Yiddish and Power Ten Overhauls of a Stateless Language

by Katz, Dovid

• ISBN13: 9780230517608
• ISBN10: 0230517609
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Yiddish and Power is a survey of a thousand years of social, linguistic and intellectual, social and political history of the Yiddish language within the traditional civilisation of Jewish Ashkenaz in central, and then in eastern Europe, and its interaction with the surrounding non-Jewish culture. The book explores the ways in which Yiddish has empowered masses first by providing access to romantic literature from outside, and then later, to the 'secrets' from inside the Jewish heritage (including KabbalahKabbalistic mysticism) that were previously accessible only for those rabbinically trained in the two classic Jewish languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. Along the way, the study of Yiddish variously served the interests of Jewish rebels, anti-Semites (and in an unusual agreement, Jewish assimilationists) who sought to vilify the language as an embodiment of evil. The language went on to become a beloved and key value in radical new Jewish movements, in politics, culture and literature.Yiddish today continues to serve various interests ranging from the far left to the far right. This book covers close to a thousand years of uses, abuses, disputes, love and hate of one of Europe's genuinely exotic languages.

Maps and charts by Giedre Beconyte

Author Biography

DOVID KATZ is Professor of Yiddish Studies, Vilnius University and Director of Research, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Lithuania.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Crafted by the Maker: A Stateless Language in the Hands of Linguistic Entrepreneurs
1540s Italy, Germany, Switzerland: Mass-based Counterculture
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Germany, Bohemia and Poland: The Women's Sanctity Movement
Eighteenth Century Berlin: Germanization
Eighteenth Century Ukraine: Judaization
Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe: An Eastern Version of the Haskalah Movement
Late Nineteenth Century Odessa: Literarization
Fin-de-sicle Vilna: Full-scale Standardization
The USSR in the Twenties and Thirties: Dejudaization, Proletarization, Russification
New York in the Late Twentieth Century: Ausbauism Applied to Yiddish
New York, Antwerpen, Jerusalem, London in the Twenty-First Century: Neo-Hasidic Yiddish
EPILOGUE

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