#lingua yiddish

[svartikotturinn]

שומע יא אידיוט תפסיק לתקוף יהודים אמריקאים ולקרוא להם לא יהודים? מאיפה אתה חושב שאנחנו הגענו? לפני מאה שנה גם אנחנו היינו בגלות. תחשוב מה שאתה רוצה על יהדות רפורמית אבל מאיפה הטימטום לחשוב שלראות את האויבים שלנו כאשכרה אנשים זה לא יהודי, ומאיפה הטמטום שיהודים בגלות ברחבי העולם הם לא יהודים.

סתום ת'פה ותפסיק לפגוע בקהילה של עצמך כפרה.

I’m gonna take the opportunity and respond both to your stupid bullshit and the stuff I got from @spacelazarwolf and @the-catboy-minyan with this image:

This kind of bullshit is a perfect example of why so-called ‘American Jews’ get on my last nerve. They are not actually a part of the culture, they engage with it on an extremely shallow level, and then have the nerve to barge in and pretend they fucking own it. (Here is another example. Here is another one.) So no, I am not ‘threatened’ by them, I am deeply irritated. (Much the same way Irish and Scottish people in those countries are irritated by Plastic Paddies boastfully claiming to be descendants of Robert the Bruce, by the way.)

I don’t know who you are, anon, but I do NOT appreciate your bullshit strawmanning. I did not say this applies to all Americans, and certainly not to all Jews living abroad. I am talking about this type which does not do the absolute bare minimum, which is, first and foremost, speaking Hebrew. This is the one major thing that Jews have in common outside of religious practice: the lingua franca Jews have used for millennia (yes, even beyond religious practice—read some Shlomo Haramati), without which you might be in touch with your own community but your link to Jewishness as a whole will be hobbled.

Now, as for Pharaoh, here is what Jewish scripture and exegesis has to say about him. Notably, here is how the Talmud describes him physically. This is not a flattering description, it’s barely humanizing, it repeatedly refers to him as evil with the only thing resembling a redeeming characteristic being that he charged at the front of his advancing army as a form of showing respect to God by confronting him personally at that one particular time. The thing about ‘forgivenss’ is particularly galling, as it is specifically pointed out that he explicitly refused to repent, and he is outright stated to be an evil fool. Compare and contrast with Christian scripture. (EDIT: Also, you claim to be Jewish yet are entirely unfamiliar the lyrics to Dayenu. Curious.)

This is another thing you need to be meaningfully Jewish: you need to actually engage with Jewish tradition and texts (and to do that, you need to—once again, say it with me—speak Hebrew). Once again, that brand of ‘American Jews’ are not doing that, but rather watering down the real deal to something palatable to their own sensibilities, regardless of whatever actual traditions they might have to trample along the way.

And the worst part of it? Now Israeli teens who socialize primarily online and speak English instead, a language they are not native speakers of, are getting in on this bullshit and become indistinguishable from their ilk at a glance. Hell, a few years I even saw one claiming the Jewish Bible was originally in Yiddish on Reddit.

So quit your LARPing, quit your harping, and kindly fuck off.

[argyrocratie]

"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language. 

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’” 

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . .  in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama”), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.” 

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim 

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

[jollmaster]

I'm finally getting my thoughts about asileverse together: this is first of some lore posts 👐

asile!Hazbin Hotel, pt. 1: about creation and chronology

• chronology is from the age of Adam and Eve; Adam and Eve lived 930 years, and 5,500 years later Yeshua (a.k.a. Jesus Christ), the son of God, was born

• there are actually two chronologies, the traditional BC/AC (before/after the birth of Christ) and AWC (after world creation), when 6,430 years are added to the years after the birth of Christ

• world is divided into three spaces (the middle one is a classical world of mortal people)

• Heaven is an evergreen garden with a mild climate and weather; this is the Garden of Eden, as it was created at the dawn of the world

• Hell corresponds to Dante's Hell (with nine circles, not all of which reflect the seven deadly sins)

• Hell is called Hell only by mortals: this is the Underworld with its own ecosystem

• both hellborns and heavenborns use Latin, Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic names; their lingua franca are Latin, Yiddish and Hebrew

• both hellborns and heavenborns use blood magic, universal source of power

• some extra information about them lies here

• the fruit of knowledge was figs

asile!Hazbin Hotel, pt. 2: about powerful creatures

asile!Hazbin Hotel, pt. 3: first people

asile!Hazbin Hotel, pt. 4: where (and who) it all began

[eretzyisrael]

It’s worth noting that Yiddish has been maligned by gentiles and Jews alike. Antisemites considered it the parlance of vermin, while the rabbinical elite deemed it unworthy of serious Talmudic discussion. 

