Benjamin Harshav’s “Language in Time of Revolution” teaches the reader that social factors, historical factors, willpower, and accidents of history brought back and revived the Hebrew and Yiddish language. This was important because it created the base for a new, secular Jewish society and culture to emerge again with their own language and a new social identity. This new social identity meant that there was a nationalistic movement toward having a common language, literature, and cultural heritage. However, the reason why the Hebrew and Yiddish language lagged in the first place was due to Nazism and Stalinism. These two totalitarian empires wiped out the Yiddish culture since the Jews were not the majority population in places such as Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Since only one language of government and education was imposed on various ethnic groups, it is not a surprise that the Yiddish language became irrelevant. Stalinists argued that Jews can’t be a nation because they do not have a territory and a common language; the Zionists, however, tried to help by enforcing the Hebrew language on immigrants from all countries and languages because they believed in “national power and sovereignty rather than mere cultural autonomy.”
When the Hebrew language was revived, it provided a limited range of religious topics and ignored other areas. The reasoning behind the loss of the Hebrew language was due to the fact that denotations were lost and the universally valid law was more important than knowing concrete objects. Thus, Jews were forced not to pay attention to concrete nature and objects or use words from other languages. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the Hebrew revivalist, during the time of 1858-1922, edited Hebrew ne...
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...ost significant numbers to emigration. All this contributed to the asymmetrical production and legacy of Ladino and Yiddish secular culture in the interwar period (504).
Education was also a reason as to why Yiddish flourished more than Ladino did. In the
Russian Empire, there was a Yiddish school movement where in 1925 the Yiddish
Scientific Institute was created, with the sole purpose of study and preservation of
Yiddish. Unlike the Yiddish, the Ladino did not experience the same scholarly activism.
Works Cited
Biale, David. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken, 2002. Print.
Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California,
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Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture In
Comparison.” Jewish Quarterly Review 96.4 (2006): 498-509. Web. 26 Feb. 2014
René de Chateaubriand, François. The Beauties of Christianity. The Hebrew Bible In Literary Criticism. Ed. and Comp. Alex Preminger and Edward L. Greenstein. New York: Ungar, 1986. 445.
Theodor Herzl is often referred to today as the Father of Zionism, a man known for his role in the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people. His most famous pamphlet, The Jewish State, inspired thousands of Jewish men and women from across the world, although particularly in Europe, to leave their homes to realize the glory of creating their own homeland in Palestine. While Herzl was originally a believer in the gradual assimilation of German and Austrian Jews into the European cultural world, the growing anti-Semitism within Europe led him to believe that the only solution to Jewish ostracism was the creation of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Although Theodor Herzl became, over the course of his lifetime, a man who held a crucial role in the creation of a state that Jews across the world could take pride in and refuge from the prejudice they faced throughout the European world, he was never truly a believer in the traditions of Judaism and was primarily concerned with the necessity for the “reformation” of the Jewish culture instead of the founding of a prejudice-free environment.
Following the declaration in 1977 by Israeli government officials that the Law of Return applied to Beta Israel, a flow of Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel with values and traditions that has influenced the emerging society in their host country. Ethiopian Jews tend to possess more differences with Israeli Jewish culture in comparison to other immigrant groups and it is this that makes their adaptation to society a multifaceted process. The emergence of Zionism promised freedom, redemption, revolution, liberation and normalization ; concepts that appealed to Beta Israel who had been persecuted in Ethiopia. Simultaneously however, Israel was facing worldwide immigrants including those from the former Soviet Union, and it is the immigration of Russian immigrants that will provide a stark contrast in the differences of their assimilation. Israel, being a country of wide immigrant absorption, adopted the ‘melting pot’ idea in the hopes to create a unified Israel; this has proved unsuccessful following the problems that emerged from its use that was highlighted in the immigration of Ethiopian Jews. Immigrants perceived this ‘melting pot’ ideology as an instrument that was assisting to subject them to discrimination, which arguably led to a form of ethnocentrism taking place in Israel. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s culture is to be preferred over all others and provides a frame of reference in which to evaluate other beliefs, often leading to stereotyping and misplaced judgment . In recent years there has been an increase in the approval of cultural pluralism, however, this research paper will discuss the many factors that led to the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel as well as the factors that rendered this absor...
