|
Results for Yiddish
|
On this page:
|
The language historically of Ashkenazic Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, resulting from a fusion of elements derived principally from medieval German dialects and secondarily from Hebrew and Aramaic, various Slavic languages, and Old French and Old Italian.
[Yiddish yidish, Jewish, Yiddish, from Middle High German jüdisch, Jewish, from jude, jüde, Jew, from Old High German judo, from Latin Iūdaeus. See Jew.]
Yiddish Yid'dish adj.For more information on Yiddish language, visit Britannica.com.
Yiddish was one of the main languages of European Jewry for a thousand years until the Second World War. The word itself means ‘Jewish’ in Yiddish, and designates a language largely of Germanic lexical composition, written in the Hebrew alphabet. Having its origins among Jewish communities in the medieval cities along the Rhine, the language included Hebrew and Aramaic words and expressions from the Bible, Talmud, and rabbinical writings. Subsequent Jewish migration into Eastern Europe introduced elements of the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the Slavic languages of the lands where the majority of Jews lived for centuries. Other migrations produced further enrichments of the vocabulary as the language spread throughout Europe and the Russian Empire. With the vast emigration of Russian Jews driven by the pogroms which occurred regularly from the 1880s until the Revolution, and the exodus from Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the rise of National Socialism and the Second World War, Yiddish was transported to Israel, North and South America, Britain, southern Africa and Australia.
Linguistically, pre-modern Jewish life was organised on a diglossic basis in which Hebrew, the most prestigious Jewish language, and to a lesser extent Aramaic, were used in the liturgy, in commentaries on sacred texts, and in formal correspondence. Women, who were not taught Hebrew, relied upon Yiddish as their only medium of expression. Early Yiddish literature is therefore exceptional in having been written for women, children, and less educated men. These texts were destined for use in schools, private Sabbath reading at home, and the synagogue, to enable women and untutored men to read prayers and the weekly portion of the Bible. The 16th, 17th, and 18th c. saw the publication of an abundance of religious and educational material, as well as books of the special form of prayers of supplication and consolation called tekhines, written for and often by women. Other popular genres included songs, collections of tales, parables, allegories, and legends about the lives of famous rabbis, or about a particular community. Judaized versions of German sagas, courtly romances, and epic poetry patterned after the tales of King Arthur's court or Till Eulenspiegel formed a flourishing body of writing whose primary purpose was entertainment rather than moral improvement. One of the outstanding examples of a Yiddish narrative of love and chivalry comes from northern Italy, The Bove bukh (1541) by Elye Bokher (Elia Levita).
From the time of the Reformation, the Yiddish language became a target of hostility in Germany. Luther, for example, in the 1528 edition of Liber vagatorum, inveighs against the Jews whom he associates with the development of Rotwelsch, the underworld thieves' cant. Although some Yiddish words and expressions entered into common use in various German dialects, interest in the Yiddish language, as such, was confined largely to missionaries and the police. As the spoken language of the Jewish population, it was considered useful either as the most direct and effective means by which to convert Jews to Christianity, or as the source of vocabulary for Rotwelsch. Among German literary figures, Goethe is perhaps the least expected to have shown an interest in Yiddish. During 1761, the young Goethe was tutored in the rudiments of the language by a Jew who had taken the name Carl Christian Christfreund upon his conversion to Christianity.
Modern Jewish history dates from the Enlightenment, or haskole as it is termed in Yiddish. The goal of this movement, which emanated from Berlin in the 1780s under the inspiration of Moses Mendelssohn, was to modernize and educate the Jewish people. In Western Europe, the Enlightenment led to the demise of Yiddish as Jews increasingly adopted the languages and lifestyles of the societies in which they lived. For some Jews, the image of Yiddish was tarnished by its association with the humiliations of exile. For others, this long history meant that it was the only language in which the sufferings and aspirations of the Jewish people could be fully expressed. It was this aspect of the language which Kafka found moving when he saw Yiddish plays performed by a troupe of wandering Yiddish actors in Prague between 1910 and 1912.
