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Learning Yiddish is popular: “It touches a chord somewhere”

Sija van den Beukel,
18 januari 2023 - 12:08

Starting next month, students can take a  course in Yiddish at the UvA. The colloquial language that used to be spoken by Jews from all over the world and sometimes till is can provide access to the everyday Jewish history of Amsterdam. Registrations for the course are pouring in. “Perhaps too much watching of Netflix series Shtisel”

The new Antwerp teacher of Yiddish, UvA PhD student Daniella Zaidman-Mauer, had to sit up and take notice when she saw the number of applications for the new course Yiddish coming in. “Yesterday morning there were 38...”

 

“...and now 42,” adds Irene Zwiep, professor of Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac languages and cultures. “That is an astronomical number for our department within the faculty. Normally, 20 students is already a lot. We just got rid of the waiting lists and thought: come on. Daniella can handle that.”

Yiddish at the UvA

Irene Zwiep: “In the past at the UvA, Yiddish, if offered at all, was always taught by teachers who happened to be proficient in Yiddish. It was something that colleagues offered to teach in addition out of the goodness of their hearts, but it was not an official subject.” Daniella Zaidman-Mauer: “Until 2015, Yiddish was taught by Shlomo Berger, associate professor of Yiddish language and culture. He died unexpectedly. After his death, his chair remained vacant.”

Daniella Zaidman-Mauer is a native speaker of Yiddish and already gave a master’s course at the UvA last term on early modern Yiddish books printed in Amsterdam. Now she is speaking to us via a zoom link from abroad about the course in Yiddish that starts next month. “There are people from everywhere, old and young, from Limburg to Groningen. And all are willing to travel to Amsterdam twice a week. People want to learn the language because their grandparents spoke it or because they want to read literature in Yiddish. I am completely in shock at the reactions.

 

Zwiep: “Yes, it’s really taking off. And what you also notice is that the media find it extremely exotic and very exciting. There are daily newspapers that have decided they want to experience Daniella’s first lesson. I like it, but I don’t completely understand why the reintroduction of Yiddish strikes a chord somewhere. Maybe they’ve all been watching too much of the Netflix series Shtisel, but it is getting an awful lot of attention.”

Foto: UvA
Daniella Zaidman-Mauer

Daniella, how did you learn Yiddish yourself?

“I grew up in Antwerp with the Yiddish that my grandparents spoke. They lived in our home, which was common in Antwerp. I spoke Yiddish with them but I wasn’t crazy about it. No one in my class spoke Yiddish and I wanted to speak French or Dutch at home like everyone else. But later, when I studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I had to choose another Jewish language and I tried Yiddish. When I discovered the history and literature of early modern Yiddish, I fell completely in love with it.

 

Who speaks Yiddish today?

Daniella: “Yiddish is the vernacular of the Jews and was spoken by all Jews until the Holocaust put an end to it. Now it is only spoken by ultra-Orthodox Jews. In Antwerp, there is a large community, in New York and other big cities...”

Irene: “...and even in Jerusalem. Just where you would think everyone speaks Hebrew. There, the very Orthodox communities, for all sorts of reasons, partly political, have started speaking Yiddish to each other again.”

 

Why is it important that Yiddish be taught again at the UvA?

Daniella: “Amsterdam was once the center of Yiddish printing in all genres. A lot of Jewish heritage lies in Amsterdam: in the Rosenthaliana and the Ets Haim Library. To understand that, you need the Yiddish language.”

“Yiddish is like a linguistic cake that Google Translate can't make chocolate out of”
Foto: Bob Bronshoff
Irene Zwiep

Irene: “What I personally love about Jewish history is that you often associate it with Hebrew, but very often the exciting things happen precisely in the other Jewish languages such as Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, or Ladino. Hebrew is the language of high culture, but if you want to get closer to ordinary people and everyday culture, you need languages like Yiddish. Then you get much closer to Jewish people and history. That is why it is so important for our education that we teach Yiddish.”

 

“And we hope that we can develop Yiddish at the UvA such that students also write theses, do research, and want to do something with Yiddish in cultural institutions, including elsewhere in Europe. In this way, we hope to also give the field a boost internationally.”

 

Can’t you just throw Yiddish texts into a translation program?

Irene: “I think that would be very difficult with Yiddish. Especially when you throw old texts into a translation machine, you notice that the machine doesn’t really have a feeling yet for all the layers in the language. The Jewish language is like a kind of linguistic cake with all kinds of layers on top of each other. Google Translate is not going to make chocolate out of that linguistic cake, to stay in the culinary sphere for a moment. Plus, Yiddish has regional variations. Daniella will teach mainly Western Yiddish. With her, we have brought in a young expert in the making. She is someone who has mastered Western Yiddish, the Yiddish of the early Jewish communities in Amsterdam. There are big differences between Western and Eastern European Yiddish.”

 

Is it difficult to learn Yiddish?

Daniella: “I don’t think so. Yiddish is a Germanic language with elements from Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic languages, among others. So for people with a Western European, Dutch or German background, the syntax and grammar are not that difficult. It is difficult to learn the Hebrew alphabet, though.”

 

The UvA is the only university in the Netherlands that teaches Yiddish. Is learning Yiddish a trend that will also be adopted by other universities?

Irene: “No, I don’t think so, for two reasons. There is no longer room for new language studies, especially for minor languages like Yiddish. In addition, Yiddish belongs to Amsterdam because of the large Jewish community that lived there before the war. The language goes hand in hand with the city’s beautiful libraries, museums, city archives, and Jewish DNA. If Leiden, for example, wanted to do something like this, they would be better off with cuneiform.

 

On February 14th, 2023, the undergraduate course in Yiddish will begin, focusing on reading and understanding the language. An in-depth course on the Yiddish language and culture will start in the summer. The courses are open not only to undergraduate Hebrew language and culture students but also to students from other programs and outside the university.