Should Yiddish be Taught as an Independent Language?

Transcription

1 10 Cyril Aslanov (Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, LPL, UMR 7309; The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem; Saint-Petersburg State University) Should Yiddish be Taught as an Independent Language? 1 Yiddishistics seems to be a very disputed field of studies and investigation, as shown by the multiplicity of disciplines that claim the right to integrate Yiddish in their curricula: Germanistics; Jewish Interlinguistics; Eastern European Studies; Jewish sociolinguistics and even Hebraistics. This article tries to evaluate the respective advantages of such affiliations on the base of strictly linguistic arguments. Since the grammatical base of Yiddish is mainly the continuation of German, or more precisely of medieval German dialects, the best choice would be probably the inclusion of Yiddishistics within the field of Germanistics. Another argument could corroborate this assumption, namely the historical and geographical continuity that used to unite Modern Eastern Yiddish with Western Yiddish, and more specially with Yidish-Taytsh, once a high language in the frame of Eastern European Jewish diglossia. Another affiliation that could also be legitimate on the base of strictly linguistic arguments is to view Yiddish as a complement to Hebrew in the era of Haskalah and later on, when the nativization of Hebrew exposed this language to a huge pression of the Yiddish substrate. As for the other options (inclusion in the study of all the Jewish languages considered as a whole; part of broader continua), they will be mentioned, but not recommended for scientific or pedagogical purposes. Keywords: Eastern Yiddish; Western Yiddish; Yidish-Taytsh; Middle High German; Jewish Interlinguistics; Slavic languages; Eastern European Jewry; American Jewry; Modern Hebrew. *** This paper stays in the continuation of an article where I reassessed the status of Yiddish by stressing that compared with German dialects rather than Standard German, Yiddish is far less idiosyncratic than it may appear from a normativist vantage point. 2 This approach that insists on 1 This research was conducted thanks to the funding of the Russian Science Foundation (project no ), Saint Petersburg State University. 2 (Aslanov, 2014: ).

2 11 the continuum uniting Yiddish to other German dialects should now be applied to the didactic of Yiddish. In other terms, is the teaching of Yiddish for its own sake without any reference to Germanistics a sound way to transmit the language to the generations to come? Is it legitimate to teach and research Yiddish in the frame of special programs where every possible Jewish language are gathered in spite of blatant differences between them? What is more important in Yiddish: The German foundation? The fact that this German foundation underwent a process of Slavization? The Hebrew component? Or its insertion within a multilingual sociolinguistic horizon? It could be thought that since the study of grammar is more essential than that of the lexicon for language acquisition, the focus on the German foundation of Yiddish and the appreciation of its connection with other German dialects of the present or of the past is certainly more efficient than overrating the importance of the Hebrew or the Slavic components that are after all the result of relexification, sometimes with some impact on the grammatical level, but not necessarily. However, shouldn t we consider that advocating such an approach that tries to replace Yiddish in its German context is somehow a regression to a pre- Weinreichian stage of Yiddishistics? Or could it be promoved as a dialectic move that tries to moderate Weinreich s conceptions whereby the pedagogical and scientifical views were sometimes subordinated to or influenced by the vision of a language renewer? Instead of opposing Yiddish to Standard German in the frame of a Sprachaufstand, whereby Yiddish may really appear as a quite independent entity, the approach that takes into account the diversity of German dialects may reveal whatever Yiddish owes to its German medieval background. In order to appreciate at its true value the merits of a Germanisticoriented approach in researching and teaching Yiddish I would like to compare it with three other methods commonly used in Yiddishistics: the attempt to consider Yiddish as part of a broader field called Yiddish Interlinguistics; the focalization on Yiddish as a language of its own; the perception of Yiddish as part of a loose Eastern European Jewish cultural continuum, which goes far beyond the strictly linguistic dimension. On the base of some selected examples I will try to show what are the expected pedagogical results of each of the aforementioned research orientations.

