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Magda Teter, Aya Elyada. A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany; Yaacov Deutsch. Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1587–1589, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1587
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The young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's visit to the Frankfurt ghetto and his subsequent efforts to learn Hebrew and Yiddish are the starting point for Aya Elyada's book. The anecdote underscores what David Ruderman recently called the “connected histories” of European Jews and Christians. All too often topics related to Jews have been relegated to a “historiographical ghetto.” But as historiography breaks the chains of national histories, it becomes more obvious that Jews squarely belong to European history, which cannot be fully understood without them. Elyada's A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish and Yaacov Deutsch's Judaism in Christian Eyes are products of this historiographic shift and testimonies to the idea of “connected histories.”
Elyada's study draws attention to Christian scholars' turn to Yiddish works, which she calls, not unproblematically, “Yiddishism” in parallel to Hebraism, the Christian interest in the Hebrew language. Elyada points out that “Christian concern with Yiddish should be seen on the one hand as part of a wider interest in Jews and Judaism in early modern Germany, and on the other hand as part of a general interest in questions relating to language and linguistics at the time” (p. 4). For German Christian scholars, Yiddish was a “bridge language” to Hebrew since it was much easier to master.
