ABSTRACT
As both language and literature, Yiddish has been a presence in Europe for at least a thousand years. In British bookshops today, one seeks in vain for the classics of Yiddish literature. Only of recent decades, notably in the United States, has the richness of Yiddish been demonstrated conclusively and without apology. Like every vernacular, Yiddish was originally feared by the rabbinical authorities whose power lay in their command of Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Torah and the Talmud. In the modern period, language became the criterion by which Jews defined themselves. Moving to Germany, Florian Krobb takes us back to the beginning of the nineteenth century: the earliest stages of emancipation. Martin Buber, whose Prague lectures on the Jewish essence Kafka attended, was steeped in Eastern Jewish culture. The essays collected here are the fruits of two successive conferences held under the auspices of the European Humanities Research Centre at the University of Oxford.
