Herbert Paper obituary

[Sarah Benor]

Dear Jewish languages list,

I'm sad to inform you of the death of Herbert H. Paper, who taught for many years at the University of Michigan and Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Dr. Paper published dozens of articles and reviews on Jewish languages, especially Judeo-Persian and Yiddish. He edited an important volume on Jewish languages:

Paper, Herbert, ed. 1978. Jewish Languages: Themes and Variations: Proceedings of Regional Conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies Held at the University of Michigan and New York University in March-April 1975. Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies.

Below is the death announcement sent out by Hebrew Union College, as well as a review he wrote in 1995. I'd be interested to hear others' memories of Dr. Paper.

Sarah Benor

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It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Dr. Herbert H. Paper, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Near Eastern Languages. Dr. Paper served on our Cincinnati Graduate School and Rabbinical School faculty with great distinction, intellectual vigor, warmth, humor, and menchlichkeit.

His extraordinary knowledge of many languages, his special electives in Yiddish language, and his quick and ready wit will long be remembered by his many colleagues, students, and friends.

Our heartfelt condolences to his wife Bess, his family, and his friends.

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Wexler, "The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew"

The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic past  by

Paul Wexler

Review by: Herbert H. Paper

The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 85, No. 3/4 (Jan. - Apr., 1995), pp. 451-452

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1454740 .

By strange coincidence, two days before my copy of  this book arrived from the 

editor of JQR, I received the gift of a reprint from the same author on a similar subject 

entitled "Yiddish-the  Fifteenth Slavic Language: A Study of Partial Language Shift 

from Judeo-Sorbian to German," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 

91 (1991):  9-150.  In both works Wexler strives mightily to prove (1) that Modern 

Hebrew has been so heavily influenced by Russian that it has become a Slavic lan- 

guage; and (2) that Yiddish is a Germanic metamorphosis of  (a textually unattested) 

Judeo-Sorbian, and hence is also a Slavic language in a Germanic outer garb. Sorbian 

is a West Slavic language spoken in southeastern Germany and western Poland, and 

so for Wexler, the likeliest  candidate as the first Slavic  language to be learned by 

German-speaking Jews in their move from the West to Eastern Europe. Both mono- 

graphs contain a wealth of  interesting examples of  loanwords and loan-translations 

from Slavic languages. However, in my opinion, Wexler's basic argument about both 

Modern Hebrew and Yiddish is flawed. Regardless of how many loanwords and loan- 

translations from Slavic languages can be found in both languages, by the standard 

tests of  linguistic genetic  affiliation, Modern Hebrew remains a Semitic language,

and Yiddish remains a Germanic one. 

Wexler is quite correct in criticizing the traditional "revivalist" claim for Modern 

Hebrew. That was and remains an exaggeration. The essential point of  the revival 

claim-if  we take the term "revival" only as a metaphor-is  to be seen in the new 

phenomenon that at the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time in many cen- 

turies, generations of  children were acquiring Hebrew as their first language. He is 

also quite right in insisting that Modern Hebrew is not to be piously affiliated directly 

with Biblical Hebrew. The many intervening centuries of post-Biblical and Rabbinic 

Hebrew were surely of  considerable influence and importance in the history of  the 

language. The claims of the pioneers of Modern Hebrew were of course exaggerated 

in their enthusiasm for their program of having the language become the primary spo- 

ken vehicle of the Jews of  Palestine. But Wexler's claim about Modern Hebrew as a 

Slavic language is-to  put it mildly-no  less exaggerated. He states his major thesis 

in his Introduction (p. 6) in boldface print: "The roots of  Modern Hebrew go back 

to the 9th century when Jews in the bilingual German-Slavic lands first began to make 

a partial language shift to German lexicon, and the revival of Modern Hebrew rightly 

belongs to the one-thousand-year history of  Yiddish (and Slavic) and not to that of 

Semitic Hebrew." Surely the coexistence of  both Rabbinic Hebrew and Old Yiddish 

for so many years must have had a mutually interdependent effect, to say nothing of 

the continuous knowledge  of  Rabbinic Hebrew among Jews from non-Ashkenazi 

lands as well. 

There can be little doubt that the native language(s) of the early pioneers of spoken 

and written Modern Hebrew-primarily  Yiddish and Russian-had  a profound effect

on every aspect of Hebrew structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. But 

such influence does not alter the ultimate genetic affiliation of the language. Coterri- 

torial languages, widespread bilingualism, and extensive interlanguage borrowings are 

found in many other well-known instances. For example, no matter how many Arabic 

borrowings have come  into Modern Persian-and  in earlier times the number was 

enormous, together with the Arabic morphology of many items-Persian  remains an 

Iranian language and hence an Indo-European language. 

Or let us take this example from English, the opening clause of  the Preamble to 

the Constitution of the United States: " We, the people of the United States of America, 

in order to form a more perfect union, . . ." Only the italicized items are of Germanic 

origin; all the others are borrowed and/or adapted from French, Latin, and Italian. It 

is precisely these "small change" words and suffixes that point unerringly to the fact 

that English is  a Germanic language. I have little doubt that a careful count of  the 

Swadesh-Lees lexicostatistic word-list for Modern Hebrew would show that almost 

all the words on that list have clear Semitic cognates. 

