Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 3.043
June 22, 1993

1) Stankiewicz on Wexler (Victor Bers)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue Jun 22 17:43:46 1993
From: VBERS@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu
Subject: Stankiewicz on Wexler

Edward Stankiewicz is sending the following to the English Forward:

         Remarks on Wexler's theories on the origin
            and linguistic position of Yiddish.

   Over the last three weeks (June 4th, June 11th and June 18th) I
have read the reviews written by your regular linguistic
contributor, Philologos covering two of Professor Wexler's recent
works on the history of Yiddish and of Eastern European Jewry . One
of these works entitled  "Yiddish- the Fifteenth Slavic Language"
was published in the International Journal of the Sociology of
Language (vol.91, 1991), while the other,  "The Ashkenazic Jews: A
Slavo-Turkic People in Search of of a Jewish Identity" has yet to
appear. In the past I came to appreciate the erudition, clarity of
exposition and objectivity of Philologos. In the recent three
columns, however,these qualities seem to be missing. I am writing to
you to correct the impression given by Philologos that Wexler's
first work represents a breakthrough and a significant new phase in
the study of Yiddish. I shall refrain from commenting on the second
book which is still in the offing. My disappointment in the two
earlier columns is due to the reviewer's failure to point out the
gaps and misinterpretations in Wexler's study, its theoretical
shortcomings and the near lack of historical documentation.  In
fact, the reviewer goes out of his way to describe Wexler's treatise
as a scholarly "bombshell" and "revolutionary" achievement. He duly
notes that Wexler's ideas "have so far not been taken seriously by
most scholars", but he ascribes this to the fact that the acceptance
of these ideas might necessitate a rewriting of the entire history
of Yiddish and of East European Jewry."And  who", he quips, "wants
to rewrite everything?" Had the reviewer considered and reported on
the critical reactions to Professor Wexler's "discoveries" (some of
which appeared in the same volume as the monograph), he might have
concluded that the scepticism of scholars with regard to Wexler's
theories is due not so much to their reluctance "to rewrite
everything" as to the qualities of Wexler's work. In the following
remarks I shall try to show why Wexler's monograph about the history
of Yiddish must be treated with utmost caution and why it marks not
a new turn but a step backward in the study of Yiddish. On might
even wonder whether it qualifies altogether as a theoretically
balanced and factually grounded scholarly work.

    While the title of Wexler's monograph announces that Yiddish is
"the !5th Slavic language", this claim is somewhat toned down in the
text were we read (on p.15) that "the antecedent of Yiddish was a
Judaized form of (Upper) Sorbian". The qualification "Upper"
Sorbian, too, must not be taken quite seriously for Wexler switches
almost imperceptibly from Upper to Lower Sorbian and from Sorbian to
Polabian, as if the three were one and the same language. In fact
they were even more distinct from each other in the period Wexler
deals with (i.e. in the early Middle Ages) than in the following
centuries. The idea that the language spoken by the Eastern European
Jews before they switched to Judeo-German was Slavic is at any rate
not new, for Jewish scholarship has long ago established that the
East European Jews came not only from the West (as implied by your
reviewer) but also from Byzantium (via the Danube and Vltava
waterways), and that their original language was Knaanic, which they
also called "our language" (leshoneynu). Wexler's originality  thus
lies only in his identification of Knaanic with Upper (or Lower)
Sorbian (with a bit of Polabian), whereas scholars have hitherto
been divided as to whether it was Old Czech or a kind of common
Judeo-Slavic. There are certainly strong arguments in favor of
either position:  Bohemia was a major Jewish commercial and
scholarly center (its capital Prague was known as the city of
"khakhamim shel khakhamim"), and the Slavic forms transmitted to us
in the 11th and 13th centuries Knaanic texts bear a clear imprint of
Old Czech. On the other hand, it is well known that the Eastern
European Jews continued to speak Judeo- Slavic well into the 15th
century not only in the West but also in the East of the Slavic
lands (i.e., in Russia). The question is why then did Wexler opt for
Judeo-Sorbian? Sorbia had, as far as we know, neither  important
commercial centers nor a thriving Jewish community. Schuster-S|ewc,
the leading contemporary specialist of Sorbian and one of the
reviewers of Wexler's monograph seems to suggest that Wexler's
choice of Sorbian as the cradle of Judeo-Slavic my be due to the
fact that one can attribute almost any West Slavic feature to Old
Sorbian, since we know very little about the early (pre-12th
century) character of that language.

        The issues become more problematic when we move from the
hypothetical Judeo-Sorbian to Yiddish. For according to Wexler,
eastern Yiddish continued to retain its Slavic (i.e., Judeo-Sorbian)
character even after its speakers switched to German in a process he
labels "relexification". To support this hypothesis Wexler is
compelled to make at least two very strong claims: (1) that the bulk
of Yiddish Slavicisms is of Sorbian origin (with a bit of Polabian),
and (2) that the other components of Yiddish (above all German and
Hebrew) play no role in defining the linguistic character of
Yiddish. To support the first claim Wexler forces almost every
Yiddish Slavicism into his Sorbian straitjacket. His alleged Sorbian
items include not only words which are found in many or most Yiddish
dialects (bobe, zeyde, yoykh, blote, kopite, breg/bz|eg, blondz|en,
pupik), but also words which to judge by their phonetic or
morphological forms could not have come from Sorbian (e.g. demb,
pic|evke, ozere, cerkve, praven). To prove his point Wexler posits
some historical changes  which defy the rules of Slavic comparative
phonology and, as Schuster-S|ewc pointed out, misinterpret the
origin and meanings of a number of Sorbian forms.It is also of some
interest that not a single typically Upper Sorbian word (such as
nan, deri, dve|l, plampa, cibla, fromny, z|ohnovac| so) found its
way into Yiddish (in which the corresponding terms are tate, derfar,
tsveyfl, pisk,tsibele, frum, zikh gezegenen). We sholud also note
that by insisting on the survival of a Judeo-Sorbian substratum,
Wexler slights the historical development of Yiddish and its age-old
contact with the various coterritorial Slavic languages, a contact
which is partly reflected in the richness of its Slavic-derived
stylistic and lexical variants.

