Yiddish and Hebrew in Pre-Israel Palestine | In Conversation with Eddy Portnoy

hello and welcome or welcome back to this channel my name is fre Belle and here I explore the Orthodox Jewish World Language history it's relationship to Zionism and so much more as many of you know my first language is Yiddish it is the language of the sore htic community that I come from the story of why I grew up speaking Y and not Hebrew it intimately ties to the story of the birth of Israel Zionism and Jewish languages and so today I want to delve into the fascinating story of how two jewi languages came to represent contrasting Jewish ideologies I was inspired to do the segment after visiting the wonderful Yeo exhibit in Manhattan called Palestinian Yiddish a look at Yiddish in the land of Israel before 1948 to which I will link in the video description with me today is Eddie pornoy the curator of the exhibition Eddie pornoy is an expert on Jewish popular culture pno earned an MA in yish studies from Columbia University and a PhD in Jewish study from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America he currently holds the position of senior researcher and exhibition curator at Evo welcome Eddie thank you Freda thanks for having me was that correct was that good yeah great o o and Wikipedia sometimes still delivered so actually there used to be a lot of like incorrect things in that entry you worked on it no no I actually I don't even I've never even I don't even know how to get into wh wi I can only read Wikipedia I don't know how to change it oh but but someone at work made some changes that's very nice actually actually inserted some jokes into it um which were eventually removed by someone else oh wow that's hilarious it's good to have a Wikipedia page then the comedy I guess some actually some guy in Poland made it I don't even know how you know how it appeared so on that note I would love to get to know you a little bit hear a little bit about your background who is Eddie por can we do a little bit of where you come from and your interests sure wow this could could feasibly be a really long boring story we can try to do it short we can try to keep it an intruction let's see I'll just try to keep it to the you know the topic at hand so I uh grew up in Detroit um my uh father's first language was Yiddish and he grew up in a household where yish you know was house full full of immigrants and yish was the language of the house and it was the language he always spoke with his parents and it was something that I took an interest in as a kid and when I was in R around 13 14 years old I used to go to my grandparents house and I used to walk around with my grandmother asking what things were I would say you know what's this what's this I would point to things and I would write them down in Yiddish it would give me the Yiddish names for them and so when I was in high school my father bought me a little booklet called the Yiddish ler which means the Yiddish teacher and I taught myself to read and write Yiddish it was just this kind of weird H hobby that I had and so when it was something that I maintained all through college I never really took classes and I would you know get books at bookstores and I would just you know read them it was just something that interested me and uh you know a number of years later after I went to college and I moved to New York I got a job working for a small publishing company that was kind of academic adjacent we used to do projects that for a lot of academic libraries and we did a project with Yeo uh which I had never heard of and Yeo is this kind of like academic institution it's sort of like a Library of Congress slash Smithsonian institution of the Jews or of yish culture in the Jews and Jews of Eastern Europe and so I hadn't heard of them because my grandparents you know were from and weren't involved in yish secular culture at all and so they were my only entree into Yiddish culture and so we did this project to microfilm Old Yiddish newspapers with EVO and when I went to meet with the librarian to organize the project I happen to tell him what I just told you about this hobby I had where I taught myself to learn to read and write Yiddish and he said oh well you know Yeo runs this intensive uh Yiddish language summer program it was at the time it was at Columbia University now it's in Bard College uh and he said you might be interested in that so I looked into it and I wound up taking it I took a leave of absence from work I took evos summer program I was able to go right into the advanced class uh because I already knew Yiddish reasonably well and I was totally hooked I was you know my mind was blown learning about you know all of this Yiddish literature um you know the Yiddish press yish theater there was this whole sort of Universe of yish culture that I just really didn't know about and uh the next year I applied to grad school you know wound up as you said getting a master's in years from Columbia and then I W up getting a PhD in history from from the Theological Seminary and I always tell people that I turned a fun hobby into a low-paying career there's not money in yish I mean no the short answer is no I mean you can you know do I make a living yes but you know I think I'm one of the few I mean they're you know not you know it I will say that the tradeoff for getting to work every day with something that I really love is totally worth it it's like to get to work like so so so actually the end of the story is so I wound up after I got my P D I taught at Rutter for about eight years uh and then I wound up getting a job at Yeo uh where I'm the academic advisor and uh curator of exhibitions and I do a variety of other things with the programming and education to artment as well but it's I get to work with this incredible archive so yo has this Archive of something like 24 million documents and artifacts related to ashkanazi culture and it's not entirely ashkanazi but I would say 99% of it is and it's everything from ethnographic collections um interviews joke books recordings photographs manuscripts of famous and not so famous yish writers there's a ton of Hebrew material there's rinic material um there's enormous amount of Holocaust related material it is really the greatest collection in the world of sort of Yiddish cultural material only really rivaled by the National Library of Israel which also has a fantastic collection and yo was started now one of the reasons that Evo has this very significant collection is that it it started in 1925 and that's when it started collecting it was founded in 1925 and began collecting then um it was headquartered in v VNA uh and so it's I you could say it's a very litf fish organization uh but it was headquartered in Villa it had offices in Warsaw Berlin and New York uh when World War II broke out the you know the Berlin office had disappeared you know by the time the Nazis had taken power in Germany but when World War II broke out the Warsaw office was shut down leaving only New York and Zelda Villa at the time was under Soviet rule so that lasted for about a year and a half until the Germans attacked the Soviet Union and really through the incredible efforts of um a group of people who uh who helped save a good portion of yeo's archives during the war um does yivo have portions of its pre-war archive a huge component of Yo's current archives is also material that they collected after World War II um in once Yo's headquarters you know was moved to New York I want to start this discussion by giving a basic overview of what edish the language is and hopefully after that to talk about how it stands in contrast to Modern Hebrew sure so yish is a Jewish language uh that began to develop in they think the nth or 10th centuries in the Ry region of Germany it's a Germanic language it's a Jewish and Germanic language basically um the theory is is that Jews from uh Northern Italy and