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Abstract
This manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish Studies and for the broader study of modern Jewish culture. The manifesto takes as a paradigm an early name for the Yiddish language, taytsh, which initially means "German," and leverages the ways in which this name signifies the proximity of Jewish a,nd non-Jewish languages and their intimate entanglements. The call to taytsh is mea.nt to provide an alternative vocabulary for analyzing Jewish modernity that would uncover its embeddedness within global empires while avoiding the siloing of Jewish identity (as stable, unified, and translatable) within multicultural and pluralist systems. Instead, a taytsh paradigm sees Jewish cultural production as constituted by ceaseless translation, in which vernacular inscrutability mingles with the possibility and failure of universal communication. To perform a taytsh reading of a text is to examine the incomplete relations of Jewish modernity-its translational origins and its migratory ends.
Key words: Yiddish, translation, Jewish languages, vernacularization
This manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish Studies and for the broader study of modern Jewish culture. There is a need for a shift in vocabulary, for new ways of describing modern Jewish language practices. I call for reading strategies that do not assume a coherent Jewish subject, united-despite its plurality-throughout history and across geographies, and that instead acknowledge the translational instability that conditions Jewish modernity. Scholarship needs a translational paradigm to account for the multidirectionality of modern Jewish culture.
Current scholarship repeatedly hesitates to take up this paradigm. Jewish literary studies is still dominated by the concept, introduced by the Yiddishist Max Weinreich, of "Jewish languages."1 This seemingly innocent term contains within it a prescription that would seek to unify diverse moments of cultural contact under a single conceptual heading. This pluralist strategy takes up the normative politics of the hyphen, as when languages are given names like JudeoSpanish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Italian, and so on. The "Judeo" comes to make the Jewishness of the language-variously and often vaguely defined-sovereign and categorizable. That is, the Jewishness of these languages, as identified by scholarship, renders them wholly other in relation to the non-Jewish languages to which they have incidentally been attached. The "Judeo" appears to be constant, even in its inevitable diversity, while the hyphen acts as bridge between two...