Yiddish language

Yiddish (Yid. ייִדיש, yidish, = "Jewish") is a Germanic language spoken by about three million people throughout the world, predominantly Ashkenazi Jews. It may be an abbreviated form of ייִדיש־טײַטש yidish-taytsh (compare German jüdisch-deutsch = "Jewish German"). Its earliest historical phase (13th-14th centuries), was formerly referred to as Judeo-German but that designation has subsequently been disfavored in linguistic discourse.

History

From German dialects to Old Yiddish

By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had developed in Central Europe known as Ashkenazi, or Germanic Jewry. (Ashkenaz was the medieval Hebrew name for Germany, derived from a reference in Genesis 10:3.) The Medieval Jewish cultural areas did not coincide with the Christian principalities; thus Ashkenaz included Northern France, and bounded on the Sephardic area: the Sephardi, or Spanish Jews, who also inhabited southern France. Later, the Ashkenazi territory would spread into Eastern Europe as well.

The vernacular language of the earliest Jews in Germany cannot be known with certainty. It contains elements absorbed through dispersion and preserves much of what was left behind by the evolving vernaculars of the Near East and Europe. Since many settlers came from northern France, it is quite likely that the Romance-based Jewish language of that region was carried over into Germany. It has left some traces in the modern Yiddish vocabulary, particularly in West Yiddish. Dovid Katz has also made a plausible argument that the first language of European Jews was Aramaic (Katz 2004). Aramaic was the vernacular of the Jews in Roman era Palestine and also in the great Jewish community of 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. Jews also brought with them ancient paralinguistic patterns of gesture and intonation.

In Germany, the young Jewish community would have encountered the myriad German dialects from which standard German was destined to emerge many centuries later. Jews would soon have been speaking their own communal versions of these German dialects mixed with linguistic elements that they brought along with them. These dialects would have been heavily adapted to fit the needs of the very distinctive Jewish culture and, as characterizes many such devlopments, included the deliberate cultivation of linguistic differences to assert cultural autonomy. The Jews also had their own distinctive geography with a pattern of relationships among Jewish settlements that was somewhat independent of that of their non-Jewish neighbors. This distinctive geography led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects whose borders did not coincide with the borders of German dialects. In general, Yiddish dialects were distributed over much larger territories.

The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book from 1272 (described more extensively in Frakes 2004 and Baumgarten/Frakes 2005):

transliterated,

gut tak im betage se waer dis makhazor in beis hakneses terage

and translated,

may a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.

This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in a purely Hebrew text (a reproduction of which is in Katz 2004). Nonetheless, it indicates the status of the Yiddish language as more or less standard Middle High German, but the words makhazor (prayer book for the High Holy Days) and beis hakneses (synagogue) are Hebrew.

In the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and also macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to be written. These were collected by the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. In the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of Jewish singers singing for the Jewish community their 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 genisa of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.

Apart from the obvious use of Hebrew words for specifically Jewish artifacts, it is very difficult to decide how far this 15th century written Yiddish differs from the German of this period. A lot depends on how the phonetic values of the Hebrew characters are interpreted, especially with regard to the vowels. There seems, however, to be a consensus that by this period, Yiddish would have sounded distinctive to the average German, even when no Hebrew lexemes were used. In university faculties, the literature of this period is studied both in departments of Yiddish studies and in departments of Medieval German.

The 16th century witnessed an upswing in writings in what may now be referred to as Old Yiddish. The development of the printing press contributed significantly to the improved rate of survival of these writings. The most popular work of the 16th century was the 650-stanza Bovo-Bukh, composed by Elia Levita (1469-1549) in 1507–1508, which has gone through at least forty print editions, beginning in 1541. 1972, 4-5 Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, also wrote Paris un Vienne. Another Judeo-German retelling of a courtly novel which presumably also dates from the 15th century, though the manuscripts are from the 16th, is Widuwilt, also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg. Another significant Old Yiddish writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei whose paraphrase on the Book of Job dates from 1557.

While Hebrew always remained the official language of Jewish prayer, the Hasidim mixed considerable Yiddish into their Hebrew, and were also responsible for a significant secondary religious literature written in Yiddish. For example, the tales about the Baal Shem Tov were written largely in Yiddish. In addition, even beyond the Hasidim, Ashkenazic Jewish women traditionally were not literate in Hebrew; women were the main audience of works like the Bovo-Bukh, but there was also a large body of Yiddish religious works written for (and often by) women, such as the Tseno-Ureno, the memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, and the tkhines. 1972, 4-17

The modern Haskalah

Use of the Western Yiddish dialect began to decline in the 18th century, as The Enlightenment and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) led German Jews to view Yiddish as a "corrupt German". Between assimilation to German and the beginnings of the revival of Hebrew, Western Yiddish was largely squeezed out, surviving mainly as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups such as the cattle-dealers of the Eifel Mountains". 1972, 2

Farther east, where Jews were denied emancipation, Yiddish formed the basis of a secular Jewish culture, known as Yiddishkheit (literally: "Jewishness"). The late 19th century and early 20th century are widely considered the Golden Age of secular Yiddish literature; this period also coincides with the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, and the revival of Hebrew literature. Some Modern Hebrew words began to find their way into Yiddish, as well.

