Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (hardcover) by Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman

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One vital form of the Jewish nationalism that developed in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries held that the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture should be at the center of any Jewish nationalist efforts. In Defining the Yiddish Nation, Itzik Gottesman analyzes how and to what degree folklore study aided the imagining of a modern Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation in Eastern Europe between the two world wars. Gottesman looks at who studied folklore, how it was collected, and for what purposes, as well as how both the folk and the lore were represented by those who collected and wrote about them. Polish Jewish folklorists had much in common with folklorists in other nations, with a central difference. Like nearly all European folklore movements, the Yiddishist one was rooted in nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and Herder's idea of the volk; yet whereas the folk for others meant the peasantry, Jews were urban -- there was no Jewish peasantry. Ultimately this determined the kinds of materials the Yiddish folklorists collected, leading to their focus on oral folklore that reflected the beauty of the Yiddish language.

Defining the Yiddish Nation examines the evolution of Yiddish folklore and the pioneering work of three important folklore circles in independent Poland: the Warsaw group led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, and the YIVO Ethnographic Commission. Much more than a study of one particular folklore tradition, however, Defining the Yiddish Nation reveals how the work of the Yiddish folklorists sought to connect Jewish identity with the past, while simultaneously contributing to an autonomous Jewish national culture that would help reshape the present and create a future.

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