YIDDISH LANGUAGE
Yiddish is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the pre-existing language of the nascent Ashkenazi community with an extensive Germanic based vocabulary. Yiddish is written with a fully vocalized alphabet based on the Hebrew script.The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language or (taytsh), a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. In common usage, the language is called (mame-loshn, literally "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from Hebrew and Aramaic, which are collectively termed (loshn-koydesh, "holy tongue"). The term "Yiddish" didn't become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the more common designation.
Modern Yiddish has two major forms. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern, Mideastern (Polish-Galician-Eastern Hungarian), and Northeastern (Lithuanian-Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern (Swiss-Alsatian-Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic-Northern German) dialects. Yiddish is used in a large number of Orthodox Jewish communities worldwide and is the 1st language of the home, school, and in many social settings among most Hasids. Yiddish is also the academic language of the study of the Talmud according to the tradition of the Lithuanian yeshivas.
The term Yiddish is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with Jewish, to designate attributes of Ashkenazi culture.
A prevailing view of long standing was that Yiddish was derived almost entirely from the Middle High German spoken in the region in which the Ashkenazi community settled. They retained the Semitic vocabulary needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language.
Subsequent linguistic investigation has questioned this notion, and provides two alternative lines of approach to the origins of Yiddish. Both agree that Yiddish resulted from the fusion of the language spoken by the Jewish community prior to its arrival in Germanic territory with the indigenous language of that territory. There is, however, divergence of thought about the locus of the linguistic interaction, the elements of the indigenous language that carried over into the nascent Yiddish, and the identity of the language that was thereby transformed.
The 1st scholarly statement of this approach was provided by Max Weinreich in the 1920s, and remains widely accepted. Weinreich developed a model in which Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian, who were literate in Hebrew or Aramaic, migrated to the Rhine Valley, where they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German. Both he and Solomon Birnbaum developed this further in the mid-1950s. Further studies in the same school debated the location in which the interaction took place, taking the basic alternatives to be the Rhineland and Bavaria. This work allows that there may have been parallel developments in the two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged instead out of contact between speakers of High German and natively Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East.
In 1991, Paul Wexler proposed that Yiddish wasn't a Germanic language, but rather Judeo-Sorbian whose vocabulary had been largely replaced by High German in the 9th to 12th centuries, when large numbers of German-speakers settled in Sorbian and Polabian lands. A 2nd shift occurred in perhaps the 15th to 17th centuries, when Yiddish speakers migrated eastward, intermingling with Jews - possibly including descendents of the Khazars - speaking the Polesian dialect of Belarusian/Ukrainian (an Eastern Slavic language), who then relexified their language to Yiddish. In this theory, genealogically Yiddish isn't a Germanic language, but a Slavic language, retaining a largely Slavic phonology and syntax combined with Germanic vocabulary and morphology, though even these Germanic components often follow Slavic semantics. (Wexler also posits two later relexifications of Yiddish itself, in the late-19th century, one resulting in Modern Hebrew and the other in Esperanto, both of which would thus also be Slavic languages.) Regardless of the relative merit of the Germanic and Slavic schools on the origin of Yiddish, both recognize the massive extent of its Germanic vocabulary.
In the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture formed in Central Europe. This came to be called Ashkenazi, from Ashkenaz, the medieval Hebrew name for northern Europe and Germany. Ashkenaz was centered on the Rhineland and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer), in what is now the westernmost part of Germany. Its geographic extent didn't coincide with the German principalities of the time, and it included northern France. Ashkenaz bordered on the area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardim or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations.
Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. The 1st language of Ashkenazi Jews may, as noted above, have been Aramaic, the vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews living in Rome and Southern Italy appear to have been Greek-speakers, and this is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names. Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use. Much work needs to be done, though, to fully analyze the contributions of those languages to Yiddish.
It is generally accepted that early Yiddish was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe, absorbed through migrations. Since some settlers may have come via France and Italy, it is also likely that the Romance-based Jewish languages of those regions were represented. Traces remain in the contemporary Yiddish vocabulary: for example,, from the Latin benedicere; (leyenen, to read), from the Latin legere; and the personal names Anshl, cognate to Angel or Angelo; Bunim (probably from "bon homme"). Western Yiddish includes additional words of Latin derivation (but still very few): for example, orn (to pray), cf. Latin and Italian "orare".
