Yiddish Books Research Articles

National Yiddish Book Center

National Yiddish Book Center

Books for the Masses: The Amsterdam Yiddish Book Industry, 1650-1800

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Amsterdam functioned as the European printing centre of Yiddish books. Texts in the Ashkenazi vernacular were published in the city for the benefit of the local reading public, and these books were also distributed throughout the Ashkenazi diaspora, in central and eastern Europe. Two basic guidelines directed the work of Yiddish book agents in Amsterdam: printing was considered a service to Ashkenazim and their communities: nevertheless, printing of Yiddish books also needed to be a commercially sustainable project. Therefore, books dealing with religion, tradition and didactical literature comprised the majority of the printed output. These were considered as practical (printed in Yiddish for the benefit of the masses who could not read Hebrew) and thus their production also included a commercial logic. Between circa 1650 and 1800 more than 500 Yiddish books were published, including texts in various genres. The modernization process that encompassed Jewish communities in Western Europe also signalled the downfall of Yiddish book production in Amsterdam, and the end of a period of Yiddish literature composed and published in West Yiddish, a dialect that was pushed aside by the emerging Eastern European, modern, Yiddish.

Yiddish in Cuba: A Love Story

YIDDISH IN CUBA:A LOVE STORY by Rosa Perelmuter University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill IT was a warm summer evening in Durham, North Carolina, but I was shivering as we approached the door of a lovely home where a gathering of Yiddish speakers was congregated. A colleague who heard that I had studied Yiddish in Cuba had invited me to the Yiddish Kreis (‘circle’) to which she belonged. I had accepted without hesitation but now, as I crossed the threshold and was greeted by the hostess in fluent Yiddish, I sensed that I had somehow taken a wrong turn. I had not spoken Yiddish since I was a school girl in my native Cuba, where I attended a bilingual (Spanish-Yiddish) school, but that had been decades ago. What was I thinking? I tried to answer the smiling face whose words I comprehended – I thought I could answer – but I couldn’t remember what to say beyond “gut ovent” (good evening). Where had all that Yiddish gone? All those years of study (ten years, to be exact), half a day in Yiddish, half in Spanish, at the Colegio Hebreo Autónomo del Centro Israelita de Cuba – how could I have forgotten all that I learned there? Well, as it turned out, I hadn’t forgotten everything. After a while, with some gentle prodding by the other members of the Kreis, some reading, and some patient use of the dictionary, I discovered that I was still semi-fluent and that I remembered more than I initially thought. I also discovered, to my amusement, and thanks to my new friends, that I spoke Yiddish with a Cuban accent. Who knew? I don’t know why that should have come as a surprise to me, but it did. After all, I speak English with an accent, but while my Spanish accent in English is relatively minimal (I think), in my spoken Yiddish the sounds of Spanish are apparently much more pronounced. And this brings me to the topic of my essay, Yiddish and Spanish, Yiddish in Cuba. I want to take you on a brief historical trip to the island of my birth, to the languages of my 133 youth, and then end with a trip up north, to Amherst, Massachusetts, and its National Yiddish Book Center, the new depository of many of the Yiddish books of Cuba. Havana’s famous “Parque Central” was the unlikely gathering place for many of Cuba’s Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 1920s. They gathered there daily and held debates, lectures, literary tertulias. More often than not, they would speak in Russian but, as the immigrant population changed almost daily, Yiddish started taking over as the language of choice for Eastern European Jews. The group became known as the Yidishe Kulturgrupe, and they even organized an amateur dramatic group under the direction of A. Wallenstein that staged several performances of four Yiddish plays (Kahn 33). This troupe was succeeded by another headed by Elias Geltman, the Dramatishe Sekzie of the Yiddisher Kultur Tsenter, and during 1924-25 it performed seven Yiddish plays. The immigrants turned to the Tsenter for Spanish and English classes since most, if not all, were planning an eventual move to the United States. In addition, the Tsenter provided more opportunities for gatherings , lectures, and debates. In March 1925 the Yiddisher Kultur Tsenter changed its name – now in Spanish – to the Centro Hebreo. The Centro’s membership included many left-wing sympathizers and thus eventually the more radical members of the group (i.e., the communists) formed a new organization, the Kultur Farain-Unión Cultural Hebrea. This group was joined by the Centro Hebreo’s Dramatishe Sektzie, and their “Dramatisher Kreis in Havana” produced seventeen Yiddish plays during the winter of 1925-26. As Jeffrey Kahn explains, “Even the Farain’s most bitter political opponents considered the artistic standard of the Dramatisher Kreis the highest in Cuba” (36). The Centro Hebreo soon gave way to the Centro Israelita, which opened its doors on September 1, 1925. Jay Levinson notes that “By 1925 there were between 7,500 and 8,000 Jews in Cuba. About 2,700 were Sephardim, and...

