Yiddishist movement
Yiddishism (
19th Century Origins
The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement that arose in the late 18th century played a large role in rejecting Yiddish as a Jewish language. However, many maskilim, particularly in the Russian Empire, expanded the Yiddish press to use it as a tool to spread their enlightenment ideas, thereby building a platform for future Yiddishists. Aleksander Zederbaum, a prominent member of the Haskalah, founded the influential Yiddish periodical Kol Mevasser, which would become a mainstay of the Yiddish press, including not only news but also stories and several novels in serialization.[5]
In 1861,
Although an adherent of the Enlightenment, [Lifshitz] broke with its sterile anti-Yiddish philosophy, to become an early ideologue of Yiddishism and of Yiddish-language planning. He courageously stood up for the denigrated folk tongue, calling for its elevation and cultivation. He did this in the form of articles in the weekly Kol-mevaser (in the 1860s) and in his excellent Russian-Yiddish and Yiddish-Russian dictionaries [...].[7]
Several prominent Yiddish authors also emerged in this time, transforming the perception of Yiddish from a "jargon" of no literary value into an accepted artistic language. Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz are now seen as the basis for classic Yiddish fiction and are thereby highly influential in the Yiddishist movement.[8][9]
The Czernowitz Conference
From 30th of August to 4th of September 1908, "The Conference for the Yiddish Language" (קאָנפֿערענץ פֿאָר דער ייִדישער שפּראַך, Konferents for der Yidisher Shprakh) also known as "The Czernowitz Conference" (טשערנאָוויצער קאָנפֿערענץ, Tshernovitser Konferents) took place in the Austro-Hungarian city of
Further developments
YIVO
In 1925
Soviet Russia - The Bund
In the Soviet Union during the 1920s, Yiddish was promoted as the language of the Jewish proletariat.
In 1928, the Soviet Union created the
United States
As many Eastern European Jews began to emigrate to the
Yiddish also became the language of Jewish labor and political movements in the US. The majority of the Yiddish-speaking political parties from the Pale of Settlement had equivalents in the United States. Notably, even the Zionist parties, like the North-American branch of Poalei-Zion, published much of their material in Yiddish rather than Hebrew.[21] Further, at the beginning of the 20th century, American Jewish radicals also printed many political newspapers and other materials. These included the newspaper Forverts, which began as a socialist endeavor, and the Freie Arbeiter Stimme founded by anarchists.[22]
The Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews that came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were also often underpaid and overworked in unsafe conditions, resulting in the creation of many Jewish unions. Notably, the United Hebrew Trades was a collective of labor unions founded in 1888, eventually representing over 250,000 members. Forverts, and other leftist Yiddishist newspapers, were instrumental in organizing and recruiting for these organizations.[23]
Owing in a large part to the efforts of the Yiddishist movement, Yiddish, before World War II, was becoming a major language, spoken by over 11,000,000 people.[24]
Contemporary Yiddishism
The Holocaust, however, led to a large decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive European Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Around 5 million, or 85%, of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, were speakers of Yiddish.[25]
Additionally, the revival of the Hebrew language as the national language of Israel, created a significant decline in the use of Yiddish in the daily Jewish life.[26] To some, Yiddish was seen as the language of the Jewish people in diaspora and believed its use should be extinguished in the early establishment of Israel.[27] Di Goldene Keyt was a literary journal started by Avrom Sutzkever in 1949 in an attempt to bridge the gap between Yiddish and Hebrew literature.[28] In this journal, Yiddish and Hebrew poems and pieces of literature were published but much of Sutzkever’s work went unrecognized until the 1980s because of the fierce rivalry between Hebraists and Yiddishists.
However, Yiddish did not become a completely “dead” language after the Holocaust. In the mid 20th century there was the establishment of the Yungntruf, a movement for young Yiddish speakers which still continues today. The Yungntruf movement also created the Yiddish Farm in 2012, a farm in New York which offers an immersive education for students to learn and speak in Yiddish. The use of Yiddish is also now offered as a language on Duolingo, used throughout the social media platforms of Jews, and is offered as a language in schools, on an international scale.[29] Particularly in the United States, the use of Yiddish has become a part of the identity of young Jewish Americans ranging from queer to orthodox individuals.
Additionally, the decline of secular Yiddish education after the Holocaust encouraged the creation of summer programs and university courses at more than 50 institutions catered to Yiddish learning.[1] Scholars including Uriel Weinreich, Mordkhe Schaechter, and Marvin Herzog were especially influential in establishing American academic Yiddish programs.
See also
- Anti-Yiddish sentiment
- Yiddish literature
- Yiddish symbols
- War of the Languages
- Jewish political movements
- California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language
- L. L. Zamenhof § Work on Yiddish language and Jewish issues — the first Yiddish grammar, published only partially. It proposed a romanized version based on the Białystok (Northeastern) dialect, as a unifying language for the Jews of the Russian Empire.