Southern France began to migrate to the Ry region of Germany where they began to take on uh their own version of the local dialect and so because Jews always lived separately from everyone else any language they speak is going to be their own variant of it so the Jews picked up this Germanic language and when they wrote it they wrote it using Hebrew characters uh so when you look at a page of Yiddish you know if you're not if you can't tell that there's in Yiddish and Hebrew it just looks like Hebrew because all the letters are you know it's all in you know Hebrew letters uh so but you know there are various ways to tell the difference uh usually the edish words are much longer than Hebrew words that's one like sort of quick and dirty way to figure that out but there are other ways as well um additionally there's also a lot of Hebrew ad mixture in yish you know just certain words and phrases uh in Yiddish are taken from Hebrew um I mean a common one is the word for family uh Mish yeah or uh which in the modern Hebrew is Misha um so you know you have a lot of you have a lot of that as well um it's called the loan kidish component or the you know holy holy tongue component of Yiddish uh so as uh the Jewish populations grew in Central Europe you know over the centuries yish grew with them and as they were expelled from various places as they moved to new places um in particular they began to move Eastward into um into the uh the kingdom of Poland uh H as a result of that there was Slavic admixture polish and Slavic admixture that was included with Yiddish yish is a very flexible language it's very absorbent it easily accepts words and phrases from other language if there's a utility to it uh so um you know just as an example a yish speaker from Poland would have a lot of Polish words in their Yiddish a Yiddish speaker from uh the United States or North America would have a lot of English words in their Yiddish you know speaking from Argentina might have a lot of Spanish in their yish so that's just the way that the language functions it's just very it it easily absorbs you know words and phrases from other languages but over the centuries as you know Jews moved into Eastern Europe uh they by the uh really the 18th century they became the largest Jewish community in the world and uh yish was their language and one interesting factor in this is that uh in the late 18th century the kingdom of Poland was split uh into three segments uh it was uh the largest went to Russia another portion went to Austria or the kingdom of Austria and another portion went to Prussia and uh when as I said the largest segment went to Russia uh Russia pre prior to taking over this area of the kingdom of Poland they didn't allow the Russian uh Empire didn't allow Jews into their country but suddenly they had a lot of Jews and they didn't really know what to do with them so in order to handle what they perceived as a problem uh they created what's called The Pale of settlement uh which is the area that basically conforms to the Old Kingdom of Poland uh but it was the area to which the the Empire's Jews were restricted uh sometimes certain Jews could get permission to enter the Empire but generally they were most Jews were restricted to the pale of settlement and in the pale of settlement there were other populations there was a large polish population they were the in fact the dominant population but there were also ukrainians lithuanians Germans you know a variety of different people um but Jewish interaction on a daily basis was mostly with Polish and Ukrainian peasants and because uh the and and to a certain degree Jews Jews had to be able to communicate with these people so they learned you know whatever elements of their language they found necessary but there Jews didn't feel that the culture of Ukrainian polish peasants was sufficiently appealing to want to assimilate to it and so they sort of turned Inward and only spoke yish amongst themselves and so the pale of settlement be became sort of this like Yiddish land area where Yiddish was really the dominant language of Jews now if you compare that to what was happening in Germany where uh German culture was a more modern more advanced culture with growing art music science philosophy that was really appealing to a lot of Jews so the level of assimilation to German culture at the same time and this is like late 18th early 19th century the appeal of German culture is is really significant so you have a lot of Jews just saying we would you know we'd prefer to speak German and just be Germans because it's so interesting and as I said the you know the opposite is happening in the pale of settlement where you know the other cultures don't really appeal to the Jews and so they sort of turn inward on Yiddish and during the 19th century you wind up with a development of modern Yiddish literature writers like shim and M uh and a you know wide iety of others uh you wind up with the yish press and um you know at the same time you know from the 1880s onward you have a huge outmigration of Jews because the reality was that life for the Jews in the pale of settlement was not particularly good uh the economic situation was terrible there were also uh occasional and sometimes frequent pums uh they had no political or civil rights they had to pay special taxes it was generally not good so if you if your position in society wasn't particularly strong meaning you didn't you weren't in a good economic position and the option to leave appeared you left and so as a result from the 1880s through the 1920s about two million Jews left the pale of settlement these are yish speaking Jews left the pale of settlement and went to places like most of them went to North America created large yish speaking settlement there but also you know Jews went everywhere they went to Argentina was another local South Africa you know other places in South America Australia um and of course Palestine uh which Jews had been migrating to for you know a thousand years in small numbers but you know by the 1880s you know you have this interface between Jews and uh modern politics and nationalism and uh you wind up with the development of a kind of Proto Zionism and so Jews began migrating in larger numbers to Palestine um where there was already uh uh community of Jews that live there um but what happened here is it increased the number of yish speaking Jews uh to a very significant degree can you talk I could go on like for a million years about this sorry I actually want you to expand before we talk to about Hebrew and I think this is relevant um if you can talk more about what you mean by the interface between I think you said nationalism modern you were essentially talking about the beginning of these youth movements these these movements in the Jewish world like I'm supposing Buddhism and so on so can you talk about that sure so um you know beginning really in around the 1880s you um you know you have it's the age of industrialization uh and it's the age of migration and you also have you know huge advancements in printing Technologies and a variety of other Technologies but as a as far as printing technology goes you wind up with uh yish newspapers and yish newspapers becomes the delivery medium for uh not just news but for political ideas and National ideas and at the same time in Europe you have other National groupings uh um you know who live in Empires like the Russian Empire so the Russian Empire is really a multi- cultural multinational Empire and so you you have you know lithuanians lvans estonians poles ukrainians you know all kinds of different groups who want to gain their own National rights they don't want to be ruled by you know the Russian Zar they they you know wanted you know they want their own countries uh and often these places were had once been kingdoms of their own uh and this same thing happens all over Europe you wind up with you know