- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (9 Jun 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297829416
- ISBN-13: 978-0297829416
- Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.5 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 668,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Yiddish Civilisation
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Review
"sophisticated... conveys the author's enthusiasm and bears his very individual mark." (JEWISH RENAISSANCE )
'Paul Kriwaczek's essential argument is simple: this is, or rather was, a civilization. Its people were a nation. So his book is essentially descriptive, showing that the culture was indeed broad and deep and widespread enough to justify those terms. The description is well done and makes the point very effectively....I do not know what Jews will make of YIDDISH CIVILISATION, but for Christians it could not have been published at a more opportune time.' (SPECTATOR )
"galloping through the centuries at a swift pace, recreating wonderful pictures of lost communities of Jews, going from Roman times through to the 21st century with barely a pause for breath." (IRISH TIMES )
'Paul Kriwaczek's essential argument is simple: this is, or rather was, a civilization. Its people were a nation. So his book is essentially descriptive, showing that the culture was indeed broad and deep and widespread enough to justify those terms. The description is well done and makes the point very effectively....I do not know what Jews will make of YIDDISH CIVILISATION, but for Christians it could not have been published at a more opportune time.' (SPECTATOR )
"galloping through the centuries at a swift pace, recreating wonderful pictures of lost communities of Jews, going from Roman times through to the 21st century with barely a pause for breath." (IRISH TIMES )
SPECTATOR
'Paul Kriwaczek's essential argument is simple: this is, or rather was, a civilization. Its people were a nation. So his book is essentially descriptive, showing that the culture was indeed broad and deep and widespread enough to justify those terms. The description is well done and makes the point very effectively....I do not know what Jews will make of YIDDISH CIVILISATION, but for Christians it could not have been published at a more opportune time.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Paul Kriwaczek turned to history after having been for many years a television program producer, and there is a strong journalistic and pictorial flavour about this book. This makes it very readable and enjoyable. There are many personal touches in it; quite a lot of interesting information about matters that are not strictly germane to his subject; and a number of intriguing and illuminating comparisons between the distant past and more recent periods.
The first third of the book is not really about Yiddish Civilization at all, dealing as it does with the history of the Jews from the time of the Diaspora to the medieval period when something like a Yiddish identity emerged among the Ashkenazi Jews. In his Bibliography he comments that general books on the history of the Jews are "disappointing in their lack of attention to eastern Europe during the earlier medieval period", and it is this first third of the book that I found most original and that advances a number of theories which challenge commonly received ideas about Jewish history.
The first is that Kriwaczek has the first Jews arriving in Eastern Europe not from the West, but from the East, being swept westwards from the northern edges of the Byzantine Empire by wave after wave of nomadic tribes, generically known as Scythians; and Kriwaczek says that the word Ashkenazi is actually derived from the Semitic name for the Scythians, a-Shkuz. (The problem seems to me that these nomadic waves belong to a period that had ended before the 7th century.) So there were already many Slavic Jews living in Poland, Bohemia and Austria before the arrival of Jews there from Germany.
The second of Kriwaczek's challenging ideas is that there is no evidence in Jewish or Gentile sources for the generally believed idea that the Jews of Germany fled to Poland from persecution during the crusading period - only that they often fled from insecure places in Germany to more secure ones in the same country. The Jews who did arrive in Poland, Kriwaczek says, were not refugees but part of a general German penetration into Slavic lands during that period, sometimes as conquerors, but sometimes invited by the rulers of these lands, who valued the skills that Germans - Christians as well as Jews - could bring to their backward countries. The Jews from Germany, better educated and with better connections to commerce and politics, became a kind of aristocracy, which explains why their language came to dominate over the Slavic languages spoken by Jewish communities in the East.
