THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YIDDISH PRE-HISTORY

292 Slavic and East European Journal REVIEW ARTICLE THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YIDDISH PRE-HISTORY Andrii Danylenko, Pace University Paul Wexler. Silk Road Linguistics. The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Roads, 9–13th Centuries. The Indispensable Role of the Arabs, Chinese, Germans, Iranians, Slavs and Turks. Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, Vol. 10, Part 1–2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021. 1412 pp., 198,00 Eur (cloth; E-book). The book under review summarizes several decades of Wexler’s staunch scholarly interest in the prehistorical and historical vicissitudes of Yiddish in its relation not only to Slavic, Arabic and other oriental languages but also a number of other Eastern and Southeastern Asian and even African languages, such as Chinese, Tokharian, Mongolian, Hindi/Urdu, Ethiopic languages, Coptic and Berber. By its empirical scope and theoretical insight, Wexler’s work can be viewed as a true encyclopedia of our knowledge about the history of Yiddish and its oriental diachronic linguistic roots (21). Therefore, the traditional view of Yiddish which allegedly emerged in the German Sprachraum as a local replacement for the native Judeo-Romance speech introduced into the German lands by immigrants in the 9th–10th century can hardly take away from Wexler’s theory (21). Wexler’s book covers not only the vertical dimension of the internal history of Yiddish, but also presents the Silk Road as an open linguistic space inviting the social scientist with a historical flair to elucidate a horizontal crosslinguistic continuum (4). The book consists of two parts. Part 1 opens with an editorial preamble, penned by Alexander Borg (3–7), and an introduction (9–19) in which Wexler dedicates his book to his prominent teachers, Uriel Weinreich and George Y. Shevelov. Here Wexler provides an exhaustive list of abbreviations and transliteration systems; symbols used with Yiddish examples which are identified as borrowed from or modeled on Afro-Asian patterns of discourse are introduced in pages 16 through 19. This complex system of icons reflects different patterns such as Germanisms next to Germanoidisms, Hebrew next to Hebroid, Iranian, Romani, Slavic next to Review Article 293 Slavoid and the like; the author also uses icon combinations like “♣ /τ: Yiddish component of Germanoid and/or Turkic origin” (17). Chapter 1 of Part 1 is devoted to methodology and historical background, e.g., Judaists next to Judaeanism, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, professional (non-tribal) confederations and others (21–223). Chapter 2, entitled “AfroEurasian elements in Yiddish,” is the largest in this book. This chapter consists of two sections, unequal in size: the first section offers a small introduction (225–37), while the second presents several thousand Yiddishisms and supporting data from roughly two hundred and seventy Afro-Eurasian languages (237–989). Part 2 opens a separate volume and provides extended conclusions and topics for future study (991–1095). Although somewhat repetitive, this part presents detailed “re-definitions” of major concepts and outlines the development of Yiddish and other Old Judaic languages through the lens of Silk Road Linguistics as a collaborative endeavor. The volume is supplied by an impressive bibliography and a series of glossaries, including historical authors, sources, ethnic groups, geographical locales and linguistic concepts; one can also find an extremely informative and useful index of examples, listed under the language names. Intext pagination, however, would make the glossaries more user-friendly. Chapter 1 can be read as a separate study, containing references to entries on particular Yiddishisms. For instance, when discussing additional requirements of Yiddish relexification, such as the preservation of Slavic grammatical and phonological parameters, Wexler cites the “Ukrainian-BelarusianIranian pseudo-dual” as respected in Yiddish by means of the German/Persian plural marker -(e)n and/or Hebrew Judeo-Aramaic -n, e.g., Ukrainian částka ‘part’ častky (plural), but dvi částky (dual) ‘two parts’ > tejl(n) originally dual and now only plural vs. German Teil ‘part’ and Teile (plural); Persian also has a plural suffix -an (134, 145, 158, 420, 422–24). Chapter 1 also introduces major concepts, methods, and the historical setting for the theory which lies at the basis of Wexler’s study. Wexler prefers to reiterate the main postulate of his theory which he has been developing for three decades, i.e., Yiddish cannot fully be defined as a European Germanic language that absorbed a massive Slavic component; it is very much an Afro-Eurasian language— specifically a highly Iranianized Slavic language (23). According to Wexler, Yiddish has a mixed Western Slavic (Sorbian and Polabian)-Eastern Slavic (pre-Northern Ukrainian and Galician, and pre-Southern Belarusian) grammar and phonology upon which were superimposed a German, Germanoid, Hebrew and Hebroid lexicon (30). Wexler provides newly calibrated ideas and a wealth of documentation—over 5,000 pieces of Yiddish evidence, supported by approximately 20,000 examples from about 270 Afro-Eurasian languages of diverse genetic affiliations 294 Slavic and East European Journal Wexler advances several “revolutionary new ideas” (25). First, the author outlines important parallels and contacts between Arabic and Yiddish, though he admits that Arabic surfaces in Yiddish covertly (25). Second, until ca 1,000, the overwhelming majority of Jews in the world resided in the Iranian Empire; conversion or a looser form of adherence to Judaism was common among non-Jews (25). Third, because Aramaic was the spoken language of a sizeable minority of people in the Iranian Empire, the Jews in Iran could preserve knowledge of closely related written Old Hebrew (25). Fourth, the Afro-Asian imprint influenced all aspects of the Yiddish language, which now has to be defined as a highly Iranianized Slavic language (26). Fifth, most ethnically and linguistically mixed Irano-Slavic and Turko-Slavic confederations known to have resided in Slavic and German lands lost Asian languages and merged with Slavs by the 10th century; Yiddish, according to Wexler, appears as a heavily (mainly covertly) Iranianized, Arabicized (and mildly Turkicized) Slavic language—with a German impact found almost exclusively in the lexicon (26). This is why, as Wexler (45) reiterates, the Jews are not a “people” of Semitic origin but a “religious community” of heterogenous ethnic origins, of which “Semitic” Arabs and Aramaeans are minimal contributors to the Judaic ethnogenesis. Some of the author’s “pieces of Yiddish evidence” look, at first glance, convincing. One can take as an example the Germanoid unterkojfen ‘to bribe’ derived from unter ‘under,’ or ‘illegal activity’ + kojfn ‘to buy’ vs. German *unterkaufen from unter- ‘under’ + kaufen ‘to buy.’ As Wexler explains, the Yiddish Germanoidism was licensed by the Ukrainian pair kupyty ‘to buy’ / pidkupyty ‘to bribe,’ with pid- ‘under’ (44). This Germanoid is included in file #140 on Yiddish terms connected to ‘buying and selling’ (502–23), although no new facts are added for the explanation of the term unterkojfen (511). What is missing in this etymology is relative chronology—Wexler does not indicate when this model emerged since the respective Ukrainian pidkupyty could appear in the early 18th century when the alternation o, e : i had been curtailed (Shevelov 1979, 724). Additionally, it is not clear how you can connect Middle High German überkouf ‘cheating in purchase’ (not used in modern German) to early modern Ukrainian pidkupyty as a model for Yiddish unterkojfen. Despite some drawbacks in textual evidence, Wexler provides aptly construed reconstructions and valuable information from written sources. The fundamental term “ashkenaz” is explicated through the prism of the comprehensive term “Irano-Sino-Arabo-Turko-Slavic Royal Roads” (perhaps even, as Wexler adds, with the addition of “Germano'”) (51, 1048). The term “ashkenaz,” according to Wexler, has undergone several shifts in meaning from (a) ‘Iranian’ or ‘Turkic’ > (b) ‘Slavic’ > (c) ‘German/Yiddish’ (84). Leaving some parallels in other languages for further discussion, Wexler’s reconstruction appears rather convincing: Stage (i) ‘Ashkenaz’ = Iranian: David ben Abraham al-Fāsī, a Karaite Review Article 295 philologist from Fez, wrote in the 10th century that Ashkenaz was a man from whom the Khazars descended. Šlomo ben Šmuel, the