Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 6.276
April 4, 1997

1) Yiddish Studies in Israel II (Leonard Prager)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 97 23:48:26 IST
From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il
Subject: Yiddish Studies in Israel II

The Decline of Jewish Studies

It needs to be noted here that Israeli universities face two
particular crises aside from the perennial (and more or less
universal) financial crush.  Fewer and fewer students are electing to
study the humanities and within the humanities fewer and fewer choose
Jewish studies.  The joke is told that at the Hebrew University
"Lachug leTalmud yesh talmid" ('In the Department of Talmud there is
one student').  (5) It should also be understood that the single or
double-major structure of university courses in Israel locks students
into one or two departments with little opportunity to participate in
the theoretically available chativot 'programs' such as the Yiddish
Study Program.  There was a time when the Department of Jewish History
at the University of Haifa sent students to the Yiddish Study Program
but today that department's required courses make this impossible.
Departments are constrained to keep their students in their own
courses to justify the size of their teaching staff.  Some Israeli
universities partly liberalized their curricula by creating
Departments of General Studies where students earn a first degree with
a wide choice of courses from various departments (as in most North
American universities).

The Rigid Curriculum

Many Israeli students would, I believe, elect to study Yiddish if
their curricula were not so rigid.  As it is, the average Israel
undergraduate enters the university after several years of army
service, generally dependent on his parents for tuition and room and
board, aware that he is light years away from "getting established" in
life -- learning a saleable skill, accumulating sufficient money to
begin to think of marriage, to buy a flat, to acquire some motor
vehicle (even a motor skooter), etc.  He or she often must work while
attending university simply to be able to do so.  Part of Bar-Ilan
University's success in attracting students to its Yiddish courses may
be attributed to the attractive financial features (independently
funded) with which it lures candidates.  The pressure against studying
for intellectual growth and inner satisfaction, i.e. for getting an
education -- as distinct from vocational preparation -- is great.

Languages: the Larger Context

There have been innumerable conflicts in Israeli universities when
Yiddish language courses (as distinct from degree offerings in
literature, etc.) have been administered in a Department of Foreign
Languages (in Hebrew "Chug lesafot zarot"). The notion that a language
with a 1000-year old Jewish pedigree was a _safa zara_ ('foreign
language') infuriated lovers of Yiddish.  Most administrators showed
little sensitivity on this issue, though they were of necessity very
language conscious.  No student can study in an Israeli university
without a certain minimal grasp of English which he generally improves
on during his first year of studies.  Ironically, English is today a
necessary language for sophisticated Israelis -- from a Jewish as well
as a general point of view, English today being the preferred Jewish
interlanguage (a position once occupied by Yiddish).  Some Israelis
are also aware that a peaceful Middle East with open borders -- not a
totally utopian fantasy -- will create new pressures on Israelis to
study Arabic.  Israeli and Palestinian Arabs speak Hebrew; tomorrow
Israeli Jews may feel the need to know Arabic.  This total linguistic
and educational context must be understood to grasp the situation of
the Israeli Yiddish-speaker who wants his children to be
Yiddish-speakers as well.

The leading sociolinguist of Yiddish, the Yiddish-speaking,
Yiddish-living Professor Joshua A. Fishman, has thought deeply and
written widely on the problem of reversing language shift. (6) There
are scattered families in Israel (as in America and Europe) who are
trying to raise their children in Yiddish.  There has been a certain
success in Israel in introducing Yiddish into the schools. However,
none of the Israeli Yiddish scholars I know have raised their children
to be Yiddish-speakers; most of their children have no more than a
passive command of the language.