the de you know you you have you know from the Age of Enlightenment on you have the development of um these states that were once kingdoms that become uh sort of national entities and so uh this influences the Jews as well uh and the but the Jews have this strange problem they their place of national origin is not in Europe and they they're well aware of it um not only what do you mean their place what do you mean by that well the place the Jews place of national origin is the land of Israel and and that that's why Jews you know consistently went back there um but they you know there they they were made to understand uh sort of most clearly through anti-Semitism that they were not European that that you know Russians didn't consider them Russian um uh poles didn't consider them polish uh and you know and so on there were certainly attempts uh and sometimes successful attempts to assimilate to these cultures but invariably there were racists and bigots uh among them who who refus the Jews you know the possibility of of truly being um members of these societies and so they were you know the Jews were really these Outsiders who wound up in Europe in in a in a way a bit like um Roma or or gypsies uh you know they their their home you know Roma's home the homeland of the is is in India and so you know the the Jews were made to understand this and so this brought about the Advent you know because this occurred in the period where you know nationalism uh and modern politics was was becoming you know part and parcel of everyday life and everyday thought uh you know this is one of the things that um prompted the development of Zionism as a um uh as a modern political phenomena you know at the same time you have phenomena like um B budism so the the the Bund uh was a uh an organization that was created actually what's interesting is the the first Zionist Congress was in 1897 the Bund was also founded in 1897 and the bun was founded as the representative of the Jewish working class uh and um the uh at the time Le especially in the Russian Empire left-wing politics was kind of the order of the day there was really like a wide variety of them um you know there were bulvik and menik and and socialists of different kinds anarchists uh you know this is all very common and and you know one of the interesting aspects of all this is that Jews were allowed to participate in a lot of these movements because these movement saw themselves as Progressive and thought you felt that you know anyone should be able to regardless of national origin you know anyone could you know be part of these parties and so Jews because Jews were welc welcomed in these parties many of them joined you know there was a lot of interest um in the beginning at least like let's say the 1880s 1890s the the um uh the reality was that they were kind of assimilationist parties the you know Jews would end up having to speak the dominant language they Jews would have to have to speak Russian um you know they' have to speak Polish if they wanted to be part of these parties because those were you know the dominant you know groups within the parties and but the bond decided that the that Jews were as a as a distinct uh grouping within society that the Jews needed their own distinct representation and that's why they were created and interestingly the initial founders of the bun were not Yiddish speakers but they learned Yiddish in order to be be able to speak to uh the Jewish working class whose language was Yiddish and one interesting thing is that you know the intention of the Bund was not to promote Yiddish or Yiddish culture when it first started but what they eventually realized was that um Jews yish speaking Jews actually liked their culture and so the bud began to promote Yiddish as a sort of a cultural value unto itself they developed Yiddish school systems um and you know had all kinds of lectures and Publications and newspapers in yish uh and it it they became really one of the you know um an important uh an important Locus for for the creation of of gsh materials incidentally this these phenomena that I'm talking about the sort of modernization of Jewish life and the entrance into the political sphere also affected religious Jews who were um at at first sort of pushed it away um but in the early part of the 20th century for example when the Yiddish press becomes a significant force in uh in Eastern Europe um rabbonim realized that uh that religious Jews were reading secular newspapers and they didn't want this to happen because in there's material in secular newspapers that uh they don't want you know really from people read it and so uh they gave permission for I think it was in 1912 um you know the G Reba gave permission for the first uh Orthodox newspaper and uh you know from that point on you wind up and also 1912 is the it marks the creation of uh the Auda uh the you know the first Orthodox political party um and so that's really that marks the entrance of and the and it shows the influence on you know this sort of new modern political world on you know the a variety of different Jewish communities how though largely did the religious Jewish Community respond besides for creating their own literature what was their attitude towards these nationalistic movements these new ways of of Jews interpreting their their plate so um certain groups were so for instance when you have I don't so the Bund is a socialist organization that is officially anti-religious so that's obviously offensive to religious Jews and so they're you the B to them is an enemy um but as a result one interesting thing is you wind up um uh with you know parties like auru CIS having offshoots created for workingclass religious Jews that promoted a form of Socialism among religious Jews uh you know so that's that's interesting uh in and of itself then you have Zionism um which uh was a problem for religious Jews of different type so when when the the first GI Zionist Congress was announced for example in 1897 uh the first reaction uh was from uh I mean they're hered but there there's no I mean they're Orthodox Jews uh but the first reaction was written by a group of Orthodox rabbis together with a group of Reform rabbis in Germany so this is really weird because Orthodox and reform hate each other as well but Zionism was so offensive to these two groups at the time that they decided to you know band together and and comment on it and so the and the reasons for their dislike of Zionism are totally different so um the reform movement was opposed to Zionism uh because the reform movement was ultimately an assimilationist movement and Z according to Zionism Jews are a distinct Nation with uh a distinct Homeland and that made German Jews who were reform seem suspect in the eyes of other Germans that they weren't truly German they you know they're they're something else and that was an accusation that was always leveled at them so that's why the re Reform movement was a post-design ISM Orthodox Jews were post- design ISM because uh according to tradition you're not allowed to have a Jewish polity in the land of Israel uh until the Messiah arrives uh and so without the Messiah you Jews cannot have their own country in in Palestine or in in the land of Israel so you know you have these two opposing forces but then there's a third Group which forms mizi uh the Orthodox political party and mrai which in fact was a very very popular party um my own Grandparents were part of this party uh they um they were a religious political party that promoted Zionism and their view was that uh Zionism could help save Jews Jews their view was that Jews in Europe were in danger and needed to go somewhere else and that by reading a Jewish Run Country in the land of Israel uh they could help protect Jews uh and that so that was basically the the view of uh of of that religious party um go ahead sorry ask me anything I'll yeah yeah like I said going