Veiling knowledge: Hebrew sources in the Yiddish sermons of ultra-orthodox women
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Dalit Assouline
Abstract
This article discusses a gender-based aspect of contemporary language contact among Israeli Yiddish-speaking Haredi Jews. The speakers are all bilingual, and their command of Israeli Hebrew undermines the traditional linguistic disparity between men's and women's access to sacred Jewish texts. These texts are studied solely by men, with the result that, throughout the generations, men's command of “the holy tongue” (Hebrew and Aramaic) was much higher than that of the women. Today, in contrast, the familiarity of Israeli Haredi women with Israeli Hebrew facilitates their understanding of such materials. This is a new phenomenon, giving women access to sacred texts which had formerly been available only to men. Consequently, in quoting from sacred texts, when they speak in public (for example, in giving sermons to other women in their community), Israeli Haredi women employ various strategies in order to camouflage their true linguistic competence, so as not to display knowledge of the holy tongue on a level higher than that perceived as socially legitimate for women. Linguistic and discourse-based analyses of these strategies – in marked contrast to those of their American Yiddish-speaking counterparts – illustrate a facet of the continuing Haredi efforts to preserve a traditional way of life in a changing world.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and contact linguistics
- The problem of Judeo-French: between language and cultural dynamics
- Let my people know!: towards a revolution in the teaching of the Hebrew Bible
- Nathan Birnbaum's The tasks of Eastern European Jews
- Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality?
- Slavic influence in Eastern Yiddish syntax: the case of vos relative clauses
- Veiling knowledge: Hebrew sources in the Yiddish sermons of ultra-orthodox women
- Home language usage and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nouns and noun plurals
- Bare participle forms in the speech of Lithuanian Yiddish heritage speakers: multiple causation
- A pragmatic and idiomatic Yiddish substrate of Modern Hebrew: insights from translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye
- The Folkshuln of America
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and contact linguistics
- The problem of Judeo-French: between language and cultural dynamics
- Let my people know!: towards a revolution in the teaching of the Hebrew Bible
- Nathan Birnbaum's The tasks of Eastern European Jews
- Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality?
- Slavic influence in Eastern Yiddish syntax: the case of vos relative clauses
- Veiling knowledge: Hebrew sources in the Yiddish sermons of ultra-orthodox women
- Home language usage and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nouns and noun plurals
- Bare participle forms in the speech of Lithuanian Yiddish heritage speakers: multiple causation
- A pragmatic and idiomatic Yiddish substrate of Modern Hebrew: insights from translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye
- The Folkshuln of America
