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Tracing the Heritage of a Heritage Language
An account of contemporary Jewish practice in Amsterdam needs to be situated alongside the development of Yiddish within broader sociopolitical and historical contexts. In particular, the shift in the tenor and telos of the European political left since the 1980s is crucial to understanding the existence of Koosjer Nederlands today, especially in regard to the two distinct streams of Jewish identification since the late 19th century. These themes surface continuously, although often indirectly, in the discourse of Amsterdam’s Yiddish speakers, and their attempts to articulate their connection to Dutch Jewishness as it has transformed and taken on different meanings over time in relation to other challenging social processes.
The two main streams of political activity that have characterised Jewish life in modern Europe are Zionism, associated with Hebrew, and Bundism, bound up in Yiddish. Both have roots in late 19th century Ashkenazi life in Eastern Europe, and each offer a different organisational logic for Jewish identity and community. The Zionist movement bases itself on territoriality and exclusivity, embodied in the idealised state of Israel, whereas the Bundists, steeped in socialist-labour history, have sought to overcome Jewish isolation and exceptionalism in Europe by integrating into local settings while maintaining “an appreciation of the place Jews occupied in a culturally diverse world” (Slucki 2009, 112). This latter paradigm has since been cited as the historical predecessor to modern multiculturalism, as it stresses the need for minority groups to maintain their cultural integrity while integrating, and is compatible in many ways with classical Dutch verzuiling [pillarization] social policy (Pickhan 2009).[4]
The postwar permutations of Bundism failed to reclaim the impact and presence of its original Eastern European incarnation due to a range of factors, not least the tragic fact that most of the original Bundist base was killed in the Shoah. Zionism is most salient in public discourse today, even as its aims were recognised in the formal establishment of Israel in 1947. Indeed, according to Chaya Brasz, Zionism and Israel have become the “central factor” in Dutch Jewish identity, to the extent that most of the postwar Jewish population in the Netherlands has harboured a ‘deep lack of belief in the continuation of the Dutch Jewish community… that the ultimate goal was to go to Israel and that there was no future in the Netherlands,’ only recently finding hope for the strength and continuity of their community (Brasz 2001, 154).[5] Many contemporary Yiddish speakers in Amsterdam descend from the Bundist tradition, however, and its philosophy of cultural sharing continues to permeate their activities. Simultaneously, as expressions of identification with Israel increasingly have come to signify rightist political affiliation, many are looking for alternative means of remaining connected with their sociopolitical Jewish roots while distancing themselves from the actions of Israel. This distancing from Israeli Zionism, and the often Christian and rightist proponents of these politics in the Netherlands, was a constant theme in our interviews, as these Yiddishists stressed the secularism of their practice and the dangers of collapsing religion and politics into one another. Jewishness, they typically feel, has long been a ‘normal’ and everyday feature of life in Amsterdam, encountered daily and part of the shared patrimony of all its citizens.