Leon Pinsker’s Proto-Zionist Pamphlet Autoemancipation! in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Skeptical Yiddish Reworking
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.45.2.10Keywords:
Leon Pinsker, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, territorialist nationalism, adaptation, German, YiddishAbstract
Leon Pinsker’s pamphlet Autoemancipation! (1882), a seminal text of early Jewish nationalism, arguably established Zionism as a movement functioning in the German language. Soon after its publication, the renowned Yiddish writer Sh. Y. Abramovitch produced a Yiddish language version (1884). Abramovitsh’s rendering is above all an adaptation of German or Western European political and cultural concepts and vocabulary to the Jewish, Eastern European Yiddish-speaking milieu, with changes in vocabulary, rhetorical strategies, and cultural references. Abramovitsh reworked the pamphlet according to his own thinking on the plight of Jews in the Russian Empire and a possible nationalist solution, as exemplified in his contemporary novels. In the article, I compare the language in which several socio-political concepts are expressed in the two texts in order to determine whether Abramovitsh, in his ideological skepticism, also subtly adapts the content of the nationalist thesis.
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