Really? The "rabbinical elite" were anti-Yiddish? What planet does he live on?  Yiddish was the lingua franca of all the major European yeshivas, even after they were transplanted to America or Israel after the Holocaust. The roshei Yeshiva (yeshiva heads) from Europe gave their lessons in Yiddish as long as their students understood it, well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today's American "yeshivish" language includes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and plenty of Yiddish along with English. And some of the "yeshivish" Yiddish has become part of modern Israeli Hebrew - such as "shkoyach" meaning "good job, itself a Yiddishization of a Hebrew term. 

But the article really descends into modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism here:

Another enemy of Yiddish was Zionism. In the late 19th century, as the hope for a Jewish state found its ground, it was portrayed as jargon spoken by the diaspora — the language of homelessness, without a true national voice. To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived. Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified. Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.

So according to Stavans, Zionists are antisemites who regard diaspora Jews the same way that neo-Nazis do, while modern Hebrew is the language of oppression. 

This is a sick slander.

In fact, the people who initially embraced Hebrew as a modern language outside the religious context, and who rejected Yiddish, were the exact type of people that have embraced Yiddish today: the anti-religious, supposedly enlightened Jews. 

[a-different-stroke]

Sign-Ups Half-Time

There’s only one week left to sign up, so I want to take this as an opportunity to address an often-mentioned reservation about signing up:

“No one but me will want to sign up for my language anyway.”

At the point of composing this post, 15 languages have been nominated, meaning there is interest in much more than just the “big” languages, since every nomination means interest for it by at least one person!

Take a look at the following list, in randomised order, of this year’s nominated languages:

Bahasa Indonesia | Indonesian

Castellano | Spanish (Spain)

Chinese Language

Cymraeg | Welsh

Deutsch | German

Español | Spanish (Latam)

Français | French

Gaeilge | Irish

Gàidhlig | Scottish Gaelic

Italiano | Italian

Lingua Latīna | Latin

Polski | Polish

Português | Portuguese

Русский | Russian

ייִדיש | Yiddish

Are you interested in writing fic in any of these languages? Or maybe you want to add your own language to the mix?

A Different Stroke is a multilingual gift exchange open to all languages and fandoms. If you’re interested in participating, please share this exchange around! The more people join in your target language(s), the more likely we’ll be able to match you! 

Sign-ups are still open until 26 February, and nominations will stay open the whole time. AO3 Collection, Tag Set, Important Links

[yuri-puppies]

actually i do have one thing to say.

"hebrew is the natural choice for a jewish lingua franca, and the hebrew revitalization project predates the state of israel by several decades" and "the government of israel not just failed to preserve yiddish but actively worked to suppress and denigrate it" are truths that can and do coexist

and if you have the fucking audacity to dismiss ladino, yiddish, etc as "creoles and therefore not real jewish languages" while calling yourself a linguist, i wish you a very.

a very.

fuck i don't know. i don't wish you death. i hope you get sprayed by a skunk or whatever

[spineless-lobster]

do you think that the captain knew polari?

I actually had no idea what polari was before you asked this, but actually it’s history is very interesting!

For those who don’t know, Polari was a coded language used in Britain that is a mixture of Romace, (Italian or Mediterranean Lingua Franca), Romani, rhyming slang, sailor slang, and thieves cant. Later adding Yiddish to its slang. It was mainly used by gay people but was also popular amongst criminals, sex workers, actors, showmen, etc. (I ripped this straight from google lol)

It’s actually the origin of the terms “butch” and “camp” which is very cool

I feel like the Captain might’ve known a few words or phrases but I don’t think he was surrounded by that subculture enough to be fully fluent in it. He does like Cole Porter and said “Ah, Dorothy” so unless that’s a shocking coincidence it’s safe to say he must’ve known at least a little bit about gay culture at the time, even if it was when he was a young man

Learning about polari is actually really interesting! Queer history is one of my favourite topics so it’s great that I got to learn about this

Thank you for the ask!!!

