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Introduction: Aural Mokum
What is the sound of Jewishness? A cursory consideration might turn up the typical list: a mournful clarinet solo, a primordial shofar bleat, an exuberant rendition of Hava Nagila, a simple ‘Oy’. Silence, even, might be posited, a nod to the ‘unspeakability’ of the Shoah. These ‘iconic sounds’ conjure up the typical images of Jewish life, the generalised and imagined spaces of Jewishness that Morris suggests are distant and fabricated, displaced and fetishised (Morris 2001, 374). For many, this may well be the case. But for a number of Amsterdammers, ‘Jewishness’ is heard on a daily basis in the tone and timbre of the Dutch language itself. A significant number of Yiddish words have been integrated into Dutch vocabulary through centuries of Jewish interaction and assimilation, influencing common phrasing and pronunciation and coming to signify the language of the street, the echte Amsterdam (Fuks-Mansfield 2003).
To a small but dedicated set of individuals, the aural/oral presence of Yiddish in Dutch is both strange and familiar, a whispered entreaty to ‘go deeper’ into the languages in order to understand their resonant relationship. Its familiarity is complex and far from complete; equally palpable as its presence is the sense that part of it is missing. Koosjer Nederlands [Kosher Dutch], as it has been called by Van Kamp and Van der Wijk (2006), evokes the enigmatic in the everyday, giving voice to the often silent state of Amsterdam’s Jewish past. Today’s ‘Yiddishists’ build their knowledge of the language together, through historical texts and musical recordings, attempting not to revive or reawaken a purely Yiddish sound-world but to uncover what lies dormant within Dutch, in order to better understand their own often inexplicable sense of connection to the language. Why do they feel such a strong affinity towards Yiddish, they wonder, when the vast majority of them are not Jewish and were raised in a completely secular household? What does this fuzzy but felt sense of ‘Jewishness’ mean in light of Amsterdam’s Semitic social history, and the current tension between Dutch secularism and multiculturalism?
The sense of Jewishness they feel has a unique texture linked to their status as Amsterdammers. Jewishness, as I here define it in contrast to Judaism, is an embodied, sensorial state cultivated in the cultural and linguistic practices characteristic of a place – in this case, Amsterdam. Where Judaism is religious, exclusive, and timeless (as Jews generally believe their souls, and the souls of future converts, have always been Jewish), this Jewishness is at once socio-cultural and specifically historical. By specifically historical, I mean that it is linked (by those embodying it) to a particular period of Amsterdam’s temporal trajectory, and part of a common heritage that remains embedded in Amsterdam’s linguistic, cultural, and physical landscapes. Often it is encountered in the interstitial and intersubjective spaces of city life, such as the man who calls out ‘de mazzel!’ [a modified ‘mazal tov’ blessing here meaning ‘goodbye’] as he takes leave of an old friend at the market, or the playful intonation of the woman on the stalled tram who, rather than submitting to road rage, asks loudly, playfully, rhetorically, staat er een konijn op de tramrails [is there a rabbit on the tram tracks]? For many people I spoke to, such as Yiddish singer Shura, such typical communicative form and content bespeak the rich Jewish history of the city, setting the tone for contemporary interaction, and differentiating it from other places like Rotterdam, with its (to her ears) hard-edged, humourless dialect. Amsterdam’s Jewishness is found in this “sonic sensibility”, a tacit knowledge and a potent factor in shaping people’s understanding of themselves and others sharing their civic space (Feld 1996, 97).
And yet, the majority of Dutch speakers do not share this sonic sensibility, and remain unaware of the presence of Yiddish in their language.[1] There is nothing essentially or enigmatically ‘Jewish’ about the Yiddish influences coursing through Dutch. Though the topic of the present ethnography is Yiddish speech and song, typically a signifier of Ashkenazi Judaism, making sense of the Koosjer Nederlands phenomenon requires a broader look at just where this ‘Yiddish sound-world’ is socially situated, and who is compelled and able to participate, Jews and non-Jews alike. Speaking one warm afternoon on a café patio in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, Shura’s eyes glow as she likens Yiddish song to ‘a levenslied, a song about life; people that care for anything dealing with life in a very vivid way, they're on board.’ This is music for anyone who’s ‘into humanity,’ she says, a sonic celebration of enduring existence. Musicians like Shura travel the world, sharing the Yiddish sound with rapt and responsive audiences, cognizant of how well they respond to the music’s potent mix of ‘sorrow and joy.’ Placing this largely uncritical appraisal of the humanist qualities of Yiddish song into the contemporary European sociopolitical context, however, enables us to discern the subtle notes of discordance in this soundscape. Not everyone ‘hears’ Yiddish in Dutch, and not everyone ‘listens’ to the triumphant humanity in Yiddish song. Listening, especially to a ‘heritage language’ like Yiddish, is a ‘technology’, a deeply social process that ‘reveal[s] significant characteristics about the particular social situations in which people are listening’ (Kelman 2006, 130).
This study of civic Jewishness in Amsterdam enters into the ongoing dialogue about memory, identity and sound in European Jewish studies, taking sensory experience seriously as an ontological practice. But rather than examining the more overt aural practices of (virtual) Jewish communities (Gruber 2002), or clinging to the conceptual ideas of silence and unspeakability in the still rippling wake of the Shoah (Agamben 1999), it pursues the ways people are actually experiencing contact with something they consider Jewish. In these pages, following a brief history of European Yiddishism and Jewish Amsterdam, and a theoretical overview of listening, you will hear the voices of these Dutch individuals speaking about their own understandings of this Yiddish sound-world – ‘aural Mokum’[2] – opened up in their daily speech and singing practices, and the significance of this space to their lives as social subjects in the Netherlands.[3] We will be hearing what they have to say, but also listening to what is opened up beyond the immediacy of their words, to what they are saying about not only Jewishness but its relationship to what can constitute Dutch social identity itself, in light of the politicisation of multiculturalism and ethnic integration that is currently polarising the nation.