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Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation
Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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577 people want to read
About the author
Paul Kriwaczek
7 books65 followersPaul Kriwaczek was a British historian and television producer. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for twenty-five years. A former head of Central Asian Affairs at the BBC World Service, he was fluent in eight languages, including Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi and Nepalese.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
January 12, 2022
Disappointing. Engagingly written, but draws wild conclusions based on limited evidence, often apparently choosing to follow threads that have limited support from actual scholars.
For instance, Kriwaczek cites Arthuer Koestler as a definitive authority on the question of the Jews of Khazaria, when Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe has been more or less debunked (based, as it is, on extremely thin and limited evidence).
Kriwaczek also seems (for lack of a better word) obsessed with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are the product of vast numbers of European converts to Judaism, when this is not supported by science or genetics. He goes on at length about veritable legions of Roman, Greek, and other European converts, and to his credit it is true that during the heyday of Rome, there were a great number of "Sabbath-keepers". But Kriwaczek himself admits that the Greco-Roman converts and their descendents mostly were reabsorbed into the ethnoreligious majority when Rome Christianized fully, and did not remain Jewish.
Kriwaczek likewise claims that "European Jews are almost without exception the progeny or proselytes", but cites no sources that validate this claim – a declaration that is at odds with the consensus of population geneticists who have conducted studies of ethnic Jews (particularly of Ashkenazim). He asserts that "there is no gene for Jewishness", and claims that "after several generations, ethnic Hebrews, descendents of Middle Eastern, Roman and Greek converts, German, Slav and Turkic proselytes would have been so intermingled that even modern DNA analysis would be quite unable to separate the different strands in their genetic inheritance."
This is not in fact the case, and dozens of genetic studies have proven it. (This is such basic knowledge that I can confidently direct the reader to Wikipedia for further reading.) To bolster this claim, Kriwaczek cites something truly incredible. Not a geneticist, nor an historian – Kriwaczek cites Adolf Hitler's Politisches testament: die Bormann-Diktate, stating that "even Hitler, in spite of his psychotically racist anti-Semitism [sic], wrote that ... 'we speak of the Jewish race only as a linguistic convenience ... from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race".
It was at this point that I had to stop reading. Not only is the Kriwaczek obsessed with the (false) notion that European Jewry is the product mostly of non-ethnic Jews, he is either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the many genetic studies that have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews show far greater genetic affinity with other Jewish populations than with European non-Jews. This is common knowledge and has been affirmed by many subsequent studies at this point (showing that nearly all Jewish ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to their surrounding non-Jewish populations). It's bizarre and alarming that Kriwaczek is so determined to obfuscate this, particularly since he doesn't cite anything that actually negates it. It's just his repeated assertions of something that has been credibly refuted, again and again and again, as though that constitutes scholarship.
I understand that for many Jews of his generation, particularly those who have personally brushed against the Shoah, acknowledging anything about Jewishness that is tied to genetic inheritance triggers the echoes of Nazi "race science". I am sympathetic to this, but that sympathy goes only so far, and I cannot extend much sympathy to someone who has written a book, and supposedly done research to support his claims.
I can't even say this is poor scholarship or poorly researched; it is essentially a polemic being presented as popular academic-adjacent writing supported by research, which – to be clear – it is not. I am willing to countenance someone making claims I disagree with, provided they can cite material that supports their arguments. But Kriwaczek appears to have hardly tried.
Critics tend to agree with me:
Review in Jewish Book Council: "a fascinating and energetic, but significantly flawed, effort . . . The book is peculiarly documented . . . and there are numerous misspellings and mistranslations . . . Sadly, one cannot recommend this book."
Review in Publisher's Weekly: "Charming but frustratingly rambling . . . the book [is] more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language."
Review in Literary Review : "Indeed, it is hard to see the point of [this] book. [Kriwaczek] opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe."
For instance, Kriwaczek cites Arthuer Koestler as a definitive authority on the question of the Jews of Khazaria, when Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe has been more or less debunked (based, as it is, on extremely thin and limited evidence).
Kriwaczek also seems (for lack of a better word) obsessed with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are the product of vast numbers of European converts to Judaism, when this is not supported by science or genetics. He goes on at length about veritable legions of Roman, Greek, and other European converts, and to his credit it is true that during the heyday of Rome, there were a great number of "Sabbath-keepers". But Kriwaczek himself admits that the Greco-Roman converts and their descendents mostly were reabsorbed into the ethnoreligious majority when Rome Christianized fully, and did not remain Jewish.
Kriwaczek likewise claims that "European Jews are almost without exception the progeny or proselytes", but cites no sources that validate this claim – a declaration that is at odds with the consensus of population geneticists who have conducted studies of ethnic Jews (particularly of Ashkenazim). He asserts that "there is no gene for Jewishness", and claims that "after several generations, ethnic Hebrews, descendents of Middle Eastern, Roman and Greek converts, German, Slav and Turkic proselytes would have been so intermingled that even modern DNA analysis would be quite unable to separate the different strands in their genetic inheritance."
This is not in fact the case, and dozens of genetic studies have proven it. (This is such basic knowledge that I can confidently direct the reader to Wikipedia for further reading.) To bolster this claim, Kriwaczek cites something truly incredible. Not a geneticist, nor an historian – Kriwaczek cites Adolf Hitler's Politisches testament: die Bormann-Diktate, stating that "even Hitler, in spite of his psychotically racist anti-Semitism [sic], wrote that ... 'we speak of the Jewish race only as a linguistic convenience ... from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race".
