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Aya Elyada, "A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938" (Stanford UP, 2026)
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- [00:02]
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Amir Engel
Welcome to the New Books Network Hi everyone. My name is Amir Engel and I'm the Chair of the German Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm also a visiting professor at the Theologische Facultet at Humboldt University, Zuberlin. Today I have the pleasure to talk with Aya Eliada about her new book, A Lingering the Afterlife of Yiddish in German Jewish Culture, which came out with Stanford University Press only a couple of weeks ago. Aya, it's wonderful to see the book. It's wonderful to have you here and to talk with you about the book.
- [02:39]
Aya Eliada
Thank you so much, Emile. Thank you for having me in this podcast. It's a pleasure.
- [02:45]
Amir Engel
Tell us about yourself. Who are you? How did you get to write this book?
- [02:51]
Aya Eliada
So, as I said, my name is Aya Elada. I'm associate professor at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm a cultural historian. I specialize in German and German Jewish history, in history of language and translation, and in the encounters between Yiddish and German throughout the ages. Now, before I explain how I came to the topic of the book, maybe I will explain what the topic in fact is like, what this book is about. So I would say that the book explores a practically unknown chapter in the history of the Yiddish German encounter, specifically in the engagement of modern German Jews with Yiddish literature. Now, of course, we have many excellent studies by Geoffrey Grossman, the Film Dachtel, others about the engagement of German Jews with modern Yiddish literature, the Yiddish literature that emerged in Eastern Europe during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. So, and this is a fascinating topic. And they explore, for example, all the translations that were made into German of Sholem Aleichem in Dunlap Min Peretz and Ned and Mochas Forim, all these translations into German for the benefit of German and German Jewish readers. What I aimed to do in my book is to look at what we might term the other Yiddish, that is old or early modern Yiddish literature. So Yiddish evolved in the medieval German territories and in fact was for centuries also the vernacular of the German Jews before moving also to Eastern Europe. And during the early modern period, it served, as I said, as the vernacular. It was the everyday language of the German Jews, but it was also a written language. And a vast corpus of old Yiddish literature emerged throughout Europe from Amsterdam to Krakow and throughout the German territories. A huge and very diverse and very rich corpus of Yiddish literature that today we term old Yiddish literature to differentiate it from the modern Yiddish literature that evolved in Eastern Europe. And this literature, it flourished during, you know, the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. And then around 1800, it disappears from the German territories. It ceases to be published in the German territories and hence the afterlife, right? So all the ditch literature no longer exists in the German territories. And after I learned about this corpus during my work on my first book, I realized that there was this huge corpus of early modern Yiddish literature, old Yiddish literature that was extremely popular in the early modern era. I mean, all Ashkenazi Jews, I mean, this is the literature they were reading. And I wondered, can it be that it simply disappeared, that they no longer thought about it, they were no longer engaged with it that it didn't matter anymore. So I started digging a bit. And especially since I knew that, on the one hand, German Jews were very much interested in the past, in Jewish history, in literary history, and on the other hand, they were very much interested at the turn of the 20th century, they were very much interested in Eastern European Yiddish literature, modern Yiddish literature. So how can it be that they were not engaged at all with old Yiddish literature? And then I started digging, and once you start digging, you will certainly find something. And not only did I find something, I found this huge corpus of German Jewish writings, or we can also say rewritings of Jewish old Yiddish literature. I mean, translations, interpretations and anthologies of this literature and literary surveys and bibliographical lists and scholarly studies. So it was really an object of this huge and diverse corpus that stretched from around 1818 until 1938.
- [07:40]
Amir Engel
It's fascinating. So let me see. Just if I understand. We have old Yiddish and modern Yiddish, and then most Jews in the German territory start speaking German.
- [07:50]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. So this is, in fact, the reason why all Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German territories around 1800. Because from the late 18th century and during the first decades of the 19th century, German Jews switched. They replaced Yiddish with German. They rejected the Yiddish of their ancestors, and they adopted German as their vernacular and also as their literary language. And we have a huge corpus of modern German Jewish literature in German rising throughout the 19th century.
- [08:29]
Amir Engel
Right. And this kind of stuff.
- [08:32]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. So they just. They had this linguistic shift and cultural shift from Yiddish to German. And Yiddish continued to evolve, develop and flourish in Eastern Europe, but in Germany, German Jewish culture. Exactly.
- [08:48]
Amir Engel
Okay, so two more question of clarification, because I find this very interesting. So the first one, what is the relationship between old Yiddish and new and modern Yiddish? I mean, do modern Yiddish speakers, are they able to understand old Yiddish? And the second question is, what are the conditions? Why did Jews move from speaking Yiddish in the German territories to speaking German? I assume that has to do with emancipation, modernization, but I'd love to hear more about that a little bit.
- [09:18]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. So let us start with the first question. So modern Yiddish, in fact, evolved from old Yiddish. The German Jews in. In the German territories, in Ashkenaz, from the late Middle Ages, they started to immigrate due to pogroms and expulsions and so on. They started to immigrate to Eastern Europe, to Poland, Lithuania, and so on. And they brought Yiddish with them. And during the early modern period, Yiddish exists in the entire Ashkenazi realm, or Ashkenazi domain of Europe, including the German territories and. And Eastern Europe. But in Eastern Europe, Yiddish develops in a different direction because of the Slavic influence of the. Of the surrounding. So it evolves into modern Yiddish with this Slavic component. So modern Yiddish has this Slavic component that old Yiddish doesn't have.
- [10:22]
Amir Engel
Right. That's what my grandmother probably spoke. Right. This is kind of. Was it Russian, Polish?
- [10:27]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. Because old Yiddish literature or old Yiddish or Western Yiddish as the language is sometimes called, Western Yiddish, in fact disappeared throughout the 19th century. So your grandma for sure didn't speak it. Right. So there were a few remnants in the language of, like, older people and stuff, but as a language, it was no longer a vernacular. Yes. And this Western Yiddish, this was the language of the old Yiddish literature. It was much closer to German than modern Yiddish, because modern Yiddish had the Slavic component.
- [11:03]
Amir Engel
Right. So was it accessible to Eastern Yiddish readers or was it difficult to understand?
- [11:10]
Aya Eliada
So at first everyone read the same literature. Books that were printed in Amsterdam were read in Krakow, and vice versa. I mean, it was for the entire. But it was a frozen literary language. The spoken language developed differently. And in the early 19th century, or even late late 18th century, early 19th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe said, why do we have to continue reading this literature in a language that is more and more difficult for us with time? Whereas the German Jews stopped reading it and moved to German. And then in Eastern Europe, they change the literary language, and then the modern Eastern European literature develops on a somewhat different language.
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Amir Engel
Right, fascinating. So now to finish the setup, tell us about transition from Yiddish to German to modern German.
- [12:11]
Aya Eliada
Right, Correct. So we can say that it's part of the broader processes and transformations that German Jews underwent from the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. You mentioned emancipation, of course. So in many of these emancipation edicts and tolerance edicts that were issued from the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, Jews received more privileges, more freedoms, less restrictions and so on. But it always came with a quid pro quo. And what they wanted in return was Yiddish. So the Jews were required to give up Yiddish, at least in the public sphere, at schools, at commerce and so on, and switched to German. So you had this pressure from above, but you also had pressure from below, from inside the Jewish community, where middle class Jews realized that if they want their children to succeed in life, it's better for them to learn German and not Yiddish. And also the Maskilim, of course, the adherents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. For them, replacing Yiddish with German was also the key for the cultural regeneration of The German Jews, it was not for the purposes of assimilation. It was for the purposes of regenerating Judaism from within. And Yiddish was perceived as a language that is not suitable for culture and for Bildung and for scholarly writings, and hence the drive to replace it with German.