3 12 1. Yiddishistics in the frame of Germanistics The approach that consists in putting Yiddishistics in the frame of Germanistics already characterizes Yiddish studies in Germany, where the sections of Yiddish Studies are often integrated within the Departments of Germanistics. This model has also been applied in some other institutions outside Germany, as for instance at Columbia University where the Department of Germanic Languages hosts the Yiddish Studies program since 1989, after the Department of Linguistics at Columbia that previously hosted the Yiddish Studies program was dismantled. However, there is more than a merely organizational reshuffling in this shift from the frame of general linguistics to that of Germanistics. It can be considered an implicit recognition of the fact that Yiddish studies are a satellite disciplin of German studies alongside with other Germanic languages (Dutch and Swedish in the case of Columbia). It is also symptomatic that the main project that emanates from the Yiddish Program at Columbia, Marvin Herzog s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, was published by Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen with the help of a German editorial committee that gathers no less than three prominent German germanists: Ulrike Kiefer, Robert Neumann, and Wolfgang Putschke. 1 No less significant is the fact that YIVO was a partner in this publication. The Institute founded by Nochum Shtif and Max Weinreich was and still is a proponent of a Sprachaufstand attitude toward German. And yet it accepted to collaborate with a publishing house partly specialized in the publication of researches in the field of Germanistics. Apparently, there is a gap between the proclaimed YIVO attitude in terms of linguistic policy and its praxis as a research institute. Moreover, the fact that the founder of the Yiddish Studies Program is no other than Max Weinreich s son Uriel is also symbolic of the gradual shift that contributed to integrate Yiddishistics into a Department of Linguistics, which was the first step toward the admission of this discipline in the lap of a department of Germanic studies. Admittedly, as mentioned above, the Yiddish Studies program was relocated within the Department of Germanic languages 22 years after Uriel Weinreich death. However, judging from the publications gathered in the collection The Fields of 1 (Herzog, ).

4 13 Yiddish, where considerations about the Germanic base of Yiddish hold a significant place, it is easy to guess that Uriel Weinreich would have appreciated such a move Diachronic attitude: From Middle High German to Modern Eastern Yiddish through Old Yiddish and Yidish-Taytsh Considering Yiddish from a Germanistic perspective helps understand the dynamics of language evolution that allowed the crystallization of a specifically Jewish koiné on the base of several dialects of Middle High German (mainly East-Franconian 1 and perhaps also Bavarian-Austrian 2 and Thuringian). 3 It also allows to appreciate the paradoxical archaism of this language that in spite of its relative young age (the Late Middle Ages, i.e. the stage of Late Middle German or even Early New High German, and not around 1000 at the stage of Late High Old German, as Max Weinreich thought) owes to its relative isolation from the German-speaking lands to have preserved some features from medieval German. Let us mention for instance the word mume that continues directly the Middle High German kinship term muome/mume aunt (the mother s sister) (cf. Modern German Muhme that is actually an obsolete word mainly used with a touch of irony) or the word feter, which does not mean cousin like Modern Standard German Vetter but uncle like Middle High German veter(e)/feter(e), a word that can also refer to other relatives, like nephew or occasionally cousin. From the wide range of meanings expressed by Middle High German veter(e)/feter(e) Yiddish has retained only that of uncle while Modern German has continued only that of cousin. However, Yiddish expanded this signification of uncle inasmuch as it started to use veter(e)/feter(e) also in order to designate the mother s brother, not only the father s brother. Sometimes, the Middle High German etymology has been blurred by a phonetic superevolution specific to Yiddish like in bronf < bronfem < bronfen where one can recognize the Middle High German etymon brantewîn brandy. However, some other times, Yiddish is the trustful continuator of a Middle High German etymon, the morphological 1 (Beider, 2015: ). 2 (King, 1987: 73 81; Eggers, 1998). 3 (Beider, 2015: 118, 163).

