I wouldn't have thought Yiddishkeit had any especially lefty/messianic/revolutionary connotation. I've always used it to mean a cultural sense of or identification with broadly Eastern European Jewishness, a pretty big tent which can reach from the Hasidim to the Commies. I'd be surprised if the term had much currency among Ashkenazi Jews either there or here around the turn of the last century. We were just Jews, and the immigrants and the first generation were trying really hard to be Americans.
I think the idea of Yiddishkeit might have gotten some traction due to (a) the obliteration of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish culture by the Nazis and the (b) nostalgia for old ways and the old country by increasingly assimilated American Jews in the postwar era. Fiddler on the Roof (about 1890s Russian life in the Pale, the area to which Jews were restricted under Czarism, and based on the stories of the socialist radical Sholom Alechem) was a big hit in B'Way in 1964, movie was in 1971. Leo Rosten's The Joys Of Yiddish first came out in 1968 -- in the period 1890 through the 1940s, roughly, Jews didn't need anyone to romanticize the language that they or their parents spoke and the culture they were part of, and which, if they were immigrants or children of immigrants, they wanted to forget. (My father recalled my grandmother, born in Poland in 1890, becoming incensed in the 1930s if someone in the paper were to refer to "Jasha Heifetz, the great Jewish violinist': "Antisemitism!" she'd say.) A generation later, in the mid 60s, second and third generation Jews in could indulge in nostalgia.
Now, as to messianic and radical elements in Yiddishkeit. Like lots of oppressed people, these sorts of ideas and values had a lot of traction for Jews in the old country and among poor immigrants. Although mystical, messianic Hasidim wasn't anything like a majority view among Ashkenazi Jews, it had a large following, some of which came here. Likewise, political radicalism wasn't a majority view but a disproportionately large number of radicals were Jews, and that was also true among the immigrant generations. That fell off sharply, of course, as Jews became assimilated and successful. (Although Jews are still about the most liberal group in the American electorate, isn't that so, Doug? At least most liberal white group? Not that Jews were white when we came over, decidedly not.) Neither extreme view is an essential part of Yiddishkeit, both are parts of Eastern European culture, and both get some soft focus nostalgia in the Fiddler On the Roof - Joys of Yiddish sort of lets-pretend-those-were-the-not-so-bad-old-days kind of sentimental Yiddishkeit.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm doing some research on Tillie Olsen. Her parents
> were
> revolutionaries who left Russia after 1905. The term
> "Yiddishkeit" was
> used to characterize their culture and social
> protest, but when I looked
> it up, Wikipedia tells me:
>
> *"Yiddishkeit* (Yiddish
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish>:
> ?????????? /*yidishkeyt*/ in standard
> transcription) literally means
> "Jewishness", i.e. "/a Jewish way of life/", in the
> Yiddish
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish> language. It
> has come to mean the
> "Jewishness" or "Jewish essence" of Ashkenazi Jews
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews> in
> general and the
> traditional Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern and
> Central Europe in
> particular. In particular, it is associated with the
> popular culture
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture> or
> folk
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk> practices of
> Yiddish-speaking Jews,
> such as popular religious traditions, Eastern
> European Jewish food
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_cuisine>,
> Yiddish humour
>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_humor#Eastern_European_Jewish_humor>,
>
> shtetl <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl> life,
> and klezmer
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klezmer> music, among
> other things.
>
> Before the Haskalah
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah> and the
> emancipation of Jews
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Emancipation>
> in Europe, central to /Yiddishkeit/ were the study
> of Torah
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah> and Talmud
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud> for men, and a
> family and communal
> life governed by the observance of Jewish Law for
> men and women. Among
> Haredi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism>
> Jews of Eastern
> European descent, who compose the majority of Jews
> who still speak
> Yiddish in their every-day lives, the word has
> retained this meaning.[1]
> <http://www.yiddishkeit.org/>
>
> But with secularization
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization>,
> /Yiddishkeit/ has come to encompass not just
> traditional Jewish
> religious practice, but a broad range of movements,
> ideologies,
> practices, and traditions in which Ashkenazi Jews
> have participated and
> retained their sense of "Jewishness". /Yiddishkeit/
> has been identified
> in manners of speech, in styles of humor, in
> patterns of association.
> Another quality often associated with /Yiddishkeit/
> is an emotional
> attachment and identification with the Jewish
> people.[2]"
> <http://www.ou.org/about/judaism/yz.htm#yiddishkeit>
>
> That doesn't seem to be much related to social
> protest or anything near
> to what Tillie Olsen grew up with. Does anyone out
> there know anything
> more about this term and its association with
> Messianic/revolutionary
> movements among Ashkenazy Jews at the turn of the
> century?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joanna
>
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