Advertising Yiddish Books: Solomon Zalman London's Koheles Shlomo

Advertising Yiddish Books: Solomon Zalman London's Koheles Shlomo

Functioning Within a Diasporic Third Space: The Case of Early Modern Yiddish

Yiddish plays a particularly important and intriguing role in Ashkenazi history. It is a language that originated on German soil and subsequently became a powerful Jewish language that had the potential to foster cohesion among the various Ashkenazi communities and thus also supported the formation of an Ashkenazi diaspora. While Yiddish is assumed to have emerged by the end of the first millennium, and Yiddish writings were penned in manuscripts from the thirteenth century on, the following arguments focus on the period after the invention of print, when books became a vital cultural medium. Their growing distribution became a crucial factor in standardizing Yiddish and its usage, and made it a central communication instrument within Ashkenazi society and culture. Despite a certain reluctance to accept Yiddish as a legitimate vehicle of Jewish culture on the side of the rabbinical elite, Yiddish books (like books in nonJewish languages) became an instrument of change, a modernizing force. l How should we then understand the Ashkenazi diaspora in the early modern period?2 How did Yiddish play a role in formation of this dia-

Yiddish and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Sefer mides (Book of Virtues), the first comprehensive ethical work published in Yiddish, appeared in Isny, Germany, in 1542, seven years after the first Yiddish book was printed.1 Like its generic predecessors it was an adaptation of a Hebrew work; unlike them it was published first in Yiddish and only about four decades later in the original language and with a different title: Sefer orhot zadikim (The Ways of the Righteous). 2 At the end of Sefer mides two pages are appended. They are relevant to the book but not to its contents and absolutely independent of the Hebrew original. The conventional opening formula honoring God Almighty is followed by the dedication of the book to women and maidens and first of all the noble and chaste Frau Morada, doctoress of the liberal art of medicine, now residing in Gunzburg.3 For all of them, says the writer, as well as for anyone who reads this book and has difficulty in doing so, the rules of reading Yiddish shall be clarified so that he or she may work it out. He then proceeds to explain that yud designates hirik or zeyre, alef means kamaz or patah, vav stands for

A Library of Hope and Destruction: The Yiddish Book Series ‘Dos poylishe yidntum’ (Polish Jewry) 1946–1966

A Library of Hope and Destruction: <i>The Yiddish Book Series ‘Dos poylishe yidntum’ (Polish Jewry) 1946–1966</i>

:Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

1. The Invention of a Language: Yiddish among the European Vernaculars 2. The Emergence of Yiddish Literature and the Crisis in Jewish Society 3. The Printing, Distribution, and Audience of Yiddish Books 4. Bilingualism and the Development of Old Yiddish LIterature 5. Yiddish Bibles 6. Medieval Epic and Romance in Yiddish 7. Elia Bahur Levita and the 'romanzo cavalleresco' 8. Books of Morality and Custom 9. Prayer in the Vernacular 10. Yiddish Narrative 11. Terrestrial Suffering in a Topsy-Turvy World Conclusion: From the Old to the New

A Chimney on the Canadian Prairies: Yiddish-Language Libraries in Western Canada, 1900 to the Present

Yiddish book culture did and does exist in Western Canada, even outside the vibrant Jewish culture of Winnipeg, in communities whose geographic isolation from the Yiddish-speaking centers may seem extreme. Two libraries may serve as examples of the variety of manifestations of Yiddish reading in these localities: the library of the farm community of Edenbridge, Saskatchewan, which may be said to be emblematic of cultural organization in these rural colonies, which existed from before World War I until the 1960s; and the Kirman Library at the Vancouver Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, itself an unusual example of a Yiddish secular school, which is now the last specifically Yiddish library in Western Canada. Finally, the meaning of Yiddish books in these independent libraries, far from institutional support or a critical mass of Jews, is examined.