In the East, where the majority of Jews lived in poverty and deprivation, the Enlightenment stimulated the vigorous publication of artistic and scientific literature, in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Modern Yiddish literature therefore reflects the social, political, and economic conditions among the Jews of this region, who maintained a largely separate existence parallel to that of the dominant non-Jewish culture. Among the most important works of this period, the allegorical tales devised by the Ukrainian Hasidic Rabbi, Nakhman of Bratslav (1772-1810), for the edification of his followers, exist in both Hebrew and Yiddish versions. Representative of the rationalist spirit of the times were the satirists Ayzik-Meyer Dik (1814-93), Yitskhok-Yoel Linetzky (1839-1915), and the ‘Grand-father’ of modern Yiddish letters, Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh (1836-1917), known by his pseudonym, Mendele Moykher Sforim. Yitskhok-Leybush Peretz (1852-1915) was the most influential and respected Yiddish writer of the period, and Sholem-Aleykhem (Sholem Rabinovitch, 1859-1916), the most translated and widely-read Yiddish writer of his generation.
The first half of the 20th c. saw the flowering of Yiddish cultural life, with Warsaw as its capital. Theatre, print journalism, prose, and poetry were produced in an extraordinary richness and variety. Among the most notable of 20th-c. Yiddish writers are: Dovid Bergelson, Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, who wrote under the name Der Nister (the Hidden One), Peretz Markish, Moyshe Kulbak, I. J. Singer, Yisroel Rabon, Itzik Manger, Meylekh Ravitch. By the First World War, German Jews, mostly well-educated and middle class, had distanced themselves from Yiddish. Afraid that their already precarious acceptance among the population as a whole would be further threatened by any contact with Eastern European Jewry, German-born Jews viewed with disquiet the influx of impoverished refugees fleeing war, revolution, and pogroms in the East. Yiddish speakers, often referred to disparagingly as ‘Ostjuden’, settled in Berlin, where a small but productive group of writers created some of the most important Yiddish writing in the 1920s and early 1930s. Dovid Bergelson lived and worked in Berlin between 1921 and 1933. Other Yiddish authors who published in Berlin in the early 1920s, include Der Nister, Micah Yosef Berdyczewski, David Frischmann, and the critic Bal Makhshoves. H. D. Nomberg, a Polish Jew resident in Warsaw, was frequently in Berlin, which is the setting for a number of his finely observed stories. This was the great era of Jewish publishing in Berlin. Berdyczewski's trilingual works, published by Stiebel and Insel, are representative of the émigré intellectual milieu in which Yiddish, German, and Hebrew intermingled as a matter of course. Wostock (‘East’ in Russian), and the Klal-farlag, under the ownership of Ullstein, produced cheap editions of a wide range of literature, including Yiddish translations of German and French classics. Illustrated art books of lavish quality appeared in parallel Hebrew and Yiddish editions, under the Pomegranate imprint.
After the Second World War, centres of Yiddish writers and readers continued to exist in North and South America, particularly New York, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. Soviet Jewry, though weakened and terrorized by decades of persecution, remained a repository of artistic creativity. In prose and poetry respectively, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978 Nobel Prize for Literature) in New York, and Avrom Sutzkever in Israel, are the most haunting voices from the world of European Jewry before the Holocaust who continued to write in the Yiddish literary tradition. The death blow dealt by Stalin, upon whose orders the most talented and accomplished surviving Yiddish writers were executed on 12 August 1952, and the emigration following the break-up of the Soviet Union, have closed the long chapter of Russian Yiddish. In Israel, Yiddish was adversely affected by an ideological preference for Hebrew. As a living language, it has not been immune to the steady process of ageing and assimilation among its native speakers and their children, but a surge of interest in Yiddish studies, beginning in the 1980s, has given new impetus to the language as an academic subject, for which the following publications offer a valuable introduction: Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish, Joshua Fishman (1981), The Meaning of Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav (1990), Classic Yiddish Fiction. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, Ken Frieden, 1995, An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Joseph Leftwich (1974), A Bridge of Longing, The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, David G. Roskies (1995).
Although it is not a national language, Yiddish is spoken as a first language by approximately 5 million Jews all over the world, especially in Argentina, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, Romania, the United States, and the republics of the former USSR. Before the annihilation of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, it was the tongue of more than 11 million people. Growing out of a blend of a number of medieval German dialects, Yiddish arose c.1100 in the ghettos of Central Europe. From there it was taken to Eastern Europe by Jews who began to leave German-speaking areas in the 14th cent. as a result of persecution. By the 18th cent. Yiddish was almost universal among the Jews of Eastern Europe. It has generally accompanied Eastern European Jews in their migrations to other parts of the world.
