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‘Faust’ author Goethe’s fascination with Yiddish
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is usually remembered as a towering figure of European culture: poet, playwright, scientist, and all-around genius of the Enlightenment.
His drama Faust opens with a scene that echoes the Book of Job, where God makes a wager with the devil over whether a good man can be led astray. What far fewer people know is that Goethe’s connection to the Bible was not just literary. He actually learned Hebrew so he could read it in the original — and his path to Hebrew ran straight through Yiddish.
Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt am Main into a well-to-do Christian family. Frankfurt was also home to a densely packed Jewish quarter, the Judengasse (German for “the Jewish street”). As a boy, he ventured there, feeling both nervous and curious. In his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, published in 1833, he recalled what it was like for a German boy to step into a crowded world of people who dressed differently and spoke a strange-sounding German he called Judendeutsch (Jewish German).
But instead of fear or disdain, what stayed with him was fascination. He remembered friendly people and beautiful girls, and he was struck by the sense that the Jews carried ancient history with them into everyday life. They were, he wrote, “the chosen people of God … walking around in memory of the earliest times.” Even their stubborn attachment to tradition, he felt, deserved respect.
Goethe wanted to see more. He described how he insisted on visiting Jewish schools, attending a circumcision and a wedding, and getting a glimpse of Sukkot. Everywhere, he recalled, he was welcomed, entertained, and invited back. For an 18th-century German boy, this kind of contact with Jewish life was unusual — and it clearly made a lasting impression.
At home, Goethe was buried in languages. His father hired tutors to teach him Latin, Greek, English, French and Italian. Goethe learned quickly but soon grew bored with endless grammar drills. So he did what any restless young writer might do; he turned language learning into a game.
He invented a novel made up of letters exchanged by seven siblings scattered across Europe. Each sibling wrote in a different language: A music historian in Rome wrote in Italian, a Hamburg businessman in English, while a theology student wrote Latin and Greek. The youngest sibling stayed home and wrote in Yiddish. The effect, Goethe later suggested, was both amusing and confusing for the other characters.
That detail is telling. Goethe treated Yiddish as something playful and odd, a kind of Jewish-flavored German. But he knew it well enough to use it creatively.
In his autobiography, he describes the seven-language novel but doesn’t give it a title. We can guess, though, that his Yiddish was the Western Yiddish spoken by Frankfurt Jews at that time. A sentence like ikh vil kaafen flaash (“I want to buy meat”) would have sounded close to the local German dialect, but not quite the same.
Goethe soon realized that if he wanted to understand Yiddish properly, he would have to learn Hebrew. His father arranged a tutor, and young Goethe plunged into a whole new alphabet. Although the location of his childhood notebooks are unknown, two of its pages are located online. On them, he carefully writes out the Hebrew letters, their names, sounds and even their numerical values. His notebook contains reminders to himself that Hebrew words are built from three-letter roots and urges himself to practice again and again so the forms would stick in his memory.
It wasn’t easy. Goethe later wrote that he got used to reading from right to left and identifying the letters, but was confused by all the dots and dashes — the vowel points, that seemed to complicate things even further. Still, he pushed on. He learned to read the Hebrew Bible and even tried his hand at writing a German epic based on stories from Genesis.
His interest in Yiddish didn’t disappear with childhood. When he was 17, Goethe apparently wrote a Purim play in Judendeutsch, written in Hebrew letters, complete with a translation into High German. Years later, he translated King Solomon’s Song of Songs into German. The Bible became a lifelong companion — not just as literature, but as a moral guide. “I loved and valued the Bible,” he wrote, “and owed my moral education almost entirely to it.”
As Goethe grew older, his ideas expanded in many directions. Influenced by the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, as well as Persian, Sufi and Buddhist writings, he developed a broad, inclusive worldview. He dreamed of something he called Weltliteratur — world literature — a shared cultural space where the works of all peoples could speak to one another.
Near the end of his life, Goethe said that the age of world literature had arrived, and that everyone should help bring it about. Seen this way, his childhood journey — from the Judengasse, through Yiddish, to Hebrew — was more than a youthful curiosity. It was an early step toward a vision in which cultures, languages and traditions are not sealed off from one another, but connected.
For Forward readers, there is something especially satisfying in this story. Yiddish appears here not as a joke or a dead-end dialect, but as a bridge — linking everyday Jewish life to the Bible, and even carrying one of Europe’s greatest writers toward a deeper engagement with Jewish tradition and, ultimately, with the idea of world culture itself.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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