The first of the three great founders of modern secular Yiddish literature was Sholem-Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim. The second was Sholem Yakov Rabinovitsh, known in wide literary circles as Sholom Aleichem, whose collection of stories about Tevye the Dairyman was later the basis of the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. The third was Isaac Leib Peretz.

The 20th century

At the start of the 20th century, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. A rich literature was being published, Yiddish theater and Yiddish film were booming, and it had even achieved status as one of the official languages of the Belarusian SSR. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, standardized pronunciation and spelling, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, later YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 1972, 3 Yiddish emerged as the national language of a large Jewish community in Eastern Europe that rejected Zionism and sought to obtain Jewish cultural autonomy in Europe. It also contended with Modern Hebrew as a literary language among Zionists.

On the eve of World War II, there were 10 million Yiddish speakers, overwhelmingly of the Eastern dialects. 1972, 2 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. Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war (including nearly all Yiddish speakers in the Americas), further assimilation in countries such as the United States, Soviet Union and the status of Modern Hebrew as the official language of Israel led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish similar to the earlier decline in Western Yiddish.

Ethnologue estimates that in 1991 there were 3 million speakers of Eastern Yiddish, but Western Yiddish, which had only "several tens of thousands" of speakers on the eve of the Holocaust, is now "nearly extinct".

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, much effort was invested in promoting the use of Yiddish during 1920s. Yiddish was then regarded as the language of "Jewish proletariat"; at the same time, Hebrew was considered a "bourgeois" language and its use was generally discouraged. After the Second World War, growing anti-Semitic tendencies in Soviet politics drove Yiddish from most spheres; few Yiddish publications survived (among them are the literary magazine Sovetish Heymland (1961-1991) and the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern).

United States

In the United States, the Yiddish language bound together Jews from many countries, whose national origin was often as important as their Jewish identity. Within some families, marrying across national origin lines was seen as equivalent to marrying out of the faith. The Forward, one of seven Yiddish New York daily newspapers, and other Yiddish newspapers served as a forum for Jews of all European backgrounds. 1925 American Yiddish music, derived from Klezmer, was another binding mechanism. Michel Gelbart, a very prolific composer, probably best known for "I Have A Little Dreydl," wrote music that was very Jewish and very American. Thriving Yiddish theatre in New York City and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere kept the language vital. Many "Yiddishisms," like "Italianisms" and "Spanishisms," continued to enter spoken New York English, often used by Jews and non-Jews alike without consciousness of the language of origin of the phrases. In the United States, most Yiddish speakers tended not to pass on the language to their children who assimilated and spoke English.

Yiddish is spoken by most Hasidic Jews living in the United States, usually as a first language, while other Haredi Jews do not speak the language fluently for the most part. The non-Hasidic, Haredi communities speak English with an admixture of Yiddish words, sometimes called "Yeshivish", because of its use in yeshivas in the United States.

Largely because of the influence of Jewish entertainment figures in the United States, many Yiddish words have entered the American English lexicon. In 1968, the modern American writer Leo Rosten (1908–1997) published The Joys of Yiddish (ISBN 0743406516), an introduction to words of Yiddish origin used in the English of the United States. See also "Yinglish."

In 1978, the Polish-born secular Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, a resident of the United States, received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Israel

In Israel, Modern Hebrew is used instead of Yiddish. In part this reflected the conflict between religious and secular forces. Many in the larger, secular group wanted a new national language to foster a cohesive identity, while traditionally religious Jews desired that Hebrew be respected as a holy language reserved for prayer and religious study. In the early twentieth century, Zionist pioneers tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish, and make its use socially unacceptable.

This conflict also reflected the opposing views among secular Jews worldwide, one side seeing Hebrew (and Zionism) and the other Yiddish (and Internationalism) as the means of defining emerging Jewish nationalism. Finally, the large post-1948 influx of Jewish refugees from Arab countries (to whom Yiddish was entirely foreign, but who already spoke a Semitic language in daily life) effectively made Hebrew the only practical option. But even though this social factor would have anyway doomed any chance for Yiddish to prosper, state authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or exremely limit Yiddish theatre in Israel.

