What Language Did the Jews in Poland Speak?

Motivated by the book by Mrs. R. Centnerszwerowa:¹ There is a heated struggle going on about public schooling in the [Polish] Kingdom [of the Russian Empire]. Various speakers at a range of meetings are attempting to prove that in Jewish primary schools the language of instruction ought to be Polish, while an opposing group wants to forcibly introduce Jewish żargon [Yiddish]² into the primary schools. Anyone who reads the Warsaw newspapers will have a detailed acquaintance with this war of viewpoints since these opinions clash almost daily and at every step, and orators and writers are struggling to offer evidence in support of their arguments.

Mrs. R. Centnerszwerowa is taking part—in quite a lively and intense matter—in this struggle. Since all of her many arguments have not yet succeeded in convincing the opponents of Polish, Mrs. C. has reached into the past in order to provide historical proof that Jews in Poland spoke Polish even as late as the end of the sixteenth century.

It seems that even if the author had produced proof of this circumstance, it would not have been of much use in this struggle. Would her opponents have laid down their weapons and surrendered “because their fathers did that”?

But the author was not able to provide proof of this; and in fact, all of her theses and arguments lend themselves to being used to prove the opposite thesis.

At the outset I must point out that nervousness and distrust reign in the historiography of Jews in Poland today. Party squabbles are moving further and further into the realm of pure theory; the contemporary assimilationist-Polish and Jewish-national currents are dragging the issue two centuries into the past; no one seems able to look at the matter coldly and critically, resulting only in a distortion of the history of the Jews in Poland and harm to scientific scholarship, irreparable harm!

In science, usually the first thing is the study of facts, above all, the observation of phenomena, and only then comes a conclusion, the conclusion that emerges, such as it is. A scholar looks neither to the left nor the right; his conclusions often destroy what generations have sanctified, what the ages have recognized as dogma, and that is true science, free from the influences of the street, the motives of the day, and factions.

In the historiography of Polish Jews the opposite usually takes place. An author has a prepared thesis and seeks proofs of that thesis, has a conclusion and seeks the premises for it. That is how the late Hilary Nussbaum worked, and that is how an entire school of younger and ever-younger historians and pseudo-historians of assimilationist and Zionist views are working today. This is how Mrs. Centnerszwerowa has worked as well!

The author enumerates proofs of the harmfulness of żargon in school and adds: “Since the testimony of history as an indisputably objective warning voice and, at the same time, as an indisputable scientific indicator may weigh in the balance no less significantly than others, it, too, must therefore be allowed to speak out on an equal basis with others.” . . . “I dedicate these pages to this subject.” Thus, we have before us the goal . . . the bias of the author, and that is the chief, fundamental flaw of the entire work; despite its entire scientific apparatus, her bias deprives her work of the characteristic feature of scholarship. [ . . . ]

Proceeding through the author’s further arguments, we learn that in the sixteenth century, “the Jews themselves felt the need at the time to adopt the national culture, which was revealed in their striving for assimilation to the indigenous population in speech and customs. Unfortunately, the course of historical events . . . soon blocked that salutary current, blighted the embryo germinating in the womb of the Jewish-Polish community of unification in thought and sentiment with their compatriots and the nation.” I know that I risk unpopularity if I say that these arguments and laments of the author, making reference to the sixteenth century, are phantasms; they are at best the author’s wishes. I would have liked to see even a single effort at assimilating with the native population. The Jews fight with the burghers for the right to trade, that is, for their existence, they have to pay dearly for every inch of ground, the towns defend themselves fiercely before the Jews, because it is a fight for one’s daily bread. There is not a shred of evidence that Jews in the sixteenth century attended public schools (cathedral or parish—there were no others); there is also no reference to this in the resolutions of the Piotrkowski Synod of 1542, although a good deal is said there about schools (paragraphs 4–7) and about Jews (paragraphs 12–13). The author bases her assertion on Czacki (p. 98),³ not mentioning that today Czacki is no longer considered a source for the history of Polish Jews.

The author’s final arguments touch upon the participation of Jews in Polish literature in the sixteenth century The author, following [Aleksander] Brückner’s “Jakób the Jew from Bełżyc’s Response to the Arguments of Marcin Czechowicz,” entirely unaware that this work does not exist today and only fragments of it were preserved in the response of Marcin Czechowicz. Also, it cannot be excluded and is extremely likely that Jakób of Bełżyc did not exist at all and is only a prop for the dialogue with Czechowicz, or that, if he did exist, he conversed with Czechowicz as best he could. The example cited by the author may be, at best, a sample of Czechowicz’s language. The other writer cited by the author (Izaak of Troki) was a Karaite, wrote in Hebrew, and his manuscript was published by Professor Wageseil in Latin translation (1681); so I do not understand in what way Izaak of Troki belongs to Polish literature.

Summing up our arguments, we can state: The author is incorrect in her entire line of argument, when she claims that Polish Jews used Polish as their mother tongue before the sixteenth century. The earliest borderline would be the middle of the sixteenth century, although the author did not take into consideration indications that from the middle of the sixteenth century the Jews had to use Polish in their lives as merchants, and that this was a result of the Polonization of the towns. Thus, they became more and more familiar with that language, so that in 1797, when the Prussian government created schools for Jews in their partition, it kept Polish along with German as the language of instruction in them.⁴ However, from the middle of the sixteenth century the language of family life was Yiddish.