HUMSS - Gil Ribak

Between Translation and Transliteration: Imagination and Racial Terminology in Yiddish

An initial question in my presentation is how did 19th-century Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe portray Black people, a population that scarcely existed in that region, with which Yiddish-speaking Jews had virtually no contact? After a brief explanation of what is Yiddish and why are such research questions pertinent to wider fields, I turn to some of the methodological and historical challenges involved in answering such questions. Rather than treating racism as a binary, dichotomous concept, where individuals, groups, and cultures are deemed as either racist or not, my study presents a spectrum of attitudes and values, where one can be genuinely anti-racist, yet harbor racist judgments or imagery.