author of a HebrewPersian dictionary in the early 14th century, called his native land Ashkenaz. It is worth mentioning the view of Šteinberg (1878, 48), according to whom, this name became associated with Germany since the people of this name moved along the Don River and the Dardanelles to Europe, where they settled in Scandinavia and Germany. Stage (ii) ‘Ashkenaz’ = Slavic. In the 10th century Gaon of Sura (Saadiah ben Joseph) translated Hebrew ashkenaz by Arabic al-S! aqālibah ‘Slavic’ in his Judeo-Arabic translation of the Bible (85). The French commentator on the Bible and the Talmud Rashi (Rabbi Šlomo Yitzh!aqi, 1040–1105) used the word ashkenaz in the meaning ‘German’ or ‘German lands,’ but occasionally Slavic. Stage (iii) ‘Ashkenaz’ = German. As Wexler (85) emphasizes, the term Ashkenaz acquired its present meaning ‘German lands’ and ‘German(s)’ only after the 11th century. Wexler’s book is full of various ideas, assumptions, and brilliant hypotheses. For instance, Wexler argues that lessico franco contains both the Hebraisms and Hebroidisms of the user’s native spoken language, plus some unique written Hebroidisms, thus creating a discontinuous Afro-Eurasian Sprachbund (41). He returns to this concept in Part 2 and argues that future studies will reveal whether the Old Judaic trade languages of a millennium or so ago constitute the largest Sprachbund in the world. Moreover, another candidate for a very widespread trade language is the collection of Roman dialects/languages, which partly interacted with the Judaic merchants. Wexler then adds that comparison of the Silk Road Sprachbund with the so-called “Sinosphere” or “Indosphere” would be instructive (1077). The above statement is not enough to prove that we deal in this case with a “discontinuous Afro-Eurasian Sprachbund.” In view of the abundance of scholarly literature on different Sprachbünde, including Slavic, one would expect the author to discuss this topic in relation to the “Silk Road Sprachbund” in more detail before coming up with the above generalizations. The mention of a “discontinuous Afro-Eurasian Sprachbund” is clearly not enough to prove the existence of a particular linguistic league. In order to ascertain the historical and areal-typological dimensions of such areal grouping, one should distinguish its core, center and periphery. What is even more important in this case is a reconstruction of strictly speaking linguistic mechanisms behind the convergent developments of the contiguous and distant (discontinuous) languages which has not yet been done by Wexler for the Afro-Eurasian league with the Judaic languages as its core. Yet Wexler makes an attempt to substantiate the aforementioned linguistic league by referring to the early medieval multilingualism of the Radhanite (Rādhāniyah) merchants as described by Ibn Khordādhbeh in the mid-9th 296 Slavic and East European Journal century. In fact, I find the respective section, entitled “Ibn Khordādhbeh on the Radhanite merchants and their linguistic competence” (96–122), to be one of the most interesting. It bears reminding that the Persian historian listed only six languages used by the Radhanite merchants which are Greek, Persian, Arabic, Slavic, Ibero-Romance, and German. Wexler discusses those language which were not listed by the Persian author. In place of Ibn Khordādhbeh’s languages in the Radhanite repertory, Wexler imagines a total of ten or possible eleven languages: Greek, Persian, Eastern Arabic, Slavic, Ibero-Romance, Italian, French and German, North African/Andalusian Arabic, Berber, and possibly Aramaic (102). However, if we add languages which, according to Wexler (103), have contributed something to Yiddish to Ibn Khordādhbeh’s list—such as Ethiopic, Chinese, Tokharian, Hindi/Urdu— then the linguistic inventory of the Radhanite merchants could have reached about a dozen and a half! One can agree with Wexler’s list of the languages since all of them have been in contact with the postulated Judeo-Iranian, Judeo-Slavic (before and after relexification to German lexicon) and JudeoTurkic which all coexisted at some point within one and the same community in the Khazar Empire (96). There is just one caveat: the historiographic and textual discussion of the above languages by Wexler is not enough to explain the actual