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Yiddishism, Hebraism, and the German Language

Mon, December 18, 8:30 to 10:00am, Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, University of DC Room

Abstract

Yiddish’s historical and linguistic relationship to German played a multifarious role in 20th-century Jewish political and cultural debates. It signaled Yiddish’s belonging to the European cultural landscape, but it also marked Yiddish’s distance from Judaism’s ancient roots. During the “language quarrel” of the first decades of the century, both Hebraists and Yiddishists assessed the “Germanness” of the Yiddish language and its political implications. While linguists and literary scholars have investigated the contact between Yiddish and German, its importance in Jewish political debates has drawn less scholarly attention. In this paper I explore the political meanings Hebraists and Yiddishists attached to Yiddish’s contact with German, focusing on the 1923 debate between Nachman Syrkin and Chaim Zhitlowsky. As a language associated with the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah, as well as with Jewish assimilation, socialism, and Zionism, German’s ambivalent status captures some of the key tensions underlying the Jewish “language quarrel.”

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