Separation From The World
The oppressions under which the Jews suffered encouraged an austere view of life. They lived in fear in their Jews' streets, subsisting on what they could earn as peddlers and as dealers in old clothes. Cut off from all participation in public and municipal life, they had to seek in their homes compensation for the things denied them outside. Their family life was intimate, beautified by faith, industry, and temperance. They were loyal to their community. In consequence of their complete segregation from their Christian fellow citizens, the German speech of the ghetto was interladen with Hebraisms, and also with Slavonic elements since the 17th century, when the atrocities of Chmielnicki and his Cossacks drove the Polish Jews back into western Germany. As the common people understood only the books written in this peculiar dialect and printed in Hebrew characters, a voluminous literature of edifying, devotional, and belletristic works sprang up in Judæo-German to satisfy the needs of these readers. Although this output was one-sided, presupposing almost no secular knowledge, its importance in the history of Jewish culture must not be underestimated. The study of the Bible, Talmud, and halakic legal works, with their voluminous commentaries, preserved the plasticity of the Jewish mind, until a new Moses came to lead his coreligionists out of intellectual bondage toward modern culture.
Read more about this topic: German Jews
Famous quotes containing the words separation from, separation and/or world:
“I was the one who was working to destroy the one thing to which I was committed, that is, my relationship with Gilberte; I was doing so by creating, little by little and through the prolonged separation from my friend, not her indifference, but my own. It was toward a long and cruel suicide of the self within myself which loved Gilberte that I continuously set myself ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with cylinder oil, and coat their outsides with sprayed rubber film, and let them statically await the next emergency.”
—Norbert Wiener (1894–1964)