Maimonides — Mishneh Torah, early Hebrew printing, c 1496
2010-2011
Jewish Languages
Practices of reading and writing in several languages, inhabiting interlinguistic communities, and translating into and out of various idioms and vernaculars have characterized Jews across centuries, infusing Jewish cultures with multilingualism in every historical period. Jewish Languages interrogates this history and reputation in order to reconsider myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in Jewish history, culture, and politics. This theme invites interdisciplinary approaches that unsettle longstanding ideas of “Jewish” languages by examining cultural and material conditions of belonging and displacement under which Jews have lived and created with particular regard for theories of language structure and oral performance and relationships among vernacular, spoken and elite literary tongues.
Questions regarding language, as affect and effect, are as old as Israelite and Jewish civilization itself. Jewish Languages asks what are the social and historical forces that underlie the politics of language choice among Jews? What, in fact, does it mean to call the use of a language a “choice?” The languages of the Ancient Near East, of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, and of translations of the Bible first announced by the Septuagint open new discussions between translation studies and critical Jewish texts. How do perspectives on Talmudic discourse shift when it is read as emerging from multilingual milieus whose hermeneutics are also translational practices? In this framework, Jewish polyglotism encompasses not only distinct languages used for divergent purposes and locations, but also the emergence of hybrid idioms in oral and written cultures devised for diverse speech situations. Medieval Jewish language practices, especially the art of writing under persecution, address performative and political dimensions of mystical and heterodox speech. Mixed languages of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in modern periods—not only Yiddish and Ladino, but also Judeo–Arabic, Judeo–Italian, Judeo–Persian and many others—draw upon dissonance between “the Holy Tongue” and “la'az,” the many languages of the “strange peoples” among whom Jews have dwelt, to spark liturgical, cultural, and historical conflicts and innovations.
Since language clashes are frequently interpreted as symbolic struggles over power, belief, and social change, scholars in fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, literary and film criticism, biblical archeology, anthropology, performance studies, and history have considered how changing speech forms index social and ideological conflicts. Renderings of Jewish experience have drawn upon verbal strangeness and recombinant vernaculars to articulate speech situations as various and contradictory as alienation and assimilation, patriarchy and feminist critique, popular consumerism and revolutionary utopias. Moreover, recently language studies have expanded to include work on performance, globalization, new media and digital cultures, migration, and national language politics.
The theme of Jewish Languages will bring scholars from diverse disciplines to consider overlapping questions and controversies: What, in the 21st century, is a Jewish language? What isn't? Do such distinctions signify substantive boundaries? What forms of complex affinities and dissonances exist among mixed Jewish languages of diverse times and locations? What are the implications of linguistic conservation, revival, and extinction for global Jewry? What are the politics and aesthetics of translation and typography in Jewish cultures? What is the sociology of knowledge of bilingual books and bridge languages?
Under the rubric of Jewish language practices, the Frankel Institute invites scholars and artists to consider how the questions and implications of Jewish tongues motivate collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to narrative and literary form, biblical and Talmudic studies, gender and sexuality studies, historical and political studies, performance and orality, and visual culture.
Frankel Institute
University of Michigan
202 S. Thayer Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
Fax: 734-936-2186
