This is a long shot, but I’ve had luck with even more obscure questions, so I’ll toss it out there. I’m rereading Vladimir N. Brovkin’s superb Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922, which I’ve been recommending for decades to anyone interested in the topic, and on p. 215 I came across this quote, said to be from K. F. Kirsta’s paper Put’ Rabochego: “These are shirye Talmudists, who cannot part with their yarmulkes on their heads. They, together with the Communists, have led Russia and the Russian workers to the abyss.” I can’t figure out what this “shirye” is or why Brovkin left it in Russian. (There’s a word шире [shire] ‘wider,’ the comparative of широкий ‘wide,’ but 1) there would be no reason to write it “shirye,” 2) it doesn’t work grammatically, and 3) it doesn’t work semantically.) The footnote references it to “Kolesnikov, Professional’noe dvizhenie i kontrrevoliutsiia, p. 121,” which seemed promising… but Профессиональное движение и контрреволюция is online, and the quote is nowhere in it (though there’s a section on Газета «Путь Рабочего» и ее платформа starting on p. 257). If anybody has a lead on either the meaning of the word or the Russian original of the quotation, please share. (I thought of writing to Brovkin to ask, but he seems to be a resolutely offline person — at least, I couldn’t find any contact information.)
Update. Having learned from my learned commenters that the word in question was щирые ‘real, genuine’ (pl.), a Ukrainianism found in southern Russian dialects, I thought to google “щирые талмудисты” and discovered Brovkin made a simple error — the quote is not from p. 121 of Kolesnikov but from p. 121 of G. Kuchin-Oranskii’s Dobrovol’cheskaia zubatovshchina (Добровольческая зубатовщина: Кирстовские организации на юге России и борьба с ними профессиональных союзов [Trud, 1924]), which he had cited in the previous note; the Russian is “Это «щирые талмудисты», заявляет он, не желающие ни за что расстаться со своими ермолками, держа на голове которые они во главе с коммунистами завели Россию и русского рабочего в пропасть и бездну…” I would prefer to translate it “It’s the genuine [shchirye] Talmudists, who absolutely refuse to part with their yarmulkes and kept them on their heads as they, together with the Communists, led Russia and the Russian workers into the abyss.”
I think the word you are looking for is “щирый” (here is one dictionary link https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%B9).
Source: native Russian speaker, love your blog. Didn’t stumble for a second, the word is quite common.
https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/щирый
I had never come across that word, and I don’t know any Russian. So this is my caveat. However, there is an adjective in German, spelled “schier”, meaning “pure, bare, mere” (the nominative plural in masculine would indeed be “schiere” here, pronounced like “shee-ruh”). It can also take on the meaning of “almost” or even “complete(ly)”. There is a cognate “sheer” in English, and maybe it also exists in Yiddish, so it might mean “complete Talmudists,” or “pure Talmudists.” Completely convinced, completely devoted or completely observant. Just my idea.
I think the word you are looking for is “щирый”
Thank you so much! Now the only question is why he didn’t translate it. Why not say “These are genuine Talmudists,” or if you feel the Russian word is so vivid you have to provide it, “These are genuine [shchirye] Talmudists”? But now my spirit is at rest.
However, there is an adjective in German, spelled “schier”, meaning “pure, bare, mere”
Which the Wiktionary article linked in the first two comments says is cognate!
The spelling “shirye” looks like it’s trying to be Yiddish.* So maybe it was meant to be a foreign word in the original Russian and was thus left foreign in the English translation. However, the meaning may have been a lot more obvious in the Russian, due to the presence of partially synonymous Russian and German cognates (whereas English sheer is more distant semantically).
* Google suggests that it is not actually Yiddish, at least not conventionally spelled that way. In fact, the most prominent language that searching for “shirye” turns up is Hausa, which apparently features the reduplicated “shirye-shirye.”
Did the term щирый have some politically loaded sense at the time, perhaps due to its being a regional (southern and western?) term? For instance here:
From Peter J. Potichnyj et al. (1992) Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter, p. 252, here.
I read the headline as “the Shire Talmudists”. Disappointed.
The spelling “shirye” looks like it’s trying to be Yiddish.* So maybe it was meant to be a foreign word in the original Russian and was thus left foreign in the English translation.
No, as you can see from earlier comments it’s a normal Russian word that’s instantly recognizable if you realize (as I didn’t) that the “sh” was a sloppy simplification of “shch.”
