Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation [Paperback]

Paul Kriwaczek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2006

Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kriwaczek's charming but frustratingly rambling history places Yiddish in a very broad historical context. Admitting that he is neither "a learned Jew nor a professional historian," Kriwaczek (In Search of Zarathustra) cuts a broad swath through history as he moves, in the opening chapters, from the forum in Rome to the emergence of a distinct "Yiddish civilization" in medieval eastern Europe. Kriwaczek's insistence on defining Yiddish as a culture, or civilization, rather than a language is smart and useful—it allows him to capture the intricacies of a very complicated history and to avoid a simple "black-and-white clash between gentiles and Jews"—but it also means that his tapestry is sometimes too large. When he does narrow his focus—on, say, the autobiography of Glikl of Hamlin, born 1646, whose memoir is the first major Yiddish work by a woman—he is evocative and precise. While there is an endless amount of fascinating detail (Slavic fashions in shoes became trendy in 14th-century Europe), and all is presented in an enjoyable narrative, the book becomes more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language. 16 pages of illus. not seen by PW; maps. (Nov. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The Jews of Central and Eastern Europe may not have constituted a "nation" n the conventional sense because they lacked a central political authority and many of the other attributes of the modern nation-state. But they certainly were a civilization, with a common language, religion, and a myriad of shared cultural traits. Kriwaczek tracks the origins, flowering, and destruction of this unique, vibrant, and tenacious culture with a fine mixture of pride, regret, and eloquence. He begins with a haunting visit to the sites of several once-thriving Jewish communities whose current residents have virtually no memory of the Jewish past. Kriwaczek then proceeds with a chronological narrative, commencing with an interesting, often-surprising examination of Jewish centers in the Roman Empire north of the Mediterranean. He describes the gradual shift of Jewish life eastward after the slaughters of Jews in the Rhineland during the era of the Crusades. Out of this horror came the development of a rich culture centered upon religion and the Yiddish language. This is an outstanding survey of a civilization that endured against great odds but has now essentially vanished. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400033772
• ISBN-13: 978-1400033775
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #233,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lively and readable account., July 17, 2005

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (Hardcover)

Paul Kriwaczek turned to history after having been for many years a television program producer, and there is a strong journalistic and pictorial flavour about this book. This makes it very readable and enjoyable. There are many personal touches in it; quite a lot of interesting information about matters that are not strictly germane to his subject; and a number of intriguing and illuminating comparisons between the distant past and more recent periods.

The first third of the book is not really about Yiddish Civilization at all, dealing as it does with the history of the Jews from the time of the Diaspora to the medieval period when something like a Yiddish identity emerged among the Ashkenazi Jews. In his Bibliography he comments that general books on the history of the Jews are "disappointing in their lack of attention to eastern Europe during the earlier medieval period", and it is this first third of the book that I found most original and that advances a number of theories which challenge commonly received ideas about Jewish history.

The first is that Kriwaczek has the first Jews arriving in Eastern Europe from the East and not from the West. Many Jews of the Byzantine Empire lived on the Northern coast of the Black Sea, and during the persecution of the Jews from the 7th century onwards, many more of them moved to these outlying parts of the Empire, where the writ of Constantinople could not be so easily enforced. But across that area there swept wave after wave of nomads from the East who surged across the steppes and often deep into Eastern and sometimes even into western Europe. The Jews mingled with them, many of them were swept along with the waves and many remained in those areas when the nomadic tides receded. These nomads are often generically referred to as "Scythians", although the Scythians proper were replaced by Sarmatians, Alans and other tribes. Though many theories have been advanced for the origin of the word Ashkenazi, Kriwaczek says that the word Ashkenazi is actually derived from the Semitic name for the Scythians, a-Shkuz. (The problem seems to me that these nomadic waves belong to a period that had ended before the 7th century.) So there were already many Slavic Jews living in Poland, Bohemia and Austria before the arrival of Jews there from Germany.

The second of Kriwaczek's challenging ideas is that there is no evidence in Jewish or Gentile sources for the generally believed idea that the Jews of Germany fled to Poland from persecution during the crusading period - only that they often fled from insecure places in Germany to more secure ones in the same country. The Jews who did arrive in Poland, Kriwaczek says, were not refugees but part of a general German penetration into Slavic lands during that period, sometimes as conquerors, but sometimes invited by the rulers of these lands, who valued the skills that Germans - Christians as well as Jews - could bring to their backward countries. The Jews from Germany, better educated and with better connections to commerce and politics, became a kind of aristocracy, which explains why their language came to dominate over the Slavic languages spoken by Jewish communities in the East.

The rest of the book is more conventional in the story it tells; but it is lively and very readable; and even there most knowledgeable readers will probably find something new to them - perhaps the delightful portrait, drawn over nine pages, of Glikl von Hameln; or perhaps that the Yiddish stories of Sholem Aleichem or of Mendel the Bookseller were less loving and nostalgic in their satire and had more of a reform agenda than is commonly thought.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A nice historical panorama of Yiddish life and lore, November 14, 2005

By 

G. Shkodra (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (Hardcover)

This is a very good book about the history of the origins and the evolution of Yiddish life and lore, and since personally I wasn't very familiar with it, I really found it highly interesting. Kriwaczek presents a historical analysis of the Yiddish civilization and the Yiddish-speaking population that throughout the centuries developped its own language, culture and literature in Europe.

