Yiddish and Indonesian: Antisemitism and a Path Not Taken

Yiddish and Indonesian:
Antisemitism and a Path Not Taken

Tomasz Kamusella
University of St Andrews

 

The Alleuropean Language[1]

What was the best candidate for a single common language of all Central Europe? Which language indigenous to this region could become such a Centraleuropean?, and potentially an Alleuropean? At present, the conclusion appears to be foregone, for better or worse, after the fall of communism, English became the lingua franca of the European Union, even though Britain left the Union in 2020. The situation was not clear at all in the early 20^th century. Yes, Europe’s nobles-turned-the continent’s intellectual, economic and political elite continued the early modern tradition of speaking and writing in the supposedly ‘universal language’ of French. But the peasant masses across Central and Eastern Europe were overwhelmingly German(ic)- and Slavic-speaking. Their social betters did not consider any measures to spread the knowledge of French among the population at large. Such a move would have deprived the elite of their exclusive sociolect that distinguished them from the hoi polloi.

Which language was then in the best position to serve the varied needs of Central Europe at the cusp of dramatic modernization? This modernization witnessed during the past century cost Central Europeans the loss of their traditional microworlds, necessitating long-range contacts and communication across the entire region. Social, political, economic and cultural upheavals of totalitarianisms, authoritarianisms and the two world wars led to rapid urbanization and industrialization, mass migrations as well as to multiple acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Individual tragedies and at times meteoric social advancement took place in Central Europe on an astounding scale during the past century. Could a shared common language have calmed the rough waters of modernity across the region that literally became the continent’s bloodlands in the 1930s and 40s?

Once when discussing this issue with the students who took my course on the history of language politics in Central Europe, I proposed that Yiddish could have become this area’s common language, a Centraleuropean that never was. They were taken aback, and their gut reaction was to disagree. But why? First, I advised that they should avoid anachronism. Factoring their knowledge of the Holocaust into the analysis was unhelpful. After all, in 1939 no one knew that a Shoah would take place. Second, I asked the students to moderate the unrealized yet antisemitic in its character reflex, which to this day curiously denies indigeneity in Europe to Jews and their culture. And this is so, despite the fact that after World War II, to make some amends for Europe’s participation in or murderous silence on the genocide of this continent’s Jews, multiple documents on European integration refer to the continent’s ‘Judeo-Christian values.’

 

From Malay to Indonesian

In order to facilitate this intellectual exercise of a distinctly moral dimension, I like to introduce a comparative example of the Indonesian language. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the Dutch East Indies – or today’s Indonesia – had already been under Dutch rule for three centuries. The Dutch colonizers withheld their Dutch language from the ‘natives,’ whom they saw as ‘unworthy’ of such a lofty gift of Western civilization. The Dutch colonial administrators were similar to Central Europe’s nobles and elite, who would never consider teaching French to peasantry and workers.

This Dutch colony was strategically and profitably located at the crux of worldwide commerce and shipping lines. The Strait of Malacca was then the world’s busiest maritime route. It was the place where Malay originated, the Austronesian language of long-distance commerce and interethnic communication. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the population of the Dutch East Indies amounted to around 60 million. A tenth of the inhabitants spoke Malay as their first language (L1). The center of this language’s literacy and book production was placed in the aforementioned strait’s southern mouth, or where nowadays Singapore is wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia.

Yet, the majority of Malay-speakers used this idiom in this vast maritime area’s numerous port cities and harbors for commerce, sailing and everyday matters; not for reading or worship. European colonizers stuck to Dutch and English in administration across, respectively, the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, that is, today’s Malaysia. For religious reasons Muslims employed Arabic or at least the language’s letters (known locally as the Javi script, literally ‘Javan’) for writing in local languages, while Hinduists and Buddhists scribbled loyally in Sanskrit and Pali in both tongues’ respective syllabaries, or the Brahmi writing system and its derivatives. They also used these writing systems for recording their own ethnic languages.