[schizografia]

Elogio di uno scrittore

Il 30 maggio del 1939 fu sepolto nel cimitero di Thiais a Parigi un uomo, il cui funerale era stato benedetto da un prete cattolico, benché egli non fosse mai stato battezzato. Era ebreo, ma i suoi amici ebrei rinunciarono a recitare il kaddish. Era probabilmente morto di delirium tremens, ma i medici diagnosticarono una sincope. Era cittadino della repubblica austriaca, ma si dichiarava suddito degli Asburgo.

Quest’uomo – uno dei massimi scrittori del XX secolo – si chiamava Joseph Roth. Aveva soltanto quarantacinque anni, ma pensava che la morte sarebbe giunta comunque troppo tardi. Non aveva – così diceva – nessuno alle spalle, né un popolo né uno stato. Solo la lingua in cui scriveva – ma nemmeno questo è sicuro, se qualcuno ha potuto sentire nel suo tedesco la voce dello yiddish e il respiro del russo. Eppure forse nessuno come lui aveva visto con tanta lucidità lo sfacelo del mondo che lo circondava né descritto con tanta inaudita vivezza e gioiosa precisione le strade, i caffè, gli alberghi delle città in cui gli era capitato di vivere. Forse nessuno era stato così insolentemente felice in tutto ciò che andava perdendo, che aveva già irrevocabilmente perduto.

Per questo nessuno scrittore del Novecento ci è come lui vicino. Anche noi non possiamo crederci cittadini dello stato in cui ci è toccato di vivere. Siamo stati battezzati, ma non apparteniamo in alcun modo alla chiesa. Come lui, non abbiamo più nulla alle spalle, non un popolo e tanto meno una nazione. Ma questo non ci toglie la capacità di essere felici e di provare a scrivere e a parlare lietamente in una lingua che ci rifiutiamo di identificare con l’insulso sproloquio che i media e le scuole non si stancano di propagare e avvilire. Senza credere in nessuno dei valori e delle leggi che ci sono imposti, abbiamo come lui conservata vergine e intatta la fede nell’erba, nel cielo stellato, nel silenzio e nella bellezza dei volti.

Giorgio Agamben

[ostermad-blog]

Dungeon23 13jan23 hex 3,8 - the Zamość Synagogue

As promised, today we get to the (sizeable) Jewish population of Zamość. Sephardi Jews lived in Zamość from the city’s beginning, receiving permission to build a synagogue, mikvah, and cemetery within the city limits (something that, even in the religiously-tolerant Grand Duchy of Lithuania, could not be taken for granted). Jan Zamoyski, the founder of Zamość specially invited folks across the known world to live in the city, and the first Jewish residents were recruited from Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Ashkenazi Jews were not allowed residence in the city, which is a fascinating bit of history. Clearly a lot of politics going on here, and if I were a historian, there’d be plenty to plumb. But I’m not a historian, and our version of Zamość was built half a century after Nowa Polska lost contact with the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean we don’t have Sephardi Jews, however. It turns out that, roundabout when the Corruscation happens and our setting diverges from history, an Ottoman army had invaded the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thousands of Ottoman soldiers and attendants with no way of going home. And, of course, a notable minority of them would have been Sephardi. These are the Jews who first settled in Zamość. Let’s turn from history to the block. We have the aforementioned synagogue, of course, as well as the mikveh (ritual bath) and a kahal. Jews within the Grand Duchy (and Nowa Polska, therefore) had the right of self-government and autonomous organizing. The kahal was both administrative building and legislative body of the Jewish people, for the Jewish people. All urban Jewish communities had a kahal which functioned as a secular center of Jewish life to complement the synagogue. Furthermore, we also have a few tenements for the wealthier Jews. Zamość also has a small Muslim population - the Grenadan artificers, as well as other remnants of that Ottoman army. As they are not numerous enough to warrant a permanent mosque, the synagogue doubles as a mosque on Friday afternoons and as needed for the other Islamic holy days. Where the rest of the city primarily speaks Polish, Yiddish and Arabic are the lingua franca of the synagogue and its environs. The synagogue block presents many opportunities for Jewish player characters - consulting with the rabbi, finding a minyan, studying Torah with the elders and wealthy (although there is no yeshiva in Zamość), even temporary housing. Muslim player characters have a dedicated place to worship, may seek the imam’s counsel, and get a lead on where the other Muslims in town live. Christian player characters (of all denominations) will find little for them in the synagogue block. Centuries of pogroms do not vanish after a few years of nominal religious tolerance.