Many of the older immigrants to Israel from the former USSR (usually those above 50 years of age) speak or understand some Yiddish.

In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, particularly the Hasidic Jews and the Mitnagdim of the Lithuanian yeshiva world, who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem.

Separately, there is a certain amount of revival of interest in Yiddish culture among secular Israelis, with Yiddish theatre flourishing (though simultaneous translation to Hebrew as well as Russian is usually provided in the hall) and some young people taking university courses in Yiddish, part of them achieving considerable fluency (though often speaking with an accent which would seem very stange to native speakers).

Yiddish media

There are more than 100 newspapers, magazines and radio programs in the Yiddish language worldwide such as דער אלגעמיינער זשורנאל (Der Algemeyner Zhurnal, USA -- locally transliterated Der Algemeiner Journal), פארווערטס (Forverts, USA), דאס יידישע ווארט (Dos Yidishe Vort, Poland -- locally transliterated Dos Jidisze Wort), לעצטע נייעס (Letzte Neues, Israel), and דער ביראבידזשאנער שתערן (Der Birobidzhaner Shtern, Russia). The "Forverts" is today the largest Yiddish publication and was once the largest foreign-language newspaper in the USA. The weekly newspaper also appears in an online version.

Many Web sites are maintained exclusively in Yiddish and there are numerous e-mail distribution lists about various facets of Yiddish language and culture. In addition, several Yiddish blogs have gained a measure of popularity among Yiddish writers and speakers.

Haredi Orthodox Jews

The major exception to the decline of spoken Yiddish can be found in the Haredi Jewish communities all over the world. In the United States, within some of New York State's close-knit religious communities Yiddish is spoken as a home and schooling language, especially in chassidic communities such as Brooklyn's Borough Park, Williamsburg and Crown Heights and outside of the city in Monsey, Kiryas Joel, and New Square. (Over 88% of the population of Kiryas Joel is reported to speak Yiddish at home.^*) Yiddish is also widely spoken in some smaller Haredi communities in other cities such as London, Antwerp and Montreal. Among most Haredim all over the world, Hebrew is generally reserved for prayer and religious studies, while Yiddish is reserved as a home and business language. In Israel, however, many Haredim do commonly speak Modern Hebrew, with the notable exception of many chassidic communities. Nevertheless, even the vast majority of Haredim who use Modern Hebrew also understand Yiddish. Especially movements such as Satmar chassidism, who view the commonplace use of Hebrew as a form of Zionism, use almost only Yiddish.

Haredi educational use of Yiddish

Hundreds of thousands of young children have been, and are still, taught to translate the texts of the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy into Yiddish. This process is called taytsching or "translating" (Yid. טיַיטשן taytshn). Most Ashkenazi yeshivas' highest level lectures in Talmud and Halakha are delivered in Yiddish by the Rosh yeshivas as well as ethical talks of mussar. Hasidic rebbes generally use only Yiddish to converse with their followers and to deliver their various Torah talks, classes, and lectures. The linguistic style and vocabulary of Yiddish have influenced the manner in which many Orthodox Jews who attend yeshivas speak English; this usage is distinctive enough that it has been dubbed "Yeshivish".

Status of Yiddish as a dialect of German

It has often been suggested that Yiddish is merely a dialect of German, not different enough to be classed as a separate language. Yiddish and German share a large portion of their respective vocabularies, and a number of similar grammatical structures. Some German speakers are reportedly able to understand spoken Yiddish, considering it similar to other German dialects such as Swabian. These observations lead some observers to describe Yiddish as a German dialect rather than an independent language. See also the Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework to distinguish languages from dialects.

However, the consensus among linguists is that Yiddish and German are distinct Germanic languages, as:

The two languages are geographically and culturally distinct; ^*
Both languages have written standards, and even use different alphabets;
Some of the grammar of Yiddish differs substantially from that of German, having been influenced by contact with other (e.g. Slavic) languages;
20 to 30 percent of Yiddish vocabulary is not shared with German, including a number of basic words;
The two languages are generally not mutually comprehensible (this is especially true for German speakers trying to understand Yiddish).

Of course, politics as well as linguistics has affected the long-widespread perception of Yiddish as a dialect rather than a language. Max Weinreich famously quoted a remark by an auditor in one of his lectures on this matter: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un flot": "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." (facsimile excerpt at ^*; discussed in detail in a separate article.)

Yiddish and other languages

Yiddish eventually split into Western Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish. The latter in turn split into North-Eastern (Litvish) Yiddish, Central/Mid-Eastern (Polish/Galician) Yiddish, and South-Eastern (Ukrainian, Bessarabian, Romanian) Yiddish. The Eastern Yiddish dialects and Modern Yiddish contain many words derived from Slavic languages.

