One of the great linguistic miracles of the twentieth century was the revival of Hebrew, a language that hadn’t been used as a spoken vernacular for over two-thousand years. While scholarly Jews throughout Europe and North Africa knew the holy tongue enough to interact with biblical material, the Tanakh and the commentaries, no-one used Hebrew as a daily language. Hebrew was the language of the Jewish Bible, and Jews in the diaspora historically maintained a strict divide between the sacred language of the God and whichever other vernacular language served their daily communicative needs. The hierarchical division between sacred and secular Jewish languages prevailed until Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922) placed the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language at the center of Zionist ideology.

In the two-thousand years between the Jews’ expulsion from Roman Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Jews in the diaspora spoke myriad other languages. As Harvard scholar Ruth Wisse jokes, “Jews make languages at the same rate as Catholics make children”. In North Africa, Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic; in Spain, Greece, and Turkey, they used Ladino; in Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish flourished as a Jewish language.

The origins of Yiddish can be traced to three centers of Jewish life in eleventh-century Europe: Mainz, Worms, and Spier. Jews in those areas began to mix Middle High German, Mittelhochdeutch, the Gentile language they used for commerce and intercultural dialogue, with Hebrew expressions, curse words, blessings, and religious sayings. This mixture formed a proto-Yiddish that would subsequently snowball into a rich and varied linguistic museum of European language, reflecting the Jews’ eventual emigration from the Rhineland eastwards, to areas coterminous with modern-day Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Indeed, a sentence as simple as “Grandma makes a stew for the Sabbath day”, di bobe kokht tcholent far shabes, illustrates the extent to which Yiddish is a linguistic melting pot: bobe is Russian; kokht is German; tcholent come from French, chaud lent; and shabes is Hebrew.

Yiddish blossomed as a literary language during the European Enlightenment: beginning with liturgical literature, biblical commentary, moralistic fables, and Hasidic homilies in the eighteenth century, Yiddish reached its apotheosis as a medium of literary expression and modernism in the twentieth century with writers such as Sholem Aleichem and the Nobel-Prize laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yiddish literature often reflects the sense of otherness that Jews felt among their European Christian neighbors; Yiddish literature also focuses on the struggles of maintaining Jewish traditions in the face of secular modernity. The fate of Yiddish was bleak, however. Singer himself never overcame his own survivor guilt, or the sorrow he felt at having lost his European-Jewish readership to the Nazi murderers.

The Yiddish language also suffered at the hands of the nascent Zionist state. Family lore in most Ashkenazi households in Israel will almost inevitably include stories of grandparents and great-grandparents experiencing discrimination whenever they spoke Yiddish in the streets of 1940s and 1950s Tel Aviv. Ashkenazi Israelis reflecting on their family histories recount how their progenitors were hit or spat at whenever they spoke the European Jewish vernacular in public. For early Israel, Yiddish stank of the ghetto; it was the demotic of the persecuted, the victim, the murdered; it was a badge of failure that wasn’t welcome in the new country. Yiddish-speaking Jews who had escaped Nazi Europe were subjected to a new kind of linguistic fascism in the land of Zion.

The revival of Hebrew, however, was necessary for the success of the new country. The twentieth century sent Jews back to their historic homeland from all sides of the Mediterranean: the Nazi Holocaust pushed Jews out of Europe; Stalinism forced many Jews out of the Soviet Union; reacting to the 1948 War of Independence, many Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations; the Egyptian Revolution in 1952 resulted in the expulsion of Jews; the Islamic revolution in Persia in 1978 led to the expulsion of a large Jewish community; after the fall of the Iron Curtain, one-million Soviet Jews immigrated in Israel. While Israel provided a geographic home for the Jewish refugees of the twentieth century, Hebrew provided the linguistic glue that was needed to forge a new society. Jews in Israel today are a culturally diverse and ethnically disparate people: walking down Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, one might see a group of Amharic-speaking Ethiopian Jews in bright-colored clothes passing a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic family dressed in black garb reminiscent of the eighteenth-century Polish aristocracy. Outside a coffee shop, one might see a young couple in their twenties, the children of Arab-speaking Jewish emigrants from Morocco. Different cultures and varying levels of religiosity coexist in a fraught and tense environment dominated by the politics of religion and, increasingly, the politics of fear. What unites those diverse cultural groups is often a shared experience of a language based on a shared sacred text.

