Zygmunt StępińskiDirector's Preface

The Power of Words

The concept behind The Power of Words exhibition is based on the premise that the history of Jewish languages could serve as a vital key to understanding Jewish culture. We wish to highlight that this culture has, from the very beginning, been strongly text-oriented and that language has played an essential role in it. This is reflected primarily in the foundation of Judaism on the revealed text and the idea of the sanctity of the Hebrew language; in the creation of new Jewish languages shaped by frequent encounters with other languages due to migration; in the multilingual character of Jewish communities and, finally, in the language debates that arose in different historical periods. These issues gained prominence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the use of Hebrew and Yiddish became ideologically charged, expressing diverse forms of Jewish identity.

In terms of the exhibition's innovative character and its relevance, our approach is very much in line with the contemporary trends in linguistics which examine the fluidity and transformation of languages following contact with other languages, as well as historical, social, and political changes. We aim to step beyond the narrowly defined national narratives, pointing to the fact that languages are shaped by intercultural borderlands, and that linguistic cultures can exist regardless of political or geographical boundaries. Polish visitors may be surprised to learn that Yiddish contains a strong Slavic component, and that the Polish language includes many words of Hebrew and Yiddish origin.

I do believe that The Power of Words exhibition will contribute to achieving POLIN Museum's most important strategic goal-deepening relations with the public by offering engaging experiences and referring to contemporary discourse. Not only does the exhibition present the diversity of Jewish languages and their role in shaping and sustaining Jewish identity, but it also prompts us to pose a number of questions that seem quite pressing today-how important is communication between people? What are the strategies of linguistic communication in the era of migration and globalization? To what extent does language shape our reality and reflect our system of values?

Zygmunt StępińskiDirector, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Pandemic mask/amulet designed by Ken Goldman, Israel, 2020

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Resia Schor, Mezuzah, 2001, an assemblage

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Tamara SztymaThe Obvious and Less Obvious Powers of Jewish Languages

Why organize an exhibition about Jewish languages at POLIN Museum in Warsaw, Poland? Today, one doesn't often hear them being spoken in the streets. Occasionally, one might hear Hebrew-most likely spoken by Israelis residing in Poland or just visiting, for all sorts of reasons. Some Poles have surely heard of Yiddish, even if not many would recognize the sound of the language spoken by several million Polish Jews prior to the Second World War. The majority of Yiddish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust. Yiddish did not die away completely in postwar Poland, but the small number of survivors who still spoke it there began to diminish in the subsequent decades.

Today, there are very few traces of Jewish languages in Poland-Hebrew inscriptions can be found on tilted matzevot in Jewish cemeteries. They emerge from beneath layers of plaster in the surviving synagogues, nowadays increasingly restored. However, in order to get to them, we must be really determined. We more often stumble upon them by chance. The once-rich Yiddish visual sphere-shop signs, street posters, newspapers-has been obliterated from our landscape. Very few people are able to read and interpret books and documents held in libraries and archives. There are, indeed, a growing number of individuals who study and research Jewish languages-at universities or institutions such as the Schorr Foundation and the Yiddish Cultural Centre. These languages are also heard at Jewish culture festivals and are of interest to people involved in the realm of culture. Nonetheless, the knowledge and understanding of Jewish languages remain practically non-existent in wider society. This gap is made even more difficult to bridge by the difference in alphabets-Hebrew letters appear to most as strange arabesques. The question arises: what is the point of organizing an exhibition devoted to languages written in an alphabet that most visitors will not be able to read?

We may seek an answer to this question by posing another question: "Jewish languages-meaning what?" Many people in today's Poland have a very faint idea about what language Polish Jews used to speak before the war, or which languages Jews speak today in various corners of the globe. The term 'Jewish language' is sometimes associated with Hebrew, and sometimes with Yiddish. There is no widespread awareness of the diversity of Jewish languages or the relationship between Hebrew and other Jewish languages developed in the diaspora. And yet, this is precisely where the key to understanding Jewish culture lies: its ancient roots, religion and rituals, the diaspora and migration, and finally the emancipation, modernization and national revival. Afterall, language is more than just a communication tool-it is also a key to understanding the cultural and historical identity of a given community. It is a code in which culture is encrypted. And even though our analysis will be limited without the command of a given language, examining its history-its origins, functions, and transformations-can nonetheless offer valuable insights into the culture of its speakers. By the same logic, one could construct a compelling narrative about Japanese, Chinese, or Sanskrit.