It was at this point that I had to stop reading. Not only is the Kriwaczek obsessed with the (false) notion that European Jewry is the product mostly of non-ethnic Jews, he is either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the many genetic studies that have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews show far greater genetic affinity with other Jewish populations than with European non-Jews. This is common knowledge and has been affirmed by many subsequent studies at this point (showing that nearly all Jewish ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to their surrounding non-Jewish populations). It's bizarre and alarming that Kriwaczek is so determined to obfuscate this, particularly since he doesn't cite anything that actually negates it. It's just his repeated assertions of something that has been credibly refuted, again and again and again, as though that constitutes scholarship.
I understand that for many Jews of his generation, particularly those who have personally brushed against the Shoah, acknowledging anything about Jewishness that is tied to genetic inheritance triggers the echoes of Nazi "race science". I am sympathetic to this, but that sympathy goes only so far, and I cannot extend much sympathy to someone who has written a book, and supposedly done research to support his claims.
I can't even say this is poor scholarship or poorly researched; it is essentially a polemic being presented as popular academic-adjacent writing supported by research, which – to be clear – it is not. I am willing to countenance someone making claims I disagree with, provided they can cite material that supports their arguments. But Kriwaczek appears to have hardly tried.
Critics tend to agree with me:
Review in Jewish Book Council: "a fascinating and energetic, but significantly flawed, effort . . . The book is peculiarly documented . . . and there are numerous misspellings and mistranslations . . . Sadly, one cannot recommend this book."
Review in Publisher's Weekly: "Charming but frustratingly rambling . . . the book [is] more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language."
Review in Literary Review : "Indeed, it is hard to see the point of [this] book. [Kriwaczek] opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe."
April 11, 2015
"Sheynere ligt man in drerd." They bury better-looking. Isn't that a very London thing to say? As a German- and English-speaker, I can read it, with a little thought. As a Londoner (well, estuary at least) I can imagine hearing someone say it on the streets of my home city. Or of New York. Or of Berlin. If you come from any of these places, you can only with difficulty remain unaware that Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Jews in particular, are one of the foundational communities that lend the city is characteristic, black humour. So why is it that only New York still has much of a Yiddish-speaking community? Berlin requires no special explanation, but why not "tolerant" London? Well, Kriwaczek offers an explanation. "Tolerant" Britain, after the expulsion of 1290, had again developed a strong and well-integrated English-speaking community of native Jews. The flow of Yiddish-speakers from the mid-19th Century onwards was held to threaten their integration and draw potentially hostile attention. British Jews made Eastern-European Jews unwelcome. So they either integrated and assimilated and lost their unique language, or they joined the flow heading West to the US, devoid of a surviving "native" culture to be forced to assimilate with.
So Kriwaczek's rambling and charming tale is not entirely free of prejudice and discrimination, but it is not always where you expect it. Primarily, this is a tale of a European foundational nation, its roots in the soil for centuries before the - often very late - Christianisation of the Slavic world started to grub them up. To those who would say that Europe must be a Christian club and the religion a part of its constitution I would say: read Kriwaczek. The Jews were there first, not merely in the Roman world but suffusing the East to Lithuania, first fully Christian in the early modern age. In fact, this book tells of a surprising tolerance even from Christianity in the East, as Jews, Muslims and Pagans all resisted assimilation for many centuries. Some of the Eastern cities were almost majority Jewish communities, and until the tragedy of the Shoah derived much of their economic and cultural vibrancy from the contribution of the Jews. For once, not merely a tale of tears.
The Jews in the East underwent great disruptions, not least the Reformation and the wars which followed it, but prior to the Shoah there seems to have been no climacteric event such as the expulsions from ha Sefarad or England. (An exception appears to be Russia, where brutal measures were enacted in early modern times to try to erase non-Russian identities.) Their nation in the East seems to have functioned almost as a discontiguous nation state, governing itself independent of the kingdoms, fiefdoms and dependencies whose physical territory it overlaid. In any case, the expulsions rarely worked, as Christians rapidly discovered that without non-Christians to practice "usury" the economy collapsed, and in any case the Jews were never as rapacious as the religiously-dubious Christian money-lenders that took their place. The Jews had been forced into a niche in the West, but it was a niche without which society could not prosper. The Eastern Yiddish-speakers, on the other hand, were not forced into a small niche in the first place and played a role in the prosperity of the whole of society, from the trades and agriculture up to court advisory and diplomatic positions, mirroring the more typical situation in the Muslim world. To this day, Orthodox Jews of various kinds signal their varied and subtle allegiances to their Jewish neighbours with clothing styles taken from the 16th and 17th-Century Polish court.
Ultimately, Kriwaczek's most jaw-dropping contribution to my attempts at learning is a sense of the debt that we non-Jews in the modern age owe to individuals stemming from this extraordinarily vibrant nation. Mendelssohn, Einstein, Marx, Freud - what would 20th Century history and culture have been without any one of these men, let alone all? Kriwaczek writes with love and learning of a civilisation without which nothing would have been the same, and he does so without becoming maudlin at its murder. Kriwaczek is no mere Oyster, dropping ostentatious yiddishisms to advertise his ethnicity, but a sympathetic and readable friend of the lost nation. There is space to mourn, but there must also be space to celebrate. This is what Kriwaczek gives us.
So Kriwaczek's rambling and charming tale is not entirely free of prejudice and discrimination, but it is not always where you expect it. Primarily, this is a tale of a European foundational nation, its roots in the soil for centuries before the - often very late - Christianisation of the Slavic world started to grub them up. To those who would say that Europe must be a Christian club and the religion a part of its constitution I would say: read Kriwaczek. The Jews were there first, not merely in the Roman world but suffusing the East to Lithuania, first fully Christian in the early modern age. In fact, this book tells of a surprising tolerance even from Christianity in the East, as Jews, Muslims and Pagans all resisted assimilation for many centuries. Some of the Eastern cities were almost majority Jewish communities, and until the tragedy of the Shoah derived much of their economic and cultural vibrancy from the contribution of the Jews. For once, not merely a tale of tears.
