Yiddish, historically referred to as Judeo-German or Jewish German, is a West Germanic language and Jewish ethnolect historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German, fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic Hebrew) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian, "A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry". University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet.
For centuries, Yiddish was the vernacular of Ashkenazi communities. Starting in the late 18th century, under the sway of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the language suffered decreasing prestige, being stigmatized by assimilationists and later also by Zionists, in favor of national languages and Hebrew. Efforts by the Yiddishist movement to counter that trend had limited success. Nevertheless, before World War II, the language still counted 11–13 million speakers. Some 85% of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3. resulting in a massive decline in use of the language. This, together with further assimilation following World War II, along with aliyah (immigration to Israel), sped up the process of language shift to national tongues and Modern Hebrew, particularly among secular Jews.
The number of Yiddish speakers is, however, on the rise in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 speakers in the rest of the world (for a total of 600,000).
The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language (loshn-ashknaz; ) or (taytsh), a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called (mame-loshn; ), distinguishing it from (loshn koydesh; ), meaning Hebrew, and (targum loshn; ), meaning Aramaic. The term "Yiddish", short for "Yidish-Taitsh" ('Jewish German'), did not 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 most common designation today.
Modern Yiddish has two major dialect groups: Eastern and Western. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern, or Ukrainish (Ukrainian–Romanian); Mideastern, or Poylish (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian); and Northeastern, or Litvish (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western Yiddish both by its far greater size and 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. Ethnologue classifies Western Yiddish as endangered.
The term "Yiddish" is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Ashkenazi Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit ("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and music).Oscar Levant described Cole Porter's 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy" as "one of the most Yiddish tunes ever written", even though "Cole Porter's genetic background was completely alien to any Jewishness". Oscar Levant, The Unimportance of Being Oscar, Pocket Books 1969 (reprint of G.P. Putnam 1968), p. 32. .
History
Origins By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. By the high medieval period, their area of settlement, centered on the Rhineland (Mainz) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer), came to be known as Ashkenaz, a term also used for Scythia, and later of various areas of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi (d. 1105), Ashkenaz becomes a term for Germany and Ashkenazi () for the Jews settling in this area."Thus in Rashi's (1040–1105) commentary on the Talmud, German expressions appear as leshon Ashkenaz. Similarly, when Rashi writes: "But in Ashkenaz I saw [...]" he no doubt meant the communities of Mainz and Worms in which he had dwelt." Ashkenaz bordered on the area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews, who 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. As noted above, the first language of the Ashkenazim may 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 (such as Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres). Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use.
The established view is that, as with other Jewish languages, Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the case of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic (Judeo-French) and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German, and from these groups the Ashkenazi community took shape. Exactly what German substrate underlies the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed. The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the Middle High German dialects from which the Rhenish German dialects of the modern period would emerge. Jewish communities of the high medieval period would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region, including many Hebrew and Aramaic words, but there is also Romance.Traces remain in the contemporary Yiddish vocabulary: for example, (bentshn, "to bless"), ultimately from the Latin ; (leyenen, "to read"), from the Old French lei(e)re; and the personal names Bunim (related to French bon nom, good name) and Yentl (Old French gentil, "noble"). Western Yiddish includes additional words of ultimate Latin derivation (but still very few): for example, orn (to pray), cf. Old French orer. Beider, Alexander (2015). Origins of Yiddish Dialects. , pp. 382–402.
In Max Weinreich's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France. There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in the mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language.
Later linguistic research has refined the Weinreich model or provided alternative approaches to the language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the source of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata, and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base. The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. 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 from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. The lines of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others (at least not entirely); an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish's origins will probably be based on the work of Weinreich and his challengers alike."
Paul Wexler proposed a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish, not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as "Judeo-Sorbian" (a proposed West Slavic language) that had been relexified by High German. In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has been met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists.
Written evidence
Yiddish orthography developed towards the end of the High Medieval period. It is first recorded in 1272, with the oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish, a blessing found in the Worms machzor (a Hebrew prayer book).
+ A Yiddish phrase transliterated and translated Yiddish Transliterated Translated May a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.
This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German written in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – , (prayerbook for the High Holy Days) and , 'synagogue' (read in Yiddish as ) – had been included. The niqqud appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation.
Over 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 .Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period by Zinberg, Israel. KTAV, 1975. . 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 Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.
Printing