The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture

201 Pages·2010·0.609 MB·English

by  David E. Fishman

THE RISE OF
MODERN YIDDISH
CULTURE
PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN
AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
Jonathan Harris, Editor
THE RISE OF
M O D E R N
Y I D D I S H
C U LT U R E
n
David E. Fishman
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Copyright © 2005, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
First paperback edition, 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
isbn 13: 978-0-8229-6076-8
isbn 10: 0-8229-6076-1
Contents
n
Preface vii
PART I: TSARIST RUSSIA
1. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture: An Overview 3
2. The Politics of Yiddish 18
3. Language and Revolution: Hevrat Mefitse Haskalah in 1905 33
4. The Bund’s Contribution 48
5. Reinventing Community 62
PART II: POLAND BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS
6. New Trends in Interwar Yiddish Culture 83
7. The Judaism of Secular Yiddishists 98
8. Commemoration and Cultural Conflict:
The Vilna Gaon’s Bicentennary 114
9. Max Weinreich and the Development of YIVO 126
10. Embers Plucked from the Fire:
The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna 139
Notes 155
Selected Bibliography 177
Index 183
v

Preface
n
This book examines the development of Yiddish culture in its east
European context. It is an attempt to view Yiddish culture histori-
cally, that is, to connect its development to social and political condi-
tions and to broader intellectual currents among east European Jews.
It also evaluates the position of Yiddish in east European Jewish cul-
ture as a whole, which was, from the second half of the nineteenth
century on, trilingual—written, performed, and lived in Hebrew, Yid-
dish, and either Russian or Polish.
While modern Yiddish literature has received extensive scholarly
attention, this book’s point of departure is the view that Yiddish culture
did not consist of poetry and artistic prose alone, but embraced all
forms of writing, including political and philosophic discourse, jour-
nalism, and scholarship. It also examines the institutional infrastruc-
ture that modern Yiddish culture, like all modern cultures, developed
in order to sustain itself and flourish: the daily and periodical press,
publishing houses, libraries, theaters, literary and cultural associa-
tions, schools and academies. It pays special attention to the relation-
ship between Yiddish culture and the Jewish national and social move-
ments in east European Jewry, including Zionism and Bundism, and
the “language question” that arose in the Russian Jewish intelligentsia
at the turn of the century.
In considering the rise of modern Yiddish culture, this book gives
sociology priority over ideology. Many scholars have presented the
changing attitude toward Yiddish among the Jewish literary and intel-
lectual elite as the paramount development leading to the rise of Yid-
dish. I consider the shifts in ideas and attitudes on Yiddish to be one
factor among many. The dramatic emergence of a new, large Yiddish
readership, with new intellectual needs and expectations, was no less
important a factor. The new readership/audience was itself an impe-
tus for the intelligentsia to reevaluate its attitude toward Yiddish.
vii
viii PREFACE
Many have assumed that modern Yiddish culture was proletarian
based and Socialist oriented. This view is challenged in several chap-
ters. The rise of Yiddish cut across socioeconomic classes, and much of
the Jewish middle class (especially those who would be classified by
Marxists as petit bourgeois) actively partook of Yiddish books, newspa-
pers, theater performances, and concerts. Yiddish became a major ve-
hicle for Zionist journalism. And, to complicate matters even further,
the commitment of the Jewish Workers’ Bund to Yiddish emerged
gradually, and its relationship toward modern Yiddish literature was
complexly ambivalent.
The rise of Yiddish culture was not a smooth social process but one
that was highly contested and debated by the Jewish intelligentsia.
Contempt for Yiddish as a jargon or corrupted German was as old as
the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) movement. What was new at the
turn of the twentieth century was the emergence of a pro-Yiddish in-
telligentsia, which embraced the language, its literature, and its cul-
ture as values. Several chapters explore the varieties of this pro-
Yiddish orientation, and the Yiddishist movement, in eastern Europe.
Yiddishism was predicated on certain Jewish nationalist and pop-
ulist ideas: the Jews needed to preserve their linguistic distinctiveness
as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora. On the
other hand, the linguistic chasm that had separated the Jewish intelli-
gentsia from the Jewish masses needed to be eliminated. The intelli-
gentsia needed to draw near to the masses and learn from the latter’s
accumulated wisdom, as embodied in their language and folklore.
This common core of Yiddishism was embraced by a large part of the
Jewish intelligentsia from 1905 on: Bundists, non-Bundist socialists,
socialist Zionists, liberal Diaspora Nationalists, and even a few general
Zionists.
Whether the rise of Yiddish signaled a radical shift in the content
and direction of Jewish culture was a subject of debate among Yid-
dishists. For Chaim Zhitlovsky, the rise of Yiddish and anticipated de-
cline of Hebrew marked a shift from a religious-dominated culture to a
thoroughly secular and European one. Language would be the glue of
Jewish group cohesiveness, not content. Modern Yiddish culture did
not need to have particularly Jewish content, any more than French
PREFACE ix
culture needed to be uniquely French, let alone Catholic, in its con-
tent. But for I. L. Peretz, it was imperative that the new Yiddish culture
inherit the riches of the old, Jewish religious culture, from the Bible
through Hasidic thought, which had been created primarily in He-
brew, and that modern Yiddish culture perpetuate its spirit. For Peretz,
Yiddish could only legitimately claim to be a Jewish national language
once all great Jewish cultural treasures, such as the Bible and
Midrash, would be available in it. Modern Yiddish culture arose in ten-
sion between the positions of Zhitlovsky and Peretz.
The tension is best illustrated in the curricula and textbooks of
modern Yiddish schools. While it is commonly assumed that Yiddish
schools were staunchly secularist, much traditional Jewish content
was integrated into Yiddish schools under new, transformed rubrics.
Bible could be recast as ancient Jewish history, Midrash and Agadah
could be considered folk literature, the holidays and their rituals were
national customs, Hasidic tales were folklore. Even the Vilna Gaon, an
ascetic and elitist and an arch opponent of Hasidism, could be appro-
priated by some Yiddishists as a folk hero. Furthermore, Yiddish litera-
ture could itself be used as a source to teach children about the Sab-
bath and holidays. Thus the break between traditional Judaism and
secular Yiddish nationalism was far from total and was often less dra-
matic in practice than in theory.
One of Yiddishism’s most daunting tasks was the creation of an in-
telligentsia, which would speak Yiddish at home and in its own circles
and would satisfy its cultural needs and aspirations not in Russian or
Polish but in the language of the Jewish masses. The pinnacle of this
effort was the establishment of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO, in
Vilna in 1925, as an institution dedicated to historical, philological, and
sociological scholarship in Yiddish.
n
This book is divided into two sections, on tsarist Russia and on
Poland between the wars. Each section begins with an overview essay
on Yiddish culture in the period under consideration, laying out gen-
eral trends and placing the chapters that follow in their context. The
concluding chapter tells the dramatic story of the fate of YIVO’s library
and archive, and other Judaic collections in Vilna, during the years of