The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

Much more sympathetic are the few pages which Berenson devotes to it in an article in the Andover Review;[7] though abounding in errors, it is fair and unbiassed, and at least displays a familiarity with the originals. Still better are the remarks of the Polish author Klemens Junosza in the introductions to his translations of the works of Abramowitsch into Polish; the translations themselves are masterpieces, considering the extreme quaintness of Abramowitsch's style. There are, indeed, a few sketches on the Judeo-German literature written in the dialect itself,[8] but none of them attest a philosophical grasp of the subject, or even betray a thorough familiarity with the literature. A number of good reviews on various productions have appeared in the Russian periodical Voschod, from the pen of one signing himself "Criticus."[9] To one of these reviews he has attached a discussion of the literature in general; this, however short, is the best that has yet been written on the subject.

It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to extinction.[10] Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.[11] It would be idle to speculate when these persecutions will cease.

II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE

THERE is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on the Judeo-German.[12] Philologists have neglected its study, Germanic scholars have until lately been loath to admit it as a branch of the German language, and even now it has to beg for recognition. German writers look upon it with contempt and as something to be shunned; and for over half a century the Russian and Polish Jews, whose mother-tongue it is, have been replete with apologies whenever they have had recourse to it for literary purposes.[13] Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish, for passions have been at play to such an extent as to blind the scientific vision to the most obvious and common linguistic phenomena. Unfortunately, this interesting evolution of a German dialect has found its most violent opponents in the German Jews, who, since the day of Mendelssohn, have come to look upon it as an arbitrary and vicious corruption of the language of their country.[14] This attack upon it, while justifiable in so far as it affects its survival in Germany, loses all reasonableness when transferred to the Jews of Russia, former Poland and Roumania, where it forms a comparatively uniform medium of intercourse of between five and six millions of people, of whom the majority know no other language. It cannot be maintained that it is desirable to preserve the Judeo-German, and to give it a place of honor among the sisterhood of languages; but that has nothing to do with the historic fact of its existence. The many millions of people who use it from the day of their birth cannot be held responsible for any intentional neglect of grammatical rules, and its widespread dissemination is sufficient reason for subjecting it to a thorough investigation. A few timid attempts have been made in that direction, but they are far from being exhaustive, and touch but a small part of the very rich material at hand. Nor is this the place in which a complete discussion of the matter is to be looked for. This chapter presents only such of the data as must be well understood for a correct appreciation of the dialectic varieties current in the extensive Judeo-German literature of the last fifty years.

All languages are subject to a continuous change, not only from within, through natural growth and decay, but also from without, through the influence of foreign languages as carriers of new ideas. The languages of Europe, one and all, owe their Latin elements to the universality of the Roman dominion, and, later, of the Catholic Church. With the Renaissance, and lately through the sciences, much Greek has been added to their vocabularies. When two nations have come into a close intellectual contact, the result has always been a mixture of languages. In the case of English, the original Germanic tongue has become almost unrecognizable under the heavy burden of foreign words. But more interesting than these cases, and more resembling the formation of the Judeo-German, are those non-Semitic languages that have come under the sway of Mohammedanism. Their religious literature being always written in the Arabic of the Koran, they were continually, for a long period of centuries, brought under the same influences, and these have caused them to borrow, not only many words, but even whole turns and sentences, from their religious lore. The Arabic has frequently become completely transformed under the pronunciation and grammatical treatment of the borrowing language, but nevertheless a thorough knowledge of such tongues as Turkish and Persian is not possible without a fair understanding of Arabic. The case is still more interesting with Hindustani, spoken by more than one hundred millions of people, where more than five-eighths of the language is not of Indian origin, but Persian and Arabic. With these preliminary facts it will not be difficult to see what has taken place in Judeo-German.

Previous to the sixteenth century the Jews in Germany spoke the dialects of their immediate surroundings; there is no evidence to prove any introduction of Hebrew words at that early period, although it must be supposed that words relating purely to the Mosaic ritual may have found their way into the spoken language even then. The sixteenth century finds a large number of German Jews resident in Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. As is frequently the case with immigrants, the Jews in those distant countries developed a greater intellectual activity than their brethren at home, and this is indicated by the prominence of the printing offices at Prague and Cracow, and the large number of natives of those countries who figure as authors of Judeo-German works up to the nineteenth century. But torn away from a vivifying intercourse with their mother-country, their vocabulary could not be increased from the living source of the language alone, for their interests began to diverge. Religious instruction being given entirely in Hebrew, it was natural for them to make use of all such Hebrew words as they thus became familiar with. Their close study of the Talmud furnished them from that source with a large number of words of argumentation, while the native Slavic languages naturally added their mite toward making the Judeo-German more and more unlike the mother-tongue. Since books printed in Bohemia were equally current in Poland, and vice versa, and Jews perused a great number of books, there was always a lively interchange of thoughts going on in these countries, causing some Bohemian words to migrate to Poland, and Polish words back to Bohemia. These books printed in Slavic countries were received with open hands also in Germany, and their preponderance over similar books at home was so great that the foreign corruption affected the spoken language of the German Jews, and they accepted also a number of Slavic words together with the Semitic infection. This was still further aided by the many Polish teachers who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were almost the only instructors of Hebrew in Germany.[15]

We have, then, here an analogous case to the formation of Osmanli out of the Turkish, and Modern Persian out of the Old by means of the Arabic, and if the word Jargon is used to describe the condition of Judeo-German in the past three centuries, then Gibberish would be the only word that would fit as a designation of the corresponding compounds of the beautiful languages of Turkey, Persia, and India. A Jargon is the chaotic state of a speech-mixture at the moment when the foreign elements first enter into it. That mixture can never be entirely arbitrary, for it is subject to the spirit of one fundamental language which does not lose its identity. All the Romance elements in English have not stifled its Germanic basis, and Hindustani is neither Persian nor Arabic, in spite of the overwhelming foreign element in it, but an Indian language. Similarly Judeo-German has remained essentially a German dialect group.