Phonetically, Yiddish is closer to Middle High German than is modern German. Although the vocabulary of Yiddish is basically Germanic, it has been enlarged by borrowings from Hebrew, Aramaic, some Slavic and Romance languages, and English. Written from right to left like Hebrew, Yiddish also uses the Hebrew alphabet with certain modifications. In 1925 the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) was established in Vilnius, Lithuania. It served as an academy to oversee the development of the language. Later its headquarters were transferred to New York City, where in time it became the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. Coping with the problem of dialects, this institute has done much to bring about the standardization of Yiddish.
In the eyes of many, Yiddish has significance both as the language of an important literature as well as a unique expression of the Jewish people. It is widely thought that modern Yiddish literature began in 1864 with the publication of Das Kleyne Mentshele (The Little Man) by Mendele mocher sforim. Among the best-known writers in Yiddish literature are Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Isaac Meier Dik, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the first writer in the language to be awarded (1978) the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thousands of Yiddish works are housed at the Yiddish Book Center at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
Bibliography
See M. I. Herzog et al., ed., The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature (1969); M. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (1980); D. Katz, Grammar of the Yiddish Language (1987); D. G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (1995).
A vernacular language used by Ashkenazic Jews.
A language based on Germanic dialects infused with Hebrew and loanwords from areas in Europe in which it was spoken, Yiddish is the vernacular used by Ashkenazic Jews since the European Middle Ages. As Hebrew became primarily the language of liturgy and religious scholarship, Yiddish, by the end of the eighteenth century, emerged as the vehicle for the expression of secular literature, drama, poetry, and popular literature. By the nineteenth century, Yiddish was established as the la nguage of a secular European Jewish culture found mainly in Eastern Europe.
The Zionist ideology that stressed the return to Palestine and the use of Hebrew as the language of the Jewish nation was instrumental in the revival of Hebrew. In the language controversy that ensued in the early part of the twentieth century, Hebrew gained prominence over Yiddish and became the official language of the Yishuv and, later, the State of Israel. Yiddish increasingly became identified with Jews and Jewish culture of the diaspora. In response to the Holocaust and the liquidation of Yiddish culture under Soviet rule there has been a resurgent interest in the Yiddish language both in Israel and in North America. As a spoken language Yiddish has become the established vernacular of Orthodox Haredi and Hasidic Jews.
Bibliography
Rosten, Leo. The Joys of Yiddish: A Related Lexicon of Yiddish,Hebrew and Yinglish Words Often Encountered in English . . . From the Days of the Bible to Those of the Beatnik. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Weinstein, Miriam. Yiddish: A Nation of Words. South Royal-ton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2001.
— REEVA S. SIMON
UPDATED BY NEIL CAPLAN
| Yiddish ייִדיש yidish |
||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | /ˈjidiʃ/ | |
| Spoken in: | United States, United Kingdom, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere. | |
| Total speakers: | 3 million[1] | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic High German Yiddish |
|
| Writing system: | uses a Hebrew-based alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia (de jure only); officially recognized minority language in Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel and Moldova | |
| Regulated by: | no formal bodies; YIVO de facto |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | yi | |
| ISO 639-2: | yid | |
| ISO 639-3: | variously: yid — Yiddish (generic) ydd — Eastern Yiddish yih — Western Yiddish |
|
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Yiddish (ייִדיש yidish or אידיש idish, literally: "Jewish") is a non-territorial Germanic language, spoken throughout the world and written with the Hebrew alphabet. It originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in the Rhineland, and then spread to central and eastern Europe, and eventually to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called לשון־אַשכּנז (loshn-ashkenaz = "language of Ashkenaz") and טײַטש (taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for the language otherwise spoken in the region of origin, now called Middle High German; compare the modern New High German or Deutsch). In common usage, the language is called מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn = "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic which are collectively termed לשון־קודש (loshn-koydesh = "holy tongue"). The term Yiddish did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century. For a significant portion of its history it was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews and once spanned a broad range of dialects from "Western Yiddish" to three major groups within "Eastern Yiddish". Eastern and Western Yiddish are most markedly distinguished by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin in the Eastern dialects. While Western Yiddish has few remaining speakers, Eastern dialects remain in wide use,
The general history and status of the Yiddish language are discussed below, with further detail provided in a series of separate articles on:
Yiddish is also used in the adjectival sense to designate attributes of Ashkenazic culture (for example, Yiddish cooking and Yiddish music).
The Ashkenazic culture that took root in 10th-century Central Europe derived its name from Ashkenaz (Genesis 10:3), the medieval Hebrew name for the territory centered on what is now designated as Germany. Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities, and Ashkenaz included Northern France. It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardim, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Later, the Ashkenazic culture would spread into Eastern Europe as well.
Nothing is known about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. It is generally accepted that it was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe absorbed through dispersion. Since many settlers came 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, בענטשן (bentshn, to bless), from the Latin benedicere, and the personal name Anshl, cognate to Angel, Angelo. Western Yiddish includes additional words of Latin derivation (but still very few), for example orn (to pray), cf. Latin 'orare'.
The first language of European Jews may have been Aramaic (Katz 2004), the vernacular of the Jews in Roman era Palestine, 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 (e.g. Kalonymus). Much work needs to be done though, to fully analyze the contributions of those languages to Yiddish.
Members of the young Ashkenazi community would have encountered the myriad dialects from which standard German was destined to emerge many centuries later. They would soon have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. These dialects would have adapted to the needs of the burgeoning Ashkenazi culture and may, as characterizes many such developments, have included the deliberate cultivation of linguistic differences to assert cultural autonomy. The Ashkenazi community also had its own geography, with a pattern of relationships among settlements that was somewhat independent of its non-Jewish neighbors. This led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects, the borders of which did not coincide with the borders of German dialects.
The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book from 1272 (described extensively in Frakes 2004 and Baumgarten/Frakes 2005):
| Yiddish |
גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזֹור אִין בֵּיתֿ
הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא
|
| Transliterated | gut tak im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis hakneses terage |
| 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 that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German into which Hebrew words — makhazor (prayer book for the High Holy Days) and beis hakneses (synagogue) — had been included. The pointing appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately.
Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and also 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 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.
Apart from the obvious use of Hebrew words for specifically Jewish artifacts, it is very difficult to determine how much 15th-century written Yiddish differed from the German of that period. This is highly dependent on the phonetic properties that the alphabet is assumed to have had, particularly the vowels. There is a rough consensus that by this period, Yiddish would have sounded distinctive to the average German ear even when restricted to the Germanic component of its vocabulary.
The advent of the printing press resulted in an increase in the amount of material produced and surviving from the 16th century and onwards. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, composed 1507–1508 and printed in at least forty editions beginning in 1541. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written Pariz un Viene (Paris and Vienna). 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 Glückel 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 ווײַבערטײַטש (vaybertaytsh = "women's taytsh"; shown in the heading and fourth column in the adjacent illustration), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third 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 מאַשייט Masheyt).
An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish both appear on the same page. This is commonly termed 'Rashi script' from the name of the most renowned early author whose commentary is usually printed using this script. ('Rashi script' is also the typeface normally used when the Sefardi counterpart to Yiddish, Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.)
The Western Yiddish dialect began to decline in the 18th century, as The Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to the German view that Yiddish was a corrupt dialect. Owing to both assimilation to German and the incipient creation of Modern Hebrew, Western Yiddish only survived as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups" (Liptzin 1972). Farther east, where Jews were denied such emancipation, Yiddish was the cohesive force in a secular culture based on, and termed, ייִדישקייט (yidishkeyt = "Jewishness").
The period of the late 19th and early 20th century is widely considered the Golden Age of secular Yiddish literature. This coincides with the development of Modern Hebrew as a spoken and literary language, from which some words were also absorbed into Yiddish. The three authors generally regarded as the founders of the modern Yiddish literary genre were born in the 19th century, but their work and significance continued to grow into the 20th. The first was Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim. The second was Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער (tevye der milkhiker = Tevye the Dairyman) inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. The third was Isaac Leib Peretz.
In the early 20th century, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was more widely published than ever, Yiddish theater and Yiddish film were booming, and it even achieved status as one of the official languages of the Belorussian SSR. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, later YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 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 between 11 and 13 million Yiddish speakers (Jacobs 2005). 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 and the Soviet Union, along with the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist movement, led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish similar to the earlier decline in Western Yiddish. However, the number of speakers within the widely dispersed Orthodox (mainly Hasidic) communities has recently increased. Although used in various countries, Yiddish has attained official recognition as a minority language only in Moldova and Sweden.
Reports of the number of current Yiddish speakers vary significantly. Ethnologue estimates that in 2005 there were three million speakers of Eastern Yiddish,[1] of which over one-third lived in the United States. In contrast, the Modern Language Association reports fewer than 200,000 in the United States.[2] Western Yiddish, which had "several tens of thousands of speakers" on the eve of the Holocaust, is reported by Ethnologue to have had an "ethnic population" of slightly below 50,000 in 2000.[3] Intermediate 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.[4] 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 (LCAAJ). Numbers of native speakers from the latest available national censuses and other estimates are as follows:
There has been frequent debate about the extent of the linguistic independence of Yiddish from the languages that it absorbed. Some commentary dismisses Yiddish as mere jargon, although that precise term, in Yiddish, is also used as a colloquial designation for the language (without a pejorative connotation). There has been periodic assertion that Yiddish is a German dialect and, even when recognized as an autonomous language, it has sometimes been referred to as Judeo-German. 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: אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot — "A language is a dialect with an army and navy", facsimile excerpt at [2], discussed in detail in a separate article). More recently, Prof. Paul Wexler, of Tel Aviv University in Israel, has proposed that Eastern Yiddish should be classified as a Slavic language, formed by the relexification of Judeo-Slavic dialects by Judeo-German.
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 nineteenth and early twentieth 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."[5] 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 difficulties in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries.
The national language of Israel is Modern Hebrew. The rejection of Yiddish as an alternative 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 immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, 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 Sepharic/Mizrachi Jewish refugees (to whom Yiddish was entirely foreign, but who already were familiar with Hebrew) 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 extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.[6]
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.
There is a growing revival of interest in Yiddish culture among secular Israelis, with Yiddish theater now flourishing (usually with simultaneous translation to Hebrew and Russian) and young people are taking university courses in Yiddish, some achieving considerable fluency (albeit with an accent that would seem very strange to native speakers).[7]
Yiddish in Hebrew is called Iddish.
In the Soviet Union during the 1920s, Yiddish was promoted as the language of the Jewish proletariat. It was one of the official languages of the Byelorussian SSR, as well as several agricultural districts of the Ukrainian SSR. A public educational system entirely based on the Yiddish language was established and comprised kindergartens, schools, and higher educational institutions (technical schools, rabfaks and other university departments). At the same time, Hebrew was considered a bourgeois language and its use was generally discouraged. The vast majority of the Yiddish-language cultural institutions were closed in the late 1930s along with cultural institutions of other ethnic minorities lacking administrative entities of their own. After the Second World War, growing anti-Semitic tendencies in Soviet politics drove Yiddish from most spheres; the last Yiddish-language schools, theaters and publications were closed by the end of 1940s. Yet it continued to be widely used as a spoken medium for decades in the areas with compact Jewish population (primarily in Moldova, Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Belarus).
In the former Soviet states, presently active Yiddish authors include Yoysef Burg (Chernivtsi, b. 1912), Zisye Veytsman (Samara, b. 1946), and Aleksander Beyderman ( b. 1949, Odessa, see German-language Wikipedia article). Publication of an earlier Yiddish periodical (דער פֿרײַנד), was resumed in 2004 with דער נײַער פֿרײַנד (der nayer fraynd; lit. "The New Friend", St. Petersburg).
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was formed in 1934 in the Russian Far East, with its capital city in Birobidzhan and Yiddish as its official language. The intention was for the Soviet Jewish population to settle there. Jewish cultural life was revived in Birobidzhan much earlier than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Yiddish theaters began opening in the 1970s. The newspaper דער ביראָבידזשאנער שטערן (der birobidzhaner shtern; lit: "The Birobidzhan Star") includes a Yiddish section. The First Birobidzhan International Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Culture for Yiddish language and culture was launched in 2007. [3].
Yiddish, along with Hebrew, is an officially recognized minority language in Moldova for the purposes of the Jewish community. In the capital city of Chişinău, there is a Yiddish language radio program ייִדיש לעבן (yidish lebn; lit. "Jewish Life"), a television program אויף דער ייִדישער גאַס (oyf der yidisher gas; lit. "On the Jewish Street") and the newspaper אונדזער קול (undzer kol; lit. "Our Voice").[8] There are 17,000 Yiddish speakers in Moldova.
