In the face of persecution from Catholics during the 11th Century Crusades, the Ashkenazi Jews of the Rhine River valley in Western Europe fled east, farther into Germany, and there formed autonomous, insular communities. Once removed from outside influence, a unique culture took shape and with it a new language – Yiddish. A surprising mixture of Germanic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Slavic and Romance languages, Yiddish became the primary spoken language of millions of Jews for nearly a millennium. By the age of mechanical reproduction written Yiddish journalism, literature and poetry was also thriving.
In the 20th Century the Holocaust nearly eradicated the Jewish population in Europe. The Nazi genocide aimed to eliminate all traces of Jewish cultural and economic influence. Much of their art, music and literature was stolen or destroyed. Following Germany’s surrender in 1945 many Holocaust survivors sought refuge in the US. Wishing to leave the trauma of the Old World behind, most carried with them few if any Yiddish books. Assimilation took hold – the old tongue remained a mystery to the survivors’ Americanized offspring – and after one generation Yiddish was near extinction.
One member of that second generation, Hampshire College student Aaron Lansky, began in 1973 to learn, speak and read Yiddish in order to better understand the rich but increasingly obscured pre-Holocaust Jewish culture. He traveled to New York City and elsewhere interviewing elders, hearing their stories and collecting their Yiddish books, which were often discarded by next of kin. By the 1980s Lansky had amassed a huge collection of books and recordings, and in 1989 he received a MacArthur Genius Grant in support of his dedicated cultural preservation initiative.
In June 1997 a permanent facility for the Yiddish Book Center opened to the public on a 10-acre site at Hampshire College campus. In addition to housing over 1 million Yiddish texts, the Center offers workshops, courses, fellowships and publications on the Yiddish language and Jewish culture, and presents film screenings, art exhibitions and musical performances by artists of the Jewish Diaspora.
