SOURCE: Goldsmith, Emmanuel. “Yiddishism and Judaism.” In Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society, edited by Dov-Ber Kerler, pp. 11-22. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Goldsmith investigates the differences and similarities between Judaism and Yiddish culture and language.]

Ever since the Emancipation and the Enlightenment, there seems to be no end to the making of definitions of Judaism. Although Aristotle spoke of a definition as “a sentence signifying what a thing is”, Samuel Butler was probably more to the point when he described a definition as “the enclosing of a wilderness of ideas within a world of words”. Nevertheless, in a paper with a title such as this, there is no choice but to begin with a definition of terms.

Judaism has been defined by Mordecai M. Kaplan (1964: 10) as “the ongoing life of a people intent upon keeping alive for the highest conceivable purpose, despite changes in the general climate of opinion”. This definition takes into account both the existential dimension (the ongoing life of a people) and the essential dimension (the highest conceivable purpose) of the Jewish phenomenon. It takes into account both peoplehood or nationalism and civilization or culture. Religion is subsumed under the rubric “highest conceivable purpose” since religion is that aspect of human culture or civilization which consciously seeks cognisance of and contact with the transcendent or highest aspects of human experience. In Judaism, the latter are conceived as Divinity, Deity or God. Finally, the words “intent upon keeping alive” remind us that whatever other objectives it may assume, the survival of the Jewish people (kíyem haúme) remains a sine qua non of Judaism.

Yiddishism, which has alternatively been called the Yiddish language movement, the Yiddish culture movement, or the Yiddish language and culture movement, is a modern expression of Judaism which came into being at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries as a result of the revolutionary upheavals in the life of the Jewish people and the consequent redefinitions of its selfhood which began with the emergence of Hasidism or Jewish pietism, on the one hand, and Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, on the other, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hasidism, without intending to, unleashed both a populism or awareness of the folk aspects of the Jewish religion as well as a questioning of the halakhic or legalistic emphases of traditional Judaism that would emerge only a century later.

Even more than Hasidism, the Haskalah (haskole, a word which translated literally means “rationalism”) called into question the exclusive hegemony of Torah or traditional religious culture as the overriding preoccupation of the Jewish mind. It also caused a rift in the symbiosis of peoplehood and religion that had been the hallmark of Jewish civilization for millennia. Now that Torah was no longer the be-all and end-all of Jewish intellectual concern and romantic idealization, new forms of Jewish existence and interpretations of Jewish religion and culture evolved. The officially monolithic structure of Judaism was shattered forever and numerous Judaisms competed for the allegiance and support of the modernised Jew. The picture was further complicated by the fact that this modern Jew now no longer belonged exclusively to the Jewish community. He was on the way to becoming (or already was) a citizen of the country in which he lived and a participant in its culture which, when not overtly hostile, harboured resentments against him and his Judaism.

In Western Europe, where Jewish communities were small and widely scattered, the road to emancipation, enfranchisement and the integration of the Jew into the general body politic resulted in a general sloughing off of the folk and national aspects of Judaism and in attempts at creating new forms of Jewish identity based upon diverse interpretations of the religious heritage. The growth of Reform, Orthodoxy and Historical School of Judaism went hand in hand with cultural assimilation including linguistic self-denial. It was sustained by the rise of the Science of Judaism or modern Jewish historical and literary scholarship which set out to prove to Jew and non-Jew alike that only the Jewish religious heritage separated them. Judaism, once freed of its nationalist entanglements, was in fact more like Christianity than different from it. Discrimination and persecution of the Jew was unenlightened and intellectually abhorrent.

In Eastern Europe, where Jews lived in compact, mass settlements usually removed from the general population, and where chances of integration and citizenship were therefore virtually non-existent, it was precisely the populist and peoplehood aspects of Judaism that came to be emphasized. Hasidism and Haskalah attracted small numbers of Jewish merchants, professionals and disenchanted yeshive students who were willing to read forbidden literature, buck the generally insecure Jewish communities, and proclaim themselves maskilim (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment) or, later, socialist or Zionist revolutionaries. With the growth of modern nationalism throughout Europe and especially in the Czarist and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Eastern European Jewish intellectuals drew support for their growing awareness of Jews as a modern nation from the various exponents of modern European nationalism. Two elements of modern nationalism were of particular significance to those Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who fathered Yiddishism: (1) language as the essence of national identity, and (2) anti-clericalism or secularism.