In June 1999, the Swedish Parliament enacted legislation giving Yiddish legal status [9] as one of the country's official minority languages (entering into effect in April 2000). The rights thereby conferred are not detailed, but additional legislation was enacted in June 2006 establishing a new governmental agency, The Swedish National Language Council, the mandate of which instructs it to, "collect, preserve, scientifically research, and spread material about the national minority languages", naming them all explicitly, including Yiddish. When announcing this action, the government made an additional statement about "simultaneously commencing completely new initiatives for … Yiddish [and the other minority languages]".
The Swedish government publishes documents in Yiddish, of which the most recent details the national action plan for human rights.[10] An earlier one provides general information about national minority language policies. [11]
On 6 September 2007, it became possible to register Internet domains with Yiddish names in the national top-level domain .SE.[12]
In the United States, the Yiddish language bonded Jews from many countries. פֿאָרווערטס (forverts - Yiddish Forward) was one of seven Yiddish daily newspapers in New York City, and other Yiddish newspapers served as a forum for Jews of all European backgrounds. The Yiddish Forward still appears weekly and is available in an online edition.[13] It remains in wide distribution, together with דער אַלגעמיינער זשורנאַל (der algemeyner zhurnal - Algemeiner Journal; algemeyner = general) which is also published weekly and appears online.[14] The widest-circulation Yiddish newspapers are probably the two prominent Satmar weekly issues דער בּלאַט (Der Blatt; blat = newspaper) and דער איד (Der Yid). Several additional newspapers and magazines are in regular production, such as the monthly publications דער שטערן (Der Shtern; shtern = star) and דער בליק (Der Blick; blik = view). (The romanized titles cited in this paragraph are in the form given on the masthead of each publication and may be at some variance both with the literal Yiddish title and the transliteration rules otherwise applied in this article.)
Interest in klezmer music provided another bonding mechanism. Thriving Yiddish theater 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 City English, often used by Jews and non-Jews alike unaware of the linguistic origin of the phrases (described extensively by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish). However, native Yiddish speakers tended not to pass the language on to their children, who assimilated and spoke English.
In 1978, the Polish-born Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, a resident of the United States, received the Nobel Prize in literature.
Most of the Jewish immigrants to the New York metropolitan area during the years of Ellis Island considered Yiddish their native language. For example, Isaac Asimov states in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, that Yiddish was his first and sole spoken language and remained so for about two years after he emigrated to the United States as a small child. By contrast, Asimov's younger siblings, born in the United States, never developed any degree of fluency in Yiddish. Also the famous Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, designer of the reconstruction of Ground Zero in New York considers Yiddish his mother-tongue.
In the 2000 census, 178,945 people in the United States reported speaking Yiddish at home. Of these speakers, 113,515 lived in New York (63.43% of American Yiddish speakers), 18,220 in Florida (10.18%), 9,145 in New Jersey (5.11%), and 8,950 in California (5.00%). The remaining states with speaker populations larger than 1,000 are Pennsylvania (5,445), Ohio (1,925), Michigan (1,945), Massachusetts (2,380), Maryland (2,125), Illinois (3,510), Connecticut (1,710), and Arizona (1,055). The population is largely elderly: 72,885 of the speakers were older than 65, 66,815 were between 18 and 64, and only 39,245 were age 17 or lower.[15]
The London-based Jewish Tribune, published weekly, has a section in Yiddish called אידישע טריבונע Idishe Tribune.
The major exception to the decline of spoken Yiddish can be found in Haredi
communities all over the world. In some of the more closely-knit such communities Yiddish is spoken as a home and schooling
language, especially in Hasidic communities such as Brooklyn's Borough Park, Williamsburg and Crown Heights, and in
Monsey, Kiryas Joel, and
New Square. (Over 88% of the population of Kiryas Joel is reported to speak Yiddish
at home. [16]) Yiddish is also widely spoken in the
Antwerp Jewish community and in smaller Haredi communities such as the ones
in London, Manchester and
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 the Yiddish language. This process is called טײַטשן (taytshn) — "translating" . 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".
While Hebrew remains the language of Jewish prayer, the Hasidim have mixed considerable Yiddish into their Hebrew, and are 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, some Hassidic prayers, such as the Got fun Avrohom, were composed and are recited in Yiddish.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