References
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- ISBN 0-313-24593-2. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
- ISBN 0-8018-8188-9. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
- ISSN 0309-2984.
- ^ OCLC 60373499.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8232-1695-6.
- ^ Schaechter, Mordkhe. "Yiddish language modernization and lexical elaboration", in : Language Reform: History and Future, ed. by Istvan Fodor, Vol. III, Hamburg, 1984, pp. 195-196.
- ISBN 978-0-7914-2601-2.
- ^ Madison, Charles Allan (1968). Yiddish literature; its scope and major writers. Internet Archive. New York, F. Ungar Pub. Co.
- ^ "Yiddish and Yiddishism: A Jewish Nationalist Ideology". h-net.org. 1999. Retrieved 2019-11-12.
- ^ "YIVO | Czernowitz Conference". yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved 2024-04-19.
- ISBN 978-0-253-04518-8.
- ^ "NEW TRENDS IN INTERWAR YIDDISH CULTURE", The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 83–97, retrieved 2024-04-19
- ISSN 0032-2970.
- ^ "YIVO | Language: Yiddish". yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved 2024-04-09.
- ISSN 0025-4878.
- ^ In standard Yiddish: ייִדישע אױטאָנאָמע געגנט, yidishe oytonome gegnt
- ISBN 0-8147-8093-8. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
- ^ Cohen, Sarah Blacher (1983). From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen. Indiana University Press. p. 233. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
- ISBN 978-1-59213-872-2. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
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- ^ Herberg, Will (1952). "The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States". The American Jewish Year Book. 53: 3–74 – via JSTOR.
- ISBN 0-521-77215-X.
- ^ Solomo Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3.
- ^ "Is the War Over Yet? | Mimeo". mimeo.dubnow.de (in German). 2023-12-18. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
- ISSN 0026-9271.
- ^ "Is the War Over Yet? | Mimeo". mimeo.dubnow.de (in German). 2023-12-18. Retrieved 2024-04-19.
- ISSN 1527-2028.
Sources
- Gennady Estraikh. “A Quest for Yiddishland: The 1937 World Yiddish Cultural Congress.” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, no. 17 (2020).
- Joshua A. Fishman: Attracting a Following to High-Culture Functions for a Language of Everyday Life: The Role of the Tshernovits Language Conference in the ‘Rise of Yiddish,’ International Journal of the Sociology of Language 24, 1980, S. 43–73.
- Joshua A. Fishman: Ideology, Society and Language. The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum; Karoma Publ., Ann Arbor 1987, ISBN 0-89720-082-9.
- Joshua A. Fishman: The Tshernovits Conference Revisited: The ‘First World Conference for Yiddish’ 85 Years Later, in: The Earliest Stage of Language Planning, Berlin, 1993 S. 321–331.
- Gitelman, Zvi. “The Divergent Fates of Yiddish and Hebrew.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35, no. 1/4 (2017): 417–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44983551.
- Emanuel S. Goldsmith: Modern Yiddish culture. The story of the Yiddish language movement. Fordham Univ Press, New York 1976, reprint 2000 ISBN 0-8232-1695-0.
- Fox, Sandra. “‘The Passionate Few’: Youth and Yiddishism in American Jewish Culture, 1964 to Present.” Jewish social studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 1–34.
- Herbert J. Lerner: The Tshernovits Language Conference. A Milestone in Jewish Nationalist Thought. New York NY 1957 (Masters Essay. Columbia University).
- Katz, Dovid. "Language: Yiddish." YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe 31 October 2011. 14 March 2024 <https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Language/Yiddish>.
- Mitchell, Bruce. “Yiddish and the Hebrew Revival: A New Look at the Changing Role of Yiddish.” Monatshefte 90, no. 2 (1998): 189–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30153700.
- Panczyk, Jowita. 2023. “Is the War Over Yet?” Mimeo. December 18, 2023. https://mimeo.dubnow.de/is-the-war-over-yet/.
- Pinsker, Shachar. “Choosing Yiddish in Israel: Yung Yisroel between Home and Exile, the Center and the Margins.” In Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, 277-294. Wayne State UP, 2013.
- Shanes, Joshua. “Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism.” Monatshefte, vol. 90, no. 2, 1998, pp. 178–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30153699. Accessed 15 Mar. 2024. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.middlebury.edu/stable/30153699?seq=8
- Zohar, Emma. “Bread, Butter and Education: The Yiddishist Movements in Poland, 1914–1916.” The Jewish Experience of the First World War. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2019. 67–84. Web.
External links
- First Yiddish Language Conference, Czernowitz, August 30-September 3, 1908.