In Biblical Hebrew the term “tongue” or “language” is a synonym for nation. In the Book of Psalms (114:1) the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery is described as its escape from a people of “strange speech”. In the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, we read that

it is surely no mere accident that nation and language community tend on the whole to become coextensive terms. A common language and a common literary heritage have at all times been among the most powerful factors for creating a feeling for national unity.

(Wiener 1973: 6606)

“Language”, writes Mordecai M. Kaplan

brings into play the remembrance of past heroes and events of history, the customs to which every member of the people is expected to conform, laws which regulate conflicts of interests and help to maintain the peace, and folkways which include characteristic forms of self-expression.

(Kaplan 1948: 85)

However mystical the concept, something of a nation's soul is always revealed in its language. Although national consciousness usually arises with concern for language, the relationship between language and nation is more than merely formal. “The difference between one language and another is not only a phonetic difference,” writes Aryeh Tartakover (1970: 230-231), “it is also a difference of internal structure.”

This emphasis on the centrality of language in Jewish identity first came into prominence at the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1908 where it was eloquently expressed by Matisyohu Mieses:

He who holds the future of his people dear and who does not want Judaism to disappear must join those who seek the emancipation of Yiddish. […] Affording Yiddish the right to develop is a sacred national cause and a contribution to the progress of humanity. […] Yiddish is our language with a distinct stamp of our spirit. […] The national essence is not in the bare words; it expresses itself in the internal construction, in the contents breathed into the acquired elements, in the phonetic form and, principally, in the entire sea of feelings, images, associations, jokes, etc. which have grown into the mute, blind, material.

(Weinreich, Reyzen and Broyde 1931: 193, 163; Eng. quote from Goldsmith 1987: 208, 203)

In 1908, under the impact of this growing struggle for the recognition of Yiddish as the language of Jewry throughout the world and in the Austro-Hungarian empire in particular, and in response to the mushrooming of the Hebrew-culture movement, the Yiddishists mustered their forces at the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz. … The Conference marked the conscious recognition and public proclamation of the Yiddish language as a factor of national significance in the life of the Jewish people. In declaring Yiddish to be a national language of Jewry, the Conference symbolized the culmination of a thousand years of Jewish linguistic and cultural creativity. It signified the consummation of several centuries of efforts to raise the status of the language. It discredited and to some extent erased the pejorative “Jargon” which, although accepted even by many outstanding Yiddish writers at the time, had hounded the language for more than a hundred years. It helped to officially reinstate the older and more dignified name, “Yiddish”.

As an expression of modern nationalistic tendencies within Jewry at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Conference brought together adherents of a variety of trends, philosophies, doctrines, parties, and alignments in Jewish life. It highlighted important developments within each of these, underscoring areas of agreement and possible cooperation between them and pointing out disagreements and antagonisms. The Conference signaled the emergence of modern Yiddish literature and of the Yiddish press and theatre as potent factors in modern Jewish life. It heralded new developments in Jewish scholarship and education such as the modern Yiddish translation of the Bible by Yehoesh (Shloyme Bloomgarten), the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yivo) in Vilna in 1925, and the development of the Yiddish secularist school system in Eastern Europe and America in the second decade of the twentieth century. It gave added impetus to the emerging doctrines of Yiddishism and stimulated the Hebrew-Yiddish language controversy that raged in Jewish life and letters up until the Second World War.

The linguistic principle of modern nationalism which became one of the primary bases of Yiddishism fired the imagination of several generations of Jews throughout the world and contributed much to the advancement of Yiddish culture. It imbued the creators and devotees of Yiddish literature, press and theatre with a sense of the significance of their work and a love and dedication to the Jewish people that extended far beyond the borders of the Yiddish-speaking world and benefited Jewish life everywhere. But whereas the fruits which emerged from the implementation of this principle were warmly accepted, the principle itself was overwhelmingly rejected. While the primacy of language became the foundation of modern nationalism for many peoples, it could never serve as such for the Jewish people.

