Showing posts with label Hebrew. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hebrew. Show all posts

Monday, September 04, 2023

The New York Times has an op-ed by Ilan Stavans about the resilience of Yiddish, supposedly by an expert in the field. It includes some antisemitic tropes, oversimplifications, self-contradictions, outright falsehoods and ultimately reflects anti-Zionist politics more than it represents the state of Yiddish today.

For a language without a physical address that has come frighteningly close to extinction, Yiddish’s will to live seems inexhaustible. The lesson is simple and straightforward: Survival is an act of stubbornness.

Yiddish has been experiencing something of a revival. Online courses mean that anyone from Buenos Aires to Melbourne might learn to speak it. There are new translations of long-forgotten works and literary classics. A Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof” was performed in Yiddish. And streaming platforms like Netflix have released series, including “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and “Rough Diamonds,” fully or partially in Yiddish.

Before World War II, approximately 13 million Jews, both secular and religious, spoke Yiddish. Today it is estimated that there are about a quarter of a million speakers in the United States, about the same number in Israel and roughly another 100,000 in the rest of the world. Nowadays the vast majority of those who speak the language are ultra-Orthodox. They aren’t multilingual, as secular Yiddish speakers always were.
Here is the problem with this article in a nutshell: it is written from the perspective of the relatively tiny number of secular Yiddish speakers today, and it all but ignores the real use of the language among religious Jews, which is the core of how the language is used - and more importantly, how it is evolving.

The Yiddish of the secular Jew today is an adaptation of the Yiddish of the heyday of socialist secular Yiddish newspapers in America in the early 20th century. But the vast majority of Yiddish speakers today use it in their everyday speech and as such the language continues to evolve as needed to accommodate modern life. The religious Jews speaking Yiddish are the ones who are not only keeping it alive but they are the ones who are the ones who change it. As a result, Yiddish speakers who learn the language in university courses in the US have a difficult time understanding the many dialects of Yiddish spoken in Boro Park, Mea Shearim or Bnei Brak, which includes healthy amounts of modern English or Hebrew just as local Yiddish dialects have always assimilated elements of the majority population's language. 

To the secular Jew studying Yiddish, the language is a romantic throwback to the good old days of unionization of sweatshops in the Lower East Side. To the actual speakers of the language today, it is what is used in everyday life. That is where the dynamism of the language comes from - but the current class of secular Yiddishists tend to be anti-religious, and it shows.

Here are two religious Yiddish magazines published today. This is where the "interesant" things are happening to the language, not in academia or with today's secular Yiddish speakers. 


The writer dismisses the "ultra-Orthodox" (itself a demeaning term) as not being multilingual as the secular Yiddish speakers were. Where does he get that from? How many American haredi or chassidic Jews do not speak English? How many Israeli chassidim cannot speak Hebrew? They might not be as fluent in their national languages as they are in Yiddish, but the vast majority can speak and understand more than one language; they couldn't survive in society otherwise. This is just one example of how Stavans subtly disparages the people who are the ones that really keep the language alive - not as a museum piece but as a living language.

It’s worth noting that Yiddish has been maligned by gentiles and Jews alike. Antisemites considered it the parlance of vermin, while the rabbinical elite deemed it unworthy of serious Talmudic discussion. 
Really? The "rabbinical elite" were anti-Yiddish? What planet does he live on?  Yiddish was the lingua franca of all the major European yeshivas, even after they were transplanted to America or Israel after the Holocaust. The roshei Yeshiva (yeshiva heads) from Europe gave their lessons in Yiddish as long as their students understood it, well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today's American "yeshivish" language includes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and plenty of Yiddish along with English. And some of the "yeshivish" Yiddish has become part of modern Israeli Hebrew - such as "shkoyach" meaning "good job, itself a Yiddishization of a Hebrew term. 

But the article really descends into modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism here:
Another enemy of Yiddish was Zionism. In the late 19th century, as the hope for a Jewish state found its ground, it was portrayed as jargon spoken by the diaspora — the language of homelessness, without a true national voice. To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived. Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified.
Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.
So according to Stavans, Zionists are antisemites who regard diaspora Jews the same way that neo-Nazis do, while modern Hebrew is the language of oppression. 

This is a sick slander.

In fact, the people who initially embraced Hebrew as a modern language outside the religious context, and who rejected Yiddish, were the exact type of people that have embraced Yiddish today: the anti-religious, supposedly enlightened Jews. 