5 14 structure of which has been blurred in Modern Standard German. Such is the case of eynikl, which continues the Middle High German term eninkel better than the modern form Enkel does. Erika Timm s researches in general and her masterpiece of historical semantic in particular 1 have shown that the contrast between Western Yiddish (Yidish-Taytsh) and Eastern Yiddish is not so clear-cut, at least not at the level of the written sources in use in the Ashkenazi world before the emergence of a modern secular literature based on the Eastern Yiddish vernacular. It appears, therefore, that the boundaries between Western and Eastern Yiddish were not only diatopic, but also diachronic (the later is the text, the more it is prone to be different from the West Yiddish scripta) and diastratic, inasmuch as in the Eastern European Jewish linguistic horizon, Yidish-Taytsh reached the status of a high language in complementarity with Hebrew Variationistic approach: Eastern Yiddish as a German dialect The acquisition of Yiddish could be facilitated once the student is well aware of the systemic rationale of grammatical features and lexical particularities. Whoever compares abruptly Eastern Yiddish and Modern Standard German could be tempted to consider Yiddish an aberrant version of German. However, once those alleged anomalies are perceived against the broad frame of German dialectology, things are far clearer. Thus, the alternation between Yiddish pretsl and German Brezel, Yiddish poyer peasant and German Bauer, Yiddish taytsh German and German deutsch, Yiddish kegn against and German gegen makes sense if one is aware of the fact that in many dialects of Upper German (e.g. Austrian) or East Middle German (e.g. Thuringian) the correlation of voicing was lost as a result of the disappearance of the aspiration that characterizes the pronunciation of unvoiced stops in the Germanic languages. The term binnendeustche Konsonantenschwächung consonant lenition within German, which is in use among Germanists in order to refer to this blurring of the contrast between voiced and unvoiced stops, speaks for itself. Indeed, the phenomenon that consists in renouncing the aspiration usually connected with the feature of unvoicedness is strictly German. Its occurrence in Yiddish shows how 1 (Timm, 2005).

6 15 much this language owes to be described in terms of German phonology notwithstanding the features that apparently separate it from the German dialects. As far as the hard core of linguistic structure is concerned, the system of Yiddish is still German and as such, it should be described and taught as part of the mosaic of Upper German dialects. 2. Yiddish in the frame of Jewish Interlinguistics Less convincing is the approach that takes the Hebrew component in Yiddish as an argument for considering it part and parcel of Jewish Interlinguistics, i.e., the study of the Jewish languages taken as a broad entity notwithstanding the essential differences that make each and every Jewish vernacular a cocktail of its own. This approach is inspired by a theoretical premise that assumes that the numerous language shifts that occurred throughout Jewish history allow to view the Hebrew component within the Jewish language as the core of the language and to view it as the remnant of the ancestral language that was in use before the language shifts occurred. Such an approach is partly inspired by Salomo Birnbaum s conception of Jewish linguistic particularism as a whole, 1 as well as by Max Weinreich s preliminary considerations at the beginning of his monumental History of the Yiddish Language. 2 And yet Hebrew is perhaps not the primeval core within Yiddish. Maybe it would be more reasonable to consider it a secondary injection into the system of the language. Though it is integrated therein (but more as a specific subsystem like the non-germanic component of Modern English or the Arabic component in Persian and the Persian-Arabic component in Turkish), it corresponds to the lexicon rather than to the grammatical structure and as such, it is perhaps secondary in the acquisition of the language. The focalization on the Hebrew component of Yiddish reflects an approach that considers the accessory dimension of lexicon more important than the essentials of grammar. By dint of an a posteriori justification, the important percentual of the Hebrew component within the Yiddish lexicon (between 40% and 65 % depending on the level of the religious culture of the speakers) is often acknowledged as a sufficient reason for transforming Yiddishistics into a satellite discipline of Jewish 1 (Birnbaum, 1942: 51 67). 2 (Weinreich, 2008: ).

7 16 Studies in general and Hebrew in particular. In 1995 an important conference was held at the State University of Milan in order to deal especially to what has been coined the Hebrew vein within the Jewish languages. 1 Though this important manifestation and the publications that emanate therefrom were epoch-making in the field of Jewish interlinguistics as a whole, it is not sure that it rendered its due tribute to the paramount importance of Yiddish among the Jewish languages. After all, the Hebrew component in Jewish languages corresponds to highly specialized semantic fields rather than to the core lexicon, like the German lexical base of Yiddish. It can be considered a linguistic epiphenomenon wouldn t it be for the cases of language hybridization between the German base and the Hebrew or Aramaic lexical items. Important as the latter might be, it does not constitute a sufficiently wide platform as to justify a comparative approach of the Hebrew component in the various Jewish languages. The Hebrew component in the various Jewish languages is quite equivalent to the Latin component in the European languages that often exposes the users of the language to the phenomenon of false cognates (faux amis). Take for instance the word versatile that bears the positive meaning of polyvalent in English and Italian and the negative meaning of fickle in French and Spanish (versátil). By the same token, a given Hebrew or Aramaic etymon could bring to diverse semantic values once integrated within the frame of the various Jewish languages. Think for instance of the value of the Aramaic apotropaic expression bar minan God forbid (literally ouside from us; far away from us ). Whereas in Judeo-Spanish, this phrase has conserved its value as an adverb or as a pragmatic marker, it became a substantive in Yiddish (barminen) with the euphemistic meaning of corpse; cadaver. Moreover, the special pronunciation of the Merged Hebrew (i.e. the Hebrew component adapted to the phonemic schemes of Yiddish) 2 is a factor of estrangement for whoever has learned Hebrew according to the Sephardi-based Israeli standard, as most of the Hebraists in the world do. Thus, the affiliation of the study of Yiddish to the field of Jewish interlinguistics or its classification as an auxiliary or optional discipline within Hebraistics lato sensu do not seem to be the best gateway to a functional knowledge of the ancestral language of Ashkenazic Jewry. 1 (Morag, Bar-Asher, Mayer-Modena, 1999). 2 (Weinreich, 2008: ).