Within Israeli society, Hebrew is like a Band- Aid that masks the wounds of lost homelands and old mother tongues. Just as Yiddish speakers in the mid-twentieth-century were forbidden from using their stigmatized jargon in the streets, so today, aging North-African-born Mizrahi Jews listen to Umm Kulthum behind closed doors and fastened windows so as not to be heard enjoying music sung in the enemy’s language. They vote for extreme right-wing parties, like Shas, in order to prove to their adoptive country that, though they have dark skin, they aren’t Palestinians: they are loyal Israelis.

After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Jews across the world felt elated and inspired by the Zionist project. Young people in America and Europe began learning Modern Hebrew in greater numbers than ever before. By the late twentieth-century, Jewish schools across the world were offering Hebrew as a second language to their students. Hebrew-language programs remain popular in American universities to this day. However, as Israeli politics shift further and further to the right, and as the days of Oslo and Camp David start to feel like a distant dream, a new linguistic revival is underway: slowly, a new interest in Yiddish has begun to wax.

Languages have personalities. They have aesthetics. Anyone listening to German has a reaction to the sound of the language, even if they don’t know whether they are listening to Goethe or a grocery list. Just as Zionism in the wake of the Second World War saw Yiddish as representative of victimhood, persecution, and ultimate destruction, so today, Modern Hebrew is beginning to be associated with a sort of nationalism that belongs more to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first. The Hebrew that bound Jews to one another through a shared experience reading the Jewish Bible in exile has become less of a devotional language and more of a political statement, especially in the diaspora.

Learning Yiddish is also a political statement. Just as Modern Hebrew represents Zionism and nationalism, and echoes the often unpleasant and unpopular policies of the Netanyahu government, Yiddish has come to represent its opposite. While Hebrew is the language of a nation, Yiddish is the language of the diaspora; where Hebrew is the language of power, Yiddish is the language of pacifism, and where Hebrew stands for Zionism, Yiddish stands for internationalism. It is precisely this semiotic dichotomy that has led so many left-wing Jews in recent years to embrace the study of Yiddish.

Though the language may not be as practical as Hebrew, Yiddish plays an important role in our era of identity politics. Students can find in Yiddish a medium through which to express their religious and ethnic identities while simultaneously disassociating themselves from the Zionist project. Yiddish is moreover a language without borders. In the early twentieth century, a Yiddish speaker from Nemirov could travel to New York and rarely encounter language barriers. Indeed, the trans-nationalism of the European Jewish vernacular inspired Leyzer Zamenhof (1859- 1917), a Jew from Bialystok, to create Esperanto, a utopian language with the same internationalist scope as Yiddish. That very ideology is at the heart of Yiddish studies today, an ideology that disregards nationalism, celebrates Jewish identity, and embraces a borderless global community.

In the aftermath of the disastrous Israeli elections, it is interesting to consider the growing political extremism in Israel through the prism of language. Israel began as a socialist project. Remarkably, although the early Zionist pioneers came from countries that were dictatorships and autocracies, democracy was the default political impulse that Israel’s earliest politicians felt. Israel has experienced waves of immigration from all corners of the globe over the past sixty-seven years. New immigrants, particularly from the second and third world, frequently have to sublimate the cultural behaviors they bring with them from their countries of origin. They often vote for rightwing parties in Israel as a kind of pledge of allegiance to their new country. The vernaculars they bring with them become like palimpsests, to be written upon by a new, national, hegemonic language. Every new immigrant goes through an ulpan, a rigorous and intensive language program that serves to instill a new language and, with it, a new sense of national pride. In the process of inclusion and absorption, what is often lost is a sense of difference, alienation, and foreignness – a sense of otherness. Finding a way to preserve that sense of otherness is imperative in today’s Israel, for it is precisely that feeling of otherness that defines the Jewish experience of history and gives Judaism its humanistic character. For left-wing Jews, the study of Yiddish is not only the celebration of trans-nationalism over Zionism; it is also the search for that lost sense of Otherness, a loss that, in Israel, sadly seems to have stopped us seeing the Other in our midst.