Civ-Ashoah, a European project

The European project “Civ-Ashoah”, coordinated by La Ligue de l’enseignement in partnership with ARCI (Italy) and Taube Center (Poland), aims to raise awareness among European citizens about the Shoah by offering a transnational, historical and cultural reading of the heritage of the Ashkenazi Jewish community.

The objective of this project, co-financed by the European programme “Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values”, is to renew the approach and understanding of the Shoah and its consequences. Indeed, in response to the various forms of antisemitism observed in European societies, the project tries to put into perspective the European Jewish heritage by popularising the memory of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. More broadly, it aims to emphasise, on one hand, the dangers of rejecting and hating other people as much as rejecting this past, and on the other hand, to promote the values of tolerance, respect and living together.

For this purpose, the project has consisted in organising several events with the grand public and with young people to make them aware of the history and culture of the Ashkenazi community, which are largely unknown to the public.

The Civ-Ashoah project aims to remind us that the Second World War was the scene of a genocide that caused the disappearance of a very large part of European Jews and the culture associated with them. Our project celebrates, therefore, this remembrance and aims to highlight the richness and importance of this culture.

This is why, this website proposes different kind of resources in different languages (English, French, Italian, Polish) to find out more about the different components of the Ashkenazi culture: culinary specialties, music, literature, traditions, cultural events and more.

Many thanks to the Memorial de la Shoah for its support in organising the events and, more broadly, to implement the Civ-Ashoah project.

Introduction

by Cécile ROUSSELET (PhD in comparative literature, specialist in Yiddish and Russian),
and Guido FURCI (Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Sorbonne Alliance).

What is the history of the Ashkenazi people?

To understand the history of the Ashkenazi jews, we need to go back to the end of the ancient Jewish state in the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. For a thousand years, Jews lived mainly in the East, then, as persecution took hold, communities moved from the East to the West. At the time, Jewish communities were found in Germany, France, Northern Italy and Spain. Moreover, throughout Europe, Jewish merchants played an important role. But little by little, Jews were confined to separate districts (ghettos), stigmatised and eventually expelled. This was the case for Jewish communities in France in 1394, and in Spain in 1492.

Ashkenazi Jews in particular were the Jews who migrated from France and Germany at this time to Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, etc.). The other two main Jewish communities are the Sephardim (Jewish populations expelled from Spain and who settled in Turkey and the Holy Land) and the Mizrahim (who settled in the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asia).

Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish and represented one tenth of the population in the 16th century. They lived in small villages called shtetls. They acted as intermediaries between the nobility and the peasants, and established an erudite Jewish culture. This era of prosperity came to an end with the revolt of the Ukrainian Cossacks of Khmelnytskyi in 1648: for two years, the Jews were pillaged and massacred. More than 100,000 people were killed.

In the 18th century, Ashkenazi Jews gradually gained equal rights. The spirit of the Enlightenment movement has strongly influenced the Haskalah, a word meaning “education”. Its proponents propagated the new sciences and the idea of tolerance, and encouraged the assimilation of Jews into the surrounding populations. The second emancipation (the second “Haskalah”) began around 1815, and Ashkenazi Jews quickly gave up their linguistic and cultural particularities in favour of assimilation.

The 19th century also saw the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Jews were seen as belonging to an inferior race. In consequence of this point of view widely shared, in Ukraine appeared pogroms, i.e. attacks, looting and massacres of Jews by Christians, without any reaction from the authorities – for example, the pogrom of Kishinev in 1903, which features prominently in twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew literature (as in the work of the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik). Anti-Semitic texts were published: Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886), or the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1904), according to which an international Jewish conspiracy was being hatched to enslave Christian countries. This was the end of the shtetl. Jews emigrated en masse to the West and North America (the Jewish population of the United States rose from 275,000 in 1875 to 3 million in 1914) and Zionism made headway. After the German elections of 1933, Adolf Hitler led the “final solution of the Jewish question”: six million Jews were killed in the camps. In the USSR, after a campaign to promote the Yiddish language, Stalin had a large number of prominent Jews killed as well between 1937 and 1952. Today, there are still several Ashkenazi communities around the world (New York in the Williamsburg district, Israel, Argentina and most European cities), but the persecutions of the 20th century decimated the majority of the population.