Before Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew as a modern language in Israel, there were lots of Hebrew language secular newspapers in eastern Europe. They were created by the Maskilim, the self-described "enlightened" ones, who considered Yiddish vulgar and common and tried to make Hebrew a secular language. Here's a list from the National Library of Israel of the Hebrew periodicals in their collection that existed before 1885, nearly all of them from Eastern Europe and nearly all of them secular:


And the first cover of one famous Haskalah newspaper from 1860, trying to attract the Yiddish speaking public to Hebrew:


These secular European Jews abandoned Hebrew for Yiddish at the same time that Zionists embraced and modernized Hebrew, around the 1890s. As described by the American Israelite in a requiem for Hebrew secular literature in 1906:


And while the current secular Yiddishists are often anti-Israel, the Israeli government is doing more to preserve Yiddish than they are, having created a National Authority on Yiddish Culture in 1996.

Another point about at least some of the secular Jews in Israel at the turn of the 20th century. Many of them opposed the idea of Hebrew being the official language of a Jewish state, and instead lobbied for the official language to be - German
In contrast, Yiddish represents exile — a longing for home. 

This is the problem of the modern, anti-Zionist Yiddishists in a nutshell. Stavans cannot even understand how this sentence is self-contradictory. Exile is by definition being away from home.  To people like Stavans, Yiddish is Jewishness - but it is as transient as symbol of Jewishness as cuisine or dance. Yiddish is something that should be studied and remembered. but it is a tiny slice of the richness of Judaism throughout the millennia and throughout the world. 

In Israel, the choice to standardize Hebrew as the language of the state was partially prompted, and later vindicated, by the Mizrahi Jews in the land who did not know Yiddish and who eventually became the majority. The only thing that Jews throughout the world have in common is Hebrew, not Yiddish. 

The history of Yiddish among secular Jews is much more complex and ambivalent than is described here. This article promotes a myth of secular Jews having always used Yiddish as their preferred language when in fact they used it for political purposes - as they continue to do today. It is the despised religious Jews who keep the language relevant, alive and vibrant today, while the author of this article keeps Yiddish in a romanticized amber of a century ago. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Thursday, March 30, 2023




Anti-Zionists like to claim that Jews have no right to Israel because they were absent from the land for so long, and therefore the rights have been extinguished over time.

The proof they are wrong, of course, is that Jews have always maintained our emotional attachment to the Land of Israel. Our absence from the land was forced upon us and not a choice. The most famous example is the phrase at the end of the Passover seder and at the end of Yom Kippur services, "Next Year in Jerusalem!"  

And, of course, every day, Jews in their prayers ask God to restore us to the Land and rebuild the Temple. 

However, that argument has a flaw. Those examples may prove only that Jews want the Messiah to arrive and then return to the land of our forefathers. But what abut the ongoing attachment to the land in the two thousand years of  diaspora? How can the ties that each Jew has in each generation, not a theoretical future, be proven?

This attachment can be proven by a single Hebrew word, and that word is אַרְצֵֽנו.

"Artzeinu" means "our land. " It is used about a half dozen times in the Hebrew scriptures, but the use of the word multiplied after our exile began. 

Almost invariably, the term "our land" in Jewish literature refers to the Land of Israel - and no other. 
The Sefaria database of Jewish texts finds אַרְצֵֽנו is used scores of times in the Talmud, 145 times in the Medrash, dozens of times in Jewish liturgy and hundreds of times in Jewish legal texts. And the passage of time does not lessen the use of the word - on the contrary, it can be found in texts written in the 19th and 20th centuries as well, by scholars who were not Zionist at the time. 

From Psalms: "The LORD also bestows His bounty; our land yields its produce."

To the Mishna: "One who sees a place from which idolatry was eradicated recites: Blessed…Who eradicated idolatry from our land."

To the Talmud:"Rav Ḥisda said to Rav Yitzḥak: This balsam oil, what blessing does one recite over it? Rav Yitzḥak said to him, this is what Rav Yehuda said: One recites: Who creates the oil of our land, as balsam only grew in Eretz Yisrael, in the Jordan valley."

To the Grace After Meals: "May the All-merciful break the yoke from off our neck, and lead us upright to our land."

To Maimonides: "It is forbidden to sell [non-Jews] homes and fields in Eretz Yisrael....It is permitted to sell them houses and fields in the Diaspora, because it is not our land."

To the Chofetz Chaim (early 20th century) saying that the sin of loshon hora, speaking negatively about others, is "so severe as to have caused us to be exiled from our land!"

And on and on, through commentaries, works of philosophy, and responsa literature. 