8 17 3. Yiddish within other linguistic frameworks The main point of this article is to stress the legitimacy of the inclusion of Yiddish Studies within Germanistics. We just have shown that Hebraistics was probably less adequate as a suitable frame to host the study of Yiddish. However, besides the Middle German base of Yiddish and its Hebrew component, other ingredients bestowe to Yiddish a unique status among Jewish languages, as well as among the German dialects. One of them is the mighty impact the Slavic-speaking surroundings exerted not only on the Yiddish lexicon, but also on some features pertaining to the hard core of the grammatical structure of the language: e.g. phonological features inherited from the Slavic surroundings; the abundance of Slavic, mainly Polish, diminutives, very productive in nominal word derivation; the latent influence of Slavic aspectual values on the verbal system of Yiddish; 1 word order; some particles like the intensifier zhe < Polish -że, the interrogative particle tsi < Polish czy, the adverb take really < Polish tak i even or the conjunctions abi < Polish aby as long as and khotsh < Polish choć although. Another possible approach to Yiddish consists in considering it part of a linguistic continuum, as in the United States where the contact between English and Yiddish, both of them Germanic languages, brought toward the emergence of a strongly Anglicized variety of Yiddish Yiddishistics and Slavistics Slavic influences on Eastern Yiddish are not necessarily the result of the contact with adstratic languages. They can also be the effect of a substratic influence as the consequence of an ancient language shift underwent by local Slavic-speaking Jews who adopted the Middle German dialectal koiné brought by Ashkenazic immigrants starting from the late thirteenth century. 2 However, those influences exerted by the Slavic surroundings do not allow to consider Yiddish part and parcel of the Slavic languages family. Paul Wexler s acrobatic way of tracking a Sorbian substrate in Yiddish is more a speculative exercise than a sound certitude that could reasonably justify to view Yiddish as a hidden Slavic 1 (Taube, 1987: 13 25). 2 (Aslanov, 2013: 11 29).

9 18 language. 1 This would be even less justified than to consider French a Germanic language or English a Romance one. Whatever strong the impact of Slavic influence on the lexicon and grammar of Eastern Yiddish might have been, it is more a matter of scientific investigation than something that could be of real use for pedagogic or transmission purposes. The only thing that could justify an affiliation of Yiddish Studies to Slavistics is the frequent location of Slavic studies in the broader framework of Central and Eastern European studies whereby Slavic languages may coexist with non-slavic languages as Hungarian for instance. Thus, at Lund University the study of Yiddish is integrated within the Division of Russian Studies, Central and Eastern European Studies, Yiddish, and European Studies. Whatever it might be, such affiliations are motivated by extralinguistic considerations. Whoever wishes to transmit Yiddish as a living language and not as a field of investigations regarding a hypotethic Slavic substrate should rather consider it the Central, Central Eastern and Eastern European extension of a long history, the roots of which go back to medieval Germany Yiddish as part of a linguistic continuum Teaching Yiddish according to the rules of standardized Yiddish, the Klal-Yiddish or YIVO-Yiddish, is probably the best way to preserve the language and to transmit it to the generations to come. However, the factors that are responsible for the emergence of Yiddish as a fusion language, to use Max Weinreich s formulation, 2 may function in a similar way once Yiddish has become part of a given sociolinguistic horizon where it stays in contact with other languages with which it intermingles in order to create new fusion languages, or at least new repertoires. When the languages with which Yiddish stays in contact are Germanic languages, the kinship between them accelerates the fusion process and creates a continuum where the two languages in contact converge to each other, be it English in the Anglo-Saxon world, Flemish in Antwerp, Swedish in Sweden (where Yiddish has been recognized as an official minority language) and German of course. In the frame of an Anglo-Yiddish continuum, Yiddishicized English, which was the language variety of the first generation of 1 (Wexler, 2002). 2 (Weinreich, 2008: ).

