Introduction

Onthe road from Mt Tabor to the Sea of Galilee, about 4 kmpast the turnoff from highway 65, there is a sign by the road:

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Kfar Kama Circassian Heritage

The first time I drove past this sign, on a family outing, I remembered that I had heard that some Circassians, fleeing from their homeland in the Caucasus when the Russians conquered them in the 1860s, had settled in Israel. As a linguist and someone interested in language and cultural maintenance in general, I wanted to learn more about the situation of this language and group. Circassian is one of the three attested Northwest Caucasian languages (along with Abkhaz and the now-extinct Ubykh). The Northwest Caucasian languages are perhaps related to the 30-odd Northeast Caucasian languages (perhaps not) but not demonstrably related to any other languages in the world, and the Northern Caucasian languages, in general, are practically legendary among linguists for their staggeringly complex consonant inventories (typically between 60 and 80 different consonant phonemes), amazingly limited vowel inventories (with some languages having been analyzed as having only two distinctive vowel phonemes), and typologically unusual syntactic and morphological structure.

All are also practically in serious danger of disappearing in the next few hundred years. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these languages are a monument to what the human mouth can pronounce and their loss would represent a significant decline in the diversity of human language. Their homeland is occupied by the Russians, they have no independent country at all, they have only a limited written history, and they have a relatively small number of speakers, with the Circassians being the largest group (numbering perhaps three million but with the great majority of them scattered around the Middle East and most of their speakers in this area having switched to Turkish or Arabic as their mother tongue).

Knowing this situation, I expected a visit to Kfar Kama to be similar to visiting Native American reservations in the United States. Like many other American linguists, I have made many such visits, hoping to find some vitality in the language and culture and being disappointed to find only some tourist businesses and perhaps a small museum showing relics of what was once there and members of the group speaking the majority language among themselves and admitting ruefully that actually neither they nor anyone else below the age of, say, 70, could speak their ancestral language at all. In fact, a drive around Kfar Kama suggested that perhaps the Circassian language and culture were not even this vital: there seemed to be no tourist attractions or even signs in Circassian, other than the one by the highway. It looked like a pleasant middle-class town, not exotic in the least, if anything more similar to a Jewish town than an Arab one, though the Circassians are Muslims.

Later on, however, when I heard a lecture on the situation of the Israeli Circassians by a researcher at the University of Haifa, Isabelle Kreindler, and talked about them with her and her coworker Marsha Bensoussan, I discovered thatmyevaluation had been completely mistaken (see Kreindler et al. 1995). In fact, the Israeli Circassians in both Kfar Kama and another village, Reikhania, maintain Circassian as their native language essentially categorically, even among the youngest children. This is the case in spite of the fact that they number only about 3,000, they are educated in Hebrew1, and Circassian communities elsewhere in the Middle East, though far larger than that in Israel, have already switched to another native language (Turkish or Arabic) or are in the midst of an apparently irreversible development in this direction. Kreindler et al., reported cases of Circassians from Turkey visiting Israel and literally crying with happiness on seeing and hearing even children speaking Circassian: they had assumed that Circassian would inevitably die as a living language in the diaspora, while the fate of the minority of Circassianswholive in their homeland is unclear.

The lack of tourist attractions in Kfar Kama dedicated to Circassian ethnicity turned out to reflect not the complete lack of vitality of the community as a distinctively Circassian entity but exactly the reverse: such attractions only start to appear when a culture is locally dying and the thought would never occur to an Israeli Circassian that his/her culture is locally dying. The sign on the road is, in fact, no more than an announcement: we are Circassians (not, e.g., Jews, Arabs or Druze).

Credit for the remarkable maintenance of Circassian as a living language in Israel must, of course, go, first and foremost, to Israeli Circassians themselves. But the fact remains that Circassian is dying everywhere else in the Circassian diaspora, in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, the United States, etc. and it is not even doing very well in the homeland. It is clear that there is something different about Israel in this regard. As I will demonstrate in the course of this book, what is different is the attitude of Israelis towards language and identity. Because of this attitude, there is categorical support among Israelis of all groups for the indefinite maintenance of non-Jewish minority languages such as Circassian. This, in turn, results from general attitudes which Jews characteristically have about language and identity, in a way which I will describe and discuss in detail later.

One Friday night in the early 1990s, my wife, young daughter, and I had dinner at the house of Aharon and Esther Goldstein in Ann Arbor, Michigan, two Lubavitcher Jews, along with perhaps a dozen other people who had attended the evening Shabbat service at Chabad House. The Goldsteins had been sent from New York City by the Lubavitcher group in order to provide the Jewish community ofAnnArbor, and particularly university students, with a type of Jewish environment they would otherwise be unlikely to come into contact with. Although the Lubavitchers are, in principle, dedicated to getting more Jews to become Ultra-Orthodox like themselves or, at least, more religiously observant, in practice the Goldsteins appeared to be having almost no success at all in this area, if this was indeed what they were trying to do. Aside from special occasions such as Passover, where many American Jews simply want to go to whatever kind of Jewish activity is locally available, and perhaps 10 local observant Jews who came on a semi-regular basis (who were mostly not Ultra-Orthodox), the only participants at Chabad House services were local people like us who came once every few months basically out of curiosity and for a change from the normal routine.

When we arrived at the Goldsteins' house, we met their seven children (aged at the time between four and fifteen, if I remember correctly) and were surprised to hear that the younger ones (below seven or so) barely spoke English and that with a strong non-native accent. We quickly realized that they were speaking Yiddish to each other and that the...