Review:
Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s. September 7–December 10, 2023. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Curator: Allison Rudnick. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/art-for-the-millions. [CLOSED.]
You should always listen to your friendly neighborhood anti-Semite. You may learn more of what it means to be a Jew than you’ll ever learn from a dozen rabbis.
In the last term of my senior year in college I was happily coursing toward a major in German; out of idle curiosity one day I asked the teaching assistant, what about Yiddish? “Oh, Yiddish,” she said. “Yiddish is German spoken by dirty people.” She was factually correct, as anti-Semites often are. It took me decades to understand what she meant, as opposed to how she meant it.
Erving Goffman, in his brilliant book on Stigma, speaks of being gay, or fat, or Jew, as a social fact. In traditional sociology social facts are little more than community values, but for Goffman these facts are constantly contested, negotiated, “deconstructed” we might say, by the stigmatized themselves, while the stigmatizer consistently presents her judgements as mere facts. When the TA spoke of dirty Jews who speak Yiddish she genuinely imagined she was merely describing a social reality. If challenged she would have pointed out that people who speak Yiddish are indeed dirty, and why was I so defensive? This is what Sartre must have meant when he said, “If Jews did not exist the anti-Semites would invent them.” (Si le Juif n’existait pas l’antisémite l’inventerait.)
Having been invented thus, I had no choice, Sartre would say, but to re-invent myself for what I was: a dirty Jew. Goffman would describe this as the continuous effort of the stigmatized to reclaim their stigma for themselves according to their own moral code; to stand up as a proud and dirty Jew: “Voluntary disclosure becomes inscribed in a moral career.”1 Being Jewish was no longer who I was but what I should wish to be. (That’s a reference to Schiller, in case you hadn’t noticed.)
But it wasn’t until I got to Vienna that I found what I needed, the outcome of an anti-Semitism so crippling, so far embedded in the social fabric, that it was impossible to separate the two. That’s when I began to understand what “Dirty German” meant: Wienerisch, Viennese street slang, the language of the dirty, which indeed has many features similar to Yiddish or borrowed from Yiddish. This is true, also, of Classical French slang, which still contains a handful of Hebrew words going back to the Middle Ages. Wienerisch is not merely dirty in the sense that it’s lower class, but in opposition to echt Deutsch, pure German, the language of the Bildungsbürger, the Educated Bourgeoisie, a language that exists only in the minds of professors of German and professors of Yiddish.
Stigma, according to Goffman, is neither a negative nor a positive in itself. Rather, it’s contested on either side, like a linguistic game of pull-the-rope. The question is, for Goffman as for Sartre: who defines, the stigmatizer or the stigmatized? Franz Kafka, in a classic exposition, caught the distinction with his usual lancet mind: there’s Yiddish as seen from the inside by the Proste Yidn, the poor Jews, and Yiddish seen from the outside by the Feyne Yidn the good Jews and the professors:
“Honorable ladies and gentlemen ! I’d like to tell you that you understand far more Yiddish than you think you do.”
„…möchte ich Ihnen, sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, noch sagen, wie viel mehr Jargon Sie verstehen als Sie glauben.“2
It’s a deadly Kafkaesque joke, because it suggests, among other things, that the audience who believe they understand the fine echt Deutsch of ladies, might be familiar after all, with the dirty Deutsch of brothels: more than they believe they know. That’s the reason Good Jew Yiddishists cringe at the thought that Yiddish and German might have a dialectical relationship, which they do, of course, and would, even if they didn’t share a single word in common:
“The stigmatized are tactfully expected to be gentlemanly and not to press their luck; they should not test the limits of the acceptance shown them.” [Goffman, pp. 120-121.]
That’s the key to Kafka: the encounter between the Self seen from the outside (the Goyische self of the narrator, with his perfect Deutsch) and the Self seen from the inside, the dirty Yiddish Id:
“When normals and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence, especially when they there attempt to sustain a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology.” [Goffman, p. 13].
In Kafka, however, the normie and the stigmatized are one and the same person, the speaker or writer in a struggle with the bugs and mice and human monads. Anti-Semitism is the primal scene of European Culture—in the Freudian sense.
And what Goffman does for the stigmatized, what Kafka does for the Jewish bourgeoisie, Marx does for the Proletariat. Just as the Proletariat must come to terms with its own oppression, so, too, the Jews must accept and own their stigma, beyond the college-course grammar that sees no more than a textbook language, in order to become the instrument of the instrumentalized: from Yiddish in Itself to Yiddish for Itself. Being a Jew and a Socialist becomes a “moral career:”
“It is here that voluntary disclosure fits into the moral career, a sign of one of its phases. It should be added that in the published autobiographies of stigmatized individuals, this phase in the moral career is typically described as the final, mature, well-adjusted one—a state of grace.” [Goffman, p. 102].
That’s how the Jews who joined the Communist Party felt in the ‘twenties: that they’d reached the final stage of their own moral trajectory. My beloved great-aunt Frieda certainly thought so. And I’d tell you more, but that would only mean imposing closure. Sei gesunt.
WOID XXIII-29D. Langue d'Oy! and Langue d'OK Part IV
December 12, 2023
Erving Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 102.
Franx Kafka, „Vom jüdischen Theater,“ Gesammelte Werke: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaβ (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1995), p. 113.