The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language is Taking Shape

Scholars and computer scientists at Columbia University and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem are working together to help the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish language take shape. It will be the first comprehensive, scholarly dictionary of the language spoken by millions of Ashkenazic Jews for nearly 1,000 years.

Four volumes of a proposed 12 have been published; volumes five and six are nearing completion.

“It is an all-embracing work, the Yiddish parallel to the Oxford English Dictionary,” says Marvin Herzog, Atran Professor of Yiddish at Columbia and editor in chief of the dictionary. “It is a kind of national memory, containing the totality of the language through history and from region to region.”

Herzog described the dictionary as a “tool of scholarship. Because Yiddish is a fusion of several languages, the dictionary will be a resource for scholars of Yiddish and other languages as well — German, for instance, and the Slavic languages.”

The first four volumes, published independently and now distributed by the Magnes Press of Jerusalem are entirely in Yiddish. Beginning with the fifth volume, the dictionary’s entries will have, in addition, English and Hebrew glosses and Latin-letter transcriptions of every Yiddish entry word.

Most entries will include not only Yiddish definitions, but the various meanings of each word through the years as reflected in citations from Yiddish literature and speech.

THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

The idea for the dictionary goes back at least to the turn of the century, when Alfred Landau, a Viennese philologist, set to work on a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary. But Landau’s scholarly standards were so exacting and his resources so meager that when he died in 1935 his work was incomplete. A parallel project was begun by a team of Soviet scholars in the 1920’s, but both the scholars and their work fell victim to Hitler and Stalin.

In the early 1950’s, the renowned Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark was commissioned to begin work on a comprehensive scholarly dictionary by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research.

The institute, founded in Vilna in Poland, had been the repository of Landau’s painstakingly compiled resources and notes, most of which were lost before YIVO was relocated in New York during World War II. The Institute for Yiddish Lexicology at the City University of New York was created to support the project and Prof. Nathan Susskind of CUNY was appointed its director.

AGONIZINGLY SLOW PACE

The pace of the work was agonizingly but necessarily slow. As with the Oxford English Dictionary, which took 40 years to finish, the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language was built by the patient labor of dozens of volunteer readers, who copied out millions of citation slips by hand.

Mark died in 1975 and Herzog became the project’s editor in chief. The editorial work is now centered at Columbia and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with scholars from both institutions and from other universities serving on the editorial board.

The work has been made easier and faster recently by computers at Columbia and in Jerusalem. The computers not only speed up the lexigraphical work, but also make it possible for the two teams to communicate with each other efficiently as they work. Satellite communication allows discussions of policy to flow back and forth between Israeli and American computers within hours. Textual material is also sent by satellite.

PROJECT SUPPORTED BY NEH GRANTS

The project has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and individual donors since 1967. The National Endowment has awarded three grants to Columbia since 1981, when the dictionary became formally based at the University. Its most recent grants, for July 1985 through June 1987, include $250,000 outright and $290,000 in dollar-for-dollar matching funds, bringing the total possible NEH funding for the period to $540,000, the largest award in the nation in its funding category.

With the addition of the $290,000 in matching private gifts to be raised, the total funding for the dictionary for the two-year period would rise to $830,000.

Scholars at other institutions in the United States and Europe also contribute their talent and time. At the University of Trier in West Germany, scholars have provided both materials and expertise in the Yiddish of the 13th through the 16th centuries, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has provided etymological material.

The editorial board includes scholars from City and Brooklyn Colleges, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the University of Texas and Yale University.