There is no need to qualify the term to say "our land of Israel" or to give it any other name. The phrase "our land" needs no explanation to the Jewish people that read these texts. Everyone knows what "artzeinu" refers to. No one would think for a second that "our land" refers to Babylonia or Egypt or Poland or Lithuania or anywhere else the authors and writers lived.

No matter how far we moved away, how much we were dispersed, how bleak the future looked, Jews always knew that there was a land - and only one land - that is ours.

And this one word, used in so many ways by Jews throughout history but always with the same meaning, proves it. 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, February 16, 2023








Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, November 21, 2022

Arabic media is filled with dozens of mentions of this story:
Dr. Mohamed Mukhtar Gomaa, Minister of Awqaf, confirmed that the ministry has finished translating 20 chapters of the Holy Qur’an into Hebrew, and added that the aim of the translation into Hebrew is that there are Jewish orientalists who translated the Qur’an and there are big mistakes that lead to deviation in the meaning, so it was necessary to translate into Hebrew..
It is interesting that even though the story is widely reported, I am not seeing anyone accusing the Egyptian Waqf of "normalizing" with Israel because of this translation. Islamic scholars are especially sensitive to any misrepresentations of the Quran.

The most famous translation of the Quran into Hebrew was by Professor Uri Rubin, who was a scholar at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This abstract of an Iranian paper about his Quranic translations would explain why the Muslims might respect Rubin's scholarship but would not accept it as a translation that they would trust:

The Hebrew translation of the Quran by Uri Rubin, (1944-2021) was first published in 2005.  In 2016, the translator after 11 years, published its edited version. The importance of this translation, regardless of linguistic debates, is the existence of a lot of footnotes under the verses; the content of some of them will definitely help interpretive- Intertextuality discussions, but in some cases the footnotes have conflict with the Muslim views. In fact, the final text is something beyond translation, but a commentary.

The content of the footnotes can be categorized in four main parts: I. Purely explanatory texts for literal explanation of the meanings of verses; II. Referring to exegetical views and disagreements of commentators; III. Referral to similar verses in the text of the Qur'an; IV. Referring to the similar concepts in Torah, and Midrash. The present article focuses on this new version and its changes in two subjects of basic issues and its references to pre-Islamic texts.
At any rate, it is clear that traditionalist Muslim scholars cannot allow any Quranic translation that includes commentary showing how it corrupted earlier Jewish texts to be considered an accurate translation, and why they would want to counter it.

Among other things, Rubin specialized in finding Jewish sources for Quranic episodes. It is well known that nearly all Quranic descriptions of Biblical events are based on Talmudic and Midrashic sources.

I looked up one of Rubin's papers about the famous Quranic story of sinning Jews, who gathered fish on the Sabbath, turning into apes and pigs. Rubin attempts (not very convincingly, IMHO) to tie the "apes" story with Midrashic interpretations of the Biblical story of God punishing the children of Israel with excessive amounts of quail, claiming that the description of the meat coming out of the sinners' noses is akin to turning them into animals, even though their sin had nothing to do with the Sabbath. (Since the quail came from the sea, and the Jews complained about a lack of meat and fish, he links the quail to the fish in the Quranic story.)

One of his footnotes, to a 1902 German paper on the topic, seems a little more likely an explanation to me:
Hartwig Hirschfeld, New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran (London, 1902), 108. Cf. Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 114 n. 339. According to Hirschfeld, the Quranic story is “a mistaken rendition” of the biblical episode about the manna that became worms after the Children of Israel had disobeyed Moses by saving it for the morrow (Exodus 16:20). Hirschfeld posits that in the Quranic version, the people who left the manna overnight became insects themselves – qirāda (vermin). He maintains that the compilers of the Quran eventually preferred qirada (apes) to qirāda

I did find another Hebrew translation of the Quran online, I do not know if it is based on Rubin or on another; there have been Jordanian and Saudi translations in recent years. 

The earliest Hebrew translation of the Quran was published in 1857 by a German scholar. I was surprised to see that the lengthy introduction was written in "Rashi" script, I was unaware that this script was ever used for anything non-sacred. 






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, November 03, 2011

A poster based on this post.


The same series of stamps included Jewish and Christian shrines, as the British tried to make them as even-handed as possible. But you will have to look long and hard to find any Palestinian Arab textbook that includes, say, this stamp from the same time period:

Oh, sorry, I forgot: for the past few years the Palestinian Arabs have pretended that Rachel's Tomb is a mosque, not a Jewish holy site.

And the guardians of culture and history at UNESCO have enthusiastically supported this complete fabrication of history.

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