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Agababyan A. “How Jews Learned Kabardian in One Night”: Mountain Jews’ Language Strategies During the Holocaust in the Northwestern Caucasus

A. Agababyan
Independent researcher
Krasnodar, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0003-3571-8488
E-mail: agababyan.arusayk@yandex.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The article attempts to deconstruct a mythologem describing the patterns of linguistic behavior of the Mountain Jews of Nalchik in a critical situation — under the threat of death during the Nazi occupation. The mythologem, which can generally be formulated as “the miraculous salvation of the community thanks to learning the Kabardian language in a short period of time,” is feeble and scientifically refuted quite easily. However, endowing this Adyghe language with the symbolic status of a “savior” in such an emergency is justified under the influence of other contextual discourses. Multilingualism was typical for all known local Mountain Jewish groups and depended on the specifics of traditional settlement in various Caucasian regions with a changing non-Jewish autochthonous population. In the Western Caucasian cultural area (Great and Lesser Kabarda), where Mountain Jews began to migrate from the beginning of the 19th century from the North Dagestan (Kumyk) territories, their unique polylinguistic configurations emerged under the influence of socio-economic and cultural factors. An essential feature of Nalchik Mountain Jews’ polyglossia remained the predominant knowledge of Kabardian as an additional local language and less common knowledge of another neighboring language — Balkarian.

 

KEYWORDS: Mountain Jews, Nalchik, Kolonka, Holocaust, “savior language”, Kabardian language, multilingualism

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2024-2(24)-232-256
UDC 81`272(=411.16) (470.6) 

 

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