The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (review)

Shortly after receiving my first job out of graduate school I was introduced to a colleague whose specialization was Persian literature. When we began discussing his research I made the apparent mistake of referring to his field of scholarship as Farsi, and he immediately corrected me saying, "Farsi is a term invented by the CIA; I study Persian. The term 'Farsi' exoticizes and orientalizes Persian culture. When people start referring to German as Deutsch and French as français, I'll start using the term 'Farsi.' Until then, please refer to it as Persian." OK, I replied, my area of study is … Jewish.

The politics of naming, and the political connotations of names, are predominate themes in Barry Trachtenberg's excellent monograph The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish: 1903–1917. In the Czarist empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, when his narrative opens, what to call Yiddish was a contested question that engaged a series of political, ideological, and cultural issues. By that time, serious scholarship on Jewish themes had been conducted in German for nearly a century, begun under the auspices of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, while a Russian-language Jewish scholarship, initiated almost single-handedly by the polymath Simon Dubnow, had been a growing endeavor for more than a generation; both of these developments, in common with other modernizing trends throughout nineteenth-century Jewish culture, held the Ashkenazic vernacular in low regard. For these intellectuals, Yiddish was zhargon [jargon], a name that suggests that the language, derived over a diasporic millennium from Middle High German, rabbinical Hebrew, and Aramaic and incorporating Slavic components as well—just as English, a language almost universally esteemed in nineteenth-century European intellectual discourse, is derived from Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and classical languages—was an ungrammatical concatenation of words, a mistake, a mishmash.

The intellectuals whom Trachtenberg profiles, by contrast, formed the first, admittedly and predictably disputatious, coterie of scholars to study Yiddish culture, literature, and history in the language itself. What transforms their discourse on Yiddish from one of contempt to engagement and finally pride—never universally shared partly because of the persistence of anti-Yiddish biases and partly because of the ideological competition between Yiddish and Hebrew in the first half of the twentieth century—is a series of external traumas and internal adaptations. As Trachtenberg observes, these early scholars of Yiddish culture, who form the focus of his study, started their public career as political agitators: Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) on behalf of a Marxist-Zionist party known by the unfortunate Russian initials "SS"; Ber Borochov (1881–1917) for the more influential Labor-Zionist organization Poalei Zion; Nokhem Shtif (1879–1933) for the less militantly socialist SERP party, which argued for political and cultural autonomy by way of an independent parliament, or seym, for Jews in Eastern Europe. The crucial break that changed these writers from ideologues into scholars, in turn transforming Yiddish from a Volkskultur into a Weltkultur, were the series of political setbacks and repressions that led to the failure of constitutional liberalism in Czarist Russia and that paralyzed it from the failed 1905 revolution to the beginning of World War I.

Trachtenberg's scholarship therefore demonstrates an enduring historical lesson with implications far beyond the precincts of radical Ashkenazic intellectual journalism: cultural work isn't just a consequence of politics but becomes a substitute for political action—a politics by other means—in cultures otherwise denied self-determination. At the same time, his work identifies and articulates precisely how intellectual labor on and on behalf of a culture not only elevates the discourse, the naming, of the culture but indeed helps to call the marginalized culture into being. The first generation of Yiddish cultural activists whom Trachtenberg profiles weren't merely responding to the enormous growth in Yiddish literary modernism occurring in the decades before they began their efforts and continuing in tandem with these activities. They were also in a real sense constituting...