The Endangered Yiddish Culture and Language

-Introduction

-Discrimination

-Recommendation

-Yiddish and the United States

-Multimedia

-Yiddish Pop Culture

-Bibliography

 

Introduction

Yiddish is a language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews and began in the 10th century in central and eastern Europe, later spreading to other parts of the world. It is a Germanic language and uses Hebrew alphabets. After the Holocaust, there were around 10 million Yiddish speakers around the world. However, due to many sociopolitical factors such as genocide and cultural assimilation, the number of Yiddish speakers worldwide has dwindled significantly to around 2 million.

Since Yiddish is a Germanic language, it is a close relative of English and German, with the latter being closer. It once spanned a broad dialect continuum from Western Yiddish to Eastern Yiddish. Today, however, only Eastern Yiddish has survived, with its Slavic influence being its marked difference to Western Yiddish which was spoken in Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland and Hungary.

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Discrimination

Yiddish, being an endangered language, went through its share of discrimination. In Soviet Russia, it went through a rough period of violent suppression and subtle prejudice. Two brief excerpts show this,

"Jewish tradition mandates the lighting of memorial candles on the anniversary of bereavements, to re-member those departed. This year, the Jewish literary world commemorates Stalin’s post-war destruction of Yiddish literature and culture. Fifty years ago, on August 12, 1952, thirteen prominent Soviet Jews were shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.2 One third of them were distinguished men of Yiddish letters: the poets Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish, and the novelist Dovid Bergelson. The victims of these judicial murders were all accused of “bourgeois nationalism,” the crime of claiming for the Jewish people the right to be regarded as a nationality with a distinctive cultural identity. They were virtually the last among dozens of important 20th-century Jewish literati eliminated by the Soviet state from the early 1930s onwards: among the most prominent eliminated by the Soviet state were Moyshe Litvakov, Max Erik, Izi Kharik, and Moyshe Kulbak in 1937, Yisroel Tsinberg in 1938, and Zelig Akselrod in 1941."

                                                                                                                                                                                   -"Seven-fold Betrayal": The Murder of Soviet Yiddish by Joseph Sherman

"Yet the language in which Sholem Aleichem wrote, Yiddish, has been subjected to harsh discrimination and suppression, while other Soviet minorities are encouraged to preserve and develop their languages and cultures. The splendidly decorated Soviet bookshops have special sections devoted to the literatures of the various minorities. I could find books in each of these languages by following the signs on the shelves, but I never saw a sign marking the shelves for Yiddish books. When I asked for them—in Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa—the salespeople were not always able to locate the few hidden away somewhere behind the counter. One clerk tried to tout me off to the latest Russian translations of Sholem Aleichem or the poetry of Peretz Markish, winner of the Stalin Prize, who was liquidated shortly before the tyrant's death. When I insisted on books in Yiddish, the clerk finally, brought out an 800-page anthology of short stories by 56 authors, issued in 1969."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              -Yiddish in the U.S.S.R. by S.L. Shneiderman

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Recommendation

In light of Yiddish discrimination, the Council of Europe released Recommendation 1291 on Yiddish Culture. Two of the points in the Recommendation is shown below:

    9.   The Assembly recommends that the Committee of Ministers:

  1. ask member states to give consideration to the returning of Yiddish cultural property to Jewish Yiddish academic institutions from which it was taken during the second world war or to give to these institutions adequate compensation for the furtherance of Yiddish studies;

  2. because of the closeness of Yiddish to German, invite German-language member states to act as trustees for the Yiddish language, for example by the creation of university chairs in the subject and by the dissemination to Europe in general of the finest products of Yiddish culture by means of translations, anthologies, courses, exhibitions, or theatrical productions;

  3. establish scholarships for artists and writers who are descendants of Yiddish minority groups throughout Europe, so that they may be able to work purposefully and creatively in the field of Yiddish language and culture;

  4. ask the Council for Cultural Co-operation to establish a mechanism for co-ordinating the activities of Yiddish academic centres throughout Europe and to convene in the near future a conference on this subject, if possible involving the European Union (Commission and Parliament);

  5. invite Ministries of Culture of member states to help Jewish and non-Jewish cultural institutions concerned with the Yiddish cultural heritage to reconstruct in publications and ethnographic and art exhibitions, in audiovisual records, etc., the full picture of the pre-Holocaust Yiddish cultural landscape that is today scattered throughout Europe;

  6. invite Ministries of Education of member states to include the history of European Jewish culture in manuals on European history;

  7. set up under the auspices of the Council of Europe, a "laboratory for dispersed ethnic minorities" with a mandate, inter alia:

  1. to promote the survival of minority cultures or their memory;

  2. to carry out surveys of persons still speaking minority languages;

  3. to record, collect and preserve their monuments and evidence of their language and folklore;

  4. to publish basic documents (for example the unfinished lexicon of the Yiddish language);

  5. to promote legislation to protect minority cultures against discrimination or annihilation;

  1. commission, for the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war, and in order to commemorate the virtual annihilation of the Yiddish civilisation in Europe, a suitable monument to Yiddish culture to be set up in the Palais de l'Europe in Strasbourg;

  2. seek also the co-operation and partnership of interested organisations, trusts and other bodies in the private sector to carry out these recommendations.

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Yiddish and the United States

Yiddish in the United States is most commonly spoken in New York, with 0.63% of its population speaking the language. This percentage may seem insignificant but considering that only 178,945 speakers of Yiddish live in the United States, the 113,515 New Yorkers that speaks Yiddish certainly tells a lot about the significance of New York to the Yiddish culture and the diminishing numbers of its people.

New York
 
 
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Language   Total   %
English 12,786,190 72.04%
All languages other than English combined 4,961,380 27.95%
Spanish 2,416,040 13.61%
Chinese 304,160 1.71%
Italian 294,265 1.65%
Russian 218,765 1.23%
French 174,080 0.98%
French Creole 114,745 0.64%
Yiddish 113,515 0.63%
Polish 111,730 0.62%
Korean 102,110 0.57%
German 92,680 0.52%
Greek 86,660 0.48%
Arabic 69,955 0.39%
Hebrew 67,675 0.38%
Tagalog 65,500 0.36%
Urdu 52,445 0.29%
Bengali 51,765 0.29%
Cantonese 42,050 0.23%
Portuguese 41,320 0.23%
Hindi 41,155 0.23%
Japanese 34,565 0.19%
Kru, Ibo, Yoruba 34,050 0.19%
Albanian 26,630 0.15%
Persian 25,970 0.14%
Ukrainian 23,365 0.13%
Panjabi 22,560 0.12%
Vietnamese 20,250 0.11%
Malayalam 19,270 0.10%
Mandarin 19,040 0.10%
Hungarian 18,420 0.10%
Total: 17,747,570  

(Data obtained from Modern Language Association website)

Yiddish newspapers are circulated in New York, one of those being The Forward. It appears weekly and is widely distributed among the Yiddish community in New York. Yiddish theater also thrives there and plays an important part in the continuation of the language. (Oxford English Dictionary (OED), American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD), or Merriam-Webster dictionary (MW)).

A list of some English words that originate from the Yiddish language is given below.

Interesting fact: Isaac Asimov states in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, that Yiddish was the first language he learnt before he emigrated to the United States.

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Multimedia

Yiddish with Dick and Jane

 

Vodku Band - Old Yiddish Dance

 

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Yiddish Pop Culture

Books:

Movies:

Music:

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Bibliography

                                          

                                             THANK YOU FOR VISITING!

 

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Copyright 2007 by Steven Gunawan