10 19 immigrants, was gradually replaced by Anglicized Yiddish, the way the children or the grandchildren of the immigrants tried to preserve the ancestral language. 1 Paradoxically enough, in the youngest generations, that of the great-grandchildren of the immigrants, there is a trend that consists in re-yiddishicizing English, so as to create a specifically Jewish register of American English. 2 The integration of Yiddish within the sociolinguistic horizon of the United States may explain why Yiddish studies are sometimes part of academic programs dealing with American civilization. Let us mention for instance the itinerary that brought the specialist of Jewish American literature Rachel Ertel to found the Centre d Études Juives Américaines (CEJA) at the University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot in For two decades this structure officially dedicated to the study of American Jewish culture was actually a place where it was possible to follow a cursus in Yiddishistics with or without relation to the American context. A process of mutual convergence also happened between Yiddish and Modern Hebrew, a language that though genetically unrelated to Yiddish, has been deeply influenced by it, especially at the colloquial level of the substandard. The informal register of the Ashkenazi mainstream within Israeli society is so full of Yiddishisms that some scholars like the aforementioned Paul Wexler or Ghil ad Zuckermann went so far as to assume that the deep structure of Modern Hebrew was Yiddish. 3 Of course, assertions of this kind are hardly scientific because they fail to consider that the hard core of Hebrew morphology was preserved in spite of the simplification processes that accompanied the revival of Hebrew speech and its nativization. However, it is indeniable that the heavy influences of Yiddish on the Modern Hebrew of the Ashkenazi mainstream 4 was the price to pay in order to transform a verbalized literary language into a truly vernacular language. It seems that the intrication of Hebrew and Yiddish in the frame of the traditional Eastern European Jewish diglossia paved the way to the process of language shift whereby Yiddish, though replaced by Modern Hebrew, nevertheless exerted a strong influence on the language that superseded it. 1 (Gold, 1985: ) 2 (Weiser, 2012). 3 (Wexler, 1990; Zuckermann, 2003). 4.(אסלנוב, תשע"ו: 9 11 (

11 20 By itself, this solidarity in the long run between Yiddish and Hebrew justifies the approach that considers the study of Yiddish an auxiliary discipline within the framework of Hebrew linguistics. It is this complementarity of Hebrew and Yiddish in the sociolinguistic horizon of Eastern European Jewry and in its continuation in today s Israel more than the presence of a strong Hebrew component in Yiddish that constitutes the best argument in favor of a combined approach that neither neglects Hebrew in favor of Yiddish nor Yiddish in favor of Hebrew. Conclusion From the four approaches that we just compared with each other, the first (Yiddish as a subdivision of Germanistics) and the last (Yiddish as a complementary field to the study of Modern Hebrew) seem to be the most legitimate in terms of scientificity and pedagogical efficiency. The main difference between the approach toward Yiddish as a complement to the study of Hebrew on the one hand and the study of Yiddish in the frame of Jewish Interlinguistics on the other hand is the following: for the latter, Hebrew is considered a tool of Yiddishistics whereas from the perspective of the former approach, Yiddish serves as an instrument to fully understand the dynamics of Modern Hebrew since its revival as a modern written language in the age of the Haskalah, and by major reason, since its nativization as a spoken mother-tongue since the beginning of the twentieth century. Admittedly, such an instrumentalization of Yiddish for the study of Modern Hebrew could sound politically uncorrect by the fervent Yiddishists who frequently turned the back on the official language of the Jewish Nation-State in favor of an alternative that tries to enhance the status of Yiddish as the national language of a deterritorialized ethnos. The best way to overcome this dilemma so heavily freighted with ideological implications is perhaps to prefer the first of the four solutions, which consists in including Yiddishistics within Germanistics. The obvious academic advantage of such an option is that insisting on the continuity that unites West Yiddish and Old Yiddish (yidish-taytsh) on the one hand with Modern Eastern Yiddish on the other hand, allows to consider Yiddish a language with a literary corpus that goes back to the sixteenth century and not just to view it as a vernacular promoved to the

