Khurbn

Multilingual sign at the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center

The Hebrew-derived Yiddish word khurbn (Yiddish: חורבן) means a "cataclysmic, utter destruction", and is widely used in Yiddish to describe several major catastrophes affecting the Jewish people, including the destruction of the first and the second temples, pogroms in Russia during the First World War, and the Holocaust.

Writer and social activist S. An-sky, who was a relief worker during the First World War, wrote a book titled Khurbn Galitsiye (Hebrew: חורבן גאליציע, "The Destruction of Galicia").

Since World War II, the word khurbn (more fully, khurbn Eyrope (חורבן אײראָפּע) has often been used to denote the Holocaust. It is sometimes used in the titles of memorial books (yizkor books) about the destroyed shtetls, like Khurbn Proskurov, Rakhel Feygenberg's A Pinkes fun a Toyter Shtot (Khurbn Dubove) ("Chronicle of a Dead City: The Destruction of Dubove"), Max Kaufmann's early (1947) history of the genocide in Latvia, Khurbn Letland, or Yehoshue Perle's Khurbn Varshe. Raul Hilberg's most important work was titled The Destruction of the European Jews.

Holocaust studies are sometimes called khurbn-forshung (lit. "destruction research").

"Khurbn Yiddish" refers to the sociolect shaped by Yiddish speakers' experiences during the Holocaust, which caused them to develop new words and slang, particularly relating to theft, protest, and sexuality. It is also called khurbn-shprakh. Historian Nachman Blumental described it:

When I found myself within the borders of Eastern Poland in mid-1944, meeting the few Jews that I found there, I was almost unable to understand their language (loshn). So many modifications had occurred in the short period of my absence—in those roughly three years.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Spinner 2012, p. 160.
  2. ↑ Elbaum, Jacob; Turniansky, Chava (December 31, 2013). "The Destruction of the Temple: A Yiddish Booklet for the Ninth of av". In Fishbane, Michael A.; Weinberg, Joanna (eds.). Midrash Unbound: Transformations and Innovations. Liverpool University Press. p. 0. doi:10.3828/liverpool/9781904113713.003.0020. ISBN 978-1-904113-71-3 – via Silverchair.
  3. 1 2 "Pogrom Literature and Collective Memory | Yiddish Book Center". www.yiddishbookcenter.org.
  4. ↑ Zavadivker 2013, pp. 94–95.
  5. ↑ Rothenberg, Jerome (1999). "Khurbn and Holocaust: Poetry After Aushwitz". Dialectical Anthropology. 24 (3/4): 279–291. doi:10.1023/A:1007008429092. ISSN 0304-4092. JSTOR 29790609.
  6. ↑ Gellman, Uriel; Heilman, Samuel; Rosman, Moshe; Sagiv, Gadi; Wodziński, Marcin; Biale, David; Assaf, David; Brown, Benjamin (4 December 2017). "Khurbn: Hasidism and the Holocaust". Hasidism: A New History. Princeton University Press. pp. 652–672. doi:10.1515/9781400889198-032. ISBN 978-1-4008-8919-8. the Holocaust, or what the Hasidim (together with other ultra-Orthodox Jews) call khurbn (Yiddish for destruction).
  7. ↑ Project MUSE - Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939. 2018. doi:10.1353/book.61466. ISBN 978-0-8143-4451-4.
  8. ↑ Kaufmann, Max, Die Vernichtung des Judens Lettlands (The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia), Munich, 1947, English translation by Laimdota Mazzarins available on-line as Churbn Lettland -- The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia Archived 2011-02-07 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ Rose, Sven-Erik (2011). "The Oyneg Shabes Archive and the Cold War: The Case of Yehoshue Perle's Khurbn Varshe". New German Critique. 38: 181–215. doi:10.1215/0094033X-2010-028.
  10. ↑ Cohen, Nathan. "Perle, Yoshue". The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
  11. ↑ Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd edition) Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 2003. ISBN 0-300-09557-0
  12. ↑ Fisher, Gaëlle (1 November 2023). "Jockusch, Laura (ed.): Khurbn-Forshung. Documents on Early Holocaust Research in Postwar Poland (Archive of Jewish History and Culture, Vol. 6), 853 pp., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2022". Neue Politische Literatur. 68 (3): 346–348. doi:10.1007/s42520-023-00525-3.
  13. ↑ Jockusch, Laura (September 20, 2012). "Khurbn-Forshung: History Writing as a Jewish Response to Catastrophe". In Jockusch, Laura (ed.). Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 0. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199764556.003.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-976455-6 – via Silverchair.
  14. ↑ Pollin-Galay, Hannah (September 3, 2024). Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9781512825916.
  15. ↑ "Yiddish Language During the Holocaust". YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Retrieved 2 January 2025.
  16. ↑ "The Verbal Inheritance of Genocide | Zeithistorische Forschungen". zeithistorische-forschungen.de.
  17. ↑ Schulz, Miriam (2019). ""Gornisht oyser verter"?! Khurbn-shprakh as a Mirror of the Dynamics of Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe". The Holocaust in the Borderlands. pp. 185–208. doi:10.5771/9783835344198-185. ISBN 978-3-8353-4419-8.

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