Making Yiddish the National Language of Soviet Jewry (1918–1941)

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The phenomenon of ‘Soviet Yiddish’ as the national language of the Soviet Jews remains barely explored to date. Yiddish as the language of the Jewish ‘national minority’ was granted the official status of a national language a few years after the October Revolution of 1917. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Yiddish language stigmatized as ‘jargon’ until well into the 20th century. The Soviet Union was, if only briefly, the only country where the aspirations of the Yiddish language activists were fulfilled.Yiddish as a national language was developed in the field of tension between the poles of language planning as part of Soviet nationality politics and the projects of Yiddish culture activists beyond the Soviet borders. The lively linguistic discourse which had evolved in the Soviet Yiddish press during the early 1920s was followed by the establishment of academic journals. From 1930 onward some of the most important works on Yiddish grammar appeared in Moscow. In contemporary sources these transnational phenomena of the language and culture project were summarized under the diffuse term “Soviet Yiddish”, which still lacks a clear definition. The focus of our project is on detailed research on and analysis of this term, based on the following questions:1. How was the concept “national language” conceived in the different Ashkenazic cultural projects from the the early 20th century on? Which continuities and discrepancies existed between the interpretations in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders?2. Which processes of cultural transfer informed the linguistic discourse? Who were the actors? Which ‘travelling concepts’ were of major importance?3. Did the praxis correspond to the language concepts? How were these concepts transformed in the course of implementation and communication?4. Which part did the development of Yiddish play in the consolidation of the Jewish ‘national minority’ in the sense of an ‘imagined community’?The aim of this project is the cultural-historical reconstruction of the linguistic discourse based on its traces in the contemporary Yiddish and Russian press, in private archives as well as in linguistic publications. The interdisciplinary approach developed in cultural studies is crucial to the research questions. The aim is a differentiated description of the transcultural phenomenon ‘Soviet Yiddish’ including the divergencies between the self image of of the Soviet Yiddish cultural activists and the reception of their action in the Yiddish cultural spaces outside of the Soviet Union. This first study focussed on the category language will open a new perspective for the exploration of the Soviet Yiddish space.