- [13:53]
Amir Engel
Right, okay, so now I think we're getting to the. The setup. So then, in the 19th century, late 19th century, early 20th century, you have scholars of German who are interested not only in the Yiddish of their brethren in Eastern Europe, but also in their own historical past of the so called Old Yiddish. And this is what your book is about.
- [14:18]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. Now it begins, for example, I start in 1818, so. So throughout the 19th century, especially the visage of the Sudentums, right. Science of Judaism, they were German Jewish scholars who were very much interested in everything related to Jewish history and Jewish cultural history. And they didn't care at all about Eastern European Yiddish. They weren't interested in it. They were only interested in old Yiddish because it was part of the German Jewish heritage and also because it was already dead and they didn't have to worry about it to worry about the
- [14:56]
Amir Engel
people who speak it.
- [14:58]
Aya Eliada
Exactly. But they didn't aim at reviving the language or anything. They were interested in it as a topic of the past. And the great bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider put it very poignantly. He said, for us, Yiddish is no longer a practical, but a historical, philological issue. And this is how they related to it. And he also said, I'm not interested in Eastern European Yiddish, in modern Yiddish. For me, this is Zhogon. Right. I will leave it to those who grew up with it. But here, as a German Jewish scholar, he was interested in the past. Now this of course changes at the beginning of the 20th century. And then many of my protagonists who were interested in old Yiddish literature were also interested in modern Yiddish literature, or even started in modern Yiddish literature. And then, you know, discovered also old Yiddish literature.
- [15:57]
Amir Engel
Okay, wonderful. So I hope we could get to speak about that. But I want to first ask you about the great kind of. Great irony, kind of historical irony that is the heart of the book. I think you describe it also as such. There's a certain dialectic tension between German and Old Yiddish. Right. Because the German is both the kind of the. The tool that it was used. It was the. Or the. The reason that. That Yiddish disappears from the German, from the German lands. There is a certain, as you already kind of pointed at or kind of suggested, there's some kind of a. A certain emotional Baggage, which, which comes with the relationship between a German, which was kind of the language of culture and philosophy and, and theology and all this stuff, and Yiddish, which is jargon, which is commerce, which is women, which is people, so on. It's kind of the language of internal spaces. So on the one hand you have this kind of relationship, but at the same time, this is also the language that actually preserved and maintains the old Yiddish and makes it accessible for scholars and for thinkers and for prosperity. So talk to us a little bit about this kind of tension, this dialectic, historical dialectic. How do you see it? How do you understand it? What do you think about it?
- [17:30]
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- [18:09]
Aya Eliada
so you're perfectly right that the history of Yiddish and German is so conflicted and ambivalent and entangled. And throughout the early modern period, Yiddish was always considered like a corrupted variant of German. And it was never clear, like, how much is it German, is it a German dialect? Or is it like a different, maybe a social act? So it was very, very, it was always very close to Germany, but also distant from it because it was Jewish, because it had this Yiddishkeit, because it was written with Hebrew characters. So this tension continues throughout the centuries. And in the Haskalah, it is really this linguistic affinity between Yiddish and German comes to the fore because the Masquedim say, okay, look, it's almost German, right? So why do we stick to this jargon? Right? We can just move to German. And this, for example, is something that couldn't have been done in Eastern Europe because they couldn't just switch to Polish or to Russian. It was too far away. But Tiddish and German were so close. And this what happens at the end that the Jews really, it was of course, a gradual process. It's not overnight, but it is something that the German Jews undertook and, and they made this switch. So we can say that German dealt the death blow on Yiddish in the German lens, right? And many of my protagonists, what they do is they translate from Old Yiddish into German for the benefit of modern German Jewish readers. Now you can say that this act of translation is something that was meant to. To bury Yiddish, to make sure there is no revival. Because you don't need it, right? If you want the literature, you can read it in German. You don't need the language itself. And what they show in the book is that there was really a gap between how they perceived the language, the Yiddish language, and how they perceived Yiddish literature. Because throughout the 19th century, early 20th century, almost all of my protagonists and German Jews in general, they rejected Yiddish as a language. And nobody wanted. Nobody wanted it to make a revival. Nobody thought that the German Jews should go back to speaking Yiddish, God forbid, right? They're finally German. But they perceived the literature differently. They saw in it that it was really a wonderful heritage, that they shouldn't, you know, let it. They shouldn't let it disappear. It shouldn't, you know, be forgotten, forgotten entirely. They looked for ways to preserve it for very specific motivations and agenda. But they were very persistent in preserving the literature, working on it, presenting it to the readers, etc. But not the language. So on the one hand, German dealt the death blow to Yiddish, but on the other hand, all Yiddish literature had its afterlife in German. German allowed it to continue living, so to say, in this kind of afterlife, to live in translation, to live within a discourse that was entirely conducted in German. So this is of course a kind of historical irony, right, that at the end it's German that like preserve the Yiddish and. And let it continue to linger, right, for. Or at least Yiddish literature and let it linger for a few more decades and perhaps almost a century, while looking
- [22:15]
Amir Engel
down at it and thinking that it's jargon and not worth.
