Out of nowhere, four times as many students as expected: that was a bit of a shock for Daniella Zaidman-Mauer. From this semester she teaches Yiddish at the University of Amsterdam. The language is therefore back in Mokum after the death of professor Shlomo Berger in 2015.
Zaidman-Mauer and the Faculty of Humanities expected maybe a dozen registrations, but when the lecture series starts this week, there will be 53 students in the room – a significantly larger room than originally planned. “It shows once again that there is a strong bond between Amsterdam and this language,” says Zaidman-Mauer. “Of course, Yiddish must be given in Amsterdam.”
Yiddish originated in the ninth century in the Rhineland among the Jews living there. Driven out by Christian pogroms, they migrated to Italy, Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), and later still to Poland and Russia. Their language picked up influences everywhere. Zaidman-Mauer: “Early modern Yiddish, spoken in Amsterdam from the 17th century, is most closely related to Mittelhochdeutsch, which was spoken in Germany in the Middle Ages. About 70 percent of the language comes from there. Another 20 percent was picked up while traveling through Europe, and the final 10 percent comes from Hebrew and Aramaic.”
Until World War II and the Holocaust, the largest group of Jews lived in Eastern Europe. But Yiddish hasn’t gone through any major changes there, has it?
“No, a Jew from Latvia could easily make himself understood in Antwerp, where I learned the language from my grandparents. The grammar and vocabulary were the same, the difference was in the accent. There was a large Yiddish press, with a standardized language that everyone could read. It was as you can now hear that I am Flemish.”
Yiddish as a language of culture has ceased to exist since the Holocaust
Yiddish should now be fairly easy to learn for those who can speak German.
“The biggest stumbling block for students is that the language is written using the Hebrew alphabet. That’s why we start learning that scripture in the first few weeks. Grammar and vocabulary follow.”
Where is Yiddish still spoken today?
“It is the language of ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have large congregations in Antwerp, Jerusalem and especially New York. In total, about three million people speak Yiddish, but that language differs from Yiddish as it was spoken in Europe before the war. New York Yiddish is also called Jinglish named, because of the influence of English. And in Antwerp you hear more and more Flemish words in the language.”
Yiddish is therefore a living spoken language, but that is not what you will be teaching.
“That’s right, I focus on Yiddish as a cultural language. And that Yiddish has not existed since the Holocaust, we have to go down in history for that.”
How far back?
“Yiddish was first written down in the twelfth century, but the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century gave the written language a huge boost.
“Amsterdam played an important role in this, because at that time the city was relatively tolerant of religious minorities. Because so much was published in Amsterdam, the city has been of great importance to the development of printed Yiddish throughout Europe.”
All books on trade read in the Jewish community were written in Yiddish
What was printed?
“Really everything. Think of a classic like the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But there were also two printers here in a competition to be the first to make a Yiddish bible.
“The importance of this development can be compared to the appearance of Christian Bibles in the vernacular as a result of the Reformation. At last, ordinary Jewish people had access to the word of God.
“Written Yiddish did not enter the synagogue. The scholars there stuck to their religious texts in Hebrew, but they thought it best if people read the Bible in Yiddish to better understand their religion.
“Furthermore, Jewish Amsterdammers mainly needed texts about practical matters, such as health care. They often did not speak the national language well, and they could not read the Latin alphabet at all. Books in Dutch therefore fell out, but they knew Hebrew letters from the synagogue.
“Thus, thousands of books were printed with this alphabet in the 16th and 17th centuries containing information useful in everyday life and commerce. All books on trade read in the Jewish community were written in Yiddish.
“Thousands of examples of this material have been preserved, which can be seen in Amsterdam, for example, in the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, part of the UvA’s Special Collections department. And there are also books in Yiddish at the Ets Chaim library, which belongs to the Portuguese synagogue. There is enough material here to have students write theses for another hundred years.”
Yiddish has its own feeling, its own taste
How did Yiddish develop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the Nazis nearly wiped out European Jewry?
“The nineteenth century saw the beginning of the end of Yiddish as a language of culture. In the decades following the French Revolution, nation states emerged in Europe. Anyone who wanted to be able to fully participate in this had to master the national language – orally and in writing. Jewish children had to go to a school where they only received education in Dutch.
“Jews were thus increasingly forced to emancipate. I use that word in quotes, because how do you mean emancipation means that you have to give up your own culture? Be that as it may, Yiddish became less important as a practical written language during this time.
“This is also the period that Yiddish words like mesjogge and goochem ended up in Dutch. So the written language slowly disappeared, but Yiddish also left its traces in the national language.
“At the same time, beautiful literature was still being written in Yiddish elsewhere. Think of the work of Sjolem Alejchem, whose novel Tevye the Milkman from 1894 inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof. And after World War II, someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had fled Europe in time, continued to write in Yiddish. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.”
“Everyone reads the books of these writers in a translation, but that is of course a shame. Yiddish has its own feeling, its own taste. Some of that gets lost in translation. So I hope that my students will soon be able to read this literature in the language in which it was written.”