Dissertation Information for Carl Berry Trachtenberg NAME: - Carl Berry Trachtenberg
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2004)
ADVISORS: - David N. Myers
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Saul P. Friedlander - Arnold J. Band - Janet Hadda
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: From zhargon to visnshaft: The Generation of 1905 and the transformation of Yiddish
Abstract: This dissertation examines the changing status of the Yiddish language and literature in the Russian empire during the years 1903-1917. At the outset of this period, Yiddish was widely viewed by scholars, detractors, speakers, and supporters as a zhargon (jargon) that rendered it unfit to articulate the wide range of social and linguistic functions of other, more established languages such as German, Russian, or French. However, by the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, Yiddish was widely employed for political, literary, critical, and scholarly purposes by Jews across the empire and beyond. It further served as the basis for a linguistic national movement known as Yiddishism that sought to bring about a Jewish renaissance based upon the language and the culture of its speakers.
The catalyst for much of this transformation was the 1905 Russian Revolution. The combination of antisemitic violence and emancipatory optimism that began with the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 and reached its apex in the 1905 attempt to overthrow the Tsar prompted a new generation of Jewish activists--the Generation of 1905--to embrace a variety of revolutionary ideologies that combined socialist and nationalist ideals. Out of both necessity and ideological motivations, the Yiddish language was increasingly employed by these political parties as a medium for their propaganda efforts among the Jewish workers. In this burst of Yiddish publishing, the language began to play an ever-greater role in the ideologies of these groups, and it formed a key component in their national ideology.
With the waning of the Revolution in 1907 and the subsequent crackdown on political organizing, many activists of the 1905 Generation turned to Yiddish as the foundation of a reinvigorated Jewish nation, and sought to expand its possibilities into the realms of modernist literature, literary criticism, and eventually visnshaft (science). In the inter-revolutionary decade of 1907-1917, this generation helped to facilitate a burst of Yiddish publishing across the empire that allowed the language--once thought of as incapable of expressing such "higher" functions--to convey the most sophisticated forms of thought.
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calculated 2008-08-10 21:53:56
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