Yiddishist movement

Yiddishism (Yiddish: ײִדישיזם) is a cultural and linguistic movement which began among Jews in Eastern Europe during the latter part of the 19th century. Some of the leading founders of this movement were Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1836–1917), I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), and Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916). In 1861, Yehoshua Mordechai Lifshitz (1828–1878), who is considered the father of Yiddishism and Yiddish lexicography, circulated an essay entitled “The Four Classes” (Yiddish: די פיר קלאַסן) in which he referred to Yiddish as a completely separate language from both German and Hebrew and, in the European context of his audience, the "mother tongue" of the Jewish people. In this essay, which was eventually published in 1863 in an early issue of the influential Yiddish periodical Kol Mevasser, he contended that the refinement and development of Yiddish were indispensable for the humanization and education of Jews. In a subsequent essay published in the same periodical, he also proposed Yiddish as a bridge linking Jewish and European cultures. Scholar Mordkhe Schaechter characterizes Lifshitz as "[t]he first conscious, goal-oriented language reformer" in the field of Yiddish, and highlights his pivotal role in countering the negative attitudes toward the language propagated within the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment movement: Although an adherent of the Enlightenment, [Lifshitz] broke with its sterile anti-Yiddish philosophy, to become an early ideologue of Yiddishism and of Yiddish-language planning. He courageously stood up for the denigrated folk tongue, calling for its elevation and cultivation. He did this in the form of articles in the weekly Kol-mevaser (in the 1860s) and in his excellent Russian-Yiddish and Yiddish-Russian dictionaries [...]. From 30 August to 3 September 1908, "The Conference for the Yiddish Language" () also known as "The Czernowitz Conference" () took place in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz, Bukovina (today in southwestern Ukraine). The conference proclaimed Yiddish a modern language with a developing high culture.

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Related concepts (5)

Yiddish theatre

Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Central European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic revues; melodrama; naturalist drama; expressionist and modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of Eastern and East Central Europe, but also in Berlin, London, Paris, Buenos Aires and New York City.

Jewish culture

Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, and family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance.

Jews

Jews (יְהוּדִים, Yehudim, jehuˈdim) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group, nation or ethnos native to the Levant, originating from the ancient Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, although its observance varies from strict to none. Jews take their origins from a Southern Levantine national and religious group that arose towards the end of the second millennium BCE.