[chicago-geniza]

Thinking about communication thinking about this person I met at the conference and owe an email (we kept getting mistaken for each other as, uh, short bald transmascs with similar builds and features and glasses frames who both study Polish Jewish stuff)--basically they talked about songs in the Warsaw ghetto, and how some were in Yiddish or Polish, and a lot were in macaronic verse. I've been reading about assimilated Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto--some of them even baptized--who only spoke Polish, and was thinking about how they found a "common language" with Yiddish speakers, especially those who had a poor command of Polish, or those who'd been deported from other, more distant locales. Yiddish functioned as a lingua franca, yeah? But am also thinking about: Hasidic macaronic verse in Yiddish and Russian, how An-sky code-switches in his Bund songs; utilitarian pidgins that develop at trading posts for bare-bones communication, like the Russian-Norwegian one in the far north, or even mixes of European and Indigenous languages; the premium on SPACE in the ghetto, when everyone was living on top of each other; people who'd been educated in other languages, in Russian or German, because of empire, and could translate, or even using a third language like French, or Yiddish to translate between other European languages; how did people talk to each other? To what extent did assimilated Polish Jews pick up Yiddish when they were immersed in it, and how did that affect them later, if they survived? Did the Babel-esque cacophony of languages create a hyperlocal dialect? Etc. Draft for an email I guess!

[venus-es]

Elogio di uno scrittore

Il 30 maggio del 1939 fu sepolto nel cimitero di Thiais a Parigi un uomo, il cui funerale era stato benedetto da un prete cattolico, benché egli non fosse mai stato battezzato. Era ebreo, ma i suoi amici ebrei rinunciarono a recitare il kaddish. Era probabilmente morto di delirium tremens, ma i medici diagnosticarono una sincope. Era cittadino della repubblica austriaca, ma si dichiarava suddito degli Asburgo.

Quest’uomo – uno dei massimi scrittori del XX secolo – si chiamava Joseph Roth. Aveva soltanto quarantacinque anni, ma pensava che la morte sarebbe giunta comunque troppo tardi. Non aveva – così diceva – nessuno alle spalle, né un popolo né uno stato. Solo la lingua in cui scriveva – ma nemmeno questo è sicuro, se qualcuno ha potuto sentire nel suo tedesco la voce dello yiddish e il respiro del russo. Eppure forse nessuno come lui aveva visto con tanta lucidità lo sfacelo del mondo che lo circondava né descritto con tanta inaudita vivezza e gioiosa precisione le strade, i caffè, gli alberghi delle città in cui gli era capitato di vivere. Forse nessuno era stato così insolentemente felice in tutto ciò che andava perdendo, che aveva già irrevocabilmente perduto.

Per questo nessuno scrittore del Novecento ci è come lui vicino. Anche noi non possiamo crederci cittadini dello stato in cui ci è toccato di vivere. Siamo stati battezzati, ma non apparteniamo in alcun modo alla chiesa. Come lui, non abbiamo più nulla alle spalle, non un popolo e tanto meno una nazione. Ma questo non ci toglie la capacità di essere felici e di provare a scrivere e a parlare lietamente in una lingua che ci rifiutiamo di identificare con l’insulso sproloquio che i media e le scuole non si stancano di propagare e avvilire. Senza credere in nessuno dei valori e delle leggi che ci sono imposti, abbiamo come lui conservata vergine e intatta la fede nell’erba, nel cielo stellato, nel silenzio e nella bellezza dei volti.

20 aprile 2023

-Giorgio Agamben

[oubliettemagazine]

Stazione di Baranovitch di Shalom Aleichem: tre racconti ferroviari

Leggo nella Presentazione di Daniela Leoni che “Shalom Aleichem – pseudonimo di Shalom Rabinowitz”, nato “nel 1859 Perejaslav, piccola cittadina dell’Ucraina”, è ebreo e scrive in yiddish, che a suo dire è la lingua “nella quale ogni autore ebreo pensa anche quando scrive in ebraico…” – per cui, arguisco che, usando direttamente quel linguaggio più recente, evita di doversi tradurre…

[jollmaster]

asile!Hazbin Hotel: languages

• Charlie: Hebrew, Yiddish, Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, English (a little)

