THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 183ilim poets. Prominent among them was Jehudeh Loeb Gordon (1830-92) of
Vilna, whose poem Hakitzab Ammi (Awake, my people) came to be regarded as
the credo of the Haskalah in the Pale. Secular attitudes and the cultivation
of Hebrew went hand in hand, and from 1863 were systematically promoted by
the Society for the Dissemination of Jewish Culture in Russia. By the end of the
century, Hebrew was sufficiently well developed for its most enthusiastic pro-
moters to think of turning it to everyday use in their homes. Unable to realize
their ambitions in the conservative social atmosphere of the established Jewish
communities, where their linguistic innovations were often thought to be down-
right sacrilegious, they began to contemplate emigration to Palestine. In this
way, a direct intellectual link can be observed between the Haskalah, the
Hebrew Revival, and cultural Zionism.^9
The Yiddish Revival occurred at a slightly later date. Whereas Yiddish - a
branch of Middle High German exported to Poland-Lithuania in the Middle
Ages and commonly known as zargon (jargon) - had been mainly preserved by
the oral tradition, it, too, in the hands of modern publicists and grammarians,
was converted into a literary and political medium. In Poland especially, where
opposition to the secular use of Hebrew was strongest, Yiddish came to be pre-
ferred in the Jewish press and in Jewish secular literature. Written in the
Hebrew alphabet, it was first used for popular prose and poetry in the sixteenth
century, and was later developed by the Chassidim for disseminating the chron-
icles and legends of their sect. Later it was adopted for modern prose composi-
tion and for poetry and drama. Interestingly enough, many of its practitioners,
such as Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) of ZamoSC, began their careers as Polish
and Hebrew writers, moving into Yiddish at the turn of the century. Owing to
the Nazi Holocaust, however, the best known of modern Yiddish writers, Isaac
Bakvish Singer (born 1904, in Radzymin), will probably be the last.^10
The language issue was of crucial importance. In 1897, the mother tongue of
over 90 per cent of the Jews in the Pale and in Galicia was still Yiddish; Hebrew,
as the scriptural language, was no more spoken in everyday life than Latin was
spoken by Catholic Poles or Old Church Slavonic by Russians. At the same
time, a certain proportion of Jews had always possessed a working knowledge
of German, Polish, or Russian as a means for communicating with their Gentile
neighbours. Now, a distinct element among the educated classes could be seen
to be abandoning Yiddish altogether. An estimate of 1913 put the proportion of
Jews in the Pale with Polish or Russian as their mother tongue at 7 per cent.
Hence the long-term effects of secularization were divisive in some respects and
cohesive in others. The assimilatory trend had helped to narrow the gulf
between East European Jewry and the Gentile population at large. In this, in
Prussia and in western Galicia, where Yiddish-speakers could adapt most read-
ily to the German environment, it was very successful. Simultaneously, it served
to erect new barriers, not only between the Jew of German culture and the Jew
of Polish or of Russian culture, but also between the assimilated on the one hand
and the unassimilated on the other. The mid-century Hebrew trend was