On Marrism and Soviet Yiddish Linguistics

Philological Encounters, 2017

The article discusses the ideological role played by the Semitic component in Yiddish in four major texts of Yiddish philology from the first half of the 20th century: Ysroel Haim Taviov’s “The Hebrew Elements of the Jargon” (1904); Ber Borochov’s “The Tasks of Yiddish Philology” (1913); Nokhem Shtif’s “The Social Differentiation of Yiddish: Hebrew Elements in the Language” (1929); and Max Weinreich’s “What Would Yiddish Have Been without Hebrew?” (1931). The article explores the ways in which these texts attribute various religious, national, psychological and class values to the Semitic component in Yiddish, while debating its ontological status and making prescriptive suggestions regarding its future. It argues that all four philologists set the Semitic component of Yiddish in service of their own ideological visions of Jewish linguistic, national and ethnic identity (Yiddishism, Hebraism, Soviet Socialism, etc.), thus blurring the boundaries between descriptive linguistics and ideologically engaged philology.

Science in Context, 2007

1985

In 1897, Tsarist Russia conducted a census in which it recorded the nationality and language of its inhabitants. Of the 5,215,000 Jews living in the empire, 97% declared Yiddish as their native tongue. Only 24.6% claimed to be able to read Russian.^Given this impressive degree of Jewish linguistic cohesion upon the threshold of the twentieth century, one would expect to have found a lively and developed modern Yiddish culture in Russia at the time, in the spheres of literature, the press, periodical publications, theater, education, as well as social and cultural organizations. In fact, however, th,ere was not a single Yiddish newspaper, daily or weekly, and not a single Yiddish literary journal in all of Tsarist Russia in 1897. Nor were there any established, well-known Yiddish theater ensembles, any modern Jewish schools with instruction in Yiddish, or any social or cultural organizations operating in Yiddish. Few other languages in central or eastern Europe could "boast" such a paucity of cultural institutions. Whereas Yiddish fiction, published in book or pamphlet form, was a substantial force in Russian-Jewish life from the 1860s on, the other institutions of modern Yiddish culture lagged far behind it in their historical development. The Yiddish short story and novel were among the most important vehicles by which Jewish intellectuals expressed themselves and communicated with the Jewish public. Tens of

East European Jewish Affairs, 2000

2014

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Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages