Harold Bloom on Yiddish, Talmud, Assimilation, etc.
In the New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom has written a review of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language
If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, then American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know (or care) which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish, and many of them do not know either. Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain. It is fifty-seven years since I came to Yale University as a graduate student and I am about to commence my fifty-fourth consecutive year of teaching at an institution that once made me uncomfortable because of my social and religious origin. In the twenty-first century there are no outsiders at our major universities, and my classes are filled by many Asians and Asian-Americans, who have replaced Jews as the most alert and able of students. The commonplaces of Exile—a constant sense of endangerment and exclusion—are now irrelevant here, but mournfully are all too apt for the prosperous but embattled state of Israel.
Yet Weinreich’s great History seems to me undiminished in its urgency. Resolutely it is not an elegiac work, though initially a reader may ponder its position in a Jewish world whose languages are now English and Hebrew. What Weinreich implicitly argues is that Yiddish is the Jewish language, prime emblem of the past, present, and whatever coherent future the once-wandering people could possess, at least linguistically. His principal explicit argument is paradoxical enough to be Kafkaesque: Yiddish, he writes, is the language of the Way of the Talmud, but the Talmud is written in Hebrew and Aramaic. By “the Way of the Talmud” Weinreich meant the profound influence of the Talmudical mind and its idiom and procedures upon Yiddish itself. As “the Oral Teaching,” the Talmud suggested an endlessly subtle and nuanced way of dialectical inquiry.
See here for the full article.
October 17th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
is he Uriel Weinreich’s son? I used Uriel Weinreich’s text in my Yiddish class at Columbia.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
i have the original edition. unfortunately i don’t think i’ll be able to pick up the yale edition for such a cheap price
JDUB:
max was father of uriel