Fryderyk Kleinmann, Jews with the Torah (Simchat Torah), 1933, oil on canvas

Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, deposit at the Jewish Historical Institute

Torah mantle (17th c.), Torah crown with finials (late 17th c.), Torah shield (1740-1754), Italy

Jewish Museum, Rome

In the case of Jewish culture, the issues related to language are of particular importance. One could venture saying that Jewish culture is built upon a foundation of words and texts-much like in the work Shofar above Temple Mount by Moshe Castel, presented in the exhibition, where the artist placed the walled city of Jerusalem on a pedestal made of Hebrew scrolls and books.

Jewish culture has been characterized by a heightened sensitivity to language, stemming from both the foundation of its religion on divinely revealed text and more than 2,000 years of the multilingual existence of Jewish communities in the diaspora. The languages spoken by Jews over the centuries fulfilled various roles-they shaped the sacred sphere, served everyday communication and culture, and built religious, social, local and national identities. It is in this-along with their diversity and simultaneous cultural continuity-that the source of their power lies.

Hebrew lies at the heart of the history of Jewish languages. Its beginnings are tied to the formation of Jewish ethnic and religious identity in the antiquity. Ivrit-the Hebrew name for the language-comes from the word ivri, meaning 'Hebrew,' which could mean 'one who crosses over' or 'one who passes through.' At the end of the second millennium BCE, this term was used to describe the population inhabiting part of Canaan. The oldest artefacts bearing paleo-Hebrew script date back to the tenth to ninth centuries BCE, i.e. from the times when ancient Jewish statehood and religion were taking shape. By the end of the sixth century BCE, following the so-called Babylonian exile, Hebrew began to give way to other local languages or to coexist with them-primarily with Aramaic, which was then widespread throughout the Near East. It was during this period that the final editing of the Hebrew Bible began, and the Hebrew language came to be referred to as the sacred language-lashon ha-kodesh.

We thus arrive at the issue of the power of language in the context of the sacred. Even though Hebrew gradually ceased to be used in everyday speech, for the next 2,000 years it remained (and to this day remains) a language used in the religious sphere. In this sense, it has never become extinct. Hebrew words-referring to concepts fundamental to Jewish tradition, the shape of its letters, as well as its sound, accompanied Jewish communities in the diaspora over the centuries. From the very beginning, the sanctity of Hebrew stemmed from the reverence Jews had for the Torah which, according to tradition, was given to them in this very language.

After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the study of and commentary on the revealed text ensured both the development and continuity of Judaism. The texts-the Torah scroll, prayers and blessings-played a central role in liturgy. Jewish mystics and Kabbalists attributed supernatural power to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, believing they participated in the divine act of creation. They sought to draw closer to getting to know God through searching for hidden meanings in the Torah and using gematria (a method of interpretation based on assigning numerical values to letters). Hebrew texts of prayers and blessings were placed on synagogue walls and on objects used in worship. Combinations of divine names and anagrams of various verses appeared on mizrakhs (plaques indicating the direction of prayer), on shiviti tablets hung above the cantor's lectern, and on amulets.

Another source of the power of Jewish languages lies in their great diversity and richness, which go hand in hand with preserving cultural continuity. As Jews migrated and settled in new territories, they developed a strategy of adapting to new environments while at the same time preserving their own culture. They adopted local languages spoken by their non-Jewish neighbors and gave them a Jewish character by incorporating Hebrew words and sometimes grammatical forms-most often writing these languages using the Hebrew script. That is how languages such as Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian and many others emerged. These languages were generally written in the Hebrew alphabet and contained a strong Hebrew-Aramaic component, especially in concepts and phrases relating to tradition and ritual. It is worth noting that Jewish communities living in the diaspora were typically multilingual, meaning they used more than one language in their daily lives. Different languages were used complementarily, serving different functions and being associated with different spheres of life.