On pre‐modern Hebrew and Yiddish encyclopedias

The use of the term “encyclopedias” for pre‐modern writings is problematical. Nonetheless, medieval and early modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature comprises a number of texts that reveal encyclopedic features and therefore can be considered to belong to the genre of encyclopedias. Their authors strove to transmit introductory knowledge on a broad variety of subjects and to make it easily accessible to their readers. As was the case in the non‐Jewish world, the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries bore witness to heightened encyclopedic activity among Jews. Jewish encyclopedias were often composed in times of transition, change and crisis both in the non‐Jewish and Jewish worlds. They may be viewed as responding to changed paradigms and as attempts to provide guidance. This article considers the “encyclopedic” nature of three major thirteenth‐century Hebrew texts (Midrash hahokhmah, De‘ot hafilosofim, Sha‘ar hashamayim), three pre‐modern Yiddish books (Brantshpigel, Sefer Lev Tov, Simkhes Hanefesh) and the late eighteenth‐century Hebrew Sefer haberit, paying attention to the socio‐intellectual context in which they were composed.

The Future of Yiddish -- in English: Field Notes from the New Ashkenaz

The Future of Yiddish—in English:Field Notes from the New Ashkenaz Dara Horn (bio) Last year, I came across an article by Janet Hadda in Pakn Treger, the journal of the National Yiddish Book Center, entitled "Imagining Yiddish: A Future for the Soul of Ashkenaz."1 The article, more memoir than scholarly treatise, discussed her so-called defection from the ranks of secular Yiddish supporters, which began when she publicly expressed her belief that Yiddish as a living language has no real future. The ire raised by this idea in certain circles made her think hard about where and how she saw the future of Yiddish, and she reached a conclusion both astonishing and inspiring. In the course of her essay, Hadda discusses several of the purported heirs to the legacy of Yiddish culture. First, she addresses Haredi communities, where Yiddish surely has its most obvious future as a spoken language. But she knows that the lack of interest in imaginative literature in these communities, along with their establishment of themselves explicitly against the possibility of reinventing tradition, makes these communities precisely antithetical to the very aspects of Eastern European Yiddish culture that tend to matter most to those who wish to revive or remember it. Then she addresses the world of what she calls "neo-Ashkenaz"—secular and sometimes non-Jewish Yiddish enthusiasts who often treat the Yiddish legacy as either a hobby or a crusade. Hadda sees this cohort as largely in denial of Yiddish's obvious decline, and she finds it difficult to envision any prospects for a movement whose energies are devoted more to a resurrection of the past than to a natural development for the future. The true inheritors of Ashkenaz, Hadda ultimately claims, are today's young American Jewish writers, who are writing in English while embracing the same themes and ideas that modern Yiddish writers once [End Page 471] stirred to life. Speaking of these writers, she writes: "Their existence is a comfort, a nekhome, not to be demeaned or denied, but to be heralded, cherished, and admired. Through their work, the culture—and with it, the soul—of Ashkenaz, of Jewish Eastern Europe, will continue to breathe fire and light."2 As both a fledgling Yiddish scholar and a young American Jewish novelist, I read Hadda's article many, many times. Sometimes I read it and felt ennobled; more often, I felt like Tevye, crying out "Katoynti!" and groveling before Sholem Aleichem, the real artist, before demanding his half of the royalties. After all, are today's American Jewish authors worthy of becoming a link in the golden chain of Yiddish literature? How could we ever be, without even a language to call our own? It has been said in Yiddish that shoulders are from God, and burdens too. But isn't it unfair to burden American Jewish writers with the weight of these giants of the past? Or is it generous to allow these writers an opportunity to stand on the giants' shoulders? Who has clean enough hands and a pure enough heart to take hold of the goldene keyt? I will leave to others the question of the future of Yiddish af Yidish, of where the thousand-year-old language of Ashkenazi Jews is headed, if anywhere, and why. I do not yet feel prepared to dissect the arguments Hadda has so eloquently made for American writers in English as the heirs to this tradition. Instead, I will use her conclusion as my starting point—because the implications of her idea are so startling, humbling, and perhaps even inspiring—by offering you a few of my own personal field notes from this world of Yiddish-in-English, of this new Ashkenaz: where it came from, where it is now, and where it might be going. My first novel emerged out of jealousy. As I began my graduate studies, I immersed myself in Hebrew and Yiddish literature and soon found myself incredibly envious of the writers I was studying. I didn't envy them the old-world Eastern European setting that enchants so many people today—I had read too many Haskalah writers for that. What I envied of these...