Dor Hemshech

In a Hebrew-speaking world the decision to use Yiddish is a motivated
one.  The young people who make up the movement Dor Hemshech ('The
Bridging Generation'), children or grandchildren of primary Yiddish
speakers, wish to cultivate and preserve certain felt values embodied
in Yiddish culture; in study groups, reading circles, klezmer bands,
choirs, dramatic groups, lectures, symposia in all the major centers
they assert an Ashkenazic ethnicity in the kaleidoscopic Israeli
_kibuts hagaluyot_ ('ingathering of the exiles').  Yet they are at a
certain remove from the Yiddish world of their parents and at best
Yiddish is their second (or third) language.  Nostalgia and familial
piety help to power this interesting movement.  .pp The recent
convention of the International Jewish Genealogical Society in
Jerusalem, as well as the publication of significant onomastic studies
highlights the worldwide Jewish search for "roots," for connections to
particular places and people.  We have been seeing some massive clan
reunions and initial convenings of related individuals in Israel and
elsewhere.  We now have "shtetl-finders" and detailed. scholarly
guides to surnames, both products of the same broad impulse which
powers groups like Dor Hemshech and similar groups the world over.
(7)

_Di goldene keyt_ ('The Golden Chain')

Dov Sadan himself, despite his fierce love for Yiddish culture, had
not written in Yiddish for thirty years until his close relationship
to Avrom Sutskever brought him into the fold of _Di goldene keyt_
contributors.  It was Shmeruk on the other hand who convinced
Sutskever, editor of _Di goldene keyt_, of the value of including
academic studies in his literary quarterly.  The close relationship
between Israel's Yiddish intelligentsia and Avrom Sutskever is a large
and central theme in itself.  Founded in 1948, _Di goldene keyt_ has
in almost half a century -- all under the editorship of Sutskever --
been the outlet for the best Yiddish writing in Israel and the world.
The pattern of closeness between Israeli Yiddish scholars and "Di
goldene keyt" is echoed abroad as well:  in issue no. 136 devoted to
the poet-editor's eightieth birthday, leading Yiddish scholars such as
Benjamin Harshav at Yale, Ruth Wisse at Harvard and David Roskies at
the Jewish Theological Seminary warmly greet the poet, who in recent
years has also revealed himself to be a master of prose (and thus a
juicy morsel for avid explicators).  Unfortunately, _Di goldene keyt_
ceased to appear in 1996 -- an irreplaceable loss.

The Internationalization of Yiddish Studies

Yiddish scholarship has long been international in scope, non-Jewish
Germanists in particular having interested themselves in Old Yiddish
(e.g. at the University of Trier).  Today throughout the world there
are many gentile Yiddish scholars, some of whom speak, read and write
Yiddish well, often better than many of their Jewish colleagues.  One
of the Yiddish instructors at the Hebrew University at present is a
graduate student of Yiddish from Japan -- who of course also knows
Hebrew.  Tsugaya Sasaki wrote The Hebrew-Aramaic Component in Yiddish:
Morphology and Semantics in the recent volume of "Massorot; Studies in
Language Traditions and Jewish Languages" 1993, vol.  VII, pp. 129-144
[in Hebrew].  It is not necessary to be Jewish to be an academic
scholar of Yiddish, though obviously it is a great advantage to be
born in a Yiddish-speaking household or live in a Yiddish-speaking
milieu.  The non-Jewish scholar often starts out at the same point as
the Jewish one with regard to Yiddish.  Non-Jews have been Yiddish
instructors at the Oxford University Yiddish Summer courses.(8) The
Lecturer in Yiddish at University College, London, is not Jewish, nor
are the authors of recent doctoral dissertations on Avrom Sutskever
and Der Nister.  It is not remarkable that non-Jewish scholars are
attracted to so ramified and complex a subject field as Yiddish.  Most
of these scholars find their way to Israel at some point, either to
study at one of the universities or to use Israeli libraries and
archives.  The internationalization of Yiddish studies has also been
helped by such new institutions as electronic mail.  The
Yiddish-studies electronic bulletin "Mendele" is in its fifth year.
About one thousand persons worldwide, including many Israelis (and
many non-Jews) read it and write in it.

                        [end of Part 2]

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End of Mendele Vol. 6.276