In his first lecture on Rav Elchanan Wasserman for Torah in Motion, Marc Shapiro says: “Yiddish was the first language of every Jew in eastern Europe except for very assimilated Jews in Warsaw. You had some who raised their children to speak Polish because they wanted them to completely assimilate. [Jewish] culture was Yiddish culture.
“This was not the case in Hungary. They spoke German and Hungarian in Budapest. In Poland and Russia, Jews didn’t feel a part of society. In France, Germany, Hungary, Jews felt French, German and Hungarian. No Russian Jew felt Russian. No Lithuanian Jew felt that they were a part of Lithuanian culture. In Poland, only a tiny percentage of Jews felt Polish. Everyone knew they were different. They felt they were visitors. They never felt any nationalism or any sense of identification with the country. They had their own language. Gypsies had their own language. Armenians had their own language. Jews were their own nationality.”
