Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

Book ID/图书代码： 14240005B09455

English Summary/英文概要： For nearly a thousand years a unique civilisation flourished across Europe, stretching southward from the Baltic to the Black Sea, eastward from the Oder River to the central Russian Uplands, an area larger than all the countries of western Europe put together. It was a civilisation with its own language, its own variety of religion, its own literature and decorative arts, its own legal system, its own social and political structure. It was one of the most successful and creative civilisations of medieval and early modern times; all it lacked was a state of its own. It was the Yiddish Civilisation.
Ancient theology and modern history has led Jews to see their Eastern European background almost exclusively as a saga of exile, oppression and persecution. But this ‘lachrymose’ school of Jewish history obscures the reality of a civilisation which for most of its centuries was so prestigious that if a Jew converted to Christianity he or she was as like as not to be raised immediately to the nobility. So respected, in fact, that conversion not from but to Judaism was frequent enough to add uncountable numbers of new proselytes to the Jewish people in spite of constant vigilance and action by the Christian Church.
This book is intended to redress the balance. To show how the Jews of Austria and Bavaria, of Poland and Lithuania, of Bohemia, Hungary and Romania, of Byelorussia and the Ukraine, were for most of their history by no means all backward, impoverished and isolated dwellers in the Shtelakh, the small market towns of central and eastern Europe.
It narrates how it was the Roman Empire that converted what had been a Middle Eastern and North African people into a European nation; how the division of that Empire separated its Jews into two, western and eastern, parental bloodlines; how both sides were nurtured by the Romans’ successor states until they mingled again centuries later in central Europe and fused, to give birth to the Yiddish-speaking people.
It relates how the Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but one of Europe’s nations, ultimately more populous than many others—eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh, and how their contribution to central and eastern Europe’s economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founders founder-nations of modern Europe.
It tells how the civilisation that gave us Marx, Freud and Einstein, Süsskind von Trimburg and Franz Kafka, Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and Alfred Schnittke, found in eastern Europe a Goldene Medine, a Golden Land—until the invention of the ethnic nation state in the nineteenth century made it impossible for two civilisations to share the same territory.
And finally, it recounts how mass emigration to the USA at the close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth carried many of its beliefs, values and traditions to the other side of the Atlantic, where they served among the contributors, through film, music, literature and the arts, not to speak of commerce and enterprise, to what we think of as the American way of life—and therefore, in this era of globalisation, to the way of the entire world.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 有一个很特别的文明在整个欧洲盛行了差不多一千年了，南面从波罗的海延伸到黑海，东面从奥得河延伸到俄罗斯高地的中部，这个文明的面积比整个西欧所有国家加起来的面积都要大。它有自己的语言，宗教文化也相当多样化，有自己的文学宝库和装饰艺术，有独立的法律体系，自己的社会政治结构。它是中世纪和近代众多文明国家中最成功也是最有创造性的文明，唯一缺的恐怕就是属于自己的国家，这就是依地文明。 在古神学和当代历史的影响下，犹太人开始把自己的发源地东欧看作是一个充满流放、压迫和迫害的传奇。但是这一段悲哀的犹太人历史掩盖了文明国都的真相，几百年来，这个文明国都的声望之高，要是一位犹太人皈依基督教的话，那就好像不被当成贵族来培养了。如此德高望重，所以我们更常看到的是人们皈依犹太教而不是从犹太教改信其他宗教，这样一来，尽管基督教时时警惕也会采取必要的行动，但是无数人还是加入到了犹太人民的队伍中。 这本书就是希望平衡一下其中的不协调。其实生活在奥地利、巴伐利亚、波兰、立陶宛、波希米亚、匈牙利、罗马尼亚、白俄罗斯、乌克兰根本不是所谓的生活在中欧和东欧小集市上的落后、冥顽不化、贫穷孤僻的居民。 《依地文明：一个被遗忘的国家的兴衰》叙述了罗马帝国如何把一个生活在中东和北非的民族打造成一个欧洲国家；这个帝国的分裂怎么又会把犹太民族拆散成东和西两个不同的血脉；这两个不同的血脉是怎样在罗马帝国灭亡之后的继任王国的滋润下各自发展，又在数百年之后重新融合、交融，孕育出了这个会说依地语的民族。 作品还叙述了会说依地语的犹太人为什么不只是一个宗教或者语言的少数民族，相反他们是一个欧洲民族，人口比其他很多小国家都要多得多----恐怕到最后犹太人人口数量还会超出波斯尼亚人、克罗地亚、丹麦人、爱沙尼亚人、拉托维亚、斯洛伐克人；以及犹太人为中欧和东欧的经济、社会、文化发展所做出的贡献怎么会和他们的人口不成比例呢。所以会说依地语的犹太人算得上是当代欧洲的元老级民族了。 《依地文明：一个被遗忘的国家的兴衰》讲述了一个哺育出马克思、弗洛伊德、爱因斯坦、海涅的文明国都如何在东欧建立起那个金色国都----这种状况一直持续到19世纪，那时出现了群体民族国家的概念，从那以后两种不同的文明就可以共同分享同一个领地了。

Awards/获奖情况：

About the Author/作者介绍： Paul Kriwaczek, an Austrian Jew, was born in 1937 in Vienna. He grew up in north-west London, where the Yiddish language and culture were still strong among his friends’ parents. After a career with the BBC External Services and as a successful programme-maker for BBC television, he retired in the mid 1990s and lives in north London.

Format:HARDCOVER ILLUSTRATED

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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