Yosel ben Todros S. Y. Agnon on the Language of Ashkenaz

Jews of the Ashkenazi diaspora spoke, read, and wrote in two languages: Hebrew and Yiddish. In his work S. Y. Agnon touched on the historical duality that characterized the German language in the culture of Galician Jews after they were incorporated into the Habsburg empire. The state-sponsored linguistic shift from Yiddish to German, which took place over the course of the nineteenth century in the cities and towns of Galicia, was presented by him in an extremely negative light. This was the source of his hostility to the writer Joseph Perl, whose modern school undermined the socio-linguistic base which had preserved the cultural unity of the Ashkenazi diaspora.