The tragic biography of Lazar Sainéan (1859–1934), entangling different beliefs (Judaism, Christianity, and atheism), different lands (mainly Romania and France) and most importantly, different languages, was recently turned by leading historian Natalie Zemon Davis into a thrilling topic. In yet another impressive global-microhistorical exploration1, and once again loyal to the Italian “exceptional normal” tradition she has sparked in the US2, Davis uses Sainéan’s account to ponder about the shaping of different social hierarchies from a Jewish perspective. This is not Davis’s first engagement with Yiddish – in "Women on the Margins", for example, she explored the Yiddish autobiography of a 17th-century German-Jewish woman.3 However her new book, "Listening to the Languages of the People", is the first time she employs her methodology on the history of linguistics – a rather seldom combination. Through a close reading of sources, she deducts from one particular case on large social phenomena and global entanglements.
The research behind "Listening to the Languages of the People" began incidentally: Davis was surprised to discover that Sainéan, whom she remembered as a famous interpreter of the French 16th-century author François Rabelais, was also the first professional linguist to explore Yiddish (p. 1). In fact, ‘Judeo-German’ was not even named Yiddish at the time, hence Sainéan’s pioneering exploration of this thought-to-be ‘mixed and degenerated dialect’ was a political act, much more provocative than he himself had understood. Sainéan believed that by exploring a minority language he was doing his Romanian nation a great service. However, the leading parties of that nation, immersed in antisemitism, not only saw him as an outsider – as Davis showed in her book – but also read his work as a condemnation of their culture.
Sainéan started his academic career as a linguist of Romanian. As an assimilated, secular Jew from Wallachia, he actively engaged in Maskil (Jewish enlightenment) circles in Bucharest, which urged Jews to modernise, contribute to the Romanian nation-building, and swap their ‘substandard dialect’ for the Romanian tongue. Within this circle, Sainéan cultivated an inclusive, liberal perception of the Romanian people, inherently linked to his studies. Tracing different etymologies, Sainéan uncovered the influences Ottomans had had on Romanian, published Grimm-inspired tale collections, and skilfully used historical linguistic tools to prove the long continuity of Jewish communities in Romania. Although he was eager to see himself as a Romanian nationalist, the Romanian nationalists, however, incited against the ‘Jewish foreigner’ claiming that the ‘pure’ Romanian language, held as a ‘straight descendant’ of the ‘noble, western’ Latin, was influenced by the abominable Muslim and Jewish heretics. Thus, they rejected time and time again his naturalisation requests.
Davis illustrates that the Jews of the newly founded Romanian kingdom were deprived of citizenship, though a few individuals, ‘assimilated and contributing’, were naturalised every year. Sainéan’s repeated failures to become one of them are at times heart-breaking, at times funny and grotesque. The Romanian parliament’s reading of his linguistic claims as defamation of the nation also exemplifies, through Davis’s interpretation, how political knowledge production was. At the book’s climax, Sainéan chose to convert (p. 107) – but even his baptism only worsened his case. His applications were rejected twice again, followed by antisemitic speeches – while his Jewish best friends, disappointed from Romania and propagating Zionism, cut their connections with him following his apostasy.
Seeking to start life anew, Sainéan moved to France, where he gained recognition for his work on Rabelais. Eventually, Sainéan distanced himself from research that concerned his Jewish and Romanian identities, that is, from research engaging with his identity and with the national perceptions that had led his early intellectual project. The one Yiddish research he had completed after his mother’s death remained an outlier in his career, and sometimes he even omitted it from his CV, perhaps due to political needs (p. 82). Despite its founding importance, that research, conducted years before the Yiddish standardisation, remained forgotten even in Yiddishist circles.4
Unfortunately, Davis leaves out thorough discussions about the concepts that appear time and again in her book. Nevertheless, through Sainéan she manages to capture the paradoxical attitude towards Yiddish that characterised Jewish intellectuals at the time. Both in Eastern and Western Europe, the Maskilim sought to overcome Yiddish as part of their voluntary modernisation, yet simultaneously developed a nostalgia for their mame-loshen (mother tongue). Therefore, they contributed to the preservation of Yiddish, though not as a living language, but rather as a post-vernacular subject of scholarly interest.5 In this aspect, Sainéan is not merely an “exception”: his approach was foreshadowing the Yiddish fate. Just like him, in a world increasingly shaped by nation-states, the language couldn't find any place to belong to.
The book arouses a series of questions and speculations, such as the mutual exclusivity of different identities, linguistic xenophobia, and differences between the French and Romanian nationalisms. However, Davis only provokes those questions, ducking any deep discussions and leaving the reader with some dissatisfaction. Compared to other microhistorical works, the descriptions in the book are simply not thick enough. It is rather short – 200 pages, including the index and footnotes – and almost deprived of actual examples, or even merely quotes, from Sainéan’s work. The reader may understand Sainéan’s general linguistic claims – but we don’t get to see examples of his etymologies.
On the theoretical level, important aspects of the discussion are only briefly discussed. For example, the gendered image of Yiddish, long-considered a feminine language (and known as ‘women’s German’: “vayber-taytsh”), is touched upon only in one footnote (p. 31–32). Sainéan opposed the linguists who had a ‘linguistic purity' perception: those who saw Romanian as deprived of external influences, who mocked the transnational, diasporic mishmash of German, Slavic, and Hebrew components in Yiddish. However, the resonance between that discourse and racial theories is rarely addressed.
Although the microhistorical methodology is usually characterised by exploring the same subject from various different angles, even some biographical aspects are not fully explored in the book. For example, the fates of his daughter and brother, who appear quite frequently in the footnotes, remains obscure, and so does their impact on Sainéan's decisions to convert and to migrate.
Although it lacks comprehensive discussions, "Listening to the Languages of the People" combines different historical approaches and constitutes an accessible and interesting reading. Through a modest biography, its contribution to global and Jewish history demonstrates how contested the hierarchies of collective categories are.
Notes:
1 For a classic microhistorical biography by Davis, see: Natalie Zemon Davies, Trickster Travels. A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, London 2007.
2 Francesca Trivellato, Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?, in: California Italian Studies 2(1) (2011).
3 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Harvard 1995.
4 Mikhail Krutikov, The First Study of Yiddish Dialects Was by a Romanian Linguist, in: The Forward, 01.06.2023 (Yiddish), https://forward.com/yiddish/530793/the-first-study-of-yiddish-dialects-was-by-a-romanian-linguist/ (19.08.2023). Perhaps it is noteworthy that The Forward is one of the last existing Yiddish newspapers.
5 Aya Elyada, Between Rejection and Nostalgia. Yiddish as a Post-Vernacular in Modern German-Jewish Culture (Hebrew), in: Chidushim – Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 20 (2018), pp. 6–26.