The lecture explores the engagement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage. Although Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German territories already in the beginning of the nineteenth century, various texts of this early modern corpus gained a rich afterlife in modern German-Jewish culture, serving as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics: tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. The ideological and emotional implications of Yiddish as a post-vernacular in German-Jewish culture will stand at the focus of this lecture.
The speaker is Aya Elyada, Associate Professor of German and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her second book, A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938, is forthcoming in 2026 with Stanford University Press.