The Jews in the East underwent great disruptions, not least the Reformation and the wars which followed it, but prior to the Shoah there seems to have been no climacteric event such as the expulsions from ha Sefarad or England. (An exception appears to be Russia, where brutal measures were enacted in early modern times to try to erase non-Russian identities.) Their nation in the East seems to have functioned almost as a discontiguous nation state, governing itself independent of the kingdoms, fiefdoms and dependencies whose physical territory it overlaid. In any case, the expulsions rarely worked, as Christians rapidly discovered that without non-Christians to practice "usury" the economy collapsed, and in any case the Jews were never as rapacious as the religiously-dubious Christian money-lenders that took their place. The Jews had been forced into a niche in the West, but it was a niche without which society could not prosper. The Eastern Yiddish-speakers, on the other hand, were not forced into a small niche in the first place and played a role in the prosperity of the whole of society, from the trades and agriculture up to court advisory and diplomatic positions, mirroring the more typical situation in the Muslim world. To this day, Orthodox Jews of various kinds signal their varied and subtle allegiances to their Jewish neighbours with clothing styles taken from the 16th and 17th-Century Polish court.
Ultimately, Kriwaczek's most jaw-dropping contribution to my attempts at learning is a sense of the debt that we non-Jews in the modern age owe to individuals stemming from this extraordinarily vibrant nation. Mendelssohn, Einstein, Marx, Freud - what would 20th Century history and culture have been without any one of these men, let alone all? Kriwaczek writes with love and learning of a civilisation without which nothing would have been the same, and he does so without becoming maudlin at its murder. Kriwaczek is no mere Oyster, dropping ostentatious yiddishisms to advertise his ethnicity, but a sympathetic and readable friend of the lost nation. There is space to mourn, but there must also be space to celebrate. This is what Kriwaczek gives us.
July 28, 2016
I picked up this book while traveling in Cracow and visiting their Galicia Jewish Museum. As expected there dozens and dozens of books about WW2, but I wanted something that spoke to the thousand years before that tragedy. There is much we don't know about the interplay of cultures in Eastern Europe, about the periods when people got along just fine, and about periods when demonization was the norm. This book filled that void beautifully, coasting across the centuries both with the broad brush outlining the major emigrations and with sufficient detail to gleam the details of daily life. I highly recommend this read for anyone who is interested in the history of Eastern Europe.
September 29, 2024
Very frustrating book, ended up bailing about 20 pages before the end. Lots of broad generalizations based on limited evidence, and a very inconsistent use of citations/footnotes, meaning the reader only sometimes knows where he is quoting from or what his source is at all. He doesn’t really ever define what he calls “Yiddish civilization” which seems like a big oversight, and often declares certain things are true without explaining what information shows that. He also mistranslates a number of things. Two details in particular really stuck with me.
In a footnote to his discussion of Sarah bas Tovim, he declares that the author of tekhines was probably a man but cites no evidence or research to support this assertion. It’s even more astounding because Chava Weissler’s book on tekhines, which is considered to be comprehensive and definitive, was published prior to this, meaning Kriwaczek could have consulted it. Weissler herself has other questions about Sarah bas Tovim’s work, notably that she compiled a lot of her work from other, already published works. But she does explicitly say that there’s no reason to believe bas Tovim wasn’t a woman based on the information we have.
He also, bafflingly, translates the name of satirist Moyshe Nadir as Moses the Rare. I honestly don’t know where this comes from. All the words for rare and its synonyms in Yiddish are not even remotely similar and “na dir” is a Yiddish expression, which means “take this.” The way Nadir specifically uses it, it means “take this and choke on it,” which gets at the sarcastic, provocative nature of his writing. That’s the whole point of the pen name.
Maybe these are small details, but is surprising to read a history book that doesn’t sweat the small details, which are part of how we learn about the past.
In a footnote to his discussion of Sarah bas Tovim, he declares that the author of tekhines was probably a man but cites no evidence or research to support this assertion. It’s even more astounding because Chava Weissler’s book on tekhines, which is considered to be comprehensive and definitive, was published prior to this, meaning Kriwaczek could have consulted it. Weissler herself has other questions about Sarah bas Tovim’s work, notably that she compiled a lot of her work from other, already published works. But she does explicitly say that there’s no reason to believe bas Tovim wasn’t a woman based on the information we have.
He also, bafflingly, translates the name of satirist Moyshe Nadir as Moses the Rare. I honestly don’t know where this comes from. All the words for rare and its synonyms in Yiddish are not even remotely similar and “na dir” is a Yiddish expression, which means “take this.” The way Nadir specifically uses it, it means “take this and choke on it,” which gets at the sarcastic, provocative nature of his writing. That’s the whole point of the pen name.
Maybe these are small details, but is surprising to read a history book that doesn’t sweat the small details, which are part of how we learn about the past.
December 26, 2020
This fascinating and compelling book is well worth your time, even though it doesn't/can't quite fulfil its promise or ambition.
In some ways it's thwarted by the very scope of that ambition. Kriwaczek goes for a very broad historical sweep, and makes some exciting and stimulating claims (especially on the relationship between his notional Yiddish civilisation and Catholicism), but he's not really historian enough to make good on them. He's vague, for example, on what his 'Yiddish civilisation' actually encompasses: he seeks to explain the historical bifurcation of Jewish diaspora life, but also still seems to want to treat the two wings as basically the same, even where he's accounting for their failure to reconcile.
