Language Soup

Let me get this straight...

For most Jews, Hebrew remained [in the 19th Century] the second language, and Yiddish the language of normal intercourse, while Polish or German was needed for commerce. After the Constitution of 1867, Galician Jews enjoyed equal rights, and could consider themselves Austrians par excellence, regardless of whether or not they mastered Polish or German. Moreover, languages learned in youth need not correspond to the work of maturity. Jewish supporters of assimilation to German culture of the 1820s made their point in Yiddish; Jewish advocates of integration to Polish life of the 1870s argued in German; then the Zionists of the 1890s wrote and spoke Polish. The second generation of Zionists, in the early twentieth century, gritted their teeth and used the vernacular Yiddish as a language of politics. Themselves fluent in some combination of Polish, German and Yiddish, Zionists imagined a future in which all Jews would use Hebrew in daily life.

That's Timothy Snyder again, in The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus. To which I add only that if Jewish in Galicia in the early 20th Century were "imagining their future," one can only hope they weren't imagining too well.