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Why did many Haskala writers prefer Hebrew or German to Yiddish?
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Yiddish literature
Pen name of Sholem Rabinovitsh, Sholem Aleichem was the most popular and well-known of all Yiddish writers.
Proponents of the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) movement often viewed Yiddish as an inferior vernacular associated with the isolation of ghetto life, which they sought to dismantle in favor of modernization and assimilation into European society.12
Their preference for German and Hebrew was driven by specific ideological goals:
- German: Viewed as the language of the larger society and the Enlightenment, German was promoted as a tool to facilitate secular education and integration into Western culture.13
- Hebrew: Championed as a "classical" language, Hebrew was used to revive Jewish national consciousness and scholarship, serving as a prestigious alternative to what they considered the "corrupt" or "pompous" nature of Yiddish.124
Many Haskala authors adopted a "suicidal principle" regarding Yiddish, utilizing it as a didactic tool to educate the masses and criticize traditional customs, with the explicit belief that the language should be abandoned once it had served its purpose of modernization.2