Similarly, his determination to see this putative Yiddish civilisation as positive history, rather than viewing it solely through the lens of the brutality that asssailed it, is really great but doesn't quite come off because of what's not included. Where, for example, is the flourishing of Yiddish culture in the 1920s/30s? Yiddish cinema is mentioned solely in relation to Hollywood, but at the same time there was a thriving industry in Europe based on a brilliant theatre tradition, which also fed into mainstream filmmaking.
Lots of commentators here have noted that he's quite a digressively anecdotal author. Some historians are able to use such anecdota to illustrate a broader argument because they've a deeper wealth of background material already in play. Kriwaczek doesn't quite do that, because his illustrations are less representative examples of broader reading than the specific examples on which he's based his argument. We get the suggestion of the argument, without the support, so the early chapters seem a little too vague to be entirely convincing (even though they're essential for the longer trajectory of his ideas), and the later examples sometimes seem distractions from the argument because they're not adequately sewn into it.
He's less than convincing on questions of economic history. In part this is because he relies on too few (secondary) sources, but also because his understanding of economics in historical context is weak. (He's basically wrong in his understanding of Marxism economically and historically, for example, which is a big problem here, where I think he fundamentally misunderstands the involvement of many Jewish workers and intellectuals in the revolutionary movement as well as that movement's own ideas and history). He seems to be operating with an economic/historical framework that he doesn't quite explain. The lack of explicitness undermines his ability to argue it.
Yet, for all that, there's great material in here that's well worth a read. Some of this is anecdotal (including some nice stuff about his own family experiences), and some of it is in the nature of suggestive ideas that deserve further investigation.
In some ways it's thwarted by the very scope of that ambition. Kriwaczek goes for a very broad historical sweep, and makes some exciting and stimulating claims (especially on the relationship between his notional Yiddish civilisation and Catholicism), but he's not really historian enough to make good on them. He's vague, for example, on what his 'Yiddish civilisation' actually encompasses: he seeks to explain the historical bifurcation of Jewish diaspora life, but also still seems to want to treat the two wings as basically the same, even where he's accounting for their failure to reconcile.
Similarly, his determination to see this putative Yiddish civilisation as positive history, rather than viewing it solely through the lens of the brutality that asssailed it, is really great but doesn't quite come off because of what's not included. Where, for example, is the flourishing of Yiddish culture in the 1920s/30s? Yiddish cinema is mentioned solely in relation to Hollywood, but at the same time there was a thriving industry in Europe based on a brilliant theatre tradition, which also fed into mainstream filmmaking.
Lots of commentators here have noted that he's quite a digressively anecdotal author. Some historians are able to use such anecdota to illustrate a broader argument because they've a deeper wealth of background material already in play. Kriwaczek doesn't quite do that, because his illustrations are less representative examples of broader reading than the specific examples on which he's based his argument. We get the suggestion of the argument, without the support, so the early chapters seem a little too vague to be entirely convincing (even though they're essential for the longer trajectory of his ideas), and the later examples sometimes seem distractions from the argument because they're not adequately sewn into it.
He's less than convincing on questions of economic history. In part this is because he relies on too few (secondary) sources, but also because his understanding of economics in historical context is weak. (He's basically wrong in his understanding of Marxism economically and historically, for example, which is a big problem here, where I think he fundamentally misunderstands the involvement of many Jewish workers and intellectuals in the revolutionary movement as well as that movement's own ideas and history). He seems to be operating with an economic/historical framework that he doesn't quite explain. The lack of explicitness undermines his ability to argue it.
Yet, for all that, there's great material in here that's well worth a read. Some of this is anecdotal (including some nice stuff about his own family experiences), and some of it is in the nature of suggestive ideas that deserve further investigation.
July 23, 2018
The thesis here is that Yiddish-speaking Jews formed a bona fide civilization, one not only of language and religion but also of political and legal authority, since Central and Eastern European rulers granted autonomy and self-government to Jewish communities, ultimately culminating in the Council of the Four Lands. With a critical mass of Jews living in historic Poland-Lithuania, the Yiddish civilization waxed and then waned with the fate of that polity. Though it was wealthy for a time and even appeared poised to go through its own renaissance, it essentially collapsed when Poland-Lithuania disappeared from the map in the late eighteenth century. Thereafter, a fragmented and partly impoverished Yiddish culture survived for a time in Europe and America, achieving a late literary flowering before the Holocaust and assimilation took their toll, but this is distinct from the specific Yiddish civilization that preceded it.
The dynamism of Yiddish civilization came from the incomplete fusion of its rationalist Germanic wing in the west and the more heart-driven Slavic portion in the east. Kriwaczek seems to prefer the west, where Jews took part in the European Enlightenment, even if the historical balance sheet from Mendelssohn's Haskalah is mixed. The east, by contrast, was the realm of irrational spiritualism, false messiahs, and strict conservatism.
Kriwaczek is not a historian, but he has a gift for narrative and should be given some credit for telling an interesting story replete with fascinating details. I doubt he considered his book the last word on the subject.
The dynamism of Yiddish civilization came from the incomplete fusion of its rationalist Germanic wing in the west and the more heart-driven Slavic portion in the east. Kriwaczek seems to prefer the west, where Jews took part in the European Enlightenment, even if the historical balance sheet from Mendelssohn's Haskalah is mixed. The east, by contrast, was the realm of irrational spiritualism, false messiahs, and strict conservatism.
Kriwaczek is not a historian, but he has a gift for narrative and should be given some credit for telling an interesting story replete with fascinating details. I doubt he considered his book the last word on the subject.