The expansion of the visual: Reflections on sixteenth century illuminated Yiddish books

In her book on the medieval paradigms of memory, Mary Carruthers emphasized that in medieval culture the visual functioned as the tex tual. Artistic images referred to texts, made sense solely within the textual tradition, and apparently did not live a life of their own. Me dieval signs were first and foremost iconographie destined to be read and remembered, appealing to, and guided by, memory.1 What hap pened in early modernity was exactly the opposite: words started to function as visual signs that appeal to the imagination. Words were to be watched, however, more than read. Watching pushed aside reading, and the visual gained an upper hand over the auditory. Turned into ornaments, letters acquired independence and value similar to other visual signs. In order to recognize, recollect, and identify, one used visual imagination more often than verbal memorization. More and more often, recognition and identification required viewing and seeing. Shakespeare rarely imposed his imperative mood on his spectator; when he did so, he emphasized the visual, repeating together with his King Lear: "Look there! Look there!" Diane Wolfthal's new book contextualizes sixteenth-century Jewish culture against the backdrop of the early modern expansion of the visual. It further elaborates Wolfthal fruitful approach to art seen as a source, among other things, of cultural history.2 What did Ashke nazic Jews in Northern Italy who visualized their perceptions in book illustrations think about contemporary Jewish society? What did their

Apostasy, Fraud, and the Beginnings of Hebrew Printing in Cracow

One of the most unusual episodes in the annals of Hebrew printing involved the first Jewish printers in Poland—Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz—who began to print in Cracow or, more likely, in neighboring Kazimierz, in 1534.1 Within a year of opening their business, the brothers had produced five relatively short titles, all of which were first editions and four of which were the first Yiddish books ever printed. After about a year of work, the Helicz brothers gave up publishing only to return to the trade about three years later, when they published several classic—and more substantial—rabbinic works in quick succession. However, it was not Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz who returned to the Hebrew publishing business in Cracow in 1538 but rather Paul, Andreas, and Johannes Helicz, neochristiani.2

Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy (review)

Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy, by Diane Wolfthal. Brill Series in Jewish Studies, 36. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 283 pp. $146.00. The purpose of this important study is to question series of assumptions widespread particularly in field of art history: images of ritual in early Yiddish books are mirrors of reality; that their Christian counterparts are neutral and objective; that illustrations in secular Yiddish books are irrelevant to understanding of Jewish history; that art history should focus on beautiful images; and that Jews in past formed uniform group, who shared view that rabbis were central and women peripheral to their society (p. 203). The author attempts to refute these assumptions by means of analysis of five profusely illustrated volumes that were created in northern Italy during sixteenth century (p. xxv): three books of customs (a manuscript, Paris BN ms. heb. 586, and two printed books, Venice 1593 and 1600) and two secular books-the romance, Pariz un viene (1594), and collection of fables, Ki-bukh (1595). Since vague topics designated by book's subtitle never become focus of study, only principle that attempts to unify analysis of these diverse materials is fact that books are all illustrated and in Yiddish, which as principle of cohesion is sometimes too tenuous. The author's strength is in her expert analysis of images and their interrelation with surrounding texts and their connections with their original audiences. The volume's most important accomplishment is its reproduction in high-quality photographs of 188 illustrations from five focal books (about half of which are from Paris manuscript, which are then systematically described and catalogued, pp. 211-250). The volume concludes with very useful bibliography (pp. 251-74) and index. There are, however, several problematic assumptions that complicate analysis, including author's own unacknowledged anti-elitist project, which is manifested in her aggressive challenge to several theses proposed and accepted in still primarily male-dominated scholarly establishment and in her (inconsistent and contradictory) championing of work of non-professional artist of Paris manuscript. First, she sharply castigates several generations of apparently elitist scholars for their descriptions of images in Paris manuscript as coarse, comical and shabby, childish, naive, and caricature-like, primitive, and devoid of all artistic worth (pp. 5, 20), although she then herself consistently echoes those evaluations in her own description of drawings (pp. 15, 20, 21, 69). Secondly, she assumes that audience, patrons, and even authors of books of customs such as ones here analyzed belong to the middle or an intermediate sector of Jewish community, basing this assumption solely on fact that these books are not expensively produced (cf. pp. 14-15, 21, 76). It is thus particularly problematic when she designates scribe/artist of Paris manuscript as a member of middle ranks of Jewish society (p. 63), since he is obviously educated enough not merely to participate passively in textual culture of Judaism, but to synthesize broad range of texts from that learned tradition in order to produce accessible vernacular digest, illustrated by pertinent images that function, as Wolfthal aptly points out, almost as glosses on text (pp. …

