Davidzon_commentary_Bundle-of-Tkhines
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Part of A Bundle of Tkhines
Commentary
Yankev Azriel Davidzon, “A Bundle of Tkhines,” 1911. Commentary by Eli Rosenblatt
A pioneer of Yiddish journalism in Southern Africa, Davidzon would pen tkhines, parodies of supplicatory prayers written in the Yiddish vernacular, for various South African Jewish “types,” including teachers, ritual slaughterers, familiar wagon drivers, peddlers, bathhouse attendants, and urchins of all sorts. Part of this series of tkhines, the text is a prayer for an “English Rov,”a rabbi that through geographic origin, education, or inclination had taken on the aesthetic and ideological positions of a non-Orthodox British-Jewish intellectual. In mocking this type of rabbi’s ignorance of ancient rabbinic texts and his contempt for the “primitive” rituals of recent Yiddish-speaking immigrants, Davidson gives a stark sense of his distaste for the arbitrary and false divide between “civilization” and “barbarism” that ran through the South African Jewish community, and colonial South African society at large.
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As Joseph Sherman suggested, the racialization of a Yiddish linguistic dichotomy between “Us” and “Them” shaped how Lithuanian Jews in South Africa expressed themselves in colonial society. The environment shaped the ways in which Davidson engaged the traditional Jewish texts he sought to reclaim for modern literature. In turn, he introduced the feuilleton form to colonial African society and asserted African Jewish communities as legitimate sites for generating modern Yiddish literature.
Southern Africa, a region consisting of different races, cultural identities, languages and ethnic bonds, has harbored an Ashkenazic Jewish community since the early nineteenth century. In 1795, when the British took control of the Cape of Good Hope, they continued the Dutch policy of racial segregation. Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants, this time from Prussia, joined the British colonial economy as a direct result of their emancipation in 1812. These first arrivals, mostly from England and Germany, established communal organizations on the British model. After 1880, another more numerous migration of predominantly Lithuanian, Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived in South Africa, another branch of the same mass migration that would bring hundreds of thousands of Jews to North and South America. The Yiddish press in South Africa was established by Nehemia Dov Hoffmann, who arrived in Cape Town in 1889 from the Kovno region. Davidson belonged to a generation of Yiddish journalists working in Hoffmann’s shadow, recording the development of a new Jewish culture in the shadow of colonial settlement and violence.
Further Reading:
- Davidson, Yakov Azriel, Veronica Belling, and Mendel Kaplan. 2009. Yakov Azriel Davidson: his writings in the Yiddish newspaper, Der Afrikaner, 1911-1913. Cape Town: Isaac and Jessie Kaplan [Centre] for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town.