October 17, 2014
An engaging discussion of the development of a fundamental and unique civilisation in Europe which as the title of this book aptly hints at is quite forgotten by most. The author does an excellent job of tracking the movements across the continent of the Jewish peoples, starting from the fall of Rome and how these communities eventually met back up in Central Europe. This book also charts in some detail the role that the Jewish people played in medieval Europe and particularly in Eastern Europe. For anyone interested in Jewish history I would happily recommend this work as being an interesting topic that is far less discussed than other more recent aspects of their history yet is undoubtedly equally as important.
February 16, 2010
Every page of this book taught me something interesting and usually
surprising--not just about Jewish history, but about Europe and
surrounding parts of the world. Kriwaczek has organized an enormous
amount of information into a beautifully written and well-flowing
narrative, and amply proves his thesis that the work and actions of the Jews were essential to the
development of Europe from the age of the Roman Empire onward. I'm a
little less convinced that their intellectual contributions--as
impressive as they are--add up to a critical influence. But this book
has given me much to add to my understanding of the ancient and modern
world.
surprising--not just about Jewish history, but about Europe and
surrounding parts of the world. Kriwaczek has organized an enormous
amount of information into a beautifully written and well-flowing
narrative, and amply proves his thesis that the work and actions of the Jews were essential to the
development of Europe from the age of the Roman Empire onward. I'm a
little less convinced that their intellectual contributions--as
impressive as they are--add up to a critical influence. But this book
has given me much to add to my understanding of the ancient and modern
world.
April 2, 2010
A great start and a poignant finish but the central thesis makes too many generalized assumptions but it is loaded with fasinating facts. A little more about the late flowering in the 19th century would have helped but nevertheless I thought it all well worth the effort.
July 22, 2019
I was really impressed with the way Kriwaczek was able to weave together a story of several millennia of Jewish history, and how he pays off on themes introduced at the beginning of the book. The book is a light read, meant for a popular audience, but he makes sure to include enough detail to satisfy the audience I believe.
The author takes some small liberties with history, speculating about things that we have no evidence for or against (e.g. whether Judaism contributed to Wycliffe's heterodoxy), but all within relatively acceptable bounds. You have to remember that he's trying to tell a story, and a story that goes against centuries of established historiography, so he needs to make it captivating. The narrative that he ends up weaving is quite effective, even if it might be selective as well.
Given this purpose, we get a few characters, German versus Slavic Jews, Conservatives versus Enlightenment versus Chassidic Jews (where the first is decisively German and the last decisively Slavic). We also get various narrative signposts - the reformation is told through three defenestrations in Prague. The first half of the book is the story of two currents of Judaism, one that finds its way onto the steppe and the other to Spain, only to find their way to each other again in Eastern Europe. It almost reads like a story of long lost lovers. While it is not entirely false so told, it is as the author takes pains to explain, only one version of events and one told as much by omission of historical detail as inclusion.
The author also has a political game they're playing, and one that ultimately might water down their intended historiographical lens. We are treated to three chapters near the end that tell of the fall from grace of the Yiddish civilization. He aims to throw in a different light contemporary revivals of Yiddish culture that focus on a very narrow band of Yiddish history in the 19th century - which leads to an account of that period as a kind of pale reflection of an earlier, greater, society. Perhaps even a contrary historiography cannot help but describe that time period somberly, but that might be worth discussing explicitly.
Overall though, it is a good book. We get an account of millennia that paints a new and refreshing picture of a civilization, the Yiddish civilization, among the other peoples of Europe.
The author takes some small liberties with history, speculating about things that we have no evidence for or against (e.g. whether Judaism contributed to Wycliffe's heterodoxy), but all within relatively acceptable bounds. You have to remember that he's trying to tell a story, and a story that goes against centuries of established historiography, so he needs to make it captivating. The narrative that he ends up weaving is quite effective, even if it might be selective as well.
Given this purpose, we get a few characters, German versus Slavic Jews, Conservatives versus Enlightenment versus Chassidic Jews (where the first is decisively German and the last decisively Slavic). We also get various narrative signposts - the reformation is told through three defenestrations in Prague. The first half of the book is the story of two currents of Judaism, one that finds its way onto the steppe and the other to Spain, only to find their way to each other again in Eastern Europe. It almost reads like a story of long lost lovers. While it is not entirely false so told, it is as the author takes pains to explain, only one version of events and one told as much by omission of historical detail as inclusion.
The author also has a political game they're playing, and one that ultimately might water down their intended historiographical lens. We are treated to three chapters near the end that tell of the fall from grace of the Yiddish civilization. He aims to throw in a different light contemporary revivals of Yiddish culture that focus on a very narrow band of Yiddish history in the 19th century - which leads to an account of that period as a kind of pale reflection of an earlier, greater, society. Perhaps even a contrary historiography cannot help but describe that time period somberly, but that might be worth discussing explicitly.
Overall though, it is a good book. We get an account of millennia that paints a new and refreshing picture of a civilization, the Yiddish civilization, among the other peoples of Europe.
July 12, 2020
I cannot say what a truly scholarly work on Yiddish civilization looks like, but I very much enjoyed this overview. Kriwaczek writes well and tells the story of this religious nation, now submerged under a rush of smaltzy nostalgia (aka Fiddler on the Roof) and tragedy.
There are a lot of fun facts here. The Yiddish language seems to have come from Regensburg in Bavaria, and I'm still not certain how to square this thought with my general impressions of Munich when I was there. Aside from German and Hebrew, Yiddish not only contains a variety of Slavic influences, but some Turkish ones, too. What was also quite fascinating was discovering that contrary to the oppressed, poverty-ridden image I had of the society, Yiddish society was quite well off in Poland until the 17th century, when the affluence and tolerance they had enjoyed unraveled with the decline of the Polish state.