mechanisms—desemanticization, decategorialization, erosion, and extension, or societal factors (Danylenko 2015, 269–70)—for contact-induced grammaticalization during the postulated language contact. I concur with Wexler that a kind of intellectual myopia affects Slavic linguists, who show little interest in the linguistic interrelations between the Afro-Eurasian components, including the Slavic one, in Yiddish. The discipline created by Wexler has a great potential for Slavists. I have already written about how Slavic historical phonology can benefit from the classical Arab-Muslim geography (Danylenko 2020). Wexler’s works open up some other fields of interest to Slavists, in particular in the enforced migration of Western and Eastern Slavic slaves to Spain, the Afro-Eurasian Arabic-speaking world and Asia Minor between the 9th–12th century (36). Wexler is right to claim that this topic, long of major interest to non-Slavic historians, promises invaluable insights for Slavists, both linguistically and socio-culturally. I want to give one example related to the S! aqālibah slaves in the province of Ifrīqiyyah (Tunisia and eastern Algeria) in North Africa. The first slaves appeared there during the rule of the emir of the Aghlabids, Ibrāhīm Ibn alAghlab (800–12) although it is not clear whether they were Slavs or Negroes, as assumed by Talbi (1966, 136). During the rule of the second imam-caliph al-Qā’im bi-Amr Allāh (934–46), the rise of S! aqālibah slaves continued, three of whom—Maysūr, S!andal, and Bushrā—are noted by name in the sources in addition to Ustādh Jawdhar who rose among the S! aqālibah ranks to become the trusted confidante to the Fāt!imid imam-caliphs. It is worth mentioning one anecdote involving a Slavic slave and more specifically the Review Article 297 Slavic speech employed in the late 9th century in the city of Kairouan. The protagonist of this anecdote is a certain Abū "Alī "Abd Allāh Ibn Muh!ammad Ibn al-Faraj, nicknamed Ibn al-Bannā, who had been a judge in Qas! tīliya for a while (Mišin 2002, 241). Because of his conflict with the local people, he was sent to Raqqāda where he had to defend himself before the ruler who spoke to his Slavic slave in Slavic. I believe that the S! aaqālibah slaves in the 9th–10th century could use a kind of Arabo-Slavic. The grammar and phonology of their South Slavic language (as reflected in the form B.lāgh) could have been kept largely intact, while the bulk of the vocabulary tended to relexify to Arabic or even Berber in the view of the importance of the Kutāma Berbers serving eventually as the mainstay of the Fāt!imid dynasty. A legitimate question to pose in this case is whether the “local” (S! aaqālibah) Slavs could find some form of common Slavic speech to communicate with the Radhanite merchants based in Kairouan who had moved to Andalusia and North Africa from Sardes, GrecoIranian Anatolia and later also from other successor states of the Iranian Empire as early as the 7th century, according to Wexler (88–89, 90). The above linguistic hypothesis about the Slavic language in North Africa which we call Arabo-Slavic, deserves further study from the point of view of the enforced migration of Balkan Slavic and even Eastern Slavic slaves to North Africa (and Andalusia) between the 9th–12th century. To be sure, Arabo-Slavic has not achieved the status of what Wexler (32) labels “Wandersprachen” (peripatetic languages) in reference to the Old Jewish trading languages. I can agree with Wexler that it is a great pity that such topics as Judeo-Slavic and Arabo-Slavic, to say the least, have remained beyond the scope of interest of Slavists. Quite in accordance with Wexler’s study of the origins of Yiddish, future research will clarify the status of Slavic among other relexified languages in the Afro-Eurasian Arabic-speaking world, Asia Minor, and even the Caucasus, characterized by a high level of linguistic diversity (see Danylenko 2021). Wexler is aware that his theory can hardly satisfy all the specialists in Jewish history and linguistics. Yet he amassed a huge amount of evidence to support that, in the Silk Road experience, it was not just the birth of the Jewish peoples that we can witness but also the very formation of the emerging types of Judaism. In view of these two most dramatic non-linguistic consequences of Radhanite