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Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. By Dovid Katz. (New York: Basic Books, 2004. Pp. xvi + 430, acknowledgments, notes on transcription, introduction, 58 photographs and illustrations, index.)
Dovid Katz's Words on Fire thoroughly lays out the history (and prehistory) of the Yiddish language. Starting with earliest antecedents of Yiddish in pre-biblical Aramaic and Canaanite, the book examines its birth in medieval Germany, its development throughout the European continent, the literary flowering of the language during its nineteenth-century "secular outburst," and its most recent innovations in grammar and Internet content. As much a history of the Ashkenazi Diaspora as (in his phrase) a "linguography" (p. 9), Words on Fire is a richly informed, well written, and critically engaged work.
In his historiography, Katz pays a good deal of attention to the cultural baggage that the language eventually accumulated, in particular the rise of various gendered understandings of Yiddish's place in the world of Jewish Europe. In one form or another, Yiddish speakers have for centuries figured their native language as feminine or feminized. Rabbinical Judaism discouraged women from studying sacred texts, leaving educated women only Yiddish writings to enjoy. As Ashkenazi culture established itself, the social...