This is a good overview for anyone looking into the whys and wherefores of Jewish history, how things have come to pass. I felt it had the right mix of scholarship and easy reading to bring life to this fascinating story.
There are a lot of fun facts here. The Yiddish language seems to have come from Regensburg in Bavaria, and I'm still not certain how to square this thought with my general impressions of Munich when I was there. Aside from German and Hebrew, Yiddish not only contains a variety of Slavic influences, but some Turkish ones, too. What was also quite fascinating was discovering that contrary to the oppressed, poverty-ridden image I had of the society, Yiddish society was quite well off in Poland until the 17th century, when the affluence and tolerance they had enjoyed unraveled with the decline of the Polish state.
This is a good overview for anyone looking into the whys and wherefores of Jewish history, how things have come to pass. I felt it had the right mix of scholarship and easy reading to bring life to this fascinating story.
December 15, 2020
I was quite disappointed by this book. Paul Kriwaczek attempts to give a very broad history of northern European and eventually Yiddish speaking Jews from Roman times to the early twentieth centuries. Instead of creating a compelling and conclusive history however, his book comes off as a series of essays reflecting on Jewish life in Europe in more or less chronological order. Some chapters focus on a specific person, another on a series of events. Never does he successfully define what Yiddish civilization or the Yiddish nation is. He is often broad and vague. It was written well enough to make it a smooth listen/read and I did learn some new things. The idea of a Yiddish civilization is a great concept worthy of a conclusive history, sadly this book just isn’t it, but hopefully it will inspire others to continue adding to the literature of Yiddish history.
February 27, 2021
Engaging history, multidextrous, sprinting through two thousand years of swirling, unfocused history to achieve its own unfocused swirl. Whenever people reminisce of Yiddish they seem too nostalgic for the `boue` of the impoverished shtetl, or for the anti-Zionist idealism of the Bundt and their insistence on doikayt — though either way, they are forgetting the thousands of Jewish history in Europe that preceded those Fiddler days. Those thousands of years of history is what this book tries to narrate, infused into the wider European and global history.
So much history here, packed into such a small area. Yiddish(ele) is the language of diminutive suffixes, and really only arrives a quarter or a third of the way into the book, with the Cambridge codex from 1382 (found in Cairo, not Ashkenaz.) Kriwaczek deftly explains what Yiddish is: Definitely not a straightforward combination of the most useful parts of German and Hebrew and Slavic, but a mishmash of them, organically formed over the course of centuries.
In the beginning, Kriwaczek seems to conjecture, Jews may have moved deeper and deeper into the woods of sparsely-populated Eastern Europe from the more populated Mediterranean areas. And what about the infamous Khazar theory? Not discussed, perhaps indicating the author's unfitness for historiographic review, which could have made this highly contested topic more interesting. He mentions the influence of Tatar (think the nomadic Turkic-Mongols) on modern-day Hasidic dress (think furry black hats, shtreimels) via Polish nobility. He discusses the impact of the Protest Reformation on the Jews — seemingly a disastrous one, leading to turmoil and expulsions, following the ones from England and Spain. He discusses the Hassidic-Mitnaged split, and the many famous characters and heroes and even antagonists of Yiddish civ and of the Jewish world in general (like the Rama, the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, the Besht, Moses Mendelson...) One of my favorite parts was the story of Glikel of Hameln -- a matriarch who wrote a diary after her husband died, the tale of an ordinary life of a grieving Yiddish-speaking woman.
So much is missing, too! I was looking for some description of the Yiddish theater scene. Perhaps a word or two about Spinoza (did he not speak Yiddish?), and many more words about the exile of Jews from Palesine, and nothing, really, comes after the World War I in the this book. Alas.
So much history here, packed into such a small area. Yiddish(ele) is the language of diminutive suffixes, and really only arrives a quarter or a third of the way into the book, with the Cambridge codex from 1382 (found in Cairo, not Ashkenaz.) Kriwaczek deftly explains what Yiddish is: Definitely not a straightforward combination of the most useful parts of German and Hebrew and Slavic, but a mishmash of them, organically formed over the course of centuries.
In the beginning, Kriwaczek seems to conjecture, Jews may have moved deeper and deeper into the woods of sparsely-populated Eastern Europe from the more populated Mediterranean areas. And what about the infamous Khazar theory? Not discussed, perhaps indicating the author's unfitness for historiographic review, which could have made this highly contested topic more interesting. He mentions the influence of Tatar (think the nomadic Turkic-Mongols) on modern-day Hasidic dress (think furry black hats, shtreimels) via Polish nobility. He discusses the impact of the Protest Reformation on the Jews — seemingly a disastrous one, leading to turmoil and expulsions, following the ones from England and Spain. He discusses the Hassidic-Mitnaged split, and the many famous characters and heroes and even antagonists of Yiddish civ and of the Jewish world in general (like the Rama, the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, the Besht, Moses Mendelson...) One of my favorite parts was the story of Glikel of Hameln -- a matriarch who wrote a diary after her husband died, the tale of an ordinary life of a grieving Yiddish-speaking woman.
So much is missing, too! I was looking for some description of the Yiddish theater scene. Perhaps a word or two about Spinoza (did he not speak Yiddish?), and many more words about the exile of Jews from Palesine, and nothing, really, comes after the World War I in the this book. Alas.