The author states very clearly the purpose of his book right from the beginning: to try to rescue the Yiddish past from its oblivion. He argues that the Yiddish civilization was deeply rooted in Europe and that there was a mutual influence between these Jews and the wider Europe, the Yiddish-speaking Jews forming one of Europe's "founder nations" and being themselves a product of both Jewish and wider non-Jewish culture. Kriwaczek focuses more on Yiddish civilization's successes over the centuries and its economic and intellectual contribution to Europe's progress rather than on the recent decline and destruction of Yiddish life.

He traces the origins of Yiddish civilization to the first century destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the subsequent dispersion of the exiled Jews. The first two chapters constitute one of the most interesting parts of the book, offering an analysis of the origins of the Yiddish civilization in the divided Roman Empire. The author puts the emphasis on the positive interaction between the Jews and the newly-forming settlements in Europe, with the Jews assuming a pivotal role in international trade. In Slavic lands, for instance, economic prosperity brought steady migration from German lands and together with it the origins of a distinct Yiddish language and culture. Later on, The Yiddish civilization reached its highest point ever in the late Middle Ages when the self-governed Yiddish World stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Further on the book, Kriwaczek traces the development of the language, customs, economic life and legal status of the Yiddish-speaking population of Europe. He also offers case studies of key centres of Yiddish life, prominent figures, writers and thinkers, like the 19-th century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn or the 17-th century autobiographer Glückel von Hameln.

Towards the end of his book, the author details the gradual decline of the Yiddish culture in Europe, with the loss of autonomy, internal conflicts and increasing prosecution. He also briefly mentions the English and American offshoots of a vanished european Yiddish civilization.

This is a very interesting, easily accessible book indeed, writen in a plain, breezy style. Besides, it really is an informative and innovative work on the Yiddish civilization and culture, at least if you're somewhat interested in this subject.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good intentions do not a good book make, January 11, 2006

By 

Charles Goldfinger (Brussels, Be) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (Hardcover)

This book was sent to me as a gift by a good friend, so I should be reluctant to criticise. Nevertheless, I regret to say that this is, at best, a flawed piece. It is also dangerously alluring, if judged by favourable reviews on the site. True, the cover is nice, maps are useful, the author has an obviously engaging personality and interesting personal trajectory. He seeks to evoke colour and texture of medieval ghettos and XVIIth century shtletls. He travelled a great deal to the Yiddishland and read many books (about which later). So what's the problem? It starts with the book's subtitle" The rise and fall of a Forgotten Nation." The notion of rise and fall is at least debatable, but "forgotten"? By whom, certainly not by either Israel or the diaspora? And, from my personal experience, there is a strong and growing interest in Jewish heritage in the core Yiddishland countries, particularly Poland and Czech Republic (On the Resurrection of European Jewry see "A Chosen Few" by Mark Kurlansky). In the US, Yiddish culture has had a lasting and wide ranging influence not only on the movies and pop music but on the literature (do the names of Bellow, Roth and Malamud ring a bell?) and theatre. In addition to Isaack Bashewis Singer, who only wrote in Yiddish, Nobel prizes were awarded to Elie Wesel and Imre Kertesz. It is true that fewer and fewer people speak Yiddish but the interest in broader Jewish culture and tradition remains strong.
Kriwaczek dates the fall of Yiddish civilisation to the loss of powers of self-government by Jewish communities, following the abolition of the Council of the Four Lands by the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom in 1764 and the dismembering of the kingdom over the next thirty years. It may be true that Jewish political influence had been weakened by these events. However, we are talking here about the civilisation. And the fact is both Yiddish and Jewish civilisations have not only not declined but actually prospered during the XIXth century. Kriwaczek could not entirely ignore that and he does discuss great Yiddish writers I. Peretz and Sholom Aleichem but his misguided thesis leads him to ignore other major Yiddish intellectuals of the XIXth and XXth century. A particularly glaring omission is that of Martin Buber, the foremost Jewish philosopher of the last 150 years. For Kriwaczek, Jewish philosophy apparently ends with Moses Mendelsohn, presented as a gravedigger of Yiddish tradition.
One the explanation of these and other omissions (the role of cantor in Yiddish culture for instance) lies in a strange approach to research by Mr. Kriwaczek. So convinced was he that Yiddish civilisation had been forgotten that he completely overlooked such crucial sources as YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (founded in Wilno in 1925) and the works of Professor Antony Polonsky from Brandeiss or Howard Sachar from Columbia University. I find it mind-boggling that the author quotes frequently Norman Davies, the specialist of Polish history, and not once Polonsky, the foremost authority on Polish Jews.
In a nutshell, you can skim this book in a physical bookstore but if you want to learn about Yiddish civilisation and its heritage try other sources mentioned above.