Rethinking the Relationship between German- and Yiddish-Language Culture

Abstract

Rethinking the Relationship between German- and Yiddish-Language Culture Matthew Johnson Poetische Selbstbilder. Deutsch-judische und Jiddische Lyrikanthologien 1900-1938. By Carmen Reichert. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. Pp. 350. Cloth €75.00. ISBN 9783525573150. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism. By Marc Caplan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Pp. 394. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 9780253051981. Jewish Primitivism. By Samuel J. Spinner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 9781503628274. It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity. By Sonia Gollance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 9781503613492. Despite their linguistic closeness, German and Yiddish have most often been studied apart. Since the beginning of the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, in the late eighteenth century, German and Yiddish came to be associated with divergent and even opposed trajectories of Jewish modernity, and their relative value became the object of intense debate. Indeed, in the wake of the Haskalah, the two languages were often understood as representing either side of a series of charged dichotomies, such as West and East, Germanness and Jewishness, assimilation and dissimilation, or, at the level of script, writing from left to right and right to left, in the Latin and Hebrew alphabets. This divergence was a consequence of a number of complex factors, including migration, acculturation, nationalization, and different forms of capital (i.e., economic, cultural, and social). Its implications were far-reaching and remain [End Page 363] only partially understood. The historian Aya Elyada notes, for example, that "the language shift from Yiddish to German, which took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was likely the most crucial development in the cultural history of German Jews, at least since the late Middle Ages."1 In recent decades, however, scholars have begun to explore alternatives to this history of divergence, reconsidering the medieval and early modern past and its afterlives, turning attention to regions where language contact remained common (e.g., Habsburg Bukovina and Galicia), and utilizing comparative approaches that bring these languages into proximity without effacing their differences and without denying their disparities in power. In 1986, Sander Gilman published an influential study, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, which examines "how a group defined as different by society as well as by itself responds to one very specific stereotype, the image of its language and discourse."2 Gilman explores "the history of anti-Jewish attitudes in Germany from this relatively narrow perspective and [autopsies] the resultant acceptance (or rejection) of this perception."3 In large parts of his study, he considers the relationship between German and Yiddish, albeit in ways that foreground their antagonism and embroilment in stereotypes. In subsequent decades, a number of scholars have considered this linguistic relationship beyond what Gilman himself admits is his "relatively narrow perspective" (ix). Marion Aptroot, Aya Elyada, Jerold Frakes, Astrid Lembke, and Erika Timm, among others, have provided nuanced accounts of the interplay between Yiddish and German in the medieval and early modern periods. In The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (2000) and, more recently, in a series of important articles, Jeffrey A. Grossman has shed light on what he calls the "Yiddish-German connection."4 Furthermore, building on the formative work of Paul Mendes-Flohr, Steven Aschheim, and Michael Brenner, a number of scholars, including Delphine Bechtel, Allison Schachter, Rachel Seelig, and Nick Block, have highlighted the generative encounter between German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews during World War I and the interwar period. David Groiser, Armin Eidherr, Thomas Soxberger, Efrat Gal-Ed, Lea Schäfer, and Kalman Weiser have further explored topics such as the "problem" of translating from Yiddish into German, the place of Yiddish culture in Austria-Hungary, the phenomenon of linguistic imitation, and the fraught history of Yiddish linguistics in Germany. Taken together, these diverse (and not always cohesive) groupings of scholars have created an open field of interdisciplinary research—what might be termed "German-Yiddish Studies"—that participates in a larger multilingual turn pioneered by scholars such as Dan Miron, Benjamin Harshav, and Chana Kronfeld in the academic study...