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Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

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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.

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.

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.

Dr. Kriwaczek, in fascinating and well-chosen detail, begins with the little-told story of the Jews as a substantial and multi-ethnic population of well-assimilated Roman citizens. He tells of the dawn and rise of Europe, in parallel with the dawn and rise of what becomes a vast Yiddish "state" east of the Rhine. In fact, the thesis of the book is that because of their well-structured and highly effective system of self-government, these Jews constituted a true state within and across the ever-shifting poorly defined boundaries of the conglomerate nations of medieval Europe, one that should be considered in every sense to be a "founder nation" of modern Europe.

He makes his case well up to the end of the eighteenth century. At that point, Jews in Western Europe were seeking to assimilate, either by working towards full citizenship in France, England, etc. or by converting outright. In Eastern Europe, Poland-Lithuania had disappeared, swallowed by Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. At this point, the Jewish "state" was gone or all but gone, the Kahals bankrupted, the people stripped of whatever privilege and protection they might have once enjoyed. In other words, in the sense of this book, their civilization was dead.

Here's the problem: another 150 years of Jewish life in Europe, crammed into the last few pages of the book. In this final chapter, Kriwaczek undoes every point he has made toward Yiddish statehood. For example, when he writes of the "Yiddish Renaissance," the late nineteenth century literary movement founded by Sholem Aleichem, Mendele the Book-Seller, and I. L. Peretz, he speaks in detail of the shame and frustration these authors felt in being forced to write in Yiddish if they were to be read by the Jewish masses. He quotes an early poem from I. L. Peretz decrying the limitations of the language, its inability to express an undiluted positive emotion. But why was that? Because buried in the very structure and vocabulary of Yiddish is the overwhelming sense of the shame and grief of exile. Was there ever a true state if its citizens had no right to protect themselves, were constantly being expelled from their homes, lacked any sense of statehood? And nowhere does he mention how these same authors became champions of the language, fighting for its preservation.

More troubling to me are other statements that stretch credulity. "...Contrary to the common myth it was not just anti-Semitism that emigrants wanted to leave behind...but more the claustrophobia of shtetl existence...its self-imposed limitations on living a full, rich and successful life." Of course, a small, isolated village could be a stifling backwater, but Jewish life at the turn of the century was as heterogeneous as it is now. Many left the shtetls for the cities, lifted the burden of exile by becoming Socialists, Bundists, Communists, and Zionists. Modern education had become compulsory, and even in the shtetls, some were shaving their beards, and many were less strictly observant. Some immigrants brought their narrow views with them and set up similar communities here. I know from my grandmother and her sisters, from other immigrants, from first-generation works, that the vast majority came here to escape hunger, poverty, and economic uncertainty, as well as the pogroms and conscription.

What a shame that after a fine book describing the evolution of Yiddish and the accomplishments of its speakers, the author ends on a note of contempt.

This is a wonderful book that gives a wide berth to both Yiddish civilization and Jewish history from the Roman period to the present. The author begins with a commentary on the loss of tradition among Yiddish speaking English Jews and the fake heritage of many of ape Yiddish by enjoying its music as an instant pass to heritage without 'ties' to religious observance. Then the book begins a whirlwind tour of Jewish history and the movements and diversity of the Jewish people in the Roman empire and Spain. It trie to understand which Jews lived in Eastern Europe before the Yiddish penetration that followed the German colonization of Eastern Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries. With wonderful detail we are given glimpses into Jewish life down through the ages. Religious innovation and the great Rabbis of the period are described as well as the pogroms and the diversity of Jewish life.

The body of the book covers the period from the 15th century to the 19th when Yiddish civilization, the thesis of this book, crystallized. Here there was the Pale of settlement and the autonomous Yiddish council. This was also a period of upheavel bracketed by the reformation, including the false Messiah Shabtai Tzvi, as well as Moses Mendelsohn and the Baal Shem Tov. We learn bout the Mitnagdim or Lithuanians and get insights into those many many non-Jews who converted over the years for a variety of reasons.

In the end we read of the decline and fall of this civilization and how parts of it came to the New World. A wonderful book full of color and understanding, a brilliant work.

Seth J. Frantzman

The author captures the broad sweep of history while at the same time personalizing it with vignettes of various areas, families, individuals, and even buildings. He gives the reader a taste of many different kinds of people, famous and ordinary. And he tells this story with compassion and even humor. I've lost count of how many friends and relatives I have recommended this book to. I hope they all read it.

"Sheynere ligt man in drerd." They bury better-looking. Isn't that a very London thing to say? As a German- and English-speaker, I can read it, with a little thought. As a Londoner (well, estuary at least) I can imagine hearing someone say it on the streets of my home city. Or of New York. Or of Berlin. If you come from any of these places, you can only with difficulty remain unaware that Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Jews in particular, are one of the foundational communities that lend the city is characteristic, black humour. So why is it that only New York still has much of a Yiddish-speaking community? Berlin requires no special explanation, but why not "tolerant" London? Well, Kriwaczek offers an explanation. "Tolerant" Britain, after the expulsion of 1290, had again developed a strong and well-integrated English-speaking community of native Jews. The flow of Yiddish-speakers from the mid-19th Century onwards was held to threaten their integration and draw potentially hostile attention. British Jews made Eastern-European Jews unwelcome. So they either integrated and assimilated and lost their unique language, or they joined the flow heading West to the US, devoid of a surviving "native" culture to be forced to assimilate with.