At that time, like nowadays, the majority of the inhabitants in the Dutch East Indies spoke and (at times) wrote in Javan letters. Half of the colony’s population used to live on Java, this relatively small and densely populated island. The situation continues in present-day Indonesia. In such a case, following the logic of Central Europe’s ethnolinguistic in their character nationalisms, might makes right. So, the most numerous speakers of a language in a given territory should impose their idiom on the rest of the population. In this manner, Hungarian became the sole national and official language of Hungary as a nation-state, Polish of Poland, Romanian or Romania, or German of Germany.

 

The Path Taken

Yet, following its decolonization, the Dutch East Indies did not morph into a Greater Javan nation-state, or split into a multitude of ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states, each at least for a larger ethnicity, for instance, for the Betawi, Javanese, Madurese, Malays, or Sundanese. At the crucial juncture in the country’s history, a different decision was taken than in Central Europe. This example of Indonesia as an ethnolinguistic nation-state clearly shows that it is humans and their groups who create states and nations, not a destiny, nature, or let alone some deity.

The tiny indigenous (‘native’) elite, who gained education in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, brought back home ideas of ethnolinguistic nationalism. At that time, across Central Europe, in absence of their own nation-states, many national movements took to language as the yardstick for defining their postulated nation. What is more, the ethnolinguistically pre-defined Italians and Germans were successful at winning their own nation-states of Italy and Germany in 1861 and 1871, respectively. On top of that, Meiji Japan adopted ethnolinguistic nationalism from Germany to prevent the colonization of this East Asian country by any European or Western imperial power.

Under the influence of such inspiring examples, in 1912, the first indigenous nationalist party was established in the Dutch East Indies, namely, the Indische Partij, literally, ‘Indian Party’ in Dutch, though today we would translate the adjective ‘Indian’ as ‘Indonesian.’ The Bolshevik revolution (1917) and postwar turmoil in Europe galvanized the region’s radicals to found a Perserikatan Komunis di Hindia (Communist Union of the Indies in Malay) in 1920. In the early 1920s, the term ‘Indonesia’ gained widespread currency for referring to this Dutch colony in Malay.

Political and social mobilization grew, the communist party considered starting a revolution in 1926, but demurred. Meanwhile, nationally-minded youth, grouped in the Perhimpunan Pelajar-pelajar Indonesia (Association of Indonesian Students in Malay) committed themselves to overhauling all of the Dutch East Indies into an independent nation-state named ‘Indonesia.’ During the second congress held two years later in 1928, this association adopted the now famous Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) of tanah air Indonesia, bangsa Indonesia, and bahasa Indonesia, that is, one homeland (nation-state) of Indonesia, one (ethnolinguistic) nation of the Indonesians, and one (national) Indonesian language. ‘Indonesian’ was a novel name for the hard-working commercial language of Malay.

This pledge launched in earnest and simultaneously underpins to this day the Indonesian ethnolinguistic nationalism that closely emulates the Central European formula of Language = Nation = Nation-State. All speakers of language X are seen as nation X, which has the right to nation-state X into which all the compactly X-speaking territories should be gathered. Likewise, in Indonesia the Indonesian language was made into the unifying idea of the Indonesian nation.

It did not matter that conservative estimates spoke of only five percent of the indigenous population speaking Indonesian (Malay) as their L1 language. In contrast, by the mid-20^th century, as many as 45 percent and 15 percent of the country’s inhabitants employed in this function Javanese and Sundanese, respectively. After all, when Italy was ‘united’ (created) in 1861, a mere three percent of the Italians spoke (‘correct,’ standard) ‘Italian.’ Then Italian was more widely known as ‘Tuscan,’ because it originated from Tuscany and especially the region’s capital of Florence. A political project or dream, when implemented, dramatically alters the socio-political situation on the ground.

During World War II, the Japanese conquered all the Dutch East Indies by 1942. When it became apparent that the Allies would win back this territory soon, the Japanese occupation administration encouraged and facilitated the Indonesian nationalists’ declaration of independence of their postulated nation-state in 1945. The Dutch colonialists would not accept this decision and for the four long years fought a bitter neoimperial war against the Indonesians on multiple maritime and insular fronts. The Dutch desisted only when Washington threatened to cease channelling Marshall Plan monies to the Netherlands, unless the country stops spending these funds on the war in Indonesia.

