Introduction to the Yiddish Historians and Their Work

The Yiddish HistoriansWhen I began to read Jewish history in Yiddish, I found that I had entered a world that was eygnartik-to use a Yiddish word that means, in this case, unique in itself.I discovered a community of scholars with shared goals and common interests, who carried on a lively conversation across the continents, and an equally lively critique of each other's works.At that time-around the year 2000-this community was almost within reach; most of these historians were still within the living memory of their students and other active scholars.That is, alas, no longer true.With the eventual decline of secular Yiddish-language scholarship and its audience, little memory of the thousands of historical works written in Yiddish remains to be transmitted outside that cultural world.Most of their works are still untranslated and known only to specialists.Yet, we might ask, why read Jewish history in Yiddish?Or, more to the point, why, in the early twentieth century, did certain Jewish scholars in Eastern Europe turn to writing in a language that was barely respectable-for journals so newly established they had no scholarly reputation, to advance an enterprise that could offer no professional advancement?The answer lay in the excitement of a new venture, close to the heart.Never before in Jewish history had professional Jewish historians turned to writing the history of their own people-in their own daily Jewish language-for a readership consisting of the people themselves.Their goal was to construct the creation narrative for a borderless, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation in Eastern Europe and its worldwide dispersion.