Interpreting Antisemitism by Shulamit Volkov

Author:Shulamit Volkov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-04-29T03:54:51.853000+00:00

Regardless of how one conceives of this matter, [writes the shocked observer] it is incomprehensible why the majority of our Jews insist on speaking the language of the land in which they live and which is their mother-tongue in such a mutilated form, a form so extremely unpleasant to the ear. And even when they speak purely, without foreign admixture, they do it in such a tone, that it is once again just as unpleasant as that which is generally known as the Jewish dialect.

Still, Yiddish never disappeared from the German-Jewish landscape. It was spoken especially in rural areas and was being brought into urban centers ever anew by migrating Jews from the east, especially from Poznan and Galicia. Local Jews, who invested much effort in acquiring proper German, considered these newcomers a liability. Worse still, Yiddish remained a source of embarrassment. Language was not the only source of their attitude towards the Ostjuden, of course, but it came to symbolize the status of those who did not belong and who were bound to remain on the margin as foreigners.28

IV. In the process of acquiring German, the status of Hebrew too, even as a ritual and liturgical language, came increasingly under attack. Hebrew’s role in religious ceremonies was gradually reduced to a minimum, and in the first so-called “Temple,” established in Seesen, Westphalia, under the rule of Napoleon, even the Sabbath-prayers were sometimes conducted in German. Somewhat later, the Reform congregation in Hamburg appointed Isaac Bernays, a prominent Alt-philologist, as a preacher, and he held his sermons twice weekly in fluent and elegant German. Leopold Zunz followed suit in Berlin.29

This shift, however, became a hotly contested issue when the entire liturgy in some reform synagogues was held fully in German. The Orthodox but also the moderate Reform rabbis of the so-called positive-historical school considered abandoning Hebrew a violation of the first order. Zacharias Frankel left the Rabbinical Assembly in Frankfurt in July 1845 in protest, when it was about to decide merely not to rule on this issue.30 And while his insistence upon upholding Hebrew grew out of his deep traditionalism together with his cautious nature, no doubt, his arguments relied on Savigny’s jurisprudent historicism and on Herder’s linguistic nationalism. Like Herder, Frankel believed that Hebrew was particularly appropriate for expressing Jewish religiosity and Jewish devotion. Even more importantly, again according to Herder, he saw in Hebrew a key to the inner life of Klal Israel, namely the community of all Jews, across time and space. Nevertheless, Frankel was no Jewish nationalist. He often stressed the true bond between Christians and Jews in their German Fatherland. Hebrew, he promised, would never keep Jews away from their patriotism or from fulfilling their civil duties in Germany.

Despite his opposition to abandoning Hebrew, Frankel delivered his speech at the Rabbinical Assembly – just as he held all his weekly synagogue preaching – in perfect, fluent German. The young members of the Verein für die Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in Berlin during the 1820s had done the same, just as the later scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

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