Jewish group consciousness emerged millennia before modern nationalism emphasized either territoriality or linguistic uniformity as prerequisites of nationhood. Jewish group consciousness and loyalty were traditionally functions of the religious Torah culture and its halakhic regimen. Scripture and liturgy continuously reinforced the idea that all Jews were heirs of the Patriarchs and that they were all brothers responsible for one another. The laws and ideas of Judaism rather than the land or language were considered primary in the scale of Jewish values and central to daily existence. This was also the major reason for Jewish opposition to Zionism until the Holocaust.

Having survived the disappearance of Hebrew and Aramaic as vernaculars, Jews could never accord centrality in their hierarchy of values to any of their Diaspora languages, however attached to them they became. In addition, unlike other oppressed peoples for whom national languages were emblems of liberation and self-assertion, Jewish national aspirations could never be divorced from the languages of the Bible and the Talmud. If land and language were central to the awakening peoples of Europe during the “springtime of nations”, for most Jews religion superseded both territoriality and tongue (Lehrer 1940: 51-96).

Secularism or anti-clericalism was similarly a foreign norm and an alien ideal that Yiddishism sought to graft onto Judaism. According to Khayim Zhitlowsky,

Just as Jewish religion is absolutely independent of any national existence, so Jewish national existence is absolutely independent of any religious faith. […] We Jews are a secular nation—for which religion is a personal matter as it is for every other people—struggling for its existence and for its free progressive development as do all other progressive peoples.

(Zhitlowsky 1953: 270-271)

For most European peoples, however, self-definition and independence were linked to liberation from the medieval church which was usually seen as cosmopolitan and anti-national. In Eastern Europe, where Yiddishism took shape, the most powerful churches—Russian Orthodox and Polish Catholic—were linked to oppressive, reactionary regimes that had to be fought in the struggle for national identity and liberation. For Jews, on the other hand, religion was an indigenous phenomenon guarding the hope of national liberation and freedom from the yoke of foreign oppressors. While rabbis and scholars might sometimes be accused of insensitivity to the sufferings of the common people, they could not be considered inimical to Jewish national hopes and feelings. In the main, they themselves came from the lower classes and suffered along with their people the indignities of oppression and impoverishment.

The secularism of the Yiddishists was for the most part a dogmatic illusion which detached them from the deepest emotions of Jewry and robbed them of the sustaining power of the religious regimen and religious symbolism. They remained aloof from the modern synagogue and from the various attempts of Jewry to adjust Jewish religion to the conditions of the twentieth century. All this might have been defensible had the Yiddishists developed institutions to sustain their version of Judaism and perpetuate it in the Diaspora. The truth of the matter is that Yiddishism was for many but a stepping stone to assimilation. Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forverts in New York, was for many years vigorously opposed to the establishment of the Yiddish secular schools (see Shub 1970: 772-776). Americanization was his sole goal for his immigrant readers. The urge to assimilate was of course not limited to the Yiddishists. Zionism, Hebraism, and the modern Jewish religious movements could to some extent be similarly accused of harbouring hidden assimilationist desires. But these other movements created institutional mechanisms to perpetuate their forms of Judaism and in which their theories could be constantly questioned and revised, while Yiddishism remained largely theoretical and lacking in institutions. The theory of Yiddishism failed to inspire the kind of devotion from its followers that would lead to institutionalization and deliberate planning for the future. The negative attitude to the synagogue prevented the establishment of Yiddishist synagogues, that might have incorporated Yiddish culture in the worship and education of a modern house of assembly (see Simon, 1970: 112-132). Yiddishists spent much of their energy in justly attacking the destructive attitude of militant Hebraism in Palestine to Yiddish or in blindly applauding the temporary and illusory advantage afforded to Yiddish in the Soviet Union. (The Yiddishists, except for a few notable exceptions, failed to adequately raise their voices in protest when Hebrew culture was mercilessly silenced in the Soviet Union.)