on all day yes yes um uh it's a very big topic but I do want to get to uh Yiddish in Palestine per se so I want to talk about the birth of modern Hebrew in the context of all of this right so yes so at the same so while this was all Happ this is like late 19th early 20th century you know with the Advent of Zionism you had people who um wanted to recreate Hebrew as a modern language prior to that it had been the language of uh prayer and study uh and you know certain certain aspects of daily life like contract writing or letter writing um you know that's what that's what Hebrew was used for um in order to do so you had to be highly educated which is why most Jews wrote in Yiddish you know wrote and spoke in Yiddish but the there was a kind of I would say rabinal and intellectual Elite that had used Hebrew for centuries as uh not a spoken language but a language of discourse of a type of discourse um and so with the Advent of these new political and National movements there were Jews who wanted to you know reestablish Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews and uh and so they did they you know there you know one name in particular is elezar Ben Yehuda uh he was you know really one of the driving forces behind the recreation of of Hebrew as as a spoken language and uh you even had school schools you had zist run schools in Poland and Lithuania where he this new modern Hebrew was the language of instruction uh and this you know starts in the early 20th century uh and these are people who you know live in Poland let's say and you know Yiddish is their the their daily language and U you know maybe they have to speak Polish you know in the markets or elsewhere but they're adding this sort of third language you know this sort of ideologically provoked idea that you know they may one day go to live in Palestine and they'll speak this language as their daily language and that ultimately did come to pass what why wasn't Yiddish good enough for the Holy Land part of uh there's a component of zist ideology that uh was very much opposed to to GIS or diaspora um in modern Hebrew it's called galut and in what want to say around 1903 1905 something like that they developed uh a part of the ideology called schat galut which means the negation of the diaspora Zionist ideologues felt that the Jews problems uh you know their state of being oppressed in a wide variety of places is a result of having of of is a result of living in the diaspora and only in the land of Israel where they would speak their language of origin in their place of origin could they be a complete people free of the issues that they faced in the diaspora and so Yiddish because it the dominant language of the Jews at this time something like 75 to 80% of the world's Jews speak Lang speak Yiddish as their daily language it is Far and Away the most dominant language among Jews uh yish was one SE one seen as a threat to um you know the possible uh use of Hebrew in Palestine and two uh Yiddish was denigrated by these people as sort of the most symbolic language of diaspora jewry you know the the you know idea that the hunched over you know traditional Jew who's you know works in the marketplace is weak uh physically you know this is a Yiddish speaker and so the idea of Zionism was that they want to change you know this version of jewishness to create a new form kind of a really create a new Jew that is strong works the land uh you know is involved in agriculture um has an attachment to the land uh and speaks Hebrew uh instead of yish which you know and Yiddish is not representative of any of this how how was the the dichotomy between anti-religious movement and Yiddish playing out in all of this because we know there was a big Bund for instance yish culture so what's happening with the religious Jews of of Eastern Europe as as Zionism and modern Hebrew is being developed so there're I mean they're I would say not interested in it they are opposed to Zionism uh officially obviously I've mentioned the mizi party um which promotes it uh and is you know pure it's a Zionist party uh so there's that component of religious Jews you have Kim who are uh generally much more opposed to Zionism uh you know their view is that um they're fine where they are as long as they can continue practicing their religion in the way that they want to uh and speaking the language you know their their language was Yiddish also they didn't you know promote it in the same way that the Bund promoted it but um you know yish is was the always the language of instruction in you know cidic schools and also in lfish schools you know in religious schools uh you know this was just this was the the standard throughout Eastern Europe uh and um you know they say n you know possession is 99 or n you know 99% of the law um know because they're living their lives in Yiddish you know their uh their cultural lives whether these people are religious or secular is completely infused with the sort of Jewish culture that is embodied by Yiddish yeah so I suppose in a sense we're saying that the Zionist had a very strong point about the power of the language yeah well look language is the carrier of culture you know the language determines very much you know what culture you belong to um so if you you know I generally I would say that if you speak a lang a Jewish language uh you know that whole culture is embedded in that language and it doesn't matter necessarily matter if it's Hebrew or Yiddish uh but if you're in the diaspora and you speak a Jewish language as opposed to I don't know French or English uh you know your world view your cultural world view is is going to be different than someone who doesn't speak that you know speak a Jewish language you know I am to this day I would say I am fascinated by the ability to revive Hebrew to the the miracle of getting a language to be spoken by by an entire country there was nothing like it in history right no no it's amazing it's amazing and you have you know it's it's interesting there is a um a linguist by the name of gilad sukman uh who's Israeli uh but he he teaches at a university in Australia and he has been instrumental in Reviving uh some Aboriginal languages in Australia and his starting point is the Revival of Hebrew of modern Hebrew and interestingly this is just an aside but his view is that modern Hebrew is actually very different from Biblical Hebrew and he doesn't even call it Hebrew he calls what's spoken in Israel today he calls it Israeli I see um and he one of the things that he notes is that uh a great deal of the Israeli language as he calls it uh is actually reified Yiddish meaning that many many words and phrases are actually Yiddish words and phrases that were simply put into Hebrew and you know became part of you know the modern Hebrew language um but sort of the the the sub base of modern Hebrew is actually in some ways Yiddish it's interesting because of course the pronunciation is not ashkanazi pronunciation the pronunciation of Hebrew but it that was also aspirational they were trying to get away from Yiddish but they were Yiddish speakers right the people who built Hebrew were Yiddish speakers right well that's you know that's one of the ironies of of all of this is that um you know the people who were opposed to Yiddish were almost all yish speakers that that was their mother tongue that was the language they grew up speaking to their parents um and learn you know the language of instruction in their schools and you when they played with their friends they spoke yish and then you know once you know it's it's interesting to see how you know an ideology can really change you know someone's active daily life you know you you you you you make this change and uh you go with it and um you know people you know really on a large scale you know swapped yish for Hebrew I mean it's not an instantaneous thing um you know took many decades but it was it was clearly