activity along the international Afro-Eurasian trade routes (43), I see that Wexler’s book lacks two types of evidence, which are linguistic and glottochronological. To begin with, the linguistic evidence provided by Wexler is obviously not enough to cover the systemic nature of the postulated language(s). In fact, the reconstruction of Judaic languages or the respective lingua francas, such as Judeo-Slavic, Judeo-Iranian, Judeo-Turkic and the like, cannot be reduced to the reconstruction of their lessico franco. To argue that we deal with real 298 Slavic and East European Journal (pre)historical languages, we should reconstruct all the levels of the linguistic system, from the phonological level to the morphosyntactic one, with the lexicon playing a secondary (cultural) role. The methods of the sociolinguistic typology could prove very instrumental in profiling the linguistic patterning in such languages. Yet Wexler does in fact discuss grammatical phenomena like the aforementioned “Ukrainian-Belarusian-Iranian pseudo-dual” as respected in Yiddish. Moreover, such facts are cited randomly and do not reflect the linguistic system as a whole, whence a very vague idea of what these lingua francas could be. Finally, Wexler’s theory needs glottochronological and genetic corroboration. Ideally in the case of Yiddish (and other Judaic languages), one should provide a comparison of genetic and linguistic reconstructions aimed at searching for correspondences between the topology and dates of the respective gene and languages tress (changes) with documented historical events (see Balanovsky et al. 2011). The latter is present in Wexler’s discussion, though gene-language coevolution is not even mentioned by the author. The so-called glottochronological approach could be very helpful for the substantiating Wexler’s theory. In other words, a precise and reliable portrait of the Y-chromosomal and linguistic variation along the “Irano-Sino-Arabo-Turco-Slavic Rooyal Roads” (51) should reflect the postulated phylogenetic relationships between different languages found in the focus of Silk Road Linguistics. Yet the above concerns do not diminish the pioneering nature of Wexler’s work, which we propose to call the “Encyclopedia of Yiddish Pre-History.” Neither do its mostly minor drawbacks and occasional editorial shortcomings detract from its groundbreaking discussion. As the readers of this review may judge for themselves, Yiddish studies is today positioned at the cross-roads of the history of this and adjacent disciplines, with so many interesting new developments in the offing, in particular for Slavists. One of such breakthrough developments is the appearance of Silk Road Linguistics. What is clear for now is the fact that this discipline has become an indispensable and most influential part of Yiddish studies. The “Encyclopedia of Yiddish PreHistory” can be recommended not only to those working in different subfields of historical linguistics and the history of Yiddish, but also to linguists and historians of all stripes who are interested in what is in store for the field of Jewish studies in the years to come. REFERENCES Balanovsky, Oleg et al. “Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 28.10 (2011): 2905–20. Danylenko, Andrii. “ “Mountain of Tongues”. The Languages of the Caucasus in Arabic-Islamic Sources.” Eurasiatica. Quaderni di studi su Balcani, Anatolia, Iran, Caucaso e Asia Cen- Review Article 299 trale 18 (2021): Armenia, Caucaso e Asia Centrale. Ricerche 2021. Ed. by Artoni, Daniele, Frappi, Carlo, and Paolo Sorbello: 32–49. Danylenko, Andrii. “What Can the Arab Geographers Deliver on Slavic Historical Philology?”. Slavonic and Eastern European Review 98.1 (2020): 331–41. Danylenko, Andrii. “On the Mechanisms of the Grammaticalization of Comitative and Instrumental Categories in Slavic.” Journal of Historical Linguistics 5.2 (2015): 267–96. Mišin, Dmitrij Evgen'evič. Sakaliba (slavjane) v islamskom mire. Moscow: IV RAN—Kraft+, 2002. Shevelov, George Y. A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979. Šteinberg, Ovsej Nuamovič. Evrejskij i xaldejskij ètimologičeskij slovar' k knigam Vetxogo Zaveta. Vol. 1: Evrejsko-russkij. Vilnius: L.L. Mats, 1878. Talbi, Mohammed. L’émirat aghlabide (184/860–296/909). Histoire politique. Paris: AdrienMaisonneuve, 1966.