With the decline of the shtetl and the destruction of Eastern European Jewry, the heartland of Yiddish culture in which Jewish secularism emerged has vanished forever. Both the Yiddishist and Hebraist versions of Jewish secularism have been dealt severe blows. Despite its successes in Israel, Hebraist secularism has never succeeded in taking root in the Diaspora. Yiddish secularism, on the other hand, has had to pay the price for what Abraham Golomb has called “an organic internal defect”. “Yiddishism”, he writes,

had no self-awareness, did not plumb its own depths. We were socialists with Yiddish, anarchists with Yiddish, Zionists with Yiddish. Yiddish was something extra, not an end in itself. We were Yiddishists only to the extent that [and for as long as] Jews spoke Yiddish.

Yiddishism failed to see itself as a movement of, by and for the Jewish people. It denied its “folkist” or national character even to itself.

Even in the one practical area—in our school system, we did not want to recognize Yiddishism as the ideal of a universal people with a language and culture of its own and its own fully organized peoplehood.

(Golomb 1971: 188)

This lack of a unifying principle may explain why Yiddishism allowed itself to become encumbered with anti-religionism.

Jewish secularism in both its Hebraist and Yiddishist versions has been in conflict with itself for many years, denying the significance of traditional Jewish religious practices and symbols. Hebraists negated everything that smacked of exile (shelilat ha-galut) and attempted to create a new Biblical people while Yiddishists avoided everything that smacked of religion. The Jewish people both in Israel and the Diaspora is paying a heavy price for the failure of the secularists to articulate acceptable versions of secular Judaism for those Jews who have become estranged from organized Jewish religious life.

Having exposed the theoretical inadequacies of Yiddishism or Yiddish secularism, we must not be oblivious to its achievements. The traditional Jewish concept that “practice not theory is what really counts” manifestly applies here. To a very large extent, Yiddishism was in no small measure responsible for the Jewish survival of large numbers of Eastern European Jews both in their native lands and in lands of immigration. Those who abandoned what had become for them a rigid, fundamentalist and intolerant way of life were in most cases kept from abandoning Judaism and the Jewish people by the alternative offered them by Yiddishism. Yiddish language and culture were barriers to disaffection and defection. In its still, small voice Yiddishism proclaimed: “Ad kan! This far you may go but no further!” The hidden agenda of the Czernowitz Conference and of all subsequent Yiddish conclaves was kiyem haume—the survival of the Jewish people and the maintenance and furtherance of Jewish distinctiveness and identity (cf. Mark 1973).

The phenomenal rise of Yiddish literature and the growth of the Yiddish press, theatre, and educational trends increased the significance of the language in the twentieth century. Yiddish literature attracted many of the leading literary talents of the Hebrew and Russian press. The works of the three Yiddish “classicists”, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, as well as those of many Yiddish literary masters from the ensuing generations became classics of the Jewish heritage, which made the language in which they were written more significant than ever. Yiddish became a valuable expression of Jewish identity for a significant segment of East European Jewry, and one of the most powerful forces linking it to the Jewish people and its historic destiny. Yiddish literature mirrored the diversity and variety of Jewish life and the international character of the Jewish people. By and large, Yiddish literature managed to avoid the pessimism, nihilism, and brutality of much of modern Western literature. It faithfully reflected the traditional values and ethical emphases of Jewish civilization. It strengthened the Jewish will to live and the Jew's commitment to a better future for his people and for mankind as a whole.

The bitter controversy between Yiddishists and Hebraists, despite some of its narrower manifestations, was a sign of the vitality of the Jewish people as it entered the world of the twentieth century. The struggle, symbolizing as it did conflicting interpretations of Jewish history and destiny, unlocked many powers that had been dormant in Jewry for centuries. The major Hebrew and Yiddish writers were bilingual. Their work in one language deepened and enriched their work in the other.

Yiddishism scored its greatest triumphs and became a leading force in Jewish life during the first several decades of the twentieth century. It drew its basic strength from the fact that, at the turn of the century, Yiddish was spoken by three out of every four Jews in the world (see Tartakover 1957: 210ff). The Yiddish press was the chief medium of enlightenment and entertainment for millions of Jews, their primary source of information and interpretation of Jewish and general life. Yiddish theatre and literature were unrivaled as the basic cultural fare of the vast majority of Jews. Yiddish was the language of instruction in the overwhelming majority of tradition-oriented Jewish schools and in the newly emerging Jewish secularist school systems that resulted from the alliance of Yiddishism and the various Jewish political parties. Yiddish culture was also winning the recognition of West European Jews and even of non-Jews who appreciated its authenticity and artistic excellence.

