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Оглавление27 Languages of the Jews
Dr. Stefan Schreiner, Senior Professor at the University of Tübingen, surveys languages that Jews have adopted. When the Jewish Diaspora began, the history of a »language shift« also began: from Hebrew to Aramaic, to Greek, to Arabic—to the languages spoken in the relevant area. What makes a language a »Jewish« language? The Handbook of Jewish Languages distinguishes, »those languages that are written with Hebrew letters are called ›Judeo-languages‹, while those languages that are not normally written with Hebrew letters are called ›Jewish languages.‹«
Hebrew has a history of around three millennia. Ancient Hebrew refers to the language of the Bible and of inscriptions. The development of Ancient Hebrew over roughly a millennium reflects the consonantal text of the biblical books. Ancient Hebrew was superseded by Aramaic in everyday life but lived on in the synagogue. Hebrew persisted in the oral and written discourse of the rabbis. The wide spread of Aramaic is why we encounter it in geographically and chronologically distinct dialects. It lived on in the eastern and western Diasporas as the literary language of scholars.
With the conquests of Alexander, Greek gained significance among Jews in the Levant and North Africa. Ultimately, the use of Greek was limited by external factors: in the east by the spread of Islam and Arabization, in the west by the dominance of Latin. With the expansion of Islamic rule, Arabic displaced Aramaic. Judeo-Arabic experienced its heyday between the 10th and 14th centuries, first in the Arabic-speaking east of the Islamic world, then in the Maghreb, and finally in Egypt and Yemen.
Sephardic Hebrew was cultivated in the context of Arabic. Ashkenazi Hebrew grew in the lee of Jewish-German and Yiddish. Ǧudezmo—a Judeo-Romance language of Sephardic Jews also called Ladino—emerged on the Iberian Peninsula.
Between the ninth and the eleventh century the language called loshn ashkenaz (language of Ashkenaz) developed. Since the 13th/14th century it’s been called yidish-taytsh (Jewish German), and from the 17th/18th century in Central and Eastern Europe: yidish. Yiddish was the everyday and literary language of Ashkenazic Jews.
What makes a language »Jewish?« This remains an open question.
28 Modern Jewish Literature
Dr. Matthias Morgenstern, of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen surveys modern Jewish writing primarily from the late-nineteenth century through the present. First defining what constitutes »Jewish« writing, Morgenstern dips back into earlier centuries to trace its development. He argues that the Berlin Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) was the starting-point for modern Jewish literature. Preferred genres in Jewish writing in the German-speaking realm of the 19th century were satire, jokes, and pamphlets.
Yiddish literature was involved in intense exchanges with the literature of the German-speaking world. Ultimately, the parade example of Yiddish literature would be the work of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. When Morgenstern turns to English Jewish writing, he notes American-Jewish literature of the Yiddish narrative tradition. For America, the problem of assimilation erupts fully in the work of Nobel Prize laureate Saul Bellow.
Turning to Hebrew writing, Morgenstern comments that with a new appreciation of biblical Hebrew during the Enlightenment, Jewish writers developed Meliza style, which detached itself from rabbinic Hebrew of the medieval Talmud and integrated biblical vocabulary, word-links and verse parts, as a way of renewing Hebrew language. In the last decades of the 19th century there was a decisive turning away from the Meliza style.
Shmuel Josef Agnon (born Samuel Josef Czaczkes, 1888–1970) was the first Hebrew language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, together with the German-Jewish lyricist Nelly Sachs (1891–1970). While Agnon was a master of rabbinic tradition, the development of Israeli Hebrew as a spoken language can be observed in the writers that came to Palestine in the first Aliyah (1892 to 1903). The use of linguistic models from ancient Jewish literature to describe the Land of Israel were now felt to be antiquated, inappropriate, and comical. Hebrew became mixed with Arabic expressions—and no longer with Yiddish.
Morgenstern surveys Hebrew writing up to today. He includes writers in Israel, Europe, North and South America as he reviews Jewish fiction. He turns to drama and lyric poetry to round out his treatment of modern Jewish literature.
29 Judaism and Inter-faith Relations since World War II
Dr. Norman Solomon of Oxford University reviews interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians. The London Society of Jews and Christians, the oldest interfaith organization of its kind in the United Kingdom, was founded in 1927 by leaders of the Liberal Jewish synagogue and Westminster Abbey (Anglican). It aims »to increase religious understanding and to promote goodwill and co-operation between Jews and Christians, with mutual respect for the differences in faith and practice.«
In 1927, the National Coalition of Christians and Jews was founded in the United States. In 1938, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein at the Jewish Theological Seminary, together with Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary, and anthropologist Margaret Mead at Columbia, founded the Institute for Religious and Social Studies (now the Louis Finkelstein Institute, and since 2011, complemented by the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue).
Following World War II, under the impact of the Shoah (Holocaust) and the establishment of the State of Israel, Christians in the West reassessed their relationships with Jews and repudiated antisemitism. Distinguished French historian Jules Isaac devoted his life to combating antisemitism, which he saw rooted in the Christian »teaching of contempt«. Isaac described a »private« meeting with John XXIII in June 1960, which contributed to Pope John’s decision to direct Cardinal Bea to draft »a declaration on the Catholic Church’s relationship to the Jewish people for the upcoming Second Vatican Council.« This became Note 4 of the Declaration Nostra Aetate; in which the Church distances itself from the »teaching of contempt.«
The World Council of Churches, which includes primarily Protestant Churches, also redefined attitudes to Judaism. The International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) was formed in 1969 to facilitate relations between the world-wide Jewish community and both the Vatican and World Council of Churches. IJCIC includes leaders from Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism, from Israel, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, who work together towards interfaith understanding.
The growing presence of Muslims on the world stage has heightened the need for broader dialogue of »Abrahamic Religions.« In Israel, the need for dialogue between Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians, has always been obvious.
9 Conclusion
In these volumes, we trace the aftermath of the vanishing of Israelite religion and its transformation into Judaism following the inevitable acculturation processes caused by the Hellenization of the eastern Mediterranean. From the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Bible became the central focus and authority for Jews of the whole oikoumene, replacing the Temple and its cult. Judaism became—and still is—a religion of the book.
As such, we examine the Bible in its different versions and its transmission. The differences between the Hebrew Bible and its early Greek translations reflect the Hellenization of rabbinic religion. Clear evidence of this can already be found in the Bible text. In Hebrew, the book of Genesis begins with the announcement that when God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was as yet unformed. In Greek, the translation offers creatio ex nihilo, in which God creates something from nothing: »In the beginning, God created …« (Gen. 1:1). This embrace of Hellenistic cosmogony marks a strategy of engagement with the broader world, imbibing what it has to offer, while emphasizing the distinctiveness of that culture in its Jewish iteration.
In these volumes, our primary concern is to perceive Jewish history, literature, and life as living—and still evolving—expressions of the immense creative contribution of Jewish religion to the lasting achievements of global intellectual and cultural history. Therefore, while we explore the vicissitudes of the Jewish past, we have eschewed the »lachrymose theory« of that history, which sees Judaism as merely one disaster following another. Instead, we offer three volumes that celebrate a long and complex history of Judaism in all its manifestations and expressions of life—which while not free from terrible sorrows and destruction, nevertheless also notes triumphs and progress.
Since antiquity, Judaism has continually endeavoured to ascertain its existence and the obligatory character of its election. Therefore, a broad survey presents important Jewish documents of faith and literary works over the past two millennia, which show the fascinating diversity and liveliness of Jewish religion.
And finally, our third volume seeks to describe and analyze the rich and important cultural contributions of Judaism: what it shares with other religions and cultures, and what makes it distinctively Jewish.
In the next thirty chapters, each written by recognized authorities in his or her field, we offer our range of views of Judaism. Let us start »in the beginning.«
