Yankl Stillman
Our Secular Jewish Heritage
The Yiddish Thesaurus and Nahum Stutchkoff
Y
iddish, as is well known,
has a thousand-year history as the spoken language of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. Of the seventeen million Jews in the world before the Holocaust, over fifteen million were Ashkenazim, originating from a territory that ranged from the Rhine in the west to the Dnieper and beyond in the east — an area larger than France and Germany combined. Max Weinreich estimated (in “Prehistory and Early History of Yiddish,” quoted by Emanuel Goldsmith in Architects of Yiddishism, 1976) that there were some eleven million Yiddish speakers living in 1939. Yiddish, writes Goldstein, “is unique among Diaspora tongues in having been spoken by a larger number of Jews and for a longer period than any of the others.” Furthermore, because of the large number of Hebrew words it incorporated, Yiddish contributed in no small measure to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. The first decade of the 20th century brought unrest to the multinational states of Austria-Hungary and Russia, particularly after the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Minority populations “were asserting themselves and stressing the values of their own national languages and cultures,” writes Goldsmith. The achievements of Yiddish “are similar to those of Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Flemish . . . and a number of (other) little-known . . . languages [that] developed vigorous and diversified poetry and prose in the 19th and 20th centuries largely as a result of modern nationalism.” In 1907, Nathan Birnbaum of Czernovitz (Tshernovits) visited Chaim Zhitlovsky in New York. Zhitlovsky, who had great influence among Russian and American Jews, was enthusiastic about Birnbaum’s idea of calling for a conference on Yiddish. In the home of writer David Pinski, Zhitlovsky drafted an invitation to the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz on August 30th, 1908 — just 100 years ago. Czernowitz, in Bukovina (Romania
60
today), was chosen as the locale because it lay close to the Yiddish-speaking centers in Romania and Russia (where the conference could not be held because of government constraints). Yiddish writers and other important Jewish public figures attended. The city itself, “where diverse nationalities and diverse languages live together,” as I.L. Peretz phrased it, was polyglot and altogether appropriate as a venue for such a conference, particularly because of its large plurality of Jews. It was even referred to as the Yerushalayim d’Bukovina. (Jerusalem of Bukovina). In the third session of the Czernowitz Conference, I.L. Peretz submitted a set of a dozen missions (listed by Goldsmith in the aforementioned reference) for the organization that was meant to be launched there. One of these was for the organization to serve as an “authority in questions of Yiddish orthography, grammar and other language questions.” Another was “the translation into Yiddish of all the cultural and artistic treasures of the Jewish past and especially of the Bible.” These two missions required the preparation of dictionaries that could help translation between Yiddish and the languages of countries where Jews had lived and been creative. For example, the first modern Yiddish-German, German-Yiddish dictionary had been compiled in 1867 by Yeshue Mordkhe Lifshitz, the first modern Yiddish lexicographer. In 1869, Lifshitz also compiled the first Russian-Yiddish dictionary, and in 1876 the first YiddishRussian one. Especially after the founding of YIVO in 1926, Lifshitz was followed by a galaxy of Yiddish lexicographers, linguists and philologists, including Mordkhe Schaechter, who died only recently. In 1950, YIVO (the acronym for the Yiddish words for “Jewish Scientific Institute”) published der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh (“The Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language”). This tome consists of 933 + LVI pages and contains over 150,000 words, phrases, expressions, proverbs, etc. — an astounding number, even when compared to the estimated 500,000-plus words of English, the “richest” world lanNahum Stutchkoff guage. The Thesaurus was compiled by Nahum Stutchkoff (1893-1965) over a fifteen-year period of intense work, and was edited by Jewish Currents