- [22:20]
Aya Eliada
On the language. On the language. It's just. It's just thanks to the fact that they translated everything into German and that they discourse was in German, that they allowed themselves to engage with it.
- [22:33]
Amir Engel
So, yeah, let me follow this up a little bit further. You say old Yiddish literature. You keep saying old Yiddish literature. What kind of literature? I assume these are not novels in the sense that we know them today. What are we talking about when we're talking about the old Yiddish literature?
- [22:50]
Aya Eliada
So it had many different genres. We can put them in two main groups. The first and large and most prominent group is works of literature that were adapted from Hebrew and were directly connected to Jewish literature. So we have translations, adaptations of the Bible and biblical lexicons and books of morality and proper religious conduct and homiletic literature. So it was basically a kind of religious literature, edifying literature that was supposed to help common Jews who couldn't read Hebrew and didn't have rabbinical education to help them maintain connection to Judaism and to Jewish tradition via Yiddish. They said, okay, not everyone is a great rabbi, but everyone can at least read, you know, about Judaism and the Bible and Posture of War and so on and in Yiddish. The other group of texts that we have, and this is very interesting, in fact, these were Yiddish adaptations of German prose and fiction. So maybe we sometimes think about early modern Ashkenazi Jews, that they were all the time only very religious and very engaged with edifying literature and Jewish literature or. Well, no, they also wanted to have some fun and they also wanted to read what their non Jewish neighbors are reading. And they really translated and adapted many, many literary works from German into Yiddish. And we mentioned before that Yiddish and German were very close linguistically. So this translation, it was not too much of work, right? It was something. It was just transliteration. They would just write it in Hebr, maybe make some smaller adjustments. And there you go, you have a Yiddish work adapted from the German. And there we have all kinds of romance and adventures and humoristic tales. Everything that the German neighbors read, the Jewish people read too.
- [25:13]
Amir Engel
Once, many years ago, I worked as a research assistant at Salbaron's personal Nachlas in his papers. And I was working on this after the Holocaust, there were huge amounts of books that were shipped from Eastern Europe from Jewish libraries and put not far from Frankfurt. And this was restored and Salah Baron was involved. And I found a list of all the books that I found. It's a huge list. I mean, they didn't have Excel, so it's physically just a humongous piece of paper and you could open it and there's a list of books. By far, by far the great majority of books that were taken from Jewish libraries that were looted by the Nazis during the. By far. There were contemporary novels, right. You know, just. Just kind of popular literature that people wanted to read. And it was held by the Jewish libraries for the benefits of. And it kind of. Because everybody expects, ah, they're going to find the treasures of Jewish lore and such books also exist. But the great majority were. And lexicons and dictionaries and things that people need.
- [26:26]
Aya Eliada
Yeah. So this is true also for the early modern period and for all the literature.
