The Emancipation of Yiddish

The Nahman-Perl rivalry is an exemplum of the dialectic between continuity and change, integration and rebellion, that has structured the basic patterns of controversy in all forms of the Jewish spirit for the past two hundred years. It is the great debate on Emancipation and its discontents. The sudden access to modern life effected by Emancipation gave rise to an intoxicated embrace of the new and rejection of the old, but fears of the eventual consequences of this embrace in turn fostered a spirit of qualification that sought to preserve tradition in a modern age. Perhaps no area of Jewish life had so much invested in the promise of Emancipation, was so brutally crushed by its failure, and then revised its assumptions so profoundly, as Yiddish culture. It has been the particular fate of the study of Yiddish to continue after the loss of its cultural base. To examine the pattern of its rebirth against the backdrop of recent history is to discover how scholarship revived the essential debate after the culture itself was decimated, and to appreciate anew the relation of criticism to culture

Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore

“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele's Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish, di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people. This article is part of a broader study of the Red Jews in Jewish popular culture from the Middle Ages through modernity. It is partially based on a chapter from my book, Umstrittene Erlöser: Politik, Ideologie und jüdisch-christlicher Messianismus in Deutschland, 1500–1600 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). Several postdoctoral fellowships have generously supported my research on the Red Jews: a Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Fellowship of the German Academic Foundation, a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica/Alan M. Stroock Fellowship for Advanced Research in Judaica at Harvard University, a research fellowship from the Heinrich Hertz-Foundation, and a YIVO Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship. I thank the organizers of and participants in the colloquia and conferences where I have presented this material in various forms as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of AJS Review for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Dauber and Elisheva Carlebach of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, where I was a Visiting Scholar in the fall of 2009, for their generous encouragement to write this article. Sue Oren considerably improved my English. The style employed for Romanization of Yiddish follows YIVO's transliteration standards. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Latin are my own. Quotations from the Bible follow the JPS translation, and those from the Babylonian Talmud are according to the Hebrew-English edition of the Soncino Talmud by Isidore Epstein

The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg

In the first two decades of this century, when literary manifestos were very much in vogue, the burning issue was that of cultural renewal: Was it to come from within, by reappropriating the past, or from without, by celebrating the present and incorporating its chaotic norms? Neo-classicists and symbolists squared off against Futurists and Expressionists. The revival of folklore, myth and metaphysics was countered by the supremacy of the masses, the machine and the psyche. One rarely thinks of editors and translators, those workhorses of the literary establishment, venturing forth into such treacherous terrain, but as Dov Sadan was the first to note, the Jewish centers of Odessa and Warsaw with Bialik at the head of one and Frischman at the head of the other, were divided over this very issue, and much of their competing energies were channeled into the work of translation. Each was additionally in charge of the means of production—Bialik as editor-in-chief of the Dvir Publishing House and Frischman of Stiebel—so that policy was translated into the distribution of real books

Bialik in the Ghettos

Great books were being sold for a song in the ghetto streets and later would be abandoned and recycled for toilet paper. A universal Jewish culture now lay in ruins. Yet a short list of titles might still appeal to those readers living within an unfolding situation of absolute extremity, readers who hungered for an accurate description of their own historical condition. How different were those fortunate Jews in Erets Israel, that tiny handful of Zionist youth who lived at the farthest possible remove from Bialik's poem. While they have been faulted for consistently misreading "Be'ir hahareigah" (Shapira 2005), the same poem was reread by the overwhelming majority of world Jewry, who saw themselves living inside the poem

Probleme jüdischer Autobiographik

(Rezension) Hans-Christian Petersen über: Julia Herzberg, Christoph Schmidt (Hrsg.) Vom Wir zum Ich. Individuum und Autobiographik im Zarenreich. Böhlau Verlag Köln, Weimar, Wien 2007 , in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 56 (2008) H. 4 , S. 601-603 : http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/ Petersen_Herzberg_Schmidt_Vom_Wir_zum_Ich .htm

A literatura como motor da modernização da língua hebraica

Resumo: Neste artigo, pretendo pesquisar o processo da renascença do hebraico literário a partir da segunda metade do século XIX. Essa renascença se insere no marco de um conflito entre as tendências conservadoras e as renovadoras dentro da cultura judaica. Paradoxalmente, os reformadoresda língua, que transformaram-na num meio de comunicação moderno, costumavam recorrer às camadas mais antigas dohebraico, enquanto os judeus tradicionalistas viam na língua um conjunto intemporal. Procurarei demonstrar que esse vínculo paradoxal do hebraico modernizado com as camadas mais antigas da língua é parte de uma dinâmica mais ampla que reflete a própria essência da revolução cultural sionista, especialmente em relação à cultura religiosa tradicional. Através dos escritos de Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Bialik e Agnon, focalizarei as metamorfoses do discurso literário hebraico, anterioriarmente oun paralelamente à renascença do hebraico falado. Literature as an impeller for the modernization of Hebrew - Abstract: In this article I deal with the process of renewal of literary Hebrew since the second half of the 19th century.This renewal is part of the protracted conflict between the conservative tendencies and the innovative ones within Jewish culture. Paradoxically, the reformers of the Hebrew language, who transformed it into a modern medium of communication, usually resorted to the most ancient layers of Hebrew whereas traditionalist Jews considered Hebrew an intemporal complex. My objective is to show that the paradoxical link of modernized Hebrew with the most ancient layers of the language reflects a broader tendency that isconstitutive of the cultural revolution initiated by Zionism, especially as far as its relationship with traditional religious culture is concerned. Through the example provided by Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Bialik and Agnon, I will focus on the metamorphoses of Hebrew literary discourse before or parallelly to the rebirth of spoken Hebrew

The Task of the Jewish Translator: A Valedictory Address

There is nothing more tedious and thankless than the task of the Jewish translator. Since your average Jewish author was multilingual, possessing as many as three internal languages, the translator must be a polyglot, possessing at least one external language to boot. The author gets all the glory. The translator gets all the blame