“Yiddish Literature for the Masses”?; A Reconsideration of Who Read What in Jewish Eastern Europe

In the early 1880s, the staunch Hebraist and bibliophile Ephraim Deinard (1846–1930) became a reluctant witness to the fast-paced growth of modern Yiddish culture that began in his hometown of Odessa. At the time, Deinard owned a Hebrew bookshop that had been sliding toward bankruptcy until he grudgingly adapted his wares to better reflect the market forces of the Jewish reading culture. In Memories of My People (Zikhronot bat עami), he briefly accounts for (in his view) the ill fortune of being forced to sell the Yiddish books that his customers demanded of him rather than the Hebrew literature he held so dear. Although he mentions a host of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers whom the reader will come to know in the following pages, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to remark upon the catalytic agency he assigns to the Yiddish romance novelist Nakhum Shaykevitsh (aka Shomer) (1849–1905) and Avraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), best known as the father of the Yiddish theatre. Deinard writes:

Diane Wolfthal. Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy. Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies 36. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers ., 2004. xxxiv + 284 pp. + 120 b/w pls. index. append. illus. bibl. $146 ISBN: 90-04-13905-2.

Diane Wolfthal. Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy. Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies 36. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers ., 2004. xxxiv + 284 pp. + 120 b/w pls. index. append. illus. bibl. $146 ISBN: 90-04-13905-2. - Volume 58 Issue 4

