A personal history

A recent book dealing with the challenge of postmodernism to those who write Jewish history recognizes the problem of historians’ personal history in shaping their views of what they are describing and analyzing. By now, I am sure you have become aware of my prejudices as I have recounted the sociolinguistic history of the Jews: my background as a Zionist modern orthodox Israeli brought up as a speaker of English and now living by choice in a Hebrew-dominated society. In this chapter, which deals with the addition of English and Spanish to the sociolinguistic ecology of the Jews, I start with a personal autobiographical account of the languages of my own background, which will give me a chance to depict the changes that have occurred to many Jews in the last two centuries or so.

My mother’s oldest known ancestor was Jane Benjamin, identified in the 1841 British census as a forty-six-year-old hawker living with her daughter in the East End of London. Born in about 1795 in Holland, she probably married in London in 1816. My assumption is that she was a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi who picked up enough English to be able to work as a peddler. Her daughter, Esther, was born in London, presumably growing up bilingual in Yiddish and English. In 1860 Esther became the wife of Julius Green, a Polish-born tailor who had arrived in England some time before 1848, when he was married by the Chief Rabbi to Mary Solomons, London-born, who died ten years later after bearing two children.