- [26:31]
Amir Engel
So I want to talk a little bit about what you call a diachronic translation, which distinguishes between German Jewish writings and preservations and translations as we Call them of old Yiddish and the works that it was done by modern modern, so by Christian scholars who also studied Old Yiddish, which is a plug for your previous book. If I write. But I'm interested in this question. I mean, feel free to plug your previous book, but I'm interested in this question. What makes a Jewish translation Jewish? What is the difference between the Jewish translation Christian, if at all? What is at stake in these translations?
- [27:21]
Aya Eliada
So we should think about the fact that Yiddish was translated into German in three different capacities, let us say like this, or in three different contexts. So during the early modern period, there were Christian scholars, especially Hebraists, missionaries, theologians, et cetera, who translated Yiddish works, Old Yiddish, early modern Yiddish works into German. But this was a translation across the religions divide. And their motivations were usually missionary, polemical, anti Jewish. Okay, so it's a very interesting phenomenon. We won't get into it here, but this was like one case of translation from Yiddish into German. Another case of Yiddish into German is the German Jewish translation From the late 19th century, early 20th century of modern Yiddish literature from Eastern Europe into Germany. Now, in both cases, even though they are very different, of course, and the motivations are different and the way they translate is different, but both of these, in both of these cases, we have a kind of asynchronic translation, namely they translate from a contemporaneous culture into their own and from a different culture into their own. What I'm doing in the book, and this is the third case of translation from Yiddish into German, and is what you correctly said, I termed it the chronic translation. And this to show the translation on the temporal axis, it's a translation between the early modern and the modern, between a culture that no longer exists into a living culture. And also because from the perspective of most of the German Jewish translators, they were not translating the works of a different culture, they were translating their own culture, a kind of self translation, but from a different historical stage. They were in fact translating the literature that their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were reading. So the chronic translation is, is a very interesting phenomenon and it really shapes the entire form of this corpus of translations, like the motivations for translations, the works they decide to translate, how they translate it, how they market it, everything is colored by the fact that they translate from the early modern to the modern and that they translate their own culture that their ancestors still used to read.
- [30:24]
Amir Engel
Is it similar to the way German scholars, also of the spirit, more or less translated, you know, the early High German, you know, the Niblungenlied and this kind of the medieval into modern German. Is it similar in the sense that they're trying to kind of redefine, recreate, reassert their own culture?
- [30:48]
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- [31:16]
Aya Eliada
See full terms@mintmobile.com I think these similarities always exist. But of course the Jewish case has its peculiarities, right? Because for example, because of this linguistic affinity between Yiddish and German, you can translate it into standard German, but you can translate Yiddish into a German that is maybe still Yiddishized, that it's like a Yiddish German. And we see that each translator chooses which path to take according to his or her agendas. So for example, when Abraham Tendlau translates tales from the Meise Book, the Meise book was a collection of Jewish tales in Yiddish from 1602 and it was very popular. It was really one of the bestsellers of all Yiddish literature. And Avan tenlow in the mid 19th century, he publishes anthologies of Jewish tales. And he also translates tales from this Yiddish Meisebuch into German. Now he chooses to really, as he says it, he says it in the introduction, he puts them in modern form. So it's important to him to keep the heritage, but make sure it's suitable for acculturated modern middle class German Jewish readers. So he writes in standard German. He puts it in poetic form. He has this great apparatus of comments and explanations, philological, historical comments. So it's a bit scholarly, right? So he really, he takes something that was like very like popular literature for everyone and makes it a very respectable middle class reading in order. Now what's the agenda? He wants his Jewish readers to be able to connect to their own Jewish heritage and Jewish culture, but without undermining the sense of being German, the sense of Bildung, the sense of acculturation. On the other hand, in 1929, almost a century later, Bertha Pappenheim also translates the Seim Eisebuch, but she keeps it in the Yiddishized German. She has all these Hebraisins in it, all the Hebrew words and the syntax is somewhat Yiddish and not entirely German. And she has a different kind of agenda here. Right. She's not concerned about the acculturation and integration of the German Jews in 1929. It's not a problem anymore. Right. She doesn't have the same problem as Stendlau almost a century before. So she has different agendas. And she decides for other reasons to translate it this way.
