Ian Biddle (International Centre for Music Studies)
Location: Research Beehive 2.21
Time/Date: 29th April 2010, 16:00 - 17:00
After the dissolution of the British mandate in Palestine and the founding of the modern state of Israel, language policy in Israel towards the Yiddish language, the language spoken by some 20,000,000 Jews in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, was marked by tensions between Yiddishist and Hebraist linguists. Zionism, the philosophical root of modern Israeli political life, had long tended to figure Yiddish as a language hopelessly embroiled with German and marked by hundreds of years of oppression, a mame loshn of the poor and lowly. The Bourgeois origins of Zionism ensured that the status of Yiddish as a vernacular also held it an anxious subaltern state to Modern Hebrew. In the Soviet Union, conversely, Yiddish was embraced by the Jewish left as the working class Jewish idiom and was officially recognised in the setting up of the ‘secular Zion’ of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (yidishe avtonome gegnt) in 1934, still the only state to have Yiddish as its official language. This presentation looks at some of the differences in language policy towards Yiddish and will explain some of the unique linguistic characteristics of Yiddish.
Published: 9th February 2010