Had the Judeo-German had for its basis some dialect which widely differs from the literary norm, such as Low German or Swiss, it would have long ago been claimed as a precious survival by German philologists. But it happens to follow so closely the structure of High German that its deviations have struck the superficial observer as a kind of careless corruption of the German. A closer scrutiny, however, convinces one that in its many dialectic variations it closely follows the High German dialects of the Middle Rhine with Frankfurt for its centre. There is not a peculiarity in its grammatical forms, in the changes of its vocalism, for which exact parallels are not found within a small radius of the old imperial city, the great centre of Jewish learning and life in the Middle Ages. No doubt, the emigration into Russia came mainly from the region of the Rhine. At any rate those who arrived from there brought with them traditions which were laid as the foundation of their written literature, whose influence has been very great on the Jews of the later Middle Ages. While men received their religious literature directly through the Hebrew, women could get their ethical instruction only by means of Judeo-German books. No house was without them, and through them a certain contact was kept up with the literary German towards which the authors have never ceased to lean. In the meanwhile the language could not remain uniform over the wide extent of the Slavic countries, and many distinct groups have developed there. The various subdialects of Poland differ considerably from the group which includes the northwest of Russia, while they resemble somewhat more closely the southern variety. But nothing of that appears in the printed literature previous to the beginning of this century. There a great uniformity prevails, and by giving the Hebrew vowels, or the consonants that are used as such, the values that they have in the mouths of German Jews, we obtain, in fact, what appears to be an apocopated, corrupted form of literary German. The spelling has remained more or less traditional, and though it becomes finally phonetic, it seems to ascribe to the vowels the values nearest to those of the mother-language and current in certain varieties of the Lithuanian group. From this it may be assumed that the Polish and southern Russian varieties have developed from the Lithuanian, which probably bears some relation to the historical migrations into those parts of the quondam Polish kingdom, and this is made the more plausible from the fact that the vowel changes are frequently in exact correspondence with the changes in the White Russian, Polish, and Little Russian. Such a phenomenon of parallelism is found also in other languages, and in our case may be explained by the unconscious changes of the Germanic vowels simultaneously with those in the Slavic words which, having been naturalized in Judeo-German, were heard and used differently in the new surroundings.

However it may be, the language of the Judeo-German books in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is subject to but slight variations. It is true, the Blitz Bible printed in Amsterdam in 1676 seems to deviate greatly from other similar works, and the uncouth compound which is found there does, indeed, have all appearances of a Jargon. It owes its origin to the Polish Jews who but a few years before had been exiled from more than two hundred and fifty towns[16] and who, having settled in Holland, began to modify their Judeo-German by introducing Dutch into it. Although the Bible was intended for Polish Jews, as is evident by the letters-patent granted by John the Third of Poland, yet it has never exerted any influence on the dialects in Russia and Poland, for not one word of Dutch origin can be found in them. This older stage of the language is even now familiar to the Russian Jewish women through the 'Zeena Ureena,' the prayer book, and the special prayers which they recite in Judeo-German, and Jewish writers have recourse to it whenever they wish to express a prayer, as, for example, in Abramowitsch's 'Hymns' and 'Saturday Prayers.' This older stage is known under the name of Iwre-teutsch, Korben-ssider-teutsch, Tchines-teutsch, thus indicating its proper sphere in lithurgical works. This form of the language is comparatively free from Hebrew words.[17] On the other hand, Cabbalistic works become almost unreadable on account of the prevalence of Semitic over German words.[18]

In the beginning of the nineteenth century a Galician, Minchas Mendel Lefin, laid the foundation for the use of the vernacular for literary purposes.[19] This example was soon followed by the writers in Russia who became acquainted with German culture through the followers of the Mendelssohnian School at Lemberg, who comprise nearly all the authors from Ettinger to Abramowitsch, most of whom wrote in some southern dialect. The language of these abounds in a large number of idiomatic expressions for which one would in vain look in the older writings; words of Slavic origin that were familiar in everyday life were freely introduced, and an entirely new diction superseded that of the past century. At first their spelling was quite phonetic. But soon their leaning towards German literature led them into the unfortunate mistake of introducing German orthography for their dialect, so that it now is frequently impossible to tell from the form of a word how it may have been pronounced. Add to this the historical spelling of the Hebrew and the phonetic of the Slavic words, and one can easily imagine the chaos that prevails in the written language. And yet it must not be supposed that Judeo-German stands alone in this. The same difficulty and confusion arises in all those tongues in which the historical continuity has been broken. Thus Modern Greek is spelled as though it were Ancient Greek, with which it has hardly any resemblance in sound, while Bulgarian is still wavering between a phonetic, a Russian, and an Old Slavic orthography. Similar causes have produced similar results in Judeo-German.