12 21 dignity of a literary language at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century. Upgrading the academic prestige of Yiddish could be a way to react against a folkloristic stand and a particularistic attitude and to emphasize the belonging of the ancestral language of the Ashkenazim to the German language considered as a mosaic of extremely different dialects rather than a monolithic construction. Bibliography Aslanov, Cyril. How Jewish are Jewish Languages? Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge / Frankfurt Jewish Studies Bulletin, , P Aslanov, Cyril. Kna anim vs. Ashkenazim: From Divergence to Convergence. Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background (Proceedings of a Conference Held in Prague on October 25 26, 2012). Ed. Ondřej Bláha, Robert Dittmann and Lenka Uličná. Prague: Academia P Beider, Alexander. Origins of Yiddish Dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press P Benor, Sarah Bunin. Becoming Frum. How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Birnbaum, Salomo. Jewish Languages. In: Epstein, Isidore, Levine, Ephraim, Cecil, Roth. Essays in Honour of the Very Rev. dr. J.H. Herz. London, P Eggers, Eckhard. Sprachwandel und Sprachmischung im Jiddischen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Gold, David L. Jewish English. In: Fishman, Joshua A. (Ed). Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: E. J. Brill P Herzog, Marvin et alii. The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer King, Robert D. Proto-Yiddish Morphology. In: Katz, Dovid (Ed). Origins of the Yiddish Language. Oxford: Pergamon P Morag, Shelomo, Bar-Asher, Moshe, Mayer-Modena, Maria (Ed.). Vena Hebraica in Judaeorum Linguis (proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Hebrew and Aramaic elements in Jewish languages: Milan October ). Milan: Università degli Studi

13 22 Taube, Moshe. The Development of Aspectual Auxiliaries in Yiddish. Word 38/1, P Timm, Erika. Historische jiddische Semantik. Die Bibelübersetzungssprache als Faktor der Auseinanderentwicklung des jiddischen und des deutschen Wortschatzes. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Trans. Shlomo Noble. 2nd edition. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research P Weiser, Chaim M. Frumspeak. The First Dictionary of Yeshivish. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Wexler, Paul. Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Wexler, Paul. The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew : A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Pas t. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Zuckermann, Ghil ad. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan אסלנוב, סיריל. עברית אחוס"לית ועברית מעברתית: שני צדדים לאותו המטבע? כרמיליםלחקר הלשוןהעברית ולשונותסמוכות (העברית ואחיותיה). י"ב. תשע"ו. עמ'.18 7 Нужно ли преподавать идиш как самостоятельный язык? Сирил Асланов Университет Экс-Марсель, Франция Академия языка иврит, Израиль Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет Аннотация. По-видимому, судя по множеству дисциплин, требующих включить идишистику в свои куррикулы, она является широко обсуждаемой областью для изучения и исследования: германистика; лингвистика еврейских языков; славистика; еврейская социолингвистика и даже гебраистика. В этой статье делается попытка оценить, насколько эти разные аффилиации оправданы с чисто лингвистической точки зрения. Поскольку грамматическая основа идиша является, главным образом, продолжением немецких, или, точнее, средневерхненемецких диалектов, то, наверное, самым логичным вариантом является включение идишистики в состав германистики. Дополнительным аргументом в пользу такого

14 23 подхода является историческая и географическая непрерывность, которая в прошлом объединяла современный восточный идиш с западным идишем и, более специфически, с Yidish-Taytsh, когда-то высоким языком в рамкax восточноевропейской еврейской диглоссии. Еще одна аффилиация может оправдываться на основе чисто лингвистических аргументов: это перспектива, подчеркивающая взаимное дополнение между идишем и ивритом, либо в период Хаскалы, и впоследствии, когда превращение иврита в родной язык подвергло этот язык сильному давлению идишского субстрата. В данной статье рассматриваются также остальные варианты (включение идиша в состав общего изучения еврейских языков; включение идиша в широкий ареал), однако они не рекомендуются для научных или педагогических целей. Ключевые слова: восточный идиш; западный идиш; Yidish- Taytsh; средневерхненемецкий; изучение еврейских языков; славянские языки; восточноевропейское еврейство; американское еврейство; иврит.