Yiddishland Unbound: Interwar Yiddish Culture in South Africa and the Colonial Condition

• In Event: Works-in-Progress Group in Jewish Studies

Abstract

Yiddish-language intellectuals in the 1930s invoked a notion of a transnational “Yiddishland”—a diasporic, non-territorial, imagined land anchored in progressive Yiddish culture. In recent years, Yiddish scholarship has noted such non-nationalist sensibilities, celebrating Yiddish’s worldliness as an exemplary case of a minor culture on the global stage. My paper challenges that laudatory perspective by critically attending to markers of race in interwar Yiddish writing from South Africa. I focus on a group of immigrant Yiddish writers in Johannesburg whose writings pose an enigma: Facing the rise of Afrikaner white nationalism and fascism, these leftist writers decided to promote a stronger affinity to Afrikaans culture and ethnic Afrikaner politics among the local Yiddish readership. Their work showcases competing tendencies—an aspiration for universal justice and resistance to nationalism as well as the surfacing of imperialist desires and a racialized imagination. In accounting for these contradictions, the paper argues for adopting a global perspective while paying attention to local specificities, illustrating how notions of empire, race, universalism, and Jewish peoplehood in modern Yiddish culture are transformed in global diasporic circulation and under colonial settings.

Author

• Roni Masel, University of California