Natalie Zemon Davis. <i>Listening to the Languages of the People: Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French</i>

In her last book, Natalie Zemon Davis takes on the multifaceted life of a linguist and philologist born in Romania, who died in Paris, as a window into the survival strategy of Jewish intellectuals in the face of antisemitism in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not a new topic, but in her well-honed technique of biographical inquiry and storytelling, she brings to life the aspirations and disappointments, the passion and sorrow of someone who deserved better than he got. That is the perspective Zemon Davis presents in this empathetic portrait of Eliezer ben Moses Șain, later Lazar Șăineanu, and finally Lazare Sainéan in the last decades of his life. I will refer to this complex intellectual by the Romanian name he took on when he started attending the high school one minute from my apartment in Bucharest.The book starts from the curiosity of a French scholar with a knowledge of Rabelais, who “discovered” Șăineanu as a Yiddishist, to then further uncover the complex and unending passion of this linguist for understanding culture through language. And it is this sense of discovery that the book presents on every page, linking the education and intellectual interests of Șăineanu to important scholars with whom he worked and debated his ideas. Coming of age at a time when Jewish intellectual life was flourishing down the street from his high school, Șăineanu spent his adolescence in the company of the brilliant Moses Gaster and Moses Schwarzfeld. One cannot overstate the importance of these relationships and the taste for intellectual recognition that they provided, both in person and through publication outlets. But while Gaster decided to focus his energies on enhancing the spiritual and intellectual life of the Jewish communities in which he lived, Șăineanu did everything possible to be recognized as a Romanian scholar, and that cost him dearly.Șăineanu’s ideas and relationship with Romania are framed both by these deep intellectual friendships inside the Jewish community and by the ever-present hostility of ethnic Romanians, and especially of the government and academic elites, toward the large Jewish population in the country. In the late nineteenth century, citizenship and educational laws made antisemitism not just acceptable but in fact state policy. Leaders of the Romanian Academy, whose portraits still today proudly adorn the halls of that institution, regarded any efforts by this talented Jewish linguist as offenses brought to the entire nation and to the language itself. There were some exceptions, such as Ion Heliade Rădulescu, Șăineanu’s mentor during his studies and as he tried to integrate into the academic world. But no matter how hard Șăineanu tried to belong, he was never sufficiently Romanian, sufficiently worthy of the trust of hateful antisemites, even after winning some of the most important academic prizes awarded by the Romanian Academy, one of them for his extraordinary Dicționar universal al limbii române [Universal dictionary of the Romanian language], which he fashioned as an “instrument . . . for a deeper knowledge of the mother tongue.”1 V. A. Urechiă, founder of the Romanian Academy and one of its most virulently antisemitic voices, reacted to this contribution to Romanian linguistics and the development of Romanian culture with these words, spoken to a full house at the recently inaugurated Romanian Atheneum, Romania’s most prestigious state venue at that time: “Our language, the ‘mother tongue’ of Lazăr Șăineanu? ‘Leizer Șein,’ a son of the Romanian language? A stepson, at the most, because only a stepson could so treat, could so mistreat the mother tongue as Șăineanu has mistreated the Romanian language. From such stepsons, the Romanian tongue needs redress.” (85)To this date, the Romanian Academy has not seen fit to redress the inhumane way in which its leadership treated Șăineanu at the end of the nineteenth century. But his Dicționar has been reissued more than ten times, most recently in 1997, and remains until today one of the fundamental building blocs of Romanian linguistics and culture as a matter of practice.After numerous attempts to appease these unappeasable intellectual and political elites (fewer than 600 Jews were able to gain citizenship in Romania between 1878 and 1914, out of over 250,000 souls), like most of the Jewish community, Șăineanu was rejected, and finally decided to leave the country with his family. His success in French academic circles was not much greater, even after a serious retooling of his focus from Romanian to French linguistics and from Romanian fairy tales to the language of Rabelais and the “thieves’ argot.” He remained an outsider to that world, making enormous efforts to publish, to be recognized and accepted, but never getting the institutional positions that would have made him feel as an insider.Do people “deserve” to be part of an institution they yearn for, if they do the work to show their intellectual depth and creativity in their writings? If they win major prizes in their discipline? As Zemon Davis presents him, that is what Șăineanu believed he deserved. But that seems to suggest that the institutions that Șăineanu tried to become part of were defined in a way that in fact acknowledged someone like him as a potential member.When institutions such as the University of Bucharest were set up, “merit” was not a concept that pertained to everyone. Before the Communist period, no woman was even allowed to compete for jobs there; the most brilliant lawyer in Bucharest at the end of the nineteenth century, Sarmiza Bilcescu, couldn’t get the liberal nationalist patriarchal establishment to even consider her request to join the legal profession without prolonged special interventions. These knocks on the door of exclusionary liberal “meritocracy” could not earn the respect of those whose entire system of values was based on devaluing those different from them.In Romania, even after 1918, things didn’t change a great deal, beyond on paper. Jewish men obtained citizenship after fighting in World War I, but no women did, despite their enormous efforts on the home front. Within two decades, Jews were stripped again of their citizenship rights. Șăineanu is a tragic but altogether unexeptional case of how someone coming from his background could expect to be treated. Making efforts to be accepted by the majority ethnic Romanian elites became his tragedy in a system that was set up for neither meritocracy nor even assimilation. Intellectual brilliance can be its own reward but, unfortunately for him, Șăineanu was never satisfied with that poor consolation and instead yearned constantly for an acceptance that never came in his lifetime. The popularity of his Dicționar until today is, however, evidence of the enormous role he continues to hold in Romanian culture.

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