The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the many dialects from which standard German would emerge a few centuries later. In time, Jewish communities would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. Although not reflected in the spoken language, a main point of difference was the use of the Hebrew alphabet for the recording of the Germanic vernacular, which may have been adopted either because of the community's familiarity with the alphabet or to prevent the non-Jewish population understanding the correspondence. In addition, there was probably widespread illiteracy in the non-Hebrew script, with the level of illiteracy in the non-Jewish communities being even higher. Another point of difference was the use of Hebrew and Aramaic words. These words and terms were used because of their familiarity, but more so because in most cases there were no equivalent terms in the vernacular which could express the Jewish concepts or describe the objects of cultural significance.
Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant, which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the geniza of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.
The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which has survived. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, composed around 1507-08 and printed in at least forty editions, beginning in 1541. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written Pariz un Viene. Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg. Another significant writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557.
Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew, but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works, such as the Bovo-Bukh, and religious writing specifically for women, such as the Tseno Ureno and the Tkhines. One of the best-known early woman authors was Glxckel of Hameln, whose memoirs are still in print.
The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read mame-loshn but not loshn-koydesh, and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish was, with square Hebrew letters (shown in the 3rd column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed mesheyt or mashket - the construction is uncertain).
The Western Yiddish dialect-sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch -began to decline in the 18th century, as the Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew, Western Yiddish survived only as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". (Liptzin 1972).
In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture. Notable Yiddish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about (tevye der milkhiker = Tevye the Dairyman) inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof; and Isaac Leib Peretz.
Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, "As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that the most prominent Yiddish writers of the time-the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries-revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and 'unnecessary' Slavisms." The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries.
On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers. The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Around five million of those killed-85 percent of the Jews who died in the Holocaust-were speakers of Yiddish. Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war, further assimilation in countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union, along with the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist movement, led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish. However, the number of speakers within the widely dispersed Orthodox (mainly Hasidic) communities is now increasing. Although used in various countries, Yiddish has attained official recognition as a minority language only in Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Reports of the number of current Yiddish speakers vary significantly. Ethnologue estimated that as of ca. 1990 there were 1.5 million speakers of Eastern Yiddish, of which over a 3rd lived in Ukraine. In contrast, the Modern Language Association reports fewer than 200,000 in the United States. Western Yiddish is reported by Ethnologue to have had an "ethnic population" of slightly below 50,000 in 2000. Other estimates are also given, for example, of a worldwide Yiddish-speaking population of about two million in 1996 in a report by the Council of Europe. Further demographic information about the recent status of what is treated as an Eastern-Western dialect continuum is provided in the YIVO Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry.
There has been frequent debate about the extent of the linguistic independence of Yiddish from the languages that it absorbed. There has been periodic assertion that Yiddish is a dialect of German, or even "just broken German, more of a linguistic mishmash than a true language". Even when recognized as an autonomous language, it has sometimes been referred to as Judeo-German, along the lines of other Jewish languages like Judeo-Persian or Judeo-French. A widely cited summary of attitudes in the 1930s was published by Max Weinreich, quoting a remark by an auditor of one of his lectures:.
The national languages of Israel are Hebrew and Arabic. The debate in Zionist circles over the use of Yiddish in Israel and in the Diaspora in preference to Hebrew also reflected the tensions between religious and secular Jewish lifestyles. Many secular Zionists wanted Hebrew as the sole language of Jews, to contribute to a national cohesive identity. Traditionally religious Jews, on the other hand, preferred use of Yiddish, viewing Hebrew as a respected holy language reserved for prayer and religious study. In the early 20th century, Zionist activists in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish among Jews in preference to Hebrew, and make its use socially unacceptable.
This conflict also reflected the opposing views among secular Jews worldwide, one side seeing Hebrew and the other Yiddish (and Internationalism) as the means of defining Jewish nationalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginxy hasafx, "the language defendants regiment", whose motto was ivrx, dabxr ivrxt "Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew!", used to tear down signs written in "foreign" languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, according to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, the members of this group in particular, and the Hebrew revival in general, didn't succeed in uprooting Yiddish patterns (as well as the patterns of other European languages Jewish immigrants spoke) within what he calls "Israeli", i.e. Modern Hebrew. Zuckermann believes that "Israeli does include numerous Hebrew elements resulting from a conscious revival but also numerous pervasive linguistic features deriving from a subconscious survival of the revivalists' mother tongues, e.g. Yiddish."