In 1945 Indonesian officially replaced Dutch as Indonesia’s official language. The war enforced the use of Indonesian as the anticolonial troops’ only lingua franca. It was Indonesian that connected the country’s multiple ethnic groups in their successful struggle against the Dutch. Already in 1928, the Indonesian national activists (nationalists) also settled on the Roman letters (Latin alphabet) for the Indonesian language. It was not a bow to the Dutch colonizers’ European culture, including the Latin script, but yet another compromise. The choice of this par excellence Western script for writing Indonesian prevented any disuniting ideological struggles on which indigenous writing system would best suit the national language of Indonesian.

Now the Indonesian language is spoken by at least four-fifths of all the country’s population, be it as an L1, but mostly as an L2 (second) language. However, other languages, spoken by most Indonesians, that is, Javanese or Sundanese, are mostly used in speech. The prestige of writing and the pride of place in education and publishing is given almost exclusively to Indonesian. This is quite an achievement, given that nowadays Indonesia with its 270 million inhabitants is ranked by population as the world’s fourth largest country, following the United States and preceding Pakistan.

 

A Path Not Taken

At present, Central Europe – or the eastern half of the European Union (including Scandinavia), alongside the adjacent countries in the Balkans and including Ukraine, alongside Moldova – boasts the population of around 275 million, almost exactly matching Indonesia in this respect. The difference is that Indonesia is a single country, while Central Europe is comprised of 29 separate polities. In Indonesia the single language of Indonesian is in official use, while in Central Europe almost as many as the region’s predominantly ethnolinguistic nation-states.

Yet, prior to the Holocaust, for over a millennium Central Europe from the Baltic in the north to the Danube and Drava in the south had been spanned by the overwhelmingly urban network of closely-knit communities of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim (Ashkenazic Jews). They effectively ran most of the region’s commerce and banking services until the turn of the 19^th century. Besides typically constituting the plurality of the inhabitants in Central Europe’s cities and towns, Ashkenazim were responsible for the plurality of the region’s artisanal services and shops until World War II.

Yiddishland did not feature on maps but all Central Europeans knew of its existence. In many ways, Yiddishland was similar to the Malay-speaking network of maritime commercial routes that yielded Indonesia. Like Yiddishland, such Malay-based Indonesia remained ‘invisible’ to outside observers until the indigenous populations of the Dutch East Indies forced their country onto the political map of Southeast Asia between 1945 and 1949. This is exactly the moment when the parallel histories of Yiddishland and Indonesia diverged widely. While the country’s inhabitants of multiple ethnicities and languages consented and endeavored together to make the concept of Indonesia into a political reality, fellow Central Europeans led by the Germans and Austrians almost exterminated the region’s Ashkenazim and literally wiped away Yiddish language and culture in their entirety.

This horrific act that combined the Holocaust with the cultural genocide of all things Yiddish liquidated the region’s sole potential common language of Centraleuropean. What if after the Great War, instead of choosing the route of multiple states for the speakers of the region’s different languages, Central Europeans had chosen multiethnic unity in the spirit of the former Holy Roman Empire, the Kalmar Union, Poland-Lithuanian, Ottoman Rumelia, or the Jagiellonian-Habsburg union of the Austrian, Czech, southern Polish, western Ukrainian, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian and Bosnian lands?

In 1939, at least 11 million people spoke and wrote Yiddish. Out of this number nine million in Yiddishland itself, while two million mainly in New York and elsewhere across North America, but also in Australia, South Africa, Costa Rica and Britain’s Mandatory Palestine. The number of Europe’s Yiddish-speakers was equal to the population of the Netherlands. But in comparison to Yiddish’s international character, Dutch was a poor relative. Yiddish writers, singers and theatre actors coursed between Buenos Aires and New York, Johannesburg and Jerusalem, Paris and London, Berlin and Warsaw, Miensk and Moscow through Shanghai and Sydney to meet their readers and perform in theaters and opera houses. No other European language not connected to a vast maritime empire afforded its users such an international array of geographic and communication opportunities.

Even better, Ashkenazim did not have and did not demand any fleet, army or nation-state of their own. The peaceful and open-ended character of their inherently modern commerce- and service-based culture was a faithful reflection of the nature of its Malay counterpart in Southeast Asia. Yet again, Yiddish culture was more international in its scope than the Malay one.