• Vega: Castilian dialect of Medieval Spanish, Medieval Latin

• Alastor: Louisiana French, Southern American English (+ Mid-Atlantic accent for work)

• Angel Dust: Sicilian

• Niffty: Gheg dialect of Albanian

• Husk: Romani, Polabian, Czech, Vulgar Latin, a few more local dialects; most of them he knows not very well

• Sir Pentious: British English, Ancient Greek, Classical Latin

• Cherri Bomb: Irish Gaelic

• Vox: Japanese, American English

• Velvette: Belgian French, Soomaaliga (a little)

• Valentino: Uruguayan Portuguese, Uruguayan Spanish

• Zestial: Hebrew, Yiddish, Archaic Latin, Anglo-Saxon

• Rosie: Yiddish, Vulgar Latin, British English, Gaelic (a little)

• Carmilla and her daughters: Burgundian

• Mimzy: American English, Yiddish

• Lute: Aquitanian dialect of French

+ lingua franca of Heaven/Hell and local nobility: Hebrew and Aramaic for nobility, firstborn and higher ones; Yiddish and Vulgar Latin for younger ones

[jewishprayers]

How does Judaism see music and other arts?

Jewish music stems from ancient prayer chants of the Levant some 3000 years ago. The musical notation that developed and that we find in the bible today is one of the most ancient forms of notated music, and yet it is still in current practice all over the world today. Jewish music has been constantly adapting to new conditions and yet retaining its identity in many widely differing ethnic, social and religious environments.

Through its daughter religions, the music of Judaism is one of the fundamental elements in the understanding of the sacred and secular traditions of Europe and the Near East, first having influenced, and then having been influenced by, the music of Christian and Islamic cultures. The study of Jewish music encompasses many genres of religious, semi religious and folk music used in the synagogue and in the Jewish home and also art music using Jewish texts or themes. The study of Jewish music combines distinctively, the essential elements of musicology, ethnomusicology and interculturalism. Jewish music today encompasses a wide diversity of musical traditions and Jewish songs are sung in many different languages.

Ashkenazi Music (Klezmer)

The term Klezmer comes from the Hebrew words klei meaning “vessel” and zemer meaning “song” - literally meaning “instrument of song.” This was the Yiddish word by which the musicians themselves were known in Eastern Europe. The term “Klezmer Music” was first used in the 1970s to describe the traditional instrumental music of the Yiddish-speaking people of Eastern Europe whose origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Klezmer is enjoying huge popularity world wide and giving pleasure to thousands of listeners and performers. This toe-tapping Eastern European party music imbued with Jewish tonalities and spirituality resonates with people young and old from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Sephardi Music

Sephardi refers to the Jews who lived and flourished in the Iberian peninsula for many centuries, until they were expelled along with the Muslims, in 1492. Sephardi Jews took their language and musical traditions with them in to exile and absorbed other traditions from North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and countries in the Middle East where they settled. Many of the standard hymns in the Hebrew liturgy were composed by great Sephardic poets during the “Golden Age” in medieval Spain. The lingua franca of Sephardi Jews was Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) which was based on mediaeval Castilian and written in Hebrew script. The Ladino ballad repertoire was a very important song tradition transmitted through the female line.

Israeli Music

While many Israeli performers are internationally recognized, the vast repertoire of music for concert and stage by Israeli composers is still unfamiliar in the UK and beyond. Unique to Israeli music is the particular symbiosis of East and West and the assimilation of elements from diverse traditions, the strands of Jewish traditions, Arab and Middle Eastern musics, with Western approaches.

Western Classical Music

Jewish art music may be said to have begun with court composer Salamoni de Rossi of Mantua in the early seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, Jewish composers emerged in Amsterdam, Southern France and Italy, but the main flowering of the Jewish contribution to western art music began with the emancipation of the Jews following the French Revolution. Jewish composers born during the nineteenth century tended to write in accordance with classical mainstream and not to exhibit Jewish characteristics in their music. However, in the twentieth century, Jewish composers had the confidence to express Jewish features in their music, through the use of traditional sacred and secular material as well as evoking Jewish subjects in their works. There is also an interest in music on Jewish themes by non-Jewish composers and how music has been the medium of cultural, religious and philosophical dialogue since the Enlightenment.

