The Long Shadow of the "Jewish Question"

"For Nathan Birnbaum, the man who had organized the gathering, this was not a matter of mere academic import; it was a question of existential significance. Born in Vienna in 1864 to an assimilated family, Birnbaum had grown up largely secular yet rejected the assumption that Jews should dissolve into the surrounding German-Austrian culture. With his determined stare and full beard projecting well below his throat, he could be easily mistaken for Theodor Herzl at the time."

"Later, however, he would abandon the Zionist movement and, in its stead, embrace a different vision for the future of the Jewish people-one that diverged wildly from political Zionism and was the implicit focus of the Czernowitz ingathering. Birnbaum did not believe that the Yiddish-speaking Jews scattered from the Baltics to the Black Sea were failed Europeans awaiting transformation in Palestine, as the Zionist movement argued. Rather, they were a living nation deserving recognition where they already stood."

In late August 1908 roughly seventy delegates met in Czernowitz for the First Yiddish Language Conference to debate whether Yiddish was a legitimate national tongue or a corrupted exile jargon. Nathan Birnbaum organized the gathering and considered the question existential. Birnbaum, born in Vienna in 1864, had been largely secular, coined the term Zionism and held early Zionist office before abandoning political Zionism for a different vision. He argued that Yiddish-speaking Jews across the Baltics and Black Sea constituted a living nation deserving recognition. The conference aimed to formalize recognition by declaring Yiddish the national language of those communities.

Read at The Nation