Ashkenazi traditions aren’t so normative any more

It must be the most polysyllabic word in modern Jewish parlance and I confess I hadn’t heard of it until I went to Limmud a few years ago. I’m talking about Ashkenormativity – the presumption that Jewish culture is synonymous with the traditions of central and eastern Europe.

In recent years there has been a concerted drive to recognise Jewish diversity and ensure that Litvaks, Yekkes and Galitzianers appreciate the value of customs of communities from the Maghreb and the Near East.

All perfectly laudable, of course. But we Ashkenazim in Britain should not imagine that our cultural inheritance is secure for there are aspects of it that remain under threat of eclipse: our food and our Hebrew.

The traditional Jewish deli has all but vanished from the kosher high street, for example. Occasionally, a new salt beef bar pops in London but it is invariably unhechshered. We have raised a whole generation that must think – from what is served up at simchahs – that sashimi is a Jewish delicacy and is clueless about kreplach or kugel.

True, the bagel – which in my boyhood I would enjoy as a treat coming up from Wales to visit my grandparents in Golders Green – is now ubiquitous. But the staples of the Middle East have driven much of what we knew as Jewish food off the table; zchug has taken over from chrein.

My own palate is actually pretty cosmopolitan; I am partial to shishlik and shwarma and will happily try Israeli fusion seasoned with sumac or flavoured with pomegranate molasses. But not so my plain-eating family who yearn for the return of Bloom’s (may its menu be for a blessing).

I concede that Ashkenazi fare might seem as if it had been cooked up by a conspiracy of cardiologists determined to keep themselves in business. And that the shtetl has produced some culinary horrors, nothing more so than p’tcha – calf’s foot jelly, a quivering emetic grey mass that looks like the spawn of The Blob, a candidate for Room 101. But is there any dessert on the planet that can match lokshen pudding for gratifying inner warmth?

In the US there are some kosher restaurants that have tried to revive Ashkenazi cuisine by offering fresh, contemporary takes on old dishes –  but has similar experimentation caught on here? Perhaps it is time to open a gastro-pub, The Pickled Herring, devoted to the relaunch of heimishe classics.

If our Ashkenazi tongues have had to adjust to different tastes on the plate, then our ears have had to attune to different sounds in shul. Although the mainstream Orthodoxy represented by the United Synagogue still preserves “Polish” rites in its liturgy, Israel has long since captured our vowels.

I grew up in a small-town Jewish community which the modern fashion for pronouncing Hebrew in the Ivrit Sephardi way failed to reach. We rendered the long “o” as in “how now brown cow”, not as in “orange”, rounding off the service with Adown Owlom, not Adon Olam. Ashkenazi pronunciation will not become extinct as it remains a standard within the yeshivish world. But beyond, its future is more uncertain. In my own synagogue, I am one of the few still to retain it.

The die was cast in 1962 when the Chief Rabbi of the time, Israel Brodie, permitted the Sephardi accent to be taught in United Synagogue chedarim and Jewish day schools. His successor, Immanuel Jakobovits, resisted pressure for it to be formally authorised as the preferred accent in shul. “The popular argument was.. that such unification would promote Jewish unity and demonstrate our solidarity with Israel,” he wrote.

But he dismissed that claim as “nonsensical. I could not see why variations of accents compromised the unity of the Jewish people any more than the diversity of accents in different parts of Britain, or of any other country, undermined the common loyalties in those nations.”

Besides, he argued, there was a halachic case for adhering to ancestral pronunciation among communities, while the preference for the Sephardi accent had “no scientific or historical foundation”.

Naturally, as successive generations grew up familiar with the Sephardi pronunciation, it became more widely used in prayers and so established as a communal norm.

Traces of the Yiddish past may linger in colloquial speech. We tend to look forward to kiddish rather than “kid-oosh”. But the Jews of middle Jewry are more likely to wish each other “Shabbat shalom” than “Good Shabbes”.