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| Nathan Cohen In the 1931 census , 79 . 9 percent of Warsaw’s Jews declared that their mother tongue to be Yiddish ( 7 . 8 percent - Hebrew ; 13 . 3 percent - Polish ) . The political significance of these data greatly surpasses their cultural significance , but they nevertheless reflect to some extent the relative strengths of the languages of Warsaw Jewry . Within the space of a single generation , even before the outbreak of the First World War , Warsaw had acquired the status of a leading Jewish cultural center . In the last decades of the nineteenth century , prominent writers and intellectuals settled in the city ( see above ) . Many of them wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish . These writers - and others who resided across the Russian Empire and even in the United States - took advantage of the many Hebrew presses in the city to print their books and the journals that they edited ( in the 1930 s , the city had 25 presses that printed in Hebrew letters ) . As early as 1890 , dozens...
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