The Askenazi culture is rich and distinguished by its many artists and singularities. Here are just a few highlights.

What is the Yiddish language?

Yiddish was the main language used by Ashkenazi Jews at the end of the tenth century. Depending on the period, it has been given several names: some ancient texts speak of “taytsh” (meaning “German”); ancient rabbinical sources in Hebrew call it the “language of Ashkenaz” (“language of Germany”); critics, particularly in the early 20th century, call it “Judeo-German”. Despite these differences, the term “Yiddish”, an adjective derived from the word “yid” (Jewish), has come to be used to describe this language, which is written from right to left, using the 22 characters of the Hebrew alphabet, some of which are given a vowel value by diacritical marks (unlike Semitic languages, including Hebrew).

Its appearance in the early 1000s was due to the fact that, even before the Christian era, Hebrew was a religious language and not a spoken one. Other languages therefore took its place in everyday life: first Judeo-Aramaic (which soon joined Hebrew as the language of study and writing), then Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic and mainly Yiddish. These idioms are therefore the result of a fusion between Hebrew-Aramaic, the languages of the populations in which the Jews settled, and traces of an earlier Jewish language, which followed the communities as they migrated. In the case of Yiddish, then, we tend to consider that, depending on the region where the language is used, it contains 70 to 80% elements of Middle High German origin, 15 to 25% of Hebrew origin and 5 to 10% of Slavic origin. In fact, the closer you get to Eastern Europe, the greater the proportion of words of Slavic origin is, and vice versa. It should be pointed out that Yiddish words of Aramaic and Hebrew origin are mostly spelt in accordance with the traditional Hebrew system. Finally, its syntax is fairly similar to the one of the German sentence, although it tends to reduce the distance between the various elements that make up its nominal and verbal groups.

Finally, two languages coexist in Yiddish shtetls: Hebrew, the written language of liturgy and study, and Yiddish, the spoken language of everyday life, which has earned it the widespread nickname of “mame-loshn” (“mother’s language”) – sometimes even replacing the noun “Yiddish” on certain occasions.

Apart from Hebrew, Yiddish is the Jewish language that developed most rapidly and was spoken over the widest geographical area. There were eleven million speakers before the Second World War. After the Shoah and the fact that many Jews gave up their cultural and linguistic particularities, Yiddish is not as widely spoken as it once was. Nevertheless, many communities, particularly in the United States and Israel, are passing it on to the post-1945 generations, and the language continues to be spoken and learned by students of all ages, both in academic settings and in informal settings such as the Maison de la culture Yiddish and the Centre Medem-Arbeter Ring, to name but a few in Paris.

What about Yiddish art and literature?

Literature

Yiddish literature is a reflection of the people who use it, and of their language: it is, therefore, a diasporic and fusion literature, extremely “malleable”, according to Rachel Ertel in her introduction to the anthology Royaumes Juifs. It appeared in the 13th century, as a counterpoint to the corpus of sacred texts, and was aimed at the Jewish masses who did not have access to Hebrew, i.e. women and the less educated. It was hence, above all a popular, supplementary literature that emerged in the communities of the Rhineland, and was extremely receptive to the European works of the period. There are four distinct bodies of work: in the first one, we find material of Germanic inspiration, episodes adapted from epic sources such as Tristan and Isolde, or stories with heroic and courtly characters – as, for example, in the chivalric novel Le Livre de Bovo by Elie Levita. The second body deals with biblical or midrashic episodes, such as the story of Esther, Job or Isaac. The third one is an epic with a historical content: these are great poems about Jewish suffering, of a particular community or of the Jewish people as a whole. Finally, the fourth group of texts is carnivalesque, inspired by the Scroll of Esther, playlets influenced by medieval comic farces, performed during the festival of Purim. From the 14th century onwards, Yiddish literature played a secondary role, as much educational as aesthetic. The aim was to eradicate ignorance, hence the proliferation of books on morality or adaptations of biblical texts, such as the Tsenerenè, nicknamed “The Women’s Bible”.

