Why Study Yiddish Culture?

The Foundations of Modern Europe

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

From Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, pp 5-6.

We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others -- eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founder nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)

In other words, we cannot understand modern Europe without studying the history of ethnic Ashkenazim.

For this reason the Martillo Hypothesis (Les origines des juifs actuels , The Origins of Modern Jewry) ranks in importance with the complementary Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) and with the equally complementary proposals of Crone, Cooke, Nevo, and Koren about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren, Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia).

The disproportionate contribution of ethnic Ashkenazim to the development of Europe resulted from higher levels of education and disposable income.

Unfortunately, the same combination made it possible for ethnic Ashkenazim to do a lot of damage when they became disaffected as happened in Czarist Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Pointing out the harm that ethnic Ashkenazim have done and continue to do* is no more racist or illegitimate than pointing out that Germans wracked tremendous havoc in the first half of the twentieth century.

In fact, the importance of the Jewish political economic elite in the USA has created a categorical imperative to bring up this issue (the dark side of Yiddish culture) however much American Jews whine that the discussion is anti-Semitic.

I recommend Kriwaczek's book up to Chapter 13, which seems too dependent on Martin Gilbert, who either has not gone beyond old political propaganda or who simply lies.

 

Kriwaczek apparently does not have enough Russian to analyze Soviet Yiddish culture or to discuss the role of Soviet Ashkenazim as the quintessential Soviet class. He probably should have addressed American Jewish, Soviet Jewish, and Israeli Jewish cultures as three daughter currents of Yiddish civilization.

 

[See P. Wexler, On the Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/new-vision.pdf, and http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/emergence.pdf.]

 

Notes

 

* Here is the short list.

• Jews were the leading and most important element of the Russian Communist movement. Without Communist Ashkenazim there would have been no Soviet Union.
• Jewish communists tried to take over the Bavarian state after WW1.
• Subversive and genocidal Zionists murdered Arab Palestine and made major contributions to wrecking the British Empire.
• American Jewish Communists served the Soviet Union while Jabotinskian Zionist Neocons have manipulated the USA into genocidal anti-Arab anti-Muslim policies that will harm the USA for decades.
  

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