The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire

Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-1-57113-019-8
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 208 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 603 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature L

Explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts 1781 until the late nineteenth century.

This book explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts from the onset of Jewish civil emancipation in the Germanies in 1781 until the late 19th century. Showing the various functions Yiddish assumedat this time, the study crosses traditional boundaries between literary and non-literary texts. It focuses on responses to Yiddish in genres of literature ranging from drama to language handbooks, from cultural criticism to the realist novel in order to address broader issues of literary representation and Jewish-German relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Professor Grossman shows how the emergence of attitudes toward Jews and Yiddish is directly related to linguistic theories and cultural ideologies that bear a complex relationship to the changing social and political institutions of the time. Amidst the rise of national ideologies and modern anti-Semitism, the increasing consolidation of institutions, and the drive to cultural homogeneity in the 18th- and 19th-century German context, Yiddish functioned as an anarchic element that, in the view of its opponents, "threatened" to dissolve German nationalculture. Grossman locates the response to Yiddish in the context of historical events (the Hep Hep Riots of 1819, the Revolution of 1848) and institutional changes (Jewish legal emancipation, the promotion of Bildung as an educational and cultural ideal). In its methodology and its focus, this study seeks to show how the conflicted responses to the Yiddish language point to the problems that connected and frequently divided Jews and Germans as they soughtto re-invent themselves for a new and unsettling context.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grossman, Jeffrey A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The Return of Yiddish and Other Considerations
Herder, Humbolt, and the Language of Diaspora Jews
Yiddish and the Invention of the German Jew
Language and Control: The Pedagogy and Performance of Yiddish in Linguistic and Theatrical Literature
The Threat of German Culture: The Function of Yiddish in German Realism after 1848
Conculsion: Beyond the Nineteenth-Century View of Yiddish
Works Consulted
Index