palestinian yiddish

Over the past hundred years, three ‘-isms’ have tried to destroy the Yiddish language: Nazism, communism and Zionism. Yet today Yiddish is a global language, all over the world there are people who speak or write it on a daily basis, from Montreal to Cape Town, from Argentina to Japan. And it is also enjoying growing popularity – not necessarily within the ultra-Orthodox communities with which it is usually associated, but among secular or atheist Jews and among goyim.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Yiddish is almost by definition a language of diaspora – and thus inherently multicultural. It has always adapted to, wriggled into and fed off the dominant language of its environment, be it Hochdeutsch, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, French, English, Malay or Hebrew. To which, incidentally, one may note that this Yiddish mishmash is for secular use; after all, for prayer or the study of the Talmud, there is the loshn koydesh, the ancient language of the sacred scriptures.

The claim about the linguicide from the three ‘-isms’ comes on behalf of The Times of Israel. But indeed, before the Holocaust, some 17 million Jews lived around the world, of whom some 13 million were Yiddish speakers. Of the estimated six million victims of the choerbm, eighty-five per cent would have spoken Yiddish as a mameloshn, mother tongue. By this kind of calculation, therefore, of the thirteen million Yiddish speakers, over five million would have been murdered by the Nazis and their cronies. I suppose this has to do with the fact that Yiddish was the language of the large communities of deeply religious and poverty-stricken Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, who did not have the opportunity to flee Europe in time, and who, incidentally, were victims of pogroms and massacres by the non-Jewish locals even before the Nazi massacres.

As for linguicide under communism, some things can be put into perspective. Indeed, the Soviet Union also experienced persecution of Jews, with pogroms and a ban on the use of Yiddish in the period 1948-1955. Certainly at the end of the Stalinist period, Jewish intellectuals were a target of government paranoia, and Chaim Grade, among others, describes how even as early as the late 1930s, idealistic Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Baltic states, attracted to the communist ideal, were abused and repressed in the young Soviet Union. That said, albeit out of geopolitical expediency, there was just as well the Autonomous Jewish Region of Birobidjan, founded in Russia in the 1930s with Yiddish as the official language, and numerous socialist, communist and especially anarchist militants (think Emma Goldman, for instance, or the Bund, the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund) also preached revolution in Yiddish during that period.

The history of the relationship between Yiddish, Palestine, Zionism and Israel is one that goes back much longer. Ashkenazim, the Jews who spread across Central and Eastern Europe from the first century (the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in Jerusalem) and developed Yiddish there, returned to Palestine as early as the 15th century. In the 16th century, the region was incorporated into the Turkish Ottoman Empire, but the dominant culture there was Arabic, and Ashkenazi immigrants continued to speak and write their Yiddish. A letter from 1567 already expresses the stereotype of the Yiddish mame. A Jerusalem woman writes to her son in Cairo that he should come back to Jerusalem, that Cairo is no good for him, that there is work for him in Jerusalem, and how come he writes to her far too little?

From the eighteenth century onwards, waves of mass immigration from Eastern Europe happened regularly, bringing Ashkenazi pious and Orthodox Jews to Palestine. For their religious pursuits, they all used the Hebrew of the rabbis and the Torah, but in daily life and in dealing with Palestinian Arabs, they spoke their own variant of Yiddish. Well into the 20th century, numerous Palestinian Arab families would still have spoken or at least understood Yiddish. Even Ottoman-Turkish terms adopted in Arabic thus ended up in Yiddish. One article gives the example ‘es iz a gantzer kalbelik’ (‘there is a whole crowd’), but I cannot find that term in any of the major comprehensive dictionaries (Niborski/Vaisbrot, French; Schaechter, English; Jiddisch-Nederlands Woordenboek).

Anyway, in the early 20th century the theory of Zionism develops.  It is based on the premise that, since Jew-hatred is apparently inescapable, all Jews in the world should unite to build a national homeland together and establish a national language: a modern Hebrew, or Ivrit. Yiddish, as the language of the Diaspora, was then soon seen as an expression of weakness and division. Moreover, the new Zionist immigrants to Palestine were more secular than the Ashkenazim who had come before them. They were also more clearly politically motivated, and soon they became a majority among Jews in Palestine. The Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim became a minority within the Jewish population, which was itself a minority within the Palestinian population of Arabs and Bedouins. The newcomers spoke modern Hebrew, and they established kibbutzim where men and women of all origins lived and worked together. The pious Ashkenazim had a hard time of it. They would have distinguished between the newcomers, whom they referred to by the Hebrew word for pioneer, and their own group, whom they would have called baladi, the Arabic word for native-born. But again: baladi I cannot find anywhere in the dictionaries. Palestinian Yiddish?

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Palestine came under the administrative mandate of Britain. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 proclaimed the country « a national home for the Jewish people ». From then on, the pressure on Yiddish intensified until it would be considered ‘a foreign language’ after the founding of the state of Israel. A famous anecdote takes place in 1945. Rozka Korczak-Marla, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, came to Tel Aviv to speak in Yiddish about the extermination of Eastern European Jews. David Ben-Gurion, who would later become Israel’s first prime minister, afterwards addressed the audience in Hebrew: “A comrade has just addressed us in a grating foreign language”. Is it also the Germanic foundation of Yiddish that, so soon after World War II, evoked an aversion? After the state of Israel is formed a few years later, the government will carrément ban cultural expressions in Yiddish. Its use will be suppressed from then on, legally or by force. Zionist Israel displays the classic characteristics of nationalism: ethnic cleansing (of Palestinians, Arabs, Bedouins), oppression of minorities (including Yiddish speakers), one people, one state, one language.

Literary scholar Yael Chaver details in an article what was lost in the process. Yiddish writers in Palestine for instance dealt with subjects that Hebrew writers did not know or did not want to know. Like the story about a Jewish boy who goes hunting for wild boars. He’s on his way to sell them to Greek Orthodox priests, when he suddenly bumps into a group of people dressed as Arabs, who are on their way for their Pesach seder (the ceremonial meal on the first night of the Passover festival). In the new nationalist culture there was no room for this kind of diversity.

Despite attempts to eradicate Yiddish in Israel, it remained alive. Orthodox communities grew faster than Zionist leaders had expected. Government repression eased in the 1950s, and large groups of Russian immigrants who arrived in the 1980s brought their Yiddish with them. For a time, it was thought that use of the language was limited to ultra-Orthodox Jews and a few eccentric academics. But just as Yiddish, in the course of its development, has absorbed all kinds of words, constructions, phonetic features and grammatical peculiarities of the surrounding languages, it now appears that Ivrit also contains features and peculiarities of Yiddish. And so, in addition, there is growing interest in a language that is truly a multicultural global language. Yiddish sjlogt itself doerch. Yiddish is save.

This piece is based on a number of articles following the New York exhibition Palestinian Yiddish: A Look at Yiddish in the Land of Israel before 1948. That offers an overview of the blending of Yiddish and Arabic, and the flourishing and violent suppression of the language during the creation of the state of Israel.