The Arts and Jewish Self-Understanding

In the 19th century, the arts became even more crucial to the community’s recreations of itself. The flowering of Yiddish literature, for instance, was a way to maintain continuity with a culture already fading away; and the renewal of the Hebrew language and literature, among other things, was an expression of newfound self-determination.

Both in late 19th century America, and in Weimar Germany, an emphasis on scholarship and history, and the creation of institutions to promote them, helped reenergize communities searching for new answers to the question of why they should remain Jews. This emphasis on the intellectual was not radical; but its promoters realized that Jews needed to reconnect to Judaism through an association with broader cultural and intellectual ideas and venues. So the creation of The Jewish Encyclopedia in 1905 in America gave Jews a sense of pride in the sweep of their civilization, while Franz Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus [a Jewish educational institution], sensitive to the biases of the German Jewish middle class, hired well-known doctors and physicists, revered citizens, to teach about Jewish life.

Even more compelling, perhaps, was the way in which Martin Buber resumed the Lehrhaus under the Nazis (and recreated it yet again in Jerusalem in the early 1950s) as a way to maintain community and raise spirits when, one could argue, there were more pressing problems than an unexplicated poem. But Buber–and Rosenzweig before him–believed that culture led to the strengthening of community, and that a sense of community is what makes the difference between a withering civilization and a thriving one.

Doorways is the online hub for what to offer at life’s most important events

This website is a tool you can use to add meaning to your life events. We aim to build a new sense of how to be “at home” in Jewish life. You can build a better life using these spiritual tools. This website offers you the opportunity to glean from traditional and modern sources: prayers, poems, songs, texts and psalms. Whether you are preparing to offer a toast, leading a service, or writing a letter, we invite you to use this website to enhance your words and inspire your community.

Are you looking for a Clergy Member to help you with this life event? Please fill out the form and we’ll connect you with someone in your area.

To know more visit: https://jewishdoorways.org/

[incipit-adribrando]

Incipit 100/100

Incipit 100/100

Secondo la leggenda di famiglia, il nonno di Ferguson partì a piedi da Minsk, sua città natale, con cento rubli cuciti nella fodera della giacca, viaggiò a ovest fino ad Amburgo passando per Varsavia e Berlino, comprò il biglietto per una nave chiamata Empress of China che attraversò l’Atlantico in mezzo a violente tempeste invernali ed entrò nel porto di New York il primo giorno del ventesimo secolo. Mentre aspettava di essere interrogato da un funzionario dell’immigrazione a Ellis Island, il nonno di Ferguson attaccò discorso con un altro ebreo russo. Quello gli disse: Scordati il nome Reznikoff. Qui non te ne fai niente. Per la tua nuova vita in America ti serve un nome americano, uno che suona bene in americano. Poiché nel 1900 l’inglese era ancora una lingua straniera per lui, Isaac Reznikoff chiese suggerimento al più esperto e maturo compatriota. Di’ che ti chiami Rockefeller, fece quello. Cosí vai sul sicuro. Passò un’ora, poi un’altra ora, e quando si accomodò per rispondere alle domande del funzionario, il diciannovenne Reznikoff aveva già dimenticato il nome che gli era stato suggerito da quell’uomo. Nome?, chiese il funzionario. Battendosi la fronte indispettito, lo stanco immigrato se ne uscí in yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (Non me lo ricordo piú)! E fu cosí che Isaac Reznikoff cominciò la sua nuova vita in America come Ichabod Ferguson.

(4 3 2 1, di Paul Auster - Trad. Cristiana Mennella)

[mysmorgasbordoffantabulosa]

Polari

Definition:

A form of slang incorporating Italianate words, rhyming slang, and Romani, used originally as a kind of secret language by people in theatres, fairgrounds, markets, etc. and adopted by some gay people in the 20th century.