Yiddishism was essentially an ideological movement with a mystique, theory, and programme of its own. The ideology of Yiddishism fired the Jewish people's imagination with a new interpretation of Jewish history and destiny. It stimulated the Jew's will to live and his determination to survive as a Jew. It aroused creative potentialities and artistic impulses within Jewry, engendering a cultural renaissance of magnitude and significance. Yiddishism, together with its counterpart, Hebraism, spelled the cultural rebirth of the Jewish people in modern times.

The mystique of Yiddishism derived not only from the unprecedented flowering of Yiddish language and culture. The movement reflected the attempt of a major portion of Jewry to confront itself, as well as the world of the twentieth century, as a modern, “normal” nation. In this respect, Yiddishism was the product of forces similar to those which gave rise to the Zionist movement in Western Europe. It set out to relieve the unbearable psychological pressure and tension that the Jew experienced as he emerged from a segregated world of outcasts into the spiritual and mental climate of twentieth-century Europe.

Yiddishist theory was intent upon demonstrating that the Yiddish language was a language like all others, deserving of respect and recognition by the people who used it. It also set out to demonstrate the “normalcy” of Jewry and the inevitability of a future for it on the model of the modern nations of Europe.

The programme of Yiddishism involved agitation for the acknowledgment by Jews of Yiddish as the national living language of Jewry and the central factor of Jewish life, and its legal recognition by the international community as the official language of the Jewish people. During the period under discussion, Yiddish became an official language of such significant Jewish international welfare agencies as ORT, OZET, HIAS, the Zionist and Jewish Socialist movements, and all Jewish political parties in Eastern Europe. The distinguished Yiddish poet Avrom Valt Lyesin referred to Hebrew as the national language of Jewry, and Yiddish as its international language. Yiddishists not only involved themselves in the political struggles for the recognition of Yiddish; they also fought for Jewish national rights and, in the Soviet Union, for Jewish national autonomy. It was Avrom Valt (A. Liessin) who also penned the Yiddishist credo in the most celebrated poem about the Yiddish language. At a time when the extinction of the language was widely prophesied, he had a vision of its luminous significance in the heritage of generations:

Ikh kum tsu dir kind mayn, fun golesn
          shtume
fun getos farpakte, farhakte in klem;
ikh hob nor di kheynen fun tkhines,
          fun frume,
ikh hob nor di sheynkayt fun
          kideshashem.
Un trog ikh in zikh nit di blitsn, vos
          blendn,
dem flamikn zun-vort, vos vunder
          bavayzt,
to hob ikh dem shimer fun shtern-
          legendn,
di libe levone-baloykhtung fun gayst.
Fun Vorms, fun Maynts un fun
          Shpayer,
fun Prog un Lublín, biz Odes,
hot alts zikh getsoygn eyn fayer,
hot alts zikh getsoygn eyn nes.
Hot shtendik der blut-faynt gehoyert,
geloyert fil-oygik der toyt—
ot dort hob ikh, vist un fartroyert,
di eltern dayne bagleyt.
Ikh bin mit zey hunderter yorn
gegangen durkh yeder gefar.
Un ayngezapt hob ikh dem tsorn
un ayngezapt hob ikh dem tsar.
Un oysgeshmidt hob ikh durkh doyres
dem vunder fun viln un vey,
tsu lebn far heylike toyres
un shtarbn mit festkayt far zey.
Un oyb nor di kdushe di reyne
shaynt op fun inuyim un payn,
to bin ikh dir, kind mayn, di eyne,
to bin ikh di heylikste dayn.
I come to you, my child, from the
          silent exile,
From crowded, sealed-off ghettos.
I possess only the beauty of pious
          prayers,
I have naught but the loveliness of
          martyrdom.
And if I have no lightning flashes that
          blind one
Or flaming sun-like words that
          perform miracles,
I do have the spark of starry
          legends,
The precious moonlight of the spirit.
From Worms, from Mainz, from
          Speyer,
From Prague and Lublin to Odessa,
One fire continued to burn,
One miracle continued to glow.
Wherever mortal enemies lay waiting
And death was ready nearby—
There, alone and in sorrow,
I accompanied your parents.
For hundreds of years together
We faced every danger.
I absorbed all the anger
And I took in all the pain.
I forged through the generations
The wonder of will power and woe—
To live for the sacred teachings
And die for them with strength.
If pure holiness
Be reflected in suffering,
Then, my child, I am yours,
I am your most sacred one.

