Re: Ruth Wisse and German Philosophy

Expanding on Jody’s thought , there are four issues that are raised by Prof. Wisse’s comments:

Prof. Wisse surely has a case that Yiddish deserves academic study, but whether the most important expressions of Jewish writers appeared in Yiddish rather than German, or for that matter Hebrew, is far from clear. The most important Jewish man of letters of the 19th century doubtless is Heinrich Heine, whose deathbed return to Judaism produced remarkable poems on Jewish themes (“Princess Sabbath,” “Yehuda Halevi”) as well as remarkable theological poems, for example, the “Lazarus” series. It would take bit of retroactive affirmative action to put Sholom Aleichem in the same class as Heine.

Second, the emergence of literary Yiddish piggy-backed on the German literary golden age starting in the 1790s. Literary Yiddish did not exist before Eastern European Jews learned German and read the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and so forth. While there are many fine writers in Yiddish, the literate Yiddish style is highly dependent on literary German. A serious scholar of literary Yiddish must know German for the same reason that a serious scholar of fifteenth century literary Spanish must know Italian.

Third, as a practical matter, it is not the case that Yiddish is being sacrificed in favor of literary German. It is rare to find a German under the age of thirty who knows three lines of Goethe, and even rarer to find an American of any age who has heard of three works by Goethe. The same sort of cultural narrowness is harmful to both.

Finally, and to me most important, the encounter of observant Judaism and Western high culture—what the nineteenth-century German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch called “Torah in the way of the land”—largely occurred in Germany. Through Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the acknowledged leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, that cultural link continued. Soloveitchik did a PhD in philosophy at the University of Berlin and frequently cited Kant and other German philosophers (including the German-educated Kierkegaard). Michael Wyschogrod is perhaps the last living link to the high culture of German Orthodoxy. Soloveitchik was the great Yiddish sermonizer of his time, I am told; evidently he saw no contradiction between German philosophy and Yiddish homilectics. By the same token, a modern reader who is ignorant of the German philosophical sources will miss an important dimension of modern Orthodox thought.