Example words:

acdc, bibi - bisexual arva - to have sex (from Italian chiavare, to screw) aunt nell - listen! aunt nells - ears aunt nelly fakes - earrings barney - a fight bat, batts, bates - shoes bitch - effeminate or passive gay man bona - good butch - masculine; masculine lesbian cackle - talk/gossip camp - effeminate (possibly from Italian campare "exaggerate, make stand out") (possibly from the phrase 'camp follower' those itinerants who followed behind the men in uniform/highly decorative dress) carsey, karsey, khazi - toilet cartes - penis (from Italian – cazzo) charpering omi - policeman charver - sexual intercourse chicken - young man clevie - vagina corybungus - backside, posterior cottage - a public lavatory used for sexual encounters (public lavatories in British parks and elsewhere were often built in the style of a Tudor cottage) cottaging - seeking or obtaining sexual encounters in public lavatories Dilly boy - a male prostitute, from Piccadilly boy Dilly, the Piccadilly, a place where trolling went on dinari money (Latin denarii was the 'd' of the pre decimal penny) dish - buttocks dona - woman (perhaps from Italian donna or Lingua Franca dona) drag - clothing ecaf - face (backslang i.e. words writting backward) eek/eke - face (abbreviation of ecaf) ends - hair[6] esong, sedon - nose (backslang) fambles - hands fantabulosa - fabulous/wonderful (e.g. my tumblr!!!) farting crackers - trousers feele omi / feely omi - young man fungus - old man/beard hoofer - dancer HP or homy palone - effeminate gay man irish - wig (from rhyming slang, "Irish jig") jubes - breasts khazi - toilet, also spelt carsey lallies / lylies - legs, sometimes also knees (as in "get down on yer lallies") lallie tappers - feet lilly - police (Lilly Law) manky - worthless, dirty (from Italian mancare – "to be lacking") meese - plain, ugly (from Yiddish mieskeit, in turn from Hebrew מָאוּס repulsive, loathsome, despicable, abominable) meshigener - nutty, crazy, mental (from Yiddish 'meshugge', in turn from Hebrew מְשֻׁגָּע crazy) meshigener carsey - church mince - walk affectedly/campy mollying - involved in the act of sex naff - awful, dull, hetero nishta nothing[6] ogle look admiringly ogles eyes oglefakes glasses omi man (from Romance) omi-palone effeminate man, or homosexual onk nose (cf "conk") orbs eyes orderly daughters police oven mouth (nanti pots in the oven = no teeth in the mouth) palare / polari pipe - telephone ("talk pipe") park, parker - give palone - woman (Italian paglione – "straw mattress"; cf. old Cant hay-bag – "woman"); also spelled "polony" in Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock palone-omi - lesbian pots - teeth remould - sex change rozzer - policeman[11] riah / riha - hair (backslang) riah zhoosher - hairdresser rough trade - a working class or blue collar sex partner or potential sex partner; a tough, thuggish or potentially violent sex partner scarper - to run off (from Italian scappare, to escape or run away or from rhyming slang Scapa Flow, to go) sharpy - policeman (from — charpering omi) sharpy polone - policewoman slap makeup so - homosexual (e.g. "Is he 'so'?") stimps - legs stimpcovers - stockings, hosiery TBH (to be had) - rospective sexual conquest tootsie trade - sex between two passive homosexuals (as in: 'I don't do tootsie trade') trade - sex, sex-partner, potential sex-partner troll - to walk about (esp. looking for trade) vada / varder - to see (from Italian — dialect vardare = guardare – look at) vera (lynn) - gin vogue - cigarette (from Lingua Franca fogus – "fire, smoke") vogueress - female smoker zhoosh - style hair, tart up, mince (cf. Romani zhouzho – "clean, neat") zhoosh our riah — style our hair

Example phrases:

Omies and palones of the jury, vada well at the eek of the poor ome who stands before you, his lallies trembling.

taken from "Bona Law", one of the Julian and Sandy sketches from Round The Horne, written by Barry Took and Marty FeldmanTranslation: "Men and women of the jury, look well at the face of the poor man who stands before you, his legs trembling."

So bona to vada...oh you! Your lovely eek and your lovely riah.

taken from "Piccadilly Palare", a song by MorrisseyTranslation: "So good to see...oh you! Your lovely face and your lovely hair."

As feely ommes...we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth.

taken from Parallel Lives, the memoirs of renowned gay journalist Peter BurtonTranslation: "As young men...we would style our hair, powder our faces, climb into our great new clothes, don our shoes and wander/walk off to some great little bar. In the bar we would stand around with our gay companions, look at the great genitals on the butch man nearby who, if we fluttered our eyelashes at him sweetly, might just wander/walk over to offer a light for the unlit cigarette clenched between our teeth."

Some strides for the omi with the naff riah

From the Are You Being Served? episode "The Old Order Changes", where Captain Peacock asks Mr Humphries to get "trousers for the fellow with the unstylish hair."