Jewish Multiglossia and Script-Switching in Early-20th-Century Hungarian: The Case of Magyar Zsinagóga

• In Event: Religious language ideologies and multilingual textual practices

Abstract

Jewish dialects of Hungarian are understudied and we know little about their development over time. I investigate Hungarian-Yiddish-Hebrew multiglossia and Latin-Hebrew script-switching in 25 issues of Magyar Zsinagóga from 1910-1913. Magyar Zsinagóga was a monthly journal of sermons and other religious material that was open to all denominations created after the schism of Hungarian Jewry in 1869-71 (Orthodox, Neológ and Status Quo), but publishing mostly Neológ and Status Quo rabbis. Sermons are usually characterized by Hungarian-Hebrew diglossia with the main text in Hungarian written with the Latin alphabet, while Hebrew scriptural elements are provided in Hebrew script and often translated into Hungarian in the following sentence. By contrast, editorial responses to readers often feature additional Yiddish elements incorporated into the Hungarian text and written with the Latin alphabet, and Yiddish and Hebrew generally untranslated. Hebrew words conjugated in Hungarian are sometimes presented in a mix of writing systems with the root morpheme in Hebrew script and the Hungarian suffixes in Latin script. Advertisements are almost always in Standard Hungarian. Entire Hebrew/Yiddish sentences written in Latin script (i.e., trans-scripting) are uncommon overall. I contextualize the observed multiglossic, script-switching and trans-scripting phenomena in light of the target audience of these texts, and religious ideologies among Hungarian Jewry – specifically the controversy about which language/s were considered appropriate for sermons that arose during the schism. I also discuss how Hungarian non-Jewish discourse on what constituted “proper” Hungarian influenced Jewish texts that were produced by a multilingual speech community.

[This is not part of the abstract, but I'm not sure where else to put it - I'm noting that this is a resubmission, it was accepted to AJS 2021 and I could not present it due to COVID. I was advised to resubmit.]

Author

• Bogi Perelmutter, University of Kansas