Finally, the power of Jewish languages can be viewed in the context of ideological and political potential, as well as the power of revival. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new social and political ideologies developed by Jews gave Jewish languages new meanings. The Haskalah movement-or the Jewish Enlightenment-marked the beginning of the emancipation and modernization of European Jews. Haskalah emerged in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, its proponents advocated abandoning distinct Jewish languages and embracing the languages of the societies they lived amongst. On the other, they promoted the scholarly development of Hebrew and its expansion into a new secular domain. Even if this was not the original intention of the early Haskalah ideologues, vernacular languages-especially Yiddish, which was spoken widely by Jews in Eastern Europe-very often became the vehicle for modernization ideas. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of modern Jewish social and political movements, the issue of language became even more ideologically charged. Linguistic acculturation, the dream of a universal language for humanity (Esperanto) as well as debates between Hebraists and Yiddishists over the Jewish national language-all these options reflected different ways in which Jews identified themselves and imagined their future. Two particularly distinct currents emerged at that time-the development of a modern secular Yiddish culture in the United States and Eastern Europe, and the extraordinary revival of Hebrew among Zionist immigrants in Palestine, transforming it into a language of everyday speech, social life and state affairs.

The Power of Words exhibition is an attempt at telling this long and complex story. The introduction familiarizes visitors with the Hebrew alphabet and the ancient history of the Hebrew language. The section entitled More Than a Language is dedicated to Hebrew as a sacred language. The section A Language or Languages? explores how other languages came to replace Hebrew in everyday speech, as well as the multilingual nature of Jewish communities. The final section, Languages and Modern Identity, presents the transformation of Jewish languages under the influence of the Haskalah, emancipation and new ideologies. The exhibition concludes with a brief look at the contemporary state of Jewish languages-the damage inflicted by the Holocaust, the languages' post-vernacular life, and the modern evolution of Hebrew. The element that ties all these sections together is a ribbon painted on the floor that winds its way through the entire exhibition space. It begins at a table displaying the Hebrew alphabet. Along its path, the ribbon flows over some walls, spreading into a decorative pattern woven from Hebrew letters. It symbolizes the continuity of Jewish culture, referring to Dovid Katz's "chain of Jewish languages" in which each new language emerges through a fusion of elements from a previous "inherited" language and components of the surrounding "non-Jewish" language.1

How does one construct a narrative about languages? The exhibition presents several dozen original artefacts connected to the various chapters of this long history-such as a Babylonian magic bowl inscribed in Aramaic (second century CE) from the Berlin City Museum, Jewish funerary stelae with Greek epitaphs (first century BCE) from the National Museum in Warsaw, a Sephardic Torah mantle (seventeenth century) from the Jewish Museum in Rome, parochets richly inscribed in Hebrew (eighteenth century), numerous Hebrew amulets (nineteenth-twentieth centuries) from the Jewish Museum in Prague, and an illuminated Hebrew prayer book (fourteenth century) from the University Library in Wrocław. The iconography presented in reproduction is equally captivating - it offers an insight into ancient artefacts, illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, early printed books and modern Jewish visual culture including newspapers, posters and books.

Finally, contemporary art. The connection between word and image and the idea of the power of words and letters have a strong presence in the work of Jewish artists-both those who are close to religious tradition and those who distance themselves from it.

The first group is represented by the works of Warsaw-based female artists: Monika Krajewska, Ewa Gordon and Helena Czernek, as well as pieces by American artist Mark Podwal, who draws inspiration from the legends of Jewish Prague.

We also present two installations that lend a deeper, more universal and emotional dimension to the themes explored in the exhibition. Israeli artist Oded Ezer created a piece entitled Shattered Language especially for our exhibition. Taking on the role of a typographer documenting war crimes and genocide, he scattered shards of glass across the floor. Outlines of Hebrew and Arabic letters emerge from beneath the shattered glass. According to Ezer, this work speaks not only of the destruction of communities and their languages, but also of language as a source of resistance and survival.

The idea of language as the true territory where culture thrives and develops underpins the concept behind the AR sculpture and video work entitled Pseudo-Territory, created by Ella Ponizowski Bergelson (Berlin) and Anna Elena Torres (Chicago). We can watch a fluid tangle of letters unfolding like a metaphysical layer in a virtual reality presented either through a special mirror or a phone app. The letter-like forms are based on a fusion of paleo-Hebrew, Hebrew and Latin alphabets. Their continuous metamorphosis happens right in front of our eyes and allows us to sense the fluidity of languages, their mutual contact and permeation.2

We do hope that the narrative on Jewish culture that exists through languages, on its diversity and continuity, and its deep reverence for the alphabet will encourage our visitors to reflect more broadly on the cultural role of languages in our history as well as today. Exploring the obvious and less obvious powers of Jewish languages may inspire a more universal reflection on the interweaving of languages in particular, on how languages influence one another, how they transform at a time of mass migration and global culture. Ultimately, it may inspire reflection on our own linguistic identity, on the past and future of our own language.