Like Judeo-Arabic and pre-20th century Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Yiddish is written using an adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet. However, Yiddish itself is not linguistically related to Hebrew, even though it absorbed thousands of Hebrew and Aramaic terms taken from the Tanakh, Mishna, Talmud, and Jewish tradition.

Curiously, Yiddish uses Latin derivatives for many of its words relating to religious rituals, apparently borrowing the terminology from Old French as spoken in Alsace. The presumed path of entry into Yiddish is that the famous rabbi Rashi (1040-1105), and his descendants and disciples the Tosafists, used hundreds of Old French words in their rabbinical writings. Study of Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch and the Talmud was widespread among medieval Jews; Rashi has also been used by modern scholars as a reliable source for thousands of Old French words. As an example, 'say grace after meals' is, in Yiddish, bentshn (בענטשן), which is cognate with the same term that gave English the word benediction; and Western-Europe dialects of Yiddish use the word orn, derived from Latin orare, to mean 'pray'; and some scholars believe that davnen (דאַװנען), the Eastern European Yiddish word for pray, has a Romance language origin. Other Yiddish words with Romance backgrounds include leyenen (לײענען) 'to read' and tsholnt (טשאָלנט) 'a Sabbath stew' (spelled cholent in English). Many of the Old French words incorporated into Yiddish happen also to have been similarly used by the Catholic Church.

The close proximity of Yiddish speakers to the Afrikaans language community in South Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth century has resulted in considerable cross-pollination of words and pronunciations across the languages. See Afrikaner-Jews

Books

Baumgarten, Jean (transl. and ed. Jerold C. Frakes), Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, ISBN 0-19-927633-1.
Fishman, David E., The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2005, ISBN 0-8229-4272-0.
Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.), Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1981, ISBN 90-279-7978-2 (in Yiddish and English).
Frakes, Jerold C., Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, ISBN 0-19-926614-X.
Herzog, Marvin, et.al. ed., YIVO, The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 3 vols., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 1992-2000, ISBN 3-484-73013-7.
Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, ISBN 0-521-77215-X.
Katz, Dovid, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Basic Books, New York, 2004, ISBN 0-465-03728-3.
Kriwaczek, Paul, Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005, ISBN 0-297-82941-6.
Lansky, Aaron, Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilisation, Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 2004, ISBN 1-565-12429-4.
Liptzin, Sol, A History of Yiddish Literature, Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, NY, 1972, ISBN 0-8246-0124-6.
Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006, ISBN 0-520-24416-8.
Weinreich, Uriel. College Yiddish: an Introduction to the Yiddish language and to Jewish Life and Culture, 6th revised ed., YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1999, ISBN 0-914-51226-9 (in Yiddish and English).
Weinstein, Miriam, Yiddish: A Nation of Words, Ballantine Books, New York, 2001, ISBN 0-345-44730-1.
Wex, Michael, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-312-30741-1.
Wexler, Paul, Two-Tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2002, ISBN 3-11-017258-5.

Periodicals

Der Yiddisher Tam-Tam, pub. Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Paris, since 1994, also available in electronic format.
Yidishe Heftn, pub. Le Cercle Bernard Lazare, Paris, since 1996, sample cover, subscription info.
YIVO Bleter, pub. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, NYC, initial series from 1931, new series since 1991.

References

External links

Jewish Language Research Website: Yiddish
On-line Yiddish dictionary
Internationale Medienhilfe (IMH) - Federation of Yiddish and German-Jewish media worldwide
Maison de la culture yiddish (Paris)
European Academy for Yiddish language and Klezmer Music
National Yiddish Book Center
NYBC's Summer Language Internship
Shtetl
The Yiddish Voice
The Jewish Book Center of The Workmen's Circle
Language and Cultural Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (Columbia University)
Eastern Yiddish in Ethnologue
Western Yiddish in Ethnologue
The Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring
Collection of Yiddish prints from the 16th to the 20th century
Bibliotheca Iiddica Small encyclopedia on Yiddish. Home page is in Latin, most of the rest is in transliterated Yiddish.
Di Velt fun Yidish: Audio Stories
Yiddish Typewriter - A free online service to convert Yiddish texts from YIVO transliteration into the Hebrew script
Judaeo-German - Jewish Encyclopedia
Yiddish art & discussion portal

Yiddish sound recordings online

Yiddish Radio Project, "dedicated to rescuing every surviving recording from the golden age of Yiddish radio". The many RealAudio files all use RealAudio's multimedia capability to provide written English-language translation.

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