A Few Points About Two Points

I focus here on Points 7 and 9 of “A Taytsh Manifesto” (ix). What is the relation between “Taytsh is the language of ghosts, a language of the living dead” and “Translation does not imply synthesis; Taytsh is not a fusion language?” To rephrase the question (reader, take a deep breath): What is the relation between (a) the notion that a given language—here, Taytsh ^{1 1} And is Taytsh, in Zaritt’s view, the name of a language or merely the name for a nearly-infinite set of moments of engagement?
or possibly also (still) Yiddish—represents not, or not only, a legacy from past generations inherited by those currently embodied and maintained for the sake of those to be embodied in the future, but a transtemporal field in which the past remains undetermined and the future always impinges, and (b) the refusal to view a particular idiom as the legitimate property of a given (albeit diasporic and hence asovereign) nation, yea, even as the record or product of that nation’s accumulated history of borrowings and negotiations with other human collectives of the same category, whether sovereign or no? Again and in simpler words, Zaritt calls for scholarship that starts from the premise not of the fundamental integrity of the language and culture, but rather from the assumption that what we have grown used to designating by the term “Yiddish” more accurately (though one might suggest in Zaritt’s spirit, never “properly”) names a set of contingent interactions, and that the constitution of that set, even if always incomplete, is the task of scholarship to come.

The book thus represents a first, if necessarily tendentious (as is to be expected of a manifesto!) attempt to subject the field of Yiddish studies to a similar kind of deconstruction that has been deployed in recent decades to a legion of other cultural forces and phenomena (and not only in high theory). With respect especially to Zaritt’s Point 9, questioning the assumption that Yiddish is synthetic and the product of “fusion,” it is consistent with the critique in religious studies of the language of “syncretism,” a critique that assumes (as does the notion of “fusion language”) the prior existence of stable and discrete semiotic or ritual sets which are then recombined into a new formation, itself relatively stable. The critique relies broadly on the insights that the supposed source sets are themselves neither monolithic nor internally fully coherent, and on the way “syncretism” obscures the creative and often evanescent modes of meaning-making, generally by subordinate peoples in dangerous and constrained situations. With respect to Zaritt’s Point 7, about the presence of the dead, it brings to bear the critique of the notion that the dead are inert, “past and gone” as we colloquially say, a critique (in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, cited by Zaritt) that seeks to transcend the modern fear of our own ghosts or even (in Benjamin’s canonical “Theses”) insists on our own responsibility for the fate of the dead.

The paradigm (let us call it “Weinreichian,” having in mind here both Max and his son Uriel) that Zaritt seeks to undermine is one grounded in Herderian romantic nationalism, albeit absent any trace of the assumption that the congruency of blood and soil is the only really healthy human condition. For the record, Uriel’s insistence in his landmark edited collection Languages in Contact that what was still conceived there as the dynamic interplay of semiotic systems was itself both healthy and “natural,” rather than a sign of cultural crisis or degradation, was itself a profound intervention in a cultural anthropology or anthropological linguistics that assumed autonomous, non-contingent and as it were hermetic tribal cultures as the normal human condition. Yet it remains the case that scholarly Yiddish studies in the twentieth century were grounded in non-Zionist and often non-statist visions of a national Yiddish-speaking collective. Given that background, Zaritt is working simultaneously in agonistic response to this “Yiddish nationalism” and to state-territorialist Zionism. His aesthetic (which ultimately has a strong ethical and almost utopian component) of a nonstable discourse that does not clearly delineate any human collective thus illuminates the way even such non-statist nationalisms are molded by European nationalism and imperialism. Here we see a critical perception clearly reminiscent, to me at least, of something like Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry.”

The thrust to dislodge “even” the pathos of a subaltern and diasporic nationalism is bracing and a necessary check to narcissism. Zaritt’s argument for the margins of Jewishness (and for Jews writing at the margin of collective ideology) reminds me of my anthropological Doktorvater Stanley Diamond’s limitation of the value of Jewishness to the marginal stance it affords, and my own response that without some collective framework, the marginal space would certainly implode altogether. To be sure, Zaritt is careful to signal at various points that he does not mean to dismiss the claims for collective idioms, but the productive tension between those claims and a reorientation of critical attention toward decentering itself calls for further articulation, whether by Zaritt himself or any of us. We are perhaps not so good at this task, but “even the dead will not be safe” if we shrink from it.