The Emancipation of Yiddish from its Germanic Roots: Matthias Mieses and the Politics of Antisemitism

• In Event: Yiddish and German in Modern Jewish Culture(s): Ideological and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

“The Language War” between supporters of Hebrew and Yiddish was one of the most contested topics in the Jewish national sphere during the first decades of the twentieth century. Both its participants and future commentators described it as a struggle over the aspired linguistic order of Jewish nationhood. One way in which Hebraists coped with the evident disparity between the number of Yiddish and Hebrew speakers was by tackling more fundamental questions, such as the nature of the relationship between Yiddish and the German language. While ultimately a linguistic issue, it has never been only linguistic. Indeed, since the enlightenment Jews and non-Jews grappled with the Germanness of Yiddish as the emblem of Jewish difference, of Jews’ proximity to and remoteness from wider society. In order to argue for the legitimacy of Yiddish as a Jewish national language, or indeed as a language at all, proponents of Yiddishism had to debunk the common claim that Yiddish was merely a German variant. In this paper I will present the systematic effort of the Polish Jewish writer Matthias Mieses (1885-1945) to release Yiddish from the historical yoke of the German language. In a series of scholarly monographs and pamphlets, lectures, and public debates in the German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish press published between the 1900s and 1930s, Mieses addressed the Yiddish-German connection both in its linguistic, historical, and political contexts. In identifying the loaded nature of the ‘Germanic question’ in Jewish politics, Mieses ventured into themes such as the linguistic element in the history of anti-Jewish prejudice, Jewish nationalists’ engagement with antisemitic ideas, and the persistent fear and self-censorship shaping Jewish political culture. Mieses’ work sheds light on a latent tension in Jewish nationalists’ intellectual agenda during the first half of the 20th century, namely the effort to delineate lines of separation between Jewish self-critique and anti-Jewish accusations. As I will show in this paper, the ‘Germanic question’ of Yiddish largely captured this tension.

Author

• Marc Volovici, Birkbeck, University of London