The Four Classes

The Yiddish Language?

The Yiddish language is our mother tongue. But is it the language of education, by means of which we can best understand each other?¹ Does anyone even make the suggestion that our education should be conducted in our own language? On the contrary, I only hear the language being abused and ridiculed. People constantly say: it is corrupt! I confess that I do not understand with what justification one can say of a language, in which many thousands of people—a whole nation—live their daily lives, that it is corrupt. “Corrupt” can properly be said of something that once was better, but has become spoiled. Can one say of other languages that they were once better? Were they handed down from Mount Sinai in their present form? They arise, just like our language, from various other languages. Why are they not considered corrupt? The truth of the matter is that it is not appropriate to say of any language that it is totally corrupt, because a language is only the symbol of thought. Therefore, a nation can create whatever symbol it wishes, so long as people can thereby understand one another!

A corrupt idea means something that is truly corrupt. The corrupt use of the very term corrupt has unfortunately led the Jews astray! No sooner does one of us start to learn a foreign language than he becomes an expert on the corruptness of our language and begins to ridicule it. In time, he begins to ridicule us as well. Later, his ridicule leads to self-hatred. He senses that he remains a Jew. Awkwardly, he exerts himself to create the impression that he is no longer a Jew. That grants him all the more right to mock and despise the Jews. Thereby he unfortunately becomes hopelessly entangled and confused regarding the concepts of Jewishness and humanity. He tries to cease being a Jew and ends up ceasing to be a man! He tortures himself for days on end wrestling with the difficulty of pronouncing foreign languages, all in order to forget Yiddish. Yet unfortunately he speaks only Yiddish in his sleep and when he is suddenly frightened he cries out in plain Yiddish. He will never be able to make a foreign language his own, because he was not brought up in it. Yet he makes fun of his own language and tries as much as possible to distance himself from it. Such educated Jews cannot even become good friends among themselves. Each of them despises Jews, yet each of them is still called a Jew, with his own “jargon” on his tongue in spite of everything. [ . . . ]

The uneducated and devout sector of our Jewish population likewise abuses our mother tongue. They believe they can take pride only in their true mother tongue, the one in which God created the world and gave us the holy Torah. They are ignorant of the languages of the world and at the same time Yiddish is for them a kind of stepmother-tongue. For that reason there can be no unity among us. [As it is written in Bereshit Rabbah:] “Between the grandmother and the woman in labor the child suffocates.” Each one raises his child as he understands—or does not understand—and things get worse, not better.

Why should it upset us that any coarse boor can mockingly parody the way we speak? Why should it be a surprise? As the master treats his dog, they say, so the whole household will be treated. Thus in truth all other nations despise our language and us at the same time. Well, my dear readers, we see how much trouble one corrupt idea can bring with it! Of course! The most important task that our reason has to accomplish is to distinguish and compare. What is most essential to distinguish is truth from falsehood, cause from effect, essential matters from secondary matters, good from evil. Now we know what is corrupt and what is not.

[ . . . ] Some might ask me: wouldn’t it be better if we forgot our jargon and instead became accustomed to the educated language of the nation among which we live? My reply would be that there is no point in looking at what would be better but rather at what is. Perhaps it would also be better if the whole world spoke one language, if there were only one country, one faith. Or that it would be better if there were everywhere one currency and one system of weights and measures and if there were. . . . There is no end to what might be better! For the time being we speak Yiddish and it appears that we Polish Jews will not so soon be speaking to one another in Russian, in German, and not even in Hebrew! Therefore we must look at what is and if we cultivate the Yiddish language, with God’s help the fruits of our labor will arrive most quickly and most surely and be of the best quality.

My belief in the great benefit that will result for the Jewish community inspired in me a strong desire to do something about it. I was unable to talk myself out of it and since then have spent some time preparing a first draft of a German–Yiddish and Yiddish–German dictionary—though I know people may laugh at me.² But, my dear readers, one swallow does not make a summer! Therefore whoever has goodness in his heart, who loves all people in general and Jews in particular, is urged to join me in this holy work!