(Liessin [1912] 1938: 14-15; Eng. trans. in Goldsmith 1984: 34-35)

The world of Yiddish culture provided a satisfying form of Jewish association and involvement for millions of Jews during the first half of the twentieth century. Only the ever-accelerating pace of linguistic assimilation and the European Holocaust were able to radically diminish its power and influence. The integration of Jewry into the body politic of other nations spelled the end of the process of Jewish language creativity that began in antiquity. The new world in which Jewry found itself after the First World War made the maintenance of cultural differentiation in lands of immigration more and more difficult. The German war against the Jewish people resulted in the destruction of the heartland of Ashkenazic Jewry and of the Jewish communities in which Yiddish language and culture had reached its apogee. The Holocaust brought an end to that sector of the Jewish world, without which Yiddish remained bereft of the principal source of its vitality and influence. In the Soviet Union, what Hitler failed to accomplish was achieved by Stalin and his henchmen, who viewed Yiddish and Yiddish culture as embodiments of both Jewish separatism and internationalism.

The Yiddishists have also remained the only organized Jewish trend to publicly acknowledge the incontestable value of the Yiddish language and literature as depositories and wellsprings of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish values in modern times. With all our respect for Hebrew and its ability to link us with ancient glories and with all our admiration for the miracle of the revival of spoken Hebrew, we must assert again and again that the creativity of the Jewish people did not cease in the Biblical or Rabbinic periods. We must also remember that the attempt to revive Hebrew included more than a dose of self-deprecation and the desire to sever ties with what were considered to be the despicable Jews of the galut and their culture. Yiddish, on the other hand, is indeed what Khayim Bass called

the fullest, most complete and most faithful path to our people because it represents the most complete development of the creative forces in Jewish life; because it brings us the sincere love of Jewish generations that yearned and struggled; because Yiddish connects us with Jews of other communities; because Yiddish is the vehicle of the historical experience of a thousand years of Jewish life.

(Bass 1971: 558-559)

In Yiddish literature, perhaps even more than in Hebrew literature, we can discover the full richness of Jewish life throughout history and in all parts of the globe. Yiddish literature, according to Mordkhe Shtrigler,

is the only place where all Jewish life-styles have been preserved. Neither modern Hebrew literature nor the latter-day rabbinic writings have preserved the breath of pulsating life and the complete picture of hundreds of years of Jewish existence. Whoever wishes to know the Jew of many generations and read the biography of his people will be unable to do so without Yiddish literature.

(Shtrigler 1962: 73-74)

Yiddish literature has bestowed a rich heritage upon the Jewish people. As Yudl Mark puts it:

It gave us the Jewish person in all his incarnations and transmigrations. It gave us the monologues of the Jewish person with himself as well as his dialogues with his own soul. Here the Jew was absolutely honest with himself. He spoke about both light and shadow, about his healing faith and his wounding, burning doubt. Modern Yiddish literature is the long road of the Jew to himself. Know yourself and reveal yourself are its commands […] Modern Yiddish literature is a deeply national Jewish literature. It is more national than Jewish literature of all other periods and in any other language ever used by Jews.

(Mark 1964: 31)

Today more than ever Judaism needs Yiddishism. Now more than ever the survival of the Jewish people requires openness and responsiveness to all Jewish generations and to the totality of our heritage. Once again the stone that the builders rejected must become the chief cornerstone. As Yehoshua Rapoport reminds us:

the life that took place in the Yiddish language has in large measure disappeared. But that life survives in the language itself. That is why Yiddish must now be cherished and protected even more than when it was alive. Yiddish must be preserved so that the cultural treasure which it possesses in the liveliest and most contemporaneous format does not disappear.