What an excellent starting point for a common Central Europe for all Central Europeans united into a single nation of the Centraleuropeans through a Common Centraleuropean as their L1 or L2 language. And yes, Yiddish could have become this Centraleuropean as the ideological and practical basis for a Centraleuropean nation-state extending from Scandinavia in the north to the Balkans in the south, from Germany in the west to Ukraine in the east. Not only were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim typically versed in the Central European languages of the countries and areas of their residence, but at least the German(ic)-speakers of the region’s western half from Scandinavia to Germany and Austria did not have too many problems with understanding Yiddish. In the eastern half of Central Europe, most Slavic-speakers (with the exception of the Ottoman Balkans) had been exposed to Yiddish-speakers for centuries. On top of that, many aspects of Yiddish syntax and grammar are quite Slavic in their character. So, the vast majority of Central Europe’s inhabitants would not encounter too many hurdles mastering Yiddish. From this perspective this language is much easier than English, now commonly spoken by practically all Central Europeans with university or at least secondary education.

What about the Yiddish alphabet composed from Hebrew characters? Writing systems are as political as languages. Without the technology of graphic representation of speech, which writing is, languages would not exist as we know them today. The Yiddish alphabet would be an excellent compromise choice for a common Centraleuropean nation-state and language, because Hebrew letters have never been connected to any dominant – let alone, imperial – political project in this region, unlike the Cyrillic, Greek and Latin alphabets, or the Arabic writing system in the case of the Ottoman Empire. What is more, no capital forms of Hebrew letters exist, meaning less variance to come to grips with, apart from a couple of Hebrew letters with different final (end-of-a-word) forms. In practice, just 22 letters to learn.

 

Reverberations in the Wake of the Murdered Language of Centraleuropean

What stopped this viable possibility of a single Centraleuropean language for the nation of the Centraleuropeans in their Centraleuropean nation-state not from realization, but even from being considered, was the murderous unreason of antisemitism and valuing ethnolinguistically defined parochialism over lively and open liaisons with the broader world. This narcissism of small differences cost the continent, especially modern Central Europe, tens of millions of dead and even more expellees in both world wars and other conflicts, alongside numerous genocides and acts of ethnic cleansing.

The postwar process of European integration, which resulted in the founding of the European Union, has somewhat mitigated lingering xenophobia and the murderousness of parochial small-thinking. Yet, neither the European Union, nor any post-Yiddishland state has had any foresight or decency to adopt the most European of all the continent’s languages, namely, Yiddish as at least a co-official language. Even worse, not a single dedicated Yiddish-language library remains on the continent. Not only are there no Yiddish publishing houses in today’s Europe, practically no Yiddish books are published on this continent. At the same time, numerous dedicated mono- and bilingual book series and journals are devoted to publishing and republishing of ancient Latin and Greek literature, though speakers of both classical tongues have not been around for about two millennia.

Neither Yiddish, nor at least the language’s Hebrew script-based alphabet is offered in (Central) Europe’s schools. In European universities, liberal and strongly pro-democratic, in their own eyes, scholars, who unwaveringly subscribe to Europe’s Judeo-Christian values, nevertheless keep relegating the Germanic language of Yiddish from departments and institutes of Germanic languages and literatures to the ghetto of Jewish studies. Highly trained researchers specializing in Germanic studies seriously claim that at present all Germanic languages are written in the single alphabet of Latin letters. Isn’t the Hebrew letter-based Yiddish a Germanic language then?

Unrealized or unacknowledged antisemitism thrives in today’s Europe, even when in official speeches European leaders declare their never-ending abhorrence of the Holocaust. As long as antisemitism keeps the European mind closed and narrow, the continent’s inhabitants will continue rejecting their most European language of Yiddish. They will have no aptitude to conceive of the time when a common Centraleuropean was a clear possibility. In self-imposed historical and political blindness, they will deny this significant part of their historical and cultural heritage. Hence, they will reject themselves and as a result will feel restless and displeased, not knowing why.

August 2022

[1] I thank the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan for support and making it possible for me to research and write this essay. The opinions and arguments presented in this essay are the author’s, and do not represent any official position on the part of the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center.