Higher Education for Imperial Russian Jews

Today, higher education is often taken for granted, but for national movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a university using the nation’s native tongue was a key demand. Czechs, for example, won their own section of Charles University in Prague in 1882. Similarly, some courses at the university in Lemberg/L’viv/Lwów were offered in Ukrainian from the 1870s.¹ For Jews—as usual—matters were more complicated. Among the factors contributing to the complexity were the development of both modern Hebrew and Yiddish as national languages, starkly divergent Jewish political groupings, and the muddled issue of the religious–cultural–linguistic elements that would make up the modern Jew. Furthermore, a large portion of educated Jews denied the need for a specifically Jewish institution of higher learning altogether. In any case, it was only after the collapse of empires in 1917–18 and the construction of would-be nation-states that the creation of a modern Jewish university became an urgent possibility.²

Cecile Kuznitz’s book focuses on the single most famous center of modern Yiddish scholarship, YIVO, which began work in Wilno (the city’s Polish name, Vilna in Yiddish, today’s Vilnius) in 1925. YIVO in Wilno lasted just over a decade before being closed down and then destroyed—along with most of Jewish Vilna—in the terrible years after September 1939. The influence of YIVO lives on, however, to this day, in part because of the transfer of the institution to New York, where it continues to exist and prosper into the 21st century. Remarkably, given the importance of this institution and its myth for Jewish studies, Kuznitz’s is the first full-length study of YIVO in any language. Her work is more than just an institutional study of a major center of Jewish scholarship. It also provides insight into the development of modern Jewish identity and, in particular, of a secular Yiddish-speaking alternative that was almost entirely destroyed by the Holocaust.

The story of YIVO, as this book’s subtitle suggests, really encompasses the “history of the Yiddish nation.” In 1900, it would have been quite difficult—at least in the context of Eastern Europe, including the Russian Empire—to distinguish the “Yiddish” and the “Jewish” nations (in Yiddish the words are the same).³ A quarter-century later, when YIVO was founded, that distinction would have been far more apparent, and looking ahead another generation, in 1950, very few would have spoken of a “Yiddish nation” except in a nostalgic sense. Of course, no one could have predicted the cataclysm of 1939–45, but already in the 1920s many were concerned about the future of Yiddish. Long the main language for Ashkenazic Jews, even in the first generations of emigration, the status and continued importance of Yiddish was called into question during the interwar period by linguistic acculturation and the growing strength of modern Hebrew as a language and ideology. Only with a strong Yiddish-language school system, including higher education, could Yiddish retain its importance in the modern world. This is the context in which YIVO was born.

Kuznitz begins her book, appropriately, with a chapter on scholarship on Yiddish before YIVO. In the later 19th century, Yiddish had established itself—not without considerable effort and controversy—as a literary language. But scholarship? To be sure, in the years preceding World War I’s outbreak, S. An-sky (Shloyme Zaynvi Rapoport) had carried out ethnographic studies in Ukraine using Yiddish, but—as in Lithuanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and other nonstate languages of the period—scientific literature and even vocabulary in Yiddish was underdeveloped.⁴ One of the explicit purposes for which YIVO was founded was to develop this side of the language.

As Kuznitz makes clear, a number of obstacles—financial, political, even mental—stood in the way of the development of Yiddish scholarship. Zionists and assimilationists had long disdained the language, and...