very successful by the way speaking of uh calling Hebrew Israeli I recently heard that there was an academic I don't remember his name I heard it in a dinner conversation who published a book claiming that y should be called viberti or have you heard of that really yeah I have not heard that but that is great you like that wait y should be called the Viber Ty or it may be ta which means translation ta well yish actually ta was always one of the names for Yiddish like Yiddish has over the years a variety of names but Yiddish ta ta this was always a name for Yiddish you know Jaron also was a name for yish jargon this was you know yeah was always a common name for yish um but yeah ta was was you know what of the normal you you could see this on books you know from you know 17th and 18th century um you know that it's you know G ta like it'll say that on the cover of the book it's an impoverished name because it's just ta literally means translation so it's calling a language translation right well you know in the same way they called it jargon right exactly I I've never heard that yeah I mean Yiddish Yiddish itself was you know you know has long been a kind of oppressed and supressed language um that it was you know look Hebrew is very much a Prestige language it's the language of liturgy it's you know it it's you know that's people are very attached to it in that way yenish was the language of daily life you know it's clearly not you know it was never considered a Prestige language it was always you know this it was just it had a utility yeah it was useful um and uh but it was the language of every day it was a language of joking it was a language of cooking it was a day language of singing um you know and and it turned out that to a larger degree Yiddish speakers really liked Yiddish and you know this is a common thing that I you know heard throughout my childhood that like you know you can't you know you can't say things in English like you could say them in Yiddish like my grandparents always said this I mean it's just this is you know sort of just an anecdote but it's um but people feel very attached to the languages that they grew up in that they had fun in that they're you know that their loved ones spoke it's you know it's meaningful in a variety of ways yeah and speaking of that yish was a language that was constantly at risk or not constantly at least at least um without migration of Jews there was this this discussion about is this the end of yish you know right right so yish you know people say that you know I think that in the 1930s or 40s Isaac basheva Singer who's famous Nobel prize winning yish writer um yeah said that you know they they say that Yiddish has been dying for 200 years um and I hope it keeps on dying for another 200 years uh so yes Yiddish is sort of like the ever dying language so I I actually grew up speaking cish Yiddish I'm sure that if we talk to each other in yish we would we would have a bit of a hard time because my accent is very different from yours but one of the important things I grew up being taught was that Hebrew F you're not allowed to talk Hebrew is a t it's a right it's the unkosher Unholy language and what was interesting about um learning about idish in Palestine was there was a bit of a reverse of that happening in uh pre 1948 Israel with regards to yish right so um I mean the story of Yiddish in in pre-state Palestine is is interesting and it's that you know obviously that's the reason that I created this exhibit um and you know one of the just to go back a little bit further um one of the um odd things that I found that I really didn't expect to find was how far back Yiddish went uh in history and so like my like my you know when I first got the idea to do it I thought yeah you know they you know the you know kidum came to Palestine and the uh you know the sort of you know early mid 19th century they were followed by litf Fox and so like they were probably you they sort of made up the bulk of the old yeshu during the 19 uh during the 19th century you know they were probably the ones who brought yish to Palestine and so then I was looking at a website called the Princeton the Princeton ganesa project object and this is a website that um cataloges uh and has a database of uh a huge number of the fragments in the chyoa uh which is really an incredible collection of um all kinds of written material uh that was found in a ganesa or a sort of store room in uh in a synagogue in Cairo uh and the you know there something like 400,000 total fragments and they comprise you know songs stories uh religious documents letters all kinds you know business contracts shopping lists all kinds of things that related to daily life uh among the Jews mostly the Jews of Cairo but there's a lot of correspondence from Jews uh around the area and in the collection of the kyoga they have there's there's uh one there is a packet of stories uh called the Cambridge codex because it's in the Cambridge University Library um that was found in the chyoa and it's dated to the 1380s so 1380 that's a long time ago uh you know that's that's something you you and especially you wouldn't expect to find a you know collection of Yiddish stories in the kyoga at all you know much less from 13 you know the 1380s uh so that's that's kind of amazing in and of itself and I'm sure that it didn't get there in 1380 but you know but probably hundreds of years later nonetheless there's also a collection of five letters uh written in Yiddish from a woman in Jerusalem by the name of rul zusman to her son MOA in KIRO they were written during the late 1560s which is also really early to consider the idea that there're yish speakers in Jerusalem uh it's not something that people think about a lot and certainly there weren't a lot of yish speakers at the time there but they had a large enough community and you know one of the aspects what I said before the Yiddish isn't a Prestige language um you know things at this time you know in the 16 17 they're they're not you know things that people write down are getting thrown away people don't save letters in Yiddish it's not something like it wasn't like people someone would say a letter in Hebrew because it's deemed as you know more valuable or more important uh but a letter in Yiddish was and even like stories in Yiddish they these are things that just got thrown away or you know read to bits uh so you know these things all disappeared so this is kind of a really valuable find the you know the these five letters from the 1560s written in Jerusalem you know and sent to Cairo you know their letters from a mother to a son and they and you I have you know some reproductions of them in the exhibit itself uh but because they're letters from a mother to a son uh you know the bulk of the content is like you know please come back to Jerusalem there's nothing for you in Cairo you know there's work for you here um you know please come back to your family this kind of stuff but also you don't write me enough letters um I will punish you before you die uh you know she's like she's like this yish that um she's guil tripping she's totally guil tripping him which is really kind of amazing to see in a letter from the 1560s uh you know written in Yiddish but I guess that's you know the like the yish imame is a type that is immutable and uh you know will never disappear so that was interesting to find in and of itself and you know there's not much um uh evidence to Mark the exist of you know how many speak people spoke Yiddish you know in Palestine during the during the 19th century um I think in the mid I want to say in the 18 40s or 50s a book is published called uh I think it's timot uh that mentions the different languages it's it's it's written by by a rabbi in Poland who takes a trip to uh the land of Israel and you know he in the book he notes what the different language that languages that are spoken in Jerusalem and