Language and the Jews

A wide gulf lies between the rabbinic claim that dibra Torah kilshon bene adam—the Torah spoke in the language of man—and the mystical belief that the Torah is written in a perfect Divine language that humans can never fully comprehend. How are we to make sense of it? George Steiner, a language-intoxicated Jew if ever there was one, observes that "language is, within itself, infinite . . . incommensurable in its potential, but not unbounded." Indeed, the distance between the infinite and the bounded sets off the domain in which language, that eminently malleable but also profoundly constitutive force, has left its mark on human history.

In the particular case of the Jews, their long and textured relationship to language was born and developed in response to crisis—not merely to the primal and universal state of linguistic tohu va-vohu, nor to the confusing cacophony of Babel, but to the frequent exigencies of dispersion. The result was not a state of linguistic Exile; neither silence nor inarticulateness, at least since Moses, could be said to characterize the Jews. Rather, the Jews made for themselves a spectacularly colorful linguistic Diaspora, mixing, melding, adapting, reframing, and of course translating their own "native" language and the host of vernacular tongues that they encountered in their long and diverse journeys. Necessity, in their case, became the mother not merely of invention but of infatuation, which often enough developed into a full-blown romance between them and their languages.

There is in this relationship a strong dose of the daring. While pledging due reverence, Jews saw fit to modify and update their sacred tongue, the very language of the Torah; in doing so, they left behind rich accretions for the archaeologist of Hebrew to excavate. Meanwhile, when Jews found themselves in the midst of a new host culture, they hardly retreated into isolation. Rather, they boldly extended their tentacles and then, as an act of self-preservation, drew back linguistic and cultural matter that they recast into a Jewish idiom. It is this process of ongoing linguistic acculturation and adaptation—as we see in the cases of Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Italian, and so many others—that reveals both the depth and limits of Jewish assimilation. Or to borrow and tweak the wisdom of Leopold Zunz in 1818, it is this process that serves as a "gateway to a comprehensive knowledge of the course of (Jewish) culture throughout the ages."

The ambition of this issue of JQR is a bit less grand than that of the young Zunz. We lack his audacity, and perhaps a bit of his naïveté, in attempting to chart the entire expanse of postbiblical Jewish literature. But we do propose to focus on language, because it has served as a vital connective tissue for Jews and their cultural identity and because it makes manifest the very element of cultural difference among and within Jews. Moreover, our curiosity is piqued by the persistent interest of Jews, from medieval mystics and philosophers to modern philologists and literary critics, in the science and theory of language.

The resulting homage cum exploration of language and the Jews begins with a series of short but incisive notes. The essays of Dara Horn and Nicholas de Lange demonstrate the different ways in which Jews operate within and adapt to major world languages like English and Greek, in the former case, by creating a distinctive Jewish literary voice, and in the latter, by developing a more circumscribed liturgical function. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, for her part, brings Yiddish and Ladino linguistic cultures into productive juxtaposition, charting where and how their courses intersect and diverge in the twentieth century. Liora R. Halperin and Jehoash Hirshberg and Na'ama Ramot explore the vexed relationship that Jews in modern Palestine and then Israel developed toward two once-venerated mother tongues, Arabic and German. Finally, Leon Wieseltier offers five poetic fragments from Yehuda Amichai. In introducing the poems, he insists that Amichai be seen not only an Israeli poet but as a deeply Jewish one for whom the echoes of the tradition reverberate powerfully...