An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650-1800

A book without preface is like a body without soul. —Rabbi Meir Crescas, The Book of the Tashbets (Amsterdam, 1741) 1 Much can be gleaned from an introduction or preface about the book to which it is prelude, the author, his ideas, and their context.1 These texts have a distinctive structure and a specific logic, however, and they enable students of book history to propose another angle of research that aims at showing the place and position of the printed matter within a cultural setting. This can be an especially fruitful terrain in the world of Yiddish:a vernacular of the Ashkenazi Diaspora of Europe, a language that Jews spoke throughout the continent regardless of frontiers, a language that formed and united a people and helped forge its unique cultural blend. This was not the Jewish Latin—a fate that befell the scholarly, highbrow Hebrew—Yiddish was a vibrant, living vernacular. Yiddish paratexts of the early modern era can therefore shed light on books, their status and role in Ashkenazi society, and their importance to Jewish culture in Europe. The theory of paratexts, as outlined by Gerard Genette, focuses on works of fiction and describes them as a "threshold of interpretation."2 Paratexts, whether written or devised by authors, publishers, or any other promoter, are designed to persuade people to buy and read the book and [End Page 31] to encourage them to receive the volume in the way they consider appropriate. Paratexts entice the reader to delve into the book and provide clues about how it is constructed, how it was conceived, and its object. The study of paratexts therefore deals with the sociology of literature, the intellectual background of authors, texts and their environment, and their impact on literary criticism. Paratexts enable us to reach beyond a "naïve" approach to literature and reveal an interim stage in book production usually considered to be a merely technical phase but in fact of much greater importance. Paratexts are not external but internal, ulterior literary devices that represent a legitimate section of literary criticism and booklore. Despite Genette's theory, however, paratexts do not operate in one direction only into the text; often the text dictates the structure and content of its paratexts, taking the reader beyond the confines of the text.3 While an author may seek acclaim as an artist and while the publisher may hope for financial success, paratexts operate within a web of considerations. Their object is to support the book while placing it within a wider cultural setting—dominant literary circles of the day, the potential audience among religious and other sections of society, financial considerations, and matters relating to form and content and their interrelation. Authors may not always be interested in these questions, but publishers definitely are. Their concern is to support the author and his book, and their strategy includes paratexts that place the book within a context. Although most of the paratexts discussed here relate to nonfiction, this is no reason not to employ Genette's theory. Their basic function is no different from paratexts in fiction: namely, to persuade people to buy and read the book and to try to influence the way it is received. Clearly, readers view the text of a novel or poem from a specific perspective and exercise a certain freedom in forming an interpretation, so these paratexts may focus on intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic areas not touched on in nonfiction. After all, there is a world of difference between buying an anthology of short stories and buying a grammar or mathematics textbook. Yet this is more a question of content than of form or structure. Nonfiction has its own concerns, and these are reflected in its paratexts, too. As will be seen, publishers of nonfiction were just as keen to control the process of book production, maybe even more so. 2 From its earliest days, the market for Yiddish...

Firing Off a Jewish Canon

Firing Off a Jewish Canon: The Modern Jewish Canon; A Journey Through Language and CultureRuth Wisse has written a very important -- and long overdue -- book on great novels of Jewish literature, focusing on Jewish works of the last century. It is particularly timely because the National Yiddish Book Center recently invited a panel of judges to create a list of the 100 greatest books of Jewish literataure from the Enlightenment to the present, expected to be announced later this year. Wisse's book will undoubtedly make an important contribution to that endeavor.The book is important, Wisse tells us, because teaching Jewish civilization is important its own sake and as a counterpoint to antisemitism, and...learning about the Jews is more important for the future of humankind than learning about their [the Jews'] extinction. I think there is something at least as urgent today that needs to be added as a great virtue of this book: It will strengthen Jewish culture and Jewish identity among many who are unaware of Jewish contributions to world literature.The benefits of the political, social, and economic freedom enjoyed by Jews in the last two centuries have inevitably produced acculturation and assimilation, including vast defections from Judaism -- both as a religious and a national or ethnic identity, identities that are worth preserving. Moreover, the problem has become significantly and increasingly acute even in Israel, where post-Zionist ideology is moving toward a conception of Israeli identity and the Israeli polity as embracing a secular democratic state that has no necessary connection to a concept of Jewish civilization and Jewish culture.This problem, of course, is associated with an important and unique aspect of Judaism, which has been from its inception, both conceptually and practically, a religion and a polity or ethnic political community. So much so, that even Spinoza understood that Jewish ritual was an important part of a Jewish political identity. Unfortunately, he concluded -- with a prescient, if flawed, analysis -- that, in the diaspora, the rituals of Judaism were dispensable, without explaining how a Jewish return to a homeland and nationhood could be achieved if Judaism became just a Unitarian-style religion of universal moral values and behavior over a prolonged period in the diaspora.Ruth Wisse now reminds her Jewish audience -- which, I believe, is the primary audience for this book -- that Judaism, as a civilization, has produced, in addition to its many contributions to economics, law, philosophy, music, and poetry, to name just some of the important aspects of Jewish civilization during the past 2000 years, a body of literature in its principal modern form, the novel, that ranks with the literature of other nations for its artistry and its message of life, of struggle and survival, and sometimes, of individual and national redemption in history.For those who have lived without knowledge of this aspect of Jewish civilization, which, in fact, is almost as long as the history of the novel itself -- or longer, if we consider the novels and other fictional works produced during the Inquisition's reign -- Wisse sets before us a notable and representative sampling of great Jewish novels of the last century that is worthy of respect, of study, of appreciation, and of understanding. In this regard, she has made the beginning of a vital contribution to stemming the tide of continuing defections from Jewish identity, insofar as they are caused by an almost total ignorance of all of the vibrant aspects of Jewish civilization since the loss of Jewish nationhood 2000 years ago and the completion of the Talmud 1500 years ago. That void in Jewish self-knowledge easily becomes a void in Jewish self-respect and, ultimately in Jewish identity and the benefits of its preservation.In addition to noting this crucial objective of this book, there is the related question of the causes of this problem and the importance of Wisse's book, and similar efforts that will surely flow from it, in correcting or ameliorating those causes. …