(Rapoport 1961: 272)

Even the secularism or anti-clericalism of Yiddishism, despite its misreading of Jewish history, has a role to play in the present. It can serve to remind modern Jews who tend to see authentic Eastern European Jewry in one-dimensional religious terms, of the complexity of European Jewish society. Jewish pluralism was already in the making in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century and new forms of Judaism were aborning. Tshuve or return to Judaism can legitimately take many forms.

Ever since the Emancipation and the Enlightenment, Yiddish language and literature have helped sustain Jewish identity and have helped bring new life and new hope to its people. Now, Yiddish and Yiddish literature must call upon all organs of Judaism and the Jewish people to rally to their aid and help sustain the culture that has given life to generations of the dry bones of our people the world over. As Leyzer Domankevitsh has argued, “When Judaism needed Yiddish—Yiddish was there. Now, when Yiddish needs Jewry and Judaism—they must be there for it” (Domankevitsh 1965: 20). The task of Yiddishism today must be to get all sections and branches of our people to help support and sustain Yiddish language and culture. Yiddish linguistic and cultural content must become part of the educational programmes of all Jewish schools, organizations and social agencies. Yiddishism must no longer content itself with being a trend. It must become part of the Jewish consciousness of every Jew. Speaking Yiddish and reading Yiddish can no longer be the sole goal of Yiddishism. Nothing less than the recognition of Yiddish culture as an essential component of Jewish identity for all Jews will suffice.

The goal of a revitalized Yiddishism can be nothing less than the fulfillment of the Prophet's words:

Your sons shall build once more the ancient ruins, and old foundations you shall raise again. You shall be called the repairer of ruins, the restorer of wrecked homes.

(Isaiah 58:12)

References

Bass, Khayim

1971 Shrayber un verk, Hamenoyre: Tel Aviv.

Domankevitsh, Leyzer

1965 Verter un vertn, Peretz: Tel Aviv.

Goldsmith, Emanuel S.

1984 “Yiddish Poetry and American Jewish Identity” in Jewish Book Annual (New York) 42: 31-48.

1987 Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement, Shapolsky Publishers: New York.

Golomb, Avrohom

1971 Tsu di heykhn fun yidishn gayst, published by the author: Paris.

Kaplan, Mordecai M.

1948 The Future of the American Jew, Macmillan: New York.

1964 The Purpose and Meaning of Jewish Existence, The Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia.

Lehrer, Leybush

1940 Yidishkayt un andere problemen, Matones: New York.

Liessin, Avrom

1938 Valt, Avrom (A. Lyesin), Lider un poemen, vol. I, Forverts Association: New York.

Mark, Yudl

1964 “Hundert yor yidishe literatur” in Tsukunft (New York), January.

1973 “Trakhtenishn vegn kiyem haume” in Tsukunft (New York), May-June.

Rapoport, Yehoshua

1961 Zoymen in vint, Argentiner opteyl fun alveltlekhn yidishn kultur kongres: Buenos Aires.

Shapiro, Y.

1970 (ed.) Binetivei hagut vetarbut, Yavneh: Tel Aviv.

Shtrigler, Mordkhe

1962 Shmuesn mit der tsayt, vol. II, Kiyem: Buenos Aires.

Shub, Dovid

1970 Fun di amolike yorn, vol. II, Cyco: New York.

Simon, Shloyme

1970 Emune fun a dor, Matones: New York.

Tartakover, Aryeh

1957 Hahevra hayehudit, Masada: Tel Aviv.

1970 “Hurban hasafa utehiyat hasafa” in Shapiro 1970.

Valt, Avrom see A. Liessin

Weinreich, Max and Reyzen, Zalmen and Broyde, Khayim

1931 (eds.) Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents. Barikhtn, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908, Yivo: Vilna.

Wiener, Philip P.

1973 Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. III, Charles Schribner's Sons: New York.

Zhitlowsky, Khayim

1953 Mayne ani maymins, Yikuf: New York.