- [34:23]
Amir Engel
This is a perfect segue to my next question, because my next question was about Berta Peppenheim, which I think is a fascinating figure. And your chapter about her is wonderful. And so maybe we could talk a little bit about her and about her, the gendered politics of Cena Rena. Maybe it's worth also to say a few words what Senna and Rena are. So who is Berta Peppenheim? How does she integrate into the story? And what are the translations of Senna and Rena? Why are they important for you?
- [34:55]
Aya Eliada
Okay, so Berta Pappenheim, in really just a few words, she's a very known and important figure, female figure in Weimar Germany also before that, already before the war. She's very prominent in the circles of social welfare in the Jewish communities. She's an author, she's a writer, and she's a feminist leader. She establishes the German Jewish feminist organization in 1903. And she's also an Orthodox Jew. I mean, I don't know if she would define herself as Orthodox, but she was observant in an Orthodox way. And these two strands in her personality, in her education, in her worldview, feminism and orthodoxy are two things that were behind her translations of Yiddish literature, old Yiddish literature, because as she explains in every one of the introductions, I mean, she translated the Meise Buch and the Zennerene and the memoirs of Glitterlof Hamel, a Jewish woman from 17th and 18th century Germany. She says, this is the literature of women. This is the female heritage, so to say. So if Buber and Rosenzweig translate the masculine Bible, she will translate the feminine Yiddish literature that generations of generations of Jewish women were reading throughout the ages. Now, the Tsenarene was the jewel in the crown in this respect because this was a work of homiletic literature. It was organized according to the weekly portions of the Torah, the but, and also the five scrolls and hafta. So it was like suitable for reading in the synagogue or reading every Saturday, every week. But it wasn't really a translation of the Bible. It paraphrased or wrote in Yiddish several verses from the Bible. And then each verse was elaborated with many different Jewish halachic, midrashic, interpretative works. So it was really a Jewish work to offer women, like a taste from all the Jewish world of books and learning. Okay, so mainly midrashim, Talmud, agada, but also halachaim and interpretation and so on. And the book was originally meant for both men and women, but with time it became known as the women's Bible, the Weiber Homesch in Yiddish or the Frauen Bibel in German, because this was traditionally the reading for women and girls on the Sabbath and the holidays, you know, edifying Jewish religious work.
- [38:12]
Amir Engel
And it was immensely popular probably, and
- [38:15]
Aya Eliada
it was tremendously popular, probably the most popular book. And it continued to exist in Eastern Europe. My grandma still read the Tsenarene as a girl in Eastern Europe, and it's still popular today in haredic community. So this really, it had very long longevity.
- [38:37]
Amir Engel
This is a minor. Is it one specific book or do you have versions upon versions of different.
- [38:43]
Aya Eliada
Oh, you had many, many versions. And then at some point it stops publication in the German territories, but it continues in Eastern Europe, in Eastern European Yiddish, in modern Yiddish. So it has a very long history. And Pappenheim translated, she's not the first, by the way, but we won't get into it. But in 1930, one year after the Meisebuch translation, she also translates the Zenerene. And there she has a problem. So here you can see like the problem of translating from the early modern to the modern, from a previous stage in your culture to a current one. Because on the one hand, she's Orthodox and she's traditional and she's like, oh, this book is so wonderful. It's so rich. There is so much we can learn from it. Like our grandmas used to read and learn from it and get spread spiritual inspiration and you name it. But on the other hand, she was, as a feminist, she was very well aware that this was a replacement for the real thing. The real thing was for the men to study Gvit Hamidra, to study really the Talmud, the Torah in Hebrew, in Aramaic, and this derivative Yiddish work. It can be wonderful, but it's derivative. It's second class. It's not the real thing. And especially it doesn't grant you any political or social status. That being Talmit chacham, that being well versed in the Jewish sources give, men and women were by definition and still are in Orthodox Judaism, excluded from Betamidrash and from the real thing, and had to do with literature. Right? So. And she writes it in the introduction, so she translates it and she loves it. And she's fascinated by the book. But she says, but this is not the real thing. This is just, you know, women were excluded from power. She doesn't forget it. And then how do you balance right, between these two tensions?