Maybe it’s too late (I myself am quite curious now as to why he didn’t translate the word, but not sure how to ask) — but turns out Brovkin does have an online presense at https://www.youtube.com/c/VladimirBrovkinRussianEuropeanHistory
FWIW, Alexander Harkavy’s Yidish-English-Hebreyisher Verterbukh (pg 503; pg 511 of the PDF) has this word, [“שיִר”: almost, nearly: (Heb.) כִּמְעָט]. The meaning “pure” or “bare” or “mere” is not offered.
I would transliterate the Yiddish word as “shyir”. It looks very similar to “shir”, the Hebrew word meaning “song/poem”, with very slightly different vowel pointing.
Xerîb, I have no special knowledge, but щирий is a common Ukrainian word, but relatively rare Russian, in which it remains regional. Shiryj Talmudist is a bit strange, but “shyryj Ukrainian” is a “true Scotsman” of the species.
It should be noted that the quote from “Put’ Rabochego” criticizes Council of Southern trade unions, which was based in Kharkov, so that probably was a cutesy regionalism.
I also remeber that Bunin in his Cursed days railed against some Soviet/bolshevik functionary for being “an old-testament Jew” with yarmulka and all. Apparently, fair minded people of the time could accept assimilated Jews, but religious ones, that was just too much.
What D.O. said: щирий is standard Ukrainian for “true, genuine” as well as “honest, sincere.” Щирый is also non-standard (regional) Russian for the same. This should explain the italics.
@D.O.: “Bunin in his Cursed days railed against some Soviet/bolshevik functionary for being “an old-testament Jew” with yarmulka and all.”
Bunin didn’t rally against him. He simply noted that a senior Bolshevik Commissar was also an observant Jew. It must have struck Bunin as particularly bizarre that a conservatively religious, “Old-Testament” person was a member of the most revolutionary, radically atheist cabinet in human history. To make things worse, he was in charge of justice:
“Kogan told me about Shteynberg, the Justice Commissar: an Old-Testament, devout Jew; he doesn’t eat treyf [трефного] and piously observes the Sabbath…”
He was a Left Socialist Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik; to his credit, he resigned in early 1918, unable to reign in the rule of terror. That was Isaak Shteynberg, not to be confused with his brother Aaron.
No, as you can see from earlier comments it’s a normal Russian word that’s instantly recognizable if you realize (as I didn’t) that the “sh” was a sloppy simplification of “shch.”
But doesn’t leaving it untranslated and “simplified” makes more sense if Brovkin was thinking of it as a Yiddish word, even if a Yiddish word that is immediately understandable to Russians?
This should explain the italics.
No, that’s standard for foreign words used in an English context.
But doesn’t leaving it untranslated and “simplified” makes more sense if Brovkin was thinking of it as a Yiddish word, even if a Yiddish word that is immediately understandable to Russians?
No, it’s clearly the Ukrainian and dialectal Russian word, and I now understand why he wanted to use it since it is, as D.O. says, a cutesy regionalism, but I still don’t understand why he didn’t bother to translate it. Probably just sloppiness (“I can’t think of a good rendering at the moment, so I’ll just leave it for now and add a translation later…”).
A weird usage. As an Ukrainism, in Russian it is more familiar in derogatory Ukrainian bashing contexts, substituting for the word “genuine” in scarequotes. Not a natural choice of a word for an Antisemitic context.
Alex K., I was wrong to label Bunin’s quote “railing”, but I still think it is not a mere expression of surprise, but a pretty testy remark. Mind, Bunin had all the justification in the world to get testy, I am just interested in what people thought was acceptable or unremarkable in the public sphere. Probably, a socialist who kept Lent and even attended church would not make anyone to think twice. Or maybe they would?
Oh, I think it would. Revolutionary socialists were expected to be atheists as well.
Cf. the anti-religion lecture the heroic commissar gives Chapev in Furmanov’s novel.
See the Update for the original Russian and my preferred translation as well as an explanation of what Brovkin did wrong.
So… how related are English “sheer”, German “schier”, and this? I don’t know any Russian.
The English and the German one are very closely related to each other and to the Dutch schier (as in schiereiland “peninsula” – paene insula, “almost an island”). The Slavic one looks like what the cognate of the Germanic one should probably look like in Slavic, but the lack of cognates elsewhere in Indo-European makes that difficult to assess.
Actually, now that I think of it, it seems to me the vowels only fit together if the Slavic one is an early loan from Germanic, but I don’t know enough about that.