    Even more serious is Wexler's cavalier treatment of the German
component, to which he devotes only four pages of a 150- page
monograph. In his eagerness to prove the Slavic origin and
linguistic position of Yiddish, he ignores the basic lesson of
historical grammar and of its comparative method, which is that the
genetic affiliation of a language is not determined by its lexicon,
which is notoriously open to foreign influences, but by its
grammatical structure and the so-called regularity of phonetic
correspondences. Although Yiddish presents a paradigmatic case of a
fusion- language, having absorbed and integrated elements of three
distinct linguistic components, the bulk of its grammatical
structure, its derivational and inflectional suffixes, and its
phonetic development testify to its German (or to be more precise,
Middle High German) origin, and qualify it as a member of the
Germanic linguistic family. Wexler's one-sided concern with the
lexicon leads him also to treat western and eastern Yiddish as two
different languages, whereas it is precisely the common grammatical
structure and the similarities of their phonetic developments (apart
from their common cultural heritage) which compel us to view them as
variants of one and the same language.

	Wexler devotes somewhat greater attention to the Hebrew
component of Yiddish, though this component, too, serves him mostly
as a prop to support his Judeo-Sorbian genetic theory . Here too he
advances two original yet no less far-fetched ideas: (1) that
Yiddish (read Judeo-Sorbian) adopted the bulk of its Hebrew
(especially ritual) terminology to ward off the massive
encroachments of Ashkenazic German, and (2) that the Yiddish
adoption of the Hebrew religious terms shows a striking parallelism
with the adoption of German (especially Christian German)
terminology on the part of Sorbian and Polabian.  The adoption of
Hebrew in its defense against German explains, according to Wexler,
the fact that Yiddish has more Hebrew elements than any of the other
Diaspora languages of the Jews.

    The idea that the Slavic- speaking Jews resorted to Hebrew to
resist the adoption of German cannot but strike one as paradoxical
since Hebrew has from time immemorial served as the language of
Jewish spiritual (religious, ritual and philosophical) culture,
wheras the German they allegedly shunned was not a language imposed,
as in the case of the western Slavs, by a hostile power but one
imported by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. Although the process of
Hebrew penetration into Yiddish is, as Wexler himself admits, a
problem which has so far barely been explored, we may assume that it
took place over a period of many centuries and under politically and
cultural conditions that were profoundly different from those of the
other languages of the Jews. But the splendid  philosophical and
secular Hebrew literature produced by the Jews of Spain is, I
believe, eloquent testimony of the comparable and uninterrupted
significance of Hebrew among the Jews of the non-Slavic lands. While
Hebrew is undisputably the "holy lanhuage " of the Jews, its
functions are by no means restricted to the religious sphere. As any
reader of Sholem Aleykhem is aware, Hebrew remains the supportive,
companion language of the Jews providing them with ready-made
idioms, biblical quotations, macaronic proverbs, and words of a more
elevated, solemn style. The religious and ritual terminology of
Yiddish consists at the same time not only of words and phrases
drawn from Hebrew but also of elements drawn from its other
linguistic components. Wexler did, of course, argue that such words
as treybern, praven, koylech, pareve were imported into Yiddish by
Slavic (Christian and pagan) converts  to Judaism, but by the same
token he would have to claim that a similar mass conversion to
Judaism accounts for the presence in Yiddish of such typically
"goyish" Romance words as shul, kloyz, cholnt, benchn, ley(e)nen,
preyen, techen, and the proper names bunem, faytl, bendet, toltse,
yente. Wexler is no less off the mark in his discussion o the
Christian terminology bequeathed by the Germans to the Polabians and
Sorbs for, as pointed out by Schuster-S|ewc, their Christian
terminology was mostly taken from Polish and  Czechs, though it was
ultimately of Latin origin. These facts also undermine Wexler's
theory about the  parallelism between the role of Hebrew among the
East European  Jews and that of German among the Polabians and
Sorbs. While Hebrew has been for centuries the secondary, cultural
and religious language of the East European Jews, German has from
the very beginning threatened the  survival of the two western
Slavic languages, and with it the national identity and very
survival of their speakers.

    What then, we may ask, is the ultimate value of Wexler's recent
works? To the lay public which is familiar with the historical
problems of Yiddish no more than with those of the Slavic languages
the challenging ideas of his works with their provocative titles may
appear to open new and unexpected vistas for Yiddish research. But
for Yiddish linguistics nurtured by the works of Sapir and Max
Weinreich his ideas are more likely to have the eclat of a
firecracker than that of a bombshell.

Edward Stankiewicz

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End of Mendele Vol. 3.043