one of the things he mentions I think is that you know the ashkanazi community has a really hard time communicating with everybody else because they only speak their language um and everyone else SP white I guess oh so so there there are three main distinct communities in uh Palestine at the time uh and this is you know let's say you know early mid 19th century uh you have the I guess called them the mizaki community um and they're the community of Jews who who have lived there since the fall of the second since the destruction of the second temple um they've been there for you know almost 2,000 years and then you have the Safari Community uh most of whom arrived at the end of the uh uh 15th century where after the Jews were expelled from Spain Portugal uh so those two groups both speak AR Arabic as their everyday language uh the sefarim also speak um leino which is kind of like the Spanish variant of um the Spanish variant of of Yiddish uh you know as their as as one of their daily L yeah which is mostly disappearing is that fair to say yeah I mean there are far far fewer speakers of leino um today than uh you know that there have and you know I I think compar comparisons are often made with yish but I think that's a it's not a particularly good comparison to make because the the yish speaking population was always much much larger although you know during the late 19th and you know first half let's say of the 20th century there's a fairly significant leino press um you know there were Lino newspapers in New York uh Istanbul was a center for leino you know there are other locals at well as well so it you know it became a modern language in similar ways to the Yiddish did um you know it never had you know yish newspapers in the 1920s had readerships of up to a million people a day um you know Lino never had that you know there's no there's no Lino theater I mean people perform in Lino but um yish theater was it was a thing yeah I mean there were once you know 12 unish Theaters on Second Avenue um you know within like 10 blocks of each other um it was you know it was a true mass culture Lino had that just on a you know on a much much smaller scale so back to the the languages people were speaking in in uh Israel well pre Israel and and ashkanazi is having difficulty right right so so you know Arabic is is Arab you know it's you're you're in ottoman ruled Palestine um you know the majority of the population uh is Arabic speakers as a result Arabic is the dominant language so if you need to be able to function in society uh you need to be able to speak Arabic and so this becomes apparent when um I mean one interesting aspect of all this is in the beginning of the 1880s you w you wind up with this kind of Proto Zionism and Jews immigrating from Eastern Europe to Palestine um they wind up getting folded they create What's called the new yesu as a post the old yesu which is you know made up of these three communities that I just mentioned the new yesu is sort of modern uh politically engaged Jews from Mostly from Eastern Europe who are driven to speak Hebrew you know as their language uh they're mostly interested in engaging in agriculture uh and so while some of them do settle in um in yal and in well the new people in the new don't go to spat spat was a center for especially kidum uh but uh the Jews of the newu these sort of Proto designist Jews uh want to settle the land they want to engage in agriculture and one of the reasons they want to engage in agriculture is one of the accusations always leveled against Jews in Europe was that the Jews aren't a real people because they don't have land they don't work the land so they're not authentic and so as a reaction to this accusation zionists were like we need to work the land and what's more we need to work our own land uh you know in the land of Israel and so agriculture was a really important um component of these early settlements uh and in fact one of the earliest yish Publications that appeared in Jerusalem in 1893 was a um a booklet all about agriculture it's just it's a it's a booklet in yish about you know how to plant crops what to plant how to keep insects off of them it's very sort of you know has a utility but this is one of the earlier eish Publications that appeared in uh in Jerusalem in the in in the 19th century what else is there I know there was a an uh yish how to learn Arabic right so yes so Arabic was so important uh just to you know get around and do things that um there were multiple booklets published in Yiddish for Yiddish speakers on how to learn Arabic in yish you call them um but they're like these little booklets that you know that teach you kind of the basics of reading and writing and speaking Arabic uh and they were published all over the world and because you know PE Jews were always interested in in you know with the with the Advent of Zionism this place became a you know more and more important local for immigration and so one early one we have in the exhibit was published in New York I think in 1917 or 18 uh then there's uh there's one that was published in the mid 1920s in Warsaw uh and you also have them published in in Tel Aviv as well until Hebrew became you know the dominant language you know Arabic was really a necessity some of this actually one interesting side note is that many Jews who lived in Eastern Europe were bilingual anyways they spoke like let's say polish and Yiddish and yeah yeah right I mean you you know like I said before language has language has a certain utility if you need to get something done by something in the marketplace you know take class I don't know anything you need to learn you may need to learn another language and this was a this was just a necessity of life in a region that was itself multilingual and so you know Jews often knew more than one language and once you know more than one language it's often very easy to learn yet another you think I know two languages I don't I don't find it to be the case I mean I don't know you know it depend I mean it depends whether or not you like you know yes people like to learn languages as Hobbies but let's say I don't know I sent you to France and you had to get around um you know obviously English has become a dominant you know an international language but let's say I actually France is a bad example let's say I sent you to some small town in China okay where no one speaks English right you would have to learn Chinese to figure out how to live yeah and so when you when you're forced into it you know what choice do you have you just do it it's like you know it's like IM immigrants do this all over the world you know they go to work you know sometimes they've never even been to school I mean I can think of my own grandparents they never went to school but they learned English they learned you know whatever they needed to in order to you know live their lives and it's just that's you know why language is just it becomes this important utility that you you know if you don't learn it you're missing out on a lot of opportunities so what happened in in back in Palestine what happened so so what happens in Palestine is you have this huge influx beginning the 1880s um you have this huge influx of uh of Jews from Eastern Europe uh and they're all yish speakers and they're all zionists but you have this element of Zionism that I talked about earlier schat galut the negation of the diaspora the the anti- yish attitude so by the early by the first decade of the 20th century the Zionist movement is developing practices to uh get people to stop speaking Yiddish so just as an example an informal rule existed saying that um if you had been in the country for more than years you could not speak in a public forum in a language other than Hebrew really yeah and so that meant that if you were like a you know a union meeting and you wanted to ask a question or make a statement it had to be in Hebrew if