I am writing these lines in the summer of  1992 in Israel. On the table in front of 

me is a milk carton with these nicely printed words facing me: ixVtr  IWnv 

)X  '1V  nfl 

mrnIM7  (haldv tari, ddl ?umdn, mefustar, homogeni), "fresh milk, low fat, pasteurized, 

homogenized." Every term is a loan-translation (dal ?umin) or an adapted loanword 

(homogeni and mefustar-a  pu'al  (passive) participle made up from the four conso- 

nants comprising the name "Pasteur"). The pattern for this latter kind of borrowing and 

integration into the Hebrew verb system is of  long-standing practice and very wide- 

spread. This example alone, in my opinion, is proof enough of the Semitic affiliation 

of Modern Hebrew, quite irrespective of the fact that at its beginnings, Hebrew had long 

since ceased to be anyone's first language. Wexler is certainly correct in the evidence 

which he  musters to show the heavy influence of  Russian and Yiddish upon the 

development of Modern Hebrew. But to leap from that to the conclusion that therefore 

Modern Hebrew is a Slavic language is a giant and quite unjustified jump. 

Much the same can  be said for his  proposed Slavic  affiliation for Yiddish. If 

Jews who moved eastward from Germany a thousand years ago did first adopt Sor- 

bian as their primary language, why are there no Judeo-Sorbian texts written in the 

Hebrew alphabet? Indeed, even for later times, there are precious few Judeo-Slavic 

texts of  any kind. Our evidence for Yiddish-Slavic bilingualism is primarily of  an 

indirect nature, deduced from the Eastern-Yiddish Slavic loanwords and loan-trans- 

lations. For example, the existence in Yiddish of  Slavic nominal diminutive suffix 

morphemes and of  Slavic  sentence  connectives  is  proof  enough that there must 

have been a long-standing and widespread Slavic-Yiddish bilingualism among Jews 

in their long co-territorial existence with Slavic speech. Slight language contact and 

literary language contact alone do not provide the basis for the borrowing of  such 

intimate features. 

Despite my criticism of  the basic thesis that Wexler elaborates in both works, I 

heartily recommend that students of  both Modern Hebrew and Yiddish study these 

works for the very interesting data to be found there. Wexler is an accomplished Slav- 

icist and there is much to be learned from the manner in which he marshals the data 

that reflect the deep influence upon both languages from various Slavic tongues, even 

if  one does not accept his basic conclusion. 

[Sarah Benor]

With permission, I'm forwarding this message from David Bunis about his memories of Herbert Paper.

Sarah

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David M. Bunis <david...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 11:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Jewish Languages] Herbert Paper obituary
To: sbeno...@gmail.com

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for informing me of the sad news of Herbert Paper's death.

I met him during the ground-breaking conference on Jewish Languages in New York in 1975. It was the first conference in which I presented a paper and had the merit to meet many Jewish language scholars. It was clear to me then that Paper was an extremely intelligent and quick-witted man, as well as a warm, heymisher Jew. Since then I met him from time to time at other conferences. His comments and observations were always impressive. Just two weeks ago I happened to mention his broad definition of a Jewish language text - anything written in the Hebrew alphabet, if I understood him correctly - at a lecture on Early Judeo-Persian given by Prof. Ludwig Paul within the context of our Jewish language seminar series here at Hebrew University. After mentioning Paper's name I wondered to myself how her was.

I'm sure Herbert Paper - olov hasholem - will be missed by all who had the privilege to interact with him.

All good wishes,

David

[Sarah Benor]

Shared with permission from Bernard Spolsky.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bernard Spolsky <bspo...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 10:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Jewish Languages] re: Herbert Paper obituary
To: sbeno...@gmail.com

My main memories of Herbert Paper come from a sabbatical we spent in Israel at the time time many years ago.  He had just discovered someone writing and publishing poems in Judeo-Persian and was excited to find the language alive.  He rushed up to the Hebrew University, he said, to tell his colleagues, but they were not interested in the living language; only in the old texts with which they worked. He combined deep scholarship with an appreciation of real language use, and will be missed.

Bernard Spolsky

[Ghil'ad Zuckermann]

From: Bernard Spolsky <bspo...@gmail.com>

He rushed up to the Hebrew University, he said, to tell his colleagues, but they were not interested in the living language; only in the old texts with which they worked.

 

How sad and telling. Thank you, Bernard (and Sarah), for sharing this with us. יהי זכרו ברוך

 

ביז הונדערט און צוואַנציק
 

Ghil'ad גלעד

 

------------------------------------------

Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages

School of Humanities

The University of Adelaide

Adelaide SA 5005

Australia

 

gzuck...@gmail.com

 

http://www.facebook.com/ProfessorZuckermann

http://www.zuckermann.org/

http://adelaide.academia.edu/zuckermann/

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/ghilad.zuckermann