- [40:59]
Amir Engel
So how does she balance between these two tensions?
- [41:02]
Aya Eliada
I think just by writing the introduction, she said, I said my thing, and now you have it and, you know, you do with it what you want. But we have reviews of both men and women in Weimar Germany. And what's interesting is that the female reviewers, like Edith Rosenzweig and Berta Bach Strauss and Margarete Zusman, they were all educated women. They had doctoral degrees from German universities. They were modern and everything, and they were feminist as well. And they were really upset about Pappenheim writing that it was like second best and that it was emblematic of the exclusion of women from power and from real study. And they tried to maneuver somehow and say, no, look, it's very difficult. It's really an intellectual work, but it doesn't really work right because the tension is there and all these women are trying to somehow get along with it, solve it, avoid it, whatever.
- [42:14]
Amir Engel
Well, my impression is that this kind of argument is always kind of within a feminist discourse, is always part of the kind of ongoing. Because you can say, no, we're empowering women to do womenly things, but in a new way in German, modern German. Or you can say, no, we. We encourage women to abandon the old ways in favor of. Of masculine Bible, Talmud and this kind of stuff. And. And it's. I think this kind of tension is often still unresolved.
- [42:45]
Aya Eliada
Yeah, it's like they try to say it's separate but equal. Like, okay, women and men had different kinds of literature, but women's literature was also beautiful.
- [42:59]
Amir Engel
Your book covers the years 1818 to 1938. And the choice in 1938, I think is more or less obvious. I mean, Yiddish undergoes a radical dramatic transforms completely in the mid 20th century with the Second World War and the h. Holocaust wiping out large, large portions of Eastern European Judaism and Jewish life. And we know about it, but also by the fact that many of the people who survived these events lived either. I mean, the great majority left in the late 19th century to the United States, and they gave a peedish for English, actually. And then you have, of course, Zionists and Zionism and Israel, where for the most part, like my grandmother and probably also yours, swapped the Yiddish for modern Hebrew. So this is outside the realm of your book. But I'm interested, kind of as a historian of the field, I'm interested in your thoughts about this. So on the one hand, Yiddish was wiped out, or largely or almost completely wiped out. On the other hand, we have this, like, moments of kind of Yiddish revival. I remember vividly a adaptation to a Leonard Cohen song that was done in Yiddish that became viral, you know, and you have these clubs every once in a while you hear about, like a magazine or I know about this guy Talchev, I think his name is, who gives Yiddish courses in Paris and in Berlin every once in a while and so forth. So maybe we can kind of come to conclude with some thoughts about the afterlife. And in a way, your own work, which is also interested in kind of also holds this kind of relationship, this kind of tense, really ironic relationship with the Yiddishe, the Yiddish heritage, that it kind of maintains a close proximity, but also kind of transform it through scholarship. And so maybe you can say a few words about the afterlife of Yiddish into the 19th, I mean, into the 20th century and the 21st century. What are your thoughts about this?