The 18th century saw the beginning of a change: with the Haskalah, a modern Yiddish literature emerged, chosen by intellectuals as a vehicle for social change. Two new literatures emerged, one in Hebrew and one in Yiddish, often written by the same people who chose their language according to their readership to the audience and to the language. Open to the modern sciences and disseminated by the press, which became an increasingly important part of Yiddish culture from the 17th century onwards, it carried the seeds of new social ideas.

Classical Yiddish literature was born in the last third of the 19th century. Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleikhem, and Itskhok Leybush Peretz, are considered as the three “grandfathers” of this literature and as the most sensitive to European influences. From 1910 onwards, Warsaw was the heart of the Yiddish cultural scene. Modernism flourished there, at the crossroads of Russian, German, American and Parisian modernity. The magazine Khaliastra, the expressionist experiments of Isroel Rabon and the poetry of Peretz Markish and Uri-Zvi Greenberg illustrate this movement.

In the United States, the press carried novels and short stories, such as those by Joseph Opatoshu, who described American urban life, or Sholem Asch, one of the great creators of the bucolic myth of the shtetl in 1905. According to Rachel Ertel, the theatre was also extremely vibrant, ranging from melodrama and preaching to cabaret.

In Russia, the irruption of modernity is an omnipresent theme in literature. Indeed, David Bergelson was famous for depicting the decline of the shtetl, and Der Nister, in tales bordering on the fantastic, blended Jewish esoteric texts with Western and Slavic folklore. After the 1917 Revolution, many Yiddish authors had to come to terms with the imperatives of proletarian and socialist writing, such as Moyshe Kulbak in The Zelminians.

The inter-war period encouraged the production of historical frescoes and family sagas, such as Israel Joshua Singer’s book, The Ashkenazi Brothers (1936), in which the themes of war, the modernisation of society, the rise of socialism and the rural exodus led to the creation of a mythical imaginary of the vanished shtetl.

After 1945, the Jews were called upon to write their history, to remember and pass on to the next generation the memory of what happened (this was the “Zakhor”). The extermination was expressed above all through poetry, as in Yitskhok Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People. The dispersal of Jews, after the annihilation and extermination of Soviet Jewish writers in the USSR, gave rise to new centres of literary creation: in Israel (Leyb Rokhman and Avrom Sutzkever spring to mind) and New York (Yitskhok Bashevis Singer wrote most of his work there before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978). Today, there are Israeli writers who write in Yiddish, despite the fact that the State of Israel has given national priority to Hebrew (see Rachel Rojanski’s very interesting book, Yiddish in Israel: A History).

Pictorial Arts

Since the Second Commandment of the Exodus forbids the creation of images, the first Jewish artistic objects were mainly ceremonial (candlesticks and candelabras, etc.). Miniatures on religious manuscripts appeared in the fifteenth century, Jewish artistic painting is a phenomenon that began with modernity much later on. During the 19th century, Jewish painters and sculptors entered European artistic circles, often painting genre scenes drawn from the Jewish experience in the villages, or landscapes that had no trace of life in the shtetl. Throughout the twentieth century, Jewish life was staged and even carnivalised by painters in Eastern Europe or in Paris (where many artists, including Marc Chagall, emigrated from 1900, the so-called “School of Paris” movement). In Russia, after the Revolution, Jewish painters (especially those from the “small ghetto” in Moscow), like their non-Jewish counterparts, produced non-figurative works with elements of social criticism.

Music

Klezmer (a word derived from the Hebrew “kley”, musical instrument, and “zemer”, song or melody) is a musical tradition of Eastern European Jews, whose origins are thought to be the music of Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These melodies and songs appeared in the 15th century and developed in parallel with the practice of religious music (chanted and sung prayers). These were mainly oral practices, therefore Eastern European Jewish music was not transcribed or recorded until the late 19th century. With increasing urbanisation, Jewish music moved out of the small communities into performance spaces. Finally, after 1945, Jewish emigrants (e.g. to the United States) made klezmer music one of the forms of testimony to the survival of Jewish culture.