Listening to the Languages of the People

Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French

Description
Table of contents
Reviews

This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Lazăr Șăineanu (1859–1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was among the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame.

Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, Șăineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the language of Rabelais. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an “intruder,” into his old age.

Note on Transliteration
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: ROMANIA
Early Years: Studies and Friendships
The Field of Linguistics

1. FIRST PUBLICATIONS
The Science of Judaism: Advancing Emancipation
Semasiology
Paris, Gaston Paris, and the Jours d’Emprunt
Leipzig and the Neogrammarians

2. RESEARCH ON YIDDISH
The Dialectological Study of Judeo-German
Spreading The Word on Yiddish
B.P. Hasdeu, Anti-Semitism and Jewish Relations

3. UNIVERSITY LECTURES AND NEW BOOKS
V. A. Urechiǎ and the First Rejection of Naturalization
Favorable Reviews and Marriage

4. BASMELE ROMANE
The Basmele Wins a Prize
Second Defeat of Request for Naturalization
Self-Defense and Studies in Folklore

5. THE DICŤIONAR UNIVERSAL
Non-Zionist Jew and His Circle of Friends
Paris, London: Gaster and Zionism
Paris: Nordau and Zionism
The Rejection of Zionism, The Dreyfus Affair
Baptism And Its Consequences

6. THE ORIENTAL INFLUENCE ON THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Șǎineanu and Other Jews
The Last Months: Publication and Defeat
Repairing and Describing His Life: the Philological Career

PART TWO: FRANCE
The New Emigré

7. LIVING AND MAKING A LIVING; SOME TRANSLATIONS
Judeo-German for the French Scholar

8. THE POPULAR LANGUAGES OF FRANCE
Rabelais
Les Sources Indigènes and Disappointment

9. SUMMING UP
Languages and “the People” in the 1920s and 1930s
Two Jewish Critics on Sainéan’s Life

Abbreviations
Bibliography

Anita Norich, Collegiate Professor Emerita, University of Michigan

“Once again, Natalie Zemon Davis has given us a beautifully written and meticulously researched study illuminating a historical period through the story of one individual. Lazare Sainean (1859–1934)—philologist, folklorist, Jew, convert, scholar of Rumanian, French, and Yiddish—was repeatedly denied citizenship and academic positions and yet, as Zemon Davis convincingly argues, was able to cross cultural and geographic boundaries.”

Forward

Romania has been on the fringes of Yiddish research until now. A new book by Natalie Zemon Davis shows that one of the very first studies of Jewish dialects was published in Romania at the end of the 19th century. Her book "Listening to the languages of the people: Lazar Sainean on Romanian, Yiddish, and French" tells the dramatic life story of an important Romanian philologist of Jewish origin, who made an important contribution to Jewish linguistics. Zemon Davis is world-renowned for her studies of French culture from the early modern era. The name of the philologist Lazar Seignanu (Sainéan, in French) was well known to her because of his thorough research of the language of François Rabelais, the great French writer of the 16th century. But it was a surprise to her that Seinian also wrote about Yiddish, and she began to research his biography. Her new book is a research work that combines an individual's life with his era's cultural and political history... more

The first study of Yiddish dialects was by a Romanian linguist

Lucian-Zeev Herșcovici

“A very important contribution to the study of the history of the Yiddish, Romanian, and French linguistics, of Romanian and general East European and Balkanic folklore, and of the history of the Jews of Romania in the period of the polemics for emancipation in the last two decades of the 19th century. The book is very useful for philologists, folklorists, historians of Romanian Jewry and of Romania.”

Maria Silvia Crăciun, Babeș-Bolyai University

“Known under the name of Lazăr Șăin, Lazăr Șăineanu (from 1883) and Lazare Sainéan (from 1901), the renowned linguist and folklorist is an interesting addition to Natalie Zemon Davis’s study of figures who crossed cultural and geographical boundaries. This book, which often reads like a novel, emphasizing the author’s qualities as a storyteller, follows one man’s destiny in late nineteenth-century Europe, as one of many Jewish life stories. The book explores identity as constructed by its subject, but also as recast by the historian.”

Reviews in History

"Davis quotes Sainéan’s own assessment of his situation at the end of his long career: ‘indeed, here, in regard to social relations, I am always still “the intruder”’. One of the virtues of her book is that she does not seek to hide her subject’s foibles—including a somewhat thin-skinned insistence on his own rightness, a certain defiant self-regard, a pragmatism that didn’t always do him much good. Rather, Davis goes constantly in search of more complex motives behind Sainéan’s scholarly preoccupations and life choices: this renders us a very human figure, whose story serves as a litmus for the atmosphere of the times through which he lived." (The review is complemented by the author's response.)

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2472

Roger Chartier, Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania

“’My life was crossed by so many disappointments’ declared Lazare Sainéan. In a book written with erudite empathy, Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the successive disappointments of this extraordinary scholar. Her rigorous and touching work allows us to listen the vigorous and tormented voice of a man who dedicated his intellectual life to encounters, loved two nations and three languages, and, however, remained everywhere a foreigner.”