1996. “Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel” in Community, Identity, and Ideology: Social Science approach to the Hebrew Bible., ed. Charles E. Carter.
Frank Gruner suggests that evidence of this anti-Semitism is found in the amount of ‘countless Soviet citizens [that] were prepared to assist in one way or another from the very beginning of the German occupation in carrying out the mass murders of the Jewish population.’ Gruner goes on to further document multiple occurrences of internal violence directed against Jews in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1946. He later concludes however on the difficulty in pinpointing specific events as evidence for widespread anti-Semitism given the propensity for internal unrest in all areas of the Soviet Union during this time. The extent to which Stalin himself was an anti-Semite is another contested area of Soviet history, although Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaigns of the late 1940’s are often pointed to as evidence of his overt anti-Semitism. The term ‘cosmopolitan’ was paired with ‘rootless’, and increasingly took on an anti-Semitic tone under Stalin’s russification of the Soviet Union. Often derogatorily labelled as rootless cosmopolitans, Soviet Jews became increasingly portrayed as being ‘anti-patriotic’ and therefore a source of weakness to Soviet
...n. For years they had been subject to the wrath of the Egyptians. Now that the Hebrew people were no longer secondary in society, they produced writing in which they were the focus of attention instead of some other being or beings.
In Wilhelm Marr’s “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom”, he calls upon his countrymen to recognize and extinguish the threat of Jewishness in Germany in 1879. He argued Germans had willingly given up control of Germany by allowing the Jewish held daily press and financial industries to build up Germany as “western New Palestine”, or a Germany completely devoid any German identity. (Marr) Although his pamphlet blamed the Germans, his words resonated with them and validated their angry feelings stemming from Revolutions of 1848. Ultimately, Marr’s pamphlet effectively projected his underlying personal issues with the Jews onto Germans who then used it to retaliate against the Jew, thus opening them up to discrimination and scrutiny while living
In Dovid Katz’s “World on Fire”, we see the growth and development of the Yiddish culture over the past millennium from a Yiddish perspective. For example, we see that the growth of the Hasidic culture came from a series of calamities that heavily demoralized the Jews of Eastern Europe. Disasters like the Chmielnitski Cossack massacres and the predictions of the false prophet Sabberhai Zevi
The first and most important thing that needs to be addressed is the question that some might not know, that being, what is Yiddish? Though most people do have an understanding that Yiddish is the language that the Jewish population came to adapt, the core of the language is important to understand or at least grasp when trying to understand the quite infamous word, schmuck. The Jewish/German
Hannah Arendt, in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote about the rise of anti-Semitism in central and Western Europe in the 1800s.It takes a hard look at two rival movements. She wanted to give the readers a sense of reality of totalitarianism. She discusses the origins of anti-Semitism and the position of Jewish people. She examines European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Institutions and operations of
Today they are hated for their nation state, Israel. It is the only country whose right to exist is constantly challenged, and often ignored. A new wave of anti-Semitism was launched at the U.N. Conference against Racism at Durban, South Africa. Israel was charged with racism, apartheid, and crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide. “It is the sheer disproportion of the accusations against Israel that makes Jews feel that humanitarian concern isn’t the prime motive in these cases.” This article has similarities with Shalem Coulibaly’s essay because they both talk about how anti-Semitism is affecting modern day Jews and how the increase of communication and global shrinking is creating an easier platform for
Anti-Semitic sentiments were alive in well in Eastern Europe as far back as the late 1800s. In his book, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, in a chapter entitled “Laying the Basis for a Strong State: The British and Zionists in Palestine,” Joel Migdal describes the hardships that Jews experienced. Many European states were experiencing a Nationalist phase, which, as Migdal writes, “effectively excluded the Jews.” (Migdal 52). Jews were denied citizenship in countries such as Romania, despite having lived there for centuries. Other acts of open hostility were practiced not only at a personal level, where attacks and anti-Semitic comments were the norm, but also at the state level, which allowed policies that discriminated against the Jewish population.
Tartakower, Aryeh. “The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1971, pp. 285–306. JSTOR,
Not all Jewish communities continued on their faith with YHWH. Before the exile, many communities began to scatter all over the Middle East, Egypt and Babylon; however, the exile...