Now that we had some sense of Yiddish, it was time to talk culture. Zev Feldman and Michael Alpert got up to speak, in English, about the history of Jews, primarily in Poland. Zev gave the main lecture, with Michael following to embellish. Again, these are notes taken as I listened, with as little embellishment as possible. Ari
So, how many people think that Poland was a good place for Jews? Vociferous response: "when?"
Ashkenazic culture remains the most distinctively Jewish culture of the entire Jewish diaspora (Zev: who said its ended?), over the last 1500 to 1000, with the Sephardic and Yemini cultures being close seconds.
Zev continues: How and why we are different from other Jews in the world is the topic of this discussion—not to set up a "better than", but rather, to explain "what is different".
There are four things you have to say to fulfil your obligation—this is not my primary field, but over the course of years working with Ashkenazi music you have to know certain facts.
Peysakh talked about the genesis of Ashkenaz culture: the Rhine valley. That was Ashkenaz 1. We're talking about Ashkenaz 2—Poland, etc.
By the 16th century Poland was the large and great diaspora, second only to Turkey in numbers of Jews. Poland was unique in that it was a unified country, but had undeveloped economy (13th century?) and undeveloped bureaucracy. Polish authorities allows Jews to create their own guilds, so they weren't just engaged in money and trades, but also crafts. This made for a unique symbiosis of Jewish and Polish culture. The height of Polish culture around the 16th century, strengthened by migrations by Jews from Ashkenaz 1 and Sepharad (exile from Spain).
By now, Poles and Germans began to resent the power of the Jews, so Jews continued to move East.
Jews were living in shtetls. A shtetl is a town, from borderlands of Germany through to Kiev. Every town was, essentially, a shtetl. It had a trading post and a center of artisany, that had a predominately or significant Jewish population. In a village, there may have been Jews, but they were not predominant. A shtetl was about market economy. Raw materials from villages and large estates were exchanged for manufactured goods, and Jews had a prime role as mediators. These (shtetls) were newer towns built by Polish aristocrats, and the burghers had no rights—for instance, the inhabitants couldn't prevent the Jews from competing. But this also meant that Jews were no longer in touch with the culture of Poland. In the 16th century rabbis knew mathematics. By the 17th century, there were fewer Jewish intellectuals in touch with Polish culture. Now, Jewish culture was not taking in as much from the outside.
Since antiquity you had two diasporas: Egypt, as one exemplar (not Egypt of the Pharoahs, but Greek Egypt), where Jews spoke Greek and few even knew Hebrew. They knew about Greek culture. In Babylonia, by contrast, Jews were in a socieity in which people spoke Aramaic. There was no dominant culture, and Jews could deal mainly with ourselves and Jewish issues and created the Babylonian Talmud. The Hellenistic model eventually became Christianity. And all the literature which was created by Hellenic Jews (Philo, for instance) in Greek was preserved by Christians.
Poland began to become more like Babylonia, which, by that time, was an unusual Jewish experience. Yiddish became a unifying factor, not just in terms of folklore, but also for Talmud study. The Poles granted Jews autonomy (council of four lands). By 18th century, the move to push Jews out of cities and into the shtetls, so most Jews lived in villages and shetls, as though they had migrated from Montreal to Ste Agathe (the home of Camp Bnai Brith, in the heart of the Canadian "Catskills").
At the same time, this was a period when printed books (17th century) became available and cheap. So, you had Jews who were far flung and didn't have much contact with high culture, didn't have much contact with local culture, and to participate in Jewish life and spirituality, and at the same time, there was an abundance of Hebrew literature. Now you started to have autodidacts who were not under the influence of Yeshivas.
In most times and places, Jews learned at yeshivas. The result was predictable: an explosion of heretical movements. Shabtai Tzvi, Jacob Frank (perhaps the beginning of Jewish nationalism) and Hasidism, the heresy that eventually stuck. By this period, Poland was so huge, that it was impinging on the Ottoman Empire and Jews were emigrating out to Hungary and Moldavia and in 1672 the Turks temporarily conquered southern Poland, and that is where Hasidic culture emerged. There was a significant contact between Jews and Turks. Many urban Jews from Podalia were exiled into Turkey. The structure of Hasidism has a Sufi model, and is otherwise socially organized in ways that are not familiar to Jewish culture.
The way of thinking in Hasidism. (Heshele of Ostropol) are analogous to the tales of sufi teachers in Turkey, and many of those stories originated from Turkish sources. [me: this is the first I have heard of Hasidism explained in this manner. But then, Turkish culture is Zev's main field of expertise.]
By the end of the 18th century, Poland imploded. Divided between Russia, Austria, Prussia, and none of those states gave Jews rights. The only structure Jews had were the Hasidic societies. The Jews who avoided this were those who had emigrated to Hungary and Moldavia earlier, and who preserve a Jewish culture that is pre-hasidic, but is also more in contact with the local culture (Moldavia invited Jews in, as Poland had done hundreds of years before).
There were two opposing forces: Hasidim (closed) vs. haskalah (enlightenment). Other Jews didn't experience this extreme conflict. Then there was brutal state pressure, especially on the Russian side, where the state tried to destroy the Jewish economy, Jewish culture, and Jews—for instance, the use of the Kahal to pull Jews into the army (buying out for rich jews, and preying on the poor in their place) 25-year draft. The creation of Jewish proletariat, and the distrust of Jewish establishment led Jews into socialism.
