b . c . to 1300 b . c . and then
were liberated under Moses. He led them through the desert, where
they received the Ten Commandments, up to the Promised Land,
Canaan, to be renamed the Land of Israel. The significance of an idea
can be overhauled by the almighty power of the word. Canaan is what
it was, Israel what it would become, named for Jacob, who was re-
named Israel after wrestling with an angel, according to Genesis
(32:29). And then Joshua conquered the land. The Judges judged.
Samuel anointed Saul to be king over Israel. After Saul fell, David
reigned (in the tenth century b . c .), establishing the Davidic dynasty.
Traditional Jews believe fervently that the true Messiah will be a di-
rect descendant of David, king of Israel. Traditional Christians believe
with equal fervor that Jesus, who will return as the Messiah, was a di-
rect descendant of David.
After David came his son, King Solomon, who reigned, the Bible re-
ports, over a large, wealthy dominion. But early in the reign of
Solomon's hapless son, Rehoboam, ten of the twelve tribes broke away.
In 928 b . c ., they set up the renegade Northern Kingdom (the kingdom
of Israel, also known as Samaria) under Jeroboam. It was conquered
and disassembled in 722 b .c . by the Assyrians. Its exiles, the "ten lost
tribes," were never heard from again (recurring rumors to the contrary
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