Re: YIVO Acronym

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

Encyclopedia Judaica (1971) states that YIVO, or the Yidisher Visenshaftlikher 
Institut, was founded at a conference of Jewish scholars and social scientists 
in Berlin from August 7-12, 1925. Vilna was selected as the center, with 
subsidiary branches in Berlin, Warsaw, and New York.

The use of the word "visenshaft" was probably a nod to the "Wissenschaft des 
Judentums" (Science of Judaism), which was a movement founded in Germany by 
Leopold Zunz ca. 1818-1822, devoted to "the knowledge of Judaism through its 
literary and historical documentation, and by a statistical knowledge of 
Judaism in relation to the Jews of our time in all the countries of the world." 
Early scholars in this movement included Samuel David Luzzatto, Zacharias 
Frankel, and Abraham Geiger, the founder of the Reform movement. Frankel headed 
the Jewish Theological Seminary--founded in Breslau in 1854--for twenty years. 

The idea of the "Science of Judaism" was still in existence in the early 
twentieth century--although somewhat watered down. But the concept had long ago 
spread (as all Haskalah ideas had) into the Pale of Settlement and the rest of 
Russia. The Encyclopedia Judaica article states that this had a direct 
influence on the establishment of societies, such as the 1912 An-Ski 
ethnographic expedition (Beregovski Collection); the 1908 St. Petersburg Folk 
Music Society; as well as YIVO.

Eliott Kahn



At 09:55 AM 2/1/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Eve Sicular wrote, in part, "Back in the 1920s, when they founded YIVO
>in Vilna, calling anything scientific gave it a dignified tone, and of
>course there were many social sciences being studied there."
>
>True enough, but it's useful to remember that English has a particularly
>narrow use of the term "science," which is normally restricted largely
>to the natural sciences.  Yiddish _visnshaft_, German _Wissenschaft_,
>Slavic _nauka_ etc. can all be applied to any scholarly discipline,
>whether it belongs to the natural sciences, the social sciences or even
>the "humanistic sciences."  So musicology, linguistics, literary
>studies, etc. are all _visnshaftn_ in Yiddish.
>
>           Bob Rothstein
>

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+