March 23, 2020
For too long, students in the US and Western/Northern Europe have been exposed only or primarily to the history of these two areas of the West. Eastern Europe and its many populations have received short shrift. Such attitudes combined with the effects of the Holocaust and the willful forgetfulness of waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, have served to virtually erase Yiddish/Jewish East European civilization. This book does a wonderful service in bringing this history to life and providing a background on where, when and how Jews migrated (and on conversions to Judaism), what they achieved in the lands they came to call home and how they achieved it, as well as their varied responses to their singular and difficult status outside Christian society. Other reviewers have commented on the fact that the book flows easily and that the author is not a historian as if this discredited it somewhat but to me the accessibility of the book is one of its greatest assets. This is a story that needs to be known by a large audience. And in the meantime, there is a great deal of research on Jewish history which those with strong interest in the subject can read. Finally, as someone with roots in Eastern Europe, I also think that Kriwaczek's book should be required reading there in order to enhance an understanding and acceptance of the multiculturalism that has always characterized the region.
December 19, 2024
Optimistic corrective to all those books that focus only on the suffering of Jews in Europe in the century or so preceding the Holocaust, tracing Jewish life in the millennia from Rome to the near present. Most interestingly, Kriwaczek postulates that the Jews of Europe should be considered a nation like the Danes or Irish (which they outnumbered), a “Yiddish nation” that, like ethno linguistic groups which today have their own states, co-founded modern European culture.
A celebration of all the good times for Jews, when rulers sought out their communities and leaders and protected them; with sketches of some individuals who left enough to remember them in detail, like Glikl of Hamelyn and Rabbi Moses Isserles.
Because of its scope this book also works as a useful potted history of Europe itself - but also because of its scope it is necessarily often speculative, especially pre-Renaissance. And Kriwaczek - though coming to England as a two-year-old! - writes ridiculously long central European sentences (“Many would find employment in the burgeoning sweatshops of the rag and leather trades, crafting dresses, coats, jackets and trousers, belts, gloves, hats, boots and shoes, in cramped, damp, airless and unsanitary workshops set up in private dwellings, often in properties that had once belonged to Huguenots and even on occasion taking over their defunct businesses, for the French Protestants, like Jews, had been engaged in the textile trade.”)
A celebration of all the good times for Jews, when rulers sought out their communities and leaders and protected them; with sketches of some individuals who left enough to remember them in detail, like Glikl of Hamelyn and Rabbi Moses Isserles.
Because of its scope this book also works as a useful potted history of Europe itself - but also because of its scope it is necessarily often speculative, especially pre-Renaissance. And Kriwaczek - though coming to England as a two-year-old! - writes ridiculously long central European sentences (“Many would find employment in the burgeoning sweatshops of the rag and leather trades, crafting dresses, coats, jackets and trousers, belts, gloves, hats, boots and shoes, in cramped, damp, airless and unsanitary workshops set up in private dwellings, often in properties that had once belonged to Huguenots and even on occasion taking over their defunct businesses, for the French Protestants, like Jews, had been engaged in the textile trade.”)
June 26, 2018
-Roma İmp. nun gücü, mükemmel askeri yapılanma, Yunan felsefesi ve demokrasisi ve Yahudi ticareti temelindedir.
-Hazar Türkleri Yahudi olmakla övünürlerdi (İlk Musevi olan Kaan Bulan'dı -8. yy-). 300 yıl sonra Rus istilası ile bu imp. sona ermiştir.
-Yüksek faizli tefecilikten dolayı Yahudiler, 100'er arayla,1290'da Britanya'dan, 1395'de Fransa'dan ve 1492'de İspanya'dan kovulmuşlardır.
-Tarihten bugüne Yahudi medeniyetinin çok etkili olduğu kentler: Ur, Babil, İskenderiye, Roma, Kordoba, Granada, Sevilla, Toledo, Rouen, Regensburg (Ratisbon), Krakow, Floransa, Amsterdam, Selanik, Londra, New York.
-Hazar Türkleri Yahudi olmakla övünürlerdi (İlk Musevi olan Kaan Bulan'dı -8. yy-). 300 yıl sonra Rus istilası ile bu imp. sona ermiştir.
-Yüksek faizli tefecilikten dolayı Yahudiler, 100'er arayla,1290'da Britanya'dan, 1395'de Fransa'dan ve 1492'de İspanya'dan kovulmuşlardır.
-Tarihten bugüne Yahudi medeniyetinin çok etkili olduğu kentler: Ur, Babil, İskenderiye, Roma, Kordoba, Granada, Sevilla, Toledo, Rouen, Regensburg (Ratisbon), Krakow, Floransa, Amsterdam, Selanik, Londra, New York.
May 21, 2024
I wanted to learn more about the history of my ancestors, most of whom came from the now nonexistent Duchy of Lithuania.
After searching for his author of one of the great Yiddish works and finding out that Kriwaczek made her up out of whole cloth, I put the book aside. I can't ascertain how much of this book is true and how much is fiction.
Kriwaczek also expects me to believe that Jews became popular and accepted members of European society after the collapse of the Roman Empire because of their accountancy skills.
Simon Schama's THE STORY OF THE JEWS is much more accurate and better written. This book was a huge disappointment.
After searching for his author of one of the great Yiddish works and finding out that Kriwaczek made her up out of whole cloth, I put the book aside. I can't ascertain how much of this book is true and how much is fiction.
Kriwaczek also expects me to believe that Jews became popular and accepted members of European society after the collapse of the Roman Empire because of their accountancy skills.
Simon Schama's THE STORY OF THE JEWS is much more accurate and better written. This book was a huge disappointment.
July 22, 2020
An incredible odyssey of a book. I'm glad I got the audiobook version, as I don't think I could have reached the end in print. There's so much packed in here, it can be hard to keep track of what the author is trying to do at times. But at both the small scale of biographies and communities as well as the large scale of the existence of a "Yiddish civilization" that survived, and at times flourished, for centuries, the book works entertainingly and well.
