Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Johnson, Matthew

Titel

Rethinking the Relationship between German- and Yiddish-Language Culture

Ist Teil von

• German studies review, 2022-05, Vol.45 (2), p.363-373

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Since the beginning of the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, in the late eighteenth century, German and Yiddish came to be associated with divergent and even opposed trajectories of Jewish modernity, and their relative value became the object of intense debate. "1 In recent decades, however, scholars have begun to explore alternatives to this history of divergence, reconsidering the medieval and early modern past and its afterlives, turning attention to regions where language contact remained common (e.g., Habsburg Bukovina and Galicia), and utilizing comparative approaches that bring these languages into proximity without effacing their differences and without denying their disparities in power. In an analysis of adaptations of Wigalois (in German) or Viduvilt (in Yiddish), the son of Gawein of King Arthur's Round Table, Oehme brings to light a long tradition of adaptation that "provided inspiration for Yiddish-speaking Jews as well as their German-speaking neighbors since the thirteenth century, unifying, under the banner of an Arthurian knight's story, two ethno-cultural groups whose association is marked by separation and conflict. Reichert situates the poetry anthologies that she analyzes within social and political debates about acculturation, migration, and nationalism, demonstrating how they could serve as "poetic self-images," as the title of her book phrases it, or how they "could be attempts to shape or transform Jewish communities, or to convey them outwardly" (18; "Anthologien konnten Versuche sein, jüdische Gemeinschaften zu bilden, zu verändern oder nach auβen zu vermitteln").