Matt Essert

Dovid Katz, a world-renowned scholar of Yiddish and self-described “charismatic lunatic,” delivered a lecture in the Ferrier Building on March 14 called “Yiddish and Power.” In a room filled with mostly Jewish studies professors and elderly civilians, Katz explored how the development of the Yiddish language has been intertwined with various social, religious, and political disputes.

“There’s something strange-sounding about the combination of Yiddish and power, when Yiddish is seen as the embodiment of powerlessness,” Katz said.

Because Yiddish is among what Katz calls “stateless languages,” whose adherents have never held political power, a more abstract form of power developed—one that operates less through brute political or military force and more through influence and affecting the behaviour of others. Eastern European Jews, Katz said, through a high regard for cultural and intellectual achievement, wielded this second form of power as forcefully as their Westernized children do now.

When Yiddish first developed as a vernacular language about a thousand years ago, it formed only one leg of the East European Jewry’s trilingualism. According to Katz, power and prestige only belonged to those scholars in the community with knowledge of the other two languages—Hebrew and Aramaic. Part of the Jewish heritage, he said, is this deeply ingrained respect for scholarship, study, and the printed word.

“The heroes of the society were scholars instead of strongmen,” he said.

Another major theme of Katz’s talk was the relationship between the Yiddish language and various social, political, and religious movements that have seized the Jewish people in the last millennia. For instance, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, East European Jews were strongly attached to diverse revolutionary movements, such as anarchism and radical socialism.

“Those were the movements that, by the nature of things, took the language of the people and tried to raise it against the languages known only by the elitist rabbis against whom they had many taynes, many complaints, anyway,” Katz said.

Even today, Katz said, Yiddish—often considered a dead language—is enjoying a small resurgence among those non-Zionists who reject Hebrew as too tainted by its association with the modern state of Israel and all the crimes it has been accused of committing. Yiddish has a certain attraction for these young Jews because it was never the “language of conquerors.” This attractive powerlessness has brought back to Yiddish those with certain political ideas, such as non-Zionism and firm commitments to human rights and gay rights, in particular.

The other area of contemporary Jewish life in which Yiddish thrives is on the far right, with the ultra-Orthodox Chassidic Jews. The Chassids cling to the Yiddish language as the embodiment of the Eastern European tradition they fault the modern world for caring so little about.

Katz sees in this paradox the modern manifestation of the perpetual entanglement of Yiddish in communal disputes. “The political attachments of Yiddish do continue,” he said.

Katz was born in the “dull, boring, grey streets of Brooklyn” in 1956. That his father, Menke Katz, was a famous Yiddish poet meant that the language was an important part of Katz’s life from the beginning. He later studied at Columbia University and the University of London, before founding the Yiddish studies program at Oxford in the 1980s. Katz later founded and is still the director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Lithuania, which offers an opportunity for people to study Yiddish in what was before the Holocaust the capital of Yiddish culture.

“Professor Katz is such a leading light,” says Eric Caplan, chair of the Jewish studies department at McGill. “To have someone of his stature come to McGill and to not have him talk would be a shame.”

Anna Gonshor, a McGill lecturer in Yiddish language and culture, who sponsored the talk, said she particularly admired Katz’s work as a scholar of “Judaism as a civilization.”

“It’s a complex, fascinating story that is still not known or appreciated in terms of the vitality of Jewish life and community existence and the development of Jewish intellectual life over the centuries,” she said.

In an interview after the talk, Katz emphasized that while he doesn’t try to persuade or coerce anyone into studying Yiddish, he thinks it important that there be resources available to a student who decides they want to.

“I think it’s natural and healthy for people to want to immerse themselves in their own past and their own heritage and their own family backgrounds and their own immediate ancestry,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything extreme, exotic, or far-fetched about it.”