you had been in the country for more than two years it had to be in Hebrew this also plays out in the Press so one example is in 1907 uh this group called Linko letan or the left labor zionists uh who interestingly were a Zionist group they were a socialist Zionist group that had no problems with Yiddish because they felt that Yiddish was the language of the Jewish working class they were a representative of the Jewish working class and they had to be able to speak to their constituents in their own language additionally they wanted to be able to communicate with Jews outside of Palestine most of whom spoke yish so it made sense to them that you know they should use Yiddish as a language of discourse so in 1907 in Jerusalem they published this magazine called their onag which means the beginning and it's basically a little magazine all about socialism and the the need to Institute socialism among the working classes of Palestine a couple months later uh another socialist Zionist group called ha AP or the young worker begins to publish their own magazine which contains a lot of the same material about the need to to implement socialism but in ha almost every issue has attacks on the use of the yish language and there these really virulent attacks you know saying and actually one interesting thing is they won't call it Yiddish they call it either Jon Oraf Asaf the spoken language and so why won they call it e because they don't want to give it the credibility credit being like a real language it's like it's like you know Iran won't call Israel Israel they call it the Zionist entity it's the same phenomenon like it's like if you if you give if you call it by its real name you're giving it some sort of credibility that they you don't think it deserves a power of word right so um you know so this sort of marks the beginning of this kind of language War um and as part of this you know you have all kinds of different incidents like some Yiddish Writers come to Palestine to give lectures in Yiddish on on literature in in 1914 and they're they're protested you know by sort of fanatic Hebrew speak groups of Hebrew speakers um and all of this like the the fanaticism of Hebrew of like the Hebrew language fanaticism is inculcated in students in schools in Palestine and this is like a new Zionist school system where they're the language of instruction is in Hebrew and they are also instructing the students in Zionist ideology and part of this ideology is to oppose Yiddish and oppose diaspora culture and to build your own new culture you know in the land of Israel this has already been inculcated in these students and so they're the ones who to protest these writers um a little bit later in 1922 uh a group is created called um an organization is created called gud M Safa which is usually translated as the Balian of Hebrew language Defenders and it is a group of fanatical hebraists who you know promote Hebrew language culture and defend it against you know those who don't speak Hebrew group so interestingly the group was initially created because they discovered that the techon which was the uh scientific University in hia uh there that certain classes were being taught in German and they were being taught in German because the professors were German igra and also the best textbooks were written in German sometimes by these very professors so it made sense that that the light of instruction and these courses would be in German so this was too much for the dude M and they you know protested you know these classes that were being taught in German the reality is that they didn't have any success in stopping it because it had like a real utility you know it made sense to do it um a few years about five years later uh the Hebrew University in Jerusalem which had been founded two years previous in 1925 so 19 27 the he Hebrew University proposes the creation of a Yiddish department at the University which makes sense because Yiddish is faren away the dominant language of of the Jews at the in this period there is more Yiddish literature than any other Jewish literature um you know unish theater every like it's a Hu it's a it's a gigantic mass culture so it makes sense to you know have a have a department of Yiddish at Hebrew University so the dude M Safa is furious about this and they begin very adamant protests against the creation of this department and they actually succeeded in preventing it which you know shows sort of their Growing Power now so at the same time that all of this sort of like anti- yish activity is occurring in this place you have a group of Yiddish writers um who uh love Yiddish and want to write in Yiddish and so during this time they are writing books they're writing Yiddish literary anthologies that get published from you know around the 1920s through the 1940s and they produce this really interesting yish literature that is based in Palestine it's got these stories about from it's got stories oh sure kibuts are Jewish communal Farms which is like a unique feature of the new yeshu in uh in Palestine um but it's got these stories about you know about in yish about Kut stories in yish about beduins um who are nomadic people in the area who are not Jewish um but it creates this sort of new yish literature that's really interesting um but the gud manasaa and you just sort of many many zist are opposed to the use of Yiddish and so there is a Yiddish literary Union that has meetings every once in a while and so the dude M ask if I would find out where these meetings were and they would I they would do things like cut the electricity of the building they were in or they would smash the windows sometimes they would accost the members of the yish literary Union in the street and beat them up yeah it was like it was it was like a literal language War it was crazy and so and the irony the crazy irony of all this is um that all of these people were zionists all of these people were socialists all of these people spoke Yiddish and all of them spoke Hebrew as well and there's this one issue that's setting off this group that they cannot live with and so they fight and that's you know and and you know to a certain degree that's what you know a when you're very attached to an ideology um you'll kind of do anything and so that's what that's what they do um it's really like it's an interesting sort of footnote in the history of you know Zionism and the Jews of that you know era and and place uh and so that's really why we did the exhibit because it's just it it you know people don't people aren't familiar with this uh and it's just sort of fascinating moment in you know in the history of uh of this place yeah you know it's now Passover this is going to be published after Passover but it's not Passover been discussing with friends that the interpretation of the miracle Passover that some of us are familiar with is that the reason that God took the Jews out of slavery out of Egypt was because of shy Lu malish uh because the Jews did not change change their names their language and their clothing they kept it Yiddish with right so Sam said the same thing and he used this exact language like this is Sam said you know you should never change your names you should never change your uh language and you should never change your style of clothing which is um interesting and so that's that's what you know that's even more so that's why contemporary sidm continue to speak Yiddish continue to you know obviously they never change their names but but also continue to wear you know their distinct type of clothing um yeah yeah that's that's absolutely true you know this creat this creates a barrier around um you know around the rest of society I think often in dialogue about societies we lose sight of the tremendous power of the language that is spoken in a society and that language is enormously powerful absolutely so anything else about um Israel yish before I ask you a