So Kriwaczek's rambling and charming tale is not entirely free of prejudice and discrimination, but it is not always where you expect it. Primarily, this is a tale of a European foundational nation, its roots in the soil for centuries before the - often very late - Christianisation of the Slavic world started to grub them up. To those who would say that Europe must be a Christian club and the religion a part of its constitution I would say: read Kriwaczek. The Jews were there first, not merely in the Roman world but suffusing the East to Lithuania, first fully Christian in the early modern age. In fact, this book tells of a surprising tolerance even from Christianity in the East, as Jews, Muslims and Pagans all resisted assimilation for many centuries. Some of the Eastern cities were almost majority Jewish communities, and until the tragedy of the Shoah derived much of their economic and cultural vibrancy from the contribution of the Jews. For once, not merely a tale of tears.

The Jews in the East underwent great disruptions, not least the Reformation and the wars which followed it, but prior to the Shoah there seems to have been no climacteric event such as the expulsions from ha Sefarad or England. (An exception appears to be Russia, where brutal measures were enacted in early modern times to try to erase non-Russian identities.) Their nation in the East seems to have functioned almost as a discontiguous nation state, governing itself independent of the kingdoms, fiefdoms and dependencies whose physical territory it overlaid. In any case, the expulsions rarely worked, as Christians rapidly discovered that without non-Christians to practice "usury" the economy collapsed, and in any case the Jews were never as rapacious as the religiously-dubious Christian money-lenders that took their place. The Jews had been forced into a niche in the West, but it was a niche without which society could not prosper. The Eastern Yiddish-speakers, on the other hand, were not forced into a small niche in the first place and played a role in the prosperity of the whole of society, from the trades and agriculture up to court advisory and diplomatic positions, mirroring the more typical situation in the Muslim world. To this day, Orthodox Jews of various kinds signal their varied and subtle allegiances to their Jewish neighbours with clothing styles taken from the 16th and 17th-Century Polish court.

Ultimately, Kriwaczek's most jaw-dropping contribution to my attempts at learning is a sense of the debt that we non-Jews in the modern age owe to individuals stemming from this extraordinarily vibrant nation. Mendelssohn, Einstein, Marx, Freud - what would 20th Century history and culture have been without any one of these men, let alone all? Kriwaczek writes with love and learning of a civilisation without which nothing would have been the same, and he does so without becoming maudlin at its murder. Kriwaczek is no mere Oyster, dropping ostentatious yiddishisms to advertise his ethnicity, but a sympathetic and readable friend of the lost nation. There is space to mourn, but there must also be space to celebrate. This is what Kriwaczek gives us.

This book was difficult for me. I first of all found its subtitle misleading. There was not a Yiddish 'nation' A nation as I understand it has a specific territory of its own. The Jews really had in the Disapora no territory of their own , and certainly no means of defending it. The term 'civilization' seems to be better but here too the great limitations placed on Jews in terms of livelihood and profession raise the question of how it is possible to see their world as a civilization.
As for the History itself I found it instructive but confusing. One - third of the book deals with History of the Jews before there is a Yiddish speaker around. When the Yiddish world is come to we are not told really about the lives of individuals , do not get the feel of the worlds in different ways. Here I would contrast this book with the Zborowski and Herzog classic work on the Shtetl , " Life is with People"
I did learn from it about certain historical realities I knew little or nothing about , for instance the history of the Jews of Regensburg, or the role Jews played in the Islamic -Christian conflicts which dominated the Middle Ages, the significance of the Slavic elements in formation of Yiddish, the horrifying picture of the disastrous fourteeth century in Western Europe, the place great Jewish travelers had in the development of Yiddish civilization, and much else.
Perhaps this is one of those books that needed a better reading than I gave it.

Every page of this book taught me something interesting and usually
surprising--not just about Jewish history, but about Europe and
surrounding parts of the world. Kriwaczek has organized an enormous
amount of information into a beautifully written and well-flowing
narrative, and amply proves his thesis that Jews were essential to the
development of Europe from the age of the Roman Empire onward. I'm a
little less convinced that their intellectual contributions--as
impressive as they are--add up to a critical influence. As for the
other bold theses stated by Kriwaczek--mostly about the loss of
Yiddish civilization--it's not worth quibbling over the exceptions to
the theses; one should recognize the weight of Jewish life over the
ages to which he compares recent history. But this book has given me
much to add to my understanding of the ancient and modern world.

This book is a must read if you want the story of the Jewish evolution in Europe. The author has condensed an amazing amount of history into one book, which will fascinate you from start to finish.