“Critical Post-Judaism”; or, Reinventing a Yiddish Sensibility in a Postmodern Age

Within months of each other, two articles on Yiddish language and culture appeared in the public press during the summer of 1996. First, in the pages of The New Republic, Harvard's chair of Yiddish Studies. Ruth Wisse, addressed the question of a Yiddish revival in a skeptical, even pessimistic, piece titled “Shul Daze: Is Yiddish Back from the Dead?” Wisse contends that Yiddish no longer has any validity as a vital cultural idiom, and that as it currently exists, in its secular incarnation, it can only be viewed as an object of academic inquiry. She writes of misplaced hopes among various journalists, who call on her for expert confirmation that we are now witnessing a renaissance of this otherwise near-extinct language. Such journalists, explains Wisse, often mention the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts, the Yiddish film retrospectives currently en vogue at urban arts houses, and the international boom in Klezmer music. “I am tempted to tell my callers what they want to hear,” remarks Wisse, “yes, because my students can now study Sholem Aleichem in the original and write Yiddish letters to their grandparents—make that their bobbes and zeydes—a Yiddish renaissance is in the offing. But the reference to my academic post reminds me that I'm not paid to lie” (Wisse 17). Yet perhaps it isn’t really a lie that Wisse is being asked to tell after all. At least, that is what the Forward’s cultural editor Jonathan Rosen would like us to believe. In his “A Dead Language, Yiddish Lives,” published in The New York Times Magazine, Rosen calls attention to the fact that Yiddish, though still largely considered a ghostly remnant of the past, a leftover from the tum-of-thc-century migrations of Jews from Eastern Europe, is now experiencing a new life among younger Jews in the American diaspora, in particular among those searching for a source of identification beyond the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish state. Rosen cites renowned playwright Tony Kushner, who expresses equal disappointment with the state of Israel and melting pot America and, in comparison, views Yiddish culture as “less butch and macho” than Israeli culture; together with other Jews of his generation, Kushner claims that through Yiddish he is “reawakening to Diaspora culture” (Rosen 26). Rosen observes that a growing segment of gay Jews (the Yiddish equivalent to the Act Up slogan, “shvaygen=toyt”—also the title of a Klezmatics record album—adorns a t-shirt in the article's accompanying illustration) have taken to a redefined Yiddishkeit. In recent years, Rosen suggests, diversity has replaced assimilation as an American goal, and in this climate Yiddish may have the chance to flourish again. For Rosen, Yiddish is the language which best represents what he calls “the paradox of the American diaspora: the wish to feel different and at home” (27).

La Littérature Juive en Langue Yiddish (16e-17eSiecle) Crise religieuse, culture vernaculaire et propagation de la foi

Les historiens qui se sont intéressés à la diffusion de la tradition au sein de la société juive ont essentiellement focalisé leurs études sur deux aspects : d'une part, en héritiers des habitudes de pensée nées au 19esiècle, ils ont privilégié une historiographie des grandes figures et des événements marquants du judaïsme ; d'autre part, ils ont fondé leurs recherches sur le dogme de la primauté de l'écriture, au détriment de la transmission orale. Or la culture juive se caractérise par une dialectique permanente entre l'oralité et l'écriture : ces deux registres jouent un rôle complémentaire par rapport au devoir d'enseigner, de transmettre et d'inculquer les fondements de la tradition. Par ailleurs, nombre d'historiens ont mis en lumière les pratiques propres au monde des lettrés, sages ou initiés, qu'on appelle lesh'akhamim ou talmidei h'akhamim.