- [45:21]
Aya Eliada
Okay, that's a wonderful question, but I will just start by saying that the reason, of course, you are right, 1938, it's the beginning of the end for Yiddish in Eastern Europe. But I put my end in 1938 because this is the end also of modern German Jewish culture as we knew it until the war. So this was my line of the book, and I start in 1818, because then the Wisnchef, the student Tom, rises, and they are my first protagonists. But to your question, which is very, very important. So of course, also in the second half of the 20th century, also today, we still have this afterlife of Yiddish. We still also have Yiddish as a vernacular, a living culture here and there, not that much, but we especially have this afterlife of Yiddish. And I think that the most appropriate definition of this or explanation of this is what Jeffrey Chandler termed in his book Adventures in Yiddish land from 2006. He called it Yiddish as a post vernacular or Yiddish post vernacular culture. And he was writing indeed about our days. He focuses on the United states in the second half of the 20th century. And he explains that this post vernacularity comes to designate the discrepancy between the declining. The rapidly declining numbers of Yiddish speakers on the one hand, and on the other hand, the continued interest in Yiddish culture in claismeh, in Yiddish literature, and everything in translation, right? Or everything is like just buzzwords or some songs, but it's not a vernacular. And the Fact that there are so many people that are fascinated with Yiddish culture and they consume Yiddish culture and they are like, effectively engaged with Yiddish even though they are not Yiddish speakers. Right. So this is the past vernacularity. Yiddish is no longer the vernacular, but they're still interested in it. And this is what I call the afterlife. And what I show in the book is that the same with all, you know, qualifications and adjustments, because it's not exactly the same, but I show that a very similar phenomenon happens in 19th century Germany. So we can also speak about 19th century Germany as the post vernacular era in the life of old Yiddish, when all Yiddish transforms from a living vernacular into a heritage, when it has an afterlife, when it becomes a post vernacular. And what is a very important characteristic of post vernacular culture is the historical awareness that, you know, that it used to be a living culture, it used to be a vernacular, but it no longer is. Right? And this historical consciousness imbues your engagement with Yiddish with emotions and affections and meanings that are extra linguistic and extra literal. And it works Both in the second half of the 20th century until today with relation to modern Yiddish. And it was also very, very much present in the discourse, in the German Jewish discourse of the 19th and early 20th century with regard to old Yiddish literature.
- [49:10]
Amir Engel
Wonderful. Thank you for this answer. I'll just say, kind of sum it up by saying there's also a wonderful irony that the two Israelis who grew up with Hebrew as their mother tongue, whose grandparents spoke to the Meadish, are speaking about English, about. Okay.
- [49:26]
Aya Eliada
Are reading German sources and then speak about it in English.
- [49:29]
Amir Engel
Wonderful. Exactly. So before we close off, maybe you could tell us about your current new project.
- [49:39]
Aya Eliada
Okay, so I don't have a new monograph yet, but I am very much occupied with a project. I have a Jeffge project. It's funded by the German Research Foundation, a project with the amazing professor Astrid Lemke from the University of Mannheim. We run the project in cooperation, and our project is about Old Yiddish adaptations of German literary texts between 1400 and 1800. So this is in fact the first time that I'm really working with text of Old Yiddish because, you know, I've always worked about what Christian said about Old Yiddish and then what German Jua said about Old Yiddish. And now I'm finally, you know, working with Old Yiddish. And I have to say it's. Yes, it's amazing. It's an amazing corpus. And what we are trying to do in this specific project, we mainly try to facilitate and advance research in this field because there's not much research in the field of Old Yiddish literature mainly because you need to know both Germanistic and Judaistic and have different linguistic skills and various backgrounds. So what we're trying to do, we are writing a handbook that is meant to give like a point of departure for anyone who wishes to engage with works in the field. And also of course we do independent research and so on, but this is the main thing. So right now I can say that I'm really I'm working for the field of Old English literature but I enjoy it so much that I think maybe my next monograph will go, you know, somewhere in this direction.
- [51:25]
Amir Engel
Well, it sounds fascinating. I'm very much looking forward to seeing that book and I thank you again for your time. We were discussing a Lingering Legacy, the Afterlife of Yiddish in German Jewish Culture with Aya Eliada. Aya, thank you so much for talking to us.
- [51:42]
Aya Eliada
Thank you very much. Amir.
- [51:50]
Amir Engel
Sam.