The City, Sacred and Profane: Between Hebrew and Yiddish in the Fiction of the Early Jewish Enlightenment

Abstract

By now, it is the stuff of cliche to suggest that writers, in reflecting and representing cities, build them as well; that their tools are words and phrases, not cement and steel, and that while the edifices they construct may resemble the geographical spaces they claim to be in many respects, telling differences delight and inspire historians and literary critics alike. If a writer's portrayal of a city and its inhabitants can be compared to a building, the language of the portrayal follows the iron laws of engineering: the contours and possibilities of a language contours and possibilities shaped by historical moments and forces delimit and shape the finished product in ways just as important as the choice of words within that language. Questions of authors' language choices have always been central to the study of the early Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. In fact, the Haskala itself has often been portrayed as a movement concerning itself largely, if not solely, with questions of language; linguistic reform becomes a symbol of the tension between maskilic desire and contempor-