The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire Rakhmiel Peltz Jeffrey A. Grossman . The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany: From the Enlightenment to the Second Empire. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. Pp. x + 258. At this time in history, we come upon an increasing number of scholarly attempts (in symposia, monographs, and encyclopedias) to sum up and evaluate Ashkenazic Jewish history. Absent from these endeavors, however, is a description and analysis of the fabric of family and local culture, of the variety of aspirations and daily routines, in the myriad niches of daily life, from bedroom and kitchen to business office, farm, yeshiva, and beys-medrash. Linking all aspects of Ashkenazic culture in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe is Yiddish. The difficulties that intellectuals have had in dealing with Yiddish from at least the early modern period to the present day have frustrated scholarly attempts to present us with a panoramic grasp of the life in which Ashkenazic Jews are rooted. Grossman focuses on the writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German thinkers (largely non-Jewish) that touch on their attitudes concerning Yiddish. An understanding of their complex ambivalence, as Grossman describes it, will go a long way toward aiding an evaluation of the life and contributions of Ashkenazic Jews. Grossman sets out to describe the image of Yiddish within German-language culture in Germany. He uses the term "discourse" to identify the site of his analysis. Discourse implies discussion and conversation, and, indeed, the author prepares us for his concentration on interaction—on the reception of one culture, Yiddish, by another, German (p. 2). However, the promised dynamic of intercultural contact is not evident in this book. What we have instead are statements by major thinkers who refer to the Yiddish language, most often without clear reference to earlier views by other thinkers. To these are added interpretation by Grossman. Grossman's book will certainly remain the standard work in which one would search for the attitudes toward Yiddish of such writers as Moses Mendelssohn, Herder, von Humboldt, Zunz, Graetz, the playwrights von Voss and Sessa, and the novelists Freytag and Raabe. This group represents a mix of Jews and non-Jews, and it is certainly not clear that their writings in the German language represent one culture. In between, Grossman discusses the statements and publications of certain scholarly Christian missionaries. The history of missionary publications is in part the intellectual home [End Page 369] for Grossman's book, a history of scholarship on Yiddish. In the beginning part of the twentieth century, Ber Borochov (1913)1 and Max Weinreich (1923; 1993)2 had recognized that much of the early reference to Yiddish and analysis of its structure were not, as one might have expected, products of Jewish scholarship that attempted to explicate the historical and cultural traditions of European Jews in order to provide for the internal continuity of that culture. Rather they were explorations, by scholars from outside the tradition, that strove, among other things, to convert the Jews. It is not surprising, therefore, that Grossman's analysis of German-language references to Yiddish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries neither forms a coherent whole thematically nor convinces the reader of a historic progression of an understanding of the structure and societal role of Yiddish. For example, von Humboldt never writes directly about Yiddish, and even Mendelssohn, whom Grossman deems to have devalued Yiddish, presents Yiddish "as an acceptable spoken idiom, but not as an acceptable language for intellectual discourse" (p. 82). This is not much different from the expressions of such major Yiddish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Abramovitsh and Shtif, who, in their autobiographies, recounted their first attempts at writing in their own vernacular. In fact, Grossman seems to wish that "Mendelssohn had sought a positive revaluation of Yiddish," which might "have helped set in motion a different set of notions about language and culture . . . for the next century and a half" (p. 87). The centrality of the writings about Yiddish within the oeuvre of the major figures that Grossman selects is not clear. Neither does the reader come away convinced that it...