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Not many people know this about me (because it hardly ever has occasion to come up), but I can actually read Yiddish at a reasonably competent level. This despite the fact that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish heritage or other connexions to Yiddish culture. I have decided that I should talk more about it, though, because the language is in bad shape these days, and I find that sad. So I thought a few remarks were in order on why I, a non-Jew, find it worthwhile, fulfilling, and rewarding to study Yiddish, and why putting time and effort into the appreciation and preservation of this unique and fascinating language is a worthwhile endeavour for anyone to get involved with.

Yiddish was until recently the language spoken by the majority of the world's Jews, and as such was the language of an international culture (this was before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel), a culture that prized learning and literacy and which therefore produced many great cultural fruits, in music, theatre, literature, etc.

Today Yiddish is spoken by only a tiny minority of the world's Jews, and were it not for a few religious sects that cling to it as an article of faith (such as the Satmar hasidim), it's future survival beyond the 21st century would be in great doubt. In any event, though, the language is a shell of its former self: before World War II, Yiddish had 12 million speakers. Now there are around 300,000 and the overwhelming majority of these are quite elderly. At one time Yiddish theatres in New York put on productions of a quality and attendance that equaled those put on in English, and the Forward, then a daily paper, had a circulation of 275,000.

It is now a weekly paper whose circulation hovers around 5,000—every Yiddish-speaking man, woman, and child on the planet would have to subscribe for it to rival its former glory; the paper's original building in Manhattan (pictured here) has been converted into appartments.

There were three key reasons for Yiddish's rapid decline. First and most obviously, the massacre of the holocaust led to the murder of six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Yiddish speakers. But still, one may legitimately ask why the remaining Jews abandoned the language. After all, if Hitler and the Nazis failed in their quest to exterminate all Jews, should not Jews have fought to restore their culture? If Yiddish culture (the only Jewish culture the Nazis knew about, to the extent they knew anything about Jews) were allowed to perish, would not that be allowing the holocaust to wreak still more destruction, even after the Nazis themselves were stopped?

Of course the Jewish nation did re-assert its identity in the wake of the holocaust, re-taking the Holy Land in 1948 and creating the Jewish state of Israel. But the new state took as its language Modern Hebrew—and the use of Yiddish was actively discouraged. This effort to eradicate Yiddish from Israel is the second major reason for the language's decline.

It may seem paradoxical to replace a language with such a vibrant intellectual heritage with one that, in its modern incarnation at least, had little past—although of course Ancient Hebrew has through the Bible one of the most important literary heritages in the history of the world, it was produced some two thousand years before the modern state of Israel or the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

But the fact is that Yiddish culture was very much out of style following World War II: the founders of Israel wanted to make a new beginning, in a strong and independent state, and the image of the ghetto Jew, discriminated against and persecuted in Europe for so long, was something that the Jewish people were now eager to distance themselves from. And Yiddish was for many too closely tied to these images of the ghetto to be allowed to continue in "Eretz Israel". It was a past they were ashamed of.

Another, more practical reason for Hebrew to be used in place of Yiddish in Israel was that the holocaust had changed the demographics of world jewry. Whereas before most Jews were European and Yiddish-speaking, the slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis made these Jews, called Ashkenazi, less numerically dominant. Middle Eastern Jews, called Sephardi, had no knowledge of Yiddish, but if the state of Israel was to survive it would have to have as many Jews as possible on board to build it. Hebrew was a neutral language and a link to the common heritage of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi; Yiddish was not. Thus Modern Hebrew, a spoken language less than a century old, became the official language of Israel.

The third reason for Yiddish's decline lay with the diaspora. Not all Jews live in Israel, obviously; many millions continue to reside in other countries all over the world. Here too, though, modernity and a desire to fight the anti-semitism seen in the ghetto have led Jews to abandon Yiddish. American Jews now most often speak English at home, French Jews speak French, etc. The older generation, eager to see their children better integrated, simply did not teach them Yiddish, and as their generation dies out, a large percentage of the remaining Yiddish speakers in the world will go with them.

So far I have laid out what Yiddish is, and how it once flourished, and how it came to be that it is now becoming endangered. However now that I have traced the reasons for Yiddish's decline I want to get back to my main topic, which is why, despite all this, one might still get a heck of a lot out of knowing Yiddish.

Cultural Charm—the Joys of Yiddish

There is no other language like Yiddish. It is a Germanic language (it shares a common ancestor with German), written with Hebrew letters, and with a large amount of borrowings from other languages, mostly Hebrew and Slavic. It has a wealth of idiomatic expressions, which combine to give it a character and personality that are completely unique. Many Yiddish words have come into English, such as klutz, chutzpah, and tukhes—and the fact that these are some of the most colourful words in English should give you a taste of what sort of personality Yiddish has as a language. This makes Yiddish a fascinating language to study for linguists and those interested in quirky languages. For those with a more casual interest in this side of Yiddish, all of this is explored in Leo Rosten's book The Joys of Yiddish, which provides an accessible look at Yiddish as a language of humour and personality that is aimed at those who are not big on learning languages.

The Language of Literary Heavyweights

Yiddish was once the language of an international intelligentsia whose literary works have gained international acclaim. As a language that is highly idiomatic, and with its own personality and character, it should be obvious that Yiddish literature is best appreciated in the original. Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer provide a wealth of literary classics in Yiddish that are not read often enough by students of world literature today. Admirers of world literature have a lot to gain by reading Yiddish; in this light the objection "but I'm not Jewish" seems as absurd as avoiding Victor Hugo because one is not French, or Dostoyevski when one is not Russian.

Preserving What has Nearly Been Wiped Out

I try to avoid talking about politics in my posts on this blog, however I am willing to go so far as to say that I am not in favour of Nazism. Dead set against it, as a matter of fact. It is not for me to judge, living in another time and place and not being Jewish, the feelings of those who decided that Yiddish culture was something to be ashamed of. However, with the perspective that distance does bring, I can see this much: the Nazis wanted to eliminate Yiddish culture, and in light of the events of the last 65 years, they have been largely succesful. Learning Yiddish and appreciating its culture is one small way to, symbolically at least, refuse them that success.

There are religious communities within Judaism that feel the same way, and more strongly than I do. I am confident that because of their existence, Yiddishkeit is not really in danger of extinction. Yiddish-speaking communities exist in the United States and Israel who are not persecuted (and have phenomenally high birth rates), and some still remain in Europe as well, so the language will not be allowed to die out. Secular Yiddish culture, though, such as that embodied in the Forward, has clearly seen its glory days come and go.

Still, there is nothing like the connexion one feels through a first-hand knowledge of Yiddish with the world of pre-war European Jewry, the vibrant world of intellectual debate and artistic achievement that lives on in their writings, music—and cinema. The most poignant illustration of this for me is the 1936 movie Yidl Mitn Fidl (a film that is as charming as the name sounds), filmed on location in Poland (then home to hundreds of thousands of Jews; now home to barely any). Many of the extras in the film were inhabitants of the local shtetls (Jewish villages). In other words, the faces of many of the extras in this movie are those of the very people who would soon be rounded up into concentration camps. To me, hearing the songs of this film gives us a connexion to what happened in the holocaust that makes Schindler's List pale in comparison—so much so that I feel it is unfortunate that for so many people, holocaust awareness pretty much begins and ends with that movie. A far cry from cold memorials and remembrances, learning Yiddish gives one the opportunity to connect directly with the past and to know those who lived and died in it through their own voices.

(Posted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009. Move ahead a few minutes in the clip above to see an extract of the movie Yidl Mitn Fidl.)