December 21, 2019
Enjoyable read with the admirable and mostly successful task of highlighting a civilization too often reduced to the shtetl, the German banker, and precious little in between, and painting its portrait in a way that isn't purely tragedy. The religious disputes, while important to the story, were difficult for a gentile to follow, but that's not the author's fault.
Read
May 17, 2024I don’t even remember when I started reading this book. Decent, but too pretty in its words and not honest enough in what it says. Almost a work of myth making. I don’t know enough about most sections of the book to say with any confidence what it gets right and wrong, but the sections I do know about… I can comfortably it is not the best.
October 2, 2019
This is a book that needed to be written, and it needed to be written while the memories of the Yiddish nation as a constituent part of modern Europe were still alive. It's filled with wonderful historical vignettes and despite appearing dense, is an easy read. Very enjoyable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 8, 2017
A very entertaining synopsis of the Yiddish nation, its influence on world culture which skirts over several thousand years of oppression in a very positive light. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Read
June 10, 2020Terrific
September 1, 2020
Good. I enjoyed the subtle British humor.
December 16, 2021
DNF. It was interesting in places but so so dense I got bored - and I'm a Jew with a degree in Jewish history so this is my area of interest!
August 21, 2023
2.5. Very rambly in large swathes.
December 20, 2023
Riding the crest of empire, renaissance, reformation, schism, revolution and malignant nationalism.
November 20, 2023
"Reading Latin characters -- or, in the East, Cyrillic, the symbols devised in the ninth century for the Slavic language of Moravia by Saints Cyril and Methodius -- was thus a religious Christian act. Jews had either to use the alphabet with which they were already familiar from their own sacred texts, or forgo literacy altogether. To this day Latin characters are still known to some Yiddish speakers as galkhes, from Hebrew galeakh (shaven), referring to the Catholic priesthood." (115)
"Since science had no claim, unlike the Torah, to absolute truth, was in other words merely a collection of greater or lesser lies, what scientists said was of no importance in the greater scheme of things. So there need be in Judaism no equivalent of the Catholic Church's fight against the new astronomy, no threats of torture or burning at the state, no Jewish Index Librorum Probibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) such as was instituted by the Council of Trent in 1558, no forcing of believers, like Galileo, to recant their views. ... So science and religion belong to different worlds that do not have to match. Now Jewish scholars could accept novel facts that science was delivering daily without disloyalty to Torah and Talmud -- no different from the separation of domains that the pious of all religions maintain in their minds today, able to allow both the stories in the biblical Book of Genesis as well as the findings of palaeontology at the same time." (202-3)
"Albert Ballin, the shipiing magnate who made his fortune by conveying poor Jews across the Atlantic from Hamburg to New York, saw his responsibility as ending with the provision of transport. Emigrants traveling steerage had to provide their own food for the ten-to-fourteen-day crossing. It needed to be simple to prepare and uncomplicated to serve, strictly kosher and above all low cost. Kosher meat, being salted, keeps well. When minced it goes further than steak. Rolled into balls, flattened into patties, it can be rapidly cooked on a hot-plate and served on bread. The dish soon became so well known as the staple of Hamburg-America's steerage class that it was nicknamed Hamburger steak, the first explicit recipe appearing in Aunt Babette's Cook Book of 1889: 'Hamburger steak is made of round steak chopped extremely fine and seasoned with salt and pepper. You may grate in part of an onion or fry with onions.'" (316)
"Since science had no claim, unlike the Torah, to absolute truth, was in other words merely a collection of greater or lesser lies, what scientists said was of no importance in the greater scheme of things. So there need be in Judaism no equivalent of the Catholic Church's fight against the new astronomy, no threats of torture or burning at the state, no Jewish Index Librorum Probibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) such as was instituted by the Council of Trent in 1558, no forcing of believers, like Galileo, to recant their views. ... So science and religion belong to different worlds that do not have to match. Now Jewish scholars could accept novel facts that science was delivering daily without disloyalty to Torah and Talmud -- no different from the separation of domains that the pious of all religions maintain in their minds today, able to allow both the stories in the biblical Book of Genesis as well as the findings of palaeontology at the same time." (202-3)
"Albert Ballin, the shipiing magnate who made his fortune by conveying poor Jews across the Atlantic from Hamburg to New York, saw his responsibility as ending with the provision of transport. Emigrants traveling steerage had to provide their own food for the ten-to-fourteen-day crossing. It needed to be simple to prepare and uncomplicated to serve, strictly kosher and above all low cost. Kosher meat, being salted, keeps well. When minced it goes further than steak. Rolled into balls, flattened into patties, it can be rapidly cooked on a hot-plate and served on bread. The dish soon became so well known as the staple of Hamburg-America's steerage class that it was nicknamed Hamburger steak, the first explicit recipe appearing in Aunt Babette's Cook Book of 1889: 'Hamburger steak is made of round steak chopped extremely fine and seasoned with salt and pepper. You may grate in part of an onion or fry with onions.'" (316)
March 21, 2014
I found this book fascinating as it dealt with a subject that I know little about. My historical knowledge is limited to British history and the Classical period and I know little of the Jewish experience in central and eastern Europe. Unfortunately, I finished the book having retained very little of the information in it. The writer jumps between time periods, locations and historical figures in such a way that I occasionally felt my head spinning. This is a shame because his writing is good, someone should have sorted out the structure.
June 16, 2009
Kriwaczek again comes to numerous fascinating (unfootnoted, perhaps historically tenuous) conclusions, this time about Yiddish culture. I gobbled up his book on Zoroastrianism, but this one wasn't as sharp, writing-wise. It sits on my unfinished shelf, but the parts I read about pre-Yiddish European Jewish culture and about the German, Greek, Roman, Sephardic, Scythian, and Slavic roots of Yiddish civilization were very, very cool.
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