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YIDDISH LANGUAGE, language used by Ashkenazi Jews for the past 1,000 years. Developed as an intricate fusion of several unpredictably modified stocks, the language was gradually molded to serve a wide range of communicative needs. As the society which used it achieved one of the highest levels of cultural autonomy in Jewish history, the Yiddish ...
- It Is Over 1,000 Years Old. While the exact origins of the Yiddish language are still shrouded in some uncertainty, all agree that it has its roots in the 9th–10th centuries, when the first Jews settled in the Rhineland and the Palatinate (in present-day Germany).
- It Is Distinct From German. Living in the Rhineland, where Germanic languages were developing, the Jews concurrently developed their own unique language, Yiddish.1 This explains why many Yiddish words have similar counterparts in modern German.
- Yiddish and Hebrew Have Different Uses. Jews over the ages generally refrained from using Biblical Hebrew, the “Holy Tongue,” for day-to-day speech. Hebrew was therefore reserved for holy, spiritual speech such as prayer and Torah scholarship, while Yiddish became the language of regular conversation.2.
- It Crossed Borders and Oceans. While Yiddish originated in the Germanic lands, when Jews immigrated to Eastern Europe they brought Yiddish along with them.
Most of these languages, and many other Jewish hybrid languages, are extinct or almost extinct. The two best-known Jewish hybrid languages are Judeo-Spanish — better known as Ladino — and Yiddish. Judeo-Spanish was spoken by the Jews of medieval Spain, as well as their descendants. It received most of its linguistic characteristics from ...
The term "Yiddish" is derived from the German word for "Jewish." The most accepted (but not the only) theory of the origin of Yiddish is that it began to take shape by the 10th century as Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German Rhine Valley. They developed a language that included elements of Hebrew, Jewish-French, Jewish-Italian, and ...
- What Is Yiddish?
- The Origin of Yiddish
- Early Yiddish
- Early Modern Yiddish
- Modern Yiddish
- Yiddish in The 20th Century
- Post-Holocaust Yiddish
Literally speaking, Yiddish means “Jewish.” Linguistically, it refers to the language spoken by AshkenaziJews — Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, and their descendants. Though its basic vocabulary and grammar are derived from medieval West German, Yiddish integrates many languages including German, Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic and Romance...
It is impossible to pin down exactly where or when Yiddish emerged, but the most widely-accepted theory is that the language came into formation in the 10th century, when Jews from France and Italy began to migrate to the German Rhine Valley. There, they combined the languages they brought with them, together with their new neighbors’ Germanic, pro...
In Ashkenazi societies, Hebrew was the language of the Bible and prayer, Aramaic was the language of learning and Yiddish was the language of everyday life. Scholars refer to this as the internal trilingualism of Ashkenaz. Though they vary in sound and use, all three languages are written in the same alphabet. The first record of a printed Yiddish ...
Yiddish publishing became widespread in the 1540s, nearly a century after the invention of the printing press. To ensure the broadest possible readership, books were published in a generic, accessible Yiddish, without the characteristics of any particular Yiddish dialect. In the 1590s, the Tsene-rene (also called Tzenah Urenah) was published for th...
The late 19th century saw the birth of modern Yiddish literature. The “grandfather” of this new literary movement was Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, known by his pen name Mendele Mokher Seforim (Mendele the Bookseller). I. L. Peretz, a Polish writer, poet, essayist, and dramatist became known as the “father” and humorist Sholem Aleichem, born in Ukrain...
In 1908, the first international conference on Yiddish language (the Czernowitz conference) declared Yiddish to be “a national language of the Jewish people.” The purpose of the conference was to discuss all the issues facing the language at that time, including the need to establish Yiddish schools, to fund Yiddish cultural institutions and to est...
On the eve of World War II, there were roughly 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world. The Holocaust destroyed most of this population. In America after the war, immigrant parents were often hesitant to speak Yiddish with their children. Though there were a few networks of Yiddish schools in the post-war period, after-school programs and camps co...
- Mordecai Walfish
22 Yiddish Expressions About Telling the Truth. By Professor Richard Zuckerman and Menachem Posner. Art by Rivka Korf Studio. Truth is a prized quality in Judaism, to the point that Talmud calls it is G‑d ’s own signature. 1 The Hebrew, and by extension Yiddish, word for truth is emes. Comprising the three Hebrew letters א-מ-ת, it is a ...
Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazim, central and eastern European Jews and their descendants. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, it became one of the world’s most widespread languages, appearing in most countries with a Jewish population by the 19th century. Along with Hebrew and Aramaic, it is one of the three major literary languages of ...