final question sure I mean I you know the one thing I can add is there's this one really interesting figure this this uh a man by the name of morai kosov who uh was born in Villa and uh immigrated to Palestine at about the age of 20 or so he was a student uh he was really interested in Yiddish in in the Yiddish language and um he in the 1920s he did the first and kind of only study of the Yiddish of the Jews of the old yeshu he went to places like MIM and SAS uh where there were you know many many Jews of the old yeshu who spoke the yish of the old yeshu and uh he did a study of their language and one of the things that he discovered was that there was a huge amount of Arabic ad mixture in their language so you know when I when we started and I talked about how you know yish is this language that easily absorbs words and phrases from other languages um you know just as the yish of you know the United States has a lot of English in it the ysh of Palestine you know from the time it started always had a lot of Arabic in it because Arabic was the dominant language and so he did the study and published a book called Arabic in elements in Palestinian Yiddish um and that's actually where the exhibit got its name from Palestinian y I see uh and it's got hundreds and hundreds of examples of the way that uh Arabic words function within Yiddish and it's just it's really you know and that's also part of the exhibit it's really kind of a fascinating work that this man did and we're really fortunate that he did it because otherwise we would just we would never have known yeah it's fascinating I did look at it and I don't think I knew a single word that we saw in the exhibit that were Arabic oh in the examples the examples that I gave well so the one the one example that most people are familiar with like you you do you speak Hebrew a little bit a little bit okay so there's an expression in Hebrew um Al yeah yeah um means like that's great um and one of the that's from Arabic that's not Hebrew it's it's it's an Arabic expression so in Co more in koser's examples that's one of the ones that he gives uh the example that he gives um you know it's really like it's like saying like it's really awesome it's really great yeah so that's you know so like that's just one example of like a many of how you know how that kind of you know language functions Within yish I did grow up with the word yala um oh yeah right of course that's everywhere yeah but it we thought it was Hebrew and it was a bad word but we still said it that's funny yeah so my final question um and thank you so much I've learned so much uh but I something that's been on my mind because I see you on Twitter and you're tuned into to what's happening in the world right now um is it okay that I say that I mean I'm as tuned in as Edie like elderly Jew is tuned into anything oh well what my question was going to be because the exhibit I'm sure you've been working on for quite a long time and then it was on display after October 7 when there's been so much dialogue about the history of Israel um I'm wondering if if you've seen in some way the context of current events colliding with the exhibit a little bit when I first opened the exhibit in September last September uh we got some complaints that it was an anti-zionist exhibit really which it's not yeah yeah right of course it's not it's critical I would say of a certain aspect of Zionism this phenomenon of schlat galut negation of the diaspora and you know the you know like the fact that I say the exhibit that you know early Zionist persecuted Yiddish is a true statement um you know I'm a historian I can't yeah you know not say that that's that's just the reality um that doesn't make it anti but that was that was one of the initial reactions that we got um you know after October 7th I I don't know I people I think were a little bit maybe reticent to want to criticize aspects of Zion at least some people were actually some people were really happy to criticize uh aspects of Zionism after October 7th um but I don't I mean I didn't see that much you know because the event was so you know enormous and horrible I don't think people really looked at the exhibit and said this has anything to do with this I I I mean it's just this is a historical exhibit um you know it's about matters that are you know long over um it doesn't it doesn't have anything to do with what's going on right now I guess I place my questions coming from is is there seems to be a lot of Need For Education about the history of Israel prior to its formation sure yeah I mean there's a lot of Need For Education period I mean my I think a lot of people don't know anything which is uh obviously a problem yeah but they're not going to come to an exhibit on yish and Palestine as their starting place for learning I mean you know you know what well you know what's weird is sometimes people just wander into this building and just want to look at exhibits and to me that's really cool because they're they're falling into something that they didn't expect to fall into and they're learning something about it and to a certain degree you know I'm thrilled that that happens because if you know if I can teach something you know something about anything to someone accidentally you know in a way that's really an easy way to learn you know when you don't expect something and it's interesting and it's it's you know it's compelling and you didn't expect it um you know that that really helps you know push knowledge along it's a wonderful exhibit with with with wonderful manuscripts and stuff to look at thank you thank you thanks for coming to see yeah well hopefully others will come till when is it uh running it's up I think um I want say to the end I think just for like another month I think so on that note um I want to wrap up by asking you to tell me what you would like for people to know about the work or where they should go any anything you publish that you'd like people to know of so on website wow I don't know I mean obviously come to yo uh for our public programs and Exhibits and things that we do it's um it's a really amazing organization and if you're doing research into the Jews of Eastern Europe at any way um it's one of the best places in the world to come and do research uh it's really a fantastic organization other things I have I wrote a book about five years a five years ago called bad Rabbi and other strange but true stories from the yish Press which is full of literally strange but true stories from the eish Press that's really like unusual uh stories about Jews mostly in Warsaw New York but it's sort of the uh moment where Jews are becoming modern and it's sort of their CL with modernity where they you know where scandals the scandals of their personal lives begin to meet the front pages of yish newspapers and um so there're just a lot of stories about you know I guess bad Jews Like You Know Jewish criminals um Jew or Jew Jews rather not necessarily bad Jews but some are bad but uh you know Jews who got caught in compromising positions see let's say salacious right it's it's it's not the you know it's it's it's not like any other Jewish history book I see I hear you joh fun thank you so much for your time and I want to thank everyone for watching for those of you on the podcast for listening I'll be linking to Eddie poro stuff in the uh video description and thanks again [Music]

Channel: Frieda Vizel

Views: 22,681

Keywords: what is yiddish, yiddish language, jewish language, jargon language, mamme lashon, mame loshen, momma loshen, hebrew, ivrit, veiber teytch, teitch, teytch, yiddish teich, yivo, yivo institute, yivo yiddish, yiddish in palestine, origin of yiddish language, eddy portnoy, origin of hebrew, zionism, the bund, history of zionism, history of hebrew, ben yehuda, ben yehuda zionism

Id: tq8y3KkAWTk

Length: 78min 3sec (4683 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024