The trades were now restricted. Once the Jewish communal organizations were no longer functioning, anyone could start a band (many more bands, much more circulation)—the old guilds wee no longer functioning.
Out of this came Yiddishm, socialism, Zionism, bundism (part of Yiddishism). All are distinctive to east Ashkenazim, not even by German Jews.
Trying to understand the background of Jewish popular cultgure is difficult. Rabbinic sources presented one authorized culture. What happened elsewhere is less clear.
[Aside from Zev to illustrate the sense of culture wars in Poland vs. Jewish culture elsewhere: "A couple of months ago I was in Istanbul having tea with cantor—Ashkenazim are so different from us, so many denominations, here we are just Jews and only one kind of synagogue; some are more more religious, some less, but they are all the same, with just some minhagim (customs) that are different—Italian, Persian, whatever."]
What is important about Eastern European Jews is that there are competing ideologies, not just minhagim.
One way to understand Ashkenazic culture is to look at gender issues. In Sephardic culture women have a much bigger role, for instance, in wedding celebrations—a month of ritual and song in the hands of women. In Ashkenazic custom, the celebration was mainly in the hands of men—male musicians, badkhanim. There are no wedding songs. Women have very few roles. The "broigeztanz" ("anger dance") is an example. Ashkenaz culture is quite misogynistic. (See Biale, Katz—Chasidism puts women in the lowest position, almost entirely a male-only society with women having no role.)
Yiddish song: several different genres: domestic folkloric (lyrical, romantic—women). Men's are largely didactic (religious—often in Hebrew and Yddish; Polish and Yiddish; Ukrainian and Hebrew). With the haskalah, "enlightened" men writing songs dealing with social issues. In 20th century, now you have writers like Gebirtig. With Ashkenazim, the public discourse is dominated by men.
Zev: I did a quick survely of singers of Yiddish song today. The majority of professional singers of Yiddish today are women. But the repertoire is about 80% male. The public discourse is dominated by men.
Michael: Bronye Sakina, for instance, was very aware of the importance of presrving "women's" songs. I remember a conversation between her and a young chasid talking about the importance of niguim and they reach god and are a higher words—and she responds, "yeah, but my words you have to understand." (do I have this translation correct?)
Zev: The "traditional" Jewish counterculture presenting life force not delineated by dogma. And most singers are not singing that.
Sephardic song: most singers women, and most singing women's songs.
Traditionally, klezmorim were male, and had to be male. Both, an essential part of the traditional Jewish wedding, but also a rebel, a dangerous character. The Ashkenazim needed such a character because of the way women were not part of Jewish culture.
A living culture is always in tension; once your culture is dominated by one voice, it ceases to be become a culture and is now an ideology.
Michael: In thinking about Jewish music and Jewish cultural patterns, things are very different today from what they were. Once Austria and Turkey were great empires whose borders touched. Jews, Roma, others went in between those cultures and mediated between them. A lot of our view of who we are as Jews, what Poland means, who the Ukrainians mean has been shaped by lsst 200 years, not the period before that.
There was a time when Poland was not the center of anti-Semitism, but it was the home of a vibrant community—the united states of its time in the 14th-17th centuries—that's why we all went there. No society anywhere else in the world that so reflects the importance of the Jews; it is one of the tragedies of both Jews and the 20th century that things happened as they did. At its height, Poland was multiethnic and huge, almost unique in Europe. Jews were fundamental to the formation of the Polish nation and Polish socieity in a way that is not true anywhere else. Not just Jewish loan words, but there are Polish words for Jewish concepts, e.g., there is a Polish word for the Jewish women's area of the synagogue, for a Jewish cemetery, to practice Shabbat. That stands in marked irony to the absence of Jews in Polish culture today.
Alan Bern: The rise of ideology in eastern European culture-comes from Western Europe? Perhaps not, Ashkenazim had a central means of dealing with dissent, centralized authority due to autodidacts and dispersed, smaller communities, before the modern period, which reached full flower in the 19th century.
Me, to myself: So, how did we go from Yiddish as a women's language, from the "Tzena Rena" to Yiddish literature? And what role did Chielmenicki play in this version of Jewish history in Poland?
My great grandfather's name was Abis, and they lived in Russia, and this was, I believe during the time of the Russo-Japanese war. My great grandfather realized that there were a lot of Jews being drafted and very few of them coming back. And he himself was called up. There was another Jew in the village who came back as a corpse. His name was Garber. And my great grandfather took the toe tag basically off the corpse and took that as his name—and as a dead person emigrated to America. So my mother's family name ever since has been Garber.
My father's family is from Burma and India and his mother is born in India and his father in Burma, and they're Sephardic Jews. During the war they were in Burma and they got bombed out and had to go to London and got bombed out again and ended up in the United States. And his two brothers got drafted. They were in their twenties so it must have been the Korean War. My father's father got injured. He got a spinal injury and ended up in a wheelchair. My father ended up having to support his mother and the other three children from the age of 18, so they ended up not drafting him out of hardship. So he's the only one in the family who didn't get drafted. He ended up working and going to college part time and trying to make a living for everyone else.