The rest of the book is more conventional in the story it tells; but it is lively and very readable; and even there most knowledgeable readers will probably find something new to them - perhaps the delightful portrait, drawn over nine pages, of Glikl von Hameln; or perhaps that the Yiddish stories of Sholem Aleichem or of Mendel the Bookseller were less loving and nostalgic in their satire and had more of a reform agenda than is commonly thought.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm surprised that I learned as much as I did from this. Really enjoyable, hooks you in from the first page, just wonderful. Slightly pessimistic implications on non-territorial nations...I wonder if the decline of Yiddish civilisation is a one-off because the Jews migrated from the Heym before the age of the internet and satellite TV? Will future groups of immigrants sustain their culture more easily/successfully?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
For over a thousand years, Yiddish civilisation, with its own unique, rich culture and language, flourished in central and eastern Europe. It's pretty much all gone now, but in this fascinating account, Paul Kriwaczek does a great job of resurrecting it. Writing both informatively and with wit, he describes first one exodus - from the Roman province of Judea - and then subsequent ones across southern and into central and northern Europe, before Yiddish culture really began to take hold in the medieval German city-states, then migrating steadily eastward into what are now Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
There's a wealth of detail here - though Kriwaczek also gives the reader a panoramic overview of the wider currents in European history, especially that of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. This was home to the Yiddish civilisation from the Middle Ages onward, once the Crusades began to spell persecution for the Jews of the German city-states. Greater toleration under Poland's Casimir the Great and land/trade opportunities in the `Golden Medine' of the East led to a push eastward, though by this time the Yiddish language as a form of Judaeo-German had already substantially taken the form it would retain, despite the civilisation's locus being, for much of its life, beyond German-speaking territories. Financial opportunities - with the Jews as trusted providers of precious coinage at a time when money economies were beginning to grow - brought wealth. But we should not see Yiddish civilisation as one comprised entirely of financiers: the Jews were represented in all the strata of society. The high point of Yiddish culture was reached in Prague, the cities of Silesia, in Polish Krakow and Lithuanian Vilna in the 16th and 17th centuries - the period of the great teachers known as the Rema (Moses Isserles), the Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loew) and David Gans. But even at this high point, the storm clouds were gathering. Harsh Jewish overlordship in hard economic times led to peasant revolts in Poland, fuelled by the rise of the Cossacks in Ukraine, who began to move westward into the Yiddish heartlands.
The subsequent period of the Chassidim under the Ba'al Shem Tov, of the Gaon of Vilna and the Haskalah (the assimilation-minded Jewish enlightenment under Moses Mendelssohn) seemed to present opportunities for Yiddish civilisation to modernise and become more `mainstream'. But the reality by the 19th century was that it found itself marginalised by growing nationalism. In Russia, vicious pogroms accelerated the flight westwards, and Kriwaczek recounts the culture's late flourishing on a small scale in London's East End and in New York.
The Holocaust, a Jewish homeland, and the re-emergence of Hebrew as a spoken language have, in their different ways, put paid to a European Yiddish culture. But no history of the continent can ignore its massive contribution, and Paul Kriwaczek has done an excellent job of bringing its vanished ways, personalities, triumphs and tragedies more clearly to light.
There's a wealth of detail here - though Kriwaczek also gives the reader a panoramic overview of the wider currents in European history, especially that of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. This was home to the Yiddish civilisation from the Middle Ages onward, once the Crusades began to spell persecution for the Jews of the German city-states. Greater toleration under Poland's Casimir the Great and land/trade opportunities in the `Golden Medine' of the East led to a push eastward, though by this time the Yiddish language as a form of Judaeo-German had already substantially taken the form it would retain, despite the civilisation's locus being, for much of its life, beyond German-speaking territories. Financial opportunities - with the Jews as trusted providers of precious coinage at a time when money economies were beginning to grow - brought wealth. But we should not see Yiddish civilisation as one comprised entirely of financiers: the Jews were represented in all the strata of society. The high point of Yiddish culture was reached in Prague, the cities of Silesia, in Polish Krakow and Lithuanian Vilna in the 16th and 17th centuries - the period of the great teachers known as the Rema (Moses Isserles), the Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loew) and David Gans. But even at this high point, the storm clouds were gathering. Harsh Jewish overlordship in hard economic times led to peasant revolts in Poland, fuelled by the rise of the Cossacks in Ukraine, who began to move westward into the Yiddish heartlands.
The subsequent period of the Chassidim under the Ba'al Shem Tov, of the Gaon of Vilna and the Haskalah (the assimilation-minded Jewish enlightenment under Moses Mendelssohn) seemed to present opportunities for Yiddish civilisation to modernise and become more `mainstream'. But the reality by the 19th century was that it found itself marginalised by growing nationalism. In Russia, vicious pogroms accelerated the flight westwards, and Kriwaczek recounts the culture's late flourishing on a small scale in London's East End and in New York.
The Holocaust, a Jewish homeland, and the re-emergence of Hebrew as a spoken language have, in their different ways, put paid to a European Yiddish culture. But no history of the continent can ignore its massive contribution, and Paul Kriwaczek has done an excellent job of bringing its vanished ways, personalities, triumphs and tragedies more clearly to light.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Would make a wonderful TV series!
Paul Kriwaczek has a background as a TV producer, and this book would lend itself well to a series of TV programmes visiting the locations he covers, and talking about the... Read more
Published on 19 Jan 2010 by Mrs. M. Connolly
A wonderful history
As well as being a history of the migration of the Jewish people across Europe from the Middle East during the Roman Empire up until the flee across the Atlantic escaping the Nazi... Read more
Published on 25 Oct 2009 by I. A. Ashleigh
yiddish civilisation
Thisexcellent and well researched book deals with a civilisation which existed in eastern and central Europe from the 11th-19 centuary. Read more
Published on 1 Oct 2009 by G. I. Forbes
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