Kalman Zingman’s EDENIA: A Utopian Window into the History of Yiddish Political Thought

• In Event: Remaking it New: Yiddish Socio-Political Thought

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ‘golden age of Yiddish’ dawned. At the epicentre of this cultural explosion were a handful of thinkers who, by speaking and writing in Yiddish, broke the linguistic monopoly of the Jewish intelligentsia that favoured Russian, German, and Hebrew, opening political theory to everyday Jews. A deluge of Yiddish works followed. Among the millions of Yiddish documents that have been saved and archived are thousands of forgotten works of political thought. Despite being relevant to Marxist, Zionist, German-Jewish, and utopian political thought and history, works of political thought written in Yiddish remain under-studied, and their contributions are largely unexplored. Beginning with Kalman Zingman’s Yiddish-language utopian novella, IN DER TSUKUNFT-SHTOT EDENIA (1918), I develop and use what I call a ‘function-based’ approach to analysing utopian texts to elaborate three central ideas in Yiddish political thought – Yiddishism, Autonomism, and Doikayt. Yiddishism is the idea that Yiddish, rather than any other language, should play the preeminent role in modern Jewish life, giving it its cultural shape and defining its national but non-territorial boundaries. Autonomism is the idea that Jews should have national cultural autonomy wherever they live, and that this autonomy is a necessary condition for national flourishing. Doikayt, ‘hereness,’ entails a commitment to remaining in diaspora and to the idea that everyone has responsibility to the political community in which they live as well as to the national community to which they belong. This paper (1) constitutes a significant work of historical recovery; (2) acts as a necessary complement to existing accounts of Marxism, Zionism, and German-Jewish political thought that are incomplete and impoverished without an account of how they were influenced by Yiddish political thought; (3) provides new and important substantive insights on nationhood and nationalism, non-territorial sovereignty and the nation-state, language politics and post-vernacularity; (4) offers intellectual resources for contemporary theorising and action; (5) expands our sense of what ‘counts’ as political thought by undertaking a serious study of utopian fiction written in Yiddish.

Author

• Sophie Cardin, University of Oxford