The Secret of Yiddish: On Reading Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Manifesto

In A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Saul Noam Zaritt qualifies Yiddish, or taytsh, as fluid, entangled, translational, shifting, migratory, porous, undecidable, hybrid, unstable, multidirectional, disjunctive, diasporic, untranslatable, boundary-crossing, and so on. To be sure, this list of adjectives would also apply to English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, etc. What makes these qualifications particularly compelling, or even necessary, with regard to Yiddish/taytsh demands further interrogation. ^{1 1} Several years ago, I encountered a similar question while examining the theoretical foundation of the concept World Hebrew: “Just as the Jewish people is a people of the world (and of eternity), so too Hebrew is an eternal world tongue. Insofar as its “worldness” (‘olamiut) is not new, the question arises as to why the need emerged in the modern era to emphasize this inherent trait. The affirmation of world Hebrew became necessary precisely because this trait was negated and denied, initially in the temporal sense, and later also in the spatial sense” (Tal Hever-Chybowski, “Mikan Ve’eylakh (From this Point Onward): Foreword,” trans. Rachel Seelig, In geveb [April 2018]).
However, rather than providing a phenomenological theory of taytsh, Zaritt’s program concentrates on replacing what he justifiably identifies as a normalizing paradigm of Yiddish with a problematized paradigm of taytsh. It should also be noted that despite its programmatic proclamations, Zaritt’s manifesto often reads as an anti-manifesto, subverting the binarism, dogmatism, and violence characteristic of the genre.

Zaritt’s theoretically and politically enticing argument, however, rests upon an unsettling assumption that appears on the very first page and on the back cover of the book:

I call attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German,” parallel to the modern Deutsch. By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. ^{2 2} Saul Noam Zaritt, A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 1. Emphasis added (THC).

To argue that by calling it “taytsh,” Jews in early Ashkenaz indicated their language “was not entirely their own” succumbs to the very traps the book manifestly aims to dismantle. ^{3 3} Zaritt makes this statement to establish the groundwork for a nuanced problematization of the question of taytsh and ownership, which he later develops, drawing on, among other sources, a similarly unsettling citation from Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, published in 1921 (Ibid., 22). This ill-formulated statement reinforces a teleological national linguistics of essentializing normalization more than any other formulation in the book, contrasting with Zaritt’s otherwise careful academic prose. But the statement is particularly pertinent to the yet-to-be-investigated genealogy of taytsh as it uncannily echoes thesis 5 of the Twelve Theses Against the Un-German Spirit circulated in German universities on April 12, 1933:

German

Der Jude kann nur jüdisch denken. Schreibt er deutsch, dann lügt er [...]

English

The Jew can only think Jewishly/Yiddishly. When writing German, he lies [...] ^{4 4} Hauptamt für Presse und Propaganda der Deutschen Studentenschaft, 12 Thesen wider den undeutschen Geist (Berlin: April 12, 1933). My translation (THC).

I have no doubt that Zaritt did not intend to suggest that at any point in time German/taytsh belonged to Jews any less than it did to its non-Jewish speakers. However, it would have been welcome had he clarified this point explicitly. By calling attention to the way in which his definition of taytsh echoes a manifesto that led to the May 1933 book burnings in Germany, I do not wish to shock, scold, or moralize, but rather to fully accept Zaritt’s invitation to enter the haunted castle that is taytsh and to suggest another approach to dealing with its ghosts.

I suggest reading Zaritt’s manifesto alongside another text, a Yiddish text, written by one of the manifesto’s main protagonists: the great enfant terrible of modern Yiddish literature, Aaron Zeitlin. His poem “Der sod fun yidish” (“The Secret of Yiddish”), ^{5 5} I am grateful to Nathan Wolski of Monash University in Melbourne for introducing me to this poem in May 2018. Wolski’s English translation is reproduced here in full with his permission: Nathan Wolski, Kabbalistic Yiddish: Aaron Zeitlin’s Mystical-Messianic Poetics. Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 66 (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2020), 4–5. The Yiddish text is drawn, with minor spelling adaptations, from Aaron Zeitlin, Ale lider un poemes: lider fun khurbn un lider fun gloybn, Vol. 1 (New York & Tel Aviv: Bergen Belsen Memorial Press, 1967), 379–380.
likely written between 1957 and 1967, ^{6 6} Wolski, Kabbalistic Yiddish, 2n6. provides an even more provocative theory of taytsh, which is sure to scandalize the band of Yiddish normalizers that Zaritt’s manifesto strives to destabilize: