Nathan Birnbaum's The tasks of Eastern European Jews

Abstract

Here we have translated the German text of a (1905) lecture of Nathan Birnbaum's that has been almost completely overlooked by researchers of modern Jewish movements generally, and particularly in the study of the Czernowitz Conference. This lecture was itself given at Czernowitz and ends with a call for “linguistic and literary conferences” on behalf of Yiddish and the elevation of the public status of the language. The lecture was given in German not only because the intellectual Jewish society Zephirah conducted its business in German, as was still (and long remained) the custom among the majority of the Czernowitz intelligentsia, but also both because Birnbaum himself had at that time never spoken Yiddish before an audience and because some of the individuals who had invited him to Czernowitz had been pupils of his in the previous decade when they were studying in Vienna, and so his relationship with them had already been established in German.