
A Lingering Legacy
The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818-1938
Aya Elyada(Author)
Stanford University Press
Will be published approx. on 7. April 2026
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-1-5036-4599-8 (ISBN)
Description
This book explores a unique and under-researched chapter in German-Jewish cultural history: the engagement of German-speaking Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage. From the late eighteenth century onwards, as growing circles of the German-Jewish population shifted from speaking Yiddish to German, the once-popular early modern corpus of Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German-speaking lands. But this rich literary corpus did not entirely disappear from the cultural landscape of modern German Jews. Aya Elyada shows how Old Yiddish texts continued to be retold, translated, adapted, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German Jewish authors.
In doing so, she uncovers a rich afterlife, in which these beloved Yiddish works were not only newly appreciated as historical monuments, but served as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics within modern German-Jewish culture, including tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. Illuminating how modern German-Jewish authors engaged with their premodern Yiddish heritage as central to modern Jewish experience and their distinctive cultural identity, this book unfolds a new dimension to German-Jewish history, culture, and literature.
In doing so, she uncovers a rich afterlife, in which these beloved Yiddish works were not only newly appreciated as historical monuments, but served as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics within modern German-Jewish culture, including tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. Illuminating how modern German-Jewish authors engaged with their premodern Yiddish heritage as central to modern Jewish experience and their distinctive cultural identity, this book unfolds a new dimension to German-Jewish history, culture, and literature.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth
Illustrations
10 illustrations - 10 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 158 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
564 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5036-4599-8 (9781503645998)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Aya Elyada is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, 2012), and co-editor of German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations (2023).