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| The now extinct Forverts- a once very popular Yiddish newspaper |
I also noticed that Rabbi Yaakov Mencken has written a highly critical response to Stavans in the Times of Israel. Which I believe is at best overblown. I do not see it as the ‘Hit Piece’ against Chasidim that he does.
In fact, I don’t really find all that much to argue with Stavans about. His history of the Yiddish language seems pretty accurate to me, Rabbi Mencken on the other hand reads into Stavans a motive that is not there. I think he read the article with a jaundiced eye - based on all the negative articles written about Chasidim in the Times recently. Whether those articles were accurate or not is beside point. That they were negative is clear. In my view, however, no the objective reader would read anti Chasidic bias into Stavans article.
In any case, here is my take on the language. Yiddish is indeed a language without country. It is the way European Jews have for centuries communicated with each other across national borders where languages differed. Until recent times, it could quite probably be argued that any Jew of European ancestry anywhere in the world would be able to communicate with another Jew of European ancestry regardless of any language barriers. That is no longer true as Yiddish has become near extinct among American Jewry. Even among mainstream Orthodox families
There are two major exceptions to that. One is among Chasidim where Yiddish is their first language and spoken almost exclusively among each other. The language of the country in which they live is learned as a second language. In America, English is spoken with a heavy Yiddish accent. So indeed Yiddish language flourishes among Chasidic sects like Satmar, Bobov, and Skvere. I don’t think this is arguable.
The other exception is the Yeshiva world. Gemarah had for many centuries been taught in Yiddish. In the immediate post Holocaust period many of the great Talmidei Chachamim and Roshei Yeshiva who immigrated here, gave their Shiurim (Talmudic discourses) in Yiddish. Rav Soloveitchik, for example, famously continued doing so until - if I remember correctly - his wife at the urging of one of his students told him to give it in English because his students had a hard time understanding him.
That was true in Chicago’s HTC as well. Rav Mordechai Rogov, a huge Lithuanian Talmid Chacham who came to Chicago post Holocaust gave his Gemara Shiurin exclusively in Yiddish.
While there are still Yeshivas where Shiurim are delivered in English in American Yeshivas post high school, that is decreasingly the case in Israel. Mir, one of the largest Yeshivas delivers slmost all of its Shiurim in Hebrew (or in English for many of their American students).
Is Yiddish really a legitimate language with its own rules of grammar? If you talk to Yiddish teachers they would insist that it is. Although there is an ongoing debate about which dialect is the correct one. But i have my diubts about its legitimacy. As Stavans notes:
Yiddish came to life at least a millennium ago. The earliest historical documents we have date back to the 12th century in the Rhineland in western Germany as a code-switching form of communication — called loshn ashkenaz, the language of Ashkenaz — juxtaposing High German and Hebrew.
More than any other language - Yiddish is an evolving language that is heavuly influnced by the language of the country in which Jews are located. Increasing its vocabulary with words taken from albeit spoken as Yiddish with a ‘Yiddish twang’. For example, I would ask my mother if I could ‘mach off’n di vinde’ (open the window). The word ‘vinde’ had replaced ‘fenster’ in our home. But it was all considered Yiddish.
(As an aside I have noticed that in recent years a lot more Yiddish has somehow crept into the English language than I could have ever imagined!)
I recall many years ago listening to a professor of Yiddish speaking Yiddish on an Israeli radio station. I could not understand a word he said since half of it was in Hebrew. That proved to me just how much the language of a country influences the Yiddish language.
There ago a group dedicated to perpetuating Yiddish (YIVO) as the primary cultural Jewish value flourished. They were mostly (but not all) European Jews who were not observant (some would even say anti observant). But they barely even exist any more - if at all.
Does Yiddish have a future? Absolutely. But I don’t know if it will continue to exist among the mainstream. In the Lithuanian Yeshiva world most students are fluent English speakers - as are their religious studies teachers. Students are all taught in English. The era of the European trained Talmid who came here after the Holocaust is long gone. To the extent that it still exists at all in post high school Yeshivos is due to it being learned as a second language - so as to imitate and perpetuate the glorious traditions of the European Talmidei Chachomim. In Israel the trend seems to be toward teaching Gemera exclusively in Hebrew.
Where Yiddish will continue to thrive is in the Chasidic world where its is learned as a first language. It is they who will assure its perpetuation with a Chasidic dialect.
What about the true benefit mentioned earlier about Jews being able to communicate with each other across national borders? In my humble opinion, English is becoming the language of the world. Just about every country teaches English as a second language. The language of international commerce and the language